The UnTexan

I'M WITH BRUCE or HOW MUCH GOOD COULD A DO-GOODER DO IF A DO-GOODER COULD DO GOOD?

It was a prairie dog drive-by in Santa Fe involving a retired guy named Bruce (who obviously couldn't shoot straight), his pickup truck, a snazzy pellet gun with a telescopic sight, and a do-gooder named Steve, who said, according to the local newspaper, that "he had been sitting in his own car near Galisteo Street, using binoculars to conduct surveillance" on a prairie dog village where he claimed 14 prairie dogs have died from pellet gun wounds in the past few weeks.

Even though Santa Fe has many more of the rodents than it needs, dead prairie dogs upset Steve in the worst way. But prairie dog surveillance? The very idea boggles the mind, but Steve is nothing if not a rodent-loving mind-boggler (Santa Fe is full of mind-boggling lovers of one thing or another, but I keep away from them). So he's sitting in his car conducting surveillance when (eureka!) he sees a pellet gun barrel poke out of a pickup truck window. And. Bang! A shot rings out (It is a pellet rifle. So, I suppose it was, Pooft! A shot etc., etc.). First Steve runs to check on the prairie dogs (because he is a man who has his priorities straight), but finds no rodent carnage. I'm sure that disappointed him just a little (I am also sure that Steve, being Steve, would he have administered CPR or applied teeny-tiny rodent bandages or lamented the dead, whatever was necessary). No deaths or injuries. Whew! But Steve (again, being Steve) then rats out Bruce (rodent habits are as contagious as are some of the diseases their fleas carry) and the police cite Bruce for animal cruelty. Bruce claims he didn't kill the other 14 rodents, says he has nothing against prairie dogs "per se" (but knows Santa Fe has too many of them and they carry diseases like plague) and that, while he admits he fired the errant shot, he is "not a terminator" of prairie dogs and will man-up and accept whatever punishment is handed down. Steve no doubt is somewhere giggling in delight.

And then the story ends up on the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Who, what, when, where and why did that happen? There are reasons. But this isn't about newspapers. It's about do-gooders and the silliness of prairie dog surveillance.

I don't particularly like do-gooders, but I really don't like do-gooders who aren't doing all that much good about anything that matters. At the top of my list are the fearless prairie dog protectors of Santa Fe - the most self-righteous bunch of handwringers in a city full of self-righteous handwringers.

They call themselves People for Native Ecosystems (sounds grand,doesn't it?) though their stated single purpose is to save prairie dogs, specifically Gunnison prairie dogs. That's it. And they are volunteers who work only for what they advertise as that "warm feeling of knowing you are assisting someone or something who/which really needs your help." Of course a prairie dog is a "something" not a "someone" and a "which" not a "who," but these people don't care. They prefer helping rodents to helping people (I wonder if they ever ask themselves why?) and will go to great lengths to do their "job" - for nothing more than what they advertise as that "warm feeling" that do-gooders strive to achieve. It sounds positively orgasmic the way they say it. So the prairie dog protectors must feel so warm and good about the story of Bruce, Steve and the prairie dog drive-by on the front page of the daily newspaper that they want to roll over and smoke a cigarette in the afterglow.

Another do-gooder really believes he's done something good. And I suspect Steve believes in his heart he is saving the world one cute little prairie dog as a time. But what good has he actually done?

I know prairie dogs are cute as all get out - and some people think cute doesn't deserve to die (ask any aging, formerly "cute" person - but I'm with Bruce on this one (and with the guy who suggested that if Steve and his bunch are really interested in Native Ecosystems, they will introduce rattlesnakes and other prairie dog predators - maybe even a wolf - to take care of the problem the old fashioned way. Steve can conduct surveillance and watch it happen. He might even hear the hiss, the rattle, the growl).

Years ago I had a friend named Bruce, a quiet and peaceful fellow from Tennessee pursuing a ph.d. in literature, who ended up with a skunk in the wall of the farmhouse he was renting outside Iowa City. He tried trapping it and when that didn't work he borrowed my shotgun. He hadn't fired a gun in years and didn't know if he could actually shoot the skunk, but a few days later he returned the shotgun and said with a shy grin, "I had forgotten how much fun it is to kill small, helpless creatures." He's right. It produces a warm feeling. A tingle. Thrilling. Almost orgasmic. I know the feeling. Steve would recognize it. But I'm sticking with Bruce.

