The English poet William Wordsworth may have been the first to come up with the puzzling proposition: “The child is father to the man.”
    My take on it is that the child grows older, and in becoming a man, has spawned his own maturity.
After an exhausting day of removing paneling in the new room to our house, in order to install bats and bats of insulation, we called the Public Service Company of New Mexico for an energy audit.
Back around 1980, PNM reps were happy to visit your home and advise you on whether the energy savings wrought by the new insulation would offset the costs of the materials.
But that’s as far as we got. The PNM representative, I think, felt intimidated by us. Here’s why:
    In 1957, some 70 of us National Guardsmen with what used to be called the 515th anti-aircraft artillery unit in Las Vegas, filed into the orderly room, having been issued an M-1 rifle which for its time was high-tech. One of the soldiers, who should have known better, cocked his weapon and placed the muzzle against the head of another soldier, who appeared to be napping, and hissed out the words, “I’m gonna kill you, Commie.”
    The Optic’s 125th anniversary observance recently was a great opportunity to see acquaintances of yesteryear.
    It was great to see Margie Crespin, whose father Carlos was a pressman at the Optic when I was there. I saw Jose “Luger” Lucero, Max Maez, Eloy Gonzales, Freddie Baca and others.
    And I met a man almost my age whose face meant nothing to me, but whose name meant everything, for in the moment it took to identify himself, a torrent of memories surfaced.