By Peter Anderson
Dear Matt:
Sorry I missed your wedding. The East Coast seems further away than it used to. And I’m sorry I haven’t met your honey. Now your little boy is two maybe three and soon you will be driving him to school. When you were here, I was carrying Rosalea up the trail.
She is twelve now, Caroline is seven, and we are still here on the side of the mountain. If it weren’t for a stop sign and a slight rise in the grade once we get down to the valley floor, I could almost roll the girls out to school in neutral. They humor me on our morning rides when I play them my classics—no not make’em smart Mozart, but Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland, 1968. Today, the intro to Gypsy Eyes, Mitch Mitchell laying down his base drum top hat groove – boomchazz, boomchazz, boomchazz, boomchazz. Jimi slides down the neck of his Stratocaster – can you hear it? – as we are losing altitude.
It’s almost three hundred feet down to the flats. Sometimes that means moving out of cloud into clear, sometimes out of clear into cloud. Today light rays bend through the layers of our winter inversion and San Antonio Peak appears to hover above the ground some 100 miles to our south. Out on the valley floor, after we hit the county road straightaway, an elk herd morphs like mercury, one way then another, until a big cow takes the lead and turns them west. Then a raven swoops down in front of us and wings away with fresh roadkill. Meanwhile, Rosalea rides shotgun, covering Jimi’s riff on her air guitar – jiggajiggabingbingchackalack – while Caroline covers the backbeat in the backseat – boomchazz, boomchazz, boomchazz, boomchazz.
We pass the windshagged whole earth flag and come to a stop in the Charter School parking lot. Some other parents and kids glance over our way and all of a sudden I feel very loud. Jiggajiggabingbingchackalack. I turn Jimi down. “Where’s the love? ” I say as we unload and we hug. And then the girls walk off toward the windswept doublewides that serve as their classrooms here.
As I pull out of the parking lot, Jimi’s still singing I love you gypsy eyes … I love you gypsy eyes and I am wondering if my two little gypsies will end up as far away from their starting point as I did from mine in the northeast. I can hope that the gravity of this good place will rein in their someday orbits a little closer to home, but the truth is, Matt, I have given them the wandering gene. My people have been restless for a few generations now. We rarely die where we grow up. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Still. I hope the wandering gene is recessive this time around. Or maybe Grace’s influence – her clan almost seventy years on the same piece of ground near Mancos – will hold sway.
Who knows? Anyhow, I hope you and your family are doing well on the other end of the road. Keep in touch. Yer pal, Pete.
