I am waking up to the sound of beeping. First soft, probably interjecting into my dream, then more insistent, then finally a claxon pealing into the soft, soft tissue of my gentle brain.

I sit up in bed…I do this lately. Long something I only saw in movies and TV shows, I now wake up with alarming quickness and sit straight up instead of lazily curling up and lounging in bed while my body wakes up. Now, about half the time lately I’m sitting bolt upright in bed, startling my sleeping cat Ned, jumpstarting my day with the feeling of misplaced anxiety and panic. I’m not gonna lie, autocorrect just changed that to “jumpsnarting” for a second and I am now going to make it a thing.

I look around; it’s my dad’s guest bedroom/office in his house and I remember I got into Albuquerque last night at midnight. I had eaten the World’s Worst Mexican Food at a restaurant in the Las Vegas airport on my layover and was a little queasy in the Lyft to his place across town. The driver wouldn’t stop making conversation, even when I closed my eyes, pretending to doze off. I offered a couple of observations about visiting my hometown: “Yeah, it’s grown a lot”, “I went to Albuquerque High School…no not the first one, I’m not that old!”, “Yeah, every time I come here Albuquerque feels more and more backwards and conservative”. At that last one, the driver finally falls mercifully silent the rest of the ride. “Drive safe!” I cheerfully say as a peace offering when he drops me off in my dad’s driveway. He does not reply.

The next morning, I wake up to the alarm system panel’s beeps. I pad out of the guest room in my bare feet and sweatpants, turn the panel off. I look around: there it is, my dad’s oxygen tube snaking along the carpet. He’s awake. I follow it to the kitchen, where he’s reading the newspaper, the city’s remaining paper. There’s a niche in the guest bedroom next to the bed where the other paper’s last issue rests. The Albuquerque Tribune’s last front page gently says (but in large font) “Goodnight, Albuquerque”. The town wasn’t big enough for two papers in this digital age.

We spend some time catching up. Not much has changed in either of our lives: I’m still very busy and satisfied at my day job, he still keeps busy, joined a new church, enjoys his neighbors. At some point later that day something he says strikes me. “You know, I’m not lonely. I was afraid I would be lonely.” I say something like “That’s great, Dad!” but inside it plucks my very heart. We’re the same he and I, our personalities are similar and we see and feel things very similarly. He thinks about his mortality a bit, and I do too, both his and mine. Getting to an age where there are fewer days ahead than behind can feel like you’re getting close to the weekend, to me at least. I wonder how old I’ll be when I finally have wisdom; I wonder when I’ll start to act my age.

He hands me his phone, frustrated. I have so many questions: Why isn’t your phone updated? Why aren’t any of your apps updated?? Why is your wifi so slow?? Why is your phone not even connected to your wifi?? I smile and fix everything, and hand his phone back to him.

In the meantime, I go to a local drag show with my friend Shawn. The city’s gay bars have slowly been disappearing, helped in no small part by construction of a wildly unpopular transit corridor called ART, but the Social Club still seems to be going strong.

The show has a horror theme, fitting for the spooky time of year, and a lot of the performers have outdone themselves to fit in with the night. Others, well, not so much. The host is chatty and catty and wonderful, and while interviewing members of the audience, slips in “Oh, sorry, what are your pronouns please?” This is where I belong. Maybe Albuquerque isn’t as backwards as I think.

I wake up the next morning at 4:30 am. No this is not a typo, though I wish it was. Shawn comes by shortly after with iced coffees, which we sip in the early morning desert chill as he drives us to a hotel not too far away. We get out, I pull out my phone, open an app, look around. There they are, lined up in a row: the scooters. We get on them, and after a few false starts, we’re zooming down Alameda boulevard in the predawn light past blocks and blocks of cars, slowly trudging their way to where we’re zipping to. For a moment we’re back in our college days at UNM, wind in our hair in the night air.

We park the scooters, navigate through the crowds, and turn a corner: there it is, the Balloon Fiesta field, grassy and damp and 80 acres vast. Over to our right, vendors peddle savory breakfast burritos and navajo-patterned blankets, but up ahead is where we’re headed. Shawn and I trudge through the pickup trucks and trailers carefully unloading huge wicker gondolas.

There’s something special, something sacred about this early morning atmosphere. Maybe it’s the feeling that everyone together is waiting for something, the camraderie. Maybe it’s the mischievous sensation of weaving in between the flight and chase crews setting up the hot air balloons, it’s rare to be able to interact so freely at other, smaller festivals.

We quietly munch on our burritos, standing in the damp grass.

