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This is what I did this week. No, I didn’t go fishing for hearts. I wrote this song. It’s still in development, since I have to put the accordion parts together. I sang it a capella on my YouTube channel:

FISHERMAN OF HEARTS
Every dusk my net is empty
Every dawn my song is worn
I’m lonely in my boat
And I’m tossed in every storm.
But every night I dream of you
And my heart grows strong again
That I can ride the crest
And cast my best
And pull up fish for men.

You are the fisher, the fisherman of hearts
You are the lover, the lover of my arts.
You map my sea, you study all my charts.
Did I catch you, or did you catch me?
Who made it start?

One afternoon I saw you
Standing on the shore
You asked me how I fared
When my net was old and torn.
But then you patched it up until
It held my hopes like bottled gin
You steered the tide
And stopped the ride
To drop my anchor in.

You are the fisher, the fisherman of hearts
You are the lover, the lover of my arts.
You map my sea, you study all my charts.
Did I catch you, or did you catch me?
Who made it start?

One night I didn’t dock my boat
but drifted in the waves
That sang out little hymns to me
Like I was kneelin’ in the nave
But then I heard you whisper in my ear
That I should cast my net again
The same old glide
On the other side,
You decide to win.

You are the fisher, the fisherman of hearts
You are the lover, the lover of my arts.
You map my sea, you study all my charts.
Did I catch you, or did you catch me?
Who made it start?

That night my net was heavy;
I could barely pull the trawl
Of teeming fishes, a weight of riches,
A market’s worthy haul.
But you whispered to me one more time
That it wouldn’t be my last.
I made for shore,
My tragic lore,
Already in the past.

You are the fisher, the fisherman of hearts
You are the lover, the lover of my arts.
You map my sea, you study all my charts.
Did I catch you me, or did you catch me?
Who made it start?

What else is happening? Not much. Next week is the most amazing Fair Week of Roswell. That means even banks will close their doors on Monday, which is Parade Day. My office will undoubtedly be very slow. All other events and classes will be closed next week, too.

I ❤️ you, Roswell.

There are a few exciting local events each year, such as the UFO Fest and the Piñata Fest. At least, Piñata Fest had good live music the last time I was there. Also, St. John’s Church has a yearly feast that carries on all weekend with great bands and food. And then there is the Chile Cheese Fest.

This weekend, I was tempted to spend most of my time reading and napping as I had the previous weekend. A call from my sister and a brisk walk in the cool sunshiny day snapped me out of it. I needed to get out and see some sights. I had missed Piñata Fest and the St. John’s feast weekend, but I spotted a flyer for the Chile Cheese Fest on Facebook (I was specifically searching for community events). I texted a friend and asked her if she wanted to go. She had never heard of it but said it sounded delicious.

Sadly, when we arrived about the dinner hour, there wasn’t much happening. We spotted three food trucks and a handful of vendors and a man with DJ equipment on the courthouse steps.

It was sparse, only a few people were drifting through, and the music was an uninspiring canned Latin mix. However, the Roswell Daily Record captured this image of someone roasting chile, so clearly exciting things had happened at some point:

Roswell is an agricultural town, and New Mexico is an agricultural state. Two of our most iconic ag products are chile and dairy. I would guess dairy is our biggest money-making agricultural product. Chaves County has more dairies than anywhere else in the state. A Chile Cheese Fest could be both appropriate for this part of the state, as well as a lot of fun if it had live country or folk music and food tasting and vendors actually selling chile and cheese products. Maybe this did happen earlier in the day or at previous festivals – I don’t have a clue.

In any case, we were soon bored of the uninspiring vendor goods and headed to Martin’s Capitol Cafe for dinner, which is a block away from the courthouse.

Martin’s has been in Roswell a long time. One of our local hang-out restaurants, Pepper’s, closed in the last year, leaving us with a handful of these types of places left. I’m familiar with Martin’s mostly because we used to have them cater at the church for events, and sometimes families hire them for funeral receptions. The family who owns it are parishioners.

