Tanya Journey to the East in Santa Fe

Tanya in Santa Fe, New Mexico "Journey to the East" 2007.

Encouraging advice

“Tadyata; gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate bodhi javaha.”

Sanscrit

“It is thus: proceed, proceed, proceed beyond, be founded in enlightenment.”

English translation

Tomasito, 2008

Memory of Racism

Tomasito, Archbishop Lamy statue in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2007.

My Early Contacts with Racism

I was born in a racially divided land: New Mexico, USA.

As a small child I had no concept of racism, and, sheltered by my family and friends, I had no experience with racism until I entered school, where I encountered instant hatred directed against me by my little peers. I was a “white”, a detested “gringo”, and since I was the only gringo in my elementary class for a while, I discovered that I was a true alien.

In the classroom I could count on the teachers (all white women) for protection, but on the playground I became the target of verbal abuse and was constantly threatened with physical violence. My first Spanish words were “Quiere combate?” (Do you want to fight?) These words, frequently shouted at me by older children, I didn’t need to have translated.

I learned very young to run from enemy “Mexicans”, and, if caught, to use every gift of diplomacy I could invent. I hated fighting and have never learned the art.

Oddly, I never complained to my parents or teachers about this curious state of affairs. Like most children, I accepted life as I found it: my environment seemed absolutely normal to me. I had no idea that the juvenile terrorism and intimidation as practiced by my classmates and the older kids at the school was an aberration.

Besides, I was raised in a devout Christian family and believed, as a matter of course, that I should “turn the other cheek” and to “do good to those who spitefully abuse you and persecute you...”

I can’t say I was noble enough to always practice these qualities--I was far too frightened of physical pain for that kind of courage and I wasn’t drawn to martyrdom. Instead I learned to avoid the “pachukos” or “fighting Mexicans” which made my life so interesting.

I have seen a large and growing number of books, stories and articles about young people growing up intimidated by white people (Gringos, Haoles, etc.) and I am truly story about that--but for the record--some white kids in America were abused by other majority (in their own neighborhoods) races.

Tomasito, 2008


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New Mexico

Tanya with Mayor of Santa Fe, David Coss, Santa Fe, New Mexico 2007

A short Historical Perspective of New Mexico

The State of New Mexico was historically a part of Mexico, which in turn had been a part of New Spain a few generations ago.

The present states of Texas, Arizona and California had also been a part of this older country until the United States seized or purchased them from the neighbor to the south as a part of the young North American nation’s imperialistic expansion program.

The earliest human inhabitants of New Mexico were probably Mongolian travelers on their generations-long migrations from the steppes of Asia.

The present remnant of these folk are probably the “Indians” who still thinly populate the area, mingled, as humans always will, with sojourners from many other races and times.

By my generation, the original “Indian” inhabitants of New Mexico were practically a vanished mythic tale, though boys from the Government Indian School in Albuquerque came to dance their exotic “Hoop Dance” for we gringo Boy Scouts occasionally at our meeting place in the basement of Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church, also in Albuquerque.

The half acre “ranch” that my father was always buying in Albuquerque--making monthly payments for years and years--had a deed going back to a Spanish land grant two hundred years ago.

The Rio Grande, The “Great River”--“too thick to drink and too thin to plow”, as they say, was a highway of commerce for time out of mind.

“Mexica” traders from pre-conquest Mexico City (Tenochtitlan) had exchanged manufactured goods and feather-craft for the silver and turquoise mined in this area.

Traces of a trade route path have been found leading all the way from Mexico City (and points south) to the ancient Indian village of Taos (and perhaps points north).

In my generation, Taos is famous for the “high rise adobe apartments” of old Taos Pueblo, the thriving art colony of new Taos and the condos and good skiing at very new Taos Ski Valley.

Today Wealthy Americans from the east who retire to New Mexico to enjoy its novel cultural ambiance and its healthy climate own the high priced homes near Taos.

Some Taos land is still owned by “Mexican-Americans” who can trace their genealogy back to the conquistadors and the Taos Indian Tribe owns the largest tract of land communally.

