City different cowboys
It’s a soft-serve-snow afternoon. Yesterday—a blizzard. Today—with our brilliant Santa Fe sunshine, it's like the corner Häagen-Dazs melted down (caramel butter pecan?) in the streets.
A silver timbre fills the air as out-of-state SUVs splash through the potholes of The City Different. They cruise around the drenched plaza, passengers’ noses pressed against tinted windows, and I have to dash between them to get to where I’m going. This is a tourist town after all.
Water runs down the brown adobe shop walls in rivulets. The high desert air is momentarily sweet and wet, but will cast off any remnant of moisture quickly, like my pretty blue-heeler dog after a bath.
An elderly woman on the corner is giving her husband detailed, blow-by-blow directions on how to take a photo of the cathedral that is one of the landmarks on the plaza. The one with the unfinished spires. He’s wielding the expensive looking digital camera like he means business. “Don’t worry about the people. Or the cars,” his wife is saying, pointing randomly at people, cars, trucks. “I can get rid of them.”
I hope she’s talking about using Photoshop.
I dodge a Hummer chock full of Texans, jump a puddle, and land on the sidewalk outside the La Fonda Hotel. Get slowed down by a family strolling five abreast. Two little boys, they must be about my son’s age (8), lead the group. They are dressed from shoulder to toe in Land’s End wear for kids.
But on top of their heads, they are sporting brand spanking new, wide brimmed, black felt cowboy hats, complete with fancy braided bands. Their red and blue preppie down jackets are wide open, their hands are shoved deep into the pockets of their adjustable waist, relaxed-fit jeans, and they are amblin’, strollin’, struttin’ down the sidewalk like little banty roosters. Two sixty-pound Marlboro men from upstate New York. Those boys are pretty proud of their new cowboy hats.
I cruise around them as one of the moms stops to admire a fringe leather jacket in a shop window. I smile at the little boys as I zoom past. Resist the urge to say, "Howdy pardners!"
It's Santa Fe, and everyone’s a cowboy this afternoon.
Flickr photos: mountain mike; mountain mike
