Old Cherokee Seminary, Tahlequah

I’ve been out and about this weekend, spending two lovely nights in my trailer sanctuary at the lake listening to the pitter patter of rain on the tin rooftop. 

I woke up early and drove to Tahlequah, the tiny college town with a beautiful name in the heart of the Cherokee Nation.  I forgot to bring coffee, so I was “jonesing” for a cup or two.  Other than the two largish cities in Oklahoma, and perhaps along the interstate at a couple of few-and-far-between Starbucks, most of Oklahoma is a coffee desert (unless one prefers the burned out truck stop variety).  I was feeling this effect as I was driving bleary-eyed into Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, former home to Sequoyah, and home to a regional university known for a prodigious pot culture. 

 

So as I entered the town I was pleasantly surprised to see a tiny freestanding espresso shack in the parking lot of the only grocery store.  Now these places are hit or miss in Oklahoma, but I knew in an instant this was a good one when the barista sporting full sleeve tattoos and a handlebar mustache stuck his head out the window and waived to his buddy driving by in a 66 VW split-window microbus.  So I ordered up a cup of Joe and was surprised when he pulled out a French press, filling it with locally roasted beans, brewing it up right there in the window.  When I said I was new in town, he referred me to Sam and Ella’s downtown.  He claimed their chicken Florentine pizza was “mind-bending”, so I made sure to eat there for lunch.  And sure enough, it was a mind-bending mix of roasted chicken, caramelized red onions, spinach, cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and feta cheese and the most delightful crust I’ve had in some time. 

 

As I was leaving Sam an Ella’s I noticed a hair salon next door, so I went in.  The only available stylist was a chap named Daniel.  So I said, “Daniel, I beg of you . . . please fix this awful haircut of mine!  It’s sort of a take on a faux hawk, at least as much of a hawk as possible with my rapidly vanishing hair.  You know . . . a little height up top to counterbalance my undistinguished chin.”

I told him that last week I panicked because my hairdresser up and quit.  So I stopped by one of those “walk-ins welcome” places in the mall.  There was nobody there except for the hairdresser, a lovely lady named Maria.  I asked her to trim my faux hawk.  And she said, “Que?”  As she was configuring her clippers, she told me she was from Juarez.  So I told her I grew up just across the border from Juarez in El Paso.  And although much of my early childhood is a fog, I still dream about my first love, a beautiful raven haired girl from Juarez named Tatiana.  She rode the bus across the border every day to attend my school while her mother cleaned houses for rich people.  I told Maria that I often catch myself wondering if Tatiana ever made it out of the slums of Juarez; that I’d do almost anything to know. 

As I said this Maria became quiet, and a tear ran down her cheek.  She told me she was lucky to be alive after leaving Juarez twenty years ago to be with her husband, the love of her life, who’d migrated to the U.S. to find work a year before.  So she hired a Coyote to smuggle her across the border in a semi-trailer packed with immigrants like cattle in the heat of summer.  There was evidently some trouble, because the driver ditched the trailer along a remote highway in Oklahoma, but not before opening the door.  She said they were lucky that day because usually the driver fails to open the door.  She also said she dreams every night about how her life would have turned out if she had found her husband, the only man she ever loved.  Odds are the driver never opened the door for him.  
 

Guy Clark, “El Coyote”

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QryLf3-C4Uk

Now that I think about it, perhaps conversations with the barber should be kept to a minimum, or at least not of topics such as life and death,  or especially of love.  Because just about then I realized why she said “que?” when I asked her to trim my “faux hawk”.  She was half way to removing the hawk, leaving me with little more than what the rural folks of my childhood used to call a burr.  My once proud and mighty hawk was a humble sparrow. 

So I said, “Daniel, please fix this for me.”  And so he did.

One of my favorite Mexican border songs . . .

Guy Clark’s “Magdalene”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B2rQr5Vudg