New Mexico Mercury

The women behind a great man who changed New Mexico

The logic would seem irrefutable: The atomic age made modern New Mexico; Robert Oppenheimer was the man most responsible for making the atomic bomb; three women in his life helped shape the man; these women are important for us today to understand.

This logic led me to An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer’s Life by Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus, which was published in September...

Following dreams - to the end of the road

How far should you follow your dreams? When do dreams become obsessions? Obsessions become delusions? Delusions become tragedy?

These are the questions I pondered as I left a Saturday evening performance of a new play, Up (The Man in the Flying Chair) at the Mother Road Theater in Albuquerque...

Plants that don’t just sit there

Peter D’Amato walks among the hundreds of plants arranged in rows in the country’s—and possibly the world’s —largest collection of flesh-eating plants until he reaches a Venus flycatcher with hungrily gaping petals. He carefully lifts a live worm and lays it on the lower petal.

This is the eerie, beautiful and fascinating world of carnivorous plants. Once rarities, carnivorous plants have multiplied geometrically in recent years...

The Kennedy Hype

I had intended to pass up the opportunity to join the coteries of commentators analyzing, scrutinizing and memorializing the 50th anniversary Friday, Nov. 22, of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But so much of what is being written and broadcast is so contrary to my own memories that I have decided belatedly to join the fray.

The assassination was one of these rare tragedies, like the death of Franklin Roosevelt or the destruction of the World Trade Center, that makes people remember all their lives what they were doing and where they were at that momentous moment...

Tragedy and comedy on the Albuquerque stage

It may seem paradoxical but it often happens that traveling to distant places gives you a clearer understanding of home. Having just returned to New Mexico after three months in northern California, I have acquired a new and broader perspective on some aspects of New Mexico. One of them is the unusual theater scene in the Albuquerque area.

All this is by way of commenting on two Albuquerque plays I saw last weekend...

On the wild side

Some years ago my family, and a friend and I went for a long day hike to the high lakes around Truchas, Las Trampas and Santa Barbara in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe. At a gorgeous but icy mountain tarn more than 11,000 feet high, my quite large friend plunged into the clear turquoise water. His splash boomed through the thin air and created a wave that bounced off the far shore. He emerged shivering but with an ecstatic smile of pure triumph.

That incident occurred to me as I was reading a new book about the mountains of northern New Mexico, A Walk Around the Horizon by Tom Harmer (UNM Press, 208 pages, $24.95 in paperback)...

Across the Ethnic Divide

The headlines are all too familiar to a New Mexican: Cop shoots, kills unarmed suspect. It has happened so often in Albuquerque that the FBI is now investigating the city police department at the request of the city council. But the headlines of the past week are not from New Mexico but from a small California city 10 miles from where I have been temporarily living.

At 3:14 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 24, two Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies radioed that they had spotted a suspicious person. Ten seconds later, the suspect had been fatally shot...

California and the Media Revolution

As newspapers adapt to their digital fate, somebody's got to pay for it.

Book Review - Leaving Tinkertown: The story of a father, a daughter and a museum

The first sentence of Leaving Tinkertown,—“I was conceived in a pickup camper on the New Mexico State Fair Grounds when my parents were on the road with the carnival.” — is definitely a keeper. You immediately sense you are going to hear about some unusual people. And you do.

This memoir tells the story of Ross Ward, the artist and collector who created the unique Tinkertown Museum in Sandia Park. It is also a story of Ward’s developing Alzheimer’s disease, of his daughter’s love and effort to cope with her father’s decline, of a young woman coming to terms with the end that awaits us all...

Hanging together—reluctantly

Edgewood is a tranquil rural village of pastures, mountains, cows and blue skies. This Edgewood is in northern California at the base of Mount Shasta, at 14,179 feet the tallest summit in the region and the second tallest anywhere in the Cascade Mountains.

Shasta’s year-round snowfield and five glaciers hang over Edgewood like a living presence, a white ghost exhaling pure, cold air over fields and homes. Rising some 11,000 feet above the village, the massive mountain doesn’t just dominate the skyline; it is the skyline. It is as if Sandia Peak rose 2 miles above Albuquerque instead of 1 mile and was sitting virtually on top of the city...