FoxxMD Blog

“All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.”

 Don Juan Matus as quoted by Carlos Castaneda in The Teachings of Don Juan

Don Juan Matus

Before we could finalize our Santa Fe dream we had to find a place to live but it was the spring and summer of 2020 and the COVID lockdown was in full force.  Every listing we ran down, every agent we spoke to, came up with nothing in our price range.  It was one of those deals where everyone said; “Ya shoulda been here a few months ago.” 

We were looking for that cubic centimeter of chance and coming up empty.

JoAnn threw a Hail Mary and called an old friend from Indian Wells, a realtor who was now living in Mississippi.  Did she by any chance know anyone in Santa Fe?  Turns out she did.  JoAnn’s friend had worked with someone in the desert, another realtor named Yancy, who was now living in Santa Fe. The Universe was flipping switches like crazy, making connections like Lily Tomlin at the switchboard.

I called Yancy.  We had a great but unproductive conversation.  One of those “I’ll call ya if I hear anything…”

Four days later, the conversation long forgotten, I was sitting at my desk in Valley Center on a quiet Sunday afternoon checking emails, thinking about how our gossamer dream was not going to come to fruition and maybe it was time to start looking for a new place in San Diego County when a email popped from a friend of Yancy’s about a house that was available in our price range.  I looked at the video of a house not far from the Plaza, the center of Santa Fe, while I held my breath and the hair stood up on the back of my neck.  “JoAnn,” I called out, “Check this out.  This is exactly what we’ve been looking for.”

The house was everything we had visualized for the past I-don’t-know-how-many-years.  A house built  in what was called the pueblo revival style on a piece of property surrounded by juniper and piñon trees with views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Jemez Mountains not far from the Plaza.  A fireplace in the living room and a traditional kiva fireplace in the bedroom.  Heavy pine vigas supporting the pine ceiling.  Just what we were looking for.  In three days we had pulled it together and we were back on track.

We contacted the mover we had chosen and found out it would take “about” ten days for our “stuff” to make it to Santa Fe so we had to plan for living out of suitcases for that time.  Minor details.  We got a Queen size air mattress, consolidated all of our kitchen supplies, and targeted the third week of September as M-day, Moving Day.

M-day was Tuesday.  The movers worked all day to get everything into the large semi and when it was done and everything tagged with a bar code and everything photographed the crew chief walked over to us.  “I can get your furniture out to you in Santa Fe by Friday if you’d like.” 

Friday?!?!  We hadn’t planned on leaving until Thursday.  Macarena’s horse transport wouldn’t be leaving until Thursday night and she wouldn’t get there until Friday.  No way would we be ready for the offloading until Monday.  He was good with that so we bravely stood in the driveway and watched as most of our worldly possessions went through the gate and out of our hands.  What was on the truck was only material things and you can replace material things but there were a lot of memories behind those locked truck doors.

If you’re pushing the speed limit and only stopping for gas and coffee Santa Fe is about a twelve hour drive from Valley Center.  We decided to drive Artie, our red F-150 pickup (Red Truck.  R. T.), and tow JoAnn’s Hyundai.  Artie and I have hauled a lot of horse trailers but we had never towed a car.  Minor details.  It looked easy when I Googled “how to tow a car” so I went over to U-Haul and reserved a trailer.  But when I called to confirm the availability of the trailer a few days before I needed it there was no trailer available anywhere south of Los Angeles.  Time for Plan B.  I would drive Artie, JoAnn would drive the Hyundai.

Many phone calls later we finally located a car trailer at an out of the way garage in Escondido.  I towed it home after the movers were gone and proceeded to find out that turning around a long automobile trailer with a long F150 in a narrow driveway on the slope of a hill falls into the category of easier said than done.  Time to call my friend Ray, a man who knows everything about anything.  Ray is also a committed and experienced buckaroo, a vaquero horseman in the traditional Californio style, a man of endless patience who taught me how to catch a cow with a reata and ride with a spade bit many years ago.

Ray on Noches and me on Chapo

Ray came over with his ten year old grandson, Aden.

In all fairness to me it even took Ray a while to turn Artie and the trailer around so all I had to do was load the Hyundai on and drive out in the morning.  Ray gallantly crawled under the hitch and laid on the asphalt driveway to make sure it was secure.  Just for good measure I asked Ray to hang around while we loaded the car.  Good thing.  I opened two cans of Modelo, gave him one and we watched as JoAnn drove the Hyundai onto the ramp.  Easy.  But when she tried to open the door of the car the door bumped into the fenders of the trailer and she was trapped inside the Hyundai.  She lowered the window.  “What now, gentlemen?”

Ray and I looked at each other.  Daylight was fast slipping away.  We had no idea about what to do.  This was something the rental guy hadn’t prepped me for.  “Let’s try backing the Hyundai on.”

By this time JoAnn had climbed out of the window on the driver’s side.  She climbed back in and drove the Hyundai off and then on backwards.  That didn’t work.  Out the window again and it was then that I finally noticed some instructions on a weatherbeaten label on the fender of the trailer.  The label gave detailed instructions about how to unlock the fender and move it out of the way so the door of the towed car could be opened.  Somehow I had missed that.

JoAnn climbed back in through the window one more time and backed the Hyundai off and then turned it around so it was facing forward.  The door opened.  All was well once again.  Ray and I finished our beers, said our goodbyes and we watched as he and Aden drove away.  Ray had been more than a good friend, a brother vaquero, and I would miss meeting him from time to time him for coffee and to split a cinnamon bun at CJ’s Deli.

JoAnn and I went inside and spent our last night in California on an air mattress in an empty house.  JoAnn had lived in California for 45 years.  I had lived in California since I was discharged from the Army in 1968 when spent my first night at Mr. C’s Motel on Coast Highway in Long Beach with my German Shepherd, JB.  At first light we were down the driveway and gone.

