Origin Story of Santa Fe Substack

Do you own your home? Or are you a renter like I was for my entire adult life until I finally broke down and bought my first home in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August 2022? At 75 years young. If you own your home, how well do you know your realtor? Your real estate agent? The person who sold you your home? If you’re a renter, read on anyway; buying my home is just the birthplace, the origin story, of Santa Fe Substack.

I mean, what did I know of realtors? Having never owned a home, practically nada! That is, until I and my family were forced out of Los Angeles after 40 years in the Southern California desert because we couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Yep, we were “priced out”. Even though I was a decently paid USC theater professor for 31 years, I was never smart enough, or motivated enough, to leave my perfectly appointed three-bedroom paradise in the Echo Park Hills - to buy a “real house of my own”. Of course, my Indonesian immigrant wife advised me to, many times - it was “The American Dream” - but I was typically stubborn, stupid, and “old school” enough - not to!

But when our greedy landlords of 30 years threatened to evict us during the pandemic, but we resolutely refused to move, we nastily negotiated a “tenant buyout” that finally allowed us to “fly the coup” and look elsewhere - outside LA - to find an affordable home of our own - to actually buy… and own!

But move - to where?

I was a big city boy. An artist: a modern dancer in Chicago for seven years, a professional clown in New York for another seven, a solo performer and theater prof in LA for forty more. I had no idea where to go. And Surya, my wife? She’d moved to LA twenty-one years ago without speaking any English, and LA was the only place she knew outside of third-world Sumatra, Indonesia. Same with our adopted son, Exsel. Now almost sixteen, he’d arrived in LA, also from Sumatra, at eight years old, also with no English, and he’d gotten through elementary and middle schools in Echo Park and Eagle Rock, and he was definitely not ready to move again for tenth grade. But move it had to be - we had no choice.

But exactly how to go about it? Well, there was only one obvious way - Facebook.

The post went like this:

“The Trules are finally leaving LA. Where should we move to? Our new home has to be geographically beautiful, with good weather, good schools for Exsel, a good art scene for moi, and a good culinary scene for Surya’s next job.”

(Surya had been a server in LA’s hospitality industry ever since she first arrived, working in, and with, some of LA’s best restaurants and chefs.)

Well, that post worked, for about a minute. Ashland, Austin, Baltimore, Bellevue… just to start off at the top of the alphabetical list. Great weather, great restaurants, great schools, great theater, great great great! Then came the deluge: Minneapolis, Charleston, Seattle, Portland, Asheville, New Orleans, Dallas, Scottsdale, Atlanta, Denver, Salt Lake City, and every city on both the east and west coasts of Florida. All from sincere and reliable “friends”. It was ridiculous and overwhelming. A little like blindfolding ourselves and playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”!

“Good luck, just pin any damn place on the map!”

So next… it came down to… Zillow!

Where else?

But… where to begin?

Well… I’d been to Santa Fe once before, by myself, in the early 70s, when I was a modern dancer in Chicago, in my early twenties. I clearly remembered the toasty warm adobe home with the kiva stove that my New York art dealer friend, Peter, rented over the Christmas holidays, and the surrounding, white-blanketed Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Soooo beautiful! And then, more, recently, Surya and I had visited both of my former dancer friends, Donna, from my heady modern dance days in the early 70s in Chicago, and Lisa, a Public Theatre costumer from my Cumeezi clown days in New York in the early 80s, both now in Santa Fe. Surya and I had both really loved it: Donna’s little casita right off the State Captial building in downtown Santa Fe, and Lisa’s and her husband Ben’s big cherry tree farm near the Okey Owinge Reservation next to Espanola, right on the Rio Grande River.

So… why not punch in “Santa Fe” onto Zillow”?

I do. And BAM. THAT’S IT.

It could have been any other city on Zillow, I’m sure. Because Zillow is like quicksand. Once you make your first move, you’re stuck. “NO EXIT!” Zillow doesn’t let you out. You click on a single home, and you are literally barraged with real estate agents - who email you. And text you. And telephone you. You’re trapped.

Fortunately, I was trapped in Santa Fe Zillow.

Where it isn’t long afterward, that one young attractive real estate agent, let’s call her Amy G, actually from Santa Monica, my first residence in the LA desert… Amy G, a tall charming blond in cowboy boots with a beaming internet smile, the daughter of an ex-hippie Mom married four times to four different miserable men… Amy G, completely hypnotizes and bedazzles me, and within two days, finds me four beautiful, affordable homes, even while Surya and Exsel are 8000 miles away in Indonesia, so that I have to show them my first choice by Zoom, which is totally ridiculous, but totally worth it… because within seven days, we somehow make an offer on it that is only $5000 over the asking price, as opposed to $40,000 over the asking price that we have made more than once in LA but have never even come close to “winning the bid”.

So now suddenly, we ARE HOMEOWNERS TO BE - with a “house under contract”!

While Amy G is quickly becoming our new best friend! Holding our hands with finding a local Santa Fe loan company, making an earnest money deposit, getting an appraisal, scheduling an inspection, buying homeowners’ insurance, scheduling an actual walkthrough after she negotiates a $35,000 deduction for a faulty plumbing repair, and coming with us to closing. For newbies like us, we couldn’t have done any of it without Super Amy G! She even gives us an expensive local “Nambe” sculpture gift at closing.

Why all this about Amy G, our realtor?

Because… just days ago… six months after we’ve moved here from LA, to Twin Yuccas Lane, right near the Santa Fe Rodeo on the South side of town… after not having seen cowboy-booted Amy G in those same six months, we meet at my new Thursday night hangout, just off the downtown Santa Fe Plaza and the gorgeously golden-lit St. Francis Cathedral - at the Club Legato, the New York-style jazz club in the old Sena Family courtyard, one of the most beautifully-historic homes in old Santa Fe.

Where ever-generous, Amy G, presents me with a late Christmas present, a lovely little book on the history of early twentieth-century Santa Fe called “Remembering Santa Fe (1928-1943)” by Willard F. Clark, a renaissance man, printer, and engraver who lived in Santa Fe during those years. A simple and beautiful book about the old adobe homes, the dying railroad, the La Fonda Hotel on the Plaza, and much more, I will tell you all about it in my next Substack post.

But already having become my “biggest fan in Santa Fe”, Amy surreptitiously has something else on her mind:

“Well, you’ve blogged about your world travels for decades. You have a big following on the Internet. You have your own clown and movement technique and have taught it in Russia, Spain, Indonesia, and all over the world. I think you should start blogging about Santa Fe. It’s a perfect fit.”

I’m flattered.

I read “Remembering Santa Fe”. It’s fascinating. And inspiring.

Over the next few days, I think about Amy’s idea. Amy, my cowboy-booted, real estate agent.

It comes to me.

I dream up… “Santa Fe Sustack”!

And…

VOILA!!

Love from “The Land of Enchantment”,

Trules

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