The first 20 pages of my novel SANTA FE WOMEN:
Try
staying in a band after college while any non-musician friends go on
to real jobs in other parts of the country. Try working at
Zingerman’s Bakery part-time because, though it doesn’t pay well,
it allows a flexible schedule, because this is what you want to do,
play music, so try it. Try playing clubs like The Heidelburg and The
Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, branching out to places in Detroit (this may
take years) and even down to Toledo, Cleveland, or over to Kalamazoo
and down to Chicago, and putting out your own CD, which sells ok
(that is, you make back the money you spent), and your band may even
get an offer from an indie label, who pays for another CD (this will
take years) but who never pays you a cent, though they may hook you
up with a booking agent, who gets you on a circuit starting in
Chicago but going down, way down, to Texas, then across west through
New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and back to Chicago.
And
try living on the road like that, in the back of a rental van that
you weren’t supposed to take out of state, with the same six guys
24/7 for weeks, staying in hotel rooms or (to save money) even
sleeping on the floors of strange but generous fans in various
cities, living on ten dollars a day for food, or more, since there
are always credit cards to live on which you can always pay back,
right?
And
try leaving Austin one morning, heading north to Dallas, with your
singer Rick talking non-stop and realizing, this is it, I can’t
stand him. All the confidence and attitude that came off so well on
stage just a façade for this insecure jabberjaw and you can’t take
it anymore. You’ve heard about husbands or wives just leaving a
relationship, just getting up and walking away, and this is how you
feel: you could almost walk away right there at one of those truck
stops, only your guitars and amplifiers keeping you there. You have
no money, no way to get them home, so you spend the next two weeks
with your headphones on, trying to drown out the world with Metallica
and Johnny Cash.
And
try having a relationship while on the road. Either you’re on your
cellphone in a van, or at lunch or dinner breaks, or you’re at a
club setting up, or you’re at a club and it’s too loud, or you’re
playing, or it’s after the show, at the hotel room, which you’re
sharing with one or two other guys, and it’s late, especially with
the time difference the farther you go west, and your girlfriend
Donna doesn’t stay up that late anyways, and then you’re each
talking on cellphones which, no matter what anybody says, suck, sound
quality-wise, so not conducive to long conversations, and try getting
home and finding out your girlfriend wants to break up with you, and
in fact already has in her head, so that all that’s left for
her to do is go through the rehearsed lines and the already imagined
emotions, so that you are being broken up with by an emotional robot.
And
then when Rick, the one you’ve come to despise for his ego, or his
seeming to feel that he is the leader of the band, after all
the phone calls you made booking gigs, arranging rehearsals, making
flyers, and all the songs you brought in, some of which you felt
(admit it now, might as well) that he contributed some pretty
cheeseball lyrics, of everyone in the band, he’s the one
that calls to tell you that he and the other two guys have decided to
kick you out, and he’s telling you this on his cellphone while he’s
in a Burger King, and even though you were going to quit anyways (I
mean, probably) you suddenly see in the future nothing but a black
wall....
....except
maybe that small path off to the side, the one that opened up when
you were in the van leaving Santa Fe and you thought, I’d like to
live here someday, and that path too goes in the black wall of the
future, but it seems to keep going, past where you can see, but it’s
something, which is more than what you currently have.
So
you sell most of your equipment, your guitars and amps (except that
Fender acoustic—that one you decide to keep, no matter what) and
you throw what you have left in the back of your truck, and you head
south and west, south and west, past the cornfields, the Mississippi,
the Ozarks, into high desert plains, cow processing plants, Carhenge,
mountains and reservations, until you’re there behind the black
wall, and though you see another black wall way up ahead, where
you’re at doesn’t seem that bad: it’s sunny. You’re alone,
but it’s sunny and you’ve got some things to be doing, which will
keep you busy for a while, and also there are women in Santa Fe so,
you hope, they too will keep you busy....
I
knew I wanted to live near el centro, the old town part of town, and
not down south off of the Cerrillos Road strip mall part. Finding a
place seemed to come down to luck more than anything. I checked
CraigsList online and most places I called had already been rented
out almost immediately, though I found a few, mostly what they called
‘casitas’ there, small houses out back of people’s houses, old
garages maybe, that owners rented out, either officially or
unofficially (I was finding that people made a living, had to
make a living, creatively), but prices insane, and that’s coming
from someone who lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so I kept holding out.
Almost went with a woman who had a casita out back of her place, but
she also kept goats and chickens in a pen in the rest of the
backyard. In fact, the pen was bigger than the casita, and I kept
imagining those chickens screeching at five in the morning.
