One-Year Anniversary in Santa Fe, Part 2

A Whole Lotta Livin' Goin' On

For some instinctive, very good reason, I have a sense that a large majority of my 1500 Substack readers and subscribers are… more or less… close to my age… of my generation… that is… olllld. And that… you will recognize my play on… in the Subtitle of this post, “A Whole Lotta Livin' Goin' On” - one of the great rock ‘n roll songs of all time, Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1958 “A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”. And for those of you who don’t know it (or those of you who’d like to refresh your memories), here’s the YouTube link below. It’s a great, great song!

The metaphor is on my mind, you see, because one of my most loyal Santa Fe Substack devotees, “Richie Boy” (Rich Malley, a nice Jewish boy who I affectionately call by the good Irish moniker, “O’Malley”), recently turned me onto a brilliant rock ‘n roll podcast rightfully lauded and praised in The New Yorker, and I have been listening to a whole lotta Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Coasters, The Bobbettes, and hundreds of more rhythm and blues pioneers and founders of the great American ground-breaking music of the 50s and 60s. The podcast is called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey, and according to The New Yorker, when Mr. Hickey is done (after two years and this writing, he is only on Episode 168, “I Say a Little Prayer” by Aretha Franklin), it will be the longest document (have the most words) ever written in English!

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT. Here’s the iTunes link:

I’m only up to Episode 60, “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke.

Anyway…. “A whole lotta livin’ has been goin’ on”…. since September 21, 2022 — by the Trules Fam — since the day we arrived in Santa Fe!

How/where to begin? How about with the drastic change in topography and weather? From the all-year-round balmy LA desert at sea level - to the 7200-foot high seasonal terrain of Santa Fe - that all three of us had to experience - before we each had to make our individual unique adjustments?

Well, contrary to popular belief, Santa Fe isn't actually “high desert” at all. Technically, it's:

a semiarid steppe at the crossroads of grass and shrub lands, piñon-juniper woodlands, and 1.6 million acres of coniferous national forest, nestled at the foot of the awesome Sangre de Cristo Mountains, part of the American Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

Un-technically, that means that the leaves of the white-barked, straight-standing local aspen trees were already turning from summer green to golden autumnal yellow just weeks after we arrived, and by mid-October the temperatures were dropping from late summer 70s to fall 40s, heading toward the first light blanket of winter snow well before Halloween.

By Turkey Day and Christmas, Ol’ Pak Trules (that’s me, the Indonesian name Surya, my wife, and Exsel, my son, call me, with a silent “k” in “Pak”) had already purchased three pairs of thermal long johns on Amazon and three more fleece-lined pants for the 15-degree 7 a.m. mornings that he/I had to walk Cassius the Dog in the new park, just four houses up the street from our new abode.

It was colllllld!

But you get the point: Santa Fe has Seasons!!!!

What else did we have in common?

The House. We all live here.

We like it.

It didn’t take us long at all to move in. About a week. From 100+ packed boxes, beds, couches, coffee tables, desks, plants & trees, and 40 years of LA collectibles all stuffed into “Lucretia Gardens” - hence packed into one moving truck - driven - then un-packed - into one modest, two-story, 3-bedroom Santa Fe house, about fifteen minutes from the center of town.

I can’t say it was “easy” to part with some of “the collectibles”. It wasn’t. Especially things like ”The Purple Couch”, where some of you know I spent wayyyy too much of my “free” time in LA, so you can only imagine how hard it was to watch the sweet velvet, oh-so-comfortable antique be driven off, up “The Hill”, in the back of an anonymous pick-up truck to somewhere in the sweltering San Fernando Valley to some new, under-appreciative owner’s unremarkable living room.

But…

I promised Surya that,

I won’t just drag everything I own in LA and park it in the new house in Santa Fe.

So I kept my word.

Except…

I managed to bookshelve, pushpin, and nail the new Santa Fe garage with a shitload of my old LA collectibles that I just couldn’t part with.

But still keeping my word:

I didn’t bring them into the house.

