Perhaps the best letter I ever got was a pink post-it note with nearly illegible blue ink scrawl on it stuck to a sheet of newspaper. The newspaper carried an article about a big pottery store in a place called Santa Fe, New Mexico and folded inside of it were a couple of brochures hyping the same business. “Folkart by the Truckload” they proclaimed.
The scrawl said, “Hi Eric, thanks for your letter, I’ll be calling soon to visit. -Darby”. And just like that, with a big pink inky thwack destiny’s arrow scored a bullseye in my dreamer’s heart and some part of my 22 year old self absolutely knew this.
Just a few months hence I had returned from a mind blowing semester of good living and gurgling bowels in Oaxaca, Mexico where a million things happened. But core among them was feeling more pulled to that place than anything else, falling in love with the old time potters of this land and their work, and meeting a potter in ribboned braids named Dolores Porras who told me about a mythical place.
“There is a store in Santa Fe, Nuevo Mejico where artisans from all over Latin America come every summer.” She spoke tenderly, slowly, at the pace of earth, it seemed. “ I go and make pottery. There are weavers from Ecuador, wood animal carvers from Oaxaca, gourd carvers from Peru…” she wove a story of a dream I didn’t even know I could have, for all I wanted at that point in my life was to be among the old time artisans of Latin America. But having just left the nest, I was generally yet too young and naive to think I could travel through Latin America on my own to meet them. But here was this kind-eyed potter of earthy language telling me that such a place existed in a city in the US of A called Santa Fe!
“Buena gente,” she said, “good people. It is called” she said sweet and slow in her bird song voice, “Ya kah lo pay”. Her words sounded like the dream in my head. “Yakahlopay is the name of the place. It is a store full of pottery from all over the world.”
The moment I got back into the US from that semester of finding my way in Mexico…or anyway, after I enjoyed summer vacation and then found my way back to school, I set to work finding this mythical Yakahlopay. It should be noted that this was 1990 before the internet when I have no idea how we found out about anything. And I, though being an acutely telephonaphobic, picked up the phone and called nonetheless! When you want something bad enough you’ll walk through fire. I wanted to spend the rest of my life hanging with the old timers of the south who knew how to make beautiful things with their hands and earthy materials. But, at least for the time being, do it here in the north. So I dialed zero.
The consistently nasal, human but slightly robotic voice of the Information Operator answered.
“What city pleeeze?”
“Uh, yeah. Um Santa Fe. New Mexico.” I’d never been east of Nevada.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a place called Yakahlopay.” I said it high and sweet and slow just like Dolores. Or so I wish. Actually, I swallowed my words and mumbled. But let’s remember, I’d only recently departed adolescents. There was a pause while the operator searched whatever magic phone book she had that the rest of us didn’t.
“I’m sorry, there’s no listing under that name”. Then she went on to offer, “I do have a listing for a Tecolote Cafe, would you like that number?”
“Oh. Um, no… Thanks.” Operators, in my experience, weren’t people you actually talked to. Simple questions and be done with it. The entire country was calling trying to find phone numbers, they were very busy.
Click. She hung up and that was that. I’d hit a dead end. THE dead end. No more trees to bark up, my Sherlock Holmes days, only just beginning, had come to an end.
But then, and I still don’t know how this happened, because though I was in college, I hardly had a clue about how things actually worked. But somehow it occurred to me to call the Chamber of Commerce in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Another operator gave me that number, it was an easy one to find.
That call was more or less the same in that she’d never heard of Yakahlopay but “perhaps I was looking for the Tecolote Cafe?” Here was the big difference, though. A lot less people are calling the Chamber of Commerce, whatever that is, and so I could just feel that there was space to talk.
“Nah, it’s not that. It’s not a cafe.” Grasping, desperate, hopeful, I added, “ It’s like… It’s like this big pottery store. They have pottery from all over the place and..and…,” I remembered what Dolores Porras had told me, those words were seared into my mind, tattooed on my heart, “artisans from all over Latin America go there each summer and, I guess, make their stuff.”
I probably sounded normal as I described the place. Just saying a thing. But inside I was buzzing like a beehive, humming and howling and yearning and burning. Oh how I wanted to find this promised land, and if this person didn’t know what I was talking about, I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
Or maybe I sounded like all of that, teetering and volcanic. Whatever the case she said, “Oh, you mean Jackalope.”
She said as if it was no big deal. Like anyone would know that. Which was probably true if you lived in Santa Fe, but on my end of the phone in Northern California it was like finding the location of the lost Dutchman's gold mine.
