We are on the open road between the two places I have spent my holiday. It’s just about high noon and we’re entering the little town in Huerfano (Orphan) County, which marks the half way point. I generally stop here – at the Load ‘n Jug – to fill up on gas, Coca-Cola and Sweet Tarts. It’s been a wile since I’ve done this trip with my mother. She’s been doing it more and more frequently since I moved to The Smoke. She suggests a bite to eat, and I immediately think of the Loaf ‘n Jug. She tells me she knows a place for a proper bite. I am impressed by my mother’s sense of adventure; I would never have ventured beyond the Loaf n’ Jug in this small town. I am, I recognise, a city-slicker at heart.
The place my mother knows is an unlikely-for-people-like-us place to stop. It’s called Georges. It’s a roadside diner, family restaurant, burger joint from some other era. The patrons are simple folk with cow shit on their boots and big bellies hanging over the top of their dungerees. The waitresses hand us a menu before we even sit down. They take our order before we get a table. They buzz around offering refills of ice tea and serving extra ice.
How does my mom know about this place?
It will be the last meal I have ‘out’ before going home.
Going home. It’s time. I miss Butters. I miss Petunis. I miss the Mista who left me here an extra week.
Have I done all the things I wanted to do? Have I bought all the things I wanted to buy?
Yes and almost — there is always more to buy with a 2 to 1 exchange rate. 3 week vacations are good. I’m ready for the Smoke, but will I be ready for work?
I’ve not been honest, here with my words.
I’ve not been entirely disingenuous either, but wanting to be clever and poetic and beautiful has gotten in the way of sincerity.
I resolve to try harder henceforth. If I’m lucky, there will be clever, poetic, beautiful moments, but they will be sincere clever, poetic, beautiful moments. I’ll probably regress from time to time. Be patient. Grab me by the shoulders and shake me. Hopefully my cringe-causing affectations to greatness (or cleverness or poetic-ness or beautiful-ness) will be short-lived, and I’ll return to the straight-talk, the this-is-me-this-is- who-I-am I know to be me.
Even now, as I fight to break the habit, I find myself writing in circles without honing in on what I mean to say, like I expect you to “get it” but when I reread, my words ring false.
I mean:
When I read what I write, I sound like a phoney. I want to be honest. I want my words to sound authentic. So: I resolve to be more frank. I resolve to turn on the spigot to my brain so that even if I’m not spilling my guts with emotion, I’m at least giving a truthful account of what’s in my head.
I’ll start now, with my current view from the window of my mother’s guest room.
Having lived in England so long, I have forgotten what impending rain smells like. The pervasive damp, forever-about to rain state of affairs in England is so saturated with the smell of rain that it is the always-smell.
Having spent near on three weeks in a truly arid climate, where my skins crackles and my nose innards get crusty, I forgot the smell of environmental wet. Until last night when the cotton ball clouds rolled themselves up into a puffy blanket behind which the almost full moon glowed. The cotton ball clouds had become rain clouds. I could smell it!
From the vantage point of the guest bed, which looks out the window of my mother’s guest room, I watched the cotton ball clouds become fat, threatening thunder clouds with the glow of the moon whitening their edges. It’s a guest room decked out with paraphernalia of the Southwest. Anywhere else, and this room would be tacky: branches taken from the rugged desert and fashioned into pieces of art, Native American Indian feathers (of course, not feathers actually plucked from the Native American Indians themselves, but rather feathers plucked from sacred birds by the Native American Indians), prints of old cowboys with faces as rugged as the scenery outside my window.
Now, in the early morning, the sky is clear and pale blue all the way down to the gentle curve of a piece of the mountains that surround this valley. Sometimes I fantasise: if there were no Mista* would I give up the Smoke and banish myself to a place like this?
*The Mista is no man for this country (side).
Everyone’s talking about gas prices. I don’t mention that petrol has been a pocket plunderer in other parts for a lot longer and with a lot less complaining.
Here, you can’t get from here to there without wheels. Distances are big. But so are the cars and motorised bikes. Dogs are even bigger here. Seriously. I kid you not.
