Embedded Files
El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Complete contact information at end of letter
Year-End Letter December 2010
NOTE: This year-end letter, along with all my past ones (since I began doing them on a computer) can be found on my Web site, http://sites.google.com/site/kensruminations/ - then go to the page on year-end letters.
December 2010
Dear Friend,
2010 got off to an exciting start – in fact, technically speaking, it got going just before the arrival of 2010, by attending Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at the mission church of San Felipe Pueblo, one of the string of pueblos along the Rio Grande River, San Felipe being about halfway between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. David and I had earlier attended a Christmas Eve service at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Santa Fe. (It had begun as a desire to hear a well-known harp player give a short concert, and we wound up staying for the service). Then we drove down to San Felipe, where the “midnight mass” actually began at 11:00 p.m. The contrast between First Presbyterian and the mission church could not have been greater. The former was all sparkling and renovated and rather soulless. The interior of the mission church was white-washed adobe, with a corbel and beam roof typical of the New Mexico missions, a wooden choir, painted in bright geometric patterns in a naïve style. There were no pews – everyone stood, and except for a few Caucasian visitors, it was a sea of native American faces, a look that definitely put one way outside the mainstream of America. Many of the faces (and clothing) called for being photographed, they were so rich in character.
The mass itself was rather perfunctory, led by an Anglo priest, with native helpers. But when it ended, the true excitement began. The church was packed. All the attendees formed two phalanxes along each side of the nave walls, about 6-8 deep, creating a wide channel in the center. Before long, native dancers in a variety of spectacular customs danced from the outside (where it was 20o F) into the channel, filling it from the altar to the rear door. Drummers and singers were behind them, providing the musical accompaniment and keeping the rhythm. Eventually the “set” was finished and they danced out. Before too long, another set of dancers entered (it was hard to tell if any of them had been in the first set), this time in a truly ravishing set of animal costumes – buffalo, deer, elk. The men had darkened their skin so that it was almost black. Animal howls erupted, and we were truly in another world. Had we traveled halfway around the world to some remote part of Africa or an unknown Pacific Island, it would be hard to find a non-Western experience more exotic than just 45 minutes from our own home! The second set ended, and then a third set eventually began, with a completely different grouping of costumes.
Also consider that this was taking place inside a Catholic church, and what the cultural-religious evolution this implies from the earliest days of the Spanish conquest and its complete intolerance for such barbarian “idolators.” Think of the centuries of pain and brutality it took to reach this eventual accommodation between the Western mother church and the traditions of native peoples! This whole rich experience rolled over us faster than we could absorb. Eventually, the dances were over and everyone, in good cheer, disbanded, leaving the beautiful, simple church to go their separate ways, after 1:00 in the morning.
This is not an isolated experience, but rather part of the special quality of living in northern New Mexico. I think of the Christmas Eve sunset bonfires in the main plaza of Taos pueblo: beautifully built, gigantic “luminarias,” 30-feet high, spread through the enormous plaza, that are set alight and create an image of not merely another world, but of another universe, something stranger than strange. I think of the time, years ago, when I was privileged to witness Shalako, an amazing, all-night event at Zuni Pueblo, in Western New Mexico (no longer open to non-Indians), in which gigantic figures parade through the town, and the Zuni members designated as hosts that yet open their houses to everyone for unlimited quantities of food and drink. There are magical dances taking place at almost all the pueblos, and they are almost all open to the public. They take place in every season, at major holidays (Christmas, Easter, summer solstice), at dawn, mid-day, and night. I don’t think there is anything like it anywhere else in the U.S. Some of us travel very far to witness a comparable experience, and we are fortunate to have it close-by. (The schedule of Pueblo dances and festivals is posted on the Web, if you are curious).
