pay it forward

Our post office, for reasons I can’t explain, is as busy or busier than most large metro area postal centers - but they don’t have the staff to compensate, and so invariably there’s a long wait any time we need to mail a package, get a package or something else we’d need a clerk for. The wait can range anywhere from 5 minutes on a really good day to 40 minutes or more during the holidays.

They’ve got a pull-number system, and today I pulled #54. I look up.

Currently serving: #40

Eh, I figured I’d be there about 20-25 minutes. I was starving, it was closing in on 2pm and we had yet to get any lunch. I was frustrated because we’re exceptionally tight on finances until mid-March, and every cent we have or make between now and then is going toward closing the land deal in less than 10 days. I needed to get back to the office and catch up from four days of mail and messages piling up while I was gone. (you get the idea)

But then a lady who’d been up at the counter came toward me, and did the most incredible thing. She said… “here”. And handed me her #50 ticket.

Apparently she lucked out and got what she needed from the forms on the counter, and didn’t need to wait until her number was called. It was only 4 spots, but 4 spots could mean 8 or 10 minutes. I smiled and said thank you.

I looked at my #54 ticket, then looked around the waiting area. The lady behind me had #56. I handed her my ticket. She brightened up and said “thank you!”

Then she looked around, found somebody with #59 and gave him her #56 ticket. He turned around and gave his to someone with #62, who in turn gave their #62 to someone with a #65. And so on. And so on. And pretty soon the crowd of 20 or so people in the waiting area, who had otherwise been standing very still and silent with their crappy tickets, were now smiling and talking and laughing with one another.

All because one thoughtful person chose to quietly pass on a tiny thread of good fortune. Which then snowballed into a chain reaction that, within less than two minutes, had brightened the afternoons of more than 20 people in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Posted by tee in de la vida, favorites
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January 24, 2005

compensation for a camera out of reach

As luck would have it, I’ve got a window seat in an aisle where carry-on luggage has to be stowed up top and not under my feet, so here I sit with views, and can’t reach my camera.

I shall compensate:

I’m at 28,000 feet above the earth, somewhere over western New Mexico. Originally clear and cloudless, the sky has now turned partly cloudy underneath me, and bands of rain fall like silver columns at various points on the distant horizon. I make a mental note, which I will later forget, to call Shane when I land and say they’ve got weather coming their way.

We pass mountain after mountain - from here the size of so many anthills in a backyard. We drift over top thunderheads and cotton balls and long, thin cloud bands like the tails of exclamation points. Between breaks in the white, there are wrinkles and ridge lines and dirt roads snaking through canyons. I see nothing but brown. My beautiful, rich sandy and chocolatey brown. Dimpled and freckled in places. Flat like old dusty mirrors in others. Alluvial fans rolling upward, or downward, depending on your point of view. Every once in awhile a bright green or blue splotch on all that brown appears. The desert turns water into rare magic.

Some turbulence and my pen slips off the tiny notepad I’m using to record this, and marks up the cover of my new book. The man sitting next to me, a construction manager from Las Cruces, grins and says “oops”. I shrug, and we talk about traveling and building and architecture.

I nurse my ice water and notice (I love window seats) the ground quickly sprouting clumps of evergreen, then whole forests, below us. We must be over Flagstaff, there being no other geographic possibility along this part of our route.

We shift, and pitch south.

Posted by tee in favorites, sense of place
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January 15, 2005

a walk among mailboxes

I walked out this morning under Venus and Mars hanging out together just barely above the eastern horizon. It was cold; I wrapped in a black jacket and a wool scarf and set out before sunrise because weird things happen in the desert in the morning.

A curious pair of ravens drop by to investigate me, squawking as if discussing my possibilities. Low; I can hear the cut of their wings through the cold air. I’m not dead yet, I tell them. But they continue their planning unfazed, flying off to the edge of my field of vision and then reappearing later overhead, circling and chattering amongst themselves.

The cottontails are out. Every bush or driveway or mailbox births a bunny shooting out from behind as I pass. One jumps high enough to clear a small Chamisa and startle me, landing casually in the road a few feet ahead like he thought nothing of it, or that I should be impressed.

Jackrabbits meet up and go off together in pairs to whatever place it is that jackrabbits go, and I accidentally disturb a den of quails with the dirt crunching under my feet - the desert is otherwise silent, you know, and even wandering footsteps are cause for alarm. They cackle and gurgle in the juniper bush, then, not sure what else to do, all dart out at once in all directions in front of me and I have to stop short to avoid tripping over them.

It’s cold, I tie the scarf tight so that it stays over my mouth and nose without slipping. I’d like to say the walk was brisk and vigorous enough to warm me up, but bring the camera means I never move fast enough for any rise in body temperature.

The ravens, either distracted or discouraged by my lack of fresh wounds, have ventured far off into the distance, tumbling and diving in the last of the pink sunrise. But as I turn toward home one of them has come to have a last look, resting itself, fat and teetering, on a single, tiny branch of piñon in the driveway. The click of the lens cap coming off sends it off in a huff toward the Sangre de Cristos as a last cottontail tears around the corner when I stomp my hiking boots by the front door.

I was hoping for coyotes.

Posted by tee in favorites, sense of place
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January 15, 2005

the hands at eleven thirty-nine

When I roll over and inhale the stuffy left side of my nose
blends with the tune of the flute
for a second and I can’t differentiate.
With the tiny alien yellow-green “on” light
covered up by the sweatshirt behind my pillow I get
my eyes closed, and for a moment I lose consciousness, but
quickly the violin pulls me back. We play this game.
A stray crumb of banana bread under my earlobe
from the clump he brought in earlier, warm between his fingers,
to taste while I was reading again about Colorado.
I don’t move it.
Where would I put it?
We exchange yawns with our touching knees and elbows,
then shift positions, because I still sleep
better with the exhale falling on
the back of my shoulders.

Posted by tee in verse
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January 14, 2005

the sun just barely

A large congregation of tiny bluebirds has descended to bathe in the puddles on my gravel driveway. There are so many that, from the corner of my eye from where I sit by the dining room window, it looks like explosive puffs of blue confetti every few minutes as they play tag in teams.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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January 11, 2005

Temporary Meaning

“Things sit around, decompose, get thrown out.
This is what I think of the broken hoe
and a blackened orange while neighbor’s hammer
and grackles drop and stab into the watered lawn.
Now, at this moment, the universe clicks into place,
admits quite openly that all is pointless and gives
temporary meaning to several philosophies.
At what point I wonder, will it dawn on everyone?
Should I run to the fence and ask, “Have you gotten it yet?”
Instead, I yell: “Your repairs are useless!”
The mindless hammering stops and it occurs to me
that I am the chance generator of a silent wave
that rolls in all directions, sucks everyone
into its undertow and never spits them out.
Or that I’m the last to catch on and the first one
tossed naked onto the long-awaited Mohave beach.
This would explain a sign that says “Psychic Dump.”
It would also explain how easily birds
have learned the ring of a cordless phone,
and why every time they sing, I run to answer.”