Texas International Airline

The old moniker, the handle, was Tee–Eye, and I spent some kind of formative years as a passenger on that airline. I’m unsure of what became of TI, probably subsumed in mergers and acquisitions, some years distant.

Part of my shuffle, this month, the other afternoon, I was looking out the window of the now–commonplace SWA 737, as it described an arc, landing at ABQ — Albuquerque, NM.

The Rio Grande, turbulent and stained with recent rains, looking very much like the North Texas counterpart, the Red River. Along the western flank of the mountains, thinking, “This is why I’m at home here, El Paso is just 200 miles south, same river, and my friends on the West Side, same river.”

Two hundred miles warmer.

Looking closely, picking my head out of the book I was reading at the time, I noticed small grouping of buildings, all held together by dirt tracks that eventually connected to a paved road that ended in a highway. The plane’s landing gear went down, making its grinding noises. Willows and angry red water flowed.

Faded memories.

Bosques define the red ribbon of a river, the rest of the countryside an apparent arid waste land, with the glittering man made downtown, and then?

On the ground.

New Mexico Sky