Ex-pats

Piles of Signs

A street in the village….

Sad to say there was another narcobloqueo in Guadalajara the other day – major roads blocked, buses set on fire, a bus driver killed, the usual. Rosa said they found two men hanged in Zapopan too. To the north, it sounds just horrible, gunfire and grenades in the night. Supposedly our fun and games here was in revenge for the federales having captured a big drug kingpin and extraditing him back to the States. Guadalajara continues on “Alerta Roja” (red alert); the scuttlebutt is that they are zeroing in on another capo or two. No matter, alas, if they get the one they want another is right behind him (or increasingly, her) in line to move into the top spot. It just never ends.

But at least over the past couple of months, we have been spared anything too horrible here in our little village, though everyone is always somewhat on edge, because of course it can all start up again at any time.  Still, for a change, there are the stirrings of some good things happening  – signs that people are coming out of the shadows after so much recent violence.  At least this week, instead of dealing with mayhem, our local government has been trying to spiff the place up a little bit, in hopes of encouraging tourism and “quality of life”, one supposes. Our much-loved contractor and volunteer-about-town, Moctezuma (Chuma for short),  has organized a charming remodel of our town plaza, with mosaic floors, new plantings, and art donated and commissioned from a number of  favorite local artists and craftsmen. The crew does as much work as they can till they run out of money, then they stop.  Chuma puts on a fundraiser or two, and they then continue on. We ran into him in town today and he said that next month there is going to be a folk dance performance we have to attend – to benefit the plaza redecoration project, as the project is once again broke. Of course we will go.

Then, the last time we took the bus in to Guadalajara, we noticed a little cement block bench at the bus stop, where before, people waiting had to stand in the blazing hot sun in the middle of a knee-high weed patch just off the highway in order to avoid being killed by oncoming traffic. The grass around it had just been trimmed and someone had painted the little bench white. This was really nice because so many of the people who wait for the bus are elderly, or are parents with little kids or babies in their arms. And then a few days later, a steel roof magically appeared over the block bench to shield people from the sun.

They have also been putting up new street signs all over the village to replace the now rusty and faded old ones. When I saw them being put up everywhere I thought “Boy, our corner could really use one of those.” The original one got knocked down or stolen years ago and now, since there are no street signs anywhere on our street, people are never quite sure where they are. So I went into our little city hall and stopped at the entrance, where a tiny desk was flanked by three police officers (one a young woman), their scary-looking automatic weapons leaned against the wall in a corner as they chatted amongst themselves over styrofoam plates of tacos. I asked, as respectfully as I could, given the armaments just a few feet from where I was standing, where the Street Sign Department was. I told them I wanted to find out how to apply to have one put up. “Oh, just go upstairs, Señora, they are working on them now and someone will help you.”

Upstairs consists of two rooms, a tiny office where the delegado – basically the mayor – works, and a second room, which was filled with boxes and piles of street signs all wrapped in plastic. I went in and pled my case – that we really needed one of those on our corner, people often got lost, there had been one before, etc. “Of course, I think we have an extra one here, and I know exactly where you mean for it to go”, said the nice man who was on all fours in the middle of the room organizing all the piles of street signs. “We’ll run out there tomorrow morning and put it up for you…” “Muchas gracias”, I said, carefully backing out of the small room. “De nada, señora, que le vaya bien”. Once back out on the street, I thought, sort of growling to myself, oh, sure, I know I’ll be back here twenty times asking about my famous sign before I ever see it, if they ever DO put it up. There are a zillion signs in there they are dealing with, they’ll never get around to it…but at least I tried. I went off on my other errands and forgot about it.

Well, damned if I didn’t walk to the corner early the following morning on my way to my exercise class, when lo and behold, there was the new sign in all its glory, gleaming in the sunlight, nailed up precisely where I had suggested they put it. Not completely straight, but there it is. Que le vaya bien.

 

Podando (pruning)

This week, we had a crew of guys crawling all over the garden in hard hats and tree gear pruning our trees. They grow like weeds here, especially during the rainy season, so this monster haircutting has to be done once a year at least. There was a huge wood chipper parked outside, partially blocking the calle, and our gate stayed open all day long so they could haul debris out to put in the chipper. Adding to the stress, chain saws and pruners were everywhere, with branches falling all over the place, so we and the animals all had to be locked inside all day. We have the “nicest” house in a very Mexican neighborhood, and I am always a little jumpy about who can peer in and check out the property. Having the driveway gates open makes me nervous since I don’t like passers-by being able to see into our garden.

