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

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

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. ...

SmokeSound

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