Category: homesick

Postcard Memories

I have been spending some time immersed in the Penny Postcards from New Mexico site (the link, a gift from my mom-in-law).

A lot of these cards predate me, but they also evoke lots of chest squeezing, heart wrenching homesickness.

My folks lived in Albuquerque back in the 1950’s, so as a kid, I loved to look through their photo albums and see my folks so young and vibrant, and the fair city of Albuquerque so sparse yet growing. A young town with an active military base.

Seeing these postcards makes me melancholy, but in that good way.

Look at this one, the venerable old Kimo Theater. A little worse for the wear these days, but still…a beautiful building.

Seeing this postcard I have a million memories of walking down Central, past the Kimo, on my way to who knows where (stores, bars, restaurants, etc!).

Speaking of Central Ave, how about this one:

Wow. Did it every really look like that? And yet, it did. Really, only in my dreams anymore, I suppose.

And this one makes me laugh right out loud.

Entitled “Scenic Drive Through Carlsbad Caverns National Park”.

Yeeeah, it might be a *bit* of a stretch to call the area around Carlsbad “scenic”, but I do love the, erm…”artistic license” they took with the colors of the landscape in this postcard:

Good stuff, fun to see all the postcards. It’s a contented sigh I have as I look through them all.

Oh Fair New Mexico…missing you today.

Happy Weekend, everyone!

What do you get for the girl…

…who wandered away from home, and might be a little bit lost?

This weekend my best friend arrived, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time.

Lately, I’ve been, yes, a little bit lost. Been thrown off my center of gravity and unable to get myself back right.

The Good Man has been a champ in propping me up, rubbing my shoulders, sending me back out there for the fight.

I keep swinging. And keep getting knocked down.

Then that great gal I described last week, the one who has been in my court for twenty plus years shows up…back up troops, you might say.

And from her roller bag, she pulls out some completely unexpected presents for my belated birthday.

In the presents, she had this (pardon the iPhone photo fuzziness):

That gift was the idea of my two goddaughters (her kids).

“Open it, friend,” she said, “and take a whiff.”

At first I thought it was some sort of unknown-to-me spice. But I was wrong.

I opened. I inhaled.

Inside that little canning jar, hauled on a plane all the way from New Mexico, was a little sprig of creosote.

“Smells like rain,” she said. She was right.

“Smells like home,” I said, and had to blink really fast so I didn’t dissolve into a huge puddle right there on the red couch.

Another time, another place

: Cue the wavy lines : Today we’re headed down memory lane.

The year was 1988. Hmm…I believe we’re talking Fall semester of school? My memory is often weak. If so, then the month would have been August, or maybe September.

It was warm, I remember that. Then again, it’s always warm in Las Cruces.

I was a student at New Mexico State University. Enrolled in the College of Business.

I was also a member of a social sorority. Yes, now it can be told. Me, I was a sorority girl. Though it didn’t mean what you think of when you think of that stereotype.

NMSU is a different sort of college and the group I belonged to wasn’t your typical sort of sorority. But yes, it can’t be denied. I’m a sorority girl. My husband never thought he’d end up with a sorority girl. I never thought I’d end up with an ROTC guy. Things change…

I had only joined the group just the semester before. It was all pretty new to me. But summer was ending and it was time to engage in “rush”, that every semester ritual whereby you try to convince new people to join (new members, the lifeblood of any organization).

We had to practice for days. Learning songs, doing skits, working on conversation skills, coming up with party theme ideas. Figuring out how to be little drone salespeople, I realize now, in my later years.

So we’d line up, white Keds sparkling in the New Mexico sunshine, shorts perfectly creased, hair teased impossibly high. We were a’twitter with anticipation about meeting the new young ladies who would come to our house to learn about us, and our particular sorority.

They would gather on the front walk and we’d run out, do some awkward singing on the lawn, then select one of the girls, cut her from the herd and bring her inside.

From there, we’d engage in some banal conversation for about ten minutes. Then with the subtle cue, we’d “switch partners” and go on to the next girl, engage is similar inane conversation, and on and on. So it went.