Then the plumber was here trying to figure out exactly where our septic tank is located; we have never had a set of plans for the house and no one ever has known exactly where it is.  “It’s by the back wall somewhere” was the best the guy who painted the house originally could do, trying to remember back to when the house was built in 2003. Thus no one had ever inspected it or cleaned it out. So, fearing a seriously unpleasant disaster somewhere down the line (literally and figuratively), I said, if this plumber has one of those cameras – as he said he did – and can figure out where the bloody thing is and look at it and tell us it either needs cleaning out or is okay, that would be well worth the investment.

So he also was out there banging and running drills and equipment, poking holes in the lawn and chipping out our exterior walls every few feet trying to locate the septic tank itself and the lines that lead to it. He did locate it out back, finalmente, and put a nice new sort of manhole cover on it, so now, if there are problems, it’ll be easy to get septic cleaning equipment down there. This new plumber is replacing the guy we’d used for years, who – sadly – has developed just a little bit too much of a drinking problem. The terrific new plumber-designate, is gradually working his way through all our temperamental and problematic plumbing and electrical systems, correcting all sorts of things that – as it turns out – had been done halfway, or totally wrong. It’s costing a fortune but step by step, things are undeniably improving around here. Or so we like to think.

But we still are suffering the ongoing battles of the cuatro gatos, which adds to the craziness. The new arrivals are still fighting to establish territory, mercilessly chasing and ganging up on our original two. Poor little Rosie got cornered on the kitchen counter by Taby this morning and took a flying leap down into the open empty dishwasher. The poor kitty, who is tiny, landed right on all the upright prongs in the lower rack. She seems okay, but pobrecita, who knows. I decided enough is enough and I called our vet, Dr. Jesus, to come over and a) give them all the shots they need, especially rabies for Group 2 who are venturing outside now into the enclosed garden with its high walls. I asked if he could prescribe some calmantes (tranquilizers) for all of them so maybe we can ratchet down the inter-gato tension a bit. Group 1 is completely stressed out and maybe Group 2 will be less aggressive with a little relaxant. He said he’s going to try some natural remedies first and see if that helps the situation. He says some Vitamin B will help with all their stress (in their water bowl!) and there are herbal remedies to try to see if it helps the territorial battles before we go to real drugs. Thank god he makes house calls – we did not look forward to bundling four yowling cats, plus Reina the dog, who also needs booster shots, into carriers and going into the village to his office.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the chaos, we had one of those Perfect Mexican Moments when Dr. Jesus did come to the house. He arrived with only half the vaccinations he needed, however, having forgotten the others. He gave the kitties what shots he had with him, and then our house call came to a screeching halt. Oh well, mañana. He is a wonderful veterinarian and much-loved by pet owners here, but in his other life he is a very serious classical guitarist and everyone in his family is musical. When he realized that he could go no farther with the vaccination project, we began chatting, as we often do, about music. In passing, he mentioned that he had his guitar in his car.  Well, we said, since you don’t have the other vacunas with you, how about you play us something? A little Sor or Tarrega etude, or perhaps some Bach? Claro que si, and he ran out to his car and brought in the guitar and serenaded us for a half hour with several pieces.  It was just delightful, hearing the music float through our house as the afternoon began to fade. The kitties, having been spared for the moment, ran off and hid for the rest of the day.

Then he had to go to minister to some other cats and dogs and took his leave, saying he’d come back tomorrow with the missing vaccinations – which he did.  But no recital on the second trip.  Sadly, he said he had to get back to his office because two guys had a very old, much-loved Rottweiler he was going to have to put to sleep, and he said “I know I will have to stay with them for awhile, it will be very hard for them to say goodbye to this poor old perro, even though they know his time has come.” This is how he is; he consoled both of us so wonderfully when we had to put our much-loved Korat cat, Achille, to sleep a couple of years ago. I said to Arnold, “So typical, he forgets half of what he is supposed to do but then, also SO typical –something completely delightful and unexpected happens instead.”  If you can just let go of your assumptions about precisely how things are to be done and in which order – difficult for us gringo types – sometimes you get really nice surprises, like the sound of a guitar  echoing against the masonry walls of your house for awhile.

In all the chaos and noise of our week of home maintenance, I tore a contact lens and without even knowing it really scratched up one of my eyes. Looks like I was in a bar fight. It’ll be okay in a few days but who needs it? But the good news is that the crew is all down there singing and bantering back and forth over the horrific racket of the chainsaws, drills, and the chipper outside. Without being too colonial about it, it is good to hear them belting out Mexican favorites at the tops of their lungs as they work. It reminds me so much of one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, the chorus of sailors in Act I of Britten’s Billy Budd, the sea chantey they sing while they are fixing the sails, readying the cannons, and scrubbing the decks of their ship, the Indomitable.

