the pelican

once more with feeling

birthdays

there was a great wind last week. broken limbs and branches and flying lawn furniture kind of wind. a rocky mountain wind. all the way from wyoming down into new mexico. a great wall of wind. a front range wind. a force. an intensity. a great movement. watched the hawks floating on the waves while struggling to keep the car on the road. it just blew and blew for two three days. and it swept the place clean and clear.

but the wind had died down to sort of medium manageable gusts by friday as i took my niece to santa fe for her birthday celebration extravaganza. a long weekend deal. dance festival, indian market, georgia o'keefe museum, the churches, the plaza, etc. she's 22 now, which just blows my tiny mind. age i was when she was born, basically.

and yes i was there for that event, my sister's coach. sort of a late walk-in stand-in actually. another woman, a friend of the family actually trained with her and was serving as the intended coach, but the whole thing took the better part of a solid 24 hour day and everyone was exhausted and fed up and getting a little stressed out by the time i arrived to meet the kid and congratulate them all in the evening. but no baby yet and things were difficult. tempers flared. tears where shed and things were said. and so i just sort of took over. the big sister thing, i guess. just took over.moved one tired worn out coach aside and stepped in. whole thing was really only semi-traumatic, baby had a bowel movement in utero, but all happened naturally by about 3 a.m. my sis and me we did it forehead to sweaty forehead with her claws dug into the back of my neck. of course i wasn't enduring the actual raw ordeal sis was going through, much less the episiotomy, so a few claw marks to the neck truly were no big deal all things considered. quite worth it, really.

for difficult labor and stress aside, when the midwife handed my niece up to my sister the little pooper just looked right over at me and said "hi." clear as a bell. and she was so beautiful.

no doubt up there in the top ten moments of my life.

so her birthday was in late may, but it was determined that the gift this year would be quality time with the crazy auntie. a six-hour road trip to santa fe. just us girlies. yee-hah.

sure and true for it is a good thing when the kidling becomes one of us. an english literature major. bit of a political activist. musician. junior in college. takes classes full time. works in an independent bookstore full time. oh but she does make an old auntie so very proud.

driving down deeper into the desert the great rocky mountains of our home to the west get smaller and smoother and then almost disappear altogether, only to resurface later in a redder crumblier sangre de cristo form further south. we drive and drive listening to yo-yo ma and bob dylan and santana and van morrison and john trudell. we talk we laugh we cry we have great cosmic and silly discussions over tuna melts and we drive and we drive and we drive.

land of enchantment yes it is oh it sure is. everything a soft muted rainbow. golden spiral sun and blue blue tourquoise bluey blue sky, green trees and bushes and pink red brown red rocky earthy earth. feels like we're looking at it all through a crystal. smells of wood smoke and roasting chiles and pinion and sage. pueblos and adobe and windy little roads and shallow canyons.

the culture clash conglomeration combination of ancient indian ruins and conquistadores and mexicans and indians and cowboys and ufo's and tourists and artists and green chili and red chili and pinto beans and tortillas and blue corn pancakes and vanilla and tomatoes and pecan encrusted ruby red trout.

so anyway my sweet niece she has a bad cold. oh just a touch of allergies she says on the phone the night before just having some allergies you know things are blooming. but you know really she's sick. sneezing and coughing and snotting all the way down I-25 refusing to admit she feels like warmed over crap. dark circles under her eyes and pale cheeks. not going to postpone this event no way no how. just a touch of allergies she says as we stop at a gas station to buy another box of the gooey kind of tissues with lotion for her raw nose.

we get into our little casita late afternoon and head out for a brief tour around town. point out the main stuff to her. we have tickets for the dance festival at 8:00 for she is very enamoured with all things dancey. and it's a smattering like all things santa fe it's entirely psychedelic it's modern jazz dance and contemporary ballet and some semi-indigenous interpretational type of native-ish stuff and we decide we like the flamenco dancers the best because we like the clapping and the passion and the guy in front of us shouting ole and the guitar players and the fringe and the colored skirts and the stomping stepping stomping stepping stomping and the clicking clacking castenettes.

all night sweet niece she coughs and hacks and coughs and blows her nose and i think oh what have i done she's going to have pneumonia. but she finally falls asleep and i let her sleep in the next morning quite late. she has roasted asparagus omelette and sweet potato homefries at the funky diner for breakfast and a couple aspirin and she's ready to explore with her ziploc bag of goey tissues and water bottle in tow. and she is so beautiful.

so we start with the churches. she's pretty much not into the churchy thing these days and i get that i do. she's figuring things out. she wasn't too thrilled with catholic school as a kid. she's more than a little lapsed in that department. she knows i don't judge her. heck i send her buddhist dharma stuff and she's met my pagan friends and she knows i have a different sort of way of looking at things and we're cool with all that. and we're just going to the churches you know to check them out. an anthropological sort of mission. history and that sort of thing.

and so we start with san miguel. oldest church. built on a hill on top of much older still indian ruins. we go in the side through the gifty shoppe and then up a couple steps and onto the old creaky wooden floors. and there is something about this place that really grips you. emotions just flood through. and sweet niece she can feel it. she looks like she's going to cry. she gasps. she wants a dollar to light the candles for her friend joe in iraq. she sits down on the bench and becomes very quiet. her eyes are big. can you feel it? she asks. oh yes. yes yes i can. my heart is pounding and the air is full of sparkles and we look at each other and the tears well up well up they just start to fall and spill from our eyes. so we laugh and gather our stuff and she blows her nose and we go out into the gifty shoppe where she buys a pocket nativity set of funny felt finger puppets of the holy family with one random gift-bearing king plus a sheep and a donkey.

