Silly Girls, 1958
This is the “Tell Me A Story” prompt #3. I know the true story of this photo. Can you make one up that is more interesting and put a link to it in comments below? Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.
I had just taken my last bite of Sweet and Sour Chicken in Min Wah, a popular Chinese restaurant in this part of Mexico, when I caught sight of this fellow diner, politely perched on the back of a chair between his two humans. He sat there without moving for the entire time, watching them enjoy their meals–hopefully of a less avian nature. I had to stop and talk to the humans on my way out. I neglected to get any names, but did learn that they had all cohabited for 32 years now. I told them of an African Grey I had once encountered as I walked through the local outside flea market in Santa Cruz, CA. He was on the shoulder of a man who wound up walking in front of me now and then most of the way, and off and on, had carried on a conversation that seemed impossible to me, even then. The bird seemed to understand what I said and to answer, as though we were carrying on a real conversation, and sometimes responded to my questions with questions of his own. When I told them this, they seemed unsurprised, as though this were common in the personality of African Greys. My human companion was patiently waiting outside for me to exit, so I garnered about 1/10th of the information I would have liked to have had the answer to, so I did a bit of research afterwards.
“Overall, African Grey parrots are highly intelligent and fascinating birds that are known for their exceptional cognitive abilities and their ability to mimic human speech. Their cognitive abilities have been studied extensively and they have been found to have similar cognitive power as a 4-year-old human child.” (From Dan’s Pet Care.) (From Judy: A study at Harvard found their reasoning ability to surpass that of a 5-year-old child! They live an average of 60 years, with some birds reaching 80 years old. Recently, the oldest known African Grey died at the age of 89.)
The whole dining family.
For Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday.
Wire Crow
A black crow formed of bent wire, specific in its detail, with the look of chicken wire, yet individually twisted. You had seen me come back to it again and again at the art show and you had taken note. You, who usually worried me about how hard I was to buy for, asking what I wanted, making me responsible for my own gift. How I hated Xmases and Birthdays for this reason. Hard enough finding the perfect gift for you and each of your 8 children and my family, but to have to determine my own needs and wants? Unfair.
Yet this gift, a surprise on my 42nd birthday, so perfect. A reminder of that black crow poem you had written about the end of your first marriage and the decline of your second—that poem that ranged so far and wide that it included even me, gathering your children and taking them to safety when we broke down on the freeway. The first poem not about other loves and past loves, where I was the heroine. A part of your official biography.
This crow, then, has seen beyond you. Seen your death and my relocation. It sits on the highest shelf of my sala, bent over a mata Ortiz lidded bowl, an ear of corn rising up from its lid, as though the crow is about to feast. It is one of the objects that gathers you around me, even now, 23 years after your death. The wooden statue you carved in Bali, Your giant spirit sled of copper and hide, Your Tie Siding sculpture that fills the corner near my desk, The spiral lamp–one of our favorite collaborations.
My whole life a continuation of that collaboration—your pulling out of me the art and words that surround me now on my walls, my tables and swirling through my head, disconnected or connected. Metered in rhyme or collecting into paragraphs. All parts of my life ones we bolstered in each other, pulling the world in around us with wood and stone and metal and paper and ideas and words. That metal crow a part of all of it that I have overlooked for so many years now. Of the few objects brought the long miles from California to Mexico, this crow was selected innocently, perhaps more by intuition than by conscious thought, and yet it stands, highest of all, to project its message.
No one who has formed us ever dies. New loves do not cancel out the old. Like one glorious recipe, our lives accumulate ingredients. Sweet and salty, tart and crusty, effervescent and meaty. Like your presence. Ironically represented by that crow that is mainly emptiness, really. Or perhaps unseen mass. Like thought. Like poetry. Like love. Like a forgotten important detail suddenly remembered.
Mama Milk My Goat
Whenever anyone in my family was feeling sorry for herself or himself and expressing it to a point where it was noticeable, another member of the family could be counted upon to use the family saying for such occasions, “Well, Mama milk my goat,” and if the person’s nose wasn’t too far out of joint, they might snap out of it. Or, alternatively, stalk away to seclusion where they could fully feel the full extent of their misery without anyone trying to dissuade them from it. Why did we say this? Because my mother had told us all that it was what my grandmother, her mother-in-law, used to say.
My grandmother, a master at martyrdom, used to say it with a small uptake of breath, in a trembling voice. I can remember hearing her do so, although it may be that sort of childhood memory that grows out of a family tale being told again and again. Needless to say, I had no reason to question its frequent usage until I got to college and again and again was met by a blank look when I issued the rejoinder. Finally, when I reported this strange fact to my folks over the dinner table during a trip home, my dad got a twinkle in his eye and confessed.