A Romp Through Andares

Last week it was time for Arnold to go have his new stent checked out at Dr. B’s office – and I also was due for a checkup and a stress test (just to be sure I would survive at least as long as Arnold will now with all his new hardware).  This required us going in to his main office, in the gleaming new Puerta de Hierro medical center in Guadalajara. Both of us got poked and prodded and tied to various machines and after two hours of this, Dr. B. said we were both fine, he’d see us in three months. Then Dr. B’s topic turned to where we were going to have lunch at the splendid Andares mall right next door. Have you tried this place, have you tried that place, this one has fantastic steaks, this one has a very fine wine list – and so it went for fifteen minutes before Dr. B. sent us on our merry way – after offering us cappuccinos to strengthen us for the arduous shopping ahead — and he had to see his next patient. How many cardiologists have espresso machines in their offices? We are getting very spoiled.

I spent most of my childhood in the San Fernando Valley, where many of the first of the “outdoor” malls cropped up. Instead of being under a roof you walked across landscaped courtyards with splashing fountains from store to store. The first one that I recall was Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks. It was always fun for my sister and me to go there with our mother to pick out clothes for school, home décor items, whatever we needed. Andares shopping center is located in a new community of tall glass office and condo towers, taking shape in one of the nicer parts of Guadalajara. It is similar in concept to Fashion Square because like Los Angeles, Guadalajara’s temperate climate allows for the mall’s restaurants and stores to be clustered around open gardens, green all year round. So of course the Valley Girl feels right at home there. We lucked out too, because there was lots on sale, it being August. It made for very good prowling through the men’s department for Arnold (who didn’t buy anything but enjoyed looking).

Anyone who still thinks of Mexico as being a land of mustachioed campesinos sleeping in white cotton pajamas and huaraches beneath a cactus needs to pay this place a visit. It’s anchored at either end, as malls tend to be, by Palacio de Hierro and Liverpool, arguably the two fanciest department stores in Mexico. You can wander in to the gleaming marble atrium of Palacio de Hierro and find pretty much anything your acquisitive little heart requires – after you pass through the sizable cosmetics section, which has counters for just about every international brand you can name from Chanel to Lancome to Bobbi Brown to Clinique, Yves St. Laurent, and many more.  Then for insane luxury purchases, there’s a Tiffany, a Louis Vuitton, a Cartier, Gucci, a Ferragamo, an English gentlemen’s club kind of store for men, – well, you name it, it’s pretty much there. The dozens of  stores in the mall itself are loaded with the latest fashions and crowded with shoppers. Mexico has more and more high-end merchandise for sale, so if you wake up one morning and decide you must purchase your Rolex watch that very day, you no longer need to get on a plane to hunt it down; there are plenty of places – not only Andares – in Guadalajara where you can find the watch of your dreams.

How times have changed. One of my favorite high-end Mexican shops (which has boutiques located in the main Mexican airports, fortunately or unfortunately) is Pineda Covalin, where exquisite items in silk and other fine fabrics are adapted brilliantly into prints from traditional Mexican folk textile designs. Their designers are endlessly creative and find the most wonderful embroidery and other images to transform into silk scarves, shawls and accessories you could wear with perfect elegance into any opera house in the world.

But what has made my Jewish American Princess heart sing of late is that there is now (yippee!!) a Sephora cosmetics store at Andares mall. I know, how superficial, how ridiculous, overpriced makeup when you could buy the same thing at the drugstore. Well, here, you CAN’T buy the same thing at the drugstore; in that respect it is still different from the States. Back in the Ancestral Homeland the scruffiest CVS or Duane Reade has a boatload of modestly priced and fun makeup and beauty accessories (hey, I’m 65, I need all the help I can get), but here, the farmacia pretty much sells medications and a few household items like diapers and toilet paper, and that’s it. Farmacia Guadalajara, the big chain around here, has hardly any cosmetics at all.

Thus I was looking for a few things I missed picking up in New York; I knew that Sephora would likely have them. So I went in with great anticipation as they have just recently opened their first stores in Mexico. To my great delight I found most of what I needed but a few things were not to be found, and the very nice young man who seemed to be the manager said “Yes, I’m so sorry we don’t have that in yet, Señora, but we will. Every week they are shipping us more things and soon we will pretty much have what Sephoras elsewhere in the world have. You must come back soon.”