But
then I tried the old fashioned way and looked in the Santa Fe New
Mexican newspaper classifieds, and there was someone advertising a
casita up in the canyon, just north of el centro. Sounded too good to
be true, but I called and it was still available.
The
landlady, Estrella, had a small adobe casita to the side of her
house. She was from an old Spanish family that had been in the area
forever, and was very proud of her heritage. She was the first,
though not the last, person I met who became very offended at being
called mexicans: They considered themselves Spanish first, then
american. When I mentioned going to Mexico once, she made a face and
snorted. —They smell.
The
property belonged to her, she was a widow, but Pedro was either her
boyfriend or second husband, I was never really clear on his official
status. When I first got there he was lying on the kitchen floor
because he said he back was hurting him, though he got up and shook
my hand.
I
tried some of my spanish on them and they were both impressed,
especially when I said I thought spanish was a beautiful language
(which it is). At that point I would’ve rented anything (except the
chicken place), since I was spending a small fortune on what was
considered a cheap hotel room, but their casita was nice. I mean,
small—one room, with a kitchenette, and a small bathroom,
but the price actually a little cheaper than some places farther out
of town, so I took it and moved in that day.
I
fell in love with many women in Santa Fe, I still fall in love with
many women everywhere, but maybe the first was one who worked at my
credit union. Tall and dark, with local spanish blood. Long straight
black hair and, though I actually don’t necessarily like super
skinny women, being that tall made up for it. Falling in love with
women at credit unions or banks seems to involve how they dress, and
she dressed well. Always with high heels and nylons. Business skirt,
grey or tan, white blouse, gold cross necklace dipping down her
chest. How many nights fantasizing about how that cross would shine
between her breasts as she rode me....
For
that reason, and guys are like this, I would skip the ATM machine and
go inside for the chance to see her, trying to jockey my position in
line to get her and her smile. Eventually I noticed the ring, but who
really cares about things like that? It just made the gold cross
fantasy that much naughtier.
Bank
managers need to realize that should hire ugly people as their
tellers, so people will use ATMs more and the banks won’t have to
hire as many employees. But then, if I were the manager, I’d hire
women like that too. Maybe the advantage of happy, in-lust customers
outweighs the money they save. Así es la vida.
She
also sometimes worked the reception desk which gave me the freedom to
say hello to her and not have to jockey for position, and one time I
even said, Cómo estás?, as I passed her and without hesitation she
said bien back which confirmed that she was my dream girl.
And
the next time I came in I saw her getting what looked like manager
training, so I knew my time was limited, but the next time after that
she was back at the reception desk, so I said hola and did my
transaction, nervous, hoping the timing would be right, And it was,
she was alone, so I went up to the desk and mumbled out in spanish
that I just wanted to compliment her on how beautiful she was. Which
took everything out of me. I had just poured my soul out to her.
And
she smiled and said, —Gracias.
And
I walked out the door, in shock. I didn’t say anything else to her.
I hadn’t planned that far ahead. My plan being for the next
time to ask her out.
And
the next time she wasn’t there.
Or
the next.
I
asked one of the other tellers that had been there as long as I had
been going, a perfectly nice young woman whose only fault was she
wasn’t my dream girl, who said Graciela had taken a promotion up at
the Los Alamos branch. So fuck.
Downtown
Subscription was a café located on the edge of downtown where the
canyon opened up, a short walk from Art Row, where many of the town’s
art dealers had their shops, though a long enough walk, and a little
bit hidden, to keep a lot of the tourists away. Most of the customers
local, including every european in town because it was a place you
could go to just hang out and talk, and study, and or write, for as
long as you wanted. It also stocked magazines from all over the
world, on any subject, from Cosmo (in German) to The String
Theory Quarterly. It was a bout a mile and half down canyon from
my casita, so on free days I liked to walk down and read or scribble
while sipping a coffee. I actually liked the walk more than anything.
It made me just think, or maybe allowed me the time to think, with no
distractions, about my life and what the hell I was doing with it, so
that by the time I had my coffee and was sitting at a table I might
be scribbling down a first verse, and spend the rest of the afternoon
working on it, with the background noise of people talking, their
energy, and looking at the various beautiful women coming and going.
Did
I ever talk to any of those women? Of course not. It was weird, but
sometimes when I saw a woman who was not only beautiful, but
intriguing-seeming, who might even be sitting by herself, those were
the times when the words that needed to be written down came the
easiest.
