111.366 - 2016 project and Albuquerque, 1956-60

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Albuquerque, 1956-60

Albuquerque is the center of New Mexico, but don't tell that to the politicians who gather in Santa Fe.  it is a city of over half a million people now, but was half that size then.  I think I remember a celebration of the city's crossing the quarter-million mark.  I was born in Albuquerque in 1942, but left in 1944, I think, to go to Brasil.  sometime after I was yanked out of Brasil and dumped in this country, around 1954, we peregrinated to Albuquerque again.  Albuquerque was an adventure, a half-vast (both senses) city big enough to sprawl but not big enough to terrify.  on  my bicycle and on foot, I wandered much of the southeast quadrant of the city then, partly just wandering and partly looking for a job.  (funny, I eventually found one not far from home, but not til I had looked at a lot of places that weren't near home.)  Albuquerque had many empty lots we used for games of football and baseball (I was beginning to get the hang of them, or thought I was).  it had a plethora of churches, some of them not much bigger than a family house, some of them as big as a bank or a jail.  it had an Air Force base and Sandia National Laboratories.  grownups did a gazillion mysterious things - someone would say "I'm a quartermegastender" and either never explain or tell you he distended the megasts into frumpkins - but mostly grownups disappeared during the day.  kids probably mostly stayed home, but I became acquainted with the ones who roamed.  I met kids who had just moved into "town" from failed farms or ranches, I met kids whose fathers had divorced their mothers then been reassigned elsewhere. I met kids who had lived in Japan or Indonesia or Thailand, places that  way out-exotic'd my Brasil.  and I did get a job, and then a paper route.  I earned enough to buy my own clothes, then enough to buy my .22 Long Rifle semi-automatic rifle, enough to buy my .32 Smith & Wesson revolver, enough to buy leather and learn to make a gunbelt and holster for my revolver.  you see, way outside of "town" in Albuquerque in 1956-60, I could still get far enough away from houses and people and drive-in movies and wrecking yards to actually be in the desert-with-brush-and-scrub before the mountains, and I could shoot to my heart's content as long as I didn't shoot toward the city.  Albuquerque 1956-60 was just what I needed, or it's what I found and I adjusted what I needed to fit it.  I probably never knew Albuquerque, 1956-60, like the kids who grew up into it, or the kids who moved there from other places in this country, but for a stranger and foreigner lost in this country which people kept telling him was his "home", it was a good place to make the transition to.  it was never home, but I became adept at seeming at home there.  or thought I did.  thank you, Albuquerque, 1956-60.