Museum Hill Santa Fe September 2023

 My first introduction to Santa Fe's Museum Hill was when it was used as a site for an episode of Antiques Roadshow. There were 2 museums located there as well as a restaurant with lovely views of the mountains in the distance. During our visit large scale, brightly colored sculptures of fanciful animals adorned the spacious plaza between the buildings.

The Museum of International Folk Art houses an impressive collection of  art forms created by a  number of different cultures from all over the world, as the museum's name implies. There are crafts, glorious textile creations and costumes worn when celebrating various festivals. One gallery is devoted to the dress of the Inuit people who live in the forbidding cold of the artic region. The highlight is a spectacular array of dolls and miniature tableaus. Small carved figures crowd around handcrafted diminutive buildings inspired by architecture from a wide variety of locales. Tiny people crowd around and line up to enter dollhouse like Russian palaces and Mexican cathedrals. There is a riverfront scene with boats, on wheels, this particular piece being a rather elaborate toy, sailing down a painted "river" that runs through a miniature village.  There are dolls and vignettes everywhere. If you are not charmed by the surroundings I would have to assume that you have no soul.

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, I found it odd that in this area of the country they did not use the term Native American, has a nice collection, some pieces dating back centuries, some quite contemporary. I got a comment on Facebook that someone was good friends with one of the artists whose work is on display there. Yet, somehow,  I did not find it engrossing. The exhibits seemed to lack focus. Perhaps had I visited it first before the Folk Art Museum I would have seen it in a different light.

According to Santa Fe tourism websites there are 4 museums on the hill but only 2 were in operation during our time there. A brief online search didn't provide any information on the 2 missing. Perhaps, like a number of other businesses and institutions, they were victims of the pandemic. The world constantly reinvents itself, our resilience is evidenced by the fact that time hasn't knocked us completely to the mat. We always beat the 10 count.

Our First Taste of Santa Fe September 2023

 After a breakfast on Santa Fe's plaza so bountiful that even I, a big eater, could not finish all of it, we began to wander the city. We marveled at the age of our surroundings, particularly notable for a U.S. city. Santa Fe is the oldest capital in the country.

I was impressed by the simple beauty of the church of St. Frances of Assisi which placed faith above the building where it was celebrated. We were also impressed with the professionalism with which a raging street person was ejected from the narthex. We visited the Loretto Chapel with it's miracle spiral staircase leading up to the choir loft, breathtaking in it's simple majesty. Our last stop was the oldest church in the nation, the San Miguel Mission. All three felt spiritual without the garish trappings I've seen in many of the cathedrals I've had the good fortune to visit, whose ostentation is ironic considering the vow of poverty taken by the church's leaders and servants. 

We strolled through the streets, occasionally stepping into shops which held an almost bewildering assortment of Native American jewelry and crafts, then headed off to the institutions on top of Museum Hill.

Madrid New Mexico September 2023

 The cheerful and friendly gentleman at the counter when we picked up our rental car suggested that on the way to Santa Fe we might want to stop in Madrid, once a small coal mining town, now reborn as a strip of galleries and funky eateries. GPS leading us we headed out through a landscape of brush studded hills. 

Nearing Madrid one can see remnants of it's past. Piles of coal dot the hills. Where the mines broke through the sand colored epidermal layer of earth brilliant colors have been revealed evidencing millions of years of geological history. 

The town features a single road of venerable repurposed structures populated with a  mix of  bikers, aging hippies and young hipsters. Behind the bar and restaurant, where we ate outside in the desert sunshine, is a small stage where various bands play against a backdrop of an antique locomotive and coal car, which harkens back to the town's past. An ancient pick up truck bears a hand painted sign which directs locals and visitors alike to the town's CBD establishment. We assumed that, looking at the people that lived there, it must do a brisk business. 

After lunch we continued to our hotel just outside the city and our balcony room that overlooked it. Travel weary we collapsed to sleep off our wanderlust dust in preparation for the start of our New Mexico adventure the next day. 

Airport Musings September 2023

 The concourses of airports, at least major ones, are like rivers composed of people, a constantly moving scene of the many varieties of humanity. The tall and morbidly obese priest in his black cossack, a huge wooden cross around his oversized neck, business people, the young men, they do seem to be uniformly young men, pushing infirm passengers to their gates in wheelchairs. There are the casually dressed, seeking comfort from the ever increasing rigors of air travel. Uniformed crew members walk by pulling their roller board suitcases behind them. At one point I worked in a jewelry kiosk in the airport. Whenever the store was slow there was always something to look at. 

I become increasingly aware of my age. 75 to 80 percent of the people flowing past appear to be younger than I. It doesn't sadden me, there is no feeling of melancholy, the day before a coworker, several decades my junior, told me he was envious that I came of age in a less chaotic era. A time when cooperation had been overrun by competition. A time before rocks had been overturned allowing the hate and division long hidden underneath to slither out and take root. 

