Abe Observes

By Abe Villarreal

Where I live, most people eat Mexican food. There are other kinds of foods to choose from, but Mexican food is usually the first, second, and last option.

I used to quibble with my not-so-Mexican friends about the authenticity of the dishes in each of the towns I have lived. The taste of the beans. The fluffiness of the rice. The color of the red or green sauce. Whether an egg should be on an enchilada or not. I'm sure I sounded like a food snob. Then, one day, I realized that none of it mattered.

By Abe Villarreal

Today, somewhere in America, a mom is getting the family ready for church. Moms do that. They get everyone ready to do things. They are good at that. Whether we want to do them or not.

Today, somewhere in America, a family is traveling back home from a getaway weekend. We all need a getaway.

We don't get to them as much as we'd like. The kids are asleep in the back or watching a movie on their phones. They don't know what they are missing. Dad is driving because he always likes to be the driver.

By Abe Villarreal

One summer ago, I was in Maine. It was the first time I had been to that part of New England, and I went because I hadn't been there before. This past summer, I was in Spain. I went there for work, and I wished I had seen more and stayed longer.

I'm already thinking of next summer. That's when we think about vacations and going away. Really, we can go away at any time. Pick a date. Take time off. I think we shouldn't wait until summer to do the things we want to do all year long.

By Abe Villarreal

Every time we enter the month of August I start to think about fall, and about holidays, and about food. The sunshine of summer is always welcome when it first arrives. Now, I'm ready for it to take its own holiday. This summer has been hot.

Fall is always memorable in the Southwest. We don't get the changing of the leaves or dramatic fluctuations in weather. Our streets and front porches don't look like what you see in movies. That's okay. We live here for a reason. We live here because it is like something you don't see in the movies.

By Abe Villarreal

I remember when growing up in my small hometown, there was a daily newspaper that had everything I wanted to know about what was happening both at home and far away. There is no daily newspaper anymore.

It was a time when all the news was in one place. All I had to do was read it from front to end. Now, I have to go find the news.

By Abe Villarreal

I live in a section of the country that doesn't experience too much of anything in the extremes. No tornadoes or floods. No hurricanes or snowstorms. Cold days feel cold only because we remember how hot the days were before them. Nothing gets ever too anything around here.

Time never moves too fast. People don't rush their words. Fast cars seem fast because everything around them is hardly moving at all. Still, time marches forward faster than we expect. Someone once told me that "time don't wait on no one."

What you don't know is what makes you happy
By Abe Villarreal

Someone, some time ago, wrote that ignorance is bliss. I think it was a seventeenth-century poet. It must have been. It sounds like something a poet would write. Today, we say things like "he doesn't know the half of it." I like the older version better.

There's a 12-year-old boy named Axel that has a brain tumor. He knows he has it and he knows he has to go to the doctor to get it "fixed." He's lost weight, and he looks younger than his age. He sells snacks at the plaza in the evening and likes to hang around the card table with the older guys to shoot the breeze.

By Abe Villarreal

In our new world of automation, I'm asking myself who will be changing my kitty litter each day. Doesn't my cat want me to do it? Doesn't it say something about our relationship?

Automation may be solving problems, but it's not replacing, or it shouldn't, what we mean to each other. Person to person. Person to cat.

I have to take my own trash bag, down from my second story apartment, to the corner trash bins for the weekly collection. Automation hasn't figured out how to do that for me. Maybe one day it will.

The older I get, the more I sound like an old, grumpy man fighting against the advancement of technology. Progress is supposed to be a good thing until it isn't. Until it changes the kind of society we all say we used to love to have when we were kids.