Life in Santa Fe
Our personal lives remain as hectic as ever, in part compounded by a busy travel schedule, which always puts us way behind on our on-going activities. The worst is falling behind on subscriptions and newspapers, which I feel compelled to look at. David has been heavily involved in some critical resident-related issues at El Castillo, where we live. He is chair of the Finance Committee, and involved with our new Health Center Task Force, contributes to the Liaison Committee, and with the passage of a new law earlier this year by the New Mexico Legislature concerning Continuing Care Retirement Communities, he is coordinating input to the New Mexico Department of Aging on the development of regulations to implement the law. All this has taken a huge chunk of his time, but in many ways, I feel he has been the most important contributor to the overall welfare of the residents here of any resident at our facility. I, too, have spent a lot of time as Chair of the Buildings & Grounds Committee, but will be glad that my two-year term ends on December 31!
One aspect of life at El Castillo that is very sobering is that one has a ringside seat at the process of aging. Not only are residents we know dying regularly, but even in the three-and-half years we have lived here, we have seen any number of people we’ve come to like begin to markedly age and go downhill. When it is all around you, you simply can’t escape the sense that you will be the exception to the rule – aging affects us all, and one way or another, it is going to get you. Living in your own home or apartment, you can put this realization a bit at bay, but where we live it is a constant. I suspect it is a good thing to have this be such a frequent and direct experience.
We continue to be involved with the cultural life of Santa Fe, which offers an amazingly rich smorgasbord of events for a town of its modest size. And then all the volunteer activities I described before have continued and take a healthy portion of time. I have applied to be a Court-Appointed Special Assistant (CASA), a program of volunteers who are part of the team working with youths (generally adolescents) who are in trouble with the law or come from such dysfunctional families that they are under the supervision of a juvenile court. This is a national program, and I feel I could make a real contribution, so I hope I will be accepted. I also served as Presiding Judge at one of the precinct polling places in the recent (November 2) mid-term election. This is an amazingly demanding responsibility, since the laws on running an election are very specific, numerous, and in some ways, complex. (I discovered that my inability to sleep the night before was shared by all the poll-workers on my team). But it is important and so I do it.
This was the year we seem to have pretty much stopped going to movies and switched to Netflix, which works very well for us. With the addition of the Turner Classic Movies cable channel to our basic service mix at El Castillo, we have more than enough movies to watch at home. I suppose the next step will be getting set up to download movies via Internet, but we’re not quite there yet.
Travels
Especially living where we do, with the realization that aging eventually makes it impossible to travel the way we have been accustomed to (that is, like young budget travelers of our earlier years), we try to keep to a fairly heavy travel schedule, and this year was no exception.
This year was filled with a mix of foreign travel and road trips in the U.S., heavily weighted to camping and the outdoors. The biggest trip was six weeks in New Zealand, covering the North and South Island. We took the train to and from Los Angeles, which gave us a little time there both before and after the trip. Departing from our usual style of travel, we had the entire trip handled by a travel agent who only works on New Zealand and Australia – she took care of car rental, hotels, special guide tours, the Milford Track 4-day walk, etc. It was still just David and me traveling on our own, but the trip was fabulous and it was a more comfortable and luxurious trip than we are accustomed to. Our other big overseas trip was spending the entire month of September in Europe, specifically Berlin and Prague, with shorter stops in two cities that are between those two, Leipzig and Dresden.
I won’t take up space to go into detail on the trip, but if you want to know more about them – the New Zealand itinerary, my observations and impressions of New Zealand, plus “reports” on Berlin and Prague, go to my Web site – both David and I have entries. Go to the home page, Ken Collins’ Ruminations, and select Ken’s Trip Reports and Trip Planning Materials as well as David’s Trip Reports. I used to send these out as e-mail attachments, but this way you can look at it only if you wish to.
There were also a number of extended camping trips – to Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks in May (along with the Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierra Nevada’s and Great Basin National Park in a remote part of eastern Nevada), the canyon country of southeastern Utah in October (I did this one with a friend and without David), and Big Bend National Park in November.
