[FRIAM] Legado de Nuevo Mexico

[Steven A Smith]

Frank and Congregation -

I finally checked my USPS mail today and discovered that the copy of 
your memoir on your NM legacy had arrived from Amazon.

Uncharacteristically I sat down over a long lunch of Huevos Rancheros 
(Xmas, over easy, extra garnish in place of rice/beans) and quaffed the 
entire book in a single sitting (with about 4 ice-tea chasers).

I gave up looking for metaphors in your very matter-of-fact chronicle.  
As predicted, the metaphors I did find were precisely the conceptual 
ones which I believe all language is built upon (as per Lakoff/Johnson, 
et al)...  not a bit of figurative language discovered!

I definitely enjoyed the romp through your memory and the eclectic mix 
of your West/East coast life with your earliest/latest years in 
Nuevomexico among communities and relatives of Spanish, Mexican, and 
Native ancestry.    As you know from some of our conversations, I was 
born/raised among communities where Natives and Spanish speakers were 
significant and sometimes dominant.  I do not have my own blood roots in 
the southwest as you do, and being about 15 years your junior, my 
experiences were a little different, but not entirely.  I prowled my 
rurality with both a spring-BB gun and an air rifle but graduated to 
archery over high-powered rifles in my teens, having noticed that I 
didn't really want to kill animals (or people).   I am probably the only 
member of my grade school who doesn't still own/shoot guns for fun.

I appreciated your observation about how multilinguals often reserve one 
language for one mode of interaction vs another.

I was so drawn in by your history that I wanted more details and 
anecdotes.  I'm sure the audience is small enough for this book and that 
one chronicling more of your technical education/interests/background 
would have a smaller audience, but I for one wanted to let you know I 
appreciated it.   I saw your sales rank is around 227,000 when I *think* 
it was 660,000 when I ordered.   This is something like a divide-by-zero 
situation I suspect?

I will pass your book on to a very good friend of mine who is your 
contemporary (also 1943) born/raised in NM/TX panhandle, visiting Los 
Alamos summers where an uncle worked.   He worked the switch yards on 
the railroads as a college student, had a classmate who "commuted" from 
school to vacations home "out west" by jumping boxcars.   Getting pulled 
by a big Eastern University (MIT) and joining the workforce in the 60's 
as an "analyst" on big mainframes with degrees in math/architecture.    
He will definitely appreciate a number of your early experiences.

Thanks for the book,

  - Steve