Alpacas & the Importance of Laughter & TLC
Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.
- Annette Funicello, 1942-
Victory Ranch, New Mexico
There is nothing like having an adoring crowd eating out of your hand to make you feel that life is grand. For a wonder junkie, this is especially true if the throng happens to be a herd of gentle alpacas, and you’re enjoying their attention in a wide valley encircled by majestic, snow-capped mountains.
Arriving at Victory Ranch in Mora, New Mexico, at the foothills of the Sangre de Christo range, I thrilled to the scene around me, taking it all in with the eyes and heart of child, albeit one 50 years old. As I drove down the entrance to the property, ahead of me a procession of cotton candy cumulus clouds tumbled over the mountain tops, moving at fast-forward speed, something that only seems to happen in Big Sky country. Scattered across the vast expanse below were groupings of the whimsical-looking animals I had come to see, smudges of white, black, brown, gray, and red on the horizon.
Victory Ranch is the largest alpaca operation in the Southwest. Alpacas are members of the camel family, now completely domesticated for their soft wool. The animals do well in the 7,000-foot-plus elevation of Northern New Mexico because they are indigenous to the High Andes of the South American countries of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Extremely hardy and adaptable to most climates, altitudes and conditions, alpacas are intelligent and respond to TLC, according to Darcy Weisner, who manages the family enterprise.
I was soon on the receiving end of a whole lot of TLC myself, with my handful of oats making me the belle of the ball with a horde of alpacas, and a few llamas and horses to boot. Within moments, I was engulfed by the herd of livestock, and up close and personal with animals making soft humming sounds punctuated by periodic grunts. No Jane Goodall, I felt a minor moment of panic as I was given another nudge. Yet standing in their midst of these creatures, it was hard to do anything but dissolve into laughter, looking into their widely-spaced eyes, which make them seem alternately startled or all-knowing, innocent or wise.
Annette Funicelllo embodies for many an age of innocence and yet her quote today conveys a common sense insight that certainly eluded me for many a year.
In 1955, when Annette was 12, she was discovered by Walt Disney as she performed as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake at a dance recital in Burbank, California. Disney cast her as one of the original “Mouseketeers”–she was the only one picked by him personally. By the end of the first season of Mickey Mouse Club, she was receiving 6,000 letters a month, according to her Disney Legends biography.
Annette’s rite of passage from adolescent to teenager saw her moving from Disney to teen idol, starring in a series of “Beach Party” movies with Frankie Avalon, including Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.
Funicello now suffers from multiple sclerosis; in 1993, she opened the Annette Funicello Fund for Neurological Disorders at the California Community Foundation.
The last of life’s phases entails accepting the inevitable effects of aging. I returned home yesterday from a trip to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I visited my mother, who now resides in an assisted living facility there. Diagnosed with terminal lung cancer almost two-and-a-half years ago, she is tethered to an oxygen tank 24/7.
She has long suffered with crippling rheumatoid arthritis that had left her hands and feet deformed. A number of years ago, she had the knuckles in each of her hands replaced. The recuperation period involved her wearing a steel contraption that ran the length of her forearm, with metal strips that extended above her fingers; the gadgetry was held together by a web of wires. She proudly called herself the “Bionic Woman.”
She and I had a trip planned to Ireland, a mother-daughter return to the Motherland. Rather than let the rigging slow her down, Mom shuffled up to the counter in her heavy metal regalia and salvaged us some leg room. As she scored us seats in business class, I was certain she was winking at me from behind her cataract sunglasses. Ever one for a dramatic entrance, she reveled in the scene she created as she tried to go through airport security.
The day after I arrived in Charlottesville, we set off for a pair of back-to-back doctor appointments and I had a lesson in humility. Mom matter-of-factly loaded her pushcart with two oxygen tanks. Once at the car, she began to collapse the heavy walker on wheels, clearly well-practiced at loading it into the back seat. She acquiesced and allowed me the honor but it was obvious it hadn’t occurred to her to ask the facility’s staff to handle the heavy lifting for her. Always running late myself, every departure from home is a mad dash out the door, and I take for granted the ease of my spontaneous comings-and-goings.
En route to the pulmonologist, she told me about a dream she had the night before, about a woman who had been our neighbor many years earlier. Mary died of breast cancer in 1997; she had been one of my mother’s closest friends and was the mother of two boys who were like brothers to me growing up.
Mary figures prominently among my memories of my adolescent initiation into the rituals of womanhood. She was the first person I knew who shopped recreationally and I learned at the feet of a master. At 12 years of age, I was a gangly 5’ 10’’ and able to wear women’s shoe sizes. The joy I took in wearing her cast-off size six lemon yellow patent-leather shoes marked the beginnings of my metamorphosis from a tom boy to a young woman. Those shoes, along with the fire-engine red “wet look” maxi coat I was given by my own fashion plate mother, were the early awakenings of my sense of style, which, thankfully has evolved somewhat.
Driving along Charlottesville’s busy Route 29 toward the doctor’s, Mom recalled her dream. “Mary said to me ‘Hurry up and join me—the shopping here is unbelievable and you don’t need any money!’” We laughed long and hard, and yet the underlying reality, voiced in the nuance of a dream, made me remember I can experience more than one feeling at the same time. This definition of heaven does make me smile even now as I write this; I suspect it will continue to be a fond if poignant memory for a long time to come.
Beyond her style sense, Mary left me another enduring legacy in my passage to adulthood.
The summer after I fit into the grown-up lemon shoes, my family moved away to foreign lands below the Mason-Dixon Line. A year later, Mary, her husband and their two boys drove to Virginia in their family camper for a visit. Extending our time together, my brothers and I returned home to Massachusetts with them for a week’s stay. On the long drive, I sat up front with Mary and her husband, while the boys rode together in the back of the camper.
As I looked out the window at the miles rolling away, the Seals & Crofts song “We Shall Never Pass This Way Again” came on the radio. I felt a wave of deep sadness and, against my will, my stomach contracted and tears surged forward from somewhere deep inside me. Determined that Mary and her husband not know about this unexplainable and uncontainable force of emotion, I resolutely and unseeingly faced the scenery, exerting every ounce of will not to burst into audible sobs. Unexpectedly, I felt Mary’s hot hand take my own and squeeze hard. Surprised, I dared to steal a glance at her and saw that tears were streaming down her face, too.
As a young teenager, that moment with Mary taught me that even painful experiences can be transformed into powerful memories of connecting. I have long looked back on the transmission line between us, and recall feeling loved and understood.
Despite having led what seemed a fairy-tale existence for much of her life, Annette Funicello nailed a fundamental truism integral to enjoying life for us mere mortals. As much as I often want to wave the Technicolor Walt Disney wand and make all my problems magically disappear, seeing others transcend their troubles with grace and good humor elevates my own consciousness, and inspires me to take a higher path. Be the journey short or long, on inter-state highways, amidst suburban sprawl or in mountain meadows, it is often life’s idiosyncrasies and imperfections–and the resulting moments of communion they inspire–that make it wonderful.
For more images of Victory Ranch and New Mexico, see Travel Photos.
