Thursday, July 04, 2019

Bus rides 🚌 to Pershing Drive, shots 💉, and arroz con frijoles 🌯, with a bowl of hot, red Jello water 🥣

Note: A member of the Facebook El Paso Memories group posted a picture of the now privately-held Pershing Theatre, and that opened a time and space portal for me.



All first run Disney movies were shown at the Pershing Theatre, and for the most part, “family-friendly.” My mother never learned to drive even though abuelo told her to get dad to teach her before they wed. “You won’t learn after the wedding,” he warned. She never did, so she and I took the bus. 

Before the various El Paso bus companies consolidated, my mom and I traveled El Paso on several bus lines. We took the blue Lower Valley bus from our house on Taxco in Ranchland Village. Next, we’d  transfer to the Government Hill green city line, and then walk to the one-screen Pershing after disembarking at what is now the El Paso Police Department headquarters (was Sears). Between Sears and EPPD the building was purchased by the Diocese of El Paso with the intention of moving Christian Brothers’ Cathedral High School into it after being retrofitted for educational and PE purposes. That would have been a neat trick as its current location sports a swimming pool. But the dream never materialized. 

Chisme sidebar: It was said the Vatican approved the loan for the building, and immediately the paper was stowed in the “never to be repaid file drawer” by the lending bank. 

But back to when it was Sears at Five Points.

Before we moved to Santa Fe, my first experience with and for a great team, supervisor, and comptroller was working the sales audit control desk. It was a routine if fast-paced situation within the accounting department. We were squirreled away in office space on the second floor. Happily, the  job opened many doors for me insofar as work experiences and future expectations went. 

The Montana Street at Piedras site is an unusual one in that, the Ralston Masonic Hospital (Lodge #130) also stood there from 1910 through WWII. From healthcare, to retail commerce, to pipedream of an reinvisioned educational facility, and now housing a local law enforcement agency — much has occurred over time on one single trapezoidal spit of land. Whatever came before Ralston Masonic Hospital?

The Ralston had a children’s ward that treated those with juvenile arthritis, polio, and Legg-Calve-Perthes, a disease that hobbled my dad at 14, and causing him to limp for the remainder of his life; sadly dad died in 2015, aged 89. Dad spent most of a year in the Ralston, learning to walk again after surgeons at Southwestern General operated on his hip to remove the diseased tissue. Over time, his hip joint fused because of the initial surgery and post-op care. According to the daughter-in-law of one of the orthopedic doctors who treated my dad, the Ralston Masonic Hospital brought El Paso its first orthopedic specialists, specifically for pediatric care.

Masonic Hospital, Five Points, El Paso

A block away on Pershing Drive and many years from his experience, I walked out of the theater with my mother after seeing “101 Dalmations” (1961) or maybe it was a holiday rerelease of “Lady and the Tramp” (1955). 

Clearing after an intense thunderstorm, dusk was turning to twilight and would soon be nightfall as clouds broke, revealing the sky’s first stars. We waited under the marquee for my father to pick us up in his 1956 Olsmobile Delta 88. It was turquoise and white. 


Sidebar parental advice gone unheeded: Though she tried after she turned 55 to get her license and then drive alone, mom never got past earning her learner’s permit. Dad had no hand in that accomplishment as she paid for the driving lessons herself. I return you now to the next part of the story.

Next to the theatre is the Pershing Inn, and next door to that was the office of our family doctor, Dr. Joseph S. Galatzan, brother to Judge Morris A. Galatzan  It was within that small rectangle of central El Paso real estate that my mother and I traveled the bus system so often. Far too often, it seemed. Especially regarding my allergies.

My dad’s family had met the Galatzans because they lived in the same neighborhood near El Paso High School (EPHS) 🐅. My grandmother Ruby and the brothers’ mother were best of friends. Their backyards were adjacent to the duplex, my grandparents first home on Virginia Street, just below Schuster Drive, after they moved from Oklahoma. They originally came from Little Rock, Arkansas. It was their good fortune to get to El Paso right before October 31, 1929. During his medical career, Dr. Joe Galatzan was team doctor for the 1966 TWC Miner basketball team and instrumental in establishing Sun Towers Hospital (now Las Palmas). 

The quintessential family doctor, he delivered my older sister who but lived one day, and me, born two years later; he removed my tonsils at Southwestern General Hospital; and later, confirmed my first pregnancy. Overall, I spent much time in his office as I had a running sore throat accompanied by horrible earaches due to airborne allergies. It was never strep, though I still can recall the pain in my ears and my mother needing to warm up drops she applied nightly. Bermuda grass and non-bearing mulberry trees — hybridized and frustrated fauna — they cost many school-aged kids  to lose classeoom time, and have goopy morning eyelids, receive painful innoculations, and experience popping eardrums.