We had a lovely lunch, along with dozens of stylish, professional Mexicans, executives having business meetings, elegant women having ladies’ lunches, young families with kids turned out in all the latest gear, at a terrific sleek, gray and steel Italian restaurant. We wandered around afterwards and bought a few more things, having had a much-needed (after all the medical stress of the last few weeks) dose of retail therapy. Just knowing it’s all there, an hour away, somehow makes more bearable the infuriating lapses of electricity, the home repair people who say they’re coming and then don’t; the petty thievery of the glass from the lamps outside our gates, the garbage strewn around the calle carelessly after every weekend’s fiestas and other stark reminders of the class differences in our village. A romp through Andares, with all its superficiality and contemporary temptations, sometimes is just what the doctor ordered, especially after an in-office cappuccino. From my Encino-bred punto de vista (point of view), every once in awhile one needs a break from the undeniable fact of Mexico being indeed the “land of contrasts” with a return – however brief – to the familiarity of the good ol’ global monoculture.

Apparently they are coming out with a new Andares app for your cell phone that will tell you everything that’s going on in the mall and gives you contact information and such for all the stores. – sales, special events and such. ¡Muy padre! (very cool). I can’t wait to take my sister there when she comes down to visit next month, so we can both wear something pretty for lunch, and channel our inner Valley Girl heritage, at least for a day.  Meanwhile if you want to see what an upscale Mexican mall looks like, here is a link to Andares’ 360 degree photo panorama. And of course, it’s like this all year. No snow in Guadalajara!

http://www.andares.com/andaresv2/recursos/vista/CentroComercialAndares.html

¡Viva México!

On top of the stresses of my mother’s ever-so-agonizingly-slow decline, the ongoing territory battles of the cuatro gatos, the occasional armed robbery and murder here to keep us on our toes, we have had to deal with the outcome of Arnold’s PET scan, done just before we went off to Puerto Vallarta. Sure enough, as Arnold’s Mexican cardiologist, the wonderful Dr. B., suspected, the PET scan showed some additional problems in his heart, and he wanted to get in there to do an angiogram – and probably put in at least one “estent” (stent) as soon as possible.

So our choices were – A) Go back to New York, where Arnold is in the hospital’s system and Medicare plus his insurance would pay for the whole thing. He mused, “We could go back to New York, I could go into the hospital overnight and then be out and guess what – we’d be in New York! We could shop and play and eat and see some performances and yippee! If we’re going to be spending all that money anyway.” B) Have it done in Guadalajara, where we would have to pay for everything ourselves, but one would come back from the procedure to one’s own home and bed – and garden terraza (terrace), with vodka and tonic at hand rather quickly – in a matter of an hour or so after being released from the hospital; no hotel rooms, flights or going through customs required. I did a rough calculation and figured that it was pretty likely to be a wash, or close to it, with New York hotel prices, airline tickets, food, and such. So it was really up to Arnold, where he wanted to have this done.

He really liked the idea of going back to New York; everyone in the hospital speaks English, and they have even more fancy technology there (or so we thought) than they do here, should something go wrong. I wasn’t sure I agreed; my wifely instincts were telling me we shouldn’t mess around with this, getting on what amounted to four plane flights, the stress of traveling and then staying in a hotel, and the general hassle of it. What if something happened to him on a plane? And there was the nagging question as to why the wonderful specialized American cardiac center had utterly missed this possibly fatal blockage in the first place. In the process of putting his pacemaker in they had done god knows how many echocardiograms and x-rays during the time he was in there. But it was his decision, so I said  “Of course, whatever you want to do” even though my gut said we should hie ourselves off to the catheterization lab in Guadalajara like NOW.  Dr. B., who deals with Americans all the time, said “I get it about wanting to have Medicare cover it, but don’t delay on this too much longer” which for a Mexican is pretty much a five-alarm bell, at least in my view.

Still, Arnold, undaunted, persisted in wanting to go back to the Ancestral Homeland. He got on the phone and contacted my cousin’s highly regarded cardiologist in New York City. Well, not exactly the doctor himself, but his office, whose Patient Care Coordinator told an eager Arnold rather briskly that unfortunately the first available appointment was mid-October and this was mid-July. Welcome to the U.S. medical care system. So, good news, you can have it done in the U.S. and Medicare and your insurance will pay for all of it. Bad news, if you wait five more months with a couple of badly clogged arteries you could be dead.

