Just Because You're Poor Doesn't Mean You Have to be Stupid

by Rachel Dickinson

My mother was always an intrepid traveler, which seemed odd because in other aspects of her life she is so passive. For her, I think getting in the car and heading out of our tiny village in Upstate New York was a way to escape poverty. With the windows open and the radio blaring and a cigarette propped between two fingers she'd begin the journey, which was often home to Washington, D.C.

We loved those trips. She'd buy us each a 25 cent comic book and we'd spend hours poring over each luridly-colored frame and then trade. With four kids, that meant a lot of BAM POW KAZAMM as we headed south.

"Keep your feet up," she'd say. This was after I lost a sneaker through a hole in the floor boards of the old Chevy. We had to turn back and find it because those were the only shoes I had.

In Washington she always made sure we went to the National Gallery and a couple of the Smithsonians. "Just because you're poor, doesn't mean you have to be stupid," she'd tell us.

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Dead And Dragged Out On The Throughway: Is this really a better way to go than by air?

by Sallie Bingham

Santa Fe to Tucson in a one-day mad dash

Jack the Pup is riding shotgun on the roommate’s lap as we head west on I-40 at nine AM, planning to reach my sister’s house in Tucson in time for dinner. The first miles across the desert, numbingly familiar by now, yield as this time we’d planned a back roads excursion south, just across the Arizona border. The map shows one of those intriguing dotted lines, a scenic highway, just what we need after hours of rumbling 18-wheelers…

To ready ourselves for adventure, we stop in Gallup at what is now our favorite eatery: Earl’s Family Restaurant. Here in Navajo Country Earl’s is shopping center, family reunion, and good staple New Mexico food: guacamole, burritos and so forth. Outside, Navajo craftspeople jam the sidewalk with their tables; inside, they patrol the aisles, silently holding out pins, bracelets, necklaces, and, in a departure from the usual, a pair of weird lamps, the ceramic bases coated with sand and then painted with iconic motifs. I’m charmed, I must buy at twenty dollars each, then wonder, too late, where in the world I’m going to put them….

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