The best architectural transition from LA to Santa Fe is the back deck, the one thing I could never give up in Echo Park, with its 270-degree view of the Pacific Ocean, the Hollywood Sign, and the San Gabriel Mountains. Well, of course, those three geographical points are gone, but… a new deck is here… in Santa Fe… with the same 270-degree view… but now of the Sangre de Cristos, downtown Santa Fe, and the Western horizon, and with the just-as-spectacular Fourth of July fireworks, and the just-as-perfect rainbow sunsets 300 evenings a year.

And now - the differences. For each of us. Naturally, many and varied.

Me

I’ve always “called home where I rest my head”. I must have heard that somewhere before I packed up my 1964 Pontiac Tempest on the first day of Spring, 1970, and driven up and down America “like it was one big map” - for about five months, without ever knowing where I was going to stay from one night to the next. That was how and where I first “fell in love with travel”. Of course, I ended up in Chicago, and by dumb luck and serendipity, I became a professional modern dancer, being the last person on the planet likely to be cast as such, so repressed and unself-aware was the young, 22-year-old Trules.

In any event, Santa Fe was an “easy fit” for me. I was comfortable right away, and as I said in a previous post, I was more than ready to leave LA and start over with a clean slate. For some odd reason, I haven’t physically missed my LA friends; the telephone and internet have been enough for me. I’ve found a new “community of friends” here, mainly through my daily pickleball playing, where there are, believe it or not, 700 members in the Santa Fe Pickle Ball Club. I play with the same folks every morning, and we hit the whiffle/pickle ball, shout, moan, laugh, win, lose, exercise, sweat, and mostly have fun. Every once in a while, we go to lunch or have a party together. We are doctors, lawyers, chimney sweeps, plumbers; I would guess far more liberal than conservative, but we never talk politics or religion, we talk pickleball, family, home remodeling, and restaurants, so for the most part, we get along just fine.

I haven’t gotten involved in Santa Fe theater. Someone asked me to read a script and direct a show. But it was a historical drama about a Mexican-American diva-saloon impresario from the mid-19th century, and the play had twenty-seven other characters. It sounded like a nightmare to direct and produce.

Hey, I’m retired. I wake up, walk the dog, stretch, eat breakfast, play pickleball, come home, do a little gardening, pay a few bills, answer some emails, write and blog a bit, listen to a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book on audio, surf the web, do cyber correspondence, talk to my son when he gets home from school, eat when I’m hungry, go out some nights/Thursdays to hear jazz (Santa Fe is gorgeously lit every night), go day tripping whenever my wife is off from work and she’s up for it, do the laundry and straighten the house (sometimes), go out to eat occasionally, be lazy a lot, read some other Substackers, listen to a new Andrew Hickey episode of “Jailhouse Rock”, “Tutti Frutti”, “Johnny B Goode”, you get my drift.

W-w-w-w-w-ork?!!!”, as Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnik character played by a young Bob Denver, said on the late 1950s sit-com, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”, who wants to do that anymore?

Surya

As you already know, my wife is a bird of another feather. One natively, from the colorful Sumatran rainforest. Of course, she’s adaptable to new environments. Obviously. She packed up and left the third world of Indonesia for good in 2001. She arrived in LA, went to ESL school to learn English, got jobs bartending, catering, and serving in restaurants in Hollywood, and convinced a lifelong bachelor (yours Trulesly) to get married, brush his teeth twice a day, adopt her nephew and become a father at 68 years young. Impressive, I’d say.

But calling a place “home” is a different story with her. Something she’s hesitant to do. It’s not that she’s still attached to Medan, Indonesia, the place where she grew up, and where her Mom and extended natal family still live. That’s “where she’s from”. Los Angeles? That was her “home” for sure, because she lived there for twenty-one years, over half her life, and the only place she lived in America… until we moved to Santa Fe.

But after a full year, she still hesitates to call Santa Fe “home”. We just spoke about it the other day, driving back from Ski Santa Fe where we took the chairlift to see the beautiful fall foliage of the golden aspens.

I like the house. I’ll always remember it as “my first house in America”. But what if, for example, in five years, you can’t climb the stairs anymore without too much pain? We’ll have to move. I just don’t want to get too attached.

I told her about my “I call home where I rest my head” theory. And “living 100% in the moment”. And being an improv teacher and artist my whole life.

She said,

I live 100% in the moment, but I always plan for the future too.