Of late, Gas prices are big*, and so are the complaints.
*$4.09/gallon
1 gallon = 3.78 litres
It’s a relative thing.
And the Indians (Native American variety). And the Spanish. And the Mexicans.
Fuck, Yeah!
London:
The Wild West:
Some colo(u)rs dominate a place.
To my eye, London is black and gray and maroon-brown with accents of white.
This place (The West) is blue and orange-red with accents of green.
In London, people live on top of people who live on top of rats. Houses abut houses, which abut sandwich shops and off-license convenience stores abutting council flat buildings.
The wild west is wide open space for as far as the eye can see until it hits the mountains in the distance, some still sprinkled with snow just above the treeline. Horses and cattle graze in the plains. Tumbleweeds really do tumble and can cause damage to your car if you’re not careful.
London is wet.
No shit.
The wild west is dry. Bone dry. Nails grow brittle. Skin begs for moisturiser. Lips chap despite the liberal application of Chapstick.
At the north end of town we stop at a flat, square, adobe structure – the typical architecture of these parts – where a sign by the road reads, “The Bean”. There must be a tag line (I don’t remember it) that indicates that The Bean refers to the coffee variety of bean because I know it is this place where I want to stop on our way out of town – to hopefully get a fix of fancy coffee before hitting the open road.
The in-laws and I leave the Mista waiting in the car. If there are lattes, I will get him a skinny. If not, I will use my best judgement. I pull open the wooden-frame, screen door. It bounces shut on its springs behind us. We’re in luck. The menu above the counter displays a gourmet coffee choice of drinks. Even soya milk and rice milk and various sizes — all at gourmet coffee prices. The interior is authentic, hippy, rustic, bordering on dirty. The girls behind the counter slowly dish out the ground coffee and begin to heat the milk.
The mother-in-law mutters, “They really take their time.”
The in-laws are relatively patient people for folks who have spent most of their adult lives in New York City; but the pace of life here is even slower for people of such patience. I, on the other hand, like it. I realise that for as impatient as I am in some respects, I am infinitely patient in others. But this isn’t about me.
This is about how different the place where I am now* is from where the place where I generally am** — starting with the pace. The domesticated wild west is now a place where old hippies, young artists, and native American Indians — Hopis, Navajos, Comanches, and all sorts of permutations — of all sorts of ages, saunter over to their pick up trucks and crawl down main street at a turtle’s pace.
London is like a game of double-dutch. You have to examine the pace and prepare yourself to jump in, keep up, avoid tripping-up and getting tangled-up in the jump rope.
*Northern New Mexico
**The Smoke, my beloved.
My brother drove to the stadium, which is on the northeast side of town away from the shaded neighbourhoods, front patios, and green lawns. Where the prairie is closer than the mountains and the absence of water in the air is immediately obvious. (In other neighbourhoods sprinklers shoot mist into the air in addition to watering the grass).
He had a VIP pass, which entitled us to park in the gravel covered rectangle nearest the stadium. Even there, where people weren’t just people but were Very Important Peoples, the time-honoured tradition of eating and drinking out of the back of the family car was embraced. To my mind, tailgating (the tradition of eating and drinking from the back of the family car) is an activity reserved for the masses (as opposed to Very Important Peoples). There’s just nothing high-brow about unfolding folding chairs, sitting down in a parking lot, drinking beer, and eating coldcuts and potato chips from the back of your car. Yet, even in the VIP parking section, football/soccer enthusiasts practiced tailgaiting with the same hearty enthusiasm as those non-English speakers way out in parking lot Z. The USA is a democracy indeed!
I’ve never been inside Craven Cottage – that quaint, other-era football stadium on the North bank of the Thames, yet I guessed the Dick Sporting Good’s Park was about the same size of Fulham’s playground. Of the 20,000 seats, maybe a quarter were full. My brother insisted that this game was not representative: evening games are much better attended.
Is it because it’s more acceptable to drink beer in the parking lot in the evening?
As the game got underway, the enormity of David Beckham’s greed-driven mistake to join the LA Galaxy dawned on me.