Land “ownership”, in New Mexico as elsewhere, has always been a function of racial features (such as skin color and so forth) and cultural characteristics (language, political system, etc.), with the temporarily strongest or most numerous race owning the land and ruling the rest of the humans. This program has not changed. The dominant race presently appears to be the “white European race” and the land ownership is changing to reflect this reality.

Tomasito, 2008

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The Most Beautiful Place

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

My mother, Lorene (Clayton) Wold, who had traveled widely in her life, left her body in a little adobe casita in Taos, New Mexico just a few miles from the old village of Las Vegas, New Mexico where she had lived as a child. She was born not so far away in Artesia, New Mexico.

A week before her spirit left the body, I drove her north out of Taos to our favorite roadside Mexican food stand where we bought our preferred picnic lunch: chili beans and tacos “to go”. Than I drove off the main highway down the little road that follows the stream flowing out of Taos Ski Valley toward the gorge through which the Rio Grande flows in that part of it’s journey to the Gulf of Mexico.

Mom always loved to be riding but that day, for the first time, was too weak to look at the passing scenery with her usual alert interest.

I parked at a wide spot in the road just where the Taos Ski Valley stream descends into the Rio Grande Gorge,. We got out and I threw down a blanket beside the stream where we could sit to eat our lunch. After the meal, Mom rested on the blanket while I explored the stream bank. The little stream was running clear and cold from snow melt in the mountains. On the other side of the road from the stream was a small irrigation ditch. Wild cress waved in its transparent water. Dilapidated barbwire fences bordered the dry alfalfa fields on both sides of the road– fields that would be bright green in the summer but which were brown and dead now. Westward, toward the Rio Grande gorge, an outcropping of black basalt formed a typical low mesa decorated at the top with a couple of adobe shacks. Eastward, in the distance, loomed the pale blue Taos Mountains.

Returning from my walk, I watched beside my sleeping mother for a while. The gentle wind stirred her short gray hair. After a few minutes she sat up, looked around and said, “This is the most beautiful place on earth.”

A few days later, I scattered her ashes there.

Tomasito, 2008

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Mom's Christmas Deer

Mom's Christmas Deer

When Mom was eighty-four, she and the family cat and I traveled together from her nice hillside house near Ventura, California to Taos, New Mexico where we rented an adobe casita for the winter.

Taos is an old village near the Rio Grande River Gorge on the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Mom had been born about 70 miles away in Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the sunrise side of the same mountains.

I landed a winter job at Taos Ski Valley. I like working at ski lifts ‘cause you get paid and you get to ski free.

Mom dearly loved New Mexico. She had worked in the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce at the time the State had been officially named: “The Land of Enchantment”, and she had put the state’s sun symbol (Zia) in red tiles on her garden goldfish pond on “Laughing Mountain” near Ventura.

Mom loved the outdoor life. She loved a campfire and roughing it. I think she was a good mother for my two brothers and myself because she really did like to do “boy” things--not organized sport so much as just “outdoor” things--which was natural for her since my grandfather had been a real cowboy when he was young and he had loved to hunt and fish and camp out. And she thought her father was wonderful.

Grandpa was not only a hunter, but he liked to draw and paint a little too. I remember a painting he did of a buck deer that I liked as a boy. He had made the picture in blue; silver and black house paint and hung it on the outside of his house trailer in Sunland California so we always saw it when we visited he and Grandma.

Mom had had several small strokes and was getting very frail, but she still had a lot of spunk. We had towed her almost-new white Toyota behind my very old Ford camper to Taos and we would drive in one or the other of the vehicles up into the mountains almost every day--usually taking her car since the gas mileage was so much better--but sometimes using my camper so we could cook a meal “in the wild”.

Christmas was coming and we thought it would be good fun to go up into the Kit Carson National Forest and find our own Christmas tree like we had done when I was a kid, so we got a five-dollar Forest Service “cutting permit” and one bright, sunny afternoon, drove up into the mountains. About ten miles out of town I parked the car and we went through a barbed wire fence into a stand of trees. We soon found a perfect one-about five feet high and with a nice shape-growing out of a little snow bank. I cut it with the saw I had brought and in high spirits we walked back to the car.

I started the engine and Mom said: “Wait a minute--there’s a deer!”