PURPLE MAJESTIES, FRUITY PLANES AND THE MEANING OF AMERICA

It took me a long time to understand what we were singing about when we sang "America the Beautiful" back in the Boys Choir. What in the hell are "purple mountain majesties" anyway? Piecing together the meanings of "purple" and "mountain" and "majesties" back then, I figured we were singing about America being king of the hill. That seemed logical enough. Hadn't America almost single-handedly saved the world from the Germans and the Japs (we thought so back then). But "fruited plain?" What is a "fruited plain?" I thought the words were "fruited plane" and decided it had something to do with Chiquita Banana flying DC-3s packed with golden bunches my way from somewhere in Central America. Naughtier friends in the Boys Choir speculated that the words were actually "fruity plains" and had something to do with "queers" (as we called gay people in those days) in the "plains" where all of those "amber waves of grain" grew. Frightened, homophobic, mostly pre-pubescent boys sabotaged the song and sang "fruity plains" and giggled as if we understood what we were saying. It was our only defense against the mystery and thrill of it all (and against the homosexual farmers waving and tending all of that amber grain). We must have learned other verses, but like most Americans I only remember the purple mountains and fruity planes parts.

It turns out there are seven more "O Beautifuls" after that. And for what?

• "...for pilgrim feet" (and the pilgrims' "stern impassioned stress"), wherein God is invoked to stitch up some flaws and "America, America" is asked to "confrim thy soul in self-control..." (those damned stern pilgrims and their big-footed self-control!).

• "...for heroes proved," wherein God is once more invoked (this time as some sort of gold smelter) touching "America, America" with "divine" gains (I suppose this verse has something to do with the cost of freedom, God, and the bargains at Wal-Mart).

• "...for patriot dream..." which includes "alabaster cities" (more on this later) and entreats "America, America" to practice more "good and brotherhood" and rhymes "dream" and "gleam" (those alabaster cities gleam) and "years" and "tears." And God's grace and "crowning" (Americans are crown-haunted people, apparently in fear of becoming Canadians) are in there too.

• "...for halcyon skies" with more "amber" grain and "purple mountain majesties," (repitition already) only this time the plains are "enameled." Enameled? Why? Maybe God knows how to smelt gold AND enamel plains, but how can enamel plains grow amber grain? Maybe it's a trick those homosexual farmers know. There is more of God's grace "on thee" followed by the lines, "Til souls wax fair as earth and air/And music-hearted sea!" Waxed souls, Earth, Wind and Fire (and musical seas)? Come on. I think the writer needed a word to rhyme with "thee" and somehow misplaced her thesaurus.

• And again "...for pilgims' feet..." (and more "impassioned stress" of course) only this time thought control is thrown into the mix as "paths are wrought through/wilds of thought" by those pilgrim feet (actually "By pilgrim foot and knee?"). Apparently those stomping, kneeing pilgrims play dirty when it comes to mind control in the name of God and America. Pilgrims sound like Scientologists.

• Then we come to "...for glory-tale.." which introduces American self-justification but also the notion that "selfish gain" just might be a "stain" on the "banner of the free" and that there might be some evil lurking in the comingling of God, democracy and capitalism (But who believes that? Wal-Mart isn't in the stain remover business).

• And finally we return to that "...of patriot dream" of "alabaster cities gleam" (those alabaster cities gleaming again), only this time the dream looks to a future when "nobler men keep once again/Thy whiter jubilee." This seems to be a clear reference to the powerful desire among Tea Partiers and other white people (the ones who always deny that they are racists) to dump Obama, put the crown back on the white guy's head where it belongs, knee the homosexual farmers right in their fruity, enameled plains, restore some good old-fashioned pilgrim self control (and thought control while we're at it), wax some souls, play some Earth, Wind and Fire, shop at Wal-Mart, pretend there are no greedy stains on the banner of freedom, and stomp the shit out of Katie Holmes. America! Beautiful! Hallelujah!

That's it. Everything we are.

But how was a pre-pubescent choirboy supposed to understand all of that "America, America" stuff was leading up to a big white jubilee (not only white, but "whiter"). Who knew? Let's boogie children.

DON'T BUY CENTURYLINK: ADVENTURES WITH THE PRESUMPTUOUS BITCH OF ARROGANT UNDERSTANDING

The UnTexan is in New Mexico and would like to be writing about how good that feels. It’s nice to be back in the land where manana doesn’t mean tomorrow, it simply means not today. That’s expected and part of the charm of the place. However, there is manana and there is corporate assholery. In this case the corporation is Internet and phone service provider CenturyLink.

My complaint is simple: CenturyLink sold me services it cannot deliver, and knew it could not deliver when I made my purchase, then did absolutely nothing to ameliorate the situation.

