San Francisco de Asis Church
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa
This morning Kaori and I set out quite early (8:30 a.m.) for the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. We had our moment at the bridge and then headed to Taos plaza.
Of course we arrived so early that most of the shops were closed. We browsed in some of the open shops, looking at all the usual junk made in Mexico and China and sold in the souvenir shops all over the southwestern US. We bought a couple of small things and had a coffee in the coffee shop that has taken the blue ribbon in the Most Indifferent Counter Help category three years in a row. Though the sign said that they proudly served S'bux coffee, it was really more like they begrudgingly served S'bux coffee.
After a bit of sitting, we wandered over to Our Lady of Guadalupe church behind the plaza. I refuse to set foot in that church because of its ridiculous memorial to "the unborn," the so-called victims of abortion. The memorial consists of some cross made of tree branches hanging over a stone marker that has, if I'm remembering it correctly, some haloed, fetus-like angel etched into it. (And actually, it was interesting because Kaori and I talked about abortion last night as an offshoot of talking about birth control. We were watching CNN and there was some item about the US school that has recently started handing out birth control pills to 11- and 12-year-old girls. I explained to Kaori what it was about and that led to a discussion about how birth control pills are virtually unknown in Japan and though condoms are widely available, women don't insist on them because "they are worried--maybe their boyfriends will hate them" if they do.)
Anyway, my ethical refusal to enter the church this (or any) time was for naught as the church was locked up tight.
Instead, we had lunch--sharing chips and salsa, a green salad, and beef fajitas--at Olgilvie's on the plaza. During lunch, I had four of five glasses of water, and the same number of glasses of iced tea which caused Kaori to ask, alarmed, if more iced tea was free. In Tokyo, of course it isn't. You get your one measly ten-ounce glass of mostly ice iced tea and that's it. You want another? Then you pay another 300 yen. So Kaori thought that I might have to pay a cool $1.75 for each refill. She wondered how I knew that iced tea and coffee are refilled for free, that juice and milk usually aren't, and that soda mostly is but rarely isn't. How do you explain that to someone? Hmmmm. American free-refill culture. Similarly, she is at a loss when it comes to American tipping culture. Who do you tip? When do you tip? How much do you tip? The Japanese want some rules godammit. (I usually take a Hemingway approach to tipping--which is to tip everyone too much and then they're your friend. It's so easy to make friends when you tip.) And yesterday, after the Sky City tour, I gave the tour guide $10 in a kind of handshake gesture while I said thanks to her and Kaori brought up that little interaction later in the car and said, "You know what to do with tipping. You are so cool!"
After lunch we needed a walk so we headed off to the shops off the plaza. In one shop I bought a pocket-sized St. Rita** plaque. In another shop I got into a rather extensive conversation about anagama kilns and Martin's B-Mix clay with a potter who happened to be manning the desk at a shared gallery space. At one point, we were talking about nature as inspiration for art and I said that I thought that nature was really the only place to find inspiration. He replied that it was often dangerous when we looked for inspiration in places other than nature, like in our own minds. I'm still not sure what to make of that. I thought I understood his meaning at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Anyway, I bought one of his small pieces and Kaori bought a crocheted brooch for a friend. After that, we headed over to FX/18 (I think that's the name of the shop) where Kaori bought a couple of antique button bracelets made by a local artist.
Drawn by a window full of calaveras, we headed over to a shop that shares the small patio with Doc Martin's. Inside, the owner/artist and I had a long conversation about, oh, everything. You know how artists are. We started out talking about his paintings and ended up talking about his girlfriend's trip to Kathmandu, his military-brat childhood, people's attitudes towards free things (he had a tray of small rings for children and he told Kaori and me, "Go ahead and take a couple; they're free." I declined, but Kaori took a ring with a small green snail on it). We talked about the concept of getting away from it all and his friend who believed that the only truly free people in the US were homeless drunks who owned and owed nothing. (Which I don't believe by the way because the baggage of most homeless drunks is unbelievable. Nothing that would hinder their journey through the eye of the needle, true, but still unbelievable.) Then he told us a story about Julia Roberts, Taos's most famous resident now that no one knows who Millicent Rogers and Mabel Dodge Luhan are.
After, we went to see San Francisco de Asis Church. I've driven by the church numerous times but I'd never before pulled into the broken-down parking lot just outside of the church. I was a little surprised to see that this post-card icon was surrounded by rinky-dink shops and restaurants. And God must really want to keep me off holy ground, because again, the church was locked up tight. We did see the priest, but he didn't offer any shelter to two poor tourists.
Notes to self: Yuko/Katsu, Kazuko/Kaori, Crunch
**St. Rita, in case you don't know, is the patron saint of lost causes and women without husbands. I'm a bit fascinated by her story (not as it might have happened or as it's recorded, but as I remember it years after having read about her): She lived in Italy the 15th century. She had two young sons and a husband who beat her. She prayed to God to stop the beatings. She prayed for years. Then her sons grew up and murdered their father--and the beatings stopped. The sons were put to death for their crime and St. Rita went into a convent. There's more to the story, something about thorns and festering wounds that smelled like roses, but that's not the interesting part to me. The interesting part was the way God answered her prayer, slowly, absolutely, vengefully. It's a reminder to me that, yes, we get what we get exactly what we ask for and if you leave some part of the prayer unspoken, undecided, if you leave it up to God, then you get what you ask for in exactly the way that you deserve.
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