Plus
I’d be scared to death to talk to a woman. What if she slapped me?
What if she ran screaming from the cafe? What if she said no? Better
to enjoy the thought, the possibility, than crush it with the reality
of rejection. Though, better to be alone than to have tried and
failed? Every man can talk himself into that logic. And meanwhile the
women sit there alone, wishing a man would come talk to them (I mean,
right?) but he never does, so the women get cats or dogs and read
Jane Austin at home, eating chocolate.
Unless
you come across a brazen whore who will actually talk to you, which
is what happened to me one day when I was bent over my notebook.
—How’s
the writing going today?
She
was short, with straight blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Skinny, with jeans and sandals and a dark green sparkly shirt with
long see-thru sleeves. Holding a cup of tea and smiling.
I
started to go into male freeze-up, but managed to say, —It’s
going alright today.
—Are
you writing a novel?
I
leaned back in my chair. —No, just...lyrics.
Her
smiled got bigger. —Lyrics? Ahh, you’re a songwriter.
—Well,
trying.
—Do
you play guitar?
—Yeah,
I do but...
—I’d
love to hear you play sometime.
She
kept standing there holding her tea. Expectantly.
—Uh,
would you like to sit down?
She
smiled and pulled up a seat. —Sure. I can’t stay long. I’m
seeing my shrink in half an hour.
Which
should have been my first warning, but being lonely makes us do these
things. But talking came easy to her. She had lived in Santa Fe for
five years. —That’s a record! Most people only last two!
Originally
from Boston, Rachel had moved out to SF after she got divorced.
—Haven’t you figured it out yet? Santa Fe is where divorced women
come to heal.
Like
everyone else, she was trying to figure out what to do with her life.
And, like everyone else, she too was exploring her creative side,
painting, but also contemplating going back to grad school to study
psychology.
I
took a sip of coffee. —A friend of mine back in college always
said, if you’re ever at a party and you meet a beautiful girl, who
seems very cool, and she tells you she’s psychology major, run away
as fast as you can.
She
laughed out loud, holding her stomach, people around us looking over.
—That’s great! I’ll have to remember that one. It’s
true of course. I’m crazier than a bedbug.
She
got up to go. —I’ll tell my shrink that one. He’ll love it.
Other
men know how to say those lines so they don’t come out like a
cliché. Me, no. —So...would you like to get dinner sometime?
She
smiled again. —You’re funny. Sure.
She
wrote down her number and put a smiley face underneath, waving
goodbye at the door.
I’d
had this thought rolling around in the back of my brain, to start
studying spanish again, I guess from being in Santa Fe, feeling like
I was in old Mexico. Back in college, spanish had actually been one
of my favorite classes, though it was a lot of hard work. I always
seemed to have to study hours with flash cards while my classmates
would look at the chapter vocabulary lists right before the tests and
do better than me. I’d done the mandatory two years, then actually
got permission from the department to take an upper level beginning
literature class, and if it hadn’t been for a horrible bitter old
lady from Venezuela, I might’ve even changed majors. But, that was
also when the band was everything, so school was less than
everything. I also took a literature in translation class, which I
also didn’t do well in, though I knew there was something there: I
liked the stories, and remembered Pablo Neruda’s odes to storms and
french fries, and I always thought it would be cool to be bilingual,
maybe just to seduce mexican girls, but maybe also because spanish
seemed like the second language of America, at least down south, and
again, if it hadn’t been for the band and music, I would have loved
to live in Mexico and do the Jack Kerouac thing, meet a Tristessa of
my own.
And
one day at Downtown Subscription I was sitting next to a woman
obviously giving a spanish lesson to a girl, explaining the verb
gustar and how it’s reflexive:
—Yo
gusto el café.
—No
no no, it pleases you. Me gusta el café.
—But
I like it.
—But
in spanish, things are pleasing to us.
—Ok...me...gusta?
El café?
—Sí.
Así.
—That’s
so weird.
So
after they were done, I leaned over to her. —Disculpe.
She
looked surprised. —Sí?
—Me
encanta el español. Could I take lessons from you?
We
would meet once a week, for an hour. María was in her late fifties,
though looked younger, her short black hair frosted with grey. She
had lived in Santa Fe for twenty years. Her ex had worked up a the
Lab in Los Alamos and still lived in their house in Tesuque, east of
town. She’d been divorced for a couple years and was living with a
rich family as a nannie. She had a son, who was in prison on a car
theft charge. I had only asked about her family for polite
conversation, and felt bad when her eyes started tearing up as she
was telling me about him.