Poor Arnold then called Dr. B. and said with a bit of trepidation, “Okay, okay, I get it that I can’t wait till October. Let’s just do it here and get it over with; tell me what I need to do”. “Stop by the office and we’ll make a plan”. So we go, and Arnold regales the doctor with his disappointment in the folks in New York, who wouldn’t make the institutional waters of the great and famous cardiac center part for his stent procedure. The good doctor listens patiently while Arnold vents about the whole situation. While Arnold talks about it all, Dr. B. intently studies his arm, saying “let me see your hand; make a fist, open it, close it, now turn your hand over”.  He then pronounced, just as Arnold put the finishing touches on his lament about Nueva York; “Great, we can go in through the wrist”. “What?” we both asked; “not through the femoral artery in the groin, with the eight hours of a sandbag on you and you cannot move an inch?” “No, he said, we don’t do it that way any more; nowadays we go in through the wrist. Much better, you can get up and move around, go to the bathroom, even go home in a few hours although we generally keep patients in overnight just to observe them. ”

Then he said, “How about day after tomorrow? I’d do it tomorrow but I have appointments with patients.” Be at the hospital at 8 a.m. and I’ll schedule it for 8:30. What? You are worried about getting to the middle of downtown Guadalajara on a weekday morning, a good hour away from where you live? No problem, we will send a car and a driver for you and your wife.”

The nice driver called us at 7 a.m. to say he was stuck in traffic himself coming from the city, but “no hay problema”, he had already texted the hospital and they were expecting us despite the delay. When we walked into the hospital’s reception area, a lovely gentleman in a while lab coat, Dr. B. SENIOR (our Dr. B.’s father, also a cardiologist, who works with him, it turns out) whisked Arnold away immediately to the catheterization lab. He told me to go in to his hospital room and wait, after I had filled out a bunch of paperwork. His room was basic, nothing fancy, a bed, a private bathroom, a TV, a couch for a family member to sleep on, and a bashed but very comfy old recliner. “Disculpe”, the doctor said, “this is a very old hospital and there are newer and prettier ones around, but this is the one where all the cardiologists work because this one is where all the best equipment is”.

An hour and a half later the younger Dr. B. called me and said “Come downstairs, I want to show you the images of his angiogram. I’m very happy you both decided to do this here and I’ll show you why in a minute.” I went downstairs into the lab and there Arnold was with a bunch of tubes coming out of him and a big pressure bandage on his wrist; he was wide awake and very happy it was over with. I noticed that they had rushed him in there so fast that they had left his wedding ring and watch on. There were six big computer screens over the table above his feet; Dr. B. said “I want you to look at this” and showed me “before and after” – what turned out to be a 98% blockage in the left anterior descending artery.  This is a really serious one; turned out he was a sitting duck for a massive heart attack. He explained, “The PET scan showed us there was a problem there, but sometimes we just can’t tell how bad it is until we actually get into the catheterization and can really see what is going on. He is very, very lucky – now he will be fine. We can do miracles repairing peoples’ hearts these days but believe me, it is so much easier BEFORE the person has the heart attack than it is afterwards.”

They moved him to his room, he promptly turned on the Olympics on the TV; I stayed with him for several hours and then decided to head home on the bus. Dr. B. saw him later that evening and said “You can go home tomorrow – how will you get back?” Arnold said “well, I’ll probably just  take a taxi to the bus station and take the bus back.” “Wait, Dr. B. said, I have patients to see in my office in Ajjic tomorrow. I’ll pick you up here at 9 a.m. and run you back there, and your wife can pick you up at my office there around 10:30.” Talk about customer service!

So the next morning, I picked him up at Dr. B.’s office here in the village, and brought him home. The four kitties and Reina greeted him, and later we both went out to the terraza  for our regular evening cocktail and chat. The next day he took off the teensy weensy spot bandaids he had on each wrist – one where the catheter went in and the other where the IV port was. And that was that.

Meanwhile Mexico just won its first Olympic gold medal in soccer and the neighborhood is going nuts, shooting off rockets and one can only imagine how crazy things are in town. Arnold is fine, recovering his equilibrium, paying bills at his desk, after having had the wits scared out of him by this series of events.  I think this means that at least for the moment, life is going to go on.

¡Viva México!

The massive wound left by Arnold’s stent procedure, through the wrist!

As You Were

No one except a crazy person would think of taking their Mexican maid and her teenage daughter, all expenses paid, on a week’s vacation to Puerto Vallarta.

The four of us at the “delifnario” ready to play with the dolphins!

And ordering the maid not to do anything, for once in her life, to just relax and let the camaristas do their job scrubbing the bathrooms and cleaning the place. Not even to make a bed. In utter defiance of every dictum of expat life (e.g. “Don’t become overly familiar with your household staff and their families”) we decided that Sofia needed a proper graduation present from secundaria. And that Rosa should come along too, to be spoiled a bit, see a new place, and to have some fun. We knew it would be a very special experience for them both.

