Traveling to New Mexico in a Chevy sedan, three adults, two teenagers, and two children, in the middle of summer, no air conditioning, must have been quite a trip. Daddy had to drive all the way. The year was 1952. I recall the purpose of the trip, the only significant road trip and therefore only official vacation our family ever took, was to deliver Mamaw Hollis to Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha’s in Santa Fe for one of Mamaw’s regular summer visits. My sister Sue, who would have been 10 in the summer of 1952, says that we also delivered our cousin Jimmy, Uncle Pat’s middle son, who had been visiting in Texas. Sue remembers that Jimmy loved being in Texas, especially getting to be around the cattle that our Grandma Fuchs and her son Frank, always Uncle Bubba to us, raised on 80 acres near our home northwest of Houston. Cows were ordinary for us and had always been a part of life for our mother, Tena Elizabeth Fuchs Hollis. At the time of this summer trip, Jimmy, whose looks replicated our daddy’s as a young man, must have been about 16, on the brink of manhood in those days. Our oldest sister Joan would have been approaching 14, and I, just shy of my ninth birthday.
I vaguely recall only two stops along the way, one in Sweetwater, where we ate bread from the wrapper, but so fresh that it was still warm, and the other to take pictures with the mule statue in Muleshoe. Our journey had begun at two in the morning, an attempt to escape some of the Texas heat.
My memory of that trip out here long ago is sketchy. Our cousin Byron, Uncle Pat’s youngest son, was away at summer camp, somewhere up in the Pecos Wilderness near Holy Ghost Canyon. The oldest brother, Donald, was already in college at the University of New Mexico.
We spent the night in the canyon, I guess in our cars. The water in the nearby stream was clear and cold, and we wore our denim jackets. Sue had gotten her ears pierced by Aunt Martha’s friend Tony in the back of Uncle Pat’s drugstore. They were sore, and rubbing them with icy water from the stream was soothing. Somewhere there are photographs of our families at this pristine place, a less complicated time perhaps. Maybe I’ll try to find them when I’m back in Texas for a short time this fall. Church was a part of Byron’s camp experience, so we went to Mass. Innocent East Texas Baptists, with little church experience, we were mystified by the liturgy. Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha had joined the Catholic Church in New Mexico. It was sort of what you did back then, I guess. After church there was a picnic, and the priest was “tooted”. At least, that’s what my aunt and uncle observed to Mother and Daddy.
Back in Aunt Martha’s Santa Fe kitchen, we were introduced to blue corn masa, but I remember only our disbelief that she would serve us mildewed tortillas. As an adult, I have made a point to indulge frequently in cheese enchiladas with green chilies on blue corn tortillas on my visits to northern New Mexico. From the counter of that same kitchen the Pat Hollis family’s standard poodle, Sissy, stole a roast that our uncle had cooked on the outdoor grill. This could have never happened in our Texas home where dogs indoors, well, that just didn’t happen.
After we had been in Santa Fe only a day or so, Sue recalls our mother calling her own mother in Texas to let her know that we would be heading back home in the next couple of days. When Grandma Fuchs died 30 years later, the unfailing commitment of daughter to mother was still firmly in place.
Fifty-five years have passed since our family visited here. After many vacation experiences in northern New Mexico as an adult, I’ve rented a small apartment in Santa Fe, telling anyone who asks that I’m giving this place a test drive for the next year.
So many changes since 1952. My sisters and I grew up and got old. At the time of our New Mexico vacation, our daddy, Russell Hollis, would have been 41 and Mother 35. The youngest child in our family, I am older than either of my grandmothers was in 1952. Jimmy, who shouldn’t have died so young, lost a long battle with cancer when he was only 55. So many changes. Between March 21, 1981, when Daddy died on the first day of spring, and September 1983, when we buried our grandmothers one week apart, both of Daddy’s brothers, Pat and Ray, died as well. Uncle Bubba died in 1989, Aunt Martha in 2005. And the event of all events, Mother died on February 1st of this year.
Joan, who was close to Jimmy growing up, has asked several times since I’ve been in Santa Fe, “Have you gotten in touch with Amelia (Jimmy’s widow) yet?” As the saying goes, I wouldn’t know Amelia if she walked in the door. There is no connection. Now remarried, Amelia still owns the home she and Jimmy built, only a few blocks from my apartment. The listing in the phone book remains James and Amelia Hollis. Their children, both pushing 50 now, were never part of our Texas family experience. Fifteen years ago, shortly before Jimmy died, I was in Santa Fe over Thanksgiving with friends. It had been at least 25 years since I had seen Jimmy, and now he lay too weak for me to visit him. When I called to say hello, his daughter answered the phone. “Is this Karen,” I asked. “Yes.” “Karen this is Harold Hollis, your dad’s cousin from Texas. Do you remember me?” “No.” Amelia takes the phone and tells me that Jimmy is having a bad day. I remember Jimmy in the prime of young manhood, and because he looked so much like Daddy, I would like to see some pictures of him.