What my grandmother, who was Dutch, actually used to mutter when when she was feeling sorry for herself was, “Mama Miet mi Dote!” (Mama might be dead.) Only my mother (her daughter-in-law), who didn’t understand Dutch, thought she was saying “Mama Milk My Goat.” My dad thought this was funny so never told us differently. So even now, “Mama milk my goat,” is occasionally what I say to anyone who is playing the martyr, and if they have any curiosity at all and ask me why, I tell them this story.
Note: For those of you who speak Dutch, I know that “Mama miet mi dote” is not how “Mama might be dead” translates into Dutch. Might might be “machen” and dead might be “dood,” but the whole phrase doesn’t translate into “Mama “machen mi dood,” either. Perhaps it was Frisian, which is where both my grandfather was from and where my grandmother’s family was from originally, or a local dialect or perhaps my ear heard the words differently, or perhaps it is just one of those family stories half legend, half fact. At any rate, if you speak more Dutch that I do, I am more than willing to be informed about what it was my grandma really said. (I only know the alphabet, taught to me by my grandma, and “Mama miet mi dote!”)
(The photo, by the way, is of my mother as a little girl with her sister Edith standing behind her. Just a coincidence that it includes a goat to illustrate my oft-told tale with!)
For Linda’s Friday Reminder prompt we were to tell an oft-repeated story.
Months ago, I published what I thought was a series of 5 of these tales, but when I decided I’d collect them all today to submit as one piece to the Ojo del Lago, a local paper, I discovered that I never did publish number IV on my blog, so here it is:
The Drunken Dog
As in any small town, there were those in San Juan who liked their drink more than their lives and those men were known to congregate under a pier that extended over the beach out to the lake. How those men earned their keep, no one knew, for they did not work but spent the day drinking under the pier. Perhaps their families supported them, or perhaps they earned money by nefarious means or begged for it In town, but most days, they could be found from sunup to sundown under the pier, and sometimes they lit a fire and remained there far into the night.
Most of the men in town, however, were hard workers, earning their keep by construction work or road work or toiling in the raspberry fields or other farms or as gardeners or repairmen. All of these professions were given a break midday for comida. There were a number of small stores in the town that sold beer by the bottle, and during the rest period for comida, as well as on their way home from work, men would gather on benches or lean against walls or scrawl on the ground nearby for a beer as well as for talk of the day.
There were many stray dogs in the town. Some were thin and almost starving, but they survived by raiding unsecure garbage cans or shredding garbage bags left in the streets for collection. These dogs were seen to be nuisances and sometimes cruel people would throw hot grease at them, burning scabs into their flesh beneath their clotted hair. But others , because of their personalities and winning ways, were fed by certain people or by scraps from restaurants or butchers. One such dog became a favorite of townspeople. Children would feed him the edges of their tortillas and restaurants would set out the remains of meals on their back doorsteps when he made his daily visits.
Unfortunately, he also became a favorite of the men of the town on breaks, who would feed him beer. He quickly became as fond of it as they were, and they would pour it in their hands or into a cup as his demands became more and more insistent. Finally, he became known as the drunken dog and as though he knew his place, he ceased his daily rounds and went to live with the human members of his sort under the bridge.
Disclaimer; Although certain details have been added by me to flesh out the story, its general subject, i.e. the drunken dog and men under the pier, is as true as stories handed down by word of mouth tend to be. The fact that I have written them down does not make them any truer but simply spreads their audience. Whether they are legend or fabrication or truth is a mystery shared increasingly by tales told on the internet, which adds to their fame if not their veracity.
In case you didn’t read the others and want to, here are links to the other four stories:
Everybody Knows I: ‘The Night the Vet Died” for One-liner Wednesday
Everybody Knows II: The Caguama
Everybody Knows III: The Martyr Dog
Everybody Knows V: The Day that Death Came to Town
These stories I am about to tell are true stories (or so I have been told) from San Juan Cosala, the small Mexican pueblo where I have lived for 21 years. Those foreigners who live in the village would say, perhaps, that I am not really a part of it, and maybe it is true, for in truth I live on the mountain a half mile or more above the town, and perhaps that is why, although I am told they are stories everyone knows, I heard this one only today. Thanks, Kristina, for adding to the rich collection of stories of the pueblo that I have heard over the years. One was. the story of the death of the town vet that I told you two days ago. Now, I am going to tell you more—one a day—until I run out of them or people stop telling me new ones.
The Caguama*
“I’d sell my soul for a caguama!” People heard her utter the pledge as she stood in the street that they had seen her traverse so many times in search of someone who would provide her with her compulsion: beer, or if she was lucky, perhaps tequila. Those who were standing near her then saw her look down, and there at her feet was a 20 peso bill-—enough at that time long ago to buy the quart bottle of beer she had just said she desired.
