FRIENDS AND THEN SOME

My oldest friend came to visit. We missed our 50th high school class reunion while he was here. But I miss all high school reunions; he went only to the 40th. None is enough for me, one must have been enough for him. What's left of the old class can re-une all they want. We were happy here in New Mexico.

We have been friends for more than 60 years and met the day I became the new kid in Miss Martinelli's combined second-third grade class at Sternberger Elementary School. That's where I ended up because my parents wouldn't allow the school to jump me directly to third grade. I sometimes wonder how it might have changed my life to make the jump, but I ended up in the half-and-half class instead, second graders on Miss Matinelli's left, third graders on her right. Only the brightest second graders ended up in that class; I am not sure how the third graders qualified to be there. It was halfway through the school year when I arrived and the only thing my new classmates knew how to do that I didn't was cursive handwriting. That was for third graders back in the school I came from. Otherwise I'd done most of the reading and arithmetic at my old school. 

Miss Martinelli said penmanship was important in life and I had to learn. Immediately. My mother assured her I would. We called it writing in longhand and I'd practice every afternoon making line after line of looping letters on wide-ruled paper. Big letters and little letters. Working my way through the alphabet and back, A-Z and Z-A. It was tedious, pencil-dulling work and I hated it, but I had to show it to my mother every day before I could go out and play with my new friend.

Then my aunts showed me how to fasten three pencils together with rubber bands so I could create three parallel lines of letters at a time. Three fat pencils angled just so, one rubber band. My mother's younger sisters were identical twins who had conspired to find an easy way to do anything and everything their whole lives. They began by charming their father then worked up from there. They were in their 20s when they showed me the pencil trick. Eventually the easy way out would become more and more difficult to find and they both became alcoholics. But their pencil trick made my life easier. I finished my handwriting homework in one-third the time and was given permission to go out and play with my best friend who lived up the road. My aunts winked as I walked out the door. We were co-conspirators and children love conspiracies more than handwriting.

My best friend's name is Durwood and we were friends at first sight. Same class, same school bus, same stop near the end of the school bus line at the edge of town. We were about one stop away from attending the county schools with the farmers' kids, but our parents would never have allowed it. We weren't country people. Our fathers had jobs in the city. We went to city schools and would have even better jobs in the city someday too. At least that was the plan. Eisenhower was president. What could go wrong? Life was good and could only get better.

Of course, times changed and people changed and the plans of the 1950s went awry in the 1960s and we went awry along with them. But before all that happened we had four years of freedom and friendship there at the edge of town: a pond to fish in, woods and fields for walking, a whole field full of rocks to throw. We learned to play chess and shared a love of Pogo comics. We lined up with everyone else for our polio shots. His house burned down while he was away at Scout camp. I watched it burn. His parents built a new one, ranch style, brick. I envied the fire and the new house. Sometimes when we slept over at his house or mine we were allowed to stay up late and watch Jack Parr. We were like brothers. Some people thought we were brothers

Then in the summer after sixth grade my family moved further into town. Durwood and I were no longer neighbors, but we always attended the same schools. We sang in a boys choir, played music in the school band. We bought identical Gibson LGO acoustic guitars. I had a guitar but he had the talent to go with it and eventually he learned to play far better than I ever would. He still came to my house, I went to his. Not as often, but often enough. Our friendship held fast.

After graduating from high school in 1963, both of us spent years climbing around in the wreckage of the 1950s, clung to adolescence through the 1960s and finally reached some semblance of adulthood sometime in the 1970s when we were nearly 30 years old. He became a banjo player, I became a writer. He once introduced me to his boss by telling her, "We tried to grow up together but didn't." His boss was country singer Loretta Lynn and we were on her tour bus somewhere in Iowa at the time. Durwood and I both laughed, but I am not sure she got the joke. Later he became a computer whiz and I became an executive. Through it all both of us remained boys who grew up just shy of the city limits, city boys with country longings.

As adults we've never lived in the same place and there are times we didn't see each other for years. But we have been friends since the day we met on the school bus and got off at the same stop in 1953. Now we have both retired to houses stuck on mountainsides, his in Tennessee, mine in New Mexico. My aunts are dead. My handwriting is strangely left-leaning (I am right handed), awkward and to this day I prefer to print when I have to write something down. I suppose I sacrificed penmanship to friendship but I have no regrets.