Keeping with the theme of chile, I ordered the asado. I often use asado as a guage for a restaurant’s quality. It’s easy to get it wrong. You can’t just take diced pork and throw some chile on it. It has to be marinated in the chile and then simmered in it. Martin’s got it right! It was really good. The sauce might have been slightly salty for my taste, but the chile was just a little spicy and smokey, and the pork was perfectly cooked. I was surprised. I had only eaten their enchiladas and hadn’t ventured beyond that New Mexican staple. Also, the staff were amazing and friendly. I’m going to go there more often, I think.

I called this post Diluvian Roswell because I wondered if people backed out of the Chile Cheese Fest because we had been under a flash flood watch and were still under a river flood watch (if the Pecos rises above flood level, it will head right towards Roswel). It stopped raining over the weekend – but the locals are traumatized from the 2024 flood that changed the landscape of the town and destroyed hundreds of homes. We are headed for more rain this coming week, which has people on edge.

It’s been a quiet weekend for me, the kind I long for when I peer into a future with a busy calendar. I imagine in my head what it might feel like to lie on the couch and read all weekend, knowing the near impossibility of the scenario, especially if it includes a backdrop of rain. Yes, I grew up in the Pacific NW. Reading was how I coped with being cooped up inside.

The miraculous happened! No, not rain – thunder and lightning with a few heavy drops, maybe, but not the drizzly stuff of my childhood. I spent the weekend reading! Sure, I went to Mass and took a walk to the grocery store, but mostly I read all weekend. I had a do-not-disturb sign stuck to my forehead – figuratively. I read one entire book and have now gotten through nearly thirty chapters of a second one. The first was a comedic ghost story murder mystery (the genre I write; yes, it actually is a genre!), and the other is a London-based Victorian murder mystery with no ghosts. At least, none are mentioned. Victorian-era London had to have been riddled with the ghosts of poor little orphans who died in gutters, not to mention the poor women who died at the hands of Jack the Ripper.

The above image of my mess attests to a quiet shut-in weekend, in which I managed a little creativity, too. I’m currently writing an awful song with strings of rima asonancia. When I try to sing my scrawls, I despair and wonder if the brain has to be wired differently to write song lyrics that are catchy rather than trying too hard to be evocative. The first two lines are passable: Iba a pescar de noche / en mi barquito de reproche. Then it all falls apart. I love songs about fishing, so it’s meant to have a theme about nets coming up empty until the POV character in the song sees someone standing on shore. Yes, the theme is stolen from John 21, except like any Christianesque pop song, it’s meant to be ambiguous – is it a love song or a praise song? The Puritanical types hate that kind of ambiguity because they don’t really comprehend the human soul and how imagery and parables function in it. They just want some good exegesis. I guess my wiring could be worse.

I bought this when I walked to the grocery store, but I buy alcohol so infrequently that I forgot that I no longer own a corkscrew. I tried to pull the cork out with a screwdriver, and instead forced it in, and the wine splashed everywhere. I do mean everywhere, all over the walls and in my eyes. In addition to tempranillo with the essence of cherry and notes of peppery cork, I’ve made myself a few comfort meals like lentils, homemade flatbread, and bacon, and settled in as if for a week. Or two. Too bad I have to go back to work just when the Victorian cozy is getting exciting.

For a minute, I forgot why I titled this as an essential question between hope and despair. The truth is I tend towards despair when I’m not following my usual routine of work, work, more work, and other activities on the to-do list. That’s what it means to be an adult, right? Being lazy isn’t on the list. And yet…I write books for entertainment. I write books because I love to read. The fact that I can get away with wasting hours reading over the weekend and not have my life collapse around me gives me hope. If I can get away with it, so can others.

More than that, if I can still get lost in the joy of reading, so can others. Thirty years ago, being a bookworm was a little weird, but there were many of us weirdos out there. These days, it seems like those weirdos are becoming a smaller and smaller group of outliers. Nobody reads because they don’t have the attention span. They watch or listen to content all day in the background, their noses pressed to their phones. What are they looking at? Who knows, but its most likely not their kindle app. I’m sadly not an outlier in that regard, being addicted to listening to YouTube content. This lazy weekend proves that social media has not entirely damaged my ability to focus for hours on long-form prose.