So she bought the bottle of beer she had wished for and, unable to wait to drink it in the privacy of her own home, she sat on a bench near the store where she bought it to drink it. But from that time on, or so the often-repeated story goes, she wandered the streets talking to herself, and she was never the same. It was as though she had lost some part of herself. A sad story, but then that was the bargain she had made.”
*The Spanish word for a loggerhead sea turtle–caguama–is also Mexican slang for a 32 ounce bottle of beer, the connection being, presumably, that the farther down the bottle one drinks, the more it comes to resemble its aquatic namesake.
Tomorrow: “The Time that Death Came to San Juan Cosala.”
Santa Clara del Cobra Hand-Raised Pots
Innocents in Mexico
Chapter 22
As much fun as we’d had in San Miguel, it felt good to be off on another adventure and to have the means of our own locomotion again. Bearcat, surprisingly, did not scoot back to his former position under the air mattress, but perched atop it and even occasionally hopped gracefully into my lap in the passenger seat, gazing out in wonder at the scenery whizzing by more quickly when viewed through the side window and more comprehendingly out of the front.
In true Bob fashion, we dallied little in our 3-hour trip from San Miguel to Patzcuaro. We Whizzed by Morelia. Whichever town we decided to settle in, it would be close enough so we could always easily return to see it at a later time. We were hoping to accomplish this trip in four days at most, and if we found an area we were more interested in than San Miguel, we could return to pick up the books and tools and remaining clothes we’d left in San Miguel and return to look for a possible rental.
We found a lovely old hotel in the heart of Patzcuaro to serve as our base during our initial exploration. The town was authentic with few modern buildings or businesses to dispel the illusion that we had gone back in time. The art and the people were wonderful and the lake was a definite plus point in Bob’s mind, but it quickly occurred to us that in terms of terrain, this was not so different from the mountainous redwood forest that we’d lived in in Boulder Creek. We spent the day investigating the wonders of the town, had our first taste of atole—a delicious drink made from finely ground cooked masa (corn flour) and agreed that although it wasn’t ideal as our next place to live, that this was a place we definitely would came back to for a visit. We had been told that the area that the monarch butterflies migrated to each year was very close by and it, too, was on our list of future explorations.
We had heard of some of the artisan villages clustered around Patzcuaro. Santa Clara del Cobre was a definite hit with Bob, as it was with me. It was a town consisting almost entirely of coppersmiths and the sound of hand-hammering filled the town. A small-scale silversmith and coppersmith myself, I was amazed at the lack of modern tools—a bellows and coal fire being used in place of acetylene torches to anneal the metal, and three men with heavy metal mallets pounding the huge pot into shape in sequence after another man had moved it with huge tongs from the fire to the anvil.
With my birthday coming up in a few weeks, Bob succumbed to his usual tactic of finding something he himself loved and when I, too, admired it, diverted me to another room while he bought it for me and secreted it in the nearby van. In this case it was an amazing very large copper jar which lay horizontally with its opening on the side. Then, to be totally fair about the matter, when I found a pot I liked equally well, he encouraged me to buy it. In spite of the fact that he hadn’t been as sneaky as he thought he’d been and I knew perfectly well that he’d bought the other big pot, I played dumb and thus we became the owners of two of Santa Clara’s totally hand-forged pots created before modern intervention arrived with acetylene and propane torches. One can never have enough Santa del Cobre copper, as I have further demonstrated over the past 22 years.
We visited Capula, the town famous for its Catrinas, and managed to depart Catrinaless and also resisted the huge stone sculptures that line the road leading into Tzintzuntzan, although I did buy a few straw decorations for my Christmas tree, which I decorated each year with ornaments from every place I’d traveled throughout my life, as well as beloved saved ornaments from the Christmas trees of my youth.
We returned to enjoy music in the plaza across from our hotel which flowed in through the open windows of the restaurant we had chosen, then made an early night of it, packed up the next day and headed for Ajijic. We did not even stop in Uruapan, renowned for Its remarkable large park filled with water features, vowing to visit it during future adventures.
Ajijc is located next to Lake Chapala, the largest lake in Mexico, which is ringed by formerly volcanic mountains. As we drove toward the city of Chapala, a small sign pointed to a cutoff to Ajijc and we swerved onto it, driving by a veritable mountain of garbage that was the town dump (happily now vanished, after the lease to use the land was withdrawn by the local ejido—the governing body of land held communally by the indigenous population.)
As we came around a bend and down the slope of the mountains that surround Lake Chapala, we suddenly saw the whole of it spread out before us. Just one volcano, 80 miles away, is still active, and we could see the tip of it peeking over the shoulder of Mount Garcia, the largest and closest mountain in view across the lake. One of the most active volcanoes in North America, it gave off a slight puff of smoke just as we caught our first sight of the lake. “Oh Yeah, Jude!” Bob exclaimed. “I don’t want to move to San Miguel. I want to live here.” Thus it was was that we settled down to supposedly look for a rental in one of the little towns that stretched along the north shore of the lake.
