Holiday Budgets on the Fly
November arrived earlier than ever this year, probably due to global warming. That means it’s time for you to kick back and relax for the rest of the season, because your Christmas shopping is already done. Unless you’re like me. I just found out that people my age are technically adults. This classification burdens me with the responsibility of orchestrating a Flawless Holiday Season. Someone should have told me sooner! For I have not started thinking about what presents to give my loved ones, let alone how to make scarecrow table settings out of oak leaves, Q-tips, and leftover jack-o’-lantern scraps...
God Picks Candidates in This Here Legacy County, Bro
Are you for James Baird for County Sheriff? God is for James Baird, and if you are anywhere near being a sane, decent, upstanding, thoughtful, God-fearing human being, you will be too. You see, here in Legacy County we all know God favors certain candidates.
He’s up there in the sky marking His ballot even now. You will receive by divine agency a pre-marked ballot showing God’s actual highlighting, his revealed choices in upcoming county and state races.
Don’t worry. They’re all Republicans...
Give people a chance
Nov. 1 was Day of the Dead but in Albuquerque it was an exceptional day of life. What made the day was a unique musical gathering called OneBeat. The performance Saturday night was a rare conjunction of time, place and people, an occasion to be not only remembered but treasured.
Some 25 young musicians from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia and North America joined to produce some three hours of music that blended a wide range of genres, traditions, styles and instruments into an evening that was a celebration—of youth, of international collaboration and harmony, most of all of music that can stir our souls and ignite our passions like nothing else on earth...
Mercury Poetry: Between Portales and Clovis
On the road from Portales to Clovis
sand mixes with cloud,
the air thick with grainy patches where dust
joins with air in a raucous dance
ignoring the people below
ignoring the animals in their burrows
ignoring the cows eating, heads down, haunches up,
not a care in the world...
Five Questions for New Mexico Authors – Paula E. Morton
This week we ask Florida author and journalist Paula E. Morton some questions about her enthralling new book, Tortillas: A Cultural History, from the University of New Mexico Press, 2014.
New Mexico Mercury: How did you come to think of the tortilla as a vehicle with which to study history and society across cultures?
Paula E. Mortan: Before I was an author, I was a farmer in York County, Pennsylvania. It was a rich but demanding lifestyle, and after more than twenty years we headed west to Las Cruces in the southwest corner of New Mexico. The most I knew about tortillas was that they tasted good in Pennsylvania and were best at the borderlands, handmade and warm off the griddle...
‘A walk back in time’
No cars. No TV. No radio. No internet. No landline phones. Just a little light at night and a little water in the shower. Furniture, decor and art from the 1920s. Wood frame buildings clinging to a cliff or squatting on the sand beside the ocean. Nothing newer than1938. An entire town built in the elbow of a gentle cove, then deserted, then re-inhabited as a state park.
The harmonies of our lives play out to the rhythms of crashing surf. The markers of our days are sunrise and sunset, waves and clouds by day, stars and a red, red moon by night...
Lack of Mental Health Treatment, Facilities Has Consequences for Families like Mine
Several years ago, my teenage son, out of the blue, began exhibiting signs of mental illness. It was a cruel twist that most families don’t expect, but what followed the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, was the deepest cut of all. It was the Kafkaesque search for psychiatrists, and for treatment programs and facilities that would provide a sense of safety and a hope of recovery.
I called every psychiatrist in the phone book and couldn’t get him seen. I called my friend Nancy Jo Archer, then director of Hogares. She got Neil an evaluation, a treatment plan, a community support worker, a therapist, and a psychiatrist all available through her agency. Both Neil and I felt hopeful. But then Neil lost his therapist when Hogares was taken over by an Arizona company in the summer of 2013...
Halloween Hissssterics
Halloween centers around the ancient, solemn Celtic rite of taking candy from strangers. I spent Halloween in Ireland once and celebrated by getting too drunk to verify how they observe the holiday in the modern era. But in America, I know for a proven fact that the tradition had not changed in hundreds, or perhaps dozens, of years.
My parent’s generation brought Halloween to our shores in what historians refer to as “pilgrim times.” Abduction had yet to be perfected as an art form, which meant kids could go trick-or-treating after dark, with all the eggs their homemade costumes could carry. Meanwhile, their parents stayed home with the porch lights off, inventing the concept of “sexy Halloween costumes"...
Playing the “Ground Game” in the North Valley
Tomas Serna was something of a regular. The 89-year old North-Valley resident called candidates, elected officials, ward heelers, volunteers who happened to come to his door whenever he had a thought—a thought about his benefits, his transportation problem, his health, his expired driver’s license or his daughter who was “no damn good.” He still believed politicians were there to help. As a result, his telephone number was on every call list, and his doorbell regularly rung by campaign volunteers. Now, in 2013, he was on the list of seniors who needed a ride to the polls to vote early in the local election. The low turnout elections could teeter on two or three votes so Tomas was in high demand when a perky field worker knocked on his door...
What Really Counts?
Rumor has it that Gubernatorial candidate Gary King is traveling around the state on a listening tour, hunkering down in every little burg and hamlet to hear people bitch about their problems. Doesn’t he get it?
These little people with their little issues don’t count anymore. The good and kind folks with the money are the People now. That and the companies are also Human.
If you have fifteen billion dollars, you are a human being. If you don’t have a job, or you are a teacher, or make less than two hunderd thou a year, you are just another member of the hoy polloy, the great unwashed, the ignorant masses, the general public...