At the end of the day, we’d compare notes and decide who we wanted to invite back the next day.

So on that fateful day back in 1988, the theme of the party was somehow something Jamaican. We’d adapted the words to Bob Marley’s “One Love” to fit in things about our sorority (a travesty, if there ever was one).

For reasons I can’t explain, yards and yards of camouflage netting had been hung from the ceilings in the house…to really bring in that tropical feel?

Being the well-behaved drone, I lined up, I ran outside, I sang, I selected, and dragged this poor young lady into the house.

Her name was Kathleen.

She was extraordinarily tall, dark hair, face full of charming freckles, and the brightest blue eyes in the world.

At six feet all, she had to spend the day ducked under that low hanging camo net, but was a good sport about it. She was a little shy, but we hit it off. We saw the world in a similar way, and I really thought she was cool. Her mom had been a member of the same sorority, what they call “a legacy,” so she was pretty odds on to make the cut.

Ten minutes passed fast, and I moved on, reluctantly. Later, in the voting round, I gave her a big thumbs up, as did all the others.

She soon joined, became “a pledge” and I got to know her more. We became distant friends, she ran pretty thick with the girl who was my roommate. They did everything together. But we were friends and always got along.

The story goes on at some length from here. Too much to tell, really.

I’ll fast forward a bit. A couple years later, some adversity hit Kathleen’s life. Hard. Big. Overwhelming. In a bid to deal with a pending breakdown, she did some stuff that made sense in the mind of youth. Some crazy sh*t that seemed like a big deal at the time, but in my now grown up eyes, looks incredibly not even noteworthy.

Because of all of that, she lost a lot of friends back then. People with small minds who didn’t want to understand. People who maybe weren’t really friends to begin with.

But through all that, she didn’t lose me.

In fact, that adversity she struggled through moved us from being pretty good friends to rock solid life-long best friends. 99.999% of the fun I’ve had up until I met The Good Man is directly attributable to her. Pretty much every wayback machine moment I have written about on this site, she was either there or more likely was the catalyst.

A lot has gone on in the twenty-plus years since. We both graduated, grew up, became actual adults, all against our will.

Tomorrow evening, I have the honor of driving to the airport to pick up my best good friend of now some unbelievable twenty years. She will be here for a weekend that likely will move way too fast.

Attached is a very small photo (sorry about the size, I don’t have the original handy) of my best friend and me on my wedding day. I wouldn’t have anyone else at my side. She’s just said something that has cracked. me. up.

You don’t laugh that hard with someone who you kind of feel fond about…you laugh that hard with someone who is family.

I love that girl. I can hardly wait to see her!

P.S. Not to be all selfish, but to have both my best girlfriend and The Good Man together this weekend, two people who are always in my court, it’s kind of all about me, and…well, hell, it’s *good* to be me!

Get outta the wayback machine!

It was Fall, had to be. Slight crispness to the evening air. Anticipation thick as the fog of Aqua Net in the Chi Omega house.

It was 1989, probably. Or somewhere close to that. The campus of New Mexico State University. I was a sophomore, maybe a junior, I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I was getting ready to go to a dance at Corbett Center.

The woman who would become my best friend for what is now over twenty years was the driving force that night, and many just like it. Her parents had met at a Corbett Center dance, so she was especially incentivized to go scoot a boot and see what’s doing. Family history.

I nervously pulled on my too shiny, too new, gray goatskin round toe ropers and jeans that didn’t really go with the boots, but were at least long enough to be acceptable. “You should buy some Rockies,” I was told, and they were right. I would, later, in quantity. But then I had neither the money nor the courage. I wasn’t sure what I was going to get into, I just knew I was going to be there come hell or high water.

It wasn’t my first Corbett dance. It wouldn’t be my last. This story isn’t about one actual night, more an amalgam of a lot of great nights.

The gaggle of high-haired women walked out the back door of our home, a sorority house containing twenty-eight women of different backgrounds, and one understanding house mom. What bound us together was our choice of educational institution. A land grant institution. To the uninformed, that means an agricultural college.

