Leaving New Mexico

I used to teach High School at Rehoboth Christian School in Rehoboth, New Mexico, which, if you're looking at a map, is just a tad to the right of Gallup which is pretty close to the Arizona border. When I went there, I'd had little experience with real life--it had always been just me and my posse of friends, until a few finally married when they were around 25. For me, going to teach in New Mexico was my way of graduating to real life. I had always thought I could just pick up and leave and thrive anywhere, and part of me needed to prove it to myself.

I don't know if you could say I thrived in NM. There were a lot of ups and downs, a lot of loneliness, but I can't say I was ever too homesick. I got something of a reputation as a womanizer, not from anything that happened in NM or that had happened in Michigan. I just got mail from female friends who had never been more than that, and since my colleagues could see the return addresses but not the contents, their imaginations did the rest of the work. It was amusing. I made some very good friends while I was there, learned a lot of lessons, and have never regretted my time there.

Except maybe when I was actually leaving. I'd had enough of the place by then. Some unpleasantness happened. In short, several students had written suggestive things in my yearbook which led some parents to assume that I was carrying on with some of my kids. I was only guilty of not having looked through the book enough to find the comments first, and in those days it was already time to realize that words convey things, and imaginations run wild, and my earlier reputation worked against me.

So when I drove out of the parking lot and hit I-40, I was more than ready to bid new Mexico adieu.

But as time has gone by, and I see what happened there in the context of the life that followed, I realize that although I haven't been back since 1990, part of the state came along with me, and has never left. My profile pic for this blog was taken out back of Rehoboth. I look at those rocks and I recall climbing on them, in good conditions and bad. I think of how I used to go skiing in the Rockies with my students, and how Greg Tiano, my best student friend there, took me hot air ballooning. I launched model rockets again, and coached track, and took long walks out to "the boobs" (a rock formation) with Steenstra, and saw the stars as they were meant to be seen, in the crystal skies of the desert southwest.

I'll never live there again, though I really expect to vist sometime in the next handfull of years. In the meantime, I'll still see it in my mind, and enjoy those bits and pieces of "The Land of Enchantment" that unexpectedly come out in my writing.