Casa Otra Banda
El Rancho, New Mexico
December 2005
Dear Friend,
The years seem to roll by faster and faster – it barely feels that 2005 began, and now I find myself looking backwards on what happened and what it might all mean.
As I get older, reflection on my life comes more easily, if not always resulting in satisfying outcomes. One very positive, if modest, accomplishment, of 2005, was re-reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which I first read perhaps 40 years ago or more, as a young man. The book impressed me powerfully then, and I always knew I would want to re-read it in later years, and see what effect it had on me. This time around, it also affected me powerfully – as a beautifully written exploration of the human animal in a social setting, and of the ways that people do not understand themselves, nay, have not a clue to what their thoughts and actions will do to them and those around them.
I would like to begin this 2005 year-end letter by quoting the final two paragraphs of this 800 page plus opus. The character referred to is Dorothea Brooke, the “heroine” of the book who is idealistic, passionate in her idealism, humane, but all the same, prone to some significant miscalculations in her life. What Eliot says, in conclusion, I believe is so applicable to most of us:
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.
For me, these are words of great wisdom for that vast majority of us whose names will never live on even a hundred years from now – and as the years ago by, one thinks about such things, at least I do.
On a personal level, it has been a year filled with many developments and ups and downs. It has been a year of beginning transitions, as I shall explain shortly. And it has been a year with its share of stresses, some with their ultimate resolution still somewhat unclear.
I thought I had retired at the end of June 2004, and technically, I had, as a full-time employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory. As recounted in my 2004 year-end letter, retirement is a fungible concept, and within six weeks, I found myself back at the Lab, a consultant. This status has continued all through 2005, and, truth be told, has been rather satisfying, in the following sense. Throughout my time as a full-time employee, both as a non-supervisor, and then as a supervisor, my day was constantly interrupted with a seemingly endless series of administrative and bureaucratic demands which never seemed to add much value (if any) but certainly made it impossible to focus on what I thought my “real” job was.
As a consultant, I have three main tasks – all interrelated – and I have virtually no interruptions or diversions from them. I actually get to focus and concentrate. On top of this, I have relative freedom to select my days and hours of work, to take vacations, go to medical appointments, and meet family obligations, without asking anyone’s permission. And best of all, I am actually paid better for such great working conditions than the Lab was willing to pay me as a full-time employee. (Admittedly, I get no annual or sick leave, no holidays, no compensation for snow days, etc., but I am more than willing to accept that trade-off for the plus side of the equation). I actually feel that I am getting something done on some interesting projects. Furthermore, with the other stressors on the personal front, continuing to go in to a highly focused and satisfying work effort becomes a kind of locus of stability. All in all, not a bad arrangement!
David and I are well along on the path to transitioning our life into a permanent retirement mode centered around living in El Castillo, Santa Fe’s lifetime care facility. As previously discussed, the attractions of El Castillo are several fold – most folks, after their initial puzzlement about why two “young” healthy guys would ever consider such a place, understand why once we explain our reasons:
the most economical living arrangements in downtown Santa Fe one could ever hope to find, by a factor of three, at least;
location, location, location – the central, downtown location, if cannot be sufficiently stressed, is about as perfect as it gets – it means reduced use of a car, and when the day arrives that neither of us can drive any longer, we are not cut off from easy access to the life of a vital and exciting community;
ability to attend many more interesting cultural events than is practical now, living out in the country;
easy access to friends and thus much more socializing, in a more relaxed manner, than is possible for us now;
guaranteed lifetime care from “cradle to grave” if you care to put it that way;
ability to get up and go for an extended period with a minimum of arrangements for taking care of the place;
no responsibility for fixing anything again! (whoo-ee!);
time to focus on other activities (particularly volunteer) besides perpetual house and garden care.
Are those enough reasons for starters?
Well, we have a long way to go until all this takes place, but this past summer we interviewed various real estate agents, and by the end of August selected one we had confidence in. The house went on the market in mid-September. Unfortunately, the rural Pojoaque Valley, where we live, is an extraordinarily difficult locale in which to sell property, especially if you have one of the higher-end dwellings.