It was a short shuffle over to Corbett, up the stairs to the third floor where they had the ballrooms. Pay the entrance fee. Five dollars I think? Maybe less back then. Get a stamp on your hand. Look around, see who is there already. Talk about who you hope shows up.

Hear the opening strains of music. Usually The Delk Band. A group of musicians, brothers, and their dad on fiddle. I went to school with most of the boys. I remember one of the Delks was cute. I remember one of the Delks was the drummer and back then had a tendency to speed up the tempo as a song wore on. Hard to dance to a wildly varying tempo. But we did it.

They were our people, and we embraced them. And we danced. Oh did we dance.

The two-step. Not the Texas double up kind, no. The slow kind, keeping time to the music.

And a waltz. My favorite, how I love to waltz. The rhythm of waltz-timed music still beats my heart a little differently.

The polka. If done right with the right boy (he had to be tall because I’m tall and otherwise we’d just bump knees) you felt like you were flying, feet hardly touching the ground.

Then of course the Cotton-Eyed Joe (stepped in what?) and the Schottische, played back to back, often enough. Linking six or eight of us, arm in arm, facing forward, laughing our fool heads off.

The ladies, my friends and I, would stand on the sidelines and take a look at the scene. My best friend would always get asked to dance first. She’s beautiful and a great dancer. Who could blame the boys for flocking to her blue-eyed, dark haired gorgeousness? Not me, for sure.

As I got better at dancing, I got asked often enough, too. The boys liked the girls who could dance, who liked to dance, who didn’t turn up their nose at dirty fingernails and cow sh*t on their boots.

There is something special about dancing with a boy who knows how to dance, a strong lead, who looked you in the eyes while we danced. The boys who had the right fold in their hat and smelled faintly of Copenhagen and beer and Polo cologne.

I got to know those folks. All of them, the boys, the girls, the dancers, the musicians, the laughers, the people who liked to swing each other around the dance floor.

They became my family. We traveled in packs, dancing until we were sweaty, then heading outside into the cool air to take a breath, drink a beer, laugh a lot and occasionally find someone to spend a little time with.

Well not me, not then. I was still too awkward and mixed up to attract much in the way of boys at that point. I was more “one of the guys” than one of the girls the guys would chase. Don’t feel bad for me though, I eventually figured it out. (cover your eyes, mom)

Over time, we all aged a little, got to be over 21 and started to migrate from dancing at Corbett center to dancing at the local country bar. It was fun but seemed a little more complicated. Add more than a couple beers to the night and weird things happen.

But still we danced. By that time, I’d moved off campus and lived with my friend from TorC. She was crazy and fun and taught me a lot (cover your eyes, mom), and she loved to dance as much as I did. She coined the phrase “big bar hair” and learned me how to get it, and keep it, despite dancing so hard sweat ran down your face.

Then we all aged a bit more, and we graduated and found respectable jobs. My best friend, her husband (a fine dancer, I must say) and I are all actually employed in the same area that’s listed on our diplomas. One might scoff at country folks, but all three of us hold a Master’s degree in our chosen fields.

Now, on the verge of turning forty, I find I still miss those days, mightily. I wished I’d enjoyed them more at the time. The stress of school and classes and “what do I want to be when I grow up” cast a pall on my days.

My own fault. A worrier by nature, a tendency I fight tooth and nail every single day I take a breath.

When I’m having a bad day, when I doubt myself, when I realize I don’t fit in at my new place of employment, when I don’t feel heard or understood or very well liked, I can always go back to those days in my mind and smile.

I can’t get together with my best friend and her husband and NOT talk about those days. Magical. I’m blessed to have been able to have them. Once upon a time, I knew where I belonged.

______________________________

(photo found via Google. That is, in fact, Mark Delk and if I’m right, that photo was taken at Dickerson’s Auction Barn…another location for a lot of good nights of dancing….)

This historic journey brought to you by the song “On A Good Night” by Wade Hayes. The song popped up on my iPod set to shuffle during the morning commute. The song itself was burned off a CD while visiting my best good friend in the world just a couple months ago. Damn you Wade for putting me in the wayback machine!