Artie with the Hyundai in tow, ready to roll

Macarena would be there the next night and we had to be there and get ready for that…

Gotta go…

“Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.”  Helen Keller

There were a lot of serious conversations between us for months about Santa Fe.  Most of them went on long into the night.  The pros and cons.  We took turns being the trailblazer and playing the devil’s advocate.  Friends tell us how brave we were to do this, how adventurous.  Little did they know.  We lost track of the times we thought of what that old cowboy had written on a napkin in the diner in Dillon, Montana.

Selling everything, moving 900 miles away.  If you looked under “risk” in the dictionary we were sure there would be a picture of the two of us headed for New Mexico.

What we were contemplating was the very essence of the concept of risking.

Risking is like jumping a crevasse.   You don’t jump the depth of the crevasse, you leap the width, you don’t jump the depth of the risk, you jump the width.  It stands to reason that anything you do to bring the sides closer helps minimize the risk.  Easy, right?  Just don’t look down.

We knew we had to try to bring the walls of the metaphorical crevasse closer together.  We knew there would be a price to pay.  We knew what Charles Portis had written in TRUE GRIT.  “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”

Not exactly encouraging.  So we began to make lists…endless lists.

The list started with getting a medical license in New Mexico.  Getting a medical license in another state is an arduous process in which everything has to be documented.  Medical school transcripts, birth certificates, licenses, continuing education courses, shoe size.  During my career I held licenses in Pennsylvania (medical school), New Jersey (where I lived) and Maryland (where I worked in the emergency department for a while).  Each document takes weeks to secure.  Sometimes months.  There are companies that collect all the data for you and submit them to the state in which you are seeking a license.  For a fee.  Even though the first company I contracted with was recommended they didn’t really know what they were doing.  It took four months to realize that.  Four months lost.

I cut them loose and hired another company.  The second company was more buttoned up but it still took four more months to secure my New Mexico license.  By this time we were into the last months of 2019.  Time to find a moving company.

In the last thirty years we had moved from Corona del Mar to Indio to La Quinta and then to Valley Center in North County San Diego.  We knew moving was a gigantic pain but it wasn’t anything we hadn’t handled before.  We were about to find out that moving out of state, 900 miles away, is an entirely different animal.  An expensive animal.

We began the process of picking a moving company.  Picking a moving company involves 1) interviewing movers, 2) realizing that not all movers are alike, 3)  realizing that reviews are virtually useless, and 4) accepting that movers are expensive (I wrote that already).  Particularly when moving out of state.

 Time was going by.  It was already the early part of 2020.  And by February, the medical community was already beginning to talk about a new virus on the horizon.  It was said to have started in China, was wildly contagious and already being talked about as if it was the reincarnation of the 1918 flu pandemic.  The world was starting to shut down.  Conventional wisdom was that it would take six weeks or so, a few months at the most perhaps, to “flatten the curve” whereupon life would return to normal.  We hunkered down but continued to make plans.  Plans that had to include Macarena.

If you have ever been in my office you no doubt remember the large sepia-toned picture of a horse examining the outstretched legs of a cowboy in a pasture.  The picture hung on the wall at my medical spa at the Hyatt Grand Champions in Indian Wells for 13 years and then in my office in Escondido for four years where any patient in my examining chair couldn’t miss it.  The picture is of Macarena.  My Spirit Horse.  The cowboy is me.

Macarena found us about thirty years ago when she was almost three years old and as green as grass.  She had been foaled in North County San Diego on a ranch owned by Willis Allen, a highly-regarded polo player, horse breeder and a dear friend. Willis sent her to his trainer at the polo club in Indio, California, where we were playing.  Needing a made horse for his string, the trainer offered to trade Macarena for an older mare I was playing named Barbara.  He hadn’t even been on Macarena but for us it was love at first sight.

We always said Macarena was chestnut colored but her coat really was the color of a newly-minted copper penny.  She seemed wrapped in a cocoon of light.  Copper flashes chased each other across her back as she moved.  She had immense dark brown eyes, pools of wisdom, a white blaze on her face like an arrow pointing heavenward and a little girly, flirty coquettish way about her when she tossed her strawberry blond mane.

She was athletic and moved like a ballerina.  No one had named her yet and for the first week or so we referred to her as “the new mare.”  Sometimes we called her cabeza roja, “red head.”

And then, one night, JoAnn and I were having Margaritas on the patio at La Quinta Resort, listening to a Bolivian pan pipe band weave its hypnotic rhythms.

The Bolivian panpipe group – Viento de los Andes

A perfect desert night, the stars crackling in the black sky.  The air was balmy, the kind of night when you could hear the wind move the tops of the palms and feel it as it floated down and kissed you on your cheeks.  Two young girls got up and began to dance slowly, sensuously, sinuously, to the music of a song I had never heard before. I walked over to the girls when the music stopped.  “What were you doing?” I asked, softly, not wanting to break the mood.  “The dance, I mean.”

 “It’s called the Macarena,” one answered.

When I told JoAnn her words were: “That’s it.  We’re going to call the new mare “Macarena.”

She became the best pony we ever rode.  I taught her all the polo moves, the quick stops, the rollbacks, the lead changes.  It was almost as if she knew and I was just reminding her.  It was like we were telepathic.  Tommy Wayman, the top American polo player at the time, was playing at Eldorado where JoAnn and I were playing.  We became friends after I had written an article about him for one of the polo magazines and I told him about her one morning over coffee, how easy she was to make.  His words are as clear now as if he said them a minute ago.  “We don’t make the good horses, you know…God makes ‘em, we just find ‘em.” 

That was her.  Our lives intertwined for the next thirty or so years.

More about the move to come.

