United States
SANTA FE, New Mexico — Woman needs a fix. Has to feed her habit. The habit is called eating — specifically NewMex.
Once a year the craving for victuals of a Southwestern nature, injections of fiery red and green chili, overcomes my friend, Aurelio, and she takes off for the so-called “Land of Enchantment” (as the state’s license plates proclaim). There she grew up among Mexican immigrants on a hardscrabble ranch, hooked on grub hotter than Mephistopheles’s sauna or an arsonist’s piece de resistance. continue reading »
August 04 2005 | United States | No Comments »
New York, NY — The ghosts of New York’s Third Avenue will stay with me.It was Black Tuesday, 12 days ago, and the ghosts were easily identified: those survivors able to walk away from the shambles of the World Trade Center – ashen apparitions, dirty-faced, smudged by debris, coated with the grime of tragedy. They were among those surging northward on clotted sidewalks, refugees marching to the unending threnody of sirens and the barking horns of fire trucks headed way downtown.
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September 23 2001 | United States | No Comments »
SANTA FE – Feverishly fluttering . . . flapping so furiously fast that focusing on it is a problem for the human eye . . . The winged wanderer pauses for an “In your face!” pose, just halts in midair, as though clinging to an invisible trapeze. Looks you square in the eye, this stop-action show-off – then is gone with its buddies.
Michael Jordan’s hang-time is small-time stuff to this creature that could use one of Michael’s toenails as a landing strip. With room to spare. continue reading »
September 10 2001 | Travel and United States | No Comments »
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – John Kierig, a cordial Chicagoan, is the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. If he had one. A shirt, I mean. His back looks fine. He would also give you his trousers, but there is no evidence that he has a pair.
There is no evidence, as he stands chatting in the handsomely landscaped courtyard at the Desert Shadows Inn, of anything on his frame except a pair of sandals – and a full suit of transparent sun block.
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March 05 2001 | United States | No Comments »
LOS ANGELES – Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird . . . it’s a plane . . . it’s supermuseum!
The old Superman intro flies again as I gaze upward at the concrete cloud that my friend, Aurelio, assures me is the young Getty Center, practically a rookie in the culture mix, merely a little over three years of age. She’s been here before and places it high on her must-not-miss list, saying, “J. Paul Getty may have been super eccentric but his money gave us a super structure. A better legacy than gas stations.”
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June 01 2000 | Travel and United States | No Comments »
Boston, MA — “Come sky with me!” could well be the lyric of David Breashears, who climbs higher than some airplanes fly.
If Breashears were a social climber, his picture would be on the cover of People and Vanity Fair. But the only thing I’d climb with him, maybe, is an escalator, or to the top row of the Museum of Science’s theater the next time I see his superbly chilling IMAX flick, “Everest.” I have to wear thermal underwear every time I watch it, fearing frostbite, in high anxiety while vicariously clambering across crevasses on shaky ladders amid shimmering, teetering glacial high-rises in the Khumbu Icefall. continue reading »
October 20 1999 | United States | No Comments »
BANDELIER, N.M. – Where goes the neighborhood?
Nobody knows exactly what happened – or why – to the folks who lived here in Frijoles Canyon, in what I like to call Beantown I because “frijoles” translates as “beans” in Spanish, and they were bean eaters. Like the people of Beantown II (a.k.a. Boston), a settlement that appeared on a shore quite far to the east about 100 years after Beantown I was abandoned.
The townsfolk, Indians called Anasazi (“ancient ones” in Navajo), have been gone for about four centuries. Just picked up and left their beautiful neighborhood, and wandered into history. continue reading »
August 10 1999 | United States | No Comments »
SANTA FE – She’s got to have it.
Hot! Hot! Hot!
My friend, Aurelio, can’t help herself. She lusts for hot, hotter, hottest chili peppers, a habit she picked up as a child and cannot shake. Not that she’d want to, as long as she can sneak into Mudville (a.k.a. Santa Fe) for an annual weeklong fix. Addiction amid the adobes.
Even though she’s lived in Boston a couple of decades or so, Aurelio is a shameless New Mexican defector. Raised on the dusty rose soil of a hardscrabble ranch in outskirting Tesuque, riding bareback and bathing in the creek, she was nurtured on home-squeezed goat’s milk and torrid chili. continue reading »
August 05 1999 | United States | No Comments »
KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. – Tricky Dick and Bebe – was that a sitcom with the laugh on us? – are gone. But that doesn’t mean the island has lost its appeal.
Of course, that depends on what appeals to you. Federal government employee Richard Nixon, the trickster, and his pal Bebe Rebozo had Key Biscayne homes, and were the darlings of many. They often communed in the presidential bunker for such vital affairs of state as cheering the televised feats of Nixon’s beloved Washington Redskins – whom he coached in his fantasy life – or adding names to his storied Enemies List. Most of those listed (such as the Globe’s storied writer, George Frazier) rejoiced in their guilt by disassociation with the trickster’s style.
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March 05 1999 | United States | No Comments »
ABIQUIU, New Mexico – Is that the Easter Bunny skittering across the sandy path through the sagebrush to the chapel? Though the furry creature, an early bird at 3:45 a.m., doesn’t pause for status identification, it is clearly illumined by a full moon to which coyotes and some insomniacal cattle croon from the other side of the lonely Chama River.
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April 05 1998 | United States | No Comments »
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