Upper Ranchitos Road in October

On a bright October Sunday afternoon, my friend Liana and I left our children at her house with their dads, who were perhaps a little too happily ensconced in the family room, eating barbecued chicken wings, drinking bloody Mary’s and watching football. We set out in Liana’s car, with a map and a list of addresses in hand, to go canvassing near my neighborhood on behalf of the Obama campaign in Taos. Our noble goal was to spread the word about early voting and answer questions on a range of related topics including poll locations and vote-by-mail ballots. Oban’s parting words of encouragement to us had been, “If a dog comes at you, just pick up a rock.”

Walking up to our first house together, I felt like a Jehova’s Witness. The last time I had gone door-to-door I was either selling girl scout cookies or trick-or-treating. We stopped first at this particular house, a sand colored trailer with pumpkins on the porch, because Liana wanted to follow up with a woman she had met last week while canvassing, and make sure she had finally received her vote-by-mail ballot which was late in arriving. The woman came out of her trailer waving and smiling, assured Liana that she had received her ballot, and thanked Liana warmly for coming back.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I said to Liana.

At our second house, a tiny brown adobe, the door was answered by a man. I can’t remember exactly what he looked like because I was so distracted by the hairy stomach that was hanging over his pants, protruding from beneath his purple t-shirt. We introduced ourselves, and asked if he had decided which candidate he would support in the upcoming election. Scratching his wiry, grey hair (on his head, thankfully) he told us, scowling, that he had a real problem with Joe Biden. When Liana noted that this was a fairly unusual comment, he explained that he didn’t like Joe Biden because of “all his Botox and plastic surgery.”

“So, you prefer Palin, then?” I ventured.

“She doesn’t have enough experience.”

“OK, so do you need any information on early voting?” asked Liana.

“No.”

“Alright, thanks,” we said, smiling, and made a break for the car.

We drove a little further down the road, until we found the next house on our list in a dusty barrio, no small feat in a town largely without road signs or marked house numbers. We recognized the sweet faced woman who answered the door. She works at the natural grocery store in town and invited us into our house. She shared a slew of good ideas, which included advertising free rides to the polls on the local Spanish speaking radio station. She bemoaned the fact that although she had never had the opportunity to go to school beyond tenth grade, she had managed to send her daughter to college to become a teacher and her daughter now earned less than she did. We could have stayed in her low ceilinged kitchen all day, chatting with her, her son – who hadn’t registered to vote, and her grandchild who was was playing in the living room while watching Pinky Dinky Doo. When we finally left, we asked her if she might know the location of our next listed address and she pointed around the bend.

We crossed a small bridge and ventured down an unmarked driveway that we thought might be the right one. Someone was sunbathing in the grassy yard. When we got out of the car, an older, wiry man, whose body language reminded me of the half-man, half goat satyr character from Narnia in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, pranced out to greet us and ushered us into the studio where he had been working. He was missing quite a few teeth. Lovely pieces of blown glass lined the shelves.

“They’re beautiful!” I commented.

Liana had realized long before I did that the delicate pieces of blown glass I so admired were either crystal meth or crack pipes. A smiling, scantily clad teenage girl scampered out a back door. It turned out we were not at the right address but the man certainly didn’t seem to mind at all.

“Sure I’m voting for Obama,” he said, high as a kite. “Pipe blowers for Obama!”

We thanked the satyr for his time and moved determinedly along. Our next stop was an old, two-story farmstead adobe that resembled a Tuscan villa melting into several lush acres, rimmed by orange cottonwood trees. The friendly man who lived there happened to be the president of the local ditch association (a distinction that is related to that of mayordomo, or ditch manager, of the local acequias, the community operated waterways in New Mexico used for irrigating fields.) He let us choose plump spaghetti squashes from a pile he had harvested in his field and helped Liana with her questions regarding the water rights on her recently purchased plot of land. He told us he planned on voting early.

We continued to zig zag our way around the neighborhood, talking with one woman who had already voted and who had a “God is coming and she’s pissed!” bumper sticker on the back of her pick up truck and with an elderly woman who finished dressing herself as she slowly made her way to the door with her walker. We felt sorry to have bothered her but she seemed to enjoy the company if only for a minute. She told us she was looking forward to voting on Election Day.