Gotta go…

Moving to Santa Fe 900 miles away would be a leap of faith.  Ya think?!?  We never actually sat down and said that to each other.  But we knew it.  It was time to find out if we had just been paying lip service to our dream or were we serious?

JoAnn, the Navy brat, had grown up in Oregon, Hawaii, California, Massachusetts.  I had grown up in New Jersey, gone to school in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and had served in the Army in Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and D.C.  Both of us had moved to California expecting to live out our days in the Golden State.  If you want to make God laugh…

For years we had been visualizing a house in Santa Fe.  Down to the smallest details.  It would have huge vigas supporting wooden latillas. Brick floors.  Piñon and juniper trees surrounding the house.  The Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the East.  The Jemez Mountains to the West.  Rewarding days, fireplace nights…

We made all the places we ever lived in look like Santa Fe.

…dreams of Santa Fe

We had a small collection of Native American clay pots we had gathered on our many trips to New Mexico.  The pots spoke to us, hypnotized us when we ran our hands around the inside of the rim, feeling where long gone, unknown fingers had shaped the wet clay.  We were mesmerized by the intricate designs on their surface.  There were paintings on the walls by Santa Fe artists, prints by Georgia O’Keeffe, works by Amado Pena, a Pascua Yaqui Indian from Santa Fe we had befriended decades before.  We treasured a few Native American blankets.

The process of visualization sets intention in motion.  The more vividly you picture your goals, the more likely you are to be able to harness the power of intention.

We targeted March, 2020.  (More about our unerring sense of timing later.)  And then a few months later our precious Sam the Dawg crossed the rainbow bridge and “us” became JoAnn, me, and Macarena, our Spirit Horse, our one remaining retired polo pony.  Sam the Dawg was 15 and he had lived a great long life but he was our Buddha dog, a wonderful, wise black Lab whose existence lent a great dimension to our lives.  We had told him about Santa Fe, about how much he would love the cool days, and now he was gone.  We missed him terribly.

We knew the Universe was going to test us.  We just didn’t know how or how severely.  We were starting to appreciate the truth of what Richard Bach had once written:  “You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.  You may have to work for it, however.”

Eisenhower probably had an easier job planning Normandy.  We started with a list.  Find a place for us to live in Santa Fe.  We knew we wanted to seriously downsize.  Find a suitable pasture for Macarena.  We knew she needed a place with grass and a shelter for when the weather turned cold.  We would need to close up the house.  Find a good mover.  Find a reputable horse transporter.  And on and on.

In 34 years you collect a lot of stuff.  Even though neither of us qualify as packrats stuff clings to you like lint on an old wool sweater.  Mementos.  Things you’ve put in the garage figuring you would retrieve them someday.  We needed a catalyst for us to get rid of clutter.  If we were serious about downsizing we would have to get rid of a lot of things.

Confession:  I am a packrat when it come to books.  I have a very hard time giving up books.  I have never been a fan of Kindle or its relatives and prefer holding a book in my hands.  When we left the desert for Valley Center in 2016 we had donated at least half of my book collection but what was left was still formidable.  I knew I would have to go through my collection and cull some more.  I also knew that would be painful.

Feng shui has been around a lot longer than Marie Kondo.  Try about 5,000 years.  And feng shui tells us it’s good to get rid of clutter, that it frees your spirit, your Xi, from the things that are holding it back.  Clutter is a way of clinging to the past. According to feng shui principles, clutter represents trapped energy and when you clear clutter you release negative emotions, generate positive energy and invite opportunity into your life.  Not a bad idea, all things considered.

In the old days there was a thing called a “garage sale.”  Most neighborhoods frown on garage sales now (although I once found a great print at a garage sale) so they call them “estate sales.”  Has a more upscale ring to it.

So we figured we would have an estate sale.  Easy, right.  Start with the furniture that had been living in the garage.  That was the easy part.  The hard part was all of the small items, things you acquired over the years that had been invested with emotion, memories.  Like the corn husk Christmas wreath we had picked up years before at the tamale festival in Indio.

The corn husk Christmas wreath.  (We kept that and it was up on our Santa Fe door this Christmas.  It looked as though it had been waiting to go there.)

The even harder part would be the books.

JoAnn is a lot more pragmatic about those things than I am.  She goes through things like a plague of locusts and heaven help you if you get in the way.

I tried to suck it up and be objective about my books.  We both recognized we would need a third party to help sort out the rest of the things.  We were fortunate in that the person we brought on, Linda, was sensitive to the emotional turmoil that went along with seeing your house turned in to an upscale flea market and listening while random people offered you a buck or two for something that was precious.

The traumatic “estate sale…”

The estate sale was our Rubicon.  Like Caesar, once we crossed that invisible line, there was no turning back.  “Alea iacta est” he said at the time.  “The die has been cast.”

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  Yogi Berra

Gotta go.

About the quote that starts this blog:  It has been attributed to everyone from Richard Bach to Patrick Overton, OR Melling to Paulo Coelho.  It was originally shared with me at least 35 years ago by a treasured patient who has since passed. I have unashamedly taken ownership of it.

As always, I welcome and encourage your comments.  You can write me at .  If you would like to receive more of these blogs about our life-changing journey please sign up here.

Christmas 2020, Santa Fe, NM

The Plaza is in the mid-foreground ablaze with colored lights and the Basilica of St. Francis dominates the scene.  Sangre de Cristo Mountains behind. We live about three miles behind the Basilica, where the land slopes gently upward.  

Photo courtesy of Gene Peach Photography www.genepeach.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2020

Our Santa Fe dream started when we went there together for the first time in1986 and it never went away.  We did go back.  Year after year.  Santa Fe was a slightly exotic shape shifter, a chimera, always familiar, always different.  We told each other we would live there someday.  When the time was ripe.  We consoled ourselves with the fact that it had taken Georgia O’Keeffe about 25 years to make that happen. We reminded ourselves that more than 60 years after she first set foot in the magic city she remembered how she felt when she went there for the first time in 1917: “From then on, I was always on my way back.”  We figured if she ultimately could do it, we could too. 