For those of us who choose to live here, “the Valley” is close to ideal. It is, first of all, a “real” place with a wide diversity of people. Hispanic families who have owned their land for two or three centuries, Pueblo Indians, and “gringos” new and old. There is a diversity of economic groupings, cheek by jowl, and dwelling types, from double-wide trailers to pre-fab houses, to one of a kind architect showcases to historic houses going back one hundred or more years. The views are spectacular, and except along the main U.S. highway, inappropriate development, now so common in the West, has been minimal. The views to the Sangre de Cristo mountain range (southern terminus of the Rockies) to the east and the Jemez Mountains with the Pajarito Plateau (a series of mesas reminiscent of looking into the Grand Canyon) to the west, are truly stunning.
Despite all that, if you are a potential buyer from California or New York or Texas (and there are many moving to the Santa Fe area), the lack of any zoning and other controls means this is almost “too real.” In this sense it is quite unlike some open lands developments in the area that are tightly controlled where one can entertain the notion of living in the country without putting up with the full reality of what that entails – a kind of Potemkin village version of rural life. This artificial version is something that is happening in much of the West. Further complicating matters, due to a 40-year water suit still unresolved, and vagueness about road access to some residences in the Valley (including to us) many potential buyers are scared off by such uncertainties. Bottom line is that we could remain hanging for some time as to when we can move on to the next (and likely last) phase of our lives – namely, the El Castillo phase – as that next phase is contingent on selling the house.
So, this uncertainty is certainly one stressor. Another, though more minor one, is the need to keep the house always “looking good” so that if a real estate agent brings a prospective buyer over, the place is perpetually clean, papers aren’t lying around, the mirrors and sinks are shined and scoured, etc. To an extent, you stop feeling as if it is your own house, since you cannot entirely make yourself comfortable in it, knowing it must always be ready to “show good.”
As to the property itself, it was a demanding year. After the wettest winter and spring since we have lived in New Mexico, we had a very dry and hot summer. This was combined with a 9-year cycle peaking of grasshoppers who defoliated many of my long established, and lovingly cared for perennials, shrubs, and trees. By mid-August, the place looked devastated. Fortunately, by that time, though the place was overrun with giant grasshoppers, the young (who are the voracious ones) had grown up, and the rapaciousness of these insects slowly began to tail off. We got one huge rainstorm in mid-August, and then a series of storms throughout the fall. By mid-October, the place looked spectacular and most of the shrubs that had been defoliated made a valiant stab at another set of leaves. The fall color was the best I can recall, and we were actually having real twinges about selling the place – it looked so magnificently beautiful again.
While we are waiting for the house to sell, we have moved ahead on other related fronts. While David is far out ahead of me on downsizing, we have both been busy on this matter. For me, it is an emotional gut-wrencher, whereas David absolutely delights in the notion of divesting himself of his past life. We have both gone through the house, grounds, carport, and shed together, identifying everything we are prepared to get rid of – sell (or try to sell), give away as a charitable contribution (thus tax-deductible), or just plain junk that has only one destination – the local landfill. All this has been tabulated on a detailed computerized table, with different codes to indicate whether we can get rid of it right away, when we sell the house, or after we move in to El Castillo and discover that there really is not the room for it we thought there would be.
I’ve gone through all my books and records, and most painfully, a lifetime of memorabilia going back to junior high school, keeping what I just cannot part with, but tossing a lot of stuff. Just going through it all has been a dramatic rendezvous with my entire life and learning a bit more, from the perspective of my current age, about who I am in terms of who I have been, the things I did, and how I related to others.
David has been far more ambitious – he is giving away some of his master drawings to the Clark Institute and Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts (he grew up in Williamstown and his father was a professor at Williams College). We are talking with local galleries and the Museum of New Mexico’s Museum of Fine Arts about donating our outdoor sculptures and perhaps some other items. David has also given away some of his serious art books to one of our local colleges, and even some magnificent items of clothes (but no longer in style) to the drama department of the College of Santa Fe for its productions. We have found a woman in Albuquerque who not only does estate sales, but sells off many of your possessions before you die, through a network of sellers of particular kinds of items, and in some cases, by posting them for sale on e-Bay or equivalent.
