Fernando Montes—Painter of THE BEST!

This, I will confess, is a story that was once begun, then aborted, and now begins again. If truth must out (as it usually does), Old Ken stopped with the story as I was sure I had written up the narrative that this exhibition by local Genius-Hat Fernando Montes spurred. But, alas, I was not able to find it anywhere in my various files. So, guided only by my dim recollections and this series of Señor Montes' paintings entitled The Spirit of the Andes, I offer you the following tale.



All this took place, so the poet said, in an age when leopards roamed the earth—back when I trod the shores of ye Olde Countree. I think the date was roughly March 2003; it was certainly cold and I recall there being snow upon the ground. So much for our setting; let us proceed to the characters and the action. I, Old Ken, was at the Digby family residence when I looked out the window and saw two shiny-new grey vans pulling briskly up the driveway. It was my first thought that these must be the goons of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft coming to silence the voice of the elder radical statesperson on the premises, and that I should go out to defend her against their thuggery.

But, as happens so often in these cases, the actuality was much stranger than my paranoid fantasty. For, rather than any sinister "men in black," the group that piled out of the vans comprised a truly motley crew. The long flowing skirts of the ladies were matched, in due course, by the long flowing beards of male attendants. No, this was not an Amish convention (at least so I was informed by the slightly wild-eyed leader who approached the house). Instead, he informed me, he had brought a Peruvian shaman (a specialist in magical or sacred sites/objects called a "huaca-cayamoc" in Quechua, an ancient Andean language - - just in case you want to get technical). Anyway, said huaca-camayoc was going to stand roughly near my grandmother's wood pile and harness the energies flowing between the monadnock to the north (Mt. Ascutney) and the mountains to the west (Okemo and perhaps Pico). Apparently, this convergence of lay-lines makes for some powerful energy flows.



Well, be that as it might have been, I had a busy day ahead of me, so I drove into town. But, apparently, my noble automobile, Sir Percival Price, was sympathetically resonated by all the energy flows back at the homestead, because he promptly died in the Springfield Plaza parking lot. As I had a number of tedious errands to run, this left me in the unenviable position of needing to go retrieve another car. And what with my mother's place of employment being but a hop, skip and a jump over the beautiful Black River, hers was the obvious choice.

Not a long geographical distance was this; but the psychological trauma involved was more formidable. As my luck would have it on that cloudy March day, my mother was not in her normal place of work but on cafeteria duty. This meant that it became necessary for Old Ken to re-enter the junior highschool cafeteria—a place I had despised when I was in junior highschool—and, at a well advanced age, stoop to the indignity of asking my mother for the keys to her car.




Alas, such things perhaps build character, or I might have repeated to myself sardonically. But all such was nothing a little coffee (and Danish!?) couldn't heal, I reassured myself as I made my way through greater Springfield, toward the Morningstar Cafe. Yes, I thought, I will sit, relax for a moment, and then do a little work. And my plan seemed to be going well as I parked and made my way into said restaurant.

But lo!—what was this? Why was I being accosted; being jostled; being brought before a strange-looking man with a bushy tuft of black hair sprouting from the tip of his nose? Had you not guessed already, this attractive personage was, of course, none other than our huaca-camayoc who had guided his flock into town for a refreshing "cuppa" as they recovered from their recent exposure to the massive energy field that is my grandmother's wood pile.

Rapidly making my excuses, I was able to extricate myself from his surprisingly chatty conversational clutches and make my way to a free table with the much-needed coffee and pastry. Slightly disoriented by this sequence of events as I had been, I took heart in the company of two tables of perfectly normal looking middle-aged women who, so I thought, would provide a pleasant buffer from the freakshow at the center of the cafe. Unfortunately, I could not have been more wrong! For, as I took a sip of my beverage, one of these "normal" seated ladies turned away from her conversation partner and toward a woman seated by herself at the window. Their conversation went something like this:

"Oh, you're there all by yourself. Wouldn't you like to join us?"
"No. Sometimes, all I need is a window and a tree."

Perhaps this is an odd thing to say. But, the absolutely insane exchange which followed—and which drove me directly out the door—requires some further backstory. Now, as you will probably recall, the city of Cuzco was the religious, cultural and administative center of the Inca empire. High in the Andes of what is now Peru, Cuzco remains home to some brilliant specimens of Inca stone masonry, which (as seems to be depicted in Señor Montes' work above) used no mortar but fit the stones together with incredible precision.

But, back to our conversation; once it had been shared that our freakish loner only needed a window and a tree, our inquisitor—completely inexplicably to my mind—nodded and gave her full assent to this statement. As if encouraged, loner lady dropped the following conversational bomb; a statement that made me vacate the premises at the time and upon the crest of whose wave I will leave you now:

"Oh," she said, excitedly, grasping the largest stone on her oversized necklace. "When you said that just now, it made my Cuzco stone wiggle!"