We’re Texans for many generations. Mother’s German family arrived at Galveston in 1866 and settled northwest of Houston. Daddy’s family migrated from Alabama to East Texas in the late 19th century, but they were forced to seek better opportunities in Houston during the depression. After living many years in Santa Fe, Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha, along with their youngest son Byron, settled in Arizona. I heard that the winters here were too hard on Aunt Martha’s lungs. She, like the three Hollis brothers, smoked for many years. Mesa, Arizona is many miles away from the Gulf Coast of Texas that our families have called home since shortly after the Civil War. Aunt Martha, born and raised in Galveston, met Uncle Pat while he was apprenticing in Galveston to become a pharmacist. It was his budding career that led him to relocate his family to New Mexico in the late 1940s.
Our family, especially Mother and Daddy, are never far from my mind. Strangely, there’s some kind of connection here, even though I haven’t figured it out yet. As a recent college graduate, in 1967 I visited Santa Fe for the first time since 1952. Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha had moved up in the world. They had built a home with an unobstructed view of the mountains. He was a successful pharmacist with his own store for many years and serving his second term as mayor of Santa Fe. So taken by the experience, I interviewed for a teaching position with the assistant principal of the high school. Uncle Pat was impressed by the maturity I exhibited as I considered the possibility of moving here. As it turns out, I didn’t have the courage to break the tie with my mother, the same one that led her to call Grandma Fuchs in 1952 to let her know that we would be coming home in next couple of days.
Two summers ago, as I was preparing to make my first trip to New Mexico in six years, and my first road trip out here since 1952, Mother worried about my safety. There was no logical reason for her to be concerned. She was a worrier, constantly borrowing trouble from tomorrow. She taught me well. At that point Mother had already been on hospice care for three years, although she continued to thrive somewhat, in spite of a very compromising heart condition. As we set in the den of her home on the same 200 acres where I have made a home out of the two-story barn, I pleaded, “Mother, just be happy for me. I’ve worked my butt off getting ready to go on this trip. Besides, if I had taken that teaching job in 1967, I might be living in New Mexico now.” “That’s right, Joan contributed, “I remember. Daddy was all for it and Mother clipped your wings.”
Without a plan, really, while visiting New Mexico earlier this summer, I casually checked the papers for an apartment. Money is always a factor, but I had a notion of how I could swing it. When this casita turned up, I immediately started crabbing backward. I just couldn’t do it. At first I didn’t want to return the voice mail to Anna, who owns the place. I knew that I had been selected from seven applicants. Although a friend encouraged me, I ended up driving 250 miles before stopping at an Office Depot in Clovis to receive the lease agreement by fax and return it. Then I drove 450 miles, within 30 minutes of my home in Texas, before I stopped to mail the deposit on this place. Finally, I called Anna to say “the check is in the mail….no, really.” Anna’s reply, “Welcome home.”
It’s August, and I’ve been here three weeks. I have a library card and a senior citizen card. I know more than one way to get to my apartment. Walking to the Plaza is becoming ordinary. I’ve found an Episcopal Church, several Laundromats, feel like a regular at Trader Joe’s grocery, and Eric, the owner of Santa Fe Baking Company, greets me by name. After I had been here a few days, he finally asked one morning, “what’s your name?!” “What’s your name?!” I challenged with a smile. “Eric…Harold…” hand shake. I’ve had my first prescriptions filled at Walgreen’s, visited the farmer’s market twice weekly, opened a checking account, and cut the crap out of my finger while slicing an onion.
I’m told that the weather has been unseasonably warm, highs in the upper 80s and lows at night in the 50s. It sure beats the hell out of our Texas dog days of summer. Air conditioning is uncommon in New Mexico homes. Our Texas bodies are spoiled. The attic fans of the 50s that we all knew don’t serve us so well anymore.
This past Sunday I called Sue as I headed out after church, in search of Holy Ghost Canyon. As I exited I-25 onto Highway 50 for Pecos, the temperature on the truck read 80 degrees. By the time I made the 10-mile drive to Pecos, the temp had dropped to 69. I headed up Highway 63 North in the rain and watched the temp drop, finally to 51 when I had reached Holy Ghost Campground. Two hours later, when I reached I-25, the temp was at 53. Back in Santa Fe the afternoon remained blissfully cool.