Not so fast…

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans… JoAnn started an equestrian marketing company in 1986, raised a record amount of sponsorship for the 1987 US Open Polo Championship in Indio, California, and then helped San Diego Polo Club get started. But fashion had been her passion since she was young and after two years of being an entrepreneur she enrolled in FIDM, the Fashion Institute for Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.  Following her passion.  She graduated magna cum laude.

That was the beginning of her dream career as the international buyer for Giorgio Beverly Hills, a career that proved every day that finding and sharing your passion is irresistible.

JoAnn hard at work at Giorgio Beverly Hills

After twelve years in the fashion capitals of the world JoAnn moved down to the desert full time after Giorgio finally closed their doors on Rodeo Drive.

Time to saddle up for Santa Fe, right?  Well yes…and no.

Not long after JoAnn became a full time desert rat, Hyatt Grand Champions approached me to open a medical spa in their newly enlarged spa in Indian Wells.  Those were the days when telling someone you were opening a medical spa got you a quizzical look.  At the time there were only a handful of medical spas in the country and JoAnn and I literally wrote the book on the concept.  Together we created The Medical and Skin Spa, which became the internationally renowned, multi award-winning embodiment of our mantra: Health and Beauty, Inside and Out.

If you have ever seen one of the old black and white movies from the 1940’s you might remember how they showed the passage of time: they would film a wall calendar and have the pages blow off and fly away.  Dust in the wind. Looking back, that’s what those years seemed like.  The wind that blew the pages away was life.  The medical spa became an all-consuming endeavor, fodder for a lot of late night conversations.  We had sold peace of mind for success but we still yearned for a place at the end of a long dirt road, someplace where we could put our feet up and finish all of the unfinished conversations we had started over the years.  No cellphones.  Fireplace nights.  Animals.

Tesuque Village Market – Tesuque, NM

We always fantasized it would be somewhere near the Tesuque Village Market just north of Santa Fe and we laughed and dreamed and told each other we would only emerge once a month to see if anyone had left a message for us on their old wall phone.

We finally closed The Medical and Skin Spa and left the desert in Artie’s rear view mirror in 2016.  (Artie II – our red F150) We collected Sam the Dawg and Macarena, our one remaining polo pony, and moved on to North County San Diego, to a very small town in the mountains called Valley Center.  Vaquero country.  A place where the clink of conquistador spurs still echoed off the old Engelmann oak trees.  Santa Fe was fading away like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.  Soon all that would be left was a smile.

A little over a year there we were sitting out on the portal off the kitchen watching the rising sun throw dancing shadows on Palomar Mountain across Pauma Valley when JoAnn looked at me with that look and said: “What ever happened to Santa Fe?  We always said we would move there.” 

It was a question I had been asking myself.  And ignoring.  I took a sip of coffee.  And then she added: “Do you think we waited too long?”

I took a long breath.  And then another. From Bilbo Baggins to Doug Combs there are hundreds of philosophers who said, one way or another, if you don’t go you’ll never know.  It would be hard.  Really hard. I thought about one of my mantras: hard is not a reason not to do something.  And then I said to myself, self, you know the worst thing you can do is never try.  “Yeah,” I finally said, “probably.  But if we don’t go now we’ll never go.” 

The dream had been hanging out there for 34 years.  We were about to find out how badly we wanted to make it come true.  How much would we be willing to do?

What would it take to upend our life and move 900 miles away to follow a dream, a promise we had made to each other decades before when we were decades younger?   The words of Richard Bach echoed in my ear: “You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.  You may have to work for it, however.”

Gotta go…

The further north you drive out of Santa Fe the further back in time you go. The road roughly parallels the Rio Grande, the mighty river.  A Southwestern landscape.  There are better roads now but not much else has changed.  The old Native American settlements that you pass, Tesuque and Pojuaque might as well exist in a parallel universe. 

The rolling dun-colored hills that rise up on either side are accented with green dots of piñon and juniper.  They haven’t changed much either since Georgia O’Keeffe immortalized them on canvas back in the mid-1960’s.  She was in love with them.  And they were in love with her.

“Her shadow snakes across the Southwest…” as Tom Russell writes, “Her spirit circles around Taos and Santa Fe.”  We could not have known it then but she would become our touchstone.  Our role model for holding dreams fast.  More about her later.

Here and there are old houses in among the trees, some of them adobe and some of the adobe bricks are crumbling, returning to the earth.  Some have vigas sticking out of the walls, supporting the roofs in the age-old Southwestern style.

JoAnn and I were on our way to Chimayo, more properly Santuario de Chimayo, an old church north of Santa Fe that had an irresistible back story and was reputed to have wonderful healing powers.  Some called it the Lourdes of North America.  We had heard it was not to be missed.  So of course it was one of the first places we went. 

Santa Fe was our first real excursion since we had become a couple.  It had only been a few months since we had rented the tiny, yellow batten board cottage in Corona del Mar.  I had only been to Santa Fe once before but the city had become precious to me and I wanted to share it with someone I already thought of as a soulmate, show it to her like I would show off a precious jewel, hoping she would like it, love it, as much as I did.   We had flown into Albuquerque, rented a car and drove up to Santa Fe and when JoAnn emerged from the car in front of La Fonda Hotel, looked around and said: “I think I’ve lived here before,”  I knew soulmate wasn’t strong enough.

In those pre-GPS days you had to rely on maps.  Once you left the main road there were no clear signs and every fork in the road was a question:  Right?  Left? 

