Post Script:I had forgotten to mention another of our neighbors, who came from "back east," and was on a disability pension, and how a rental car could be spotted on most afternoons parked across Route 66, across Interstate 40, on Rincon Loop Road, its occupant studying our neighbor's every movement via binoculars.
There was also a little bar up the highway, on the thin stretch of land between Old 66 and I-40, the Outrider Saloon, where many an evening was spent listening to local bands playing country music, but never really having learned the Cotton Eyed Joe or the Texas Two-Step, just an observant lurker. It's now a bare patch of land, used by the highway department for staging construction materials.
Then there was Woody's Truck Stop, further up Old 66 on Sedillo Hill, frequently visited for coffee late at night, especially on stormy nights, along with a few songs on the juke box, the kind that had those little stations at each booth. I could swear they put speed in the coffee pot, its jolt was that strong. Alas, it too is long gone, just a bare patch of dirt near the I-40 off ramp.
It's not the finery that we miss from our youth, but the ordinary things that meant so much to us at the time, in whose passing we lament not having documented them more fervently, now mere memories.
(Typecast via Remington Ten Forty, photos via Lumix G1, 14-45mm Lumix lens.)