But what Bob actually said as we sat in chairs in the first rental agency we came across was, “We may be looking for a rental, but do you have any houses for sale?” The rental agent’s eyes lit up as she agreed that yes, she’d be happy to show us both rentals and houses for sale. Although I was still sure I didn’t actually want to buy a house in Mexico, Bob was expressing such joy at the prospect that I went along with him. It would be fun to view some of the beautiful houses that we had already viewed from the outside in our drives around town. What was our price limit? Bob gave the price of the first house he’d found in San Miguel—$80,000. But somehow, nothing in that price range quite caught our fancy, although we had seen a few rentals that we had liked. We thanked the rental agent and said we’d be thinking about it, and consoled ourselves with a lovely meal and margaritas in the Ajiic Plaza Jardin Restaurant.
Then fate intervened as we sat discussing the houses we’d seen and debated the issue of where we’d settle. We had already found a house we liked enough to rent for eighteen months in San Miguel. The fact that we hadn’t found one in our price range in Ajijic, coupled with the fact that I was still adamant that we weren’t buying a second house anywhere, let alone in Mexico, seemed to be directing us toward choosing San Miguel, but Bob convinced me we should spend one more day in Ajjic and environs just driving around looking at houses. So it was that the next day, early afternoon, we wound up in a fraccionamiento (housing district) in the mountains above the village of San Juan Cosala, a few kilometers west of Ajijic. The sign said, “Raquet Club,” which sounded to me like the least likely place I’d ever want to live, but as our van climbed the incline toward the top of the lowest mountain, we wove sideways from east to west along streets filled will lovely houses, all different with lush bougainvillea, palm trees, hibiscus and flowering trees of numerous varieties. It was high above the lake with gorgeous views of the entire lake and Mount Garcia rising above it.
We drove back and forth for a good 45 minutes before the van came to a screeching halt before the most beautiful house I had ever seen. It was a pale mottled yellow and white in an L shape with two colossal rust-colored domes covering most of the two wings of the L. The corners were all rounded without a sharp angle in the entire house. It stood at the top of a steeply angled lot and the walls around it undulated down the mountainside like a series of falls smoothed out by flowing water. The entire house looked like it had been sculpted by an artist’s hands. If Bob were to ever design a house, I thought, it would look like this.
“Let’s see if it’s for sale!” he said.
“There’s no For Sale sign, Bob,” I said.
“I think it’s for sale, he insisted, climbing out of the van. He was now peering through the bars of the doors of an open-sided garage that stood a level above the house spread out below.”Doesn’t that look like a paper with specs on it by the door down there? Call out. See if anyone comes out!”
Embarrassed, I held my tongue, but just then, a man came out of the door. I don’t think he had yet seen us, but Bob seized the initiative and called down to him, asking if the house was for sale.
“Si,” said the man, coming up to the garage and pressing a button which opened the garage gates. With the same motion, he reached into a cabinet to withdraw a string of triangular flags similar to those at a used car lot and fastened them to nails at either side of the garage. “Come in.”
We entered the garage, walked down four steps and into a courtyard of paving stones, then in through sliding glass doors into a large terra-cotta room, the other side of which was all glass sliding doors. Spread out below was a view of the entire lake.
“Oh yeah, Jude! Let’s buy it!!!” were the first words out of Bob’s mouth, and his enthusiasm remained uncurbed as we walked through a kitchen which featured Yucatan-marble counters and a ceiling covered in tiles. There were two downstairs bedrooms and two bathrooms completely tiled in white marble with the same rose-colored marble tile on the countertops as that in the kitchen. The brick domes were fabulous—one over the master bedroom and the other over the entire living room/dining room. In the middle of the living room dome was a three-foot wide domed skylight that filled the entire room with light.
Outside the living room was a bamboo-covered terrace with a pool and hot tub filled with naturally heated hot mineral water from the volcano!!! Small palm trees dotted the yard, along with canna lilies and bougainvillea. Virginia Creepers covered the bamboo roof of the terrace and the large pillars that supported it.
The second floor casita consisted of a large bedroom with its own bathroom, two terraces and the best views of the entire house.
On the sheet of paper Bob had noticed with his keen eye was the price of the house–$180,000 U.S. It had just been reduced from a price of $220,000. Bob’s face fell. Well over his $80,000 budget. The gardener, who had been paid to live in this lovely house (albeit without furniture or appliances ) for three years, looked relieved when he saw the likelihood that we were not potential purchasers. Clearly, he had exhausted little effort in trying to sell it, as was evidenced by the absence of signs or flags when we first arrived.