I look back in sorrow and anger at what we have become and fear what may lie ahead.

 

Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe? September 2023

The sun rises later during this time of the year. The clouds in the sky change from orange to pink as we head to the airport. Airline personnel are pleasant, TSA employees less so, some downright hostile. 2 men push in front of me as I am placing my items on the conveyor belt, their rudeness sets my teeth on edge. It is still fairly early in the morning, I am not at my best at that hour. 

As we drove through the forest preserve on the way to the airport I noticed the leaves there were changing color earlier than the ones in our lakeside neighborhood. Over the next weeks I looked forward to the trees entertaining us with a beautiful and vibrant curtain call prior to their winter naps.  

We are on our way to Santa Fe, a bucket list item of mine. For a number of reasons we didn't feel comfortable going abroad this year so decided to stay domestic. Aside from the historic city itself, the oldest state capitol in the country, there several nearby National Monuments as well as the ancient, by U.S. standards, town of Taos. 

I sat by the gate in the terminal hoping that predicated storms would not delay us on our way to our adventure. We soon heard the beautiful words, "Now boarding group 5".

Be Careful What You Wish For

 It used to bother me a little. Corporations, that gave little if any visible support to the gay community 11 months out of the year, would, during the month of June, shamelessly use our hard fought battle for equality and acceptance as a marketing tool. Media would be awash in rainbows. But this year is different. Nary a rainbow to be seen. One major retailer has made the decision to move it's Pride section to secondary locations on their sales floors out of concern for the safety of it's employees and protection of their property. They have reacted, understandably so, to boycotts, personal confrontations and anger. Fear has forced the corporate turtles to take safe haven within their shells. 

How did it get here? Why is an angry and hate filled minority allowed to have an oversized voice in our country today regarding both public and private policy?

Over the last several years I have sometimes thought about how, almost fortunate, I am to be the age I am. I think about how I am watching the second act and somehow comforted that, after intermission, I will not be around or too senile to notice the third. 

Perhaps it will not be as bad as I fear. We saw hate and fear in the 50's turn into the transformative period of the 60's. But this was before social media. Please do not point out the hypocrisy and irony of making this statement on a blog, I am aware of both. When anger, hate and insults can be thrown out from a keyboard protected by the barrier of a glass screen it can sometimes have the effect, not unlike alcohol, of loosening inhibitions. 

In the meantime I live my life in my, tolerant, diverse, deep blue city with it's embarrassing wealth of culture hoping that the younger generations will eventually wake up, rise up, educate themselves and demand and begin to take responsibility for their great future that could be. 

Ode to Mexico

 First there is the food, fresh and plentiful. The breakfast buffet at my hotel included eggs, beans, potatoes, 2 days roasted, one day mashed, one morning fashioned into pancakes as delicate as butterfly wings and mounds of fresh fruit, including papaya, a rare treat. A salad in a restaurant I revisited from a previous trip served me a deep bowl of crisp greens heaped with chicken, there was the side salad one evening of shredded lettuce and seemingly impossibly sweet onions topped with a tangy vinaigrette. Vegetable medleys tasted as if the zucchini, carrots, broccoli and green beans had been plucked from a garden just minutes before being steamed to perfection. There was a breakfast so bountiful, served on the wrap around porch of a historic mansion, that I was unable to finish it, unheard of for me. There were the lovely lunches and breakfasts taken in the lush garden of the hotel in Ajijic , with it's lake view, where a caged scarlet macaw shouts out it's name "Paco" as a calico cat with beautiful markings wanders about the greenery and lounges in the sun.  

There is the architecture, late 19th century facades line the streets of downtown Guadalajara. In the historic Colonia Americana district the mansions display an eclectic mix of colonial, Victorian and baroque influences, sometimes all three in a single building. There are the churches, some centuries old, sprinkled around the city like jewels, waiting to be discovered by chance as you walk the streets. Murals in bright colors fill the walls of the buildings of Ajijic, the ancient stone pyramids of Teuchitlan hold secrets thousands of years old.

And then the people, charming and graceful. The guide to the pyramids and I had a long conversation about tequila as we returned to the city. The patrons at the bar in Ajijic ensured I felt welcome among them. The two students manning the front desk at the Museo de las Artes, sweet, intelligent, slightly flirtatious, with an underlying innocence unique to the young. The, without exception, courteous and smiling wait staff and UBER and taxi drivers. The tiny boy zig zagging across a square playing with a bubble machine I encountered as I returned to my hotel after dinner on my final night in Guadalajara. 

It is a place of history, charm and beauty, waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.