La Pájaro: Puts the Bird in Birdie

Scenes from around town

I posted some fun photos of my crazy town. Enjoy!

Local Ephemera

I found out today that I live in Ethel Mertz's sister's house. Vivian Vance used to travel to my tiny Vegas to spend time with her sis. No wonder things are so wacky around these parts!

So, if I'm Ethel, does that mean Frankie the Pot-bellied Pig is Fred?

Thirty-six Days Past Solstice

I have a story posted at Brad Listi's The Nervous Breakdown. Please visit my story: Thirty-Six Days Past Solstice in a Circle of Dead Refrigerators and leave me a comment over there!

Birdie gets political

I'm starting a new weekly column at BlogHer.org where I will feature interviews and stories from the people of New Mexico about our governor, Bill Richardson, and his presidential campaign.

The people of my beloved state have much to say!

Anyone want to try their hand at the art widget and make a graphic to go with my interviews and stories?

Extrasolar

I met a scientist. He stood in line at Wal-Mart yesterday, both arms balancing an overstuffed hand basket filled with Twinkies, Sara Lee pound cake, two Hungry Man dinners - Salisbury Steak and Chicken Cacciatore, a gallon of store-brand whole milk, a clear plastic box filled with butterless croissants. I looked at my own push basket. A dozen free-range eggs, six lemons, two bunches of cilantro, five pounds of whole wheat flour, a box of pressed soy, broccoli, a carton of organic lowfat milk.

"Heh. You must be one of those vegetarians."

He leered at my basket, as if it sprouted canteloupe breasts. He held his goods close, but his girth prevented his nose from inhaling the imprinted cardboard housing his treats.

"I just try to eat low on the food chain. I have kids. I have to teach them how to eat."

The woman in front of me turned around, stared at my sparse goods, then moved her purse, her torso, so I couldn't measure her motherhood. Her toddler shifted in the grocery cart seat, tried to lurch and grab a candy bar. She screamed when her mom slapped her wrist, her yellow-ribboned ponytail cracking like thunder. I tried not to wince at my self-righteous words. I wished I kept quiet, just laughed at the man with the heart attack horn of plenty instead of handing him a shopping list of the ways I think I'm better.

"What the hell is a person like you doing here?"

The man laughed as he spoke. His groceries rose and fell with the shake of his belly. I knew what he meant, knew the Wal-Mart stocked tofu for the short list of people like me, people who came to this cattle-fed quadrant of New Mexico to escape the smog and traffic of Calfornia.

"I like it here. I sell Avon. I'm a mom. I'm single. Where else should I live?"

He laughed. He liked my answer, and his cheeks echoed red like a school girl, as if somehow I told him those secret dirty thoughts I only dared uncork late at night when my boys slept under heavy blankets.

"I teach astronomy at the university. I wasn't planning on shopping, but I can't stop thinking about what's out there. I mean Out There. You know? Some of my colleages think there may be as many as sixty-five Earth-like planets for every basic star we've found. If this ratio holds, we're talking sixty-seven billion habitable planets in our galaxy. One galaxy. One galaxy in a sea of countless."

I imagined it as his groceries jiggled. A tide of intelligence, as if every calorie in his basket was a planet, he was a sun, he was his own galaxy, a black hole at the center, a black hole munching Twinkies, gulping statistics, swallowing us whole, us whole.

"Huh. Sixty-seven billion?" I did a quick calculation. "At current population levels, that's about fifteen planets each for every man, woman and child living today."

The cashier started to ring my goods, my bunches of wilted cilantro carelessly shoved into a cheap plastic bag, my tofu, my hormone-free milk.

"Yeah," he answered. "Talk about vacation potential."

We laughed. I paid. I carried three bags and the knowledge we might be alone in the ways we understand life, but for all our smarts and commerce we're still insignificant. Just a few hours later I sat in a school room with four middle-school students. They rested guitars on their lap, just like me, and we played one chord after another in a rhythm that echoed a song they loved, a song riddled with illicit words, a song by a band called Limp Bizkit.