One of ours finds her way back home

After moving to the Bay Area back in 1997, I settled into my new apartment, without any friends or family to speak of. I was completely alone in a big town. It was at once both terrifying and exhilarating.

I knew very few places I could drive to without getting lost, but I made myself the solemn promise that I would not just stay holed up in my apartment. I would leave the house and explore, even if it tested my bounds of comfort. And it did.

On earlier visits to the area for work, some people I knew in the East Bay had taken me to a restaurant in San Francisco. They had given me directions to get there, and I still remembered the route. I recalled the food was good and the people who worked there were nice.

So it became a steady destination. The restaurant is named Sodini’s, and I’ve spoken about it here before. If you’ve been out to visit me, I’ve likely taken you there.

Anyhow, as I went out every weekend, a little New Mexico girl picking hayseeds out of her hair, the people at Sodini’s began to know me. They looked after me. They gave me advice on how to live in the Bay Area, and they protected me.

Usually, I’d eat at Sodini’s then go across the street to a bar called The Grant and Green to listen to live music. Once in there, a part time cocktail waitress, part time stripper took over looking out for me. She was beautiful but also one tough lady. She would scare off guys she knew were bad news who had come sidling up to me, or would shout down anyone trying to run a scam on me (there were plenty who tried. What did I know? They didn’t have people like this in Albuquerque).

Then, several months later, I began idly dating a blues musician. So now I really had reason to be in North Beach. The blues scene is thriving. Over plenty of nights in various North Beach bars, I became a regular. I became part of the North Beach family. A loose band of a variety of strange and not so strange. Some talented. Some educated. Some rich. Some homeless. We are a little bit of everything. I’ve both been read to from Plato and offered the chance to buy crack in the same evening.

As motley as these folks are, truly, they became my family. I was often alone considering my boyfriend was a working musician. The more I fretted, the more they looked out for me. And I began looking out for them, too.

With all of the people I knew who lived on the streets, I began to worry about them. My big heart would be crushed if I didn’t see Willie on his regular street corner, playing harmonica to cheer passerby. Or if Lorne wasn’t standing outside Café Trieste, looking for some money or maybe to fix someone’s car for a couple bucks. And then there was Millie.

She’s about four feet nothing and would bop from bar to restaurant to bar with a huge gap toothed grin and a Polaroid camera. For $5, she’d take your photo and then give you the biggest hug you’ve ever received from someone so little. Her smile would brighten the entire room.

As the years passed, things turned rather sour with the musician. Then I went through an odyssey of my own psyche. And to add to all of that, then my father passed away. All life changing events.

I stopped going to North Beach so much. When I did go, my family would hug me, ask after my health, worry over me and welcome me home. Then they’d chide me for being gone so long.

Finally, as more years passed, I was alone again and unable to get up the courage to explore like I had before. Things were changing. I was changing. I was profoundly alone and considerably lost.

Then on a sunny day in November, my gray skies parted when I met The Good Man. For a while when we first dated, he lived in North Beach, which meant I visited my old haunts with a new set of eyes and a new man in tow. My North Beach family eyed him warily at first, but were soon as charmed as I over The Good Man.

But, to be honest, that’s not the point of my story. The point is this…recently our friend Millie, the cheery, adorable Polaroid taking woman had gone missing. I’d heard this through the grapevine and was sick to my heart. She isn’t a young lady, and I feared she’d ended up like a lot of my family and succumbed on a cold San Francisco night.

I cried this morning when read this article in the SFGate.

Millie was found in a Reno hospital after taking a bus up there and getting turned around. Some kind folks went up and brought her home.

She’s back in North Beach with her Polaroid and her amazing smile.

I don’t get back to North Beach all that much anymore. The Good Man and I moved into our place on the peninsula and now we’re all married and domesticated and living our new lives together. That’s ok too. It does my heart good to know that even though I’m not still running around North Beach, that my people are there and they are okay.

I’m a strange kid, I’m the first to admit it. I can manage to be homesick over two places at the same time. Both New Mexico and the Bay Area beat inside my heart. I’m not sure how to ever resolve that.

I’m not sure I even want to try.

Photo from the SFGate.