Dr. Joe had Highlights for Children in his office and I would read them always from cover-to-cover as I waited for the inevitable SHOT. I camped out in that office so often because I needed what seemed like monthly antibiotic shots in my butt to combat those chronic allergy-related infections I got ad nauseam. Not only shots, I constantly was instructed to gargle with warm water and salt, as directed by my mom. I must admit it did help, though she made me hot Jello water to sooth my throat, too. Red please. 

2911 Pershing Drive today.  Previously the office of Dr. Joe Galatzan. (Source: Google maps)

The doctor officed in what had been a traditional Austin Terrace/Five Points bungalow. The telephone system had a peculiar ring to it, something completely different from the usual house trill. The sound of the office phone added to the  atmosphere of dread — from the Hightlights Timbertoes family, their black and white line drawings having way too much fun, to the dim filtered light made by wide venetian blinds, and dark bricked fireplace — it was quite a dreary vignette. Once inside and through to the exam rooms, however, the light shifted immediately to bright white lights, white enameled cabinets, and the efficient- and sanitary-looking healthcare whites worn by nurse Blackie and Dr. Joe. 

Blackie was a formidable woman. She took no shit from anyone, even whiny me. She wore the quintessential stiff white uniform with cap, and thick rubber soled white nurse shoes that squeaked when she walked on the green speckled lino flooring.

After she would call me back, I was examined, and Dr. Joe would then pronounce his diagnosis. It never varied: a shot and pills in my butt and down my throat, salt and water gargle for my swollen tonsils, and ear drops and cotton balls for my popping ears. Sometimes an eyewash for summer mornings when my eyes were glued shut overnight by an obnoxious green discharge. The shot. Another shot. Always a shot. Terrified of the things, I once clenched my butt so tight I literally shot the innoculation back at Blackie. Man, she was angry. Maybe that’s when they decided I should have my tonsils removed. Nurses at Providence later told me that Blackie ended her days there, and to her dying day gave them all bloody hell. 

Sidebar childrearing: Swats on the butt after a shot hurt more than regular ones. 

After the ordeal, my mom and I would then get back on the bus and travel to either downtown to visit my dad at work, or we would get off at San Jaconto Plaza (terminal point for the green city bus line). Next, we’d walk to near the main library and catch the sky blue Country Club bus and travel on to Smeltertown where my abuelos and cousins lived. Finally, a glass of iced Kool-aid or tea, and a quick lunch of frijoles, warm tortillas made by my abula and tia that morning with Mexican rice. Then a nap. Afterwards I’d have time outside with my cousins after they came home from Jones school. It happened all beneath and across the road from the ASARCO plant. Land of hot sand and sulphured skies, the Rio Grande was about 100 yards or so from La Esmelda backyards.  La Esmelda, with her hand-built adobe and cinderblock homes, chicken coops, and caged yellow canaries, hanging from my abuela’s cottonwood tree..

Good times.



Here’s a good blog post about the theatre and its owners:

Thursday, June 06, 2019

Too many bees! 🐝 🐝 🐝 Or adventures in feral bee removal

Most likely this little bee is a Buckfast, referred to
as “the mutt of the beekeeping world,” 
Beepods

Beepods explains that, “Buckfast Bee stock is named for the location of its hybridization and origin, Buckfast Abbey, in Devon in the United Kingdom.” It is a gentle bee that has been warmly welcomed into the United States for domestic beekeeping, Buckfast bees are a good bee species for “newbee” beekeepers.

Domesticated bees are social creatures. They gather pollen to make their home, honeycombs, and honey to house, feed, and care for their queen, her worker bees, the her one-act male drones. All the while, they prepare for their new queen. As a colony, they appreciate a calm quiet place near moving water.

A drowsy remaindered bee. The next morning, she was 

gone. She must have recovered, washed herself up, 

and flew off to find a new hive.
I’ll be the first to say our yard needs work. And while the control box for the sprinkler system functions, it ended up attracting a colony of sweet tempered feral honey bees. We were unaware we had bees due to where the box is located in the yard. I think they picked our yard because it’s relatively quiet, next to the arroyo, and near what they need and like: fresh water.

Over the course of several years (I don’t think before October 2016 as that’s when the injured owl stood on the green box trying to be invisible) I believe the bees did their bee thing inside the green rectangular box that sits beneath a pine tree that needs trimming.

With the help of friends, I hunted for someone who could use a few new bees. That’s when I discovered the Paso del Norte Beekeepers Association

By submitting a form on their website, I was contacted a few hours later by a beekeeper named Josh Meier. He meet up at the house, and successfully relocated the queen and her colony. It took a while because that box was packed with combs, bees, and honey.