She
had divorced her ex not for any horrible bad thing but more, it
sounded, out of exasperation. Though apparently a scientific genius,
pulling in a good money from his own company contracting with the
Lab, he was horrible at managing it, and had put even the lease on
his home in jeopardy through simple lack of paying bills. That plus
being uncommunicative and clueless, the usual with men.
My
spanish was shaky, but María was good about not speaking in English,
and with the lessons, and me practicing reading easy stuff in
spanish, like MAXIM en español, just for the articles, I
realized I still had it with me, locked away in some dusty part of my
brain.
Hello?
Patrick?
...
It’s
me, Donna. How are you?
I’m
ok.
What
are you doing in New Mexico?
Well,
I’m not sure.
That’s
crazy.
I
guess. How did you get my number?
I
called your mom. So what are you doing down there? Are you in a band?
No,
no. Just hanging out.
Do
you have a job?
Not
yet.
I
can’t believe you’re in New Mexico. You just took off.
Well....
Do
you miss Michigan?
Um,
no. Ann Arbor a little.
So
like, you’re not playing music at all?
A
little. For myself.
Wow...so
like, it’s good hear your voice. I just wanted to, um, tell you....
Tell
me what?
In
case you found out from someone else.
What?
Just
that, Rick and I are seeing each other.
....
I
just didn’t want you to find out and think that I was, like
planning it or something. Cause I wasn’t. It just kind of happened.
Ok.
So
are you seeing anybody down there?
Um,
nobody serious. Just here and there.
Well,
ok. When are you coming back to Michigan?
Um,
never, I think.
Never?
Not even to visit?
I
don’t know.
Well
if you do, give me a call. I still have the same cellphone.
...Ok...
Are
you angry or something?
No.
Well,
you’re super quiet.
Sorry.
I
don’t care, it’s just, I thought you might be angry. But I’d
rather you hear it from me.
....
Ok,
well, I’m gonna get going.
Alright.
It
was good to talk to you.
Ok
Donna.
Bye!
For
our first date I took Rachel to dinner at Udon Noodles down on
Cerrillos, where she seemed to know everyone. —They’re all in my
yoga classes. It’s weird to see them. I never go out to eat unless
I’m with a suitor.
—A
suitor? Am I a suitor?
She
grinned. —Hee hee. You’re cute. Yes, I suppose you are, aren’t
you? We’re out to dinner.
—Ok
but for the record I’m not looking for a wife.
She
clapped her hands and people at other tables looked over. —Ha!
That’s great! Good for you! Who needs it? Except women. We need it.
—Why?
—For
security.
—Just
get a good paying job.
—As
if it were that easy. Especially in Santa Fe. And anyways, I meant it
differently. Security in life. Security in love.
—Ba
humbug.
She
wagged a finger at me. —Oh, you say that, but you’re sad and
lonely just like the rest of us.
—Yeah,
well, marriage will solve all that? You’re the divorcée.
She
laughed again, and our noodles arrived (the waitress wasn’t that
attractive so I didn’t have to worry about staring at her ass or
not) of which Rachel ate almost nothing, and ordered a box to go.
Afterwards
she invited me to a club called SWIG, which I’d heard of but knew
nothing about. We had to access it by an elevator, the doors opening
right into the club and loud ambient techno. And here were all the
young adults (late 20s to some older guys in their late 30s) from
other more cultivated cities, like maybe LA or New York. No locals.
No more cowboy hats, no more jeans, or hippies skirts, or pueblo
design wool coats. Suddenly we were surrounded by people in black,
men in ties and dress shirts, women with lots o’ make-up in
mini-skirts. I felt a little annoyed that Rachel hadn’t filled me
in, since I was in jeans and long-sleeved shirt, but she wasn’t
much better in a simple white cotton dress, though she did have some
high heel sandals, so maybe she just didn’t know, or care.
We
went into one corner and sat at a couch. No dance floor, just two
rooms connected by a hallway where the bathrooms were. Since the
music was loud, I’m not sure what anybody was talking about: They
seemed to just be standing around looking like they were going to be
doing some coke soon.
A
drop dead gorgeous young waitress in a tight mini-skirt came over and
took our drink orders and I tried not to stare at her legs as she
walked away. Rachel excused herself for a second, leaving me to
people-watch and wonder what the hell we were doing there. When she
came back she squeezed my hand. —You have to see the bathrooms
here!
