In 1983 I was living in Miami, working at the DUI program, and taking care of my God daughter "Nikki." We were living in a rented house, a beautiful two story home in north east Miami, going to church at St. Stephen's Church in Coconut Grove. The house we moved into had the unexpected surprise of her cousins living in a house directly behind ours, life was generally good. I desperately hoped that I could buy the house, but (as they say in 12 Step programs, "God had other plans."
Suddenly, near the end of school, the house sold and we had to move out. Fortunately, Nikki was finishing the school year, her father was established in the Army and stationed near Frankfurt Germany, so she went to live with him two days after we moved out. I got a house sitting gig for the summer, things quickly fell into place for the moment.
Then two friends moved to Los Angeles, and they asked me to drive with them in their UHaul truck. Being everyone's favorite truck driver, and never having been west of Mobile Alabama, I jumped at the chance.
The adventure was stupendous, and I realized that my next move was to Los Angeles. Suddenly my heartache turned into a triumph, life was moving on and sweeping me along with it.
But the hardest part was saying goodbye to friends in Miami, and the hardest of that group was Marti Kolker.
Martha Lynn Biernbaum-Kolker was a very interesting woman, a Lesbian, who had moved to Miami Beach in the 1940s from Iowa where her father had a very successful shoe business. In Miami Beach, his attempts to invest in the shoe business failed, so he became a hotelier, at one point having more hotel rooms than Conrad Hilton, mostly small hotels on what is now called "South Beach."
Marti had a friend, neighbor, who she described as "an old closet case" named Margaret. I had purchased a 1983 Renault Alliance, my 4th Renault, and Marti "hooked" Margaret by telling her that I too was a Renault fan. Margaret had a cherished R-16 Renault hatchback sedan. So, Margaret came by to drive my Alliance. She enjoyed it, we talked, I went to work, that was it, at least I thought.
But when Marti found out I was moving to LA, she insisted, "You have to stop in Santa Fe (New Mexico) and see Margaret." I protested, I'd only met her once, she was 40+ years my senior, she seemed a bit formal. Before I could say "No", Marti picked up her telephone and called Margaret, "Ed is moving to LA and I think he should stop and see you on the way." She handed the phone to me and Margaret's beautiful voice said, "Why of course dear, you must stop and see me. I'll enjoy your company, and I'll show you Santa Fe."
So it was settled, I said "Okay, thank you" and Marti gave me Margaret's contact information.
A few weeks later, as I left Miami in my very packed Dodge with a trailer behind it, my last stop was at a very tearful Marti's house. We exchanged our "Farewells", I insisting that I'd see her again soon, but it was in fact the last time I would see her.
The Dodge & trailer at a rest stop in New Mexico
But the highway called, as it always does for me, and soon I was headed first north to escape the peninsula, and then west into the sunsets, across America for my first time.
I have to say, if you've never driven across America, you REALLY need to. And don't do it in too much of a hurry. Our country it too beautiful to limit seeing it from 35,000 feet.
I spent a night in the front seat of the Dodge (it was BIG) in a truck stop in Wichita Falls Texas, and then found I-40 at Amarillo Texas. The trip into New Mexico was beautiful. The colors change almost immediately upon entering New Mexico, which truly is "The Land of Enchantment." Margaret's instructions had bee simple enough, "Get off at Cline's Corners and go north on 285. When you get to the edge of town, stop and call me (1983, no cell phones or navigation) and I'll come get you. You'll never find my house on your own."
Well, my father was a Celestial Navigator, and I've gotten anywhere I ever wanted to go with a map, no compass. So, armed with a map of Santa Fe I'd gotten from the New Mexico tourist welcome center, I drove myself right up to Margaret's house and pulled into the driveway.
She was impressed, and decided that perhaps I would not be the usual visitor. I wasn't, and her formal nature soon melted into the charming little girl that defined her inner spirit. Like so many of the people who have crossed my path, Margaret did not have a conventional life, nor did she see things simplistically. Margaret was a VERY old soul, who communed with the animals, the rocks, the very earth. To her, all of creation was a part of her, as she was a part of it. Like me, she abhorred waste.