Generally, bees have a range of between three to five miles. So from our backyard they roamed. They could get as far as the greens of the Coronado Country Club, all the fountains and swimming pools in between, to vegetation, whether native or planted flowering trees and plants. They could roam a bit up the mountainside and gather pollen from the wildflowers blooming since March, and bring back bags of pollen on their legs. Back they'd fly to their green sprinkler control box hive.
Possible range of our backyard bees.
Map courtesy, Beepod, Honey Bee Forage Map

In time, the colony grew until our neighbor noticed the bees and how much they appreciated his new fountain. This being after the house stood empty for at least five years. Before then, the pool the new owner replaced with his fountain was covered with a slipshod and highly problematic cover. There was no pool water there or routine sprinklers running.




Male Great Horned Owl, El Paso Texas Timestamp sidebar: In October 2016, a male great horned owl (one of a mated pair) suffered a broken wing and stood on the sprinkler control box trying to be invisible. Didn’t work. Caught beneath a sheet and stowed in a large box for transport, he was relocated to Stick House Sanctuary for rehab and was later released

















smoking the bees

Josh Meier moves bees for you.

Up above us on La Posta, someone lounged by a pool and played random pop songs on their tinny iPod speakers (millennial boombox.) Two doors down, a neighbor’s dog barked continuously. The late afternoon light filtered by the smoke of pine needles render the bees drunk and drowsy.

Josh cleaned out the sprinkler control box and collected about five frames worth of combs. In the end he had to vacuum the remaining stray bees who stumbled upon the bee relocation program as they were returning home from a long day gathering pollen in the neighborhood and mountainside flora. He noted any remaining bees will either move on to find another hive, or wait for the queen to return. Sadly, they will live for but a month in all, and may not have long to wait to meet the many earlier queens and other bees who went before them.

As he worked, I asked how he knew he had captured the queen. Josh said he knew so because how quickly the worker bees began clinging to the sides of a box where she now was being held. About the size of a hard-sided carryon bag or big typewriter case (O, alright, like a portable Compaq luggable, circa 1983 ) the box contained the combs that held their queen.

He used pine needles to create smoke that make bees drowsy (drunk). Immediately, the backyard smelled like we were smoking a brisket.
Raw combs straight from the hive.

Bees are clever and prolific. Josh said this bee season (spring into summer) he’s had to relocate 40 hives.

Tomorrow, he will cut into a wall to remove another feral hive somewhere else in this county. In addition, he noted our hive was about three weeks away from swarming.

Swarms occur when bees can no longer sustain itself due to its population and must therefore divide in two. One group heads out with the reigning queen, and the remainder stays in place with a new queen in waiting. Chances are they wouldn’t have re-established themselves very far away. Perhaps, just over the fence inside the next green sprinkler control box they found. Good luck bees. May you multiply and divide and make as good of honey as you left here today.

Thanks to Josh for his quick, careful work. And thanks to Ray for alerting us to their existence. And most of all, thanks to the rehomed bees for not colonizing in my courtyard wall, and behaving as sweet as their honey tastes.

For help relocating and not killing bees, contact the Paso del Norte Beekeepers Association.

Two jars of Backyard Honey™️ 🍯 as @prepgirl77 calls it. In all, we collected about one pint from the combs Josh gave us! 

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Take your child to work day, was Take your daughter to work day

Twitterscope: You may begin a project with an assertive surge, but conditions are quick to temper your approach...Work with the cosmic momentum, not against it. You can reach your destination if you’re willing to take the scenic route. 

More for Capricorn bit.ly/A5KmeJ

#ADHD that’s been happening my whole life... #cosmicmomentum (wtf?) #ego most assuredly that... #caution? Never. #ScenicRoute? Forever and a day. 


BTW, everyday when i went by #scat (sun city area transit aka shuffling chicanos around town) aka the bus, to go to downtown El Chuco, to the old school retail department store where both my parents worked, was #bringyourchildtoworkday. That actually was the cheapest form of after school childcare ever. 




Either Bassett Center or to downtown #ElPaso, and itoccurred  at least 3–4 times a week. If i went to town by myself, I didn’t have to make supper for us.