These mornings I delight in looking at the thermometer on my truck when I head to Santa Fe Baking Company around 6:30, holding my mouth just right, and smiling triumphantly when the reading shows 58 degrees. Within the adobe walls of my casita, a 10-minute walk from the Plaza, the window and door are open, the ceiling fans are whirring, and outside the sparrows are arguing with the wind chimes. Welcome home, indeed.
Letting Go
R. Harold Hollis, August 27, 2007 (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
I vaguely recall only two stops along the way, one in Sweetwater, where we ate bread from the wrapper, but so fresh that it was still warm, and the other to take pictures with the mule statue in Muleshoe. Our journey had begun at two in the morning, an attempt to escape some of the Texas heat.
My memory of that trip out here long ago is sketchy. Our cousin Byron, Uncle Pat’s youngest son, was away at summer camp, somewhere up in the Pecos Wilderness near Holy Ghost Canyon. The oldest brother, Donald, was already in college at the University of New Mexico.
We spent the night in the canyon, I guess in our cars. The water in the nearby stream was clear and cold, and we wore our denim jackets. Sue had gotten her ears pierced by Aunt Martha’s friend Tony in the back of Uncle Pat’s drugstore. They were sore, and rubbing them with icy water from the stream was soothing. Somewhere there are photographs of our families at this pristine place, a less complicated time perhaps. Maybe I’ll try to find them when I’m back in Texas for a short time this fall. Church was a part of Byron’s camp experience, so we went to Mass. Innocent East Texas Baptists, with little church experience, we were mystified by the liturgy. Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha had joined the Catholic Church in New Mexico. It was sort of what you did back then, I guess. After church there was a picnic, and the priest was “tooted”. At least, that’s what my aunt and uncle observed to Mother and Daddy.
Back in Aunt Martha’s Santa Fe kitchen, we were introduced to blue corn masa, but I remember only our disbelief that she would serve us mildewed tortillas. As an adult, I have made a point to indulge frequently in cheese enchiladas with green chilies on blue corn tortillas on my visits to northern New Mexico. From the counter of that same kitchen the Pat Hollis family’s standard poodle, Sissy, stole a roast that our uncle had cooked on the outdoor grill. This could have never happened in our Texas home where dogs indoors, well, that just didn’t happen.
After we had been in Santa Fe only a day or so, Sue recalls our mother calling her own mother in Texas to let her know that we would be heading back home in the next couple of days. When Grandma Fuchs died 30 years later, the unfailing commitment of daughter to mother was still firmly in place.
Fifty-five years have passed since our family visited here. After many vacation experiences in northern New Mexico as an adult, I’ve rented a small apartment in Santa Fe, telling anyone who asks that I’m giving this place a test drive for the next year.
So many changes since 1952. My sisters and I grew up and got old. At the time of our New Mexico vacation, our daddy, Russell Hollis, would have been 41 and Mother 35. The youngest child in our family, I am older than either of my grandmothers was in 1952. Jimmy, who shouldn’t have died so young, lost a long battle with cancer when he was only 55. So many changes. Between March 21, 1981, when Daddy died on the first day of spring, and September 1983, when we buried our grandmothers one week apart, both of Daddy’s brothers, Pat and Ray, died as well. Uncle Bubba died in 1989, Aunt Martha in 2005. And the event of all events, Mother died on February 1st of this year.
Joan, who was close to Jimmy growing up, has asked several times since I’ve been in Santa Fe, “Have you gotten in touch with Amelia (Jimmy’s widow) yet?” As the saying goes, I wouldn’t know Amelia if she walked in the door. There is no connection. Now remarried, Amelia still owns the home she and Jimmy built, only a few blocks from my apartment. The listing in the phone book remains James and Amelia Hollis. Their children, both pushing 50 now, were never part of our Texas family experience. Fifteen years ago, shortly before Jimmy died, I was in Santa Fe over Thanksgiving with friends. It had been at least 25 years since I had seen Jimmy, and now he lay too weak for me to visit him. When I called to say hello, his daughter answered the phone. “Is this Karen,” I asked. “Yes.” “Karen this is Harold Hollis, your dad’s cousin from Texas. Do you remember me?” “No.” Amelia takes the phone and tells me that Jimmy is having a bad day. I remember Jimmy in the prime of young manhood, and because he looked so much like Daddy, I would like to see some pictures of him.
We’re Texans for many generations. Mother’s German family arrived at Galveston in 1866 and settled northwest of Houston. Daddy’s family migrated from Alabama to East Texas in the late 19th century, but they were forced to seek better opportunities in Houston during the depression. After living many years in Santa Fe, Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha, along with their youngest son Byron, settled in Arizona. I heard that the winters here were too hard on Aunt Martha’s lungs. She, like the three Hollis brothers, smoked for many years. Mesa, Arizona is many miles away from the Gulf Coast of Texas that our families have called home since shortly after the Civil War. Aunt Martha, born and raised in Galveston, met Uncle Pat while he was apprenticing in Galveston to become a pharmacist. It was his budding career that led him to relocate his family to New Mexico in the late 1940s.