The first thing she taught me was how to live in, and appreciate a desert. Water is scarce in most deserts. One does not let the tap run freely, each drop is too precious, potential life, wasted going down a drain into a sewer. In the desert, one only irrigates plants that bear food. The luxury of lawns is non existent.
Margaret's home was a living piece of sculpture. She lovingly described to me how it had come to pass. She had lived with Alice Marriott, the famed ethnographer, who first knew and wrote "Maria, The Potter of San Ildefonso", a cherished masterpiece explaining the life of Pueblo Indians through the eye, ears and voice of a (now) internationally renowned artist. She and Alice lived in Nambe, northeast of Santa Fe. Their life together would later be chronicled in the book, "The Valley Below."
Margaret had been a successful art dealer in New York, but the grime and cold had affected her health. When a persistent lung infection refused to go away, her doctor told her, "leave New York, or you'll be dead in six months." It was during WWII, she had met Alice only once years ago. She called Alice, who said, "Come on out, we'll find something for you to do." Margaret packed her own Dodge, a station wagon, and drove west to seek her fortune living with Alice in Nambe.
Margaret illustrated many of Alice's books. A link about Alice Marriott and her books is below:
Her simple pen and ink drawings were perfect, and she and Alice enjoyed many years together. When the "Maria" book hit the big time, she got a sufficient royalty check to buy some land on the edge of Santa Fe, and proceeded to build a house herself with the remaining funds.
She told me about hiring men to make the adobe bricks out of the very land they leveled for the house. The house had a concrete foundation, and concrete lentils over the doors and windows, everything else is adobe. The outside she plastered with stucco over chicken wire. The "Vegas" and "Latias" (the logs for beams and boards in between the logs, done in a "herringbone" style) she peeled and dried herself.
Funds were running low, so instead of covering the wood with tarpaper, she went to Sears and collected large heavy cardboard boxes that appliances were shipped in. She opened them up, and laid them across the roof beams and wood, and then built up the roof, first with dirt, then pumice to provide insulation, then more dirt, and finally roofing paper and hot mopped tar.
She finished the walls with "Nambe Red" plaster, basically mud made from a specific earth found in Nambe. The floor was flagstones, set over sand so they could be leveled and adjusted before being sealed with red dyed concrete. She got a "Steel Kitchen" sink/cabinet some second hand furniture, including an Eames chair (who knew they would be valuable someday) and lived in the house for a week before her mother called her to come to Miami to help with her dying father. She rented the house out, and didn't return for years.
She did the same thing in Miami with an old house in Coconut Grove that had been condemned, and now in her old age, she spent winters and springs in Miami and summer and fall in Santa Fe. She could never give up her yearly migrations, she loved each city too much to give either up completely.
Because Margaret had spent so many years with her hands in soil, and paint (she was a painter), and lived with and around Native Americans, she had a deep intuitive sense of "Earth" in the "Indian Way." The Pueblo Indians in northern New Mexico have been able to maintain much of their way of life, having been occupied by the Spanish, who were more inclined to convert them to Catholicism and then put them to work.
But the lack of water made any kind of farming for profit impossible, so the Spanish sort of left them alone. While it was not paradise, it was also not the mass genocide and displacement that marked the areas settled by the English speaking settlers in the east.
Margaret was adopted by a Pueblo family in Nambe. Margaret took me to my first "dance", a Corn Dance at Tesque pueblo, one of the smaller pueblos north of Santa Fe. The dances are significant in the life of the communities. It is the Indians Eucharist. The events are festive, the Indians prepare food and share it with all who come. My own sense of the dance is that it is a "great thanksgiving" (Eucharist) that is done on behalf of all creation. The dance becomes a mystical event. Personally, I sit and cry. The rhythms evoke quiet tears, and a gentle internal melting of my rigidities. It is meditation set to ancient tones and rhythms, the very cosmos transforms in front of the witnesses and participants alike.
And with predictable accuracy, within an hour, clouds form in a previously empty sky, and rain pours out of the heavens onto the thirsty ground, it is truly mind boggling.
As we fled to a favorite cafe, The Roadrunner at Poaque, Margaret explained that she has seen rain fall from a cloudless sky many times.
