Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 30

The third event on the four-days, four-different-towns, four events blitz, was at Books, Etc. in Ruidoso, a great little bookstore on the main street of this tourist mecca. They even have a store cat, Samantha, who sat on my table and helped me sell books. I was also interviewed by Blog Interviewer today because my daily blogs on the Pot Thief Tour caught their attention. You can read the interview at: http://bloginterviewer.com/books/the-pot-thief-mike-orenduff

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 29

Today was the second event in a four-days, four-different-towns, four events blitz, the second one of this year’s tour. On Thursday I gave a talk to the Book Club at the Mission Del Paso Campus of El Paso Community College. Today I was at Imaginary Books in Cloudcroft. Despite the name, the books there are real. Cloudcroft is 9,000 feet above sea level. Climbing the steps to the second floor bookstore winded me. In addition to the book signing, I did a talk for Boy Scouts working on their reading merit badges. I’m way to old to do this many event back-to-back, but I enjoyed them too much to stop.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 28

I gave a talk to the Book Club at the Mission Del Paso Campus of El Paso Community College yesterday. EPCC has campuses all over El Paso County, and Mission Del Paso is the newest one, located in the growing town of Socorro. They had selected The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy as their book last month and were full of questions about it. After they realized the questions had gone on for two hours, they apologized, pointing out that their next book is Anna Karenina, and they won’t have anyone to answer questions about it. The most famous quote from Tolstoy’s work is probably the first sentence: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Another one I like is, “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”

Someone from the IT department had set up a PowerPoint presentation that ran automatically on a projection screen in the in the background. It had pictures from my website, of the books, and of some of the locations mentioned in the books. At one point I was asked where I was going next, and before I could remember, the screen had my next three events listed on it!

The Campus Dean, Santiago Rodriquez, and Lesley Pullen, the Librarian who heads the book club, were great hosts, providing all the attendees with a Chinese food lunch of hot and sour soup, roasted chicken, noodles, and an eggplant and basil stir-fry to die for. Even Lai liked it, and she usually hates Chinese food from restaurants.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 27

I discovered an indie bookstore today called The Bookery. It’s in Socorro on the El Paso Mission Trail and housed in the Casa Ortiz, an old adobe that has an historical marker explaining that the building is perhaps 400 years old and was occupied by the Ortiz family all the way up until 1947. The Bookery carries only books with an El Paso or Southwestern theme and educational books for children. The owner, Margaret Barber, is a feisty woman in her seventies who thinks the public schools are failing, and she has made it her mission to turn them around. She’s enlisted the help of teachers and staff who believe in her cause, and I think she is making a difference. Many classes come to her store on field trips. They see puppet shows, hear readings, and get to spend time with books and educational toys. Margaret does well by doing good, selling supplies and books to the schools. The rest of her stock – books on El Paso and the Southwest – are a hobby because there aren’t many readers in the Lower Valley. Still, she bought six of my books, and I like having them on those dusty, ramshackle shelves above which you can see the handmade clay roof tiles resting on cedras that were hewn four centuries ago.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 26

One of the most oft-quoted phrases in the English language is “You can’t go home again,” the title of a book by Thomas Wolfe. The protagonist is George Webber, who is basking in the success of a novel about his hometown until he returns home to discover that his family and friends are outraged by the way he has portrayed them to the world. What a lot of people forget about that book is that Webber does in fact eventually go home after initially fleeing his home town and even his country to search for his own identity.

Of course the home he returns to is different because he is different, so I have always seen the phrase as merely a restatement of the aphorism of Heraclitus that “You can't step twice into the same river.” It isn’t that you can’t return your foot to the water, it’s that in the time it takes you to do so, the river has changed, new waters have flowed in.

A torrent of new water has flowed into El Paso since I left in the sixties. It’s an inapt metaphor, of course, because El Paso is in the desert. Indeed, one of its prime challenges is supplying water to the nearly one million people who now live here.

I loved growing up here. The barren rock mountain that looms over the city seemed like the center of existence from which everything else spread out. The Rio Grande snaked along the mountain’s foot, dividing two countries. From the aptly named Scenic Drive, you could see a hundred miles into Mexico. Further west than Denver, slightly south of the Trinity Site, and the largest bilingual border town in the world, El Paso seemed to me a special place. Perhaps all children see their home towns as unique. Perhaps they all are.

I can’t go home to El Paso for the same reason that Heraclitus could not step twice into the same river. Too much that is new has flowed in. Too much that was familiar has flowed away.