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Marty and I went to Pecos, New Mexico yesterday for a tour of the Glorieta
battlefield. It was a van tour with a national parks volunteer, and we stopped
five places, where the soldiers had come and gone and met and run away over
three days' time back then. It was very cool.

The tourguide was glad to know more, and two things were brought up he hadn't
thought of or known, and he told us a couple of things that aren't in books,
and it was just altogether inspiring and fun.

Marty and I have been planning to go to Silver City (far SW N.Mex) and I was
looking at websites of historical sites in that area, and in a page on a
little town called Columbus, I found the following paragraph which I liked:

-=- No write-up on Columbus would be complete without a nod to Mrs. Susan
Parks Kendrick. On the morning of the famous raid, Mrs. Parks, a telephone
operator in Columbus, called for help and alerted several residents of the danger
from her switchboard. The switchboard is on display in the Columbus Museum,
only a few feet away from Pancho Villa's death mask -- two items one would never
expect to find in a room together. The distance between any two dissimilar
objects - like the border between two countries - can sometimes be remarkably
thin. -=-

The author of that, David Pike, has a nice site on ghost towns in New Mexico.
His writing style is sweet.

http://kumo.swcp.com/nm/ghosts/ghosts.html

But that reminded me of the whole exercise Thinking Sticks involves, which is
tying together disparate ideas.

I think we're going to go sooner than we had planned, because there's a
historical reenactment in Shakespeare on October 23.

I'm really enjoying these times with Marty. We were worried from the
beginning that he might feel very "middle child" in his life because Kirby's dynamic
and Holly's cute and he's in the middle, and so by trying to remember to make
Marty's life special, I'm afraid sometimes he's going to leave the other two
in the dust in a way or two. Luckily Holly has no cowboy/19th century
interest, and Kirby has no touristish inclinations, so we can go without feeling
guilty! We invited Holly yesterday to the civil war tour, but she clearly wanted
to stay home instead. Ah, the virtue of offering and then hearing, "I'd
rather not, but thanks for inviting me!"

Sandra