Though we have made a firm decision to move into Santa Fe – for a number of what we think are good reasons, as listed above – we are well aware that like so much of the rest of the country, the city and surrounding county areas are booming, and seem to have lost the battle to maintain some kind of control of their destiny. The south side of Santa Fe, especially (heading towards Albuquerque, 60 miles away), is exploding, and one big box store after another is being approved. The Santa Fe I came to love when I first visited in the early 70’s has changed dramatically, and the historic core is now, as in so many other towns, just a tiny nucleus that has been dwarfed by the metastasizing city surrounding it. The saving grace, however, is that the cultural institutions of the city are growing as well and are first rate. There is a unique population of really interesting people who gravitate here, so that what makes Santa Fe special for us now are the people we interact with. The cultural richness of the city is particularly remarkable when you consider that this small city of 70,000 lacks a major university as the locus of its intellectual life.
And one thing we never forget – how could one – is the extraordinary climate. The brilliant light, the deep blue sky, the sureness of usually sunny days, the low humidity, the true four-season climate that yet manages to make winter a positive experience – after all these years, whenever we go somewhere else and return, we realize how close to perfect it is. (With one small caveat – I do wish we got a little more rain! – the smell of rain in our dry, high desert climate is one of the most intoxicating smells I know).
Changing the topic, David’s book, Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half-Century, 1950 – 2000, a labor of four years, was published by Routledge at the end of October, with availability in bookstores and Web sellers before Thanksgiving. The early prospects are quite good – early reviews have been positive, and Routledge featured it as the lead book in its fall catalog. We won’t know for a number of months how the initial sales will be looking, so we are keeping our fingers crossed and taking a deep breath. This whole project, needless to say, has brought a considerable amount of stress into our lives – David’s most intensely, of course. As the final months of editing, reviewing the page proofs, and planning a marketing campaign reached a crescendo, the tension level, the anxieties and concerns, rose accordingly. But my sense is that things on this front are looking good indeed. Physically speaking the book is a knock-out production, indeed.
We did a varied program of travel in 2005. It began in January with a trip to Florida to pick up my father’s Toyota Camry – at almost 95, he finally admitted that “perhaps” he should not be driving any longer. David and I went to Florida to drive the car back to New Mexico as our 2nd car, having sold our fun, cute little Geo Metro convertible to make room for the new 2nd car. We took about a week, and turned the drive back in to a little road trip, with stops in west Florida on the Apalachicola coast, in historic Eufaula, Alabama, a few days in Natchez, Mississippi, with a drive up a portion of the beautiful Natchez Trace parkway to Vicksburg, and then pretty much, except for motel breaks, on back to New Mexico (except for a brief detour to the Kimbell Art Museum as we drove through Fort Worth, Texas. The Kimbell, designed by Louis Kahn, is what I consider to be, architecturally, the “American Taj Mahal.”)
In late February/early March, we went to New York to see Cristo’s The Gates installation in Central Park, and then on to Rome for a low season stay. Neither of us had been to Rome in literally decades, and just got a hankering to spend 8 days there. David did most of the preparatory work, organizing our visits to churches and other historic buildings as a military campaign, but the result was an extraordinarily satisfying visit, with a lot of self-initiated learning, delightful walks, and some of the best eating we’ve done in a long time. We only went to family-style, traditional restaurants, and the food was consistently first rate in unpretentious, reasonably-priced settings – these were places Romans went to regularly. All I’ve been able to think about is a return visit to continue where we left off. There is so much to see, that even with our intense schedule, we left a great deal out. But we came away with a renewed, intense love for Rome as the greatest city of the Western world, the city where virtually all the layers of Western history are exposed and integrated into the modern life of the city.
In April it was a visit to Mara, my daughter, and her spouse, Miryam in Seattle, and then the Coast Starlight train down to San Francisco for a week’s immersion into what, for a tourist, has become even a better city to visit than I remember from the days in the 60’s and 70’s when I lived there. In late May/early June, it was North Carolina, for a one week stay in the Blue Ridge mountains, hiking and exploring at the peak of the wild rhododendron/azalea bloom season and a celebration, in Chapel Hill, of my brother’s 60th birthday and his and my sister-in-law’s 25th wedding anniversary.
Late June saw us back in New York briefly (fortunately during the city’s famous “Restaurant Week” when three course lunches at many of the best restaurants in the city were priced at $20.12, the price tied in with New York’s ultimately failed bid to be selected for the 2012 Olympics). New York was our jump off for a 3 week trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, Riga, Latvia, and a great portion of Estonia, and a brief taste of Helsinki, a completely fascinating, mind-expanding experience, which I’ve written about separately.