We later discovered that the people who had built our dream house had lived in Guadalajara but she had parents in the Raquet Club and although the younger couple had built the house thinking they’d live there, it was so much more comfortable just visiting her parents on weekends, that they had never moved in. The pool line had a leak they’d been unable to discover, even though they’d dug up half the patio trying to find it and as a result, the pool emptied within hours of being filled. Designed by a very famous architect, Miguel Valverde, who was a personal friend, nonetheless the work of furnishing it and solving its pool problem plus the fact that it was rumored that the lake was fast drying up and would be empty within 5 years had caused them to put the house up for sale and when it did not sell, to reduce the price.
We both loved this house, but we had a house in the states and no immediate prospects for selling it. And so we turned our backs on it, drove back down the mountain and back to our little motel room. Once again, we consoled ourselves with a delicious meal—this time in the garden of the Nueva Posada—the only real hotel in town, although there seemed to be numerous b&b’s and cottage-type accommodations. I settled into my margarita and Bob into his Coke as we surveyed the menu. Once we’d made our choices, we began reviewing our past few days—the houses and apartments we’d seen, how much we loved the lake and, ultimately, “the” house in the Raquet Club. Bob’s dream house, and I had to admit I was very taken with it as well.
We were back-and-forthing it over San Miguel vs. Lake Chapala when an attractive red-haired lady at the next table pulled her chair around a bit to better face us and said, “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but overhear you. Are you looking for a house here?”
We explained our situation, sharing a bit of personal information about what we were doing here. What had we done in the states? We were artists and writers. What were we looking for? What was our present house in the States like? Were we presently working with a real estate agent? No, we had been looking but had told her we were suspending our efforts for the time being. We didn’t know what we were going to do. We needed to be back in the States in two weeks for my mother’s memorial and needed to go back to San Miguel to either pick up our stuff or to sign the lease for an 18-month rental.
Could we spare a few extra days, she asked? We exchanged glances. What did she have in mind? If we could take the time, she would be glad to show us a number of houses she knew we’d love—in every price range from $80,000 up, but first she wanted to do two things. First, she wanted us to move from our little motel-type accommodation to the Nueva Posada, and secondly, she wanted to introduce us to some people who lived here—artists and writers and musicians that she thought we would have lots in common with. Her name was Lucy and yes, she was a real estate agent. We liked her. We shook hands on it and went with her to the desk to book a room.
For the next three days, Lucy showed us house after house, priced from $80,000 to $500,000 and we loved every one. She introduced us to her friends—all of whom we felt an affinity with. They told us about the local little theater—founded 36 years ago by the man who played Jimmy Stewart’s younger brother in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And about the local writer’s group with a similar long history. She introduced us to the fascinating history of Neil James and the cultural center that had grown up around a home that she eventually left to become the Lake Chapala Society—a wonderful addition to the community. And it happened. We felt at home.
And that is why, after a three-night stay in Ajijic, we headed back to San Miguel to pick up the art supplies and books and other belongings we had left there, broke Steve’s heart by telling him that we had decided not to rent his house, and came back to Ajijic to stow what worldly goods we had brought to Mexico in the local storage facility as we once again joined Lucy in our quest for our next home.
Author’s note: Phew, I made it!!! I had to entirely write this chapter today and wouldn’t you know it–wifi was out for most of the day. So frustrating. It finally came back on about an hour before midnight so I rushed to finish and post and edit. If you found lots of mistakes, you probably read before I finished editing as I was determined to get it up before midnight. Now I need to get tomorrow’s chapter up before midnight tomorrow. What is this penance for, do you suppose??? Keep reading, please. Some big surprises in store. For me, too, as I haven’t written them yet.
For the last chapter, Chapter 23, go HERE.
San Miguel Desert Botanical Gardens (Click on Photos to Enlarge)
Innocents in Mexico
Chapter 21
For the next three days, we packed as many explorations of San Miguel into our days as possible. We took another tour of the botanical gardens, this time taking a longer path which wound down to the bottom and to the furthest edges of the ravine. We explored ancient ruins, watched goats grazing near the water far below, watched boys diving into the water from the muddy banks. Men stuccoing bovedas on rooftops across the ravine caught sight of us and waved. We ended up on the path that wound right up to the huge mansion which clung to the cliffside at the furthest edge of the botanical gardens. Its inhabitants were the owners of the most popular restaurant in San Miguel. When other restaurants were empty, theirs was always full. When the city had prevailed upon him to give the land for the botanical gardens, the owner had complied, but when they had asked for the house, he had refused. “You don’t give away your dreams,” he said. Politicians had put on pressure, denied him access to city water for years, but he had held out. Now the pathways of the desert gardens came within feet of his house, but he was still there. His view was the best in San Miguel: The city in the distance, the ravine and aqueduct and ruins below him, around him the beautiful virgin desert, much of it still blooming as we walked its various paths.