Several weeks before coming to Santa Fe, I contracted with CenturyLink to have both telephone and wireless Internet installed at our new house the day we arrived. I bought a bundled deal that had everything my wife would need to do her job, which she brought with us when we moved. CenturyLink’s sales rep (wherever he was located, those people are everywhere) assured me there was no problem – and even checked to make sure service was available at my new address. A couple of days before leaving Texas, I received an email confirming that service would be established the day I arrived complete with order number, phone numbers, etc. We moved. But when we arrived there was no phone or Internet service. Additionally no modem/wireless router had been shipped to us (also as promised).

I called CenturyLink customer service (in Memphis, I think). The modem would be delivered the next day and everything would be up and running. The next day came, the modem arrived but nothing happened, still no phone or Internet. Meanwhile my wife was in a panic about doing her job and ended up going to a friend’s house to use her wireless Internet. I called customer service again (in one of the Dakotas) and was assured I would receive an installation visit that day. Nothing. My third call was answered by a guy in Salt Lake City who did some checking and said that I could not get service for at least 30 days because of a line upgrade in our area and that my order actually had been put on hold. He said the upgrade was because CenturyLink wants to sell people a new product. He at least got me phone service. Waiting 30 days was out of the question. I decided to try another Internet service, but my house is in the mountains and the wireless signal from their tower in Santa Fe is blocked by a ridgeline. So, back to CenturyLink. Meanwhile my wife’s panic grew even more panicky. I called CenturyLink one more time to check and this time was told, by a very pleasant somebody in South Dakota, it would be at least the end of July before I receive Internet service.

Not acceptable.

So yesterday (as my wife’s panic became the panickiest) I called CenturyLink one more time to tell them that their lying to me about installing my Internet service was creating real problems and forcing me to find more expensive service elsewhere, but that I would like to keep the unlimited long distance service that was one of the reasons I purchased the original CenturyLink bundled service. I also told them I believed I should get a discount on the phone service. I figured it was the least they could do, what with their failure to deliver all of the services they sold me. What did I get? A big laugh (literally) and the exact words, “I can tell you that ain’t gonna happen,” from the customer service rep who then passed me along to someone named Jill who must have gotten her degree (or maybe her GED) in piling up bullshit – that or they taught it to her at one of those corporate shit-shoveling seminars. Jill spoke a corporate language we all recognize as soon as we hear the first few words: I call it Arrogant Understanding. She was sure sorry I was frustrated, etc., etc., and sorry about the “inconvenience” it caused my wife (“More than an inconvenience,” I said. "A real problem." I was pissed off and she knew it. So she again told me she “understood my frustration.” Jill must have taken the extra-credit course in “understanding,” because she wanted me to know she understood the hell out of the situation, but I don’t want understanding, I want action), and she said (oops!) someone should have told me about the inavailability of service until the end of July, etc., etc, and how even she had CenturyLink phone service and her neighbors across the street could get DSL and she couldn’t get it (not my fucking problem, Jill baby) and the best she could do was give me $20 off my first phone bill (in other words, eat shit and kiss our CenturyLink ass). Big damned deal, Jill baby. I’ll take it. But I’m not through with CenturyLink yet. Strangely she seemed to think throughout the conversation that when CenturyLink was ready to hook me up in late July I’d be there, computer in hand. She even said there might be some “loyalty” perks in it for me (Jill really was the presumptuous bitch of arrogant understanding).

I’ve already called the local Better Business Bureau, which passed me along to the Better Business Bureau in Kansas City, where CenturyLink is headquartered. “All CenturyLink complaints go to Kansas City,” I was told, so I must not be the only complainer. A complaint form will arrive tomorrow or Thursday. I could complain online at www.kansascity.bbb.org but I don’t have any Internet service.

If you have a complaint against CenturyLink call 816-421-7800. Or go online and file your complaint at www.kansascity.bbb.org. And if you were considering purchasing anything from CenturyLink, don’t. Find someone else. Anyone else. CenturyLink lies. Don't buy what they sell. And if customer service wants to pass you along to someone named Jill, be ready for some shit to be shoveled your way. She'll understand.

ALMOST ALREADY GONE (WOO-HOO-HOO, WOO-HOO-HOO)

"You don't have to live like a refugee." Tom Petty

For nearly 10 years our house in Austin has been more than a home and not quite a home at the same time (a sort of Mid-Century Post-Modern place).