Observataion 1: If the LA Galaxy is in the same league as these two (which indeed it is), then Beckham is a full grown man playing at the nursery. Don’t get me wrong: I am not an ardent fan of David Beckham. He is good to look at, but as a footballer, he’s never been the God that his salary would indicate. From my point of view, he’s been a slightly above average footballer in a world class league. To imagine him playing with the likes of those on the pitch at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park made me very, very sad for Becks.
I worried that the Mista would lose patience with the second rate display of the game that he loves. But, the Mista took it in stride and used the opportunity to disect the performance. He used the Socratic method to further my education.
“So, what do you think?”
“It looks like a high school game.”
“Why?”
“It’s very slow?”
“Yes and why?”
I lost patience with the Mista’s questioning before he lost patience with the lack of talent on the pitch.
“Just tell me already.”
Observation 2: “Lack of control. They can’t pass with any kind of confidence, and when they do get the ball, they don’t have the control to keep it.”
It was true. The Mista encapsulated the game in just a couple of short sentences within a few short minutes of the game.
Is this why it’s called soccer and not football? It’s another game entirely.
Observation 3: The spectators didn’t know much about football / soccer at all. The questions that I heard asked were the basic of the basic. Off-sides is a very, very basic concept. I had to explain the 4 minute stoppage time to my neighbour. He thought soccer games only lasted 90 minutes. “Why are they still playing?”
This ignorance about some basic points of the game leads me to a generalisation about Americans. For as much as I can make fun of Americans, be embarrassed by them, cringe at the sound of my own accent, I must give them/us credit where credit is due. Americans give things a shot. They try things. Here they are not knowing the first thing about this game they’re watching, yet they’ve gone out, built a stadium, funded a team and are hoping against hope that the game takes off. I like that.
In the end, the Rapids beat FC Dallas, 2-1.
Dallas trying to be Barcelona. That’s a laugh.
PS. This post has taken me by surprise. Writing about football? In America?
It’s 04:09 local time. I have snuck away from the unconscious embrace of the sleeping Mista on this, the morning of our anniversary. I have jet lag. I am wide awake and thinking about the size of the salads we had during our layover at O’Hare.
I’ve said it before at least one time: Everything’s bigger in America*.
Reminders of this indisputable fact started immediately into our journey.
Two Americans shared the Dot-to-Dot mini-bus service with us from SW London to Heathrow. A super-sized mother and daughter combo. I’m not talking plump or chunky or overweight. I’m also not talking from the perspective of a super-skinny or super-fit judger of weight. I, on occasion (ie frequently) eat too much, drink too much, enjoy my chocolate and pints with a bowl of chips too much. I’ve got some extra luggage myself. These two, however, were sadly-frighteningly fat. The fat-lady-in-the-circus kind of fat. If the mother was the star of the show, then the daughter was the understudy. At 10 years old (or thereabouts), the understudy already wobbled rather than walked due to the extraneous folds of plumpness that hung down from her gut, I imagined, covering her privates.
You I feel sorry for the child. You I think she has no shot at being a healthy size. You I don’t realise this until you I sit down to write about it: you have judged that mother.
How could she do that to her little girl?
I don’t want to admit to myself that I am a passer of judgement. Just look at my use of the second person, a subtle way to indicate it’s not just me; it’s something we all would do in the same situation. This exonerates me, but it doesn’t. Because in this case, it was just me there (well, also the Mista, but he has no qualms about passing judgement.)
In O’Hare, when the waitress brought our salads, I baulked; the Mista muttered, ‘Holy shit.’
I judged that the amount of spinach looking up at me from my salad plate was about as much as an entire bag from my weekly shopping; a bag generally split three ways.
Our salads were another reminder: (almost) everything in the US of A is bigger.
The Mista and I know this. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. The abstraction in our heads of supermegabigsized things doesn’t seem to prepare us for the reality.
Walking into Super Target nearly killed us. (Day 1: 9 thru 14 already ticked off the list.)
Today the camera comes out to bear witness.
*And been corrected: that not everything is bigger.
