As we prepare to leave Park City, we celebrated Father's Day with a breakfast of warm La Mesa tortillas, with Chris's fresh roasted green chilis and fried eggs with a sprinkling of a Mexican four cheese mixtures to brighten the dish.
How do we know when we've been away from Tucson for a week? We have used up the last of our La Mesa tortillas and are down to our last couple of fresh roasted green chilis from Chris's roasted chile and vegetable stand at the Trail Dust Town farmer's market.
As a Father's Day gift, I asked Toyo of Dark Star Leathers to make a new belt for Paul for his old Kenneth Reid belt buckle. Toyo immediately recognized the belt buckle as being made by Kenneth Reid and guessed (accurately) that it was about 40 years old. He said that the Zuni-style metal sun rays were something that Kenneth was experimenting with at that time and that the piece of turquoise was large and well-veined. Toyo made a perfect belt to compliment the old belt buckle and commented that Kenneth Reid might be interested in buying back a piece of his old body of work and that we should contact him.
I explained that we could never part with the buckle because it had a story. About 40 years ago, for a Christmas present, I bought the belt buckle from an artisan's stand in the Park Place Mall from Kenneth Reed. I spent more than I had at the time, but thought that it was a perfect gift for a very special guy. I was excited from having finally found what I had hoped would be a fine gift for Paul and was returning to the over-crowded parking lot filled with hectic Christmas shoppers in the dark of the evening when a young man approached me and told me to give him my purse and my package. At that moment I was so enraged that someone would ruin my Christmas aspirations that I began yelling at him that "No f---ing way" was he going to take my purse and my present and continued my outraged torrent. Clearly I wasn't thinking about my safety, just this young man's total lack of consideration for my work at finding the perfect gift. Fortunately, he just ran off (as I was still yelling at him) ... my adrenaline began to decrease ... and I realized that it was likely a dumb stance to have taken, but it worked for me at that time. (Probably in this day of everyone being armed, he would have had a gun and that would have complicated things a bit).
So, this belt buckle is going nowhere except on Paul's new belt in celebration of his role as a father to our sons. Bambi agrees. Happy Father's Day, Paul!
No comments:
Post a Comment