A lot of things happened while we lived here. For a few years it was the place where we had parties, Thanksgiving dinners with Texas-types and non-Texas types, visits from children, grandchildren; parents visited (my father, Dauna's mother) and siblings showed up a few times. I turned 60 here, then 65; Dauna turned 50 and then 55. We became older than that. Our mothers died a few years apart while we lived here. Dauna's best friend here died from cancer. My brother was killed in a motorcycle accident in Florida. We collected art. Dauna earned a Ph.D. (that's why we came). She deserved it. I became, of all the unlikely things I never thought about becoming, a corporate vice president. I also worked for the worst boss I've ever known - longer than I worked for anyone anywhere in my life. It took more than two years of therapy to untangle the mess and grope my way out of the dark place I was in because of that man and that job (I did it with the help of the best therapist I've ever had - and I've had a few over the past 40+ years. He was so good that I untangled lots of other old crap in my life while I was at it. Dauna dealt with her own issues - with a little help of her own). We survived things in this house that would have crushed other couples. Sometimes I wobbled, sometimes she wobbled, but our marriage never wobbled a bit. No matter what happened we always leaned toward each other, never away. We learned things we never knew about each other and pushed deeper into what it means to be really married than either of us thought was possible. Over time we wrapped the house close around the two of us and it became OUR house, as houses usually do for us, and closed the door. It felt like home. But it wasn't. Quite. It was our hiding place.

We love this house and are on intimate terms with its walls, windows, cracks, creaks, quirks, the feel of the floors under our bare feet, where the light switches are along the dark hallway. We should be happy and count our blessings here. But we can't. The house is in the wrong place. Austin, Texas. And Austin not-Texas (self-proclaimed without a trace of irony). But Austin is just another version of the wrong place. In fact, I think the Texas state motto should be: The Wrong Place. I'll bet that's what Davy Crockett was thinking as he died from a bad case of Mexicanitis at the Alamo. "I am in the wrong place, amigo." And the Mexican(s) said, "Si, senor." Or maybe the motto should be: "Where Davy Crockett came to die." Homey happiness and blessing-counting eluded us here. So more and more this house has been our refuge from Texas.

But who wants to live like a refugee? We've done that long enough. We need a home.

Selling this house has been a surprisingly unemotional experience but that is because my emotional attachment is where it's always been - hundreds of miles to the west of here. And Dauna's has shifted in that direction too. So we're almost gone, feelin' strong and about to sing our victory song, as the Eagles sang (approximately) in a song (in an entirely different context) a long time ago. But it all means the same thing. We're out of here. Almost. And pretty soon Texas will have to eat its lunch all by itself. Woo-hoo-hoo. Woo-hoo-hoo.

LIES, PICKUP TRUCKS AND REMEMBERING REMEMBERING

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." Mark Twain

"...falsehood, especially if you have got a bad memory, is the worst enemy a fellow can have."

Abraham Lincoln

I lost my truck in a parking lot a few days ago. I walked out of the hospital after a bit of skin cancer cutting and burning by my dermatologist and could not remember where I parked my pickup. It is a large pickup, a Dodge Ram 1500, and not easy to lose. But I lost it. I tried to visualize where I'd put it, but I couldn't. I knew it was there somewhere but that's all I seemed to know. After walking the entire lot in 90-degree heat and doubling back I found it, though I didn't recognize it at first. But the key fit the lock. I climbed in and drove on over to Target to pick up some pain medication (I have no idea why I was allowed to drive at all, but I made it). There weren't many shoppers at Target (there never are around here) and I found a front-row parking space not far from the door. And the pharmacist helped me right away (I wanted that hydrocodone in my hand before the numbness in my chest wore off). But when I left the store I couldn't remember where I'd parked my truck. I'd lost it again, just like I did at the hospital an hour before. I didn't even remember parking it near the store (and didn't recognize it when it was sitting directly across the driveway from me). I searched, found a familiar truck, made sure the key fit and drove on home.

Nothing like this ever happened to me before. The doctor believes it might have something to do with epinephrine. The numbing injection I received in my chest contained lidocaine (numbing) and epinephrine (stay number longer). Whatever it was I didn't like losing my truck. But I remembered enough to know that it was lost. At least I remembered that.

I do not forget things. I've always counted on not forgetting things. It's a good part of who I am. A good memory (and a way with words) kept me gainfully employed for my whole working life. It's also a bad part of what I used to be (the very same memory and words).

