How many times have you had somebody, upon hearing you’re from New Mexico, ask 1) how far you live from Mexico City, 2) what unit of currency is in use in that place way south of the U.S., or 3) are you ever afraid the Immigration and Naturalization Department will be shipping you back home?

We denizens of the Meadow City often face another barrier to communication as we explain that we are not the glitzy gambling city in Nevada. Geographic confusion makes me wonder about the quality (or even the existence) of geography instruction in American schools. Why is it that of our dozen trips to Europe, all our acquaintances there seem able to locate New Mexico?

But yet, many fellow Americans had trouble recognizing this state. My three-year stint in Illinois when I was in my early 20s, included a recitation of explanations combined with mini-geography lessons. The I’m-not-from-Mexico-City routine is the essence of a column in New Mexico Magazine: “One of Our 50 is Missing.”

Usually the submitted items are about someone’s confusion as to whether to carry pesos rather than real dollars or whether we perform El Jarabe Tapatio (Mexican Hat Dance) upon rising each morning. Retired language professor, Sara Harris, provided the tapatio translation. If not for my former Highlands colleague, I might have interpreted “Jarabe Tapatio” as a blend of jam and tapioca. Continue reading →

The new year, 2017, soon will be here, and so will I. I’ll be pondering the kind of New Year’s Resolution to try this time. One of them is to work on my second million dollars. I say it’s my SECOND million because I gave up on my attempt for the first million.

Do people even make resolutions anymore? It seems that some 20 or 30 years ago, such promises probably pre-occupied people. In much earlier installments of this column I’ve tried, albeit briefly and perhaps even half-heartedly, to choose one resolution and stick to it.

Some readers may remember that I published my weight each week for a couple of years. I urged readers to “keep me honest” and never to fear embarrassing me when discussing weighty issues. My promise then, and now, has been to report my weight honestly.

I began publishing my weight underneath my name at 234. What? I weighed that much?

During my teaching years, I hovered around 185. Suddenly, as I drew closer to retirement I tipped the scales at close to 200 pounds. It’s amazing how much difference a pound makes. As I stepped on to my very accurate scale at home, the night before, I weighed 199. The next morning — without my knowledge or consent — I’d reached the Big 200. Continue reading →

Without searching very hard, it’s possible to find many supposed awards bestowed on people and things.

Sports Illustrated treated LeBron James, the superstar of the often-luckless Cleveland Cavaliers to virtually its entire issue. It is true: LeBron is great, his having led his team to a national basketball championship (but the honor should have gone instead to Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors).

But let’s leave this session of “Coaches’ Corner.” The “award” I refer to now is what Mirriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, calls the “Word of the Year.” That term, especially the “of the year” phrase must denote something special, along the lines of Man (or Woman or invention) of the Year, an honor bestowed by Newsweek or Time.

Before revealing that magnificent word, which some readers may already have learned about, let’s discus a few items that should be criteria for such a selection:

Things like the cell phone — which I am convinced every person on the planet owns — is an incredible invention, whose guts, contained in a unit thinner than a pack of cigarettes, contain more technology than some of those supercomputers that needed an entire building to contain them. Continue reading →

I didn’t even recognize an old classmate as he rode his bike downtown and called me “Mannie,” which immediately told me I’ve known him since childhood.I believe his name is Leo. He told me that though he’d been reading Work of Art for years, he’d never made the connection. Leo said he especially liked “those articles about the fights we all used to have.”

That made me realize that in fact I have written quite a bit about a fight or several, usually in our barrio, the 900 block of Railroad Avenue. Let’s see: I’ve written about 750 columns. There are a slew of articles on language (my passion) and quite a few about school, travel, family, growing up, lost loves and my neighborhood, with its requisite fisticuffs.

Do I exaggerate the number of fights I witnessed or sometimes participated in during my childhood? I don’t think so, but my hesitation is based on the fact that now, in my late seventies, I’m not privy to much pugilism anymore. Continue reading →

Many people my age are thankful for there being younger people around to figure out things we oldsters fail at.

Case in point, we received a text message from our former foreign exchange students, Phaedra Wouters and Ana Granado, asking us to join them for a conference call at 8 Sunday morning. This call differs from so many other kinds of calls we send and receive. We panicked, as the idea of being able to see the callers is a bit of a novelty.

Sure, we’ve talked (and seen) callers before, but we’ve never fully understood how to prepare for such a call.