**I’m not going to lie. I read at least a little every night before bed, so I didn’t approach this marathon with no prior training. Please consult your physician before you, too, attempt to use screwdrivers and whatever else you need to make it through.**

I’m calling this Road Trip America for two reaaons: 1. I rarely leave New Mexico and 2. I made an unlikely state jump, traveling from Denver, CO to Paris, AR. I missed my children who had grown up and moved to these exotic climes, and I was too impatient to visit one this year and the other the next So, I packed up my car, and I drove. Admittedly, I loved the long drives. I had audiobooks and my favorite music to keep me company and no one to complain if I listened to norteño or banda for eight solid hours.

Nevertheless, the drive from Denver to Arkansas was not easy. As soon as I left Denver, the temps soared, reaching the triple digits in Kansas and remaining there as I made my way into Arkansas. Have you ever experienced triple digits with high humidity? The highest we seem to get in Roswell – unless it’s storming – is forty percent. The heat went from a wall of dryness in Kansas to walking into a steam bath in the wilds of Arkansas. Thankfully, in these blessed days, we have air-conditioning. Earlier today, I listened to a podcast of a woman discussing the health problems modern man is afflicted with because we no longer live out of doors with nature. Well, I know one medical problem I’m avoiding through remaining indoors: heat exhaustion.

The countryside appeared to be having heat exhaustion, though, with fields drying in the sun and covered in hay bales to the horizon. This heat wave will not break, and it isn’t great for farmers. It brings new meaning to this Divine Mercy message I spotted along the interstate in Kansas:

On an entirely different tangent, one architectural feature I adore when leaving New Mexico is the traditional red barns that dot the landscape. They aren’t common in my home state for the simple fact that farmers originally used iron oxide mixed with linseed oil to protect the wood frames of their barns from rot and decay. The red color came from the iron oxide. Because New Mexico traditionally didn’t use wood frames for their barn walls, they likewise didn’t typically use iron oxide to protect them. Whenever I leave the state, the red buildings rising up from the rolling hills bring a simple joy to my heart.

Rolling hills, red barns, bales of hay. And heat. It was a long drive across the prairie, made longer because the GPS kept re-routing me to avoid toll roads. When you live in the western half of the country, you can live in ignorance of such taxation. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might have to pay to drive down a road in my very own nation. I had heard of them, of course, but it was a bizarre idea that I imagined only foreign cities like Chicago might consider entrapping innocent citizens with.*

*California does have some tollways, but we already know all about that state. Colorado also has bizarre express lanes that allow you to pay for a higher speed limit. Or something like that. I’ve never driven in one and don’t know the rules. However, I’ve watched vehicles zip along in them and disappear completely within seconds, clearly moving at very high speeds.

Near the end of my long haul to Arkansas, I managed to get stuck in a traffic jam caused by a rollover semitruck accident, which meant I arrived at my final destination after midnight. But I made it with the help – in the last few hours – of an audiobook, and that’s what matters. There’s nothing like listening to stories of the quaintness of murder to make you question your life choices. Eg, why am I not a detective who trips over bodies in the English countryside? Why am I a Catholic secretary with a priest for a boss instead of an Anglican receptionist who makes tea for the kind but boring vicar? These are good questions to reflect on, especially since the murder mysteries I write involve the enchanted Southwest and waayyy too much excitement at the Catholic church. And coffee. Always coffee. Maybe some tequila or whisky for good fun.*

*Caveat: my actual real-life priest is a tea drinker, though I’ve never made him tea. He drinks it at the rectory before coming to the office.

Now I’m at the spot in my post where I should give a travel advert for Arkansas. Honestly, Arkansas sells itself. It’s beautiful and lush and has big rivers and lakes. Remember, I’m from New Mexico. My idea of a grand river is the Pecos because you can manage boats on it. I’ve even been on a boat in the Pecos at the 4th of July celebration in Carlsbad. By comparison, Arkansas is a wooded fairy land. I don’t know if fairies actually live there due to the uncountable Christian churches full of people who don’t believe in fairies – and a surprising number of Catholic churches in a state that boasts 10,000 different Baptist denominations you probably didn’t know existed. During last year’s vacation, we did a Catholic church tour in Arkansas. As it turns out, German farmers settled there and brought vineyards and their Catholic faith. My eldest daughter enjoyed the church tours purely from an art aesthetic – free art galleries!