When I was younger I was a very good liar. No, I was an exceptional liar. Because I had a talent for it. And I own the tools of the trade: (1) an exceptional memory, and (2) a gift for language (and how to use it) that is not an ordinary gift. It is a gift so grand that it is like the best Christmas present ever and I still play with it after all these years. I have my mother to thank for all of it. She made me remember things (lists, facts, names, numbers, addresses, anything other people might write down) and she taught me to read (and I did that by remembering the way the words looked on the pages she read to me). Her intention was to love me. She didn't intend to teach me to read and I don't think she intended to teach me to lie either. But she did.

This is how I described her in something I published a few years ago:

"My mother is a word person, ace-speller, Scrabble-player, crossword-puzzler, letter-writer, marathon telephone-talker; she thinks it's a sin that modern children can't spell and write better and blames it on computers with spell-checkers, public school integration, Spanish-speaking immigrants, younger teachers 'who don't know their you-know-what from a hole in the ground,' the general decline of good manners and the idea that things were better when she was young."

She passed that word stuff on to me. Unfortunately she also passed along the need to live in a world where the truth simply isn't enough to get a person through. The combination of language and an ongoing sense of insufficiency is a powerful thing. My mother was a self-stitched patchwork of lies and truths. We all are. But she was the middle child among nine children and she lost her way at some early age (when she was a young child she asked for a boy's haircut, boy's clothes and boy's toys for her birthday - she wanted to be like her two older brothers, not like her sisters - and that's what she received) and never quite found the way back to herself. Ever. She was always uncomfortable with who she was and where she was (unless she lied about that too). She was many things in her long life, but she felt like nothing and nowhere. She would not be convinced otherwise. Some people grow old letting go of their old lies and seeking the truth of their lives, but she picked her way through the pieces or the life she had made up, hid from the life she had lived and clung to that patchwork camouflage, keeping it between her and everything and everyone around her even as she felt it begin to unravel. She feared the naked truth, just as she feared her own nakedness because she didn't know what she (or even worse, others) might see. In many ways she grew old without ever growing up.

But why lie? After a while, if you are dissatisfied, displaced and disemblative enough, there doesn't have to be a reason. It is a life of distorted proportions.

A good lie is built out of just the right words in just the right order and leaning slightly toward the truth if they must, but that isn't really necessary. But grammar, spelling and a dictionary are not enough. A good lie is a work of art. The right words artfully arranged become their own truth (liars and writers know that). Once the lie is built you have to remember to tend it. And a good lie is worth nothing if you can't remember where you stashed it. And you can't forget where you buried the truth either; someone might stumble across it. Forgetful people are not good liars.

My mother and I were very good at those things. Make it up. Make it real. Don't forget where you put it. But it is an exhausting way to live and my mother led a weary life (though she often lied to cover it up). I tired of the weariness. And I did not want to grow old without growing up. Besides, I am her oldest child. I was never lost in the middle. I just learned to feel that way.

The real truth of my mother's life was clear at her crowded funeral and proved she had had nothing to fear. She was something (to a very large number of people), but she wasn't there to see it. I'd decided long before that I could not wait that long. I changed my mind and decided to change my ways. It took many years - and it took leaving and staying away - but I quit lying. I became a writer instead. Fiction writing has been described as lying in pursuit of the truth. I figured I would be good at it. But liars fear the truth and writers seek it. So fear of the truth was a problem for a long time (it clouded both my writing and my thinking). I realized changing my mind was not enough. But I worked at it and just in time I had a change of heart. Life has been easier since then. And that's the truth.

DESTINY MANIFESTS: NEW MEXICO, THE REAL PLACE

Why return to New Mexico? Why now? Why ever?

It began when I quit my job and took a drive in 1974. It was a very long drive, a giant loop through the west, and lasted the better part of a year. I was 29 years old when I left Atlanta in a blue Ford Pinto heading for Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, but I was only passing through. I'd decided the west would begin for me in New Mexico. Everybody's west has to begin somewhere. Mine began with a decision made years before - I was in junior high school - as I studied gas-station roadmaps and plotted my escape route. I was always plotting my escape and someday I would escape to New Mexico. It was more than a drive.

When I was a young boy my favorite TV show was Route 66 (a dark and dangerous-looking guy and a boyish light-haired non-threatening guy in a Corvette on the road and doing stuff) and a few years later my favorite book was On the Road (a dark and dangerous guy and darker, more dangerous guys doing more interestingly strange and dangerous stuff). Neither dark nor dangerous (I still wore shirts with button-down collars like the guys on Route 66), I had been wanting to hit the road for as long as I could remember (though I never imagined it would be in a blue Pinto), but it's difficult to go anywhere when a man remains a boy as long as I did.