One of my little projects is documenting, photographically, all Western U.S. wildflowers. Whether going out on a day hike or an extended camping trip, I always have my camera on my belt, trying to get good close-ups. A few recent examples are included below.
Rosy paintbrush Blue columbine (State flower of Colorado)
A particularly memorable experience in those travels was visiting the Manzanar National Historic Site (a National Park Service property) in the Owens Valley. Manzanar was one of the 10 major relocation centers, more accurately internment centers, for Japanese nationals and (mainly) American citizens of Japanese origin and/or descent who had been living on the West Coast when the U.S. entered World War II. One of the sadder episodes in our history, for its wanton abandonment of our civil liberty and constitutional principles, this period was only belatedly recognized a few decades ago. Manzanar is now a remembrance site, commemorating this event. Remains of the camp can be explored via an auto trail, but most moving is the museum created about how this came about and how the internees tried to make a decent life for themselves – and particularly their children – in such an isolated and austere place.
The canyon country of southeastern Utah is as beautiful and unique as anywhere I have been on earth, and I was fortunate to experience 9 utterly perfect fall days, without a cloud in the sky. This part of the U.S. is considered to have the darkest of “dark skies” and has been so designated. The weather was so perfect that the friend who went with me, and I, slept under the stars every night and were treated to n experience few Americans know any more.
A sign of the times, I suppose, was our camping trip to Big Bend, one of the most isolated parks in the U.S., with relatively low visitation compared to Yosemite, Yellowstone, or Grand Canyon. All the same, it has the worst air clarity of any Western park, due to pollution from the large Texas cities and coming up from Mexico. Remoteness no longer protects our parks from the ravages of air pollution or the coming effects of global climate change!
There were, as always, numerous day hikes out of Santa Fe, surrounded as we are by mountains and canyons, and it being so easy to just decide to “do it” and get out there. Some were with David, some with a friend or friends, and some with the local chapter of the Sierra Club, or with the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.
We got to stay at a friend’s wilderness cabin at the edge of the spectacular South San Juan Wilderness in southern Colorado, the jumping off point for some gorgeous, flower-filled hikes We spent four days camping and hiking in our favorite Rocky Mountain region – the mountains surrounding Crested Butte, Colorado. This year, my volunteer activities included two wilderness service trips – backpacking in June into the Pecos Wilderness to input data on trail campsites, using a special GPS software program to record the data (this was a joint effort of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and the U.S. Forest Service) and a week’s trip in July to build fences (hard work!) for a project on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon supported by the Grand Canyon Trust, to research the impact of hybridized buffaloes on native vegetation.
Building buffalo “exclosures” on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon
Urban experiences included San Francisco and the wine country in April (a birthday present to me from David), and New York in the first part of December.
The bottom line in all these travels is that being on our own, taking care of ourselves, seeing and experiencing new and different places, people, histories, art and the like, makes us feel much younger and alive than our chronological years might indicate. For all the advancing global homogenization, it remains a rich and fascinating world, and we want to keep dipping into it as much as possible. We already have our big trips blocked out for 2011 (Nicaragua in January, with the flights already booked), southwestern France in May/June (including an inn-to-inn walk in the Dordogne region), and hopefully, some central Italian cities we’ve wanted to visit for a long time (Lucca, Bologna, Perugia, Urbino) in October/November. I suppose as we slow down and can’t carry our own bags any more nor put up with simple budget hotels, the next step will be Elderhostel.
Books Read
A fascinating book read this year was Manahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Eric W. Sanderson. The concept behind this weight-lifting sized book is to recreate what Manhattan was like, as a natural world, at the moment that Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into New York Harbor and up what is now the Hudson River (but was originally called the North River) on a glorious fall day, September 12, 1609. The author is a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (the new name for what was the Bronx Zoological Society, aka, the Bronx Zoo). Using the latest in computer simulation and highly specialized software, combined with on-the-ground biological and anthropological research, maps and actual virtual photos of Manhattan Island (called by the Lenape Indians who lived there “Manahatta” or “land of many hills.”). Not just because I grew up in New York, but also because I think of New York as the ultimate urban space, I found it fascinating to think of the island as a natural place, just a mere 400 years ago. It turns out that it had a very hilly topography, and an extraordinary diversity of trees, shrubs, birds, mammals, fish, and insects. The quality of the publishing makes it a particularly attractive physical experience!
