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I went to Santa Fe to see some friends last week and it dawned on me that I'm a Northern guy with a keen sense of my insignificance who aims to be inconspicuous and that many Northerners go to Santa Fe to be picturesque. I saw grown men dressed up as desperadoes, wearing sombreros, black shirts with silver buttons, gaudy cowboy boots. I left that look behind when I turned twelve, the age at which you start to realize that work and competence are what give you your identity, not your outfit.
G od designed Minnesota so we wouldn't be distracted by mountains and could concentrate on getting the work done, cultivating the corn, picking potatoes. You don't wear reds, yellows, and oranges, it would only attract blackbirds.
I saw people in Santa Fe wearing loose garments, the accoutrements of mysticism, scarves and jewelry and insignia that say, I am me, unique, incomparable, the sort of stuff that was worn by twentyish folk back in the Seventies.
I am old enough to remember hippies. I once watched Allen Ginsberg chanting what sounded like English while playing mysterious chords on a harmonium to a hundred people listening intently as wisps of incense drifted around the room. A nice Jewish boy from New Jersey who achieved fame for being beyond comprehension. I considered the option of incomprehensibility but gave it up when I took a wife and we had a child. And I found that the everyday world of ordinary people is so incredibly interesting that to separate oneself from it seems ridiculous.
But that's what I saw in Santa Fe, people who probably once held down good jobs in management, investment banking, condo construction, and could then retire financially secure, to become painters. Humidity is low in the Southwest so the paint dries faster. The town is full of galleries, and not all of the art is of steer skulls and sunsets but a great deal is and some is Post-Pictorial Pueblo, giant canvases of desert landscape, studies in brown, tan, bronze, beige, burnt sienna, dust, and dusky.
Georgia O'Keeffe painted here, an artist who painted leaves that she intended to be seen as vaginas. In Minnesota, where trees are plentiful, you might collect leaves in scrapbooks but you would not see them as genitalia and you would avoid people who do. You wouldn't want them to live next door and invite you over to look at large canvases of a suggestive nature. If you quit your day job in Bismarck or Kansas City and took up painting cow skulls and sunsets, they would laugh you out of town, but in Santa Fe you'd fit right in. Instead of blizzards you'd deal with lizards, but high-heeled cowboy boots would deal with that.
My friends who moved there said they were seeking a slower laid-back way of life, which I see as a tragic mistake but they didn't ask me. Slow and laid-back comes naturally as you enter your Seventies and the goal should be a brisk and upright lifestyle. Laid-back will come inevitably, as you develop back problems, and you may be unable to pull yourself back into a sitting position and then you will be shipped to a pueblo for the prostrate.
I'm all in favor of freedom for the elderly and discipline for the young. The young need to become very good at work in a field where it's clear who is and who is not. Health care, for example, is not recreational. Teaching, also. There are hundreds of others. Some may seem lowly, such as plumbing, but when a family's toilet system goes crazy, the plumber's status suddenly rises above that of every artist in town, every poet.
I walked into an Apple store this week with a laptop with a bad power connection and a few strides into the store I found myself in the hands of intense competence by polite young men who took an old man from the Underwood era and spoke to him in comprehensible English and solved the problem in about twelve minutes and charged me $19. I put a hand on my man's shoulder and said, "I'm a writer, I have a book manuscript in there, I walked in with visions of disaster and I am grateful for your competence and professionalism at a time when the country is on the skids, and I thank you wholeheartedly." We shook hands. He made my day. We need more of him.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.