The
men’s room walls were covered in astro-turf, even around the
urinals, and it was huge, though nobody else came in while I was
there. I kept expecting a posse of American Psycho types to pile in
but I guess it was too early for that. Though it was Santa Fe:
I couldn’t imagine the place being open past one o’clock.
When
I got back and sat down next to Rachel, she slipped her sandals off
and put her bare feet in my lap, so of course I started massaging
them while we talked about her friends. She had gone to St. John’s
College there, for a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts. —Which is as
basically useless as it sounds.
But
she hooked up with some girlfriends there, all with much more money
than her: The kind that lived in houses their parents had bought for
them. —So they kind of took me in and had pity on me. I’m the
token poor girl they can all take care of. They like to come here.
And
on cue, Ingrid arrived with a gaggle of friends. She was an art
dealer in town, though I couldn’t figure out if she took that
seriously (meaning she liked bad cowboy art) or not (meaning she was
in it for the money). But she had shown some of Rachel’s paintings
at one point. She kissed me European style when we were introduced
and then I basically sat by myself while she and Rachel talked for
awhile. So I looked at our waitress’ legs some more, which were
nice, and I swear she even smiled at me, which is the weird thing
about women: She wouldn’t have even looked at me if I’d been
there by myself. Maybe since I was with a woman I wasn’t putting
out pheromones of desperation.
But
watching Rachel interact with Ingrid was...intriguing. Basically
Ingrid spoke, and Rachel listened, which reminded me less of a
friendship and more of how I used to schmooze with club owners,
promoters, or other bands. And they kept talking, and none of
Ingrid’s girlfriends were talking to me, so I got up and did a
walk-around to the other room, where the music was even louder and
there were more single guys in suits, so I just came back and told
Rachel I was taking off. She got a concerned look on her face and put
a hand on my cheek. —Oh you poor boy. I’m not paying attention to
you, am I? Do you want to go someplace and talk?
—No,
I’m done for the night.
—Well,
call me. Ok?
I
pulled up next to my casita and got out. Quiet. Crickets. Some lights
on in some of the house in the neighborhood. The air cool. I stood
there looking up at the stars filling the sky, with the Star River
running through the middle. My breath drifting lonely as a cloud. My
truck Ana clinking, cooling.
The
Pueblo Indians have been in this area since the beginning of the
tenth century, if not sooner. You can visit Bandalier National
Monument, with examples of both their cliff dwellings and old adobe
style buildings. Santa Fe became the first capital city in America in
1607 (or some sources say 1610), even though it actually belonged to
Spain at the time (the whole area was called Nueva España). It’s
also the only American city where a successful Indian uprising
happened, against the Spanish, in 1680.
Santa
Fe became the northern trade hub down to Mexico City, both for the
Spanish, and then Mexico when it seceded in 1821. After the
Mexican-American War, in 1821, the city changed hands to the United
States, and that same year the famous Santa Fe Trail was opened up to
connect the northeast states with the new southwest territories. This
makes Santa Fe the only city in North America to be under four
different national flags: Spain, Mexico, the Confederate States
during the American Civil War (for like, a week), and The United
States. It has been the capital city in the area, both as a territory
and as a state, though nowadays it seems a little out of the way
compared to Albuquerque, which grew huge from being at the crossroads
of two interstate highways.
New
Mexico became a state in 1912, but the freaks had already started to
arrive: Painters like Georgia O’Keefe (who liked the light) and
writers like DH Lawrence (who liked the freedom and wanted to found a
creative anarchist commune). You can still visit the Lawrence Ranch
north of Taos, about an hour north of Santa Fe, and see the Lawrence
Tree, which O’Keefe made famous in her painting of that name,
which, when I first saw it, looked, because of the weird perspective,
like a giant squid squirting ink in space.
Santa
Fe also seems to have been one of the first American cities (at least
west of the Mississippi) to plan for tourism and a city identity,
centering around the architectural ‘look’ of the western adobe
flat top buildings, the traditional Mexican ‘pueblo’ look. By
1912, all buildings had to have this look, reinforced by a city
ordinance in 1958, so that today when you walk around the streets, if
you ignore the SUVs, you can almost picture yourself in an old
Mexican town from 150 years ago. This ‘Santa Fe Look’ now
includes interior decorating, and even clothing.