I was a reluctant Peter Pan. I wanted to grow up, I really did. I even pretended to be an adult for several years in my late teens and early 20s and did some grownup things (the way a child does such things): boyishly, enthusiastically, stupidly, chaotically, destructively, painfully. A boy acting like a man starts many things he will never finish and his world becomes littered with the victims of his false starts. It's what happens to boys who aren't given the tools to be men.

I didn't even have a tool belt when I walked out into the world and, sadly, I am not the only guy in my family to grow older without growing up (there are cousins, brothers, nephews, even some of our fathers). We are the confused legacy of seven self-involved sisters and two brothers and the various enablers they married (or didn't) who were themselves better at being children than being adults. I sometimes hear parents say things like, "We did the best we could," and I think often that is true, but I suspect the people who raised me were not doing the best they could. And knew it. And did nothing about it (unless you count alcohol, drugs, anger, fear, sex, secrets, spite, bullying, self-pity and a whole catalog of narcissistic indulgences). All the while we seemed to be happy families, but it was a pretend life (pretend lives lead a hunger for something real). I don't know how the rest of the guys in the family feel about it, but I felt lucky to live long enough to slip off to Atlanta and beyond family grasp.

In the nearly six years I lived in Atlanta I began to acquire the tools it would take to bolt the various pieces of my manhood together, but when I was 29 my adult life still lay before me like the pieces of an Erector set without an instruction booklet. I certainly was not the man of anybody's dreams. And I wasn't man enough to go it alone. I'd discovered long before that being "alone" for me usually involved more than one person (and disappointment and misery for someone, usually not me). I finally found someone fool enough to indulge my boyish fantasy to hit the road, driving west with no particular place to go. And no promises when we got there.

West to Memphis and a night spent on the bank of the Mississippi River; further west to Texas and a night in Palo Duro Canyon. And on the third day "west" quit being the direction of my dreams and became a place. I was in New Mexico. I had arrived at the real place. I wouldn't become a full-grown man for years, but New Mexico was a step in the right direction. I could feel it.

So in the early summer of 1974 I camped in the mountains above Santa Fe for 10 days. Then I drove north and camped in the mountains near Taos another four days. That's all I knew of New Mexico. Two weeks. But I came close to abandoning my trip. I drove north to Colorado (years of pent up driving dreams demanded it and I had no way to understand that I felt "at home" in New Mexico because the words "feel at home" had meant very little to me for a long time). But I was barely into southern Colorado and had been on the road only a few hours when I wrote this in my notebook:

"After 14 days in New Mexico, Colorado. From the Sangre de Cristos to the Rockies in one short afternoon. It was sad to see New Mexico fall behind.... New Mexico already is calling me."

And a few days later:

"Santa Fe, will you take me back?"

A year and thousands of miles later I was living in New Mexico. Then I left (ego and ambition led me astray) and didn't return to live for 17 years (and missed New Mexico the whole time to the point I was never happy anywhere else). I stayed nearly 10 years that time before I left again - for Texas (love led me astray). Now I have been in Texas for 10 years (not only missing New Mexico but really disliking Texas the whole time). Everytime I left I had my reasons - and regrets.

But now Dauna and I will return to New Mexico (again) in a few weeks. I know now what it means to feel at home, that New Mexico feels that way and I need to feel it. And Dauna is the only person I've ever known with whom I never feel alone and always feel at home (of course we were real grownups when we met). Soon we will be at home together in the mountains above Santa Fe for the last time. We do not plan to leave again.

 A sketch I made in 1974 at my campsite in the mountains near Taos, New Mexico

 

HEARING BIG PINK, SEEING THE BAND, FINDING A RESTING PLACE

Levon Helm died last week and I got to thinking about how long his old and soulful voice has been part of my life. He was 71 when he died but Levon and I were young men with southern accents back then (he made music with his, I tried to get rid of mine; it worked out OK for both of us). He was singing and I was drowning in the mess I'd made of my life - and still more than a year away from pulling myself together enough to take a deep breath and swim for higher ground. Levon and I have gone through some stuff together.

It was 1968 and things were happening. The Summer of Love happened in San Francisco in 1967 and hippies were happening everywhere. Vietnam had happened, was happening and would continue to happen. The draft darkened my days because I knew being drafted would force some difficult choices about fighting or fleeing and both promised dire consequences (it was much easier to picture myself in a hippie uniform than an Army uniform). There were protests and they were growing. In March, Lyndon Johnson said he he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination for another term in office (I watched the speech alone in a beer bar). LBJ was going (and we were glad), Nixon was coming (but we couldn't see him clearly yet). North Vietnam's Tet offensive happened in January. In March as many as 500 villagers were massacred at My Lai by U.S. soldiers (no one would know about it for a year but there was already a nagging feeling that terrible things were happening to somebody over there somewhere every day). Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam war (if he was against it, who could be for it?). Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April; Robert Kennedy was killed in June (a couple of days after somebody shot Andy Warhol). There was violence in Chicago and the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey to run for president. Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onasis. Nixon defeated Humphrey in November to become president.