He is back home in Tennessee now and wrote today to say how much he enjoyed our time together. I wrote back, " The pleasure of your company is one of the truest pleasures of my life." What else could I say?

SO HERE WE ARE

I have done two things really well in my life: I have loved my wife and loved New Mexico. They aren't the only two things I've done well, but they are the things I've done best, things without question, hesitation or deviation, things I will never regret.

And there are things I have done badly, too many things, but I have been thinking about one in particular.

I have not been a very good son and now that my father is 90 years old, I am no better at it than I ever was. I call him but I feel no need to go and visit; I catch myself in gestures that I recognize as his and promise myself I will never to do that again. Our lives are far away from each other and always have been, even when we lived in the same house.

Sometimes I think my mother intended it that way. I was born when she was 19 years old.

The Veteran

She gave birth to me and then befriended me and held on. A therapist once told me that a boy should not have to be his mother's friend, that being a son was enough. But that is what I was and perhaps it is most of what I was saving myself from when I went away and stayed away; but I was saving myself from my father too.

I was born shortly before Christmas when he was 21 years old and a damaged boy-man limping out of the wreckage of World War II. He says my birth made him happy and I believe him, but he never seemed to know how to be a father to me, never seemed to know quite what was supposed to happen between us. So I never learned. I watched him with his own father but they seemed as clueless as my father and me about what to do. Mainly the men in my family did not want to disappoint each other - grandfather (whose own father committed suicide when his son was seven months old), father (who went to war and never quite came home or really wanted to), son (who has resisted both war and suicide) - and fear of disappointment is a powerful thing but it is not love.

My mother always insisted that I respect my father, but she did not insist that I love him. When I lost my respect for him and he for me, there was not much left. We have tried. For years, especially in the seven years since my mother's death, my father and I have attempted to rescue love from years of mutual disappointment. We have not been very successful so far and we are running out of time. I am not sure we have the right tools. I am not even sure such tools exist.

So here we are.

He is a 90-year-old veteran of World War II who has spent much of his life embracing the war because he has never been sure how to embrace his children or anything else. It is the one thing he has done really well. So war is the beloved companion of his old age.

And I am 1,600 miles away in my beloved New Mexico with my beloved wife, determined not to be the prisoner of anybody's war, especially his.

Several hours away to the northwest I have one son; several hours to the southwest I have another. I embrace them; I love them; I am proud of them. There are no conditions. I do all of these things simply because I am their father and they are my sons. And I know they love me, too, though sometimes I fear I have disappointed them in some way. It is a fear I never want them to know. It is the third thing I want to do really well.

Father and Sons

THE FATUOUS PHONY WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE

My wife and I went hiking on Labor Day. She wanted to show me a new trail not far from our house. We had to cut through the woods and do some arroyo clambering before we reached the road to the top of the mountain. She'd only been there once before and somehow we ended up behind a neighbor's house on the wrong side of the fence. There was a wire gate and as we were going through it our neighbor approached – skinny, white, pale (why do people who fear the sun live in the southwest?), bony shouldered in a tank top, shorts and running shoes with a large, smooth, gray rock in one hand and a smile of recognition on her face. The gate was at the back of her property and my wife explained that we had inadvertently ended up on her side of the fence. She is our neighbor. We’ve had dinner together at Harry’s Roadhouse (she invited us). She chatters like a magpie with a sort of Tennessee-ish southern accent and we had a friendly chit-chat about tomatoes, kidney stones, the trail we were about to hike, old dogs, the bear that ate its way through the neighborhood a few nights ago, a possible dinner together in a couple of weeks before they head back east. Neighbors talking. Pleasant (despite the fact that she clung to that rock the whole time like she might need to bash a bear or something). Then we went on our way up the mountain and she went back to her house. On the way down we stayed off her property because that is the neighborly thing to do and found a different route home. A very good day. A wonderful day in the neighborhood as Mr. Rogers used to say.

