We’ve just returned from a trip to New Mexico.
As recounted elsewhere (Of Money, Marriage, Dogs and the Nahanni Valley), my parents first met while attending classes at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. This was not long after the Second World War, in 1947-48 or so.
My father probably arrived direct from Michigan, where our family on his side were mainly farmers, except in the case of my grandfather, who for a time was the owner of a furniture factory. There’s still a hamlet in Michigan, Bristol Corners, named after those who lived and died there for a few generations.
Dad had returned home after savage fighting as a Marine in the Pacific against the Japanese. Before the war, he had painted sensitive oils and hunted with a passion. After the war, damaged in some ways, I think he returned seeking the most peaceful thing he knew, and tried to study art at the University of New Mexico.
My mother was there from her home in Illinois, the daughter of an executive who spent the war in Washington, D.C. as a “dollar a year” man, and of a housewife and church organist. Political science was her major as befitted an opinionated and socially conscious young woman.
My parents met, and decided they wanted to raise a family rather than wait to complete any degrees. They married and departed New Mexico, poor as winter, drifting first to San Francisco and then eventually to the Pacific Northwest.
But their photos from that time, and the few items of the southwest we had about us as I grew up — a colorful patterned cloth, a rough Navajo rug, the Hopi prints they gave my grandmother — always seemed to me to be of exotic and adventurous origin.
The few black and white photos especially, the stark shadows and brilliant light on adobe walls graced by noir characters in wide-brimmed hats, have always lurked in my memory.
So when casting about for a new place to have a vacation, the thought of New Mexico, and making it a kind of casual pilgrimage to where my parents once found themselves together, made sense to me. Both my parents are long gone, my father in his forties and my mother in her early sixties. The trip in part became a way to reconnect with who they were.
I’ve briefly travelled in neighboring Arizona and did not much like it — too hot and desert desolate for me, at least where we crossed. But New Mexico, as my wife and I started our journey in Albuquerque and eventually travelled to Santa Fe and Taos, seemed to be an environment of more interest — nubby pines, occasional rock hills in subtle earthen hues with mountains in the distance, even some greenery and flowers from recent heavy rains and careful irrigation. And the skies! The big sparkling blue skies, often filled with the most amazing clouds.
We stayed at a hotel on the outskirts of Old Town in Albuquerque, and took a day to visit the University of New Mexico. I wanted to see if the university could possibly have any record of my parents.
It’s a big, modern campus: young people scurrying to classes in bright sunshine with iPods and smartphones in hand. We tried to find an administration building, and finally found an office where I was given a phone number and an email address for an assistant registrar. In a campus Starbucks, I used my wife’s iPad to introduce myself, and hoped he could check the school’s records. We didn’t hear anything back immediately, and we went on to explore Old Town for the rest of that day.
(If you ever get to Albuquerque’s Old Town and want a meal, be sure to go to the Church Street Cafe — the best southwestern food we found all trip. Nothing too fancy or trendy, just tasty and reasonably priced. Huevos rancheros!)
Eventually we ventured by rental car to Santa Fe for a couple of days, then on up to Taos and the pueblo there, and back to Santa Fe, and then Albuquerque for the flight home. We enjoyed Santa Fe a lot — there’s a surfeit of art galleries everywhere and we even ventured to narrow Canyon Road and its end-to-end galleries. Santa Fe also has an opera house out of town in the desert. One of our neighbours, an opera buff, recently attended there for a week of performances in August. It’s not a huge structure but large enough, with open sides that let the audience take in the sunsets as they watch Madame Butterfly or whatever is being performed. (I’m not an opera buff.)
And Santa Fe also has the Georgia O’Keefe museum. Its paintings reflect her passion for the New Mexico landscape, which was a coming home for her to a place she had never seen before.
Taos too had its charms, primarily the pueblo which has had people living in it for roughly 1000 years.
In Santa Fe we heard by email from the university registrar. Their electronic records only went back to 1950. They would have to search hard copies by hand. What were my parents’ birthdates? 1918 and 1927, I sent back, a little shocked since not really thinking about those dates for many years, how far back they are now surprised me. I realized that had my father lived until today, he would be 95.
We’ve returned home now and not heard more from the university, although I hope some young assistant continues to burrow diligently through their dusty records. But whatever they find, or if they don’t, is not so important.
When my father was in art school there, he seems to have been fascinated by Roman Catholic iconography. He was not a religious man at all, he had no use for organized spirituality — although I remember he always emphasized that he was agnostic rather than an atheist. But I recall, and my brothers may still have some samples, the stylized and detailed colored woodblock prints of St. Francis of Assisi and the small squared-off sculptures of St. Francis that he had done and kept for years where we lived. This is interesting to me, given my father’s necessarily cruel and violent life during the war and his pre-war affinity for hunting juxtaposed against St. Francis’s storied love of man and animals.
I too consider organized religion pernicious, although I have Buddhist and Taoist sympathies, but I made it a point to stand next to the ornate doors of the small St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe and have my photo taken by my wife. I’m sure my father and mother must have been there at some time.
I like to think my father stood where I stood, and looked out into the New Mexico sunshine.
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Notes:
Photos from top down —
1) Along the road, driving to Santa Fe.
2) The pueblo at Taos.
I will be posting photos from the trip from time to time on my photography blog, The Suspended Moment.
Quirk 
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