A huge bird circled overhead. Lizards and a brightly striped snake crossed our path. Hummingbirds, bees, millions of giant red ants. The ubiquitous black grackles, moving their widely fanned tails like rudders, swifts gliding and darting, and those voluminous white clouds in the vivid blue sky. The neighborhood we had narrowed our wishes down to adjoined the botanical gardens land, but when we inquired about the price of lots, they were as much as we’d planned on spending for an entire house with lot. What Bob had decided he’d like to spend, that is. He had settled on $80,000—the price that the stabbed woman had put on her house, lowering it because, after all, who wants to live in the same neighborhood with a man with a knife and a proclivity to use it? I was humoring him, sure that we’d never find anything for that price that we would want to buy. He loved looking at houses, and so did I. I just didn’t want to buy another one before we sold ours!
A few days later, when Jim offered to rent or sell us his house for a figure within our budget, we switched our focus back again to reality. We could finish the compound wall, build a studio, finish tiling the house, but when we asked a builder for estimates of what this would cost, we figured that it would end up costing about what any of the places closer to the jardin would cost. In Jim’s house, we’d have privacy, a larger lot, a bigger studio, but in a neighborhood where it would be harder to sell in the future. If we didn’t want to buy, he offered us the option to rent for a year or two so he could go to South America with his girlfriend, and if we couldn’t find another house to rent for a year and a half, this was the option I preferred
On the plus side, it would get Bob’s mind off wanting to buy a house. On the minus side, our next door neighbors on one side were rowdy, the street in front of their house a gathering place every weekend for men with beer bottles and loud voices. The neighbors to our rear and other side were both metalsmiths, who often worked into the evening. One of their sons was a drummer who practiced daily on a large oil drum. The other was a whistler. True, so far, we had not been bothered by these sounds of activity, but, who knew how we would feel months or a year from now?
We loved the sounds of children playing on the huge empty field across from us. We loved watching people crisscross the field to and from Gigante. However, trucks and jeeps also used it for four-wheeling, and it was strewn with garbage: Coke bottles, water bottles, plastic bags, old tires, mounds of broken bricks, stone and cement dumped after building projects, tangles of barbed wire, tin cans, burned logs.
Every unoccupied lot in San Miguel became a repository for the rubbish of the neighborhood. Everyone drank Cokes and bottled water, and when the plastic bottles were emptied, they were tossed: out of car windows, into window grids, onto spare lots, onto city streets, into ravines and lakes and rivers. There was garbage collection and women faithfully walked to the curbs to hand over their household garbage, but when walking or driving or riding, the custom was to toss it. Highways nationwide––or for as far as we had seen––were rimmed with garbage. Coca Cola had done more to ruin the scenic beauty of Mexico than any single force. If it wasn’t their huge billboards or graffiti-like paintings on brick buildings city wide and country wide, it was the solid expanse of empty plastic bottles which paved the desert, the grass or the shoreline which bordered every road.
San Miguel was a beautifully preserved colonial town with strictly regulated ancient buildings, churches, monasteries and cobblestones. Its central zocalo––known as the jardin––was the place where lovers met and musicians played and children frolicked. Here benches lined the square and people sat to watch children, lovers, tourists, toy venders, beggars, neighbors, students, ice-cream eaters, scooter riders, ball bouncers, survey takers, shoe polishers, Spanish practicers and fruit sellers. Overhead was the dense foliage of trees. Around the outside of the square were the buildings hundreds of years old.
Within the jardin, sidewalks formed a square within a square with intersecting crisscrosses. Every twenty feet or so there arose a bronze stake. Antique, curlicued, topped with a rubbish container shaped vaguely like a mailbox, but patinaed, ornamented, lovely until you saw it from the front. There, emblazoned over the slot where the rubbish went in, in six inch high letters, was that ubiquitous script. “Coca Cola “it said, on each rubbish bin. Dozens of them marched the jardin like town criers, reminding us, “Never forget.”
The most constant presence in Mexico was Coca Cola. On one expanse of road, I spotted eight building-sized signs for Coca Cola and two for Pepsi Cola within a one block area. And in the ditches country-wide lay discarded bottles, like stepping stones between the few blades of grass that poked between them.
True, there seemed to be some awareness of litter as a problem. Here and there, you see a sign “No tire basura” (Don’t throw trash) on a spare lot or along the roadway, but few heeded them. They had become invisible. City dumps, more often than not, were located right next to major roadways. Handier that way, I guess.