And, of course. Dolores Porras didn’t speak, nor read, in English. Jackalope in Spanish reads Ya-kah-lo-pay.
So there it was! Finally, oh hallelujah and jackpot, jackpot, jackalope! The woman on the phone gave me the phone number and address of Jackalope. I used the address, not the phone number, obviously. 2820 Cerrillos Rd, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Over the next several days I penned the most important letter I’d ever written. (And in one of those small life miracles, somehow I still have a copy). As I read it now I see that that letter is two things. No, three.
The first is that it is filled with the gorgeous sort of language born of young fools, boundless dreamers and massive idealists. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Second, reading it now, 34 years later, it is prophetic.
And third, well, it was good. It worked. Darby Mcquade, the owner of Jackalope liked it, for he too had once been a young fool, a boundless dreamer, and perhaps even a massive idealist. He wrote me that note on a pink post it, that note of a letter I’d been meant to receive all my life, and called a week later to visit.
“Well then”, he wrapped up our short call in which he’d been immensely amiable while I had to struggle to keep the phone from slipping out of my sweaty palms, “why don’t you come out this summer and work?”
When I hung up I had to sit down and catch my breath. My head spun as I began to dream of this dream coming true.
What happened next…well, you can buy the book when it comes out… but basically it was the rest of my life. I went to Santa Fe, Darby welcomed me to the team at the craziest, fun, dysfunctional, successful store possible. It was indeed true that artisans from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru, as well as some New Mexican artisans…took up residence in the vicinity and spent their days making their things in stalls up and down the chaotic, over-packed, deliciously stimulating aisles of the Jackalope universe. Doloras was there with her husband Alfredo and thrilled to see me after I reminded her who I was. There was a prairie dog village out in the big yard. A place cooking up food. A map that showed you around. And acres of pottery from all over the world. Including Oaxaca, that land to which my heart belonged.
The last day of summer, my last day of work there, Darby met me on the way out. He slipped me a little bonus check and, knowing I’d be heading out into the big world soon, released from the country club of university, offered me the very best job on earth. “I need someone to go and buy pottery for me down south, would you be interested?”.
In this way my wildest wish was granted and I became the Oaxacan pottery buyer for Jackalope. What was to come from that was a fabulous freedom and flexibility, an adventure and wanderings into the unknown that took me deep, deep into the world of ancient, timeless Oaxaca.
I hoisted pots and joy for Yakahlope, for Darby, for a decade. That land, those old time people of the earth, were not unlike Darby. Slow talking, easy moving, steady. And no shortage of grins. It was a place I was meant to be more than anywhere else on earth. I made my life there and it has made my life. I made my children there. I learned how to be a fuller human there. I have been fed and fed in all the best ways by that world.
Darby was instrumental in opening that door for me. In saying yes to the idealist, to the untested young man. To saying yes, again and again. “Go ahead”. “Try it”. “Sure”. If there is a bigger plan, a great cosmic dream weaver, then it is clear to me that, for my journey in this life, the weaver placed Darby in my path as a magician of opening doors and directing the light. And not just me, for he touched the lives of so many people I couldn’t even begin to count…the hundreds of potters in Oaxaca whose livelihoods were improved by all the pottery we bought. Potters across Mexico. Potters all around the globe. Every artisan that came through the store. All of us who worked in that wonderful chaos of joy. Customers who loved getting lost and finding treasures. An entire village of prairie dogs. And on and on and on.
Ufff, my goodness! What goodness!
Darby Mcquade passed away September 6th.
In the villages of Oaxaca the raw earth becomes a pot, the pot dances over the fire for a lifetime stewing breakfasts and banquets, then the pot becomes sherds on the ground and the sherds become earth. This is the endless spinning. The spiral. And so Darby has come and touched this world and gone. It is the way.
And it is the way of our tender human hearts to ache. To wail.
Many years ago I lost track of Darby and have not been able to find my way back to him since. I have wanted to! I have wanted to come stand before him, among his pots and prairie dogs and say thank you, with all of my heart, for giving me one of the greatest gifts of my life. That gift of possibility, of a yes, of a give-it-a-chance and enjoy it too! Darby, it has made all the difference and I want you to know that.
May you go well Darby Mcquade. Go well into never and always and forever. Into the glorious, clay-otic, creative beyond.
Darby, thank you for the paths you’ve opened for me. I’ll be calling soon (but not too soon) to visit. -Eric