Sofia had never seen the ocean, never walked on the beach. Of course in the private school where she is a scholarship student, all the other kids have back and forth been to the beach for vacación all their lives. Arnold and I knew she would be thrilled at the chance to get a glimpse of a lifestyle her friends have known since they were born. I had read Paul Gallico’s Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris as a kid and that book had a tremendous impact on me – the idea that even if you could only cross the class boundary once in your life, as if by magic, the experience would change who you were forever.

Rosa had cruelly been thrown into the water when she was younger, not knowing how to swim; she nearly drowned and had been terrified of the water ever since. I decided for some inexplicable reason that to get her past that fear would be a cool thing to do. So I began to plan a week at the beach for the four of us; Sofia, Rosa, Arnold and me. They were beside themselves when I said, in the most off-the-cuff manner I could muster, “Hey, we’re going to the beach this summer and we want you to come with us this time”. Usually, they stay behind and take care of the house and the animals, but I roped Gaby, one of Rosa’s other daughters, into housesitting duty. She was happy to help out, saying “it would be so wonderful for my mother to have this experience….of course I’ll do it!”

We found a terrific “rent one condo and get one free” online deal for the summer, when it is  mostly steamy, rainy and hot in Puerto Vallarta. But summertime is when kids are out of school, so there are promociones and sales to get people to come. It is interesting for us, too, because the feeling in Vallarta is completely different from the winter when the Americans and Canadians are all there – mostly sans kids – fleeing the freezing weather up north. But in the summertime, just as it is in the States, families bundle everyone into cars and head for the beaches, the difference being that here in Mexico “everyone” includes not just the nuclear family but grandparents, aunts, uncles, in-laws, and every imaginable stripe of related kid. In fact, seeing the place overrun with Mexican families was just the lesson we wanted for Sofia.  We wanted to give her some food for thought about her future, seeing this nice hotel crowded with Mexican families from abuelita (grandma) to the littlest babies, the generations all together for one week. We said to her “Think about what these people must be doing for a living, to be able to afford to bring a bunch of their relatives here and spend this time together….they can’t ALL be narcos!” Of course they aren’t; they are also doctors, executives, and engineers, members of Mexico’s growing and increasingly influential middle class. To Sofia this is all new: if she gets even through high school she will be the first one in her family to have made it that far. But after a year of lessons in the covered indoor pool of the local swim school she is now a strong swimmer and was more than ready to try her skills in the warm waters of Banderas Bay and enjoy the enormous pools at the resort…baby steps.

Still, I was worried about the long-term consequences of this adventure, of course (as I always am). Here we are, taking two people from a completely different social class and background and introducing them to “our” world – a breezy week at the beach, an attractive hotel where they could each have their own room and bathroom (Sofia doesn’t even have her own bedroom at home), huge buffets served throughout the day; all you have to do is wave your arm with the plastic bracelet that says you’re on the meal plan, to have absolutely anything and everything you want delivered to you poolside or wherever. What would be the result of this? Was it cruel to open the doors to an experience where people very much like you are the ones waiting on you? When you can’t swim or have never seen the ocean, to be exposed to beach activities, playing in the sun by the pool? And if it was, at the end, a life-changing experience and a total blast for them, to have had a magical week? Then what? A la Cinderella – everyone returns to their customary places, sort of like “as you were, men” in the military; or musical chairs, where everyone scrambles to plop down when the music stops? I kept thinking about that, and how the one who doesn’t HAVE a chair gets tossed out. Survival of the fastest.

But arguing for going ahead with the adventure was that Sofia has just gotten herself admitted to what is probably the best high school around here; a completely bilingual school where there will be no more than ten students in a class. She is going to have American and Canadian kids as classmates, and all the kids in the school are obviously university-bound. Everyone who is working with Sofia – volunteer tutors, teachers, relatives, all think she has a tremendous future ahead of her – but as a part of her development she needs to think outside the box of her incredibly loving, warm, but provincial upbringing. She indeed had never seen the ocean. We imagine that someday it would be great to take her to New York, to Paris, to Mexico City one day, even to California (where I never have given her the long-promised trip to Disneyland). But given everything that is going on, with Arnold’s heart stuff, my mother, my sister going in for surgery – right now, those big trips are only fantasies. However, we thought, “But we can take her to see the ocean. THAT, right now, this summer, we can do.”

