Las Vegas MyOptic

You know me, even if you don’t know that you know me.

You’ve probably seen me stuffing my face at Wendy’s, Dick’s, Charlie’s Spic and Span, or K-Bobs, maybe even at Kosina de Raphael. I am the old guy with a gray beard and a pot belly who wore jeans and Tennessee paraphernalia and tennis shoes and had a Tennessee tag on his Dodge Intrepid. You know, the one that ran the call center over on 11th street on the NMHU campus.

I am the guy who replaced the original dynamo, Mike T., who came to Vegas and set things up in 2007. Maybe I should avoid last names to protect any who may think of themselves as innocent. Anyway when Mr. T left Las Vegas, I began to try to put up or shut up. For all those years in consulting, I had had the luxury of telling others how to manage people. This year as call center manager gave me a chance to see whether any of that worked and even whether I could put it into practice. But that was another life in another galaxy, far far away, not necessary detail for this initial message to you. It is, however, a part of what I hope to draw conclusions about in my book.

I spent the year, from February 1, 2008 until “Uno de Mayo” (i.e., May 1, 2009) in Las Vegas as a Tennessean in New Mexico. But the moment I pulled my old ass up into the cab of that U-Haul truck to drive back the roughly 1500 miles to Knoxville, I knew in my heart that I was a New Mexican going back to Tennessee … temporarily. If it hadn’t been for the failing health of my ex-wife who lives within a half a day’s drive of Knoxville, I might have stayed in Las Vegas rather than returning to Knoxville. However, perhaps this year will be a blessing since I’ll have the chance to be with her during her final days.

I have decided that I am going to devote the next year, until “Uno de Mayo” 2010, to the task of writing a book that summarizes what I learned, discovered, or began to believe during the last year. I know that a year in your fair city (“The Wildest City in the Old Wild West”) made a significant impact on me, so I now write to you as if I were a local reporter on the culture and zeitgeist of your (and now my) town. I realize I might not know a thing about what is really going on out there, but who needs facts in order to have opinions or even to see transformational visions for that matter.

As I was preparing for my move back to Tennessee, I told Donna Nathan that I had “come to the land of Manaña and caught it.” I suppose a more romantic way of saying it would be that I came to the Land of Enchantment and became enchanted by it. I allowed myself to consider the possibility of actually living there. And what’s more I think I know the exact moment when that happened. Fairly early in my time there but some time after I’d made a trip to Taos over the Fourth of July of 08, someone came up to me in the line at Wendy’s on 7th Street and asked me, “Do you live here?” The question caught me off guard, and I paused for a moment but finally said, “yeah, I guess I do.” He then rewarded me with a softball question, “can you tell me how to get to Mora?” Thanks to my previous trip to Taos (up Hwy 518), I could tell him “sure; follow this road.” When the words, “yeah, I guess I do,” rolled off my tongue, it was at that moment that I planted my heart in this dusty little town in the highlands of New Mexico.

Coming back to the luxury of my condo here in Knoxville has a lot to commend it, but so does driving East about 10 miles out of town on Hwy 104 toward Trujillo on a dark summer night when there is no moon in the sky and no ambient light to drown them out, the spectacular array of stars that are there all the time, but obscured by conditions have a way of humbling you and cleansing you of any sense of self-importance.

There is a lot to be said for elbow room.