San Agustín del Tucson

Retirement is not all it is cracked up to be: sometimes it is more.

Sometimes it is lunch together, just because we want to. This time--today--it was at San Agustin Kitchen, more or less on the spot where Native Americans seem first to have settled in what is now Tucson, there where once upon a time, and sometimes even now, there is water at the foot of a black mountain.

Today--in spite of the rain last night--there is no water in the Santa Cruz, but no matter, no water, there is wine and beer!

Mercado San Agustin is a courtyard, with several shops, and with an open farmer's market once a week. We ate at the namesake restaurant, and have every intention of going back again and again!

It is an elegant little corner of a traditional open courtyard; half quiet, dark wood, and half bright bar. Out in the courtyard, people gather as people do where the sun shines, sometimes to have a drink, or maybe a taco; perhaps to get off the bicycle after having gone over and back Gates Pass. Any excuse will do.

There is fine pottery, and fine clothes, and a bakery, as well as ice cream and permission to sit and do nothing at all.

Last time, when we came with Jao, he discovered that the chairs outside had trampoline straps, and that the straw bales were not just to lean bicycles up against.

It was in 1692 that Farther Kino discovered an Indian village here, although Native Americans prefer to say that it was in 1692 they they discovered Father Kino wandering around in the desert. Now, thanks to Kathy and Ivy, Mari and I know where the streetcar line ends, close enough to downtown to walk, but walking is dangerous: who knows, what if it rains again, someday? What if the river floods?

But not yet! There is still wine. And we have promises to keep.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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