"Hey, Ms. Jaworski!"

The tall eighth-grader with the kewpie doll hair and misleading angelic expression paused, three stiff fingers pressed into the neck of his instrument.

"Are you going to get in trouble for teaching us this song? Our other music teacher makes us play baby songs, even though the stuff we like is just as easy."

I tried not to smile. I knew Mrs. Baca, the woman with the short frizzy hair who wore sensible brown sweaters over khaki slacks, who taught them old school rock like the Beatles and The Doors. Kewpie Boy didn't know she passed them sure teen-aged terror, a cocktail of indecency and lust, songs that made her own teacher cringe decades ago. She didn't care what songs I brought to class.

The songs don't really change, I thought. It's all promise of sex, rage against authority. I wore safety pins along the bottom of my ripped shirts at his age. I shaved my hair into a mohawk, let my parents hate what I had become. I worshiped The Clash, The Sex Pistols. This is nothing new.

"Well, Henry, I'm going to tell you something I learned today."

He leaned close, as if my booming voice was meant just for him, not the entire room.

"There might be sixty-seven billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone. That's fifteen planets for every man, woman and child. I bet that any intelligent life on those planets has their own music, and I bet their teenagers think their music is the coolest and the best. It's nature, Henry. As you pass out of childhood you need to shake off all that uncertainty with music, with words you think might give you power. We all do it. Mrs. Baca did it, too, and those songs she teachers you are just as wild. Listen beyond the melody, listen to those words."

Henry shook his head. He kept his fingers clamped into a C chord, and I could see the edges of his finger pads grow red from the pressure.

"Nah. I don't believe that shit."

He paused, waited to see if I would reprimand him, if I would react. I didn't move.

"No such thing as aliens. Even here in New Mexico. Heh."

The boy in the back rustled. He held his guitar on lap, too, but spent class pretending to play. He wore a mud-splattered black baseball cap over unruly black hair, black dirty shirt over frayed jeans - a loner, heavy with limbs that hated excise, heavy with some kind of invisible pain. He sat afraid, still, not yet knowing his hands could caress music from a hunk of wood and six strings.

"Henry, haven't you read Bradbury? Martian Chronicles?"

The boy kept his head down. I had to strain to hear him.

"Henry, we are the aliens."

I nodded, yeah, strummed the first line of our song, and as we slowly pounded through verse, through chorus, five students stomping feet, trying desperately to look detached, cool, my heart knew that lonely boy was right.

The Other Vegas

This is going to appear in the next issue of the local Times. You have to know a few local tidbits to "get" the jokes. The back room of the Hillcrest is called the Flamingo Room. Manny Aragon was recently fired from Highlands University (he was the President) for all kinds of illegal behavior. The Serf theatre has been closed for over a year and the same movie is still showing on the marquee. The Optic is the competing paper.

The Other Vegas

Are you from out of town? Every now and then, some people are surprised to learn that there’s a Las Vegas in New Mexico. If you’re at all confused which one you’re in, here’s how you can tell the difference.

You know you’re in the “other” Vegas when…

…the only buffet in town is a potluck at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church and you're not a member.

…the only slot machines are newspaper boxes, and your biggest gamble is whether the Optic is worth fifty cents that day.

…the "ladies of the night" are cashiers working third shift at Wal-Mart.

…the strip is called Grand Avenue and the closest thing to the Bellagio's dancing water fountain is the spray blowin’ through the bays at Trujillo's U-Do car wash.

…you're looking for the famous Flamingo Hotel and Casino so you can attend Toni Braxton's dazzling show, but you end up in the back room of the Hillcrest looking at the KFUN Radio Tower out on the Great Plains and don't have a clue what’s on the air.

…you think Wayne Newton's show has run a long time, but you pull up to the Serf Theatre on Douglas and the marquee reads "In Her Shoes." Wow, that came out in 2005! Eat your heart out, Wayne!