And 1968 had its own soundtrack: Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors; Marvin Gaye heard it through the grapevine and only needed Tammy Terrell to get by; Ohio Express had love in its tummy; Janis Joplin fronted Big Brother and the Holding Company in a world that was down on her; the Intruders sang "Cowboys to Girls;" the song said Otis Redding was sitting on the dock of the bay, but he wasn't (he was dead already); the Byrds released Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Gram Parsons was already rethinking country music (lots of Byrds fans hated it); meanwhile the Rolling Stones were playing let's pretend - fronted by Jumpin' Jack Flash and posing as street fighting men; and the Beatles sang "Hey Jude."

In 1968 there were music and mayhem aplenty.

The Band's Music from Big Pink came out in July 1968. I first heard it in a grubby apartment with a grubby guy named Bill and his pale, lank-haired girlfriend. They weren't dirty exactly, but they were unwashed and had achieved a sort of hippie-grubbiness that I admired, even aspired to, but didn't achieve for another couple of years (and then mostly on weekends because I was always a hippie with a good day job). Bill was a student from Antioch College who was spending a semester as a copyboy at the North Carolina newspaper where I worked as an editor - Antioch students had to do odd things like that as part of their education - and he brought the album with him from New York City, where he'd stopped off to visit friends in the Village on the way from Ohio to North Carolina (Bill intrigued me and words like "Antioch," "Ohio" "the Village" and "New York City" sounded exotic to a guy who had never been farther south than Myrtle Beach, SC, farther north than Culpepper, VA or farther west than east Tennessee). The record wasn't even for sale where I lived. I had never heard of The Band, but Bill wanted me to hear the album. He said they had toured with Bob Dylan; he said Dylan wrote some of the stuff on the album (I liked electric Dylan). Dylan even did the painting on the album cover. He said it was something I needed to hear. He hinted there would be drugs involved (I was a southern boy and my idea of a good time in those days involved large quantities of beer and the occasional bottle of Rebel Yell). "Come over after work," Bill said. I said, "Sure."

Bill was right.

The first song on side one was "Tears of Rage" and I knew from the beginning that it was something brand new that sounded like I had been listening to for a long, long time. The feeling grew as the needle moved to "To Kingdom Come" and "In a Station" and "Caledonia Mission." Richard Manuel sang; Rick Danko sang. And then the first accoustic notes of "The Weight," and then the drums, and then the voice of Levon Helm, taking me to someplace I might have been before but via a brand new route, a place of mystery and music and language gathered up in ways that were foreign and familiar at the same time. A journey to Nazareth, a message (several messages from "Miss Anny"), Miss Moses, Carmen, the Devil, Luke waiting for Judgement Day, a guy named Crazy Chester and a dog named Jack, freighted blblical-sounding words and mysterious meanings, not quite religious but hymnlike. A new song with the heart and soul of an old song. Folk music, rock and roll. Country music (but what country? Those were the days when Bobby Goldsboro was singing the smarmy "Honey" on the radio and it wasn't that country). All of those things but not quite any of those things.

We listened to the album over and over that day. I am not sure how many times because both beer and marijuana were involved, but now I have listened to The Band for 44 years - stoned, drunk and cold sober. I even saw them a couple of times in Atlanta (where I finally washed up on a slippery slope that I mistook for higher ground), once with their manager Albert Grossman in attendance. Grossman (whose wife is on the cover of Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home and reminded every guy I knew of the woman he'd never meet) died in 1986 when he suffered a supersonic heart attack aboard the Concorde on the way to London, but that night (1971? 1972?) he was taking care of business, fussing around back stage in his black-rimmed glasses and his longish hair and The Band responded with the tightest, no-nonsense concert I ever heard. They were great. I figured it was because the boss was in town. On Jan. 22, 1974 I saw The Band on its tour with Bob Dylan. What I remember most about that concert was that Dylan opened the show with "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" and closed with a different version of the same song. I remember it being a good show, though both Dylan and the members of The Band remember that whole tour as dispirited and unhappy. I don't remember the details. Drugs might have been involved.