“How’s your dad doing?” Shawn asks.

“He’s good! Same as last trip. He curses a lot at inanimate objects.”

“Yeah you do that a lot too.”

Oh.

I message my friend AJ. “We’re in G6” she messages back. It’s go time: we start off towards the area across the field.

Last year I wandered around the Balloon Fiesta for the first time, taking in the spectacle and the riot of colors. I happened to run into a friendly team setting up their envelope and I asked if I could film them. We started chatting and it turned out that half of the team was gay or queer, and we hit it off. I spontaneously joined them in a chase and it was the time of my life.

I see the Team Grand Britannia truck up ahead just as the sky starts turning dark blue behind the Sandia Mountains in the distance, looming a mile high over Albuquerque. We join them and I introduce Shawn as I catch up with the team. In the distance, we hear a burner shoot flames and then several more as distant cheers go up from the crowds. Over the crowds, one, then two, then eight hot air balloons slowly tilt to vertical over the crowds, but still tethered to the ground. They occasionally hit their burners to stay vertical and illuminate the huge colorful envelopes from within, massive glowing orbs in the chilly, dim landscape. Then one lifts off to cheers, then others. This is the Dawn Patrol, and they’re the first ones to lift off so that they can determine which direction the wind is flowing and what the visibility is. Albuquerque has a unique “box effect” created by the mountains, river, and other climate factors that makes it uniquely suited for hot air balloon piloting.

Then the team goes into motion (and Shawn generously offers to document for social media). They get the gondola, the envelope out of the truck and unroll it. All the time I’m darting in and out and asking (annoyingly) how I can help. The team’s patience knows no bounds. All across the field literally hundreds of teams are doing the same thing as us as they all try to coordinate the launch of the first wave of balloons.

Then it happens: wave after wave after wave of massive hot air envelopes are inflated, then slowly throw themselves into the air, literally controlled by nothing but the wind and the pilot’s ability to raise and lower the balloon with their powerful burner. The sky is a riot of colors as the sun finally peeks over the Sandia mountains.

My dad and I are eating dinner that night at a restaurant I was convinced didn’t exist. See, we spent about an hour and a half the night before driving up and down the frontage roads of the freeway searching for it, this fabled brand new Mexican restaurant (“they’re very well known in Santa Fe!”), and we finally gave up and went to Garcia’s. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with Garcia’s, don’t get me wrong. It scratches a nostalgic itch I’ve had since we would always go there after Sunday mass, and I would obsess over the loud mechanically-clucking machine that dispensed plastic eggs full of cheap trinkets. Garcia’s is fine. But now that we had finally sat down to dinner at this other restaurant, and I bit into the steaming sopapilla, I got it.

I excuse myself and head to the restroom. On my way out of the stall I see a man huddled near the urinal with arms like tree trunks. I make a mental note and go sit back down with my dad. After a minute, I clock the guy coming out of the bathroom. Wellll, of course it’s my friend Matt who lives in Texas. Trying to explain this to my Dad is hard when he can’t fully hear me at first.

“WHAT? You met him in the bathroom?”

“No I saw him in there but I didn’t know it was my friend.”

“DID YOU KNOW HIM BEFORE THE BATHROOM?”

“No, we met, uh, online last year. He’s a great guy.”

“WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY HI TO HIM IN THE BATHROOM?”

I scoot out of the booth and go say hello to my friend at his table.

The next morning I wake up at the crack of dawn again, my last New Mexico morning until I’m back. I need to visit again sooner than a year from now. We’re all getting older, my Dad and I, and these times together are precious. I scoot to the balloon field alone this time (Shawn is working). It’s a smaller ascension today but still heartachingly beautiful.

I’m a kid again, in San Felipe elementary school in Old Town. I wake up in my onesie to the sound of burners going off above our house. I get up and pad to the kitchen, look out the window and see it, the massive balloon, passing over our house slowly, clearing our back chain link fence just barely, and gently touching down in the backyard. I open the french door and scuff across the yard. The pilots wave me in: it’s a bounce, they’re taking off again! I clamber in, they help me in over the edge of the gondola. We take off! It’s like being Superman (if Superman flew very very slowly, and upright)! As the balloon climbs higher and higher, I look at out at all the other balloons climbing too: there’s my dad in the next one! There’s my mom and sister! Little Mike waves to them as more balloons join us. There’s Shawn, and more and more friends in other balloons. We go higher and higher until stars start appearing. The pilot leans down to hand me the cord to the burner. “Go on”, he says, ” take us higher”

I pull the burner as hard as I can. Goodnight, Albuquerque.