A few months ago I traveled from my home in Boston back to the town where I went to college: Portales, N.M. The college is Eastern New Mexico University, a jewel of southeast New Mexico and home of the Greyhounds sports teams. I was going to be in Phoenix for a few days and had decided to tack on an extra four nights – the plan was to stay two days in Sante Fe, doing the art galleries, and then head out in my rental car for Portales, which is about four hours southeast. I had not been to Portales for 25 years and had sometimes wondered if it even still existed.
Before I left Boston, I had gotten that horrible late-spring cold – chills, come-and-go fever and a sore throat, and by the time I hit Sante Fe, I was living on hot tea with lemon and Alka Seltzer cold tablets at night, watching them dissolve as I listened to the New Mexico news and farm reports. I worked out each night in the gym of whatever hotel I was staying at, and I was careful to call my parents and husband frequently, as I had been the type to drop off the map in college, and I had worried people. I would explain the different things I had seen traveling (the Georgia O’Keefe museum, an alley cat with three legs, rose-colored adobe homes, purple mountain ranges) and give a detailed plan for my travel the next day. Then I would shut my eyes, exhausted, and fall into dreamless sleep, my head on an unfamiliar crisp pillow.
Portales was a place I had thought of often and sometimes dreamed about. I left at 21 with a life in disarray: a first love that had ended suddenly and strangely, barely passing grades, parents who had separated, painfully, then happily reconciled (I had yet to live with them as a couple again, and didn’t know how that would be), and some new and potentially troubling health problems. Portales was unfinished business for me – I left at school break for my home in Maryland and never came back. I had to resolve my health issues – it turned out I didn’t have seizures, as was feared, but the onset of disabling migraines – and soon after that, in a crowded college-age crowd on a St. Patrick’s Day eve, I met the man I would marry. Plans changed. When I thought about Portales, it was quickly, as if I wanted to push the place of so much change and disappointment and failure out of my mind. I laughed at and about Portales, and I privately wondered and disseminated myself as I had been in college. I had shared so little of my worries and concerns – of me – with anyone back then that my behavior, in the face of what they knew to be hard situations, made it seem as if I didn’t care about anything. I did care; I just had that condition that all of us suffer from at one time or another: youth.