After trying a few more houses with no one at home, and intentionally avoiding a trailer occupied by two middle aged men who we happened to know sit on the stoop every day drinking beer out of tall boy cans in paper bags, our final stop was at windowless hovel seemingly attached to an RV from the 1960′s that sat only a couple of feet from the road. The tall, weathered, white haired man who lived there mysteriously emerged before we knocked, wearing a plaid flannel shirt, green down vest, Levi jeans and work boots. He looked suspiciously down at us. When we explained what the hell we were doing there, the man paused and twisted his mouth into a Clint Eastwood kind of smirk. There was a long silence and then he dove headfirst into a monologue about his long political involvement via the Internet on a wide range of social justice issues (in a conspiracy theorist kind of way) and concluded by saying he supposed he would vote for Obama as the lesser of two evils.

“We don’t really think he’s evil,” Liana pointed out. His face softened. By the time we left, we were all friends, and he helped guide us as we backed out onto road.

Our mission accomplished, we drove back to the Obama campaign office in town to drop off our map and paperwork. I felt like Lucy stepping back out of the wardrobe, relieved and bewildered and wondering if anyone would ever believe us.

Lucia is my goddaughter and is like a cousin to Jack and Liam. She is nearly eight years old and has the throaty voice and the husky laugh of a forty year old smoker. She is insightful, precocious, sensitive, opinionated, and occasionally, she busts out singing loud show tunes from The Sound of Music, Oliver, or Annie. And with thick brown ringlets bouncing near her round face, fair skin, and dark liquid eyes, she looks like she may as well have been plucked from a Broadway stage. As a very little girl, Lucia possessed a plate shattering scream. Her tantrums were legendary. Lately, she has acquired a stillness and a contemplative sense of humor that seem almost womanly to me, since I of course spend most of my time in the male dominated lunatic asylum that is our home.

Lucia goes to the same school as our boys. On the occasional days when I pick her up from school and bring her back to our house to play, Jack and Liam spend the time jumping and flipping on our couch incessantly like maniacs. Being two years younger, and boys, and twins who do not necessarily have their own language but certainly share their own dialect, they can barely speak English compared to Lucia. While they squeal, snort and giggle in a blur of constant motion, Lucia pulls a chair up to the kitchen table and settles in for a bowl of rice pudding, a glass of juice, and some meaningful conversation. She smiles, amused, watching the boys. Last week she surprised me when she asked, “So when can I have another sleepover, Jen?”

I pointed at the two whirling dervishes flying across the ottoman, and asked with amazement, “With them?”

I used to think the only reason Lucia liked coming to our house was because it was the closest thing she could get to a trip to Vegas. With ice-cream always waiting in the freezer, waffles and sausages for breakfast, cheetos before noon, dancing on furniture, a couple of little dudes to boss around, lots of plastic toys, videos galore, and plenty of chaos, our house seemed in her estimation to be its own little garden of Eden. Now I’m beginning to think she really might like us.

Lucia arrived for her sleepover on Saturday evening, responsibly clutching in one hand a tote bag containing her American Girl doll and an overnight bag in the other. She brought a homemade birthday card for Oban, a pretty drawing for our refrigerator and a glass jar filled with blue water and gemstones for the boys. Jack and Liam tried to impress her, Liam by donning a vampire costume complete with bloody rubber vampire teeth and Jack by strapping his Ninja swords to his back and performing a series of invented “karate” moves. I cooked Lucia’s favorite meal, spaghetti, while they played.

After a remarkably civilized dinner, the boys still trying to show off, they all watched a movie with Oban. I had struggled for almost forty minutes earlier that day in the video store trying to choose something that wouldn’t scare the B’Jesus out of Jack, who hasn’t slept for the last week. Liam, apparently in the spirit of the Halloween season, has become fascinated by the dark side as is evidenced by the tower of Dracula, myths, and monster library books piled next to his bed. I made the mistake last week of letting them both watch a short Hobbit cartoon video that Liam had also talked me into at the library, the freakiness of which managed to send Jack into one of his terror ridden bedtime spirals and kept him awake all night long. The fact that Liam is all too willing to point out goblins to Jack in their room as they lay in their beds at night has certainly not helped in resolving matters. So today I selected a DVD I suspected would be boringly benign, a Jim Hensen version of The Tortoise and the Hare.

