being important

When I was younger, I used to travel with my parents. They took us to Europe twice and I am very grateful. I remember my mother composing the trip, looking through guidebook after guidebook and highlighting the "sights of importance." I remember being in Siena and wanting to walk up a cobblestone alley and her response was, "there's nothing important up there." I think about her obsession with importance from time to time and while I certainly understand it, I always wonder about the places and spaces that get left off her itinerary when she travels. Going to only important places certainly narrows down your list of visits, but I am concerned about what you might miss. If you only visited the important places in Santa Fe, where I live, would you really learn about the people who inhabit this old, old city now?

It was yesterday's event that brought this back to me. I was in the Pecos for Jamie Koch's dedication -- a friend of my husband's family, he had been a much-loved and productive chairman of Game & Fish for some time. The Governor was transported by heliocopter to the Day-Use area that would be named after Jamie. As the copter was landing, I heard my father-in-law and another man joking about how if they were ever going to arrive by heliocopter to attend a waiting crowd or get a Day-Use area named after them, they'd better do something important quickly.

Of course, they were joking, but I thought about how important they both already are, to their families, to their communities, to their businesses, etc. It's not even a matter of scale or content -- if you are doing what a good heart tells you to do, you are doing something important.