I have been in New Mexico for the past ten days. My wife Lorry is from there, my brother Sid and cousin Peter live there and I was a New Mexico boy for twenty-some years. Going back is coming home. And waking to coyotes in the early morning, hearing them spill their sad, mad delirious song into the fading stars, and then to be fully awake and to smell the juniper and the pinon in the cool high desert air of Tesuque where we once built an adobe house and raised two children, all this is more than coming home -- it's being born again in heaven.

And it gets even better because here we are, all these years later, with grandchildren running around the chamisa bushes and looking for horned toads. They don't find any. Instead, walking in the dark, we run into a bear who starts coughing. Bears cough, the Navajos say, because, well, it's a bear's nature to cough. They brought coughs into the world, the storytellers tell us. Nuthatch, sweet little ash-winged bird, brought gray hair -- another Navajo belief.

Well, Nuthatch must've been working overtime on me because when I lived in New Mexico my hair was brown and now it's nuthatch gray for sure. You learn so many things in New Mexico. Doesn't matter how seldom, or how often, you visit the place either. You learn. I always thought ponderosa pines smelled piney but my relative and life-long friend Alice said, "Smell the bark, it smells like vanilla." Then someone else chimed in, "Ponderosa smells like rootbeer." I sniffed the bark of one towering tree and it actually smelled like a rootbeer float with vanilla ice cream. "What if rootbeer bears were looking for vanilla shakes, would they scratch their backs on this bark?" I asked my seven-year-old grandson Taj. His eyes darted around trying to think of an answer and then he saw my cousin Peter wearing a pair of shorts. Peter rarely wears shorts because he says his legs are too pale. Taj studied Peter's legs for a full minute. Finally, he asked, "How come you're having half-white legs?"

We all laughed at that one.

Later Taj said to me, "Rootbears drink rootbeers?"

We took the family to the Santa Fe Plaza to visit our dear friend, Ross LewAllen. Around the corner from LewAllen & LewAllen Gallery there is a shady spot where children and adults are invited to sit at an easel and draw pictures with felt-tipped pens. Taj sat right down and drew a great blue mammoth with a comet crashing through the sky above him and an armadillo digging a hole below him. He signed the picture and just then Ross LewAllen, storyteller in silver and one of the best watercolorists in the world saw Taj's work of art and began to praise it. Ross' daughter Laura, the other LewAllen of LewAllen & LewAllen and a great jeweler in her own right, was there and she also praised Taj's work.

Soon Ross and Taj were making a deal, a trade of sorts. Ross disappeared in his upstairs studio and came back with a red mastadon painting he'd done and he traded it with Taj for the blue mammoth, and both of them smiled. I could see, however, that Taj's sister Anais was a little jealous. Ross was going to hang Taj's artwork in his upstairs studio and post it on his website and Anais, who is Taj's twin was left out of all this magnificence. We went upstairs with Ross, Taj, Mariah (our eldest daughter and twins mom), and Shai, Mariah's eldest daughter. Lorry and I followed.

And now we witnessed another of those little miracles that sweeten life and it was all in the nature of good fun and friends and relations and, best of all, love. Ross is a very generous man, a spiritual being. He gave Taj a rust-colored mastadon bone, a piece of tusk and a fang that looked like it was busted off a T-Rex but was probably taken from a javelina or wild pig. Taj smiled like an allosaurus. But Anais's face got longer and longer and sadder and sadder until Ross said, "Here, Anais, this is for you -- a shell phone!"

What it was -- a conch shell to which Ross had attached a cell phone antenna. Anais grabbed it like a purse snatcher and latched it to her ear and started babbling like crazy. I leaned near so I could hear what she said and it went like this --"Hello? Yes. Good. Yes, good. Okay, I gotta go now. Yes, good to hear from you." Anais, shell phone cupped to her ear, listened. Then she said in a loud voice, "Stop talking to me, Ocean, I gotta go."

And so we did, off into the bright New Mexican sun and the desert land that was once, yes, Ocean.