This year’s ended up being an art tour in museums – mostly. She (eldest daughter) had her Tesla drive us to the Crystal Bridges art complex in Bentonville. I tried to pretend the Tesla was KITT, but its AI was unconvincing.

Crystal Brisges is a free museum experience brought to you by Walmart. Bentonville happens to be the birthplace of Walmart. The museum contains numerous galleries, a nature art walk, and a Frank Lloyd Wright house you can tour. It is worth spending hours there for the architecture of the buildings, let alone the works inside. I was completely overwhelmed by the size, just as I was at the Denver art museum. In neither case did we make it all the way through. What I’m left with is the image of one of my favorite paintings from when I was young:

I’m not sure why I appreciated this particular painting. Now, I would consider it drab.

We left the art complex because we were both faint from hunger, thinking we would eat lunch and return. Instead, we ate lunch and decided to charge the Tesla in a hip downtown area. The Tesla drove us there, its AI brain sure there were chargers. There were not. In defeat, we went to a local café called the Onyx Coffee Lab, where we purchased overly sweet but unusual coffee drinks and sat down in the hipster-shaped chairs provided for café loungers.

That was when we met an artist called Spyridon, named after St. Spyridon. He told me he liked the medal I was wearing – it was Our Lady of Guadalupe. He said he had painted her once. He had been playing some type of card game in the chair opposite to us; I wasn’t paying attention. Now I looked: the game cards and pieces appeared to have iconography on them. Upside down, I confused St. Spyridon (the icon) for St. Patrick. He then told me about this game that he had created, using years’ worth of his artwork.

I was a little stunned: after a day spent at an art gallery, I had met a living artist in a café, who was there babysitting a little service dog until his wife and sister returned. I asked him if he had trained as an iconographer, and he said that he had, in multiple countries around the world. I took a photo of the QR code for his game website:

The purpose of the game is to help tortured souls reach the light by climbing white ladders. This was sounding peculiarly like my first published book, Anna and the Dragon. He showed me how to play an easy version of the game, and the afternoon still feels surreal to me. The artist and his family were visiting Bentonville, too, and I wouldn’t have met them at all if we had chosen to return to the museum. He told us about an indie arthouse film one of his paintings had been featured in – my daughter and I watched it on Prime later that night. It is gritty and black and white, but well worth it to see his painting and the story the film tells about it. It’s called El Tonto Por Cristo.

The film is peculiarly Orthodox, I believe, with an Orthodox trope known as a fool for Christ (like the name of the film). I appreciated its simplicity and the small ways the main character becomes a “fool” to help those around him. I didn’t appreciate the black and white and wondered at the artistic choice. In color, it  would have been visually stunning, as it was set on the Texas coastline and featured an Orthodox church and artwork.

The vacation now over, what ultimately left an impression on me was the time I spent with my daughters. They are more beautiful than paintings or sculpture, and I miss them very much already.

FIN

The first leg of my Road Trip America was a drive from Roswell to Denver, via Las Vegas and Raton, NM. I was heralded along the way by wild sunflowers because it’s exactly the season to find them along highways and freeways in New Mexico and Colorado. They are like bright eyes or little bursts of sun when the temps should be calming down. In New Mexico, they haven’t. Denver, however, brought the blessed relief of rain and heat in the 80s rather than 100s.

The reason for choosing Denver was simple: one of my daughters lives there. She lives in a tiny apartment in a neighborhood near downtown, in walking distance of many beautiful places, such as where I attended Sunday Mass:

It’s also within walking distance of numerous cafes, the public library, and the art museum.

The art museum is not only a crazy geometric building, which is itself worth exploring, but also surprised me with its collections. In the contemporary collection, you will find intriguing works by people I was unfamiliar with, such as the abstract bull below…

…as well as well-known masters like Picasso, Goya, and Georgia O’Keefe.

On the top floor of that wing of the building, there is an eclectic blend of African art (from multiple nations), geometric art, and portraits, such as this one:

Unfortunately, the image above does not do justice to the luminosity of the actual painting, not to mention the expression in the woman’s eyes.

Eventually, we meandered into the European art section, where we discovered my favorite kind of paintings: striking, realistic renditions of boats and coastlines (I’m partial to artwork with classic trucks, boats, ships, and trains.) I also love grand sweeping landscapes, especially if they involve distant ruins of castles or Greek temples, or conversely, storms at sea. I am attracted to drama.