My sadness is that despite being retired, I don’t get to read nearly as many books as I would like to. Some other highlights this year were The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, about the critical days just before and just after the start of World War I that set the tone for the horror that the war turned into, and Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. The latter is a posthumously discovered novel by a writer who spent most of her life in Paris, but as a Jew (though she avoided acknowledging such), her friends largely abandoned her during World War II, and she was eventually rounded-up and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. Suite Française Is a novel, really a collection of interconnected stories about Parisians fleeing their city as the Germans approach – the examination of the various personalities under great stress is a kind of “Ship of Fools” portrayal.
Another reading highlight was the anthology my daughter-in-law, Miryam Kabakov, edited and had published by a fine small press in Berkeley, California. It is titled Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires – a collection of essays by Orthodox Jewish women who are Lesbian. Each essay tackles some aspect of this seemingly contradictory duality – from a philosophical, historical, religious textual, or personal perspective, and it provides some fascinating insights into “the outsider.” Both Miryam and my daughter, Mara Hillary Benjamin, are contributors to the anthology, along with 12 other fascinating women.
The National Scene
Ah, the national scene. What to say? I have essentially nothing positive to say. If this spoils your sense of having received a “holiday letter” read no further.
For the first time in my life, my contemplation of, and exposure to the news has literally caused me to feel, in the diagnosable sense, depressed. I don’t think I have ever felt so down about where we are headed (over a cliff) and my role as a citizen.
I wrote a few paragraphs of this section much earlier in the year, when I was concerned, but still saw some glints of hope. These paragraphs are in italics and a deeper color. But my view as of now is far darker (see further on).
Early in the year I read what I had felt was perhaps the most penetrating article on the state of the nation: by James Fallows, in the January/February 2010, issue of The Atlantic, titled How America Can Rise Again. I have provided a link to it – you may wish to read it. It summarizes as well as anything I have read, the strengths of American society and the dysfunctionality of our political system, and lays out what we need to do to restore our traditional greatness. But since then, the situation has gotten much worse, and I see no near-term prospects for America “rising again.”
How things have changed from that period barely two years ago when so many of us had real hope for change – hope so deep that this grouchy guy was inspired to go to the Inauguration and add my presence to millions of others. I remain extremely impressed with Obama’s intelligence and grasp of the issues, with his sound approach and understanding and his genuine commitment to “do the right thing.” I have never felt both so grateful to have such an intelligent presence at the helm, nor so sad that he is so extensively despised and unappreciated by so many Americans. But I am also beginning to realize that great leadership is a very different quality from intelligence, and great leadership has defined how we emerged from previous crises. I question whether the leadership qualities we need exist.
At this point, having experienced the election campaign and its results, I feel a sense of complete hopelessness. The campaign itself, drowning in money, much of it coming from anonymous, large donors, represents the absolute low point of what I think a democracy with some very serious, complex problems should be having a discussion about. All we heard were gutter-level soundbites. I cannot recall hearing any pre-election discussion that was even worthy of a two-year child. Everything was reduced to a few simple phrases that had noting to do with a candidate’s record or a discussion of why that candidate was unsuitable. I kept thinking of “Newspeak” In George Orwell’s 1984, a constant drumming of meaningless expressions that totally anesthetized populations from thought.
And despite the use of obscene amounts of money to repeat endlessly the Big Lie, the American people bear great responsibility for being uninformed and misinformed. That they could forget, in two short years, how we were driven into the ground, on every front, for 8 years, and then vote in people with the same brain-dead ideas that are destroying the country in the first place, is unimaginable to me. That they could be suffering and vote in people with ties to all the destructive forces working against their interests is again beyond imagining.