In all things, Margaret respected our mother the earth, and I learned much from her. A biography of Margaret is here: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/waaw/lefranc/index.html
As years went by, I would return to Santa Fe, for Thanksgiving and in the summer. Our hours turned into days, and weeks, and it was like having an adult playmate, such was the time we spent, driving the local roads,Margaret sharing stories of the time a UFO had chased her on a lonely road late one night. We spent hours talking about life. She poured out wonderful stories, each filled with wisdom, insights, humor and her own bitter lessons, which she encouraged me to not repeat.
One favorite story to tell on Margaret happened one afternoon after lunch. The phone rang and Margaret answered it. Her side of the conversation went something like this, "Why hello Ceil. Yes, how long has it been? Thirty years? Well, tell me Ceil, how are you?" This was followed by a very long silence on our end, save for some whiney chatter erupting from the ear piece of the phone. Suddenly Margaret came back to life, she exclaimed, "Look Ceil, I'm an old lady now, I turned 80 this year. I don't have time to listen to people complain anymore, or tell me about how miserable they are. So do me a favor Ceil, call me back when you've got some GOOD news, or something happy to tell me. Otherwise, DON'T BOTHER !!" She slammed the phone down on the hook, looked at me and exclaimed, "Thirty years and nothing has changed."
One friend (Phil Sheeley, deceased from AIDS) who went with me one summer described New Mexico as being filled with the spirits of deceased people, filling the area with a chorus of invisible voices in a giant mystical symphony.
My own response to New Mexico is, it is as if the earth itself is singing.
Ed and Phil sitting in front of Jose's cafe in Santa Fe. circa 1990
Margaret loved animals, most notably cats. They came to her for nurture and healing. Her best friend, "Winter" had crawled onto the Miami property, mostly dead, a tattered shred of fur, barely alive. She wouldn't let Margaret close to her for weeks, but the food and milk Margaret brought brought her back to life. Winter had been de-clawed, and then left defenseless in an attack was almost killed. Once in Margaret's care she flourished, and remained Margaret's cherished companion for the rest of their lives. She was the first person I knew who spoke of the cruelty of de-clawing a cat, and how terrible it was to do, leaving the animal defenseless.
Margaret was the first person who encouraged me to write. I still have a recording of a message she left on my answering machine, "simply apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, and DO it" she said.
Margaret & Winter enjoy some afternoon sun in late November
In her final years, a companion joined Margaret, Sandra McKenzie, "McKay" remained faithful to her beloved Margaret, taking her life and paintings and creating the Margaret LeFranc Art Foundation to preserve and advance Margaret's body of work. http://www.margaretlefranc.org
For many years, Margaret would do her traveling back and forth to Miami by airplane. But once McKay came to live with her, she returned to driving back and forth. It was just easier with a cat to transport, as well as luggage for two. They bought a Ford Taurus station wagon for the drives, and for general travel around town. Most of the time, McKay did the driving. But Margaret had been a race car driver in her youth. She loved open highway, and "burning up asphalt" (as we would say in Florida). On one trip back to Santa Fe, well in her mid 80s, Margaret was at the wheel of the Ford, doing over 100 MPH, when a Texas State Trooper pulled her over. She said it was worth the price of the ticket to see the look on the mans face when she rolled down the window, utter shock. He said that though he clocked her at around 105 MPH, he was going to reduce the speed so he would not have to arrest her on the spot and take her in. She thanked him, and drove away. As soon as they were beyond "sight" she "put the hammer down" and continued into Santa Fe at 100 MPH, her favorite cruising speed. She did comment that she was disappointed that the aerodynamics of the Taurus did not dampen the wind noise at 100 MPH. Somehow she expected better.
A beautiful book that catalogs all of Margaret's work is at this link: http://www.margaretlefranc.org/store.html
Though I had always had an appreciation for "Earth", knowing Margaret brought that awareness to a much deeper level. She introduced me specifically to the depth of spirituality intuitively known by the first "Americans." She also showed me a part of the west that is beyond breath taking. It is genuinely magical, and can only be appreciated by going, and sitting and listening to the earth as it sings.
I was blessed to know her, all because I couldn't say "No" to another friend, who knowing she would soon die, passed me on to Margaret as a last act of love.
Some of her paintings can also be found here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4848817814873.185490.1129781876&type=1&l=ec64db0ff6
Merry Christmas, Ed
"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart."
"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
~ Helen Keller
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