And then, suddenly, there it was.  Tucked in among the trees, standing guard over a green meadow rolling away, its weathered adobe presence and rough hewn beams speaking of simpler, quieter times.

Before the Spaniards arrived, a hot spring that flowed near present day Chimayo was sacred to the Tewa Indians for its healing powers.  The place has a history.  Legend has it that more than 200 years ago a shepherd saw a light coming from the ground.  Digging into the dirt with his bare hands he found a cross and brought it to the local church where the priest, Father Alvarez, placed it on the altar.  In the morning it was gone, back into the spot where the shepherd had first discovered it.  That happened again the next day and after the third time it happened Father Alvarez decided to build a chapel on the spot to house the crucifix.

The santuario itself is simple adobe, the colors of the earth and of the hills, rounded corners, small wooden crosses over the unassuming entrance.  A place accessible to all.  Perhaps the size of a large, one-room schoolhouse.  A churchyard in the front encircled by a low adobe wall.  Inside it is all dark woods and candles and santos.  A handful of people sitting in the pews. A few women dressed in black. 

Off what would be the transept to the left is a doorway to a small, low-ceilinged room that must be accessed by bending over.  In the dim light you might miss the even smaller room off to the right with a depression that contains the healing dirt.  Here you speak in whispers.  Discarded crutches, pictures of sons, husbands, brothers in uniform line the rough adobe walls.  Taped.  Asking protection from a loving God.  Imploring God for grace.  For protection.  For  healing.,

The santuario crept its way into our pores the way Santa Fe had.  We knew we were looking through a window into eternity.  I don’t know how long we stayed but when we finally walked back out, squinting into the brilliant sunshine and the impossibly blue New Mexico sky, when we blundered our way back to Santa Fe down a few dead ends we knew we had been changed.  In some inexplicable way we would never be the same.

But Santa Fe wasn’t finished with us.  We found a parking spot on one of the narrow old-world streets of the old section and walked over to Water Street and up the narrow staircase to the Rooftop Cantina of the Coyote Cafe, epicenter of the place that would make New Mexican cuisine famous, and ordered a Margarita, grasping for the familiar, and let the sounds and the smells of the city wash over us. 

This is as good a time as any to say that calling Santa Fe as a “city” does not do it justice.  At all.  It is a city in the sense that it is the capital of New Mexico and home to way too many government offices and hotels.  It is an art center, a center of culture.  Natives are fond of saying: “They were born here their whole lives.” 

But with its narrow streets and absence of building much over three stories, with its population of about 70,000 back in the 80’s and its eclectic combination of backgrounds, Native Americans (Navajo, Tewa, Pueblo, whose people have been living there for 5,000 years), Spanish (many of whom trace their families back more than 200 years), gringos (a lot from the East Coast), Mexicans (who have lived in the area for hundreds of years), Catholics, traditional (and of diverse persuasions such as Pentacostals, Penitentes), Conversos, (descendants of Jews who came in the 15th century to escape the Inquisition), it has retained the cachet of a large small town off the beaten path in Spain or Portugal, a wildly dysfunctional, friendly, welcoming large small town.

The cantina helped bring us back to the present.  We decided we had fallen in love.  With Santa Fe.  That we would come back soon.  We were going down the rabbit hole that must have effected Georgia O’Keeffe the same way in 1917 when she said sixty years later: “From then on I was always on my way back.”  What better role model could there be?

Gotta go.

It has been several weeks since I last published one of these.  We have been busy.  I am now back on schedule.  If you would like to receive more please sign up here.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

even before the Santa Fe dream started…

A little more than three decades ago, about a year after we first met, the realization dawned on JoAnn and me that we had more in common than polo.  At first we were just nodding acquaintances at a small polo club in Anaheim.  And then one day she showed up with a chestnut mare she had just bought from someone in LA.  JoAnn had no place to store her tack and I had a tackroom.  “Why don’t you keep your tack in here?” I asked.

At that point I had been riding seriously for two years, ever since my eleven year old son, Loren, and I had gone to the desert outside of Palm Springs on a father-son Indian Guides weekend and happened upon a polo match at Eldorado Polo Club in Indio.  It stirred the same kind of primal attraction I had felt when I first saw a match in West Orange when I was a teenager.  I said to myself back then one day I will do that.  But like a lot of childhood dreams it got put on the very back burner, a victim of the demands of life.

What I didn’t know was that from the time I was first put on a horse when I was four or five horses had been surreptitiously shaping my destiny.  What I felt that first time was electricity.   Coming up through the saddle straight into me.  Sheer gazillion volt electricity.  It was a feeling that never got old. Growing up I had listened carefully to all of my Grandpa’s stories about horses and the Russian cavalry and how he, the man I called Poppy, had won the Cross of St. George for bravery and I said one day I will do that.  Well, maybe not actually be in the cavalry but I knew one day I would ride a horse flat out, straight for the horizon, all four feet off the ground.  For a kid growing up in a small town in New Jersey in a small house with a very limited budget that was akin to becoming Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.  Not a chance.

But still, every chance I got I was horseback.  I wouldn’t let anything stop me.  When I was eleven or twelve I took riding lessons in the Orange Mountains with money I made delivering groceries for Mr. Gerber, riding my bike each way, hurrying to get home before dark so my Mom wouldn’t suspect.

“Poppy, can we get a horse?”

“Where are you going to keep it?”

“In the backyard, Poppy.” 

You can guess how that turned out.

When I finished my residency I volunteered for the Army and rode at every Army post I was stationed.  Rode every chance I got after I was discharged.  Somehow a horse of my own never happened and it remained a dream, a secret just behind my eyes, until the day almost forty years ago that one of my patients told me she had a riding stable in Santa Ana Heights and we got to talking and she asked if I would be interested in taking lessons.  Maybe trading for my fee.  Would I?  Ya think?