Not only was this a campaign in which billions were spent to avoid informed conversation commensurate with a great democracy, but the language itself represented an accelerated coarsening of what was formerly unacceptable speech. Not only was it plain, outright vulgar, but in far too many instances, I see it setting us up into a seriously divided country where hateful speech inevitably leads to acts of violence, where one’s opponent is only to be wiped from the face of the earth. We are in a time where the Big Lie, repeated often enough, takes hold, such as Obama being a Muslim and not having really been born a U.S. citizen. The eruption over building a Muslim center in downtown Manhattan is just one other, of many examples
And now the election results are in, and any former tiny capability of considering the huge problems we face and actually doing something about them appears to be totally out of the question. It looks like the next two years, at the least, will be spent in endless and pointless Congressional investigations of the actions of the Administration, and in blocking legislation, no matter how badly needed, to face up to the economic downturn, economic inequality and poverty, climate change, our crumbling infrastructure, educational shortcomings, critical foreign policy matters, international cooperation, and on and on. The basic platform of the Opposition seems based on mindless mantras that have nothing to do with fixing problems – in fact, they are guaranteed to exacerbate them. Will we ever get selfless individuals to play a major role in the life of our country and begin to solve real problems? The forces of absolute hypocrisy and ugliness, despite their terrible record, seem to triumph over and over again.
I feel increasingly that the idea of progress that I grew up with is completely dead. The very strange thing is that we have plenty of knowledgeable individuals who understand our problems, can analyze them, and suggest intelligent approaches to solving them. However, the chasm between intelligent thought and political action (a political environment in which compromise is considered “treason”) is now so immense that there is literally no hope of doing what needs to be done. My worry is that we will keep going along for a few more years ignoring the impending disaster, and then when it comes, it will not only be too late, but real mass panic and craziness will sweep the general population. My visit earlier this year to Berlin provided plentiful proof that not so long ago, in a highly advanced, educated society there was a descent into utter barbarism. It can happen again.
Often in our country’s history, at some low point, the right person comes along, and we make a stunning turn-around. What will happen in the years ahead? I wish I could feel some hope, but I feel none.
And so….
Where I have to feel thankfulness is in my immediate and personal world, where there are still friends and loved ones, something left of our beautiful world, thoughtful writing and music that touches me to the core. For these, I am most grateful.
David and I are fortunate that the basics are provided for and for the immediate future, not a cause for great concern. Our minds remain sharp, and our bodies, knock on wood, remain in good shape, and we hope will continue to. (We are particularly aware of this, having gotten to an age where we are always aware this is not the case for all of our peers.) So we know how much cause we continue to have to be grateful.
On this note I sign off as we approach another year. Love,
Ken
David and Ken beginning the Milford Track
Fjordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand, March 2010
P.S. This coming year’s calendar, created from my photos, is devoted to New Zealand, as photogenic a place as one could ever hope to spend time. If you are interested in a calendar, let me know.
.____________________________________
COMPLETE CONTACT INFORMATION
Mail & Street Address
250 E. Alameda, Apt. 608
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
Telecommunications
Apt. 608 / Main Apartment: (505) 455-7107 [Voice] 505) 795-7276 [Fax]
Apt. 422 / David’s Office & Art Space: (505) 795-7277 [Voice] (505) 795-7277 [Fax]
760 / 705-8888 [Google Voice Phone No. on Caller ID]
Kenneth Alan Collins or k6a0c8 [Skype]
Ken + Ken & David Joint: k6a0c8@cybermesa.com
[NOTE: the “0” after the “a” is a zero, not the letter “O”]
David (no large files): d4a2j2@cybermesa.com
Ken: k6a0c8@gmail.com [Forwards to cybermesa.com address]
Social Networks, etc.
Web Site: http://sites.google.com/site/kensruminations/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kenneth.alan.collins
Twitter: flowerken
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse