SFR

Wednesday is Santa Fe Reporter day, when the weekly free paper for the City Different - or as the bumper stickers have it - Dipherent - appears, containing everything from movie listings to lost and found ads to restaurant reviews to hard news to Overheard Snippets: this week, in the Santa Fe Eavesdropper:

"Is this the Rodeo parade?"

"Does it look like a Rodeo parade?"

"Well I don't know, honey, we're not in Texas anymore."

-- middle-aged couple on the corner of Paseo de Peralta as the Gay Pride Parade began.

When I was first here in 1994, carrying home to Oxford a copy of the Reporter was a central component to trying to explain quite how Dipherent the city is. Of course, I didn't realize that Dan Savage's sex column was nationally syndicated - I just thought that it sounded from Savage Love that people all over Santa Fe were having a lot more fun than I was - and for all I know Free Will Astrology is syndicated too. But all the other ads! The Buddha Fitness Club! The Chanting and Yantra Painting Workshop!The Garlic Harvest Festival! Bluegrass! Zydeco!Western Boots! Flea Markets! Green Psychology! The Pooch Pantry! Perhaps the writing was on the wall the minute that I took this home - life was never (quite) like that down the Cowley Road, despite the CoCo, and the Jamaican Eating House - an establishment I never much patronized, and certainly won't now, since the last UK election, when I heard the owner (an elderly grizzled Jamaican man) praise David Cameron to the skies - his former regular, and such a Nice Young Man.

I made it as far as picking up this week's copy of the SFR only because Emmett and the others would have murdered me for food if I hadn't gone to the pet store: but my torn muscles are starting to feel a bit as though the darning is beginning to work.