They watched the movie without incident, ate caramel ice cream for dessert, and then Jack and Liam pulled out their sleepover pieces de resistance; transparent plastic balls in which we put their new hamsters, Tiny and Kookookutie, for their requisite hamster enrichment/torture time spent rolling themselves around on the floor. When Lucia and the boys got too hyped up and Lucia began bowling the hamster balls, with Liam wide-eyed and giggling over thrilling flashes of her underwear, we decided it was bed time. This provoked the usual displays of utter disbelief and outrage by Jack and Liam but Lucia quietly disappeared into the bathroom and emerged minutes later with pajamas on, teeth brushed and face washed. While I grew increasingly impatient and shrill with Jack and Liam’s stall tactics, from belabored book choosing to last minute toy repairs and arguing over whose turn it was for me to kiss good-night first, Lucia, of all people, remained the voice of calm and compassion.

“Can I help you guys?” she asked, sweetly.

And when, after Jack had kept me up half that night, ravaged by Tortoise and Hare phobias and a slightly sniffly nose, I emerged from my room in a dark and stormy mood, Lucia was there to comfort him.

“I used to be afraid of things like that too when I was your age, Jack,” she said.

“Really?” Jack asked hopefully, his very manliness at stake.

Yes, it was true. Lucia had been afraid of things like that. In fact, she had not so long ago been fearful of everything from the Count on Sesame Street to virtually all animated Disney movies. And it was hard to believe that this was the same Lucia who just this past summer, while at her grandmother’s house on Shelter Island, had sent Liam crying and running out of the clear water where they were happily swimming after convincing him she had seen a swarm of red jellyfish, in a way that reminded me of Liam identifying all the goblins in the room.

“ Yep. And after a week or two, I’d forget about it and I wouldn’t be scared anymore,”she added gently and knowingly. “Can I take a bath, Jen?”

Jack’s mood brightened, as did mine somehow. He took a morning bath after Lucia. The water turned the color of a swamp, since Jack is not typically a big fan of baths. Liam bathed next. I thought back to when they all could fit in a tub together. Lucia brushed her long, wet hair out, slowly and methodically, like – well, like a girl. I tucked a package of hair bands I had bought that were too small for my own ponytails but would be perfect for Lucia’s pigtails into her bag.

When her dad and baby sister arrived to pick her up, Lucia delayed her departure by playing a few rounds of Uno with Oban and the boys. When she left, I gave Lucia a big hug. With her head at my chest, all I could think of was how quickly she is growing up.

Jack and Liam had a pirates and princesses themed birthday party a couple of weeks ago at a a very magical play space in Taos called Twirl. Maybe its the novelty of it all after growing up in a household full of girls, but something about watching a bunch of boys ranging in age from three to eight, decked out in pirate regalia, commanding each other to “Man the ship!” and “Hoist the sails!” while dashing across a little wooden bridge fills me with a specific kind of joy.

Barack waves to us in Espanola. Photo by Dorie Hagler.

Last week I went to Espanola, New Mexico to hear Barack Obama speak. After dropping my boys off at kindergarten, I climbed into a minivan along with seven other Obama Mama friends from Taos. We have eighteen young children between us, the youngest of whom joined us for our adventure. We drove through the winding canyon, shimmering in autumn yellow, down to Espanola, the self proclaimed lowrider capital of the world and the town with the highest per capita heroine addiction in the nation, looking for inspiration and the best chicken tacos with guacamole in all of America.

I began volunteering at the Obama office in Taos just last week. It’s a funny little scene, complete with the requisite Taos crowd of middle aged hippies, artists, Hispanic grandmothers, pueblo kids, and ski bums already waiting for snow, with an adorable sophomore from Stanford running the joint. I doubt he had ever heard of Taos before being shipped here. And when it was announced that Obama would come to speak in Espanola, my heart welled up with the kind of ironic contentment that I have experienced only in my most New Mexican of moments. For lack of a better analogy, this event would be like seeing the pope in Fort Lauderdale – during spring break. And it would be happening only one hour’s drive away. Obamanos!

Shedding my basic black top for a ridiculously tight, cap sleeved, pink and brown Mama for Obama tee provided by my friend Dorie, I found myself looking like the thirty seven year old, wrinkled version of a pre teen Courtney Cox in Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark video. I mention this only to show how much I love Obama. And I’m not sure if it was the dry, relentless ninety degree heat that day or the aforementioned tee but I was shocked to find myself reeking of body odor within the first hour of waiting on line near the Lotaburger parking lot in Espanola. And still I wore the shirt, which again goes to show how much I love Obama.

