Better to know?

There are some things it’s good to know and then there are things that, once you know them, you wish you didn’t.

Generally this question is one of those double-edged sword dealies. You need to know it — whatever “it” may be because not knowing makes you look like a fool. However, once you’ve been let in on the knowledge — there’s no going back to when you didn’t know and everything was cool. Buh-bye.

Not knowing you have toilet paper stuck to your shoe makes you look like a doofus, but until someone points to it there on you shoe, you were doing just fine.

I just found out something about Taos I didn’t know. You see, I used to think that when the shit hit the fan, this would be where I’d want to be because I couldn’t see  myself starving to death here. I could see it happening in a big city where no one knew you. An old woman could die of hunger in her apartment and no one would notice she was dead until they either wanted the rent money or the smell was getting bad — which ever came first.

So this was one of my reasons for sticking it out in Taos. I figured it was import to go and be where I wanted to be and worry about money and food later. Once I got here I sized things up pretty quickly and realized things were pretty tough here and to stick it out I was going to have to call on internal fortitude to make a go of it.

Oh yeah. And there was also this unspoken rule about how you had to have lived here 20 years before anyone was going to listen to anything you had to say.

That was OK because I had time. Or I thought I did.

Now, I’m not so sure. I’ve spent 23 years here and up until recently I was naive enough to think that if I was stricken down by a sudden illness or event in the middle of a busy street smack down in the middle of town, that someone would stop and help me.

Apparently this is not the case. I’m not the one who suffered. This happened to a friend of my husband’s, but his story brought tears to my eyes when I realized this man lay in the street for a very very long time before he was able to pull him self out of it.

No one helped him.

He doesn’t look dirty or unkempt. He’s totally respectable looking. He was right on Placitas there at Ranchitos. His disease knocked him down and he was powerless to help himself and he lay in the street. Perhaps people thought he was a drunk or a druggie. Maybe they thought he was just poor and tired and if they stopped to help him they would be sucked into his vortex of need.

It broke my heart to hear his story. Not only did it break for this man who is facing an illness he will never get better from, but also because I found out, laughs and cautions aside, Taos is a pretty tough place. What used to set it apart is going away.

I waited and waited for my turn to be heard. I’ve passed that milestone and no one cares about that crap any more. People want to keep their heads down and we’ve all learned Taos’ small-time lessons of how the nail that sticks up gets the hammer.

So I’m thinking in this particular case would it be better not to know about any of this? Or do I take the information and decide I want something different. I was willing to do with less of everything — less money, less respect, less opportunity, just less of everything except hardship — if there was going to be some sort of happy homecoming waiting for me at the end of the journey.

Nothing is at the end of the line but the end of the line.