The
other economy of Santa Fe was, and is, the Los Alamos Lab, run by the
U.S. Department of Energy. Built during World War Two to research and
construct the atomic bomb, it was picked originally for its location:
Far away from most anything, up on a mesa thirty miles (as the crow
flies) west of Santa Fe. ‘The Lab’ stayed in business after the
war, bringing in leading scientists to continue nuclear research. Los
Alamos is now its own town, and if you go up to visit, you feel like
you’ve stepped back into a slice of the east coast: non-adobe
trophy homes, grass lawns, and even more expensive rents than in
Santa Fe. Not even the Cerro Gordo Fire of 2000, where the Park
Service lost control of a prescribed burn in Bandalier and the
escaped fire ended up burning dozens of homes, not even something
like that could pull property values down, so that lots of scientists
and their families live down in Santa Fe, or small villages out on
the reservations like Tesuque or Pojaque and commute.
During
the sixties and seventies, the hippies and alternative life-stylers
started to arrive, for the good weather, the arts, and (again) (I
think) the sense of Santa Fe being so far away from anything else. If
you watch the original version of Lolita, which came out in
1962, directed by Stanley Kubrick, which I did in a theatre there,
the pervert stalker guy (not Humbert, the other pervert, the really
bad one) ends up taking Lolita to Santa Fe for a life of hedonism and
porn. When the grown up Lol tells Humbert about her Santa Fe days,
the whole theatre started to, knowingly, laugh and snicker. Santa Fe
is called The City Different (I believe from the spanish way of
putting adjectives after the nouns: La Ciudad Diferente) and people
take great pride in being different. It’s actually one of
the attractions: If you feel like a freak somewhere else, you’ll
finally be normal in Santa Fe.
But
there was no person called Santa Fe, even if nowadays you can find
women with the name Fe. The original name of the city was “La Villa
Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís,” which means, “The
Royal Village of Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi.” San
Francisco, or in english, Saint Francis, being the patron saint of
poor people, animals, and (I guess) Italians (or anyway, they seem to
love him).
Saint
Francis had the strange anti-capitalist idea of devoting himself to
poverty, and talking other people into doing the same. The poorer he
made himself, the more money and property people donated to his
cause. But he was born rich, which allowed him to get a good
education, and would explain why he was able to think of embracing
“lady poverty,” because surely no poor person would ever come up
with that idea.
He
was inspired by the section in Mathew 10:9 when Jesus tells his
followers to go out in the world and tell about the kingdom of God.
And not bring any money. Or even shoes. And although he may not sound
like a fun guy to us Americans, he and his followers apparently could
be found enjoying themselves up in mountain forests, singing and
laughing. He was never actually ordained as a priest, but the Pope at
the time granted him permission to found a new order of monks, which
lives on to this day, and they bake good bread too, I visited one of
their monasteries up in the UP, in Michigan.
According
to legend, Francis was called to help a village whose sheep were
being killed by a wolf. He went into the woods and the wolf appeared
in front of him, growling, but as soon as Francis started talking to
him, the wolf lay down and put it’s head on its paws. They talked
and the wolf explained the situation, and Francis freaked everyone
out by bringing the wolf down into the village plaza with him.
Francis
explained the wolf’s point of view to the villagers, that the wolf
was only killing because it was hungry, because (and I’m ass-uming
this part) probably as the village grew and the farmers cut down
forests for farmland, and as they hunted more and more deer, they
took away the wolf’s normal livelihood.
So,
again, according to the myth, once Francis explained the situation,
the villagers agreed that, as long as the wolf stopped killing their
sheep, they would agree to feed it. And everyone lives happily every
after like good Christians, and we’re supposed to take the wolf as
a metaphor for anything, or anybody, say for example, terrorists.
That all violence comes down to misunderstandings, and if everyone
could just sit down and talk, we could come to peaceable agreements.
Except, what are the villagers going to feed the wolf? Bread? No,
they’ve got to feed it sheep. So apparently they’re ok with
giving away what the wolf would take anyways. So, the reasoning would
go, if terrorists perform acts of terror to get the US to stop
meddling in mid-east politics, in order to make them stop, you would
presumably stop meddling in med-east politics. Which sounds good. But
the reality is, the villagers are just going to kill the wolf. And as
the village expands, they’ll kill the next one, and the next one
(because there will always be other wolves) with the added benefit of
more deer to hunt. Sorry Francis. It’s cool you can talk to wolves
but, even though we say we’re good Christians, we can handle things
our own way, the good ole American way.
You
can find statues of Saint Francis all over Santa Fe, usually with
little bird and squirrel statues gathered around him. He was also
apparently the first person to suffer stigmata, though he never told
anybody: One of his followers described them to people after he died,
in 1226. In 1228, the Pope (a different one this time) made him a
saint.