So at least three or four times every week at about 7 AM, there I was, unlearning all the bad riding habits I had picked up over the years at the various and sundry stables.  Learning how to jump.  How to fly on the wings of a horse.

I was no closer to learning how to play polo but I was riding.  And then early one morning I met a man whose daughter was taking jumping lessons.  His name was Denny.

“What are you doing riding in an arena this early with a bunch of 12 year old girls?” and I said “because I want to play polo and I figured I had better become a better rider” and he said “I play at this small club in Anaheim.  Why don’t you come out tonight and watch?”

Why indeed?  I was there that night.  And that’s when I met JoAnn. 

And the “why don’t you keep your tack in here…” when she showed up with her chestnut mare a few months later led JoAnn and me to long and often convoluted conversations about life and relationships and families and backgrounds.  And values.  Polo was the backdrop, horses were the common bond.  And dogs.  There never seemed to be enough time to run out the conversation thread and together we learned the truth of what Izak Dineson had written years before: God made the world round so you can’t see too far ahead.  Good thing.  

Sooner or later you begin to realize life is like a giant spreadsheet, a cosmic Excel.  Change a value in one cell at the top and the results change away down at the bottom.  At any moment we are confronted with choices.  Each one leads to another set of choices and another so ultimately you wind up walking an algorithmic path you didn’t even know existed when you started, with a life 180 degrees different from the life you imagined.  As Jack Bartlett once said: “I don’t want to meet the liar who can tell me his life turned out they way he thought it would.”

The most interesting part of it is we think we are actually in control and the choices are ours to make.  But are we?  Or are we confronted with alternative paths that result from choices we made way back at the top of the spreadsheet we weren’t even aware were life-changing when we picked the one that was the most alluring or the one that we thought would bring us ultimate success.  Or made the choice that we felt would bring us happiness.

You could almost hear the cosmic spreadsheet blink and reboot when Denny told me about the club in Anaheim.  Or maybe it started to blink when my patient told me about her riding school.  Or even before.  And when the values at the end obediently changed to reflect what seemed at the time to be random events it wasn’t coincidence at all.  Maybe Santa Fe wasn’t a coincidence.

If you trust who you are and what you’ve done, the right thing will appear and inspire you to move in that direction.  Or as the late Randy Pausch once said: “If you live your life the right way the karma will take care of itself.  The dreams will come to you.”

But can you trust it?  That you are doing the right thing?  Making the right choice?  I was about to find out.

Gotta Go

What does it take to pick up and move almost nine hundred miles away when you’ve lived in an area for decades?  And why would anyone want to do that, turn their life upside down to pursue a dream?  Especially if that dream is decades old?  What would have changed about the dream?  Or the dreamer.  Would anything have stayed the same?  About two thousand years ago Heraclitus thought about that and wrote: No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

The answer?  There really is no choice.  In the end you will regret the chances you did not take. And you have to go see for yourself.  You’ll never know if you don’t go as Doug Coombs used to say.  It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

For 35 years, moving to Santa Fe has been our goal.  It started with that random invitation to play polo in New Mexico.

There is an invisible force field that wraps around our planet just as if a giant magnet was sitting deep in its core generating powerful lines of energy that circle the globe. The force fields they set up influence just about everything about life on Earth.  They enable us to use compasses and find magnetic North, they effect geotropism, the way plants grow, the weather, they even influence and govern our creative forces.  The main lines of force enter and exit the earth at the poles but there are secondary lines of force that enter our planet and emerge in places like Machu Picchu.  And Santa Fe.

I didn’t know that at first.  But I felt something.  Maybe what Georgia O’Keeffe felt the first time she came to New Mexico in 1929, something that kept her turning back and turning back and coming back for more.  And finally, more than twenty years later, she moved from New York City.  For good.  Georgia  Santa Fe.  Forever entwined.  And now me.

All the players were staying at a sprawling adobe house someone called “Happy Acres,” half in jest.  On a few acres in Arroyo Hondo outside of Santa Fe.  Debii, one of the players, had rented it for the summer.  Everyone had a bedroom but as the last man to arrive I got the distinction of being able to sleep on a couch in the living room in front of the massive stone fireplace.  Lucky me.  Debii’s two Dobermans thought it was their bed and did not take kindly to the idea of sharing it with some random stranger so the dogs and I had a talk and we agreed that they could lay on the floor next to me if they promised not to wake me.

They woke me anyway.  Dogs have this way of deciding what they want you to do and making you do it and then making you think it was your idea all along.  I gave up and opened my eyes.  My makeshift bedroom was filled with a bluish white light and I thought of the false dawn we used to talk about back when I sailed the tropics but I figured it was too early even for that.  Since the Dobies outnumbered me I got out of bed, pushed the sliders back as quietly as I could and the three of us walked into the night.  I was right.  This was no false dawn.  The light was coming from the the biggest, brightest, whitest full moon I had ever seen.  It floated in the air like a magician’s illusion.

Shamans, medicine men, native warriors, danced around us, shadows cast by moonlight shining through the branches of the piñon trees. The dogs charged ahead, beyond the silence.  I had no idea where I was going but I knew they could find their way back.  Or I hoped they could so I kept walking.  No light except from the moon.  No sound except the beating of my heart.  I laid on the couch when we got back, knowing I could never fall back to sleep.

We trailered the horses from Happy acres to the Santa Fe Polo Club the next morning and I took three of them out on the warmup around the track that circled the fields.  The polo club was an informal operation back then with an office in a trailer.  Polo, as the legendary Bob Skene once said, is the great leveler.  Ratings, bank balances, fame, celebrity, don’t hold as much value as the fact that you play.  That you are willing to lay it all on the line, get on a horse and ride out onto a field.  How well you play is not as important as that you do play and are willing to hang it all out there.  I got to spend a lot of time with the great playwright Sam Shepherd, one of my all-time writing heroes.  And the Barry brothers from Texas.  And a few 8-goalers.  And a couple of Argies.  That alone was memorable.

