no matter where you go....say it with me.. there you are. we rolled this van, as the story goes, when I was just a baby. there was a jug of grape juice inside and when we came to a stop my mom says she saw grape juice all over the inside of the van and thought it was blood. no one was really hurt. dad's story is that he hadn't slept for a long time and was hallucinating people on the road in tall top hats. I tell the story with what I think i know. they would tell it different. correct me. or add to it. it was an event in a chain of events now as remote and unconnected to any of us as newsreels of world war II. These photos surfaced again at christmas time this year. familyabelia. i remember being in albuquerque and realizing how all the houses in the suburbs were on shallow slabs and how the tumbleweeds have shallow roots and how the lives on those shallow slaps and the tumble weeds were both ready to pull up and blow away at any moment. who really had roots in albuquerque? the native americans....the spanish americans.... but not many of the white people. albuquerque was a sort of metastasized filling station community on rout 66. there wasn't any industry there to speak of. why was anyone there? because it's a hauntingly spectacular place of light and land. people invented reasons to stay there. people blew in and blew away. to someplace else. shallow roots are easy to put down.