The next day an email arrived from the neighbor:

Hi again.  I hope this message is not received as "unfriendly" - it is not our intent!

We am (sic) requesting that you not hike across our property or open the gate at the rear of our property to gain access to our private driveway when you are hiking in the areas around our property. The honest truth is that we just don't want our property - or our driveway - to become part of anyone's hiking trail again.  It has taken us the better part of 2 decades to stop the many people who used to routinely hike through our property [along with their horses, loose dogs, friends, family, house guests, etc.] as well as up and down our private driveway at all hours of the day and evening. 

Unfortunately, we have learned from experience that when one person begins trespassing, then more and more neighbors and hikers [many of whom are not neighbors] think they can do the same thing and the trespassing problems begin all over again for us. Once people start trespassing, they end up hiking all through our property and it becomes simply too invasive of our privacy, and creates security issues - which become truly troublesome for us as part time residents.

We can show you another access point ....

We understand the tensions these issues can provoke among neighbors - so, please feel free to call me or email me if you want to discuss this further.

Thanks for your understanding about our request.

OK - on to something more fun. I will send the pictures ... of the bear shortly.

And, let me know if you do want some of the bounty from our tomato crop when it comes in!

Thanks!

I love the way she chattily chirped “Hi again” then put quotation marks around the word “unfriendly” to show us she didn’t mean it that way. But she did mean it that way. She is unfriendly, un-neighborly, unwilling to simply ask us politely to find a different way to the start of the trail. But she was perfectly willing to make excuses (“The honest truth is...”) and feel compelled to give us the history of their decades long fight for privacy (the honest truth is I don’t give a shit about that and why didn’t they just build a fence after the first decade or so) and have the audacity to imply that if she let us get away with it even one time, there is no telling what sort of riff-raff might follow on our trail (we are her un-riff-raffy neighbors for fuck’s sake).

First there is the offer, "We can show you another access point ...." Then there is the use of "tensions," "issues," "provoke" and "neighbors" along with the invitation to "please feel free to call me or email me" to talk about it. Oh, please. We don't need for you to show us anything and there will be no further discussion. This is it.

And finally the cheery, fatuous fakery of the “on to something more fun” part? She can keep the picture of the bear (she's scarier than the bear anyway) and stuff her tomato bounty with whatever or wherever.

My wife (always more kind and courteous than I am, but someone who likes honest talk rather than weaselly passive-aggressive emails) wrote back to say: Thanks for letting us know.... You should have said something yesterday. We will find another route to hike because being a good neighbor is important. To which our un-neighborly neighbor responded thanking us for understanding because she really feels we might become friends.

Friends? We won’t become friends because what we understand is that she is the sort of person we don’t want to know, the sort who gives Santa Fe a bad name and who cannot understand the pompous arrogance of sending an offensive message like this via email and not expecting it to be seen as unfriendly and tension-making. She is the sort of obliviously silly and condescending person we would never befriend.

Despite its long history as a place where cultures collide, Santa Fe attracts all sorts of people who never quite fit in someplace else. In fact, it is a place where those people can get together, tolerate each other’s quibbles and quirks and call it home. Always has been. People give each other lots of leeway here to dress, eat, sleep, pray, philosophize, fleece, fake and marry however they please, as long as they respect other people’s ability to do the same.

It's not always easy because some are more tolerable than others, but there is one particular type that is intolerable.

It is the person from somewhere else – Maryland, Virginia, perhaps, somewhere just outside D.C., a place like that – skinny, white, in this case female (but not always), lives around here part time, does a little volunteer work somewhere safe for people like her and believes that entitles her to be a local, lives in a nice little place surrounded by trees up a dirt road off Old Santa Fe Trail, is afraid of things that go bump in the night (or day), fearful of strangers to the point of paranoia, yappy as a Pomeranian, untrustworthy as a pit bull and as self-righteously selfish as Ayn Rand.

What a disappointment to discover that one of those people is my "neighbor." But she is. The good thing is she will be leaving soon for the tidy confines of wherever she confines herself back east when she is not here. Maybe she won’t come back. She's clearly not from around here.

p.s. Being unfriendly is my intent.