In Circulation

Dispatches from the High Desert, #13

Maybe ken is warming up to Santa Fe :-) It’s a place where everybody knows his name. Maybe it’s beginning to feel a little like home.

Photo credit: ken anderson—his favorite pizza from Franks is a sausage pizza. The crust is special because it is made with a fermentation process that involves malt.

We went back to see family. Anne’s sister in St. Louis, my brother up in Alpha, Illinois. I grew up a little north of there, in Coal Valley, which is the kind of place you can drive through without deciding to.

I went to Frank’s in Silvis, the pizza I’ve been measuring all others against for forty years. It held up. The others I didn’t get to. Adolph’s Tacos. The Maid-Rite. Hungry Hobo. Whitey’s, where I worked summers and learned to flip a milkshake upside down so nothing comes out, a skill with a narrow application that I have nonetheless never lost. I meant to go to all of them. I went to one.

Food has always been how places stay with me. I can reconstruct most of my life by what I ate and where. It meant something, probably, that I drove past most of it. I didn’t go by the old house. I didn’t go down to sit by the Rock or the Mississippi rivers, which is the thing you’re supposed to do, the thing I have always done. I saw my brother and his family. One other person there still knows me. I didn’t look for the rest.

I was comfortable the entire time. Nothing felt wrong. Nothing asked anything of me either.

Mostly I was undone by the green. I had forgotten the sheer volume of it. I mowed lawns for years as a kid. Some part of my nervous system still flinches at that much unmown acreage, all of it growing, all of it implying a Saturday work day. The sky is something you get in pieces, between branches. The trees lean over the roads like they’re trying to close them. People talk about it. I just kept noticing how little of it there was.

I knew that street. The street did not know me back.

We drove back to Santa Fe. The green thinned out, then quit altogether somewhere in the Texas panhandle, and the sky came back all at once, the way it does.

Our kitchen was mid-remodel, so we’ve been eating out more than usual, which is how I ended up with a week that I keep thinking over.

First night back, the place we like had a two-hour wait, so we walked to the other place, the one people seem to drift into without planning ahead. The owner was at the bar where you come in. He greeted me by way of starting a conversation already in progress, told me about the new spot they’d bought and what he was going to do with it, made our margaritas while he talked.

Walking home, one of the few people who actually lives on our street stopped us. We talked about nothing for a while, the good kind of nothing, and then she pointed up at the elms and told me where they came from. The city handed them out as saplings maybe twenty years ago, gave them to the grade-schoolers and told them to go plant them at home. The kids clearly did. The whole street is them. They were supposed to be the great shade elms; they turned out to be Siberian, which is not what anyone ordered. Messy, weedy, fast. They do unreasonably well here. I’ve started to take it personally.

Tuesday, Anne played the bluegrass jam at a place across town. I was watching. Some tourists stopped at my table and wanted to know about the band. I explained that it isn’t a band, it’s a jam, and what that means, and that it’s been happening in this city for about twenty years. I heard myself doing it. The explaining.

When I’d come up to the bar earlier, the bartender started toward the tap for my Lone Butte beer before I’d said anything, then read something in my face and went for the Engine gin instead—not the house gin, not the top shelf, the one I actually order. A gin night. I hadn’t known I had gin nights.

While she poured it I asked about the penguin by the front door, a three-foot statue that has no business in a New Mexico restaurant. She said it had outlasted two owners. Nobody knows where it came from or why it’s there. A king penguin, she decided. It isn’t hurting anyone, and she thinks people are afraid to move it.

It kept going like that, all week. At the food trucks near the house, our contractors were eating at the next truck over and shouted hello and some friendly grief about the kitchen. The man at the meat counter of the corner store asked if I’d been out of town, because I hadn’t come in for my usual sausages. One afternoon the mail carrier called out to say that he hadn’t seen me lately and that the flowers out front maybe were not getting enough water.

At the Chinese dumpling place, we got the welcome-back from the grandfather working the floor. The grandmother was cooking somewhere behind the kitchen curtains. After we ordered and the fried dumplings came out, the granddaughter walked in the door. We’d seen her there before, usually at a table near the kitchen doing homework. This time she went to the storage shelves in back, pulled a can of Pringles from a box they don’t sell, and crossed the room to sit with us. There were empty tables. There were other people. I have no idea why she picked us. The grandfather looked a little unsure about it; we waved him off. She sat and immediately started talking. She told us she was in second grade, that she was coming home from gymnastics, and which Pringles flavors belong to which colors, a taxonomy she held with conviction. Then she announced she was hungry, returned the Pringles to their box, and informed us she was getting a cucumber salad. We had to leave before it arrived.

There were three of us at the table. She made four.