…the "loosest" thing in town are the stray dogs.

…you hand your keys to the "valet" in front of the Plaza Hotel, and the next morning when you ask the desk clerk to have him fetch your car, she hurriedly calls the State Police.

…the biggest show of the year involves judging jars of jelly and trotting pigs at the county fair. Yee haw!

…instead of an Elvis impersonator, you get someone named Manny pretending he can run a university.

Striiiiiiiiiike!

After an unexpected blizzard and a little reworking of time and date, today is 12's birthday party! Instead of sledding - it's a cool -4 degrees outside at the moment - we are headed with two additional boys to Santa Fe for a several hour session of bowling. 12's additional friends arrive at the homestead tonight at 6 for pizza and cake and the good goddess knows what else.

(You may remember the time I tried to sell Avon during Men's Bowling League...)

I spent the last hour fumbling through kitchen, bathroom, boys' bedrooms with an almost empty spray bottle of green cleaner in one hand, dirty rag in the other. The boys attempted some kind of half-hearted attempt to appease me. They carried laundry to the basement under one arm. The dog chased them, I followed the dog, my dishpan hands snatching dropped socks and underwear at each step.

I'm catching my breath. The wall behind me sports a large rectangular opening. My home's intestines spill forth - an intersection of pipe and energy line. I want to cover it, cover the cracks along the outside walls that give the stucco the appearance of a rippled beige Mexican wedding cookie in this snow.

When I lived in Southern California such things mattered, the things involving surface, veneer. I find my synapses in that traffic at times, Los Angeles traffic, smog thoughts. None of it makes sense on these streets. The only cars that wait are those of ranchers at Malette's Feed and Grain. I wait there some mornings, buy a bale or two of alfalfa for the bunnies, share a cup of coffee half-filled with the dulce de leche you make by boiling cans of sweetened condensed milk. That sugar fills our veins, somehow fills the cracks that spider across everyone's home.

Here's the recipe I use to make dulce de leche. It's the same recipe everyone in town uses, and I learned it from old Mrs. Gallegos one morning after I dropped off two bottles of Skin So Soft. Really, nothing else in life is this simple, this delicious. Just be sure to keep the can covered with water, less you risk a kitchen explosion!

As Mrs. Gallegos said as she spooned a healthy dollop of dulce de leche into two ceramic mugs, then poured strong pinon coffe, "It's that hidden sweetness inside, Birdie, that lightens the black."

Mrs. Gallegos' Dulce de Leche

Ingredients:

1 can sweetened condensed milk

Method:

Peel the label off of the can of condensed milk. Place the can at the bottom of a heavy pot. Pour water into the pan until it reaches two inches above the can. Put the pot on a stove and turn up the heat.

Let the pot and can simmer for three hours. Watch that pot! You may need to add additional water if it starts running low.

Let the can cool, open, enjoy! You can spoon the dulce de leche over ice cream, into coffee, or just eat it out of the can with a spoon. Yummy!

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I posted these links of my recent stories of the past week or two at Beauty Dish, but I should have posted them here, this being my clearing house, so to speak, of stories. You've already read all this stuff, but I'm sticking the list for those who might stumble across this site, and for those whose newsletters were jumbled:

10 Easy Ways to be an Environmentally-Friendly Avon Lady

Viva la Salsa

The Year of Yes

Notes on a few Avon products

Derek Jeter almost got me arrested for postal terrorism

Out with the Old, In with the Cold (I take the Polar Bear Plunge!

Blood Money

Have a wondrous MLK day, wherever you are, whatever you do!

Few more snowy shots

My corner cedar tree:

Ice covers the catalpa branches:

More snow! 6 plus inches!

Click on the photos if you want to see a larger version!

...and it keeps coming down!

The snow won't stop! 14 inches and counting... I want to write, to tell you my latest adventures, but I am stuck shoveling, shoveling, shoveling.

Here's 9 having some winter fun with Sissy the dog!