We waited for two hours before the gates even opened, and another two inside. If someone had only mentioned that Obama was scheduled to meet with tribal leaders early that morning in Albuquerque, we would have known to sleep in and gone out for coffee. Then again, it may never occurred to me that someone as powerful as the democratic nominee for president would fall into the same time warp that everyone else does the minute they step foot in New Mexico and especially when they happen to step foot in a meeting with tribal elders. And in classic New Mexico form, following that meeting, Obama’s bus driver chose to take him up north “the scenic way.” By the time he finally arrived, my physician friend Erin had treated several people who had passed out from heat exhaustion in the crowd that had swelled to 10,000, although no one complained, because nothing ever happens on time in Espanola. And besides, the music they kept pumping through the loudspeakers was really funky and good.

The sharpshooters on the roof of the adobe church even seemed relatively relaxed. As a safety precaution, the plaza was entirely ringed by empty school buses. A single helicopter circled as black suited secret service agents dripped in the heat. As he walked out on stage, smiling widely and glowing with an electric calm, my eyes literally welled up with tears and I said a silent prayer that this man should remain safe. While clapping and clamoring for a view, the entire crowd seemed to exhale a collective sigh of relief that he had, at last, arrived.

After fumbling the name of Espanola’s mayor, prouncing it something like “Mayest” instead of Maestas, which reminded me of my original “anglo” mispronunciation of the name of the principal of the Taos Middle School where I used to teach, Reynaldo Quintana as “Mr. Quinn/tan/a” instead of “Mr. Keen/tah/nah,” Obama recovered skilfully. Bill Richardson, who had delivered a rousing introduction, seemed to be willing him through it as he sat nearby, arms folded across is chest, wearing a black shirt with a traditional bolo tie. Obama spoke primarily about the economy, following the stock market’s dramatic plunge the day before. And while it felt to me that Wall Street’s cavernous towers were entire light years and galaxies away from the Espanola plaza that day, the real message that was delivered was an unspoken one, that of calm, thoughtful, honest and gifted leadership. Here was a genuinely warm and extraordinarily intelligent human being, speaking not in condescending sound bites to a rural community but in forthright, respectful, sensible, and graceful language. Bottom line; I trusted him. In fact, the dorky middle schooler in me who played the bells in the marching band wearing a green and yellow polyester suit on equally hot and sweltering days decades ago trusted him. And even more importantly, though I would not wish the laundry list of profound problems the next president will inherit on my worst enemy, I would entrust the futures of our collective eighteen children to him.

We left the rally sun burned and dehydrated, stopping at Dairy Queen for cokes and at a roadside shack called Sugars in the riverside town of Embudo for chile cheese fries that never materialized because they ran out of food. As governor of territorial New Mexico Lew Wallace said back in the 1880′s, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.” I arrived home hours late, tired, hungry and undeniably grateful for my day’s filling slice of American pie. Si se puede! Viva Obama!

I thought she had hit bottom. There, in the semi-circled driveway in front of the retirement community’s pool and recreation center sat my mother’s red 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, the windows defiantly buzzing up and down, up and down, accompanied by the cacophony of the blaring car alarm. My mother, wearing a dripping wet bathing suit, flip flops and cover-up, frantically unlocked and locked the car with her keys, then sat down in the passenger seat and attempted to start the ignition, then got out and unlocked and locked the car again, in a seemingly endless cycle. My ninety-five year old grandmother sat, dumbfounded, in her portable wheelchair on the sidewalk next to the Jetta holding a tall pile of damp pool towels on her lap.

I watched from a safe distance of about half a football field. My sons and I sat at the far edge of the parking lot, near our car, in the shade of a sheltering maple tree as I showed them how to split open the seed pods to reveal the gooey centers and stick them to their noses. I could tell it might be a while and I wanted to distract them, but the noise and the commotion coming from my mother’s car barely caught their attention. At four years old, they were already seasoned veterans when it came to grandma’s chaotic car alarm incidents.

I knew better than to get involved. My mom prized her unique personal relationship with the Jetta, and experience had taught me not to interfere. “She just thinks someone’s trying to steal her!” she would insist whenever I attempted to convince my mom that this was not the way car alarms were designed to operate, usually after having experienced a nerve wracking and embarrassing incident with the alarm myself.