Santa Fe and I bonded over the next three days filled with horses and the city and its supernatural ambience.  We were like long lost soul mates and after that my life divided itself into two parts: Santa Fe and not Santa Fe…and I couldn’t wait until I could make the time to go back.

That time didn’t come until about a year later.

I welcome your comments, as always.  You can write me at .  I plan to post one of these a week.

Gotta Go

If we were to meet somewhere, say at some cowboy bar in Montana on a crisp September afternoon when the tall prairie grasses were turning brown I would tell you I was probably the last person in the world who would call themselves a gypsy.  Gypsies go from place to place like those little white fluffy things that floated through the air we used to call “money stealers” when we were kids.  Gypsies clatter down the road in one of those ornately painted wagons drawn by patient horses decked out like it was Mardi Gras.  Not me.  Uh, uh.  Not me at all.  I’m small town.  Settled.

My past, however,  puts the lie to that.  I’ve lived in seven states, almost eight if I had decided to take up that offer in New Orleans.  Fifty thousand or more ocean racing miles with cities from Key West to Bayona, Spain, Newport, Rhode Island to Honolulu and points in between.  Pushing cattle in Dillon, Montana.  Playing polo in the California desert, in San Diego, Santa Barbara.   Sometimes moving for the flimsiest of reasons.  But after being in SoCal for the last few decades I figured the ol’ roots had finally gotten to me.  They would scatter my ashes here.

I really would have wanted them to scatter my ashes in the California I came out to when I got out of the Army, the California redolent of orange blossoms and night-blooming jasmine, the California of Haight-Ashbury and Sunset Boulevard and the Whiskey and the Troubadour.  Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys and outdoor concerts with Longbranch Pennywhistle and Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Eagles. California nights heavy with the warm smell of colitas. 

But that California is long gone.  “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”  Even Joshua Tree and the rock where Gram Parsons ascended has changed.

And I’m still here.  How the heck did that happen?  I don’t want my ashes scattered in this California.

But for one off-handed remark by a friend years ago I probably would have stayed here.  Waiting for Hotel California to reopen. “Come on out to Santa Fe and play polo for a long weekend,” a friend asked back then.  I gave my usual off-handed, go-to answer: “Sure…why not?”  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  (By the way, it seemed like a good idea at the time has gotten me into more trouble than I care to remember but it’s also gotten me into some unforgettable adventures.  I wouldn’t trade the trouble for the adventures…)

So there I was on a plane from John Wayne Airport to Albuquerque, polo helmet and polo boots at hand, to find out what lay on the other side of the mountain.

My epiphany began when I walked out of the terminal and into my rental car in ABQ.  Not just going from sea level to five thousand feet of elevation but the sense I had been transported back to a different country in an earlier time, a place where the intense blue of the sky covered everything.  The same blue color I had painted the door to my house in Newport Beach without ever having seen it.

The road out of ABQ to Santa Fe runs in more or less a straight line to the Northeast.  I-25.  Once you drop the city in your rearview mirror the road starts climbing through dun-colored hills dotted with sagebrush and piñon.  The further I drove the deeper I seemed to sink into it.  It was late on a Thursday afternoon in July.  The traffic was light.  The blue of the sky darkened as the elevation increased.

I got off the highway at Old Pecos Trail which seemed auspicious since it was a name I had read once in a Red Ryder comic book.  Or heard once in a John Wayne movie. But it had a sufficiently cowboy vibe for me, the kid from a small town in Jersey who always wanted to be a cowboy.

This was in the days before GPS, when you had to actually plot your own route from a Triple A map that lay crinkled now on the passenger seat, tossed aside.  I had arranged to meet my friends in the bar at La Fonda and I slid the rental car into a parking spot in front of the hotel, opened the car door and climbed out.

I had been here before.  It hit me just like that.  I had been here before.

Not in the deja vu sense, I had the actual surreal feeling I had been here before.  I had seen these one and two story adobe-looking buildings surrounding a grassy plaza shaded by old trees.  I had felt the air, hushed, anticipating. The sky an impossible blue-black.  The shadows could have been airbrushed on.  I Inhaled the scent of high desert dust and sage.  Four hundred years of history crowded down around me, a weight of cultures.  Native American, Catholic, Spanish, Mexican, Marano. There is no awareness of the passage of time in the other world and it was as if they had been waiting for me to come back.  Drawn me back.

As soon as I sat down the waitress set a glass down in front of me.  “Wild Turkey.  Two ice cubes, Doc.  They said to have it ready for you.”

I had a sense of vertigo.  I was sliding down the rabbit hole.

(About the gypsy thing…my maternal grandma came from a very small town in Romania.  Fvorov.  It was said by my old great aunts that she was at least part gypsy and was renowned as a fortune teller and healer.  I never knew her but she predicted my birth and I found out later she was pretty accurate about describing my life and my personality.  I carry an Anglicized version of her name.)

And, oh yeah, tell me if you like this and if you want to see more.  My email is

Gotta Go

XEOMIN

XEOMIN has been my go-to wrinkle relaxer since 2013.  Prior to that I was using BOTOX exclusively and treated more than 5,000 patients.  The primary reason I switched to XEOMIN was because my patients told me they liked the effect of the product, that it had the same effect as BOTOX, and that it did not seem to be as “heavy” when used in the forehead.  Peer-reviewed research studies show XEOMIN has the same time of onset as BOTOX and same duration, three to four months, so changing to the newer product was an easy decision.

I recommend my patients return for a re-treatment in about four months.  This is a perfect time to evaluate the effect of the previous XEOMIN treatment.  Each patient is different and the results and the duration of the results depend upon the muscle mass that underlies the skin of the face.  In many cases fewer units are needed to achieve a good result (read: less expensive) and follow up treatments seem to last longer.