and so it goes on like this. we see the miraculous staircase at loretto and we shop a little bit and we go through saint francis and we check out the oldest house full of ghosties and we go by the indian market and sweet niece gets a really nice beaded leather wristband made by an artist from the taos pueblo and i talk to the indians about my eagle t-shirt and the hawks in colorado and we get her a wooden flute and we go to the georgia o'keefe museum and we stare at the endless depth of the portals in the sky seen through pelvis bones and we marvel at the flowers and colors and movement and beauty and we then we step outside into the heat and it's cloudy and muggy and yellowish and oppressive. and tourists pushing strollers say there's a tornado coming a tornado coming and the locals roll their eyes and say yeah right a tornado uh huh and then the lightening cracks and the thunder pounds and the rain comes down in drip drop drips and then splashes and splotches and sheets and buckets and we duck into a funky clothing store and we shop through the tornado warning while the hail crashes down on the roof and slaps against building and the wind blowing in the front door makes all the racks of brilliant rainbow colored broomstick skirts and peasant blouses dance in a psychedelic ghost frenzy sleeves waving dresses swooping necklaces jingling while we try on cotton chinese jackets and look at earrings and socks until the weather dies down and we trudge back to our motel in the wet breezey aftermath of the storm and we leave the front door open on the porch to feel the breeze and smell the rain and feel the desert plants rejoicing.

and i love my niece she is so all grown up now she calls her mom in case she heard about the tornado on the news and she organizes her pamphlets and smells my smoked chipotle chili spices through the plastic bags and says she can breathe now she can smell things she's so excited and she reads me information about the history and and buildings and she makes a list of friends from the bookstore who she needs to bring back prizes for she's thinking maybe some candy and little magnets and something with aliens on it for michael and spices for heidi and a kitchy mug for her grandma. we clean up we dress up we don the appropriate semi-dressed up attire and we head out for a real dinner and we have mussels and roasted red pepper corn bisque and glasses of wine and i see her i watch her i smile at her and it wasn't that long ago just recently just a few weeks ago it seems she was coloring with crayons on kid menus at ihop and putting an entire bottle of ketchup on her french fries but here she is she is smiling she is flirting she is smiling at the waiter and ordering grilled tuna tacos and she is telling me how her literary criticism class kicked her butt and she didn't know it would be so intense and how sometimes customers bring in rare books to trade or donate and the store doesn't exactly tell them how valuable some of the books are they have to make a profit they have to stay in business but it bothers her and she's concerned about the ethics of this and i tell her it's ok it's a bookstore it's ok if they didn't know what it was they probably didn't appreciate it and they're only things and it's the words inside that count and she says still it bothers her some times she had someone bring in a first edition tolkien set and she couldn't keep a lid on it she just exploded in excitement and her boss at the bookstore told her she had to learn to just keep that to herself. she's not sure she's going to be able to do that. and she is so beautiful.

we watched hidalgo on cable back at the motel. i do kind of love that movie, and it is based on a true story. my niece she says you like because of the indians and the horses don't you? and yeah. that's true. i do just love the inter-species connection. and the native american indian thing of course. she says you know grandma says she's pretty sure we have no native american blood in us. and i said yeah we're mostly irish i guess. some scots some welsh some german some dutch. pretty darn white europoean descent yeah that's us. but you have the indian thing she says. this native american thing. you listen to john trudell and you want to explore the southwest all the time and i say yeah 'tis true. 'tis true. i can't help but love them. they love this place. they connect with the earth and the animals and the sky. they did long before our ancestors were here. they respect it. i love their spirit and courage and their great sadness and understanding and their sense of the divine in all living things and their endurance and their strength and their love of this earth. we talk about reservations as concentration camps for them to die in as well as places where some culture and race have been preserved and allowed to continue against the odds. we talk about the re-writing of history and subjugation of races and slavery and war and the imposition of beliefs upon others.

and then i tell her but you know i also have a buddhist thing and a hindu thing and a sufi thing and a pagan thing and and and all kinds of other things you know and it's really a mystic thing, not race specific. though perhaps i do hold the indians closest to my heart. they are the people of this place that i love. but it is about race too, she says. it is. and it's cultural. and we discuss how it is to feel an alien in your own culture while belonging to it at the same time. the layers and levels of cultures. the morphing of all the pieces that create a place like santa fe. a country of such diversity as the u.s. we talk about armchair anthropology and materialism and tradition and dogma and the human ability to adapt. the drive for some to conquer and exploit and for others to explore and others to appreciate and others to study others to practice and others to maintain and the desire and the love and the awe and the beauty and the recognition of the sacred. and i tell her i have a quote on my desk from Neem Karoli Baba that says to see God everwhere you have to have special eyes, otherwise you cannot bear the shock. and she says yes. yes.

she says her cold is almost over now, she's feeling much better.

and i told her i was there when she was born, you know. and that she said "hi." clear as a bell.

she said i really felt something in that old church this morning. yeah i know. she said really really i did. i was full of happiness and sadness at the same time. it filled me up. yes i said yes i know. she said it filled me up and i lit a candle for joe in iraq you know and i said yes yes i know you did.

it filled me up. and i think i understand why you like santa fe now she said. and i said yes. yes.

and so.

and so it has been 22 years since she first said hi to me.

and she is so beautiful.

posted by: limine at 10:28 | link | comments (7) |

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