Flying was ridiculously expensive for a forty-minute flight, so the four of us took the bus, heading west over the mountains, past extinct volcanoes and the agave fields of Tequila, then snaking down toward the coast through the Nayarit jungle. Even that was new for both of them, though Sofi, like all the kids I know, had to be prodded to lift her eyes from her cell phone (busy texting her friends) to catch that first glimpse of the blue ocean through the jungle. These kids experience life in a way totally different from my generation, where, when we travelled, we looked wide-eyed at all the scenery through the window of whatever conveyance we were on – car, train, plane, bus, whatever – and focused on every passing detail. Of course, in those days they hadn’t even invented computers yet, let alone Facebook and texting your pals. These kids experience everything through the filter of technology. I shake my head at how taking a photo or video of something is starting to replace actually SEEING it. But, my laments aside, obviously it’s the new reality for all of us.

Breakfast by the sea: Sofia, Rosa and Arnold

Once we got settled in our rooms, we looked around for some educational experiences, especially for Sofia, knowing that on her own, since she’s gregarious and not as shy as she used to be, she’d make friends down on the beach or by the pool and without some structure, she’d just hang out all day. We found out about a program that sounded like fun – where you get to be a “Trainer For A Day” and go to the “delfinario” where dolphins and sea lions are kept – and learn about how they’re trained and try your hand at working with them yourself. We signed Sofia up for the full day class, and we adults signed up for the much shorter “dolphin encounter”, just for fun, ourselves. Then there was a “canopy tour” harnessed to cables that fly over the jungle. On another day we sent her out alone on a day-long snorkeling cruise. She had to get herself back by taxi – we told her where she had to go, gave her cab fare, and sent her off for the day. In my beady little mind, all preparation for the day when hopefully she gets sent off to college somewhere.

Well, we can report that it all was a huge success; we all had a wonderful time. Rosa came into the pool with me guiding her (“Don’t go any farther than this, it’s too deep for you and I don’t want you to get frightened”) but after a few tries ended up – like everyone else on vacation at a resort – running from the pool to the Jacuzzi to wade into the ocean, and back again, and absolutely loved all of it. Sofia indeed made some friends; she swam and played beach volleyball until the sun went down. One day she rode on the “banana” –  a scary-looking inflatable yellow tube several people straddle, one behind the next, hanging on for dear life. You’re taken on a hair-raising ride towed by a speedboat tearing madly through the ocean until the grand finale when you, and your compañeros sitting atop this thing, are dumped with much merriment into the water as it turns sharply and heads back toward the beach. Then you all have to swim back to shore (yes they all must wear life jackets). She loved snorkeling and said the brilliantly colored fish were amazing. At the end of the day, the boat returned to the marina in a driving rainstorm over choppy water, so that was part of the adventure, too.

A Girl (me) and A Dolphin

Now, without a doubt, Sofia has experienced the ocean and Rosa is over her fear of the water and can’t wait to get back in. Sofi has to begin her new life as a preparatoria student (high school) in a couple of weeks and with her new course load, she won’t have time for swimming lessons any more. She swims well enough now, so I asked Rosa if she’d like to take Sofia’s place at the swim school, go three times a week for a couple of months till she has learned the obligatory four strokes they teach you; and once and for all, at nearly 50, to learn how to swim. I said I’d pay for it as a special treat. She is signed up and will start in a few days.

So it IS “As you were, men” but not quite. Both of them have seen a new place and learned a little of what it is to travel. Sofi learned how to snorkel and how to hang out with dolphins and sea lions and Rosa got into a Jacuzzi for the first time in her life, and we practically had to drag her out of it. We all got kissed by dolphins, nuzzled by a sea lion whose whiskers turn out to be surprisingly soft, and after it was all over we hauled our sandy selves back onto the Vallarta-Guadalajara bus and came back home. Life has resumed its normal routine but undoubtedly two lives have been changed.

In other news, we were without power for a day, and it was just restored a few minutes ago. Someone stole a block’s worth of electrical cable for the copper, leaving the whole calle without any power for almost 24 hours. The electrical guys must have found some new cable in a warehouse somewhere, because everything, gracias a dios, seems to be back to normal now. Rosa came to clean on her regular schedule and thanked us again and again. “Never in my whole life, “she said, “did I think I would ever get in the water and not be afraid, let alone ride around on a dolphin…” She is a little apprehensive about swim class and doesn’t want me to spend any more money on her, but I have convinced her – “for once, let us do something for YOU alone – a few hours a week not taking care of your daughters, your grandchildren, or the house or worrying about us”; and now after some badgering from me about how I want her to be able to swim for pool safety around her grandchildren if nothing else, she’s eager to try it. Sofia went off to the new school to finish her placement exams for the next semester. Soon it’ll be time to purchase her new uniforms, getting ready for the fall. Jose came over to see us with his periodic report on Mother and to pick up a new supply of opera DVDs from Arnold. The battles of the cuatro gatos continue apace, and we are trying different things to see what will help them all get adjusted, with varying degrees of success.