A word to the wise: If you wait until the effects of the original treatment are no longer apparent it almost always takes more to get the same effect.

FILLERS

Wrinkle fillers such as Restylane, Radiesse and Belotero often achieve effects that last up to a year.  The best way to maximize the long-term result you want (and get the most value for your money) is to return to the office for a no-charge, complimentary consultation in about seven to eight months.  That’s right.  Before the product I used is all gone.  This gives us an opportunity to take some pictures with my iPad and compare photos side-by-side.  In most cases we decide nothing further is necessary at that time but it gives us a chance to make plans for future treatments. 

My goal is to have my patients look consistently good and not seesaw between looking great and looking tired.  The way to achieve that is by “layering.”  adding a small amount of additional product to boost what we originally did.  As with XEOMIN, this is usually a less expensive option.  I invite you to come in, look at my pictures with me and decide for yourself.

BOTTOM LINE

The most important factor in achieving a natural, youthful look is the person at the other end of the needle.  My patients know me, know how much experience I have had and know how important a good result is to me.  I am proud of the trust my patients have in me and proud they know how much I cherish the relationship we have.

Looking natural, youthful and unstressed is a process.  The process begins at the first visit where we discuss what you see, what you are looking to achieve and how together we can maximize your aesthetic medicine experience and stay within your budget. 

The process continues with my open-door policy.  You are always invited to make an appointment and come in for no charge complimentary visit to discuss how the treatment I performed is working and decide on the best course of action for next time.  Remember, I am also available for ZOOM consultations so we can get together without you having to come into the office.

Your great result depends upon a deep commitment by both of us.  By me…to bring my 18 years of experience to bear in helping you get the best result possible with the least expense, and you…by following all the good health recommendations (vitamins, sunscreen, good products, stress management) I think are so important.

If you are beginning to get the feeling that you can’t open up your email program, turn on the TV or browse FaceBook without seeing ,“COVID-19,” you’re right.  And justifiably so.  This crisis is a once-in-a-hundred year event.  And as much as we think we can deal with it, that we are stronger than that puny virus is,  the threat of death from an invisible invader is never far from the top of our minds.  Like the constant and incessant fear of death that the Londoners must have felt during the Blitz in World War II, the idea that our world is spiraling out of control can’t help but cause anxiety.  Anxiety creates stress.  And stress plays a significant role in our physical health by lowering our ability to fight disease.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.

If you think anyone is immune to those feelings, you’re wrong.  Remember my spinnaker theory of life.  Everyone’s spinnaker looks full except yours.  Ain’t so.  My spinnaker, just like everyone else’s, is always on the verge of collapsing.  Always needs tweaking to keep it flying.  What I do comes down to a few tweaks that I will discuss below.  Most of the time they work.  They are always worth trying.

When you begin to spiral down into the rabbit hole, remember something many neuroscientists are saying: those feelings last for only 90 seconds.  After those 90 seconds have passed, any remaining emotional response stems from us choosing to stay in that emotional cycle.

One of the best ways to handle what is out of our control is to move on to what we can control.  What we can do for ourselves.  By ourselves.

This is good advice right here:

Taken by JoAnn’s friend, Kat Livingood, an amazing professional photographer from Santa Fe, NM

First…I’ve put myself on a news fast.  It’s like cutting out ice cream.  Only harder.  And I believe it’s better for you.  It’s easy to turn on the TV in the late afternoon and listen to the talking heads tell each other how the world is going to the dogs.  You sit there and think; “Wow, the world is going to the dogs.  I saw it on TV.”  But remember, viewership, the number of people watching, determines how much advertising dollars they get.  It’s  how they make their money.  If they all held hands and sang Kumbayah you would fall asleep and the advertising dollars would dry up.  So pick out one or two trusted news sources, not commentaries, and rely on them.  Check in once or twice a day.  And that’s it.  Let the talking heads manufacture anxiety.  I trust you to be smart enough to draw your own conclusions.

Then…do something for yourself.  I like the idea of getting outside in the fresh air and sunshine.  What some people are calling ecotherapy.  But use common sense.  Right now it’s best to avoid crowds and stay about six feet away from the nearest human.  Getting outside, walking, hiking or strolling, is a great stress reliever.  If you have a critter that likes to walk with you that’s even better. 

This is a good time to read something you always wanted to read but never had time for.  (Reading the iPhone definitely does not count.) 

Meditation is a tried and true method for relieving stress and centering your thoughts. There are a lot of good health reasons to do it too.  And it’s possible to do it without a turban and without having to learn an obscure mantra.  Not long ago, pre COVID, I wrote a short but helpful blog about meditation, what it is, what it does and how to do it easily.  You can also download a (free) app called Breethe that is available on your phone. 

That’s me, meditating with my Spirit Horse, Macarena.

Yoga is an exceedingly helpful practice.  Not only does it help your emotions, it will also help in relieving aches and pains.  Right now, of course, going to a Yoga class is pretty much out of the question but there are some excellent Yoga programs that are available on your desktop or laptop. 

And remember Foxx’s Fearless Tips:  Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds when you have to be out and about and don’t go out in public if you have any signs of a cold.  I also recommend daily Vitamin D3 (5,000 units), Vitamin C (1,000 mg), Zinc (50 mg) and an echinacea capsule.  Keep yourself hydrated and well-rested.

We are seeing patients on a very limited basis and taking extraordinary precautions to keep everyone healthy.  Call JoAnn for information at 760-972-6116.

I am also doing a limited number of telephone/videoconferencing consultations.  The modern buzz word is “telemedicine” but you and I know it’s something I’ve been doing for 20 years or more.

Gotta go…