Greetings From Grants, New Mexico & Pasco, Washington Trifecta---Another Trip To The Near East & Richard (Dick) Hirschberg And "Fish" Dead In 2018---I just Found Out

Hello from the town I spent my very eventful 7th grade year.  It was all kinda crazy, my father suddenly deciding to end our intended immigration to Canada, moving us many thousands miles south to this "rough and tumble" Mexican town located on then Route 66.  Tomorrow I intend on nosing about since this is my first time back since 1967.  A guy in a local store says it has changed much since then but I don't think so, the feel of this place even now still a "broken, jagged razor preparing to cut your throat."  But driving out of town you will find Mount Taylor, the highest peak in the state awaiting your awe and pleasure. 

Part of my mission during this two week escape from all things taxi is bringing my late brother Steve's ashes for burial in the cemetery above the house in San Lorenzo.  A poignant thought driving here from Albuquerque was that I was returning Steve to Grants one last time,  Steve visiting us here when on leave from the US Army, having been caught up by the Selective Service System a few months earlier.  After his leave, Steve shipped off to West Germany, an experience he never recovered from.  Hate to think if my brother, he of the Army sniper metal, had been sent to South Vietnam and that outcome.   My brother was a great shot, bringing home many a duck and goose during his one year stay with us in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta.  Me,  our second year there I quit the 6th grade and instead read book after book, the school library my substitute teacher.  

Anyway, memories, memories, too many memories bringing me back to the madness that was my childhood and all the harm done to me and my three siblings.  Did my mother want to be in Grants?  No but where?  Probably back with her family in Toledo, Ohio, having returned in 1957 but leaving a short two years later.  Where did we go after that?  Egnar, Colorado in the beautiful but barren juniper highlands in the Four Corners region, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meeting together in an unusual territorial, elevated country kiss. 

Once, Twice, Three Times Pasco

This time last Saturday I was returning from yet another Hopelink fare to Pasco, Washington, making it the third time and twice recently I've had the good fortune to go there.  A 215 mile drive taking I- 90, I-82 then I-182, its a fast 3 hour drive.  

Coming back, I took a state highway directly north through sagebrush steppe, an isolated road traversing the desolate high desert.  The highlight of the entire journey was stopping at a rest stop adjacent to the mighty Columbia, poking my way through a barbed wire fence and encountering three deer with the biggest ears down by the riverside.  They didn't like me but I liked them, apologizing for my intrusion. 

I got $624.90 for my effort but someone the same week had a $793.00 Hopelink, which is astonishing though wonderful for the driver getting such a big fare.  I can't remember this many large fares coming through seemingly daily, Hopelink and the State of Washington on some kind of mad spending spree.  Keep it going, is all I can and will say.  

Dick & Fish, RIP

Tuesday morning I was told that both of them left us for Taxi Heaven sometime in 2018.  Those of us long in the taxi tooth knew both of them,  Dick a longtime multiple cab owner, and Fish part of the  BYG Co-op office hierarchy. What was Fish's real name?  I was never told.  They were great characters, total taxi and forever to be missed by all who came to know them.  A belated "so long guys, its been good to know ya!" 

Poem

Waking Up to John Ashbery

How can I continue nothing, nothing?

How can I say I am something when I am not?

Outside my window glitters Bitter Lake, tannic acid once the flavor 

of the day---Baskin-Robbins meeting Pacific Northwest sawmill.

And while seeming trivial, it isn't this all everything twenty-first century 

tumbling down upon my head eleven oh two on an April eighth morning

knowing how necessary it is to not waste  minutes never to be retrieved 

unless I stop, stand, shout---this can't be my final statement disappearing 

down the shower drain!?

_________________________________________________________

note: this double spacing is not my doing but my computer software saying, "hey you, you writing a poem? well, this is how you are going to do it, ha ha ha!"   My computer is haunted, or more to the truth, I don't know how to make the software behave. 

Want to really know what the Holocaust was like?

Read the book I am in the middle of, "The Ravine--A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed," by Wendy Lower, published 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

The detail is sickening. Awful. Terrible. Tragic. A sin against all humanity!