I scare children sometimes. I know, shocking, but true. At the Rodeo back in Austin, we went in to see the Painted Horses show and I ended up sitting next to a little girl, perhaps six years old, who scooted as faaar away from me as humanly possible. I tried to stay as unthreatening and small as I could, but she looked terrified. As soon as she could she vacated the seat and went and sat on her mother’s lap, instead. When it came time to leave, she refused to go past me.
As I’ve gotten older, I haven’t gotten that rssponse nearly as frequently, but every once in a while it happens and I worry about it…
This morning we find ourselves at a new friends’ house, and I woke up and find myself kind of nervous about stepping out into the Living room. I can hear the kids (I think they were 4 and 6, or something) listening to the Wiggles, and I can hear their ruckus, but when I poked my head out, they just sort of goggled at me, and their mom, our host, was nowhere to be seen. And so I remain confined to quarters because Heather’s in the bathroom and I don’t want to sit in the Living room with the kids staaaring at me and I’m too groggy to be sociable.
Eep.
Sunday evening after our huge wisdom-gleaning drive, we pulled into Artesia, New Mexico and settled down at a campground. Contrary to my previous camping experiences, this actually looked like I could be set up to enjoy it. Settling into the Chihuaha Desert with the stars coming out above us and adventure in our future, the new tent went up mostly without a hitch and we went to bed after much stargazing and with little todo.
Falling asleep was a little tricky. The desert is full of noises and creakings and clickings and snufflings and at one point a mass howling that wasn’t ALL just the neighbouring campers’ pets…
3.30am found me awake and shivering. It was a long, long, long cold night till dawn and I’d only just fallen asleep when my alarm went off at 7.30 in the morning. I stumbled outside and dealt with my body’s morning needs and returned to the tent in kind of a miserable funk – to find a bunny sitting three feet away… nibbling.
It was at about this point that I sort of caught on to the fact that I was witnessing sunrise in the desert in New Mexico. It was breathtaking. Sunset had been a caldera of colour of reds and golds but sunrise was all silver and gentle, like tequila on either end but very differing brands.
We got up, packed up, and made our way to Roswell, New Mexico. Strictly sight-seeing, part of my Sci-Fi (or as Heather refers to it) Geek Pilgrimage. The Roswell Crash of July, 1947 is not high on my list of Things That Probably Actually Occurred but Roswell has become a mecca for the believers and the curious and I’ve always wanted to go there.
Unfortunately, the actual purported crash site in Corona (70 miles North or so) is still pretty inaccessible (hrrmmmmm says the Conspiracy Seeker) but also probably pretty uninteresting after 60 years. We wandered all the little UFO-oriented stores and took pictures and bought postcards. We went to the UFO museum and I got to see all those grainy photographs and affadavits that I knew from the internet in person! Very cool. Nothing much very new to me, unfortunately, but it was cool to be there.
After Roswell (and an amazing lunch at the Cover Up Cafe watching videos of UFO footage) we rolled to Albuquerque and caught up with Real Civilization for the first time in several days. And by civilization I mean traffic.
We got to the Blue Dragon Coffeehouse and entered slowly. I’m getting used to the fact that you never know what a venue is going to be like from either their website or their exterior, but I’m beginning to trust my sense of smell. Bars are smokey and smell somehow dense, and coffeehouses smell to varying degrees of coffee, and you can usually judge the vastness of variety by the depth of the smell. We walked into the Blue Dragon and were greeted by delicious food smells of garlic and curry and unidentified aromas of glory.
The food is amazing, the stage is awesome. Life is good.
And actually, Life is kind of surreal. Here in Albuquerque, nearly 2000 miles from home our audience consists of two old friends from the Jahva House (Ellicott City), one friend from college, and a friend from high school (though she FORGOT to come!!!) among the natives. We were in rare form (ask Heather about my plans to have my way with her bucking scorpion riddled corpse!… or don’t… if you’re a pansy) and we played well despite the altitude – I didn’t find out till after the show that part of my laboured breath was because Albuquerque is at an elevation of well over 5000 feet above sea level.
We retired to a new friend’s house and actually got rooms of our own. Stars burning bright light years above New Mexico, looking for all the world like the Roswellians could’ve just stepped down off of them…