As we were discussing the possibility of visiting Mexico and then moving there for a year or more, Bob had started reading what material was available in that pre-internet age. In addition to San Migel de Allende, he had been attracted to two areas, mainly because they were situated by very large lakes. He had often told me that he had always wanted to live by a lake, and now he suggested that in the couple of weeks we had left before we had to be back for my mother’s memorial, that perhaps we should take a weekend off and investigate both of them: Lake Patzcuaro and then the largest lake in Mexico, Lake Chapala, Then, coincidentally, at a restaurant with tables placed too close to each other to avoid becoming conversational with one’s neighbors, we entered into a discussion with a couple from Ajijic who I had heard discussing the fact that public outcry had caused local politicians to decide to move the dump from a much-used cut-off road between two of the most popular towns on the lake to a more hidden location. They said, in fact, that along the whole expanse of the lake, rubbish seemed to be less of a problem than usual. As the lake shrank away from its banks, hundreds of yards of lake bottom were exposed. Here cattle grazed, four-wheel-drive vehicles turned wheelies in the dried dirt, boats lay earthbound, blocks from the nearest water. On weekends, locals thronged to makeshift palapas constructed on the former lake bottom to drink beer or Cokes or Fanta. Yet there was very little rubbish.
In one subdivision, double oil barrels were placed on each block along the road to serve as trash receptacles, but elsewhere, even where there were no rubbish bins, there seemed to be vastly less littering. Construction crews still piled their leftover stones, dirt, concrete, bricks and rebar on spare lots, to be dealt with by the next building crew, but piles of stone and brick and wood seemed less intrusive than thousands of plastic corpses of drink containers and shopping bags. Also in this area, as in the area around Lake Patzcuaro, there seemed to be more people out along the road searching for recyclable bottles. Why, in this era when so many items––from clothing to deck materials––are made out of recycled plastic, can some program not be started in Mexico, which could make it profitable for people to collect this unsightly litter and turn it from a liability into an asset?
It seemed a sign. Bob used this conversation as a springboard and once again suggested that we at least quickly investigate the other two towns that had intrigued him in his reading about Mexico. So it was that we decided to head off for a short sortie into the wilds of Mexico. First Patzcuaro, then Chapala, before signing the year-and-a-half lease for the San Miguel house. We still had a few weeks before we needed to be back in the states for my mom’s memorial in South Dakota. Why not spend them making sure that San Miguel was really the place for us?
For Chapter 22, go HERE.
Innocents in Mexico
Chapter 19
Fireworks. In Mexico, they are the rule, not the exception. If you have two nights in a row without continuous explosions, you are lucky. Often given to exaggeration, here I need not bother. On the Sunday night which marked the beginning of our third week in San Miguel, the fireworks were especially long and loud. It might have been in honor of the movie crew who had begun filming on that day and who probably appreciated the all-night diversion as much as we did, or it may have been the conclusion of the horse show that had occurred that weekend. Or it may have just been a showy overzealous family display.
1:30 a.m. Fifteen retorts in rapid progression. Not the crisp splat of childhood firecrackers, but the solid ear-shattering report of gunfire––a giant’s shooting gallery. It was too hot to close the heavy bedroom door to the patio, too hot for covers. Bob lay awake itching mosquito bites, and when I went to the bathroom for ointment, there were four already buzzing against the mirror, in spite of the fact that all of the doors and windows were screened. I sprayed on bug spray, then rolled the tube of ointment for insect bites over my madly itching and swollen upper arms and feet. When I went back to bed, I covered us both with the sheet, protection against bloodsuckers. It was hard to imagine where mosquitos could breed in this dry windy expanse, but it had been raining a bit each afternoon and water was no doubt collecting somewhere.
I slept. I dreamed that I was back in the States, setting up an art show entitled “This Bud’s for You.” It was my friend Linda’s idea, and I had never thought it would work, so why was I the one setting up this show so dumb that there were only seven entries?
As I moved to the woods to meditate over this conundrum, I discovered a whole bank of pelicans drifting along the curving bank at the side of the road––row after row of pelicans. Then I remembered that pelicans could talk and were, indeed, good counselors. I should avail myself of their counsel while I was here in the States where I had health insurance, I thought, so I went from pelican to pelican asking which one wanted to talk to me until, still in the middle of my questioning of pelicans, two wise guy humans made fun of my efforts.
“Oh them,” said Bob. “Jerks. The one can’t stop talking about himself long enough to get lucky. Picked up a girl in a singles bar, stood on her doorstep so long talking, she gave up and went to bed. He didn’t even notice until she’d locked the door, turned out the porch light and was almost off to sleep.”
At 5 a.m., I was torn from my dream. Explosions ripped the air like someone beating on a tin roof with a sledge hammer—fifteen loud bangs in the first progression. I closed the window and stumbled to the bathroom to search for my earplugs, brought as protection against snores, not fireworks.
