Chapter 17: Tell me about one of the best days you can remember.
Originally written April 12, 2021
This question made me realize that I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve had so many good days in my life, it’s hard to pick just one. (Christ, what a cornball I’ve become!)
The first two that came to mind were the days that my daughter and son were born. Those both were just magical, as anyone who has witness the birth of their children will tell you. Both births were relatively easy without serious complications. Of course I wasn’t the one who actually went through childbirth!
I probably was more stressed when Molly was born in 1981. I was overcome with emotion driving her mother to the hospital that night when we saw a falling star blaze across the sky. I knew it was a powerful omen. And yes, it inspired the song “Child of the Falling Star,” which I posted last week.
And yet, hours later, when it came down to the actual birth, every sick joke I ever told about kids being born with only one big eyeball rushed mockingly in my head. All those stories I’d heard as a child in the early days of the Drug War about LSD causing genetic mutations gnawed at me in the moments before Molly was born.
I never believed all the anti-drug scare crap I had to endure in my teenage years, stuff like this video below. But I guess it infiltrated my subconscious, and not in a good way.
When she emerged, I actually counted all of her fingers. I think she was wrapped up, so I didn’t get to her toes until later.
[I did LSD several times in my youth, but, unlike the narrator of this classic video below, it NEVER made me hungry for hotdogs … or anything else]
When Anton came along 11 years later I was less prone to such paranoia, even though his mother’s pregnancy had been far more difficult and he had been born a month premature.
The impatient little tyke had tried to come out about a month before he was born, which resulted in his mother having to be rushed in an ambulance to UNM Hospital in Albuquerque, where she spent several days.
But somehow I knew he and his mother would be o.k. And indeed, that was the case.
When Anton was born I was so happy I didn’t even count his fingers or toes that morning. In fact, I don’t think I ever did. All these years later, I assume they’re all there.
In both cases, I was walking on air for days after each child was born.
While those two days are the major ones, I’ve had a lot of very good days.
There was that time in 1960, a month or so before my seventh birthday, when my mom, my grandparents, my brother my sister (then an infant) and I went to Kentucky to visit my great grandmother. I awoke the first morning after we’d arrived to the sound of shotgun blasts.
It was my grandfather, who had blasted a couple of squirrels out of a tree there in his boyhood home. Mama Clift, my great grandmother fried them up and served them for lunch with mashed potatoes and squirrel gravy. Tasted liked fried chicken, except better.
Now that I think about it, I’ve got to wonder how many squirrels Pappa shot. The whole family feasted on this Kentucky delicacy.
There was that day in the summer of 1970 when I first flew on an airplane. I went to Washington, D.C. for a national convention for the Teen Age Republicans. (Yes, as I confessed in a previous chapter, I was a teenage Republican during the early Nixon years.)
The day started out going down to the state Capitol, (a building where, in this century, I worked for about 17 years).
The governor at the time was David F. Cargo, a friend of the local Teen Age Republicans, who had promised to give me a check for $25 to help defray my costs. Cargo met me at the Roundhouse, took me up to the 4th floor and wrote me the check.
A few hours later, I was flying across the country, feeling amazed as I looked at the clouds under us.
Speaking of travel, there was that crazy day in South Dakota on my first major hitchhiking trip in 1973, in which I was with three guys from Connecticut who’d picked me up outside of Madison, Wisconsin.
We’d tried to get served alcohol in this bar in the tiny tourist town of Wall, South Dakota but none of us were 21. So we went back to the VW van those guys were traveling in and planned to throw a string of lit firecrackers out the window and into the bar. However, instead, the firecrackers landed right by this woman who was getting into her car and the next thing we knew we were being followed by a couple of pickup trucks.
Our driver, Bruce, pushed the VW and somehow we outran them, the rest of us chugging whiskey all through the escape. We ended up that night at Mount Rushmore, where we basically bullied a park ranger to turn on the lights on the four presidents as I strummed a guitar and we all sang “America the Beautiful.”
(I wrote about this for the original No Depression magazine back in 1999. I can’t find the actual column on the mag’s current site, but years later I posted it on my blog.
And, oh yeah, it’s referred to in this musical masterpiece below.)
There was that day in the fall of 1977 when my friend David Vigil and I, who had gone Denver to see our pal Mark Ducaj [who died shortly before I wrote this.]
Dave and I, leaving Santa Fe the night before, arrived at Mark’s in the wee hours. We drank beer and talked for a few hours and by sunrise had convinced ourselves that we needed to go to Douglas, Wyoming, 200-plus miles to the north, to see the town’s jackalope statue.
So we did.
By the time we got back to Denver we were exhausted, but still had the strength and stamina to go catch a lasar light concert at the planetarium that night with our friend John, another old high school and college buddy. Confession: For these shows people lay on the floor to watch the psychedelic lights above. I think I passed out during one of the Pink Floyd songs.
There was that famous day in the fall of 1985 that I met Bo Diddley in the office of Santa Fe Mayor Louis Montano.
I had worked with Louie’s aide Jimmy Joe Gonzales to make Bo, who was playing a concert that night at Club West in Santa Fe, an honorary citizen of the city. I’ve loved Bo Diddley’s music since I was a little kid so meeting him was a true kick.
There was the night in 1993 when I won “Best of Show” at a state press association meeting for a series of stories I’d written about a murder committed by three Pojoaque kids in Malibu the year before.
These kids had been on a local crime spree, robbed a bar and used the money to go to Los Angeles, where they lived in a restroom on Malibu beach. They were desperate and hungry so they killed a woman and stole her car keys and drove back to New Mexico.
They might have gotten away with it except they tried to sell the woman’s car and one of their dumbshit friends who was thinking of buying it drove it into a tree.
I interviewed the families of the two kids who were being tried for the murder and went out to California for their trial. It was a lot of work, but, as a journalist, very satisfying.
And winning “Best of Show” that year probably was the biggest honor I ever won as a reporter.
These are just a few of my “best days.” I could look back at many vacations — as a child, as a parent, and on my own — and come up with several more.
And I might even include today.
On my afternoon trudge today I walked more than five miles on a trail south of town I’d never walked before. It’s the Santa Fe Rail Trail running along the railroad tracks south of Rabbit Road.
The scenery is nice, though not spectacular. But there’s no nearby vehicle traffic, the path isn’t rocky and while there are enough hills to give you a little exercise, it’s not strenuous for an out-of-shape oldster like me.
This new habit of mine, which I’ve been doing since right before Christmas, probably is one of the smartest things I’ve ever done as far as my health is concerned. And discovering a new trail is always exciting.
Today was a good day.