As always camped, hiked and backpacked (David too!) around our part of the West, including two extended trips – one in March to bird-watch, camp and hike in southeastern Arizona, and a fall trip to the canyon country of southeastern Utah around Moab (Canyonlands and Arches National Parks and other nearby spectacular places). The crisp fall air combined with some memorable hikes was the fulfillment of a trip idea I had had for some years.
Finally, we have trips planned in December to San Francisco (to see the just opened, new deYoung Museum) and New York (which has the most amazing line-up, at the same time, of great museum shows in years). We may even go to the Arizona and California deserts for some camping over the holidays.
Turning to the national and international front, I am afraid, the outlook seems much darker. The generally conservative mood of the country and the behavior of the executive branch leadership and of the legislative branch (and now very likely the judicial branch) makes me feel that never in my lifetime have things been so far off course. In almost every area of national policy, I am saddened, angry, and outright appalled about approaches that seem little short of a form of national suicide combined with lack of appreciation of some of the most fundamental values upon which our nation was founded – basic freedoms, privacy, respect for the good opinion of other nations, avoidance of warmongering. Add in extreme hostility to the environment, women’s rights, religious diversity, scientific research, open government, civil liberties, protecting and helping the weakest amongst us, the lack of a sense of high purpose, and a pervasive climate of greed, and one cannot help but feel disturbed. I have little idea what it will take to right the course, but I do not have much hope that the situation can turn around any time soon.
Similarly, on the international front, the problems seem to be mounting up faster than the solutions. While I hear about occasional progress, a truly revolutionary breakthrough, and take inspiration in it, I often feel that our ability to live responsibly on our planet is losing out to a proliferation of dangerous trends we cannot get a handle on quickly enough. Are human beings a failed experiment? One such “breakthrough” was, for me, the “re-discovery” of the ivory-billed woodpecker, thought extinct and one of the most spectacular birds on the North American continent. Who could not fail to be thrilled by such an event? But even this pales against reports that the ocean’s wild fisheries are dying, irreversible changes are happening to our climate, the world’s forests are being decimated, hurricanes are reaching unprecedented levels of ferocity, and the rate at which species are disappearing is accelerating.
Most other species have survived in the millions of years, even the so-called short-lived ones. Will homo sapiens (sapiens means ‘wise”) as a species make it beyond several tens of thousands of years (most of which are already behind us), given how we are fouling the world we live in? A three-part series in The New Yorker this past summer on the scientific evidence for the extreme rate of warming of the Arctic regions was about the scariest thing I read all year. While everyone agreed that the 2004 film, The Day After Tomorrow, stretched the truth quite a bit, reading The New Yorker series was as scary, if not more so, than taking the movie for gospel truth.
I should note that the spirit is always lifted that there are scientific and artistic geniuses today on a par with the greatest men and women of the past. Just one small example – anyone who has read detailed reports (such as one in The New Yorker) about new opera, Dr. Atomic, by John Adams, about Robert J. Oppenheimer and The Manhattan Project, has to be stunned by the brilliance and complexity that has gone into this opera – it reassures one that great works on a breathtaking scale are still being created.
Strangely, as I have pointed out before, I contemplate the country and the world with great concern, and yet, on a personal level, I have to admit that life is good. Of course, I have my share of problems and “issues” and I imagine you do, perhaps much more serious than mine – we all do. And yet, when I think of the misery, the worry, the sheer terror of so many in the world, the unimaginable physical and emotional suffering, the pervasive injustice, I realize how good I have it. This is not necessarily a matter of comfort, as I did not earn it – I am just damned lucky. And I cannot help feel great dis-“ease” about it. To feel good because I am not undergoing the awful sufferings of so many other human beings, is not a state of grace. It seems that perhaps only those who devote their lives to assisting others in great need (a Mother Theresa, the doctors of Doctors Without Borders, let’s say) can escape that gnawing sense of having done nothing to merit their own good fortune.
So, despite the homogenization the world seems to be heading towards, there are still many fascinating discoveries to make, and some of our travels reassured us that it is still possible, even if a bit compromised.
So there are some shining lights against the darkening clouds, and let us hope that perhaps the lights will return us, some day, to a period of brilliant sunshine. On that note, I wish you a 2006 of good health and good cheer, and hopes of a world moving towards peace.
Love,
Ken