Cool down papa, don’t you blow your top

Heads up. We’re entering the last week of July and you know what that portends. School will start up soon and the town will buzzin’ again weekday mornings.

I’m thinking mornings in Socorro are not unlike the beginning of the play Our Town, where the stage manager comes out and starts describing where things are in town, who lives there, and what they do. “In fair Socorro, where we lay our scene … “ he says.

I know, I know. Thornton Wilder is not Shakespeare and Socorro is not Verona, but the sentiment does evoke my affinity for small-town living and how people cope and change with the times. Old folks pass away and babies are born. One business closes and one opens, and folks continue on and take things in stride.

Compare this with things out in the world that can really, really, get complicated.

Although I’m prone to slip into a nostalgic reverie, what Heraclitus said around 500 BC still goes, that the only thing that’s constant is change. I’ll be the first to say that change isn’t necessarily bad, but so far this year we’re getting a brand new variety. For all I know, the voodoo queen of New Orleans is giving us all the evil eye. I saw that in a movie once.

All too often, I find myself lapsing in doom scrolling—the urge to read every single confusing or scary thing on the internet.

All that makes me want to offer up the old Nat King Cole song where he sings, “Straighten up and fly right … cool down papa, don’t you blow your top.”

I don’t mean to wax nostalgic, but something tells me a little bit of nostalgia is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it can take you briefly away from the troubling stuff. While the Ram Dass devotee might say, “Be here now,” sometimes I’d like to “Be yesterday now.”

I’m pretty sure every generation gets nostalgic at one time or another, be it the nineties, the seventies, or what have you. Yep, I get nostalgic over all those decades, too, but mainly for those times before diversions and shortcuts of the digital age. Before hashtags and those kinds of things. When you didn’t have to log-in and log-out everything. Before your identity could be summed up in Facebook posts, and when letters were written in longhand on a sheet of paper, which could be saved and re-read without having to turn something on and remember a password. When we could add numbers in our heads faster because we had to do it more often, and we knew our “times” tables better. When we relied more on knowing how to spell words rather than using a machine to create our sentences.

OK, I’ll stop. I didn’t mean to get so carried away, but that’s nostalgia for you. And, frankly, it piles up with age. At this point, I can’t help but sympathize with the elderly gentleman in the Tom T. Hall song whose wife had passed and his friends were gone: “Ain’t but three things in this world that’s worth a solitary dime, but old dogs and children and watermelon wine.”

All our digital advancements can be hard to keep up with, but if you consider the brisk business of all the Apples, Androids, GPSs, and wall-sized flat-screen TVs, I’d say we love it all.

Speaking of technology, we just passed the 121st anniversary of Ford Motor Company. It was on July 23, 1903 that the original Ford automobile was sold. It was a two-cylinder bright red Model A and cost $850 in 1903 dollars. That would make it about $25,000 today. Compare that to Woody Guthrie singing, “On a ten-dollar horse and a forty-dollar saddle. I’m a-gonna cut them Texas cattle. Come a ti yi yippy yi yay...”

That first Ford could fit two people, had no roof, and its top speed was 28 mph.

A horse also has no roof, can carry two people and, from what I’ve been told, can do around 30, but in a race will do much more.

That said, in the 1930s Magdalena was where folks went for match races, and a lot of money was wagered at the track adjacent to the rodeo arena back then. In one such head-to-head race, Marvin Ake’s sorrel Clabber beat B. Julian’s horse, The Pie Town Mare, for a purse of $2,500.

Before I forget it, this Sunday is National Parents Day, but most importantly (if I may) happy birthday to my daughter born on this day 43 years ago in Colorado.

A cancer survivor and ADA advocate, there’s one thing she’s taught me, and I’ll quote Ernest Hemingway who flat out said, “When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.”

So, here’s to a long, long life!