I looked back over my shoulder and, sure enough, there was a magnificent buck with a big rack watching us from the forest side of the wire fence. I hadn’t seen a deer like that for a long time and neither had she. The deer took a good, long look at us and then slowly began to move away, picking up speed and finally gracefully bounding up a steep hillside and into the trees.

When I put the tree up in our cozy little living room and we had decorated it with lights it was just splendid. “And just to think,” Mom said, “our tree and that deer lived right together in the forest.”

Tomasito, 2008

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Halloween Story

I Become the Return of Christ

A Halloween Story

A few years ago I was living in a tiny mountain town in Northern California. I was working as a laborer sometimes but had plenty of time on my hands for walking in the forest and other pleasures.

There was a little general store in this town with a bar and three tables where you could eat pancakes and bacon and eggs in the mornings and chili and hamburgers the rest of the day. You could buy beer at the bar and watch football on TV with the rest of the townsfolk in the evenings.

The owner of the store was also the bartender and he was a friend of mine. I did occasional work for him like painting and repairing the cottages he rented out to weekenders.

This was high in the Sierra Nevada’s where winter comes early and stays late.

I kept time by being aware of sunrise and sunset and the change of the seasons but otherwise I had only the haziest idea of such details as the days of the week or the coming and going of holidays. A good life and I recommend it to everyone for a while.

It was getting on into winter when I stopped by the store one morning.

“Tom”, the store man said, “We’re having a Halloween party here the Saturday before Halloween and you’re invited. One free beer if you wear a costume.”

He had a couple of little kids and there wouldn’t be anything “Halloweeny” for them in the almost empty village (all the summer people had gone and the skiers hadn’t come yet) if he didn’t have a party.

I told him I’d be glad to come and thought about a costume.

I had a gray wool blanket I’d cut a hole in to make it a “poncho” and I thought with a “crown” of evergreen branches and a tallish walking stick I could go as “a druid” since I already had long hair and a full beard. Good idea.

A couple of days later I asked one of the neighbors what day it was since I didn’t want to miss the party and he said “It’s Saturday.”

So I went into the forest and got some branches and made a crown and I was ready for the party.

I thought it would start about dark since the little kids couldn’t stay up very late, so just as it was getting dark I started for the store. It was dusting snow so I wore my snowmobile boots but other than that I thought I made a pretty convincing druid!

The narrow country lane between the huge pines was already dark, but the new snow made it easy to follow.

As I approached the store an automobile pulled out onto the pavement and moved slowly toward me. The road was so narrow, I walked as far on the shoulder as I could get—even so the car would have to pass very near me.

The car got closer and moved slower and slower until it almost stopped. Then, skidding a little, it sped up rapidly, passed me and vanished around the curve in the trees. “Crazy driver!” I thought, and went on to the store. First thing I noticed when I walked in was that there was nobody else there.

The little girl of the family started yelling that she wanted to put her costume on too!

And she went upstairs where the family lived to do it.

“I suppose you want a free beer.” The owner said.

“Sure”, I answered, “I’m in costume.”

“Yeah, you are”, he agreed, “But the party ain’t ‘til next Saturday!”

So I felt foolish (a little) but drank the free beer and played a while with the kids. The little girl was dressed as “a ballerina”, and very cute ballerina too. Her little brother was “a bear” in his pajamas and a mask.

The next day I was walking past the store and the owner was out in front getting firewood.

“Tom”, he says, “Thanks to you I’ve lost one of my best out-of-town customers.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Well this guy always came up from the valley to have a few beers here in the quiet,” he says,” but he just phoned that he saw Jesus Christ on the road near here and that was a sign to him that he should stop drinking and fooling around—he says he won’t come up any more!”

Tomasito, 2008

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Greek Word

The Greek's Word For It

The other evening I discovered that the price of having a tooth pulled by a dentist in Sacramento is now $2,000, this amount is nearly my entire salary for about four weeks of hard work.

That information reminded me of a conversation I had a few years ago when I was in Thessalonica, Greece, staying in the apartment of my friend Kalogiros.

Kalogiros asked me if we had a special word in English for a person who had the training and the means to help a sick person but would not do so unless he was very well paid.

I thought of all the words I could to describe such a villain but finally told him I didn’t think one such precise word existed in the English language.

“In Greek we have such a word.” he said, “‘Doctor’”.

Tomasito, 2008
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