Our plane touched down in Albuquerque. No sooner had my feet hit the airport terminal floor than I knew immediately—call it gut intuition—that Albuquerque is definitely a city with two Qs.
Jamie, my cousin Randa, and I arrived at the theater where I performed my one-man shipwreck before an audience of extraordinarily friendly Southwesterners who were kind enough to give me a standing ovation. True, the ovation was moving toward the exits. And true, nobody in the ovation was facing me. Come to think of it, nobody was ovating, either.
But after the show I went to the lobby and met some lovely people from the audience.
I met a young woman who grew up in a strict Mennonite sect, who loved music but was prohibited from playing instruments. As a little girl, she learned the fiddle in secret, taking lessons up in town, despite the risk of being excommunicated from her community.
We also met a man who arrived wearing braids and a bandana. The resemblance was shocking. He looked
exactly like Willie Nelson would have looked if Willie Nelson had been born looking like someone else.
I also met an Apache elder and cowboy who was chewing an actual mouthful of tobacco and used words like “pilgrim” non-ironically.
I met a 95-year-old New Mexico woman named Martha Ann who hugged me and then grabbed my butt.
“I may be old,” she said, with a firm handful in her grasp, “but I ain’t dead, sonny.”
Next, we awoke in Texas. Texas was nice, but Amarillo was windy. And hot. The ambient heat index was approaching 2,106 degrees Fahrenheit. It was windy, too. I haven’t experienced that much hot air since the Baptist sermons of my youth.
That morning, we traversed the Oklahoma Panhandle, briefly.…