“Why does she think someone’s tying to steal her?” would be my inevitable follow up question.

“Because you buzzed the windows down,” she would explain impatiently, as if it were obvious that one should never open the windows of a car. “Or did you unlock the trunk?”

Generally, things miraculously resolved by the time we had attracted a small crowd of onlookers, and although various theories arose after each incident, no one in the family was ever was quite certain what would have ultimately caused the alarm to stop. This time, however, was different. When it seemed the typical alarm duration had passed without sign of resolution, I reluctantly began walking over to the scene to see if I could somehow help. I was halfway there when the alarm suddenly ceased and my mom, now pushing my grandmother in her wheelchair at a relatively high rate of speed in my direction, started waving me off. My grandmother shouted, “Stay with the boys!” with a tinge of desperation in her voice.

“We can’t get back in the car because the little red light is blinking,” my mom yelled.

This meant trouble. With the Jetta we had learned that if ever the tiny light in the driver’s side door were lit, which seemed to happen haphazardly, it meant there was virtually no chance of entering the automobile. The alarm would certainly go off, and the car would go into some sort of impenetrable lock down mode, unable to start. In the meantime, the Jetta was parked in a drop off and loading zone.

“Do you have your triple A card?” I shouted.

“No, it’s in my purse.”

“Where’s your purse?”

“In the trunk.”

We were in for it.

Unable to shove the wheelchair into the trunk of my car or to squeeze it between my boys’ car seats, we abandoned it on the lawn, much to my grandmother’s chagrin, while my mother drove my grandmother back to her condominium, helped her inside, then circled back to retrieve it and deliver it. On our way back to attempt to retrieve the Jetta, I said to my mom, “Well, what I would suggest is trying to unlock the car, then unlock it again quickly…”

My husband swore that this double unlock technique was the secret to de-alarming the car when I had called him two weeks earlier from the beach, while my mother, my boys and I were last trapped outside of the alarmed Jetta. Before trying it, we went swimming again and licked drippy Superman ice-pops from the ice- cream truck and by the time we returned to the car,with stained lips and sandy towels, the little red light had disappeared.

“I did that already,” my mom said, shooting me a look that made me realize that she too was going into lock down mode. When we returned to the Jetta this time, the little red light was still blinking and my mother was forced to charm her way through a tricky conversation with the elderly director of the retirement community, promising to have a mechanic come and repair it so that the car could me moved.

“Well at least it will be fixed once and for all,” I said hopefully to my mom. My sisters and I had tried countless times before to convince my mom to allow us to have the car’s alarm permanently disconnected, but she had resisted.

My mother called Triple A from home, explained in a business like tone that her card was in the trunk and went back to meet the mechanic who unplugged the car battery to turn off the alarm, then plugged the battery back in again. The car was technically fine, and my mother was able to get in it and to drive it back home and promised all of us that she would bring it to the dealership the following day to have the alarm disabled.

“Either that or please drop it off in Central Islip and we’ll just hope it gets stolen,” my sister added.

Of course, no one could possibly steal this car. To be fair, my mother had replaced the Jetta a couple of years ago. She kept it only to drive while my sons, my husband and I visited from New Mexico. She generously loaned us her Volvo sedan because it was newer and had airbags and she felt it was safer to drive with the boys. And yet, it was beginning to dawn on me that the Jetta remained a kindred spirit to my mother. She never personified the Volvo in the same way she did the Jetta by calling it “she” or by attributing powers of thought to it. Loyal, economical, bright, cute, comfortable and stubbornly protective, the Jetta has at different times driven her, her husband, her elderly parents, adult daughters, son-in-law and young grandsons, a dog and two cats safely through rain, sleet and snow – to airports, doctors offices and train stations. And with kayak racks on the top of it, and air conditioning that comes on strong and fast, it has always been a great beach car in the summer, despite the fact that we’re not allowed to open the windows.

It has been a few weeks now since our latest incident and my mother has not taken the Jetta to have the alarm repaired or removed. Perhaps my mom simply cannot bare to strip her comrade Jetta of its only, albeit dysfunctional, defense mechanism. I must admit that an overactive alarm may really be a small price to pay for the distance she has carried us.