I’m not as partial to impressionist paintings, but in person, the museum’s collection of master artists that include but are not limited to Monet, Degas, Renoir, Manet, and VanGogh, was awe-inspiring.

On another day, we visited the natural history museum, where we discovered more art on display, but of dioramas of North American wildlife scenes. What I loved the most was a section in the prehistoric display on extinct dragonflies. Apparently, dragonflies used to be giant! An artist’s depiction:

Near the end of my stay, I realized I needed a souvenir. My daughter took me downtown to the I ❤️ Denver store, where I then had to choose between an iconic shirt with a marijuana leaf (everyone seems high in Denver), a book about local ghosts, and a mug that states, Not today, Blucifer. I chose the latter, and I’m about to explain why.

This is the real Blucifer:

Luis Jiménez is a sculptor local to me in New Mexico. He sculpted the famous dancers at UNM (my alma mater):

He also has numerous works in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell and has or had a studio in Hondo, which is down the highway from Roswell. I say had because he was famously killed by one of his statues. However, I had no idea that it was a piece from the giant blue horse he was sculpting for the Denver Airport that killed him. In fact, his family had to finish the sculpture because he was unable to. That is why Denver locals call the horse Blucifer. For obvious reasons, they view it as cursed. The light shining from his eyes should be enough. In fairness, the eyes are a nod to the artist’s origins of having grown up in his father’s neon sign studio.

While I admit that joking about a man’s death is not generally appropriate, this is more than a joke. It is part of local legend. And the artist is part of my New Mexico experience: from Albuquerque to Roswell to every trip I make from Roswell to Socorro when I pass by his old studio. For that reason, I chose the mug. It felt like a weird tie to a high city, apart from my daughter.

Her boyfriend happens to be a potter – which is a type of sculptor – from Roswell, now living and working in a local art studio in Denver. Before I left the city toward my next stop on Road Trip America, I told him, “Let this be a lesson to you.” I don’t know what kind of lesson it is. I guess only time will tell.

Do you remember summer when you were a child, and time seemed limitless? Each morning was an opportunity to complete a checklist a mile long of fun and adventure. Sometimes, that adventure turned into reading a stack of books you just borrowed from the library.

That’s exactly the kind of adventure I desire at this time in my life – I want to revert back to a world in which I had the luxury to lounge around reading all day and let the to-do list slide. When you haven’t reached the old age of eighteen yet, it’s easy to tell yourself you can finish your mental list later. I’m sure I wasn’t the only child who made lists. Lists were just as reassuring then as they are now.

• Construct a theme park with cardboard, tape and brads
• Write the first chapter of fairy book
• Organize detective agency files with hand-drawn images of the neighbors
• search for clues in the mysterious world of the garage
• Search the streets for pop cans that you can exchange for money
• Ride bike to store, exchange pop cans, buy candy cigarettes so you can be a detective who smokes
• Read the new informational book on the lyfe of pyrates
• Read your favorite Phyllis A Whitney book for the 100th time

The rest you would get around to eventually.

When you visited yout grandparents in Palm Desert, lists were often turned into pages of doodles during the day because it was too hot to go outside, like 120-degree hot, where the heat hits you like a brick wall. Sometimes, you would hit the jackpot and somebody would drive you and your sister and cousins into town to go swimming or to the air-conditioned mall…where you would buy magazines and books.

And consequently, you spent the rest of your days reading inside the coolness of the cinder block house or fighting with your cousins because they cheated at the board games. That cinder block house was tiny, too small to house a crowd of restless children.

At night, wandering around the desert became the real adventure. The indigo blue sky was filled with stars because you were just far enough outside the city. The desert became its own city, with villages created in stones.

***

No, I don’t really want to be a child again, except for the luxury of reading all day instead of wondering how to market my books and how I’m going to finish the next one while juggling everything else.

I’d also love to see my grandparents again. My grandma loved to have fun. That was one of her main drives in the world. Sure, she worked hard on do-it-yourself projects until she died, but she made time for fun.

Maybe childhood isn’t the amswer. Maybe it’s a personality adjustment that’s needed.