First, this call involved three parties in three widely separate countries, Ana, Phaedra and us; second, it was to be on Skype, a program that lets us SEE the people we’re talking to, on our computers; and third, it was an international call, meaning that 8 a.m. our time in New Mexico equals 4 p.m. in Belgium and Spain, the home turfs of the girls we hosted all of the last school year while they attended West Las Vegas High School. Continue reading →

Almost daily we come across — and many of us even use — familiar expressions that, when you come to think about them, really defy explanation.

As a person who’s made a living by using words, I confess I’m one of the biggest offenders; that is, I often use expression that I feel comfortable with and that I’ve heard before, but seldom am able to explain why I used such terms.

The one that I’ve struggled with is “having an ax to grind.” Surely you’re heard it, possibly even used it. When I first heard it, it was in the context of a faculty meeting at Highlands University, where I used to work.

The professorial crowd, working on proposed changes to the class offerings couldn’t agree on much. So protective were the instructors of their turf that they tried to vote down any proposal that didn’t benefit them directly. Continue reading →

I came close to creating another obituary for the Optic as I drove downtown on Hot Springs Boulevard Thursday night.

I proofread all the obits after La Gente Editor Mercy López places them on the page. Thus, it’s safe to say we have a long-time vested interest in what appears on the Optic’s page three.

On Hot Springs, as one approaches the Behavioral Health Institute, the speed limit drops from 45 to 35. I slowed down and soon noticed a woman close to the middle of the street.

She crossed the street as if she owned it. Worse, she didn’t seem to have even noticed whether cars were whizzing by in both directions.

Was she inebriated? Confused? Injured? She was none of these things, merely a woman trying to get across, and for whom crosswalks are a mere suggestion. Was the pedestrian wearing bright-colored clothes that a motorist on that dark night would notice? Was she even aware that she was in the wrong, avoiding the crosswalk lines and walking diagonally across the busy street? Continue reading →

In just a short week, I’ve noticed many people — including myself — “zoned out,” clearly distracted, grumpy and not very conversational. For what reason? For one thing, Hillary lost the election, preventing the United States from inaugurating its first woman president.

The flip side of that statement is that Donald Trump won. That brings up the questions — I won’t attempt answers here — as to how and why it happened.

The scene last Tuesday night and Wednesday morning was like a dream whose ending I’d hoped I could change. The early results showed Trump with an impressive lead, one of those I naively believed would change once the west-coast checked in. As I tuned in to various networks, I kept expecting to see a shift in momentum that never came.

By around 3 a.m., many millions of Americans turned off the tube and accepted the reality of an honest-to-goodness President Donald Trump.

I then checked Facebook comments and caught a post from my son, Stanley Adam, who just recently celebrated his 10th wedding anniversary. He married a Dane in Copenhagen and they have two young daughters. Continue reading →

THE CARIBBEAN — When my wife, Bonnie, and I took a weeklong vacation to Belize formerly British Honduras, in northeastern Central America, we were both impressed.

The trip came as a retirement present after 28 years of teaching at Highlands.

Never having entered Central America before, we couldn’t believe how organized the itinerary was. We flew from Houston but needed to get across to Ambergris Cay, a tiny island whose natives and tourists get around in tiny go-carts whose maximum speed is about 10 mph.

A simple tug on the starter-rope got the thing going for us, and we used it for several days. The first thing we noticed was that the entire island is sandy, and people don’t wear shoes.

Recalling all of the details of that trip, back in 1999, would be fun, but I mention that vacation to contrast it with our dozen days in Puerto Rico, the place Rita Moreno sang about in West Side Story. My first insistence is that the just-completed trip to San Juan and a host of islands clustered around the Atlantic really was enjoyable. Although I complained about the heat in my previous column of island-hopping, I really would recommend it. Continue reading →

Our bus driver-guide told us, “There are four seasons here: summer, summer, summer and summer.” And he was absolutely correct.

He made that flippant remark as we rode high up into the mountains of Puerto Rico on Monday. I don’t know how many of the 60-plus passengers even caught the driver’s exaggeration, as many of us were nodding off in the heat and humidity in San Juan.

Along with almost a thousand others, my wife and I had naively assumed that the higher up the mountain you go, the cooler; in fact that’s why we chose that particular tour of the Viking cruise we booked in late October to the British Virgin Islands and a handful of other scenic islands clustered around that site.

We’re in our fourth day of an 11-day cruise of a half dozen attractions in a place we’d never been. But we hadn’t been totally unaware of weather conditions here, as locals have told us this season is, well, unseasonably hot and dry.

Still we wondered while making comparisons. If a drive up Gallinas Canyon can give us temperatures 10 to 20 degrees cooler than in Las Vegas, why isn’t the same happening here? Continue reading →