Childish Things

The second time we lived in New Mexico was from 1990 until 1993. We briefly lived in Albuquerque in the mid-80s for about four months before we moved to England while my dad finished some special ops flight training stuff (or something). I was really young and don't remember much about the first time. Here's what I do remember:

We lived in the pink apartments (but then, everything's pink and adobe in N.M.)

I almost drowned in the complex pool (my mom told me not to go in, but I did)

I refused to eat the green eggs and ham (made with a touch of food dye when reading Dr. Seuss at playschool)

And I was terrified of this place:



This is an exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, a place that would become one of my favorite spots on the face of the planet (besides the barn and the Rio Grande Nature Reserve) when we moved back to Albuquerque after being in England.

This volcano exhibit scared the shit out of me because the floor was of thick plastic with red "lava" running underneath. When I was little, the first time in Albuquerque, I was about four and my dad had to carry me through this room because I was afraid the floor would collapse and we'd sink into the whooshing lava below. This is probably why today, if I ever lay down on a tanning bed, I can't stop thinking about what would happen if the plastic cracked and I fell onto the light bulbs.



There were other great things about the museum, though, including the dinosaurs and the exhibit about the start of life on earth. I loved the tiny colored diodes that came together to form DNA; even as a little kid, I was a dork. When I was in elementary school, after we moved back from England, I'd generally gotten over my volcano fear, but I still didn't particularly like that room. When I went back this year, I saw they'd opened a new dark and dramatic room about the end of the dinosaurs, filled with strobe lights and crashing sounds and shaking floors, and they feature a nice warning for parents. There's still no warning on the volcano room. The new room also features this awesome photo of tiny rat-like creatures eating a T-rex carcass. That's mammals FTW, for those of you keeping track at home.





I did the science museum on the first full day in Albuquerque. That day I woke up, hiked around one of the canyons that is part of the Petrogylph National Monument (more on that later), went to the museum, dinked around Old Town (which is like the Stock Yards in Fort Worth, filled with tourists), and then went through the nature reserve (more on this in a later post, too). My last full day in Albuquerque, Sunday, was again partially spent looking at my elementary school years in New Mexico.

We moved from a tiny community in England, a fishing village, to Albuquerque, where I got ridiculed for my accent and the administration at the school tried to put my sister and I into speech therapy. It was a confusing time for me, that first year (second grade). Third grade got better, and fourth grade was one of my best years of school, period. It may have been THE best year of school for me before graduating from high school. Those three years were spent at Kirtland Elementary School, right outside Kirtland Air Force Base (where my dad was stationed) and within walking distance from the base housing. I'd walk to school every day with some other kids from base housing, and after a while, I loved that school.

There are new murals on some of the walls, now, and the playground looks infinitely smaller than it seemed when I was little. I remember buying popsicles after lunch for a quarter, trying to eat them before they melted into the sand, and catching lizards on the playground. All the play equipment is new, shaded, covered in brightly-colored poly. There are still portables where some of the classrooms are, and there's one tree in the back playground. There's still a carefully cultivated green quad that's shaded with big, handsome trees where I studied Van Gogh for the first time.





Tooling around the perimeter of the base in my car with the windows down was strange. Very little had changed, except now what was one of the centers of my life--everything within the borders of that base fence--was now off limits, gone. That's something I can't go back and visit again, like so much of my past. Well, I guess I could if my parents escorted me on base as a visitor, but that doesn't do much for my personal love of revisiting the past on my own.

There were three blue-tiled pieces of public art near the base that I took a lot of delight in as a kid. One was a giant car, up on an arch, that actually had a hole all the way through it. I always thought it was a real car they somehow gutted and holed out, but now I think I was probably wrong. The other was this odd, slanted table coming out of a wall. The third piece, a blue armchair that appeared to be sinking into the ground, is gone. I found the piece of land it used to be on, but now it's flat and empty, pink concrete that no longer has a quick-sand appearance due to the disappearing chair.







I guess some things do change, after all.