bit.ly/A5KmeJ

Wednesday, February 06, 2019

Lost Guitars: Google book searches, Twitter, and Milagros

On Tuesday, Corgan’s fortunes changed. A friend of his contacted him with a picture of a guitar that looked like the stolen instrument. But he was still incredulous because he’d been tricked before. “Somebody sent me a picture a couple of weeks ago of another one of my guitars, and I wrote the guy back and said, ‘How did you get my guitar?'” he says. “And he wrote back,
‘Oh, it’s a recreation.’ He’d literally gotten the same stickers, worn them down in the same way and scraped the paint so it looked worn. You could have fooled me.” So he decided to check it out in person. Sure enough, it was the early Seventies Fender Stratocaster that he had been looking for for more than 25 years.
Corgan knows it’s his guitar because it had certain distinguishing marks beyond the psychedelic paint job he’d given it. He recognized the place where a previous owner had carved the initials “KM” into it, and he remembered the placement of certain cigarette burns on the headstock “that I always thought were unsightly.” These were things he’d never talked about in the press, so it would have been impossible for someone to copy them.  
[...] 
Perhaps the most incredible part of it all is that the guitar was ostensibly stolen in the first place; it’s an instrument worthy of a story by Homer. Corgan recalls that about 10 years after Chamberlain sold him the instrument a person he didn’t know asked him if he still owned his guitar. He then described the one that Corgan just got back. “He said, ‘I lent it to Jimmy, it was actually my guitar,'” the singer says. “And I said, ‘Oh, I feel so bad.’ And he wasn’t mad. He was like, ‘Oh, that’s OK. Jimmy’s my friend. If Jimmy sold it to you and you used it, that makes me happy.’ 
“But that’s the guitar’s circuitous history,” he continues. “Jimmy procured it and somebody procured it from me, and now it’s back. This guitar has a certain magical mystery to it. It changed the fortune of my life. So that’s why I felt it would come back to me. It was like the talisman or something, like in Lord of the Rings. It was meant to come back to me.”   


Tuesday, February 05, 2019

To the Students: What Is and Why the Need for Superb Owl Sunday?

A snowy owl rests on Jones Beach on Long Island in New York. #  Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography / Getty

What Is and Why the Need for Superb Owl Sunday?

Hearkening to information that covers copyright infringement and fair use in general and specifically for commercial use, many announcers for companies not sponsoring the "big" event went out of their way not to refer to Sunday's championship game by its official name directly. As a result, they carefully removed the words "Super Bowl" or "Super Bowl Sunday" from their scripts due to the exorbitant amounts "official" sponsorship companies pay for advertising during the game and pregame shows. Read the word official as costing millions of dollars per minute during the game to run a single commercial. According to the CBC:
That's roughly $175,000 per second.
This year's host network, CBS, is charging a record $5.25 million for just a 30-second spot during the championship match-up between the Los Angeles Rams and New England Patriots, reports CNBC's Julia Boorstin. 
(Huddleston, 2019)
But things being ironic and fun, suddenly, misreading or re-emphasizing an alternative spacing of letters produced Suberb Owl instead of the other two words. Of course, this let loose with all sorts of Hedwig cousins flying around the internet as so many puppy bowl howlers.
Owl with large orange eyes looks directly at audience.

Here is a collection of backgrounder articles and cautions at the CommLawBlog:
https://www.commlawblog.com/tags/super-bowl-trademark/

No. 9: A barn owl in Galyat, Pakistan #  Zahoor Salmi / Getty
Not to be outdone by all the owl related memes, The Atlantic promoted their gallery of Superb Owl images:

Superb Owl Sunday III - 28 photos of these magnificent nocturnal hunters. If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely) I invite you to have a look, it was a real hoot putting this together. https://t.co/G1aX9U9JFR pic.twitter.com/jDCiHjrJ23
The Atlantic Photo (@TheAtlPhoto) February 3, 2019

Check them out!

References

Huddleston, T., Jr. (2019, January 30). This is how much it costs to air a commercial during the 2019 Super Bowl.
      Retrieved February 5, 2019, from CNBC Make It website:
      https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/30/ how-much-it-costs-to-air-a-commercial-during-super-bowl-liii.html 


Jauron, V. (2019, February 3). A snowy owl rests on Jones Beach on Long Island in New York [Photograph].
      Retrieved from
     https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2019/02/photos-superb-owl-sunday-
     iii/s25_955699818/main_1200.jpg 


Salmi, Z. (2019, February 3). A barn owl in Galyat, Pakistan [Photograph]. Retrieved from
      https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2019/02/photos-superb-owl-sunday-
      iii/s09_908304352/main_1200.jpg 


Tag archives: Super Bowl trademark [Blog post]. (n.d.). Retrieved from CommLawBlog website:
      https://www.commlawblog.com/tags/super-bowl-trademark/ 


Taylor, A. (2019, February 3). Superb Owl Sunday III. The Atantic. Retrieved from      https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/02/photos-superb-owl-sunday-iii/581917/ 


TheAtlPhoto. (2019, February 3). Superb Owl Sunday III - 28 photos of these magnificent nocturnal hunters.
     If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely)...
     https://t.co/G1aX9U9JFR  [Tweet]. Retrieved from
     https://twitter.com/TheAtlPhoto/status/1092149813766967297 


Sometimes you need to get away from it all.

And sometimes, it's time to return and be part of the larger world.  Between the first of 2023 and February 14, I painted many watercolo...