Creative Nonfiction

During the interval of Augusto de Campos’ plurivocal poetry reading accompanied by his son, Cid on the guitar, a person from the audience turned on the short-wave radio to hear the news. I could hardly believe that while the living spaces of Sao Paulo, the most populous and popular of Brazilian cities, was being projected on a white screen, the twin-towers of New York’s Trade Centers had been bombed earlier by hijacked terrorist planes.

The only things in my bookbag were a small pack of Kleenex, five sticks of Big Red gum, and a copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Jim Morrison biography by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman. It was April 1982, and I was nearing the end of Ms. Margo’s 7th grade English class at Great Neck North Middle School.

Welcome to Planet Earth, where people lie to gain favors and cheat to win romance. Hookers get trampled on at the crack of sunset by men fiending for the unholy. Priests touch young children and fathers hit their wives. Trans women are murdered in Brazil and Morocco and in the banlieus of Paris. Gay men are called faggots over high school loudspeakers.

Today we have left one home for another. Taos is our heart-home, and Colorado’s Front Range is the other. Driving north on NM 522 which crosses the state border at Costilla and turns into CO 159 is our long goodbye. We have left midmorning, packed the Subaru, settled ice into the cooler, and loaded our dog through the hatchback to harrumph into his blanketed nest.