This struck me. It’s not something I’ve ever done. Or whenever I tried, I’ve failed miserably.

But this is my wife we’re talking about. Who is now working 3 jobs at a time. At three different restaurants in Santa Fe. Who just left her most stable hotel job of almost a full year and just started two new ones. Who just paid off many thousands of dollars of principal on our mortgage, and has a plan to pay off our entire 30-year mortgage in just 5 years! Who is hoarding away money right now as I hunt and peck on this Substack - for her and Exsel’s trip back to Medan, Sumatra for Winter Break - so she can take her entire family to Lake Toba (her Batak tribe’s holiday retreat) for New Year’s Eve - while Ol’ Pak Trules stays put right here in Santa Fe for Christmas Eve with Santa Claus.

She also had a plan for our new backyard - the one we bought with an all-gravel ground cover surrounding a single evergreen pinion tree. I thought it looked perfectly fine. Very simple and Santa Fe.

Not my wife.

I want a garden. A simple, organized garden. With an outdoor dining table, a barbecue, a fire pit, a place to grow vegetables, and a “bale” (a traditional wooden Balinese gazebo for eating and relaxing).

As we say in my tribe (not in Batak),

Oy! That’s going to be expensive.

But… just as Spring was starting to spring… sure enough… Surya discovered that… one of the bussers at her hotel… also had a side hustle…. or perhaps… it was his father’s main hustle… a full-time landscaping biz…

…so that when they both “made us an offer we couldn’t refuse”… to design us the perfect, custom-made backyard of Surya’s dreams…

…one with hand-laid red brick paver stones, a found-in-the-alley black wrought iron table with four matching wrought iron chairs in excellent condition, a free barbecue and propane tank on Next Door, an affordable fire pit at Home Depot, three corrugated colored aluminum vegetable planters on Amazon, and a hand-built, seven-foot square, wooden bale.

Voila!

And for me,

a Lazy-Man hammock and umbrella to laze the sunny summer Santa Fe daze away,

And… after we had to abandon my beloved Jacuzzi on the lower concrete deck at Lucretia Gardens, because we could no longer “fly it over” the house after the eucalyptus tree we used to “fly it in” fell through the roof during a violent LA storm, I lucked out, when… Lisa and Ben, living on the Ohkay Owingeh Reservation between Santa Fe and Taos, donated their 8-seat hot tub to us because of Ben’s failing health. It only took 8 Guatemalans, 2 days, and a major Laurel and Hardy comedy - to haul the damn tub from Espanola to Twin Yuccas Lane (the name of our street)!

Look at 4 of the joyful, tired Guatemalans and THE TUB!

Exsel

As soon as we arrived, and I guess as soon as he heard about our inevitable move from LA, Exsel was a vociferously vocal, anti-Santa Fe-an. As I mentioned in a previous post, he felt ripped off, cheated, and unfairly uprooted from his 9th-grade friends and routine at Eagle Rock High School in the LA School District.

Thanks for ruining my life, Pak Trules!

That was hard to deal with, believe me.

But then, as I also wrote previously, we won the Christmas lottery with Exsel being accepted to the charter school right near our home, and with the mature young 15-year-old making a conscious decision to change his hostile attitude to a more open and friendly one, with the results being that he won “Most Friendly”, “Most Stylish”, and “Best Newbie” in the 10th grade in the new charter school. A “miracle” if ever I saw one!

Over the summer, “The Little Man” was given a paid “X-3” internship by an organization called Future Focused Education funded by the likes of the Gates and Zuckerberg Foundations - to work three times a week at $16/hour for a company called Little Globe, a video production company, where he learned to shoot video, record sound, edit, make his own personal voice film, and help local high school and neighborhood kids do the same. All while entertaining everyone at the company, losing his Airpods on a middle school football field, and at the end of the summer, buying himself some trendy Doc Martins and a Prada backpack on e-Bay, and some YSL cologne for a hundred bucks at the local mall. Hey, why not? He earned it!

Now he’s in 11th grade at the same Monte Del Sol Charter School. He just passed his driver’s test and has a Provisional License. State of New Mexico. He drives himself to school. In his own car! Yeah… he lucked out.