Born on the third of July, I had always considered fireworks to take the place of my personal totem, and I was so addicted to them that I would never have believed that there could be anything which could sour me on them; but there I was, cursing them after just two weeks in town. Sure, they were pretty spread against the night sky, but what fool set off cherry bombs (I later discovered them to be cohetes or bottle rockets) by the hundreds at 5 in the morning? With earplugs on, I could still hear them.
They sounded like someone buckling thin gauge metal siding or like giants farting down an echo chamber. Last night, there were marching bands, someone on a loudspeaker, strings of cars back and forth across the empty lot and fireworks drawing streaks of color over the black sky. We watched from our roof. They reminded me of what a friend with a brain tumor had once said—that it was like this every time she moved her hand—sparks in the air, flowing after it. Beautiful. But at 5 a.m., even through earplugs they sounded like fifteen metal doors slamming shut down the corridor in sequence. The cat slept on. Bob slept on. I moved down the balcony corridor. One way lead to the office, the other to the spiral staircase to the roof.
The sky turned cherry red over my left shoulder. Through the earplugs, I heard the sounds: someone banging cooking pans or caving in car doors with a baseball bat. My San Miguel alarm clock: firecrackers, then roosters, then church bells.
They were the beginnings of a normal day for the man who stood in the spare lot across the street watching the real spectacle: a fleshy woman from el Norte in a t-shirt and skull shorts climbing a spiral staircase to watch the sunrise from her roof.
For Chapter 20, g0 HERE.
Innocents in Mexico
Chapter 18: Rooftops
First of all, in Mexico, almost everyone has them: flat rooftops. They are reached by stairs or by wrought iron ladders attached to the side of the buildings or by tightly spiraled metal staircases. Many serve the purpose of a security system by serving as home for the family “roof dog.” These dogs, not as plentiful nor as vocal as in Oaxaca, nonetheless exist in San Miguel as well, where they live their entire lifetimes on the roof. When people pass by on the street, they bark. When fireworks go off and other roof dogs bark, they bark back. Should anyone attempt to climb onto the roof to gain access to the house, they bark louder.
Since we had rented by far the tallest house in the neighborhood, we got to look down on all of the other rooftops. We tended to go up on the roof at least once a day––usually to observe the sunset, or fireworks, or to just look at the incredible panorama of 360 degrees of blue sky dotted with white clotted clouds. These San Miguel skies astounded us. We had lived in the California redwoods for too long. We’d forgotten what it was like to see the horizon.
Other people seemed to use their roofs for other things. On each and every one, there was a stack of old lumber, twisted wire and bricks. On many were piles of curved clay roof tiles. From the tops of the brick columns at each side of the house and at intervals along the walls extended the bumpy heavy wires of rebar. Like particularly tough bristles, they sprouted from the tops of the houses in clusters, ready and waiting for the next story, to be added as the money appeared to build it. This was an ever-present activity in San Miguel. In no place where we’d stayed in the past weeks had we been freed from the sounds of construction. After men came home from work, they would go to the roof and add a few bricks. The pounding of their mallets to set the bricks extended far into the evening.
The other purpose of roofs seemed to be to store pop bottles. On most of the roofs spread below us were case after case of Coke bottles. Why they hadn’t cashed these in, we had no idea, since a considerable amount of the price of each bottle of coke or beer covered the price of the bottle. For a liter bottle of Corona, a third of the price was the bottle deposit. Perhaps this was their bank––hoarded Coke bottles on the roof. Perhaps they were waiting for the price of Coke bottles to go up––like the peso. Or perhaps they were waiting to cash them in to buy drinks for their next fiesta.
Other rooftops displayed geraniums in clay pots. We never saw them being enjoyed or tended to. They were just there. For our pleasure, perhaps, since no one else ever went to the rooftops except to shovel roof dog poop. One night, as we stood watching the sunset, we saw two women climb the stairs up to their own rooftop. So people did watch the sunset here, too, I thought, but for the half hour they were on the roof, they sat on chairs talking, their backs to the setting sun.
Aside from Coke bottles, geraniums and construction materials, rooftops were proper storage places for: old bicycles, extra flowerpots, broken and sound, shovels, pickup bed covers, folding chairs, half-used buckets of paint, old bed springs, rain barrels, extra tires and purloined shopping carts from Gigante which were upended and appeared to be used as some sort of kennel, although we never saw any animal inside. It was well into our second week in the house when I thought to go up on the roof during the day. It was then that I saw activity, for women had stung clotheslines in the bright late morning sun and were hanging clothes. From rooftop after rooftop, the bright flags of socks, undershorts, pants and shirts hung like fiesta decorations across half the rooftops within vision.
Photo of rooftop washing day by Gwendolyn Anderson on Unsplash
For Chapter 19. go HERE.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 