I was 24 years old in 1968 and my world was angry, noisy and confusing and things would get worse before they got better. The Manson murders and Woodstock (both in August 1969) and the Rolling Stones grim Altamont concert (December 1969) were in the future. A psychiatrist and a long hospital stay were in my future because 1969 was when I finally decided to save myself rather than keep sloshing around in my own private cesspool. And through it all, even in the worst of times, I could count on the voice of Levon Helm and the music of The Band to carry me to a refuge and a resting place. I still listen.

HERE, THERE AND THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF TEXAS

"A philosophy which exalts health and safety to the status of virtues

cannot be called heroic."

                                               J. Brinckerhoff Jackson/A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time

On July 18 we will have lived in Texas for 10 years. Hopefully it won't come to that. The clock is running. The hourglass is trickling. The details are being worked out. Forget The Alamo! The end is near and New Mexico is close at hand.

It's over. Just like that. Finally.

A couple of weeks ago my wife sent me to New Mexico to look at houses. Alone. She put together a list of 11 places she found online - she is a meticulous and obsessive internet searcher - and sent me to have a look. And pick out a place for us to spend the rest of our lives. I picked. She likes the pick. We made an offer. It was accepted. It is a house that will embrace all of the life we bring to it and see us through. I think we recognized it as soon at we saw it on the internet. Dauna has seen photographs, but when we move there in a few weeks and she looks up the mountain and glimpses it through the trees it will be the first time she actually sees the house. ("Really," more than one person has asked? "Yes," always the answer.) I would trust her to do the same for me. And the house is right for people like us, a co-conspirator of a house. It's what we need. It's home.

Now there is the house here and there is the house there. I am juggling them as fast as I can. I spend my days wrapped up in the details of buying and selling and wandering among piles of real estate paperwork. For a man who never thought seriously about owning a house until I was 50 years old, I now have a house I want to call home and a home I want to get rid of. I am in a real estate frame of mind. Contracts are pending. It is slow and tedious work but it must be done. And it is time.

We have lived in Texas among Texans far too long - ten years in a place we always knew we never could call home. The Un-Texan was born in the first years we were here; more recently my wife has dubbed herself the Anti-Texan.

And we live in an Austin neighborhood among old people. They wrap themselves tightly in the fabric of their old lives but it does not seem to comfort them. They lament change. They worry about their health, their safety, streetlights and strangers, property values and Mexican-Americans, Jehovah's Witnesses who might be thieves casing the place (a black man and a white man together! Who knows what they might be up to?), traffic and speedbumps, firetrucks, police cars, ambulances. They worry and worry. Reports and alarms go out on the neighborhood association email daily. What we are about to do would alarm them too if they knew about it. They would advise caution. Their intentions would be good. But we have had enough of caution and good intentions, too.

So my wife and I are about to leave Texas and step into the mysterious and unsteady space between here and there one more time. It won't be the first time - in 24 years of marriage we have moved from apartment to house, renters to buyers, Minnesota urban to Wisconsin rural, Wisconsin to northern New Mexico, and from there to Texas - but we have promised ourselves this move will be the last. When we get back home to New Mexico this time we will stay. Besides, Austin's elevation is approximately 540 feet. The new house is at around 8,000 feet. We are rising in the world. We can feel how thin the air will be.

Dauna in New Mexico, 2011

YOU CAN FEEL THE DISEASE

Remember polio? Texas is like that. Sometimes it cripples you, sometimes it sits on your chest and smothers you. But it always gets you one way or another. Ask Rick Perry. He just came limping back. And I have felt stifled nearly to death for a decade. In fact, Rick Perry and I suffer different manifestations of the same ailment: Too much Texas. I should never have come here and he should never have left. Now we are both in the process of curing our mistakes.

 

GOV. OOPS COMES HOME

Rick Perry, that wiley old coyote shooter, Bible thumper and latter-day seccessionist, came home to Texas from South Carolina (where seccession is a religion and Rick's faith obviously was found lacking) this week after his presidential aspirations turned into a well-financed Texas-sized flop. Apparently South Carolinia Republicans (and Iowa Republicans and New Hampshire Republicans) prefer Latter-Day Saint Romney or nefarious Newt or stealthy Santorum to the stumbling, bumbling son of Texas. I guess there's one thing Texans can say about him: "Well he's no George W. Bush now is he?" Nope. He's not George W. Bush. W. came home a winner - no smarter than when he went away, that was too much to hope for, but a winner nonetheless. Rick Perry -- The Not George Bush. Who wants to be Not George W. Bush? It's a role Gov. Oops should get used to. As a friend of mine said, "Now Rick can come back to Texas and stare at his racist rock."