You see, my car, the 2002 RAV4 that I smashed up on my “exodus” from LA and then had the front end entirely repaired here in Santa Fe, decided, at 237,000 miles, to give up the ghost… that is, its transmission. With Exsel driving it… which of course, he couldn’t be blamed for… right?

Anyway, the three of us had one car for about two months. Not fun. Exsel and I were stuck ferrying Surya to work, and back, sometimes to two jobs a day, until we could figure things out. Should we fix the RAV4’s transmission for six grand? Or not? After all, I had a “new” Japanese factory-rebuilt engine just installed in my trusty chariot, with less than 30,000 miles on it; why should I buy a new car, or much more likely, a used car for $20-$30,000? I hemmed and hawed… and finally, with professional advice, I decided… to fix the transmission. Hence… the two-month wait.

But soon… Surya got sick of waiting for her son’s and husband’s taxi service. And with the multiple, failed CarMax purchase attempts. So off she went - to Craigslist - and five days later - boom. She was driving herself to work in our “new” 2017 Mazda CX5.

…leaving… the aforementioned Lucky Little Man with her… former 2007 Toyota Matrix.

Exsel has also, fortunately, found many new friends to replace, or at least substitute for, his exiled LA friends: Monte del Sol’s Miguel, Jada, Adnan, Ko, Natalie, and Jayden, most of whom just got inducted into the 11th grade NHS (National Honor Society) along with him last Wednesday after school. Surya and I, the proud parents, went to the induction ceremony, listened to some brief words by “Zoe, the Head Learner” (no “Principal” at this happening alternative school!), and a pep talk by a former NHS member from 50 years ago (now a Monte Board member). We snapped some photos of our new inductee and wisely passed on the lemonade, brownies, and oversized donuts and cookies. (At least I did because of my once-again elevated diabetic A1C blood count.)

One of the unique things about “Monte” that the school is most proud of is its 2-year “mentorship program” that each and every student must take to graduate. Whereas Santa Fe High, the first school that Exsel attended and struggled at was a public high school with 1600 students, a football team, and a Homecoming Dance like his Eagle Rock High School in LA, Monte Del Sol is tiny by comparison, with only 40-60 students in each grade, no football team, and almost no frills. Still, they did go camping for two nights in Colorado on a Junior Class trip in September, and the students are on a first-name basis with all their teachers. The trade-off seems to be working in Exsel’s favor.

But guess what his “mentorship” is in?

“Fashion and design”. That’s right. Pretty amazing. At least to me. He has his own Singer industrial sewing machine, from the same Ohkay Owingeh Reservation as our infamous hot tub, given to him by our same friend, Lisa, who used to be a costume designer both at the Public Theatre in NYC and in Hollywood as well. And the fashion-forward, Prada-carrying backpacker has a professional costumer and designer named Dawn Hudson, right here in Santa Fe, who he’s been meeting with once or twice a week, coming up with his own 3-piece fashion line to present to the whole school at the end of his senior year. He even patched up my father’s vintage brown leather bomber jacket (which he’s stolen from me because he “rocks it better”), and he sewed up my Rafael Nadal white, 3/4 length tennis pants from Madrid!

College? He doesn’t know yet.

And I’m not pushing him - giving him enough rope to find - or hang - his own beautiful self.

All we know is that he wants “to split this nowhere burg, Santa Fe” right after high school — and to move back to the limitless skies of LA.

Probably with Surya calling him every other day and… visiting him at least… once a month.

Ha Ha!!!

And that’s the scoop from ”The Land of Enchantment” — after One Year!

Of course, that isn’t the whole story… because there is, at times, a whole lotta shaking goin’ on!!! Teenage growing pains. Shouting matches. Major and minor rebellions. The stuff of school daze, stormy marriages, and revolutionary rock ‘n roll!

But that’s the stuff… for another Substack post!

If you enjoyed this post, or any previous ones, please LIKE it (by clicking the Heart), and LEAVE A COMMENT. It REALLY DOES help build an enthusiastic and interactive readership.

Also, if you have any friends who you think might enjoy Santa Fe Substack, PLEASE SHARE IT WITH THEM.

“Let Me Hear That Rock ‘n Roll Music”,

C. Berry & E. Trules

Cassius, the Dawg with the “Santa Fe Cowboy Moose”