New Mexico (Part I)
I bury part of my soul in the dusty New Mexican soil every time I leave. Sometimes I realize what I’m doing as I lower it into the hole I’ve dug; sometimes I don’t. Yet every time I return to where I was born I unearth a part of myself, regardless of whether I was aware the last time I buried it. I leave part of myself there, but never in Los Alamos, the town where I grew up. Or if I do bury it there, I first pass it back in time to the age of the ranch school, or even earlier: to the age of grazing rights and adobe walls.
The nauseating complexities of life that we consider from our armchairs amidst a cloud of contemplative pipe smoke and pretension vanish in the lonely high-desert wind that carries, in its whistling, the sorrow and splendor of human lives that are lived instead of being observed from a cautious distance. Most of the state lags between five and 50 years behind modernity; pockets still lag a century or more. The streets of elm trees and Victorian homes, so out of place in Las Vegas, NM are a relic from the golden age of the railroad, when culture was transmitted over iron tracks.
Now, the Las Vegas train station that brought 19th-century modernity is a bar, a concession in itself to the shifts in what is fashionable. I remember once I went for a drink there with three friends and someone one of them knew who the rest of us didn’t. The man most of us didn’t know was thin, muscles like stones and cables clearly visible beneath pale craggy skin. He was missing several teeth and didn’t say much, maybe because he wasn’t quite sure of those of us he’d just met. He sipped his Miller Lite and only leaned forward on occasion to offer a couple words or tell a quick story that didn’t entirely make sense to the rest of us due to a lack of context. He sat back again when we weren’t quite sure what to say—or whether to laugh—and settled instead for giving him tentative smiles of encouragement. Eventually, when it became clear our visit to the bar was wrapping up, I got up from our table on the covered brick patio, and I went inside to pay. Paying at the register made it easier to cover everyone’s drinks without anyone complaining. When I went back outside, I said nothing about what I’d done. I couldn’t be entirely sure if the others would be {happy} I’d bought their drinks or would feel I’d overstepped in depriving them the chance to protest. Paying for yourself is a point of pride for some people. So I sat down again and waited for the rest of the group to finish their beers. When our glasses had been empty for a while, the man I didn’t know looked at the table. “I guess I should go pay now,” he said and reluctantly began to push himself up from his chair.
“I took care of it already,” I said. The man stopped getting up but didn’t seem to understand because he hovered there, fists on the table as he stood partway. “I already paid,” I said, thinking that would clarify my meaning. It didn’t.
“You paid, but I still need to.” He pushed himself the rest of the way up.
“I paid for everyone,” I said. “I already paid for you.”
The man sank back into his chair. I must have stood to leave at some point because I remember how he looked up at me then. I’d been worried about these complex, abstract things: would what I intended as generosity be viewed instead as paternalistic? Would he want to pay for himself and perhaps even feel less of a man if I didn’t give him that chance? Ultimately, I needn’t have worried. The smile he gave me, gums where teeth should have been, outshone the sun.
Face the wind of exigency: you will find you can no longer light your pipe of inconsequential contemplation.