When I was in my 50s, I checked out opera. I had a friend who was recently widowed, and he held two season tickets to what SF put on. I attended performances with him a few times a year.

I hated the seats there. We were in the dress circle but it was a torture tier, with no leg room and little air. I wondered if the physical discomfort damped the experience for me; I was impressed but not as impressed as I anticipated I would be. The orchestra was always good and the voices were extraordinarily powerful. If the composer was Puccini or Mozart then the melodies were perfect too. But the whole shebang was just not good enough, in my opinion, to be considered the top of one’s art. There was too much affectation and ostentation.

I tried somewhere else. I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico for a week in August for several consecutive summers, and I took in their mountain-top opera. It was much more comfortable. But the performances weren’t smashing enough to lure me there now.

The Santa Fe weeks were enjoyable though. Although the opera schedule forced us to hurry our dinners, the rest of the day was easy, the place was hospitable, and the art was rife. We always spent a few afternoons on Canyon Road. My companions were as likely to buy original art as opera tickets.

I was a witness. I didn’t buy stuff. I’d seen art streets before, in Laguna Beach and Mendocino and San Francisco and Berkeley, but I never encountered any place as serious about it as Canyon Road.

On Canyon Road in Santa Fe, the street
is mostly marked one-way, purveying craft
and art of any scale, inclined to feet
and wheels. With buying eyes the lookers laugh
in scorn or lust to own a plate of glass
frit-fused, or black-on-white lithography,
or jetsam-woven things the rich amass
till they matriculate to ancestry.

The tourists upward ooze for seven blocks,
discomfited by heat and damped by rain,
their socked or polished toes in Birkenstocks,
their vision visored and their silver plain.
They are collectible; the sellers trade
the lookers like they’re stones the desert made.