Our family, especially Mother and Daddy, are never far from my mind. Strangely, there’s some kind of connection here, even though I haven’t figured it out yet. As a recent college graduate, in 1967 I visited Santa Fe for the first time since 1952. Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha had moved up in the world. They had built a home with an unobstructed view of the mountains. He was a successful pharmacist with his own store for many years and serving his second term as mayor of Santa Fe. So taken by the experience, I interviewed for a teaching position with the assistant principal of the high school. Uncle Pat was impressed by the maturity I exhibited as I considered the possibility of moving here. As it turns out, I didn’t have the courage to break the tie with my mother, the same one that led her to call Grandma Fuchs in 1952 to let her know that we would be coming home in next couple of days.
Two summers ago, as I was preparing to make my first trip to New Mexico in six years, and my first road trip out here since 1952, Mother worried about my safety. There was no logical reason for her to be concerned. She was a worrier, constantly borrowing trouble from tomorrow. She taught me well. At that point Mother had already been on hospice care for three years, although she continued to thrive somewhat, in spite of a very compromising heart condition. As we set in the den of her home on the same 200 acres where I have made a home out of the two-story barn, I pleaded, “Mother, just be happy for me. I’ve worked my butt off getting ready to go on this trip. Besides, if I had taken that teaching job in 1967, I might be living in New Mexico now.” “That’s right, Joan contributed, “I remember. Daddy was all for it and Mother clipped your wings.”
Without a plan, really, while visiting New Mexico earlier this summer, I casually checked the papers for an apartment. Money is always a factor, but I had a notion of how I could swing it. When this casita turned up, I immediately started crabbing backward. I just couldn’t do it. At first I didn’t want to return the voice mail to Anna, who owns the place. I knew that I had been selected from seven applicants. Although a friend encouraged me, I ended up driving 250 miles before stopping at an Office Depot in Clovis to receive the lease agreement by fax and return it. Then I drove 450 miles, within 30 minutes of my home in Texas, before I stopped to mail the deposit on this place. Finally, I called Anna to say “the check is in the mail….no, really.” Anna’s reply, “Welcome home.”
It’s August, and I’ve been here three weeks. I have a library card and a senior citizen card. I know more than one way to get to my apartment. Walking to the Plaza is becoming ordinary. I’ve found an Episcopal Church, several Laundromats, feel like a regular at Trader Joe’s grocery, and Eric, the owner of Santa Fe Baking Company, greets me by name. After I had been here a few days, he finally asked one morning, “what’s your name?!” “What’s your name?!” I challenged with a smile. “Eric…Harold…” hand shake. I’ve had my first prescriptions filled at Walgreen’s, visited the farmer’s market twice weekly, opened a checking account, and cut the crap out of my finger while slicing an onion.
I’m told that the weather has been unseasonably warm, highs in the upper 80s and lows at night in the 50s. It sure beats the hell out of our Texas dog days of summer. Air conditioning is uncommon in New Mexico homes. Our Texas bodies are spoiled. The attic fans of the 50s that we all knew don’t serve us so well anymore.
This past Sunday I called Sue as I headed out after church, in search of Holy Ghost Canyon. As I exited I-25 onto Highway 50 for Pecos, the temperature on the truck read 80 degrees. By the time I made the 10-mile drive to Pecos, the temp had dropped to 69. I headed up Highway 63 North in the rain and watched the temp drop, finally to 51 when I had reached Holy Ghost Campground. Two hours later, when I reached I-25, the temp was at 53. Back in Santa Fe the afternoon remained blissfully cool.
These mornings I delight in looking at the thermometer on my truck when I head to Santa Fe Baking Company around 6:30, holding my mouth just right, and smiling triumphantly when the reading shows 58 degrees. Within the adobe walls of my casita, a 10-minute walk from the Plaza, the window and door are open, the ceiling fans are whirring, and outside the sparrows are arguing with the wind chimes. Welcome home, indeed.
Letting Go
R. Harold Hollis, August 27, 2007 (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
1 comment:
Harold: I've never had any desire to go to New Mexico, but...now reading about just how nice the weather is really makes me want to go explore your town. Your stories are so funny, made me laugh a few times, esp. reading about your mother not wanting you to move. I can so relate with my son and when he finished college, I didn't want him to move to Austin, but he didn't listen. Thank God for that. Also, how your mom borrowed worry from tomorrow, sounds like my family, too funny!
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