Pie Town, NM
(Shorpy photo) 30’s era cowboy, thankful for his flivver and gas to fill it. Pie Town Motel manager at far right, thankful for spree-killers and bank robbers traipsing the west, and paying good money for rooms. (Note: a gas tank just like that above, stands in the living room of Wise Acres Bunkhouse, bright red, same top, everything. Maybe it comes from Pie Town…)
Pie Town, Wise Acres, and Indigenous Peoples Day
I imagine you’re full up with November and December holidata, though some of it is kind of fun; the really REALLY bad schmaltz-TV romantic shows, and the attempts to “update” Christmas song classics. I heard (on a sports talk show, no less) while driving, a host ranting on just that.
“Leave ‘em alone! You don’t put lettuce on a PB&J. It’s a classic!” That made me smile. But “Buy More, Save More!” doesn’t, even though it’s just a comment on The American Way, which, all in all, is a pretty good way, or struggling to be. Back to the classics; wonder how Mel, Bing, Frank, Nat et al would feel about their music being compared to the most pedestrian of sandwiches. Well, it’s the thought, and it took a sportscaster to vent it, to matriculate it down the field, as they were fond of saying for awhile. (Here’s a link to some classics, led off by Nat King Cole…)
The Wise Acres lighting ceremony went off (on?) without a hitch and we gave thanks for perfectly prepared salmon, sweet potatoes and various fantastic pies, none of them from Pie Town, but here’s a link. Salmon was more like what the pilgrims had, that and cod and eel. No turkeys, maybe some grouse.
The postlady is showing up later each day, a sign of her increased burden of boxes and Christmas cards and “Buy More, Save More” sales literature. The supply chain deficit seems remote; is it just another conspiracy? There may be an XBox shortage, but any gamers under 14 should be outside anyway. No hope for the rest of them.
The postlady reminds me of all the various holidays when the mail doesn’t come and the banks close. Fed stuff. Like Columbus Day. Which they have now designated Indigenous Peoples Day. Columbus “discovered” San Salvador, not America, but he savaged a lot of natives along the way. What he had to do with America is doubtful. The El Nino, the Pinto and the Santa Fe, right? Anyway, Indigenous Peoples Day came out of Berkeley in 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival... somewhere, and was a sop to the forenamed groups to make up for the 400+ treaties that the feds made. And broke. Every single one. Let that sink in. I’m guessing it doesn’t come close, this naming of the day.
Picture of F’s grandmother, sits in the dining room amid some heirlooms…
Reparations would force a lot of moves. A huge reverse Mayflower deal, millions of us being returned somewhere. I’d be hustled off to Belgium. My wife would suddenly have lots of land, her grandmother, Pearl Bigfeather Osburn, having been 100% Cherokee. Pearl lived to 100, and her mother before her, a Sixkiller, was also longlived. Freddie loved visiting her grandmother as a child, remembers sitting on the porch and watching her quilt. I asked, the grandparents being a farm family, if they put her and her siblings to work. “Oh, no. She waited on us hand and foot, taught us to quilt and crochet, all kinds of things. It was great fun visiting there.” She had one of the colorful quilts for years but lost it in a move.