For the moment, at least, everyone got a chair.

Death of a Pajarito and Other News

As so often is the case, there is good news and bad news. Well, sort of bad news, I guess, but maybe it is actually good news. My mother, who has hovered in an undoubted twilight zone for the past year, since my father had the audacity to pass away rather suddenly and leave her behind in this vale of tears, seems to be more responsive than she’s been in a while. But she is also simultaneously starting to be much less interested in food and drink, which may be a signal that she’s fixin’ to die. Death has been on my mind the last couple of days, because yesterday I found a little bird struggling in the fountain, gasping for breath, with what looked like broken neck and a broken wing and it was clearly probably not going to make it. But I got it out of the water and set it down in a sheltered place where at least Reina wouldn’t get it, and thought maybe there would be a miracle, maybe it would recover; maybe it was just in shock, maybe it wasn’t that badly injured.  I couldn’t tell how it got into the water but it was cold and rainy and I know birds can’t survive long once they have gotten that waterlogged . And I was right, the poor little pajarito soon died. It just was one more sad thing upon sad thing that I’ve been dealing with lately.

The other day, I went over to the pretty little house we have rented for my mom and her caregivers, and for the first time in many visits, she was actually awake and seemed to recognize that I was there. She is in bed night and day; they turn her every so often to prevent bedsores, and change her diapers, keep her warm, give her oxygen, adjust her nebulizer, cool her off, whatever she needs; she has the world’s most attentive care from Jose and Sandra. She can’t really talk any more but I made a joke about getting her up and dressed because there was a sale on at Saks Fifth Avenue and there was just the tiniest, tiniest hint of a smile. That’s more than I’d gotten out of her in months. But the horrible thing about it was that it also was proof positive that – as we all say – she’s still “in there” – and what must this ongoing saga be like for her? She is asked repeatedly by the nice young doctor who stops by every few days to check on her, whether she’s in pain, and she nods her head to say she is not. I ask her if she wants anything or needs anything and she nods no. Or barely whispers no. But she – who was one of the most visual people I can remember – admired for her beautifully decorated homes and her personal style, is now completely blind, bedridden, incontinent, and her health has been failing, leading to this final landing place, for decades.  Now, she can’t carry on a conversation any more, and she is ever so slowly fading away, but she is still, for some unfathomable reason, with us, in spite of the ravages of diabetes, COPD/Emphysema, and just plain old age and frailty.

As I’ve noted on these pages before, I’ve been waging a pitched battle to lose the 70 lbs I managed to put on god knows how over the years.  It got more serious for me as I watched my mother disintegrate and I’ve read more and learned that in fact, based on my own history and blood test scores, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that the tendency to obesity, strokes, diabetes, heart stuff, is also genetically encoded in me as well as the various relatives who have died from all this stuff over the past few decades. I’ve read every book I can find about all this and they all sort of drum “diet and exercise” into your head to the point where I finally just surrendered to the obvious, cut all the carbs and sugar out of my diet and started to make excruciatingly slow, halting progress on the journey back down to a normal weight.  From the point where I began, it felt like being at the base of an enormous mountain I was going to have to climb, some monstrous, fog-shrouded Alp or something. I had no idea whether I would succeed. But, with all my “numbers” now in normal ranges, I guess I can say I have won at least the major skirmishes of the battle since nothing else horrible seems to be going wrong with me just yet.

It has been hard, but in a way it hasn’t, when I consider what I’m trying so hard to avoid – the pleasures of having to replace my entire wardrobe with new, NOT-plus-size stuff notwithstanding. Watching so many people around me age, especially my mother, I realized that thanks to the “miracles” of modern medicine, the chances are pretty good that lots of us baby boomers are indeed going to live to a ripe old age, whether we are actually fit to keep living or not. Everyone who knew my dad would have agreed he was one of the most brilliant people they’d ever met – with a Ph.D. from USC in musicology and an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Oberlin. He was brilliantly funny, loved by his colleagues, and successful enough to have kept us all in reasonable Southern California style when I was a kid, complete with red Jaguar and Encino swimming pool. He spoke four languages – five, if you count Italian, required by his musicology degree and love of music; even through the ravages of Alzheimer’s or whatever dementia or depression finally got the best of him. Though he died quickly and with great dignity, his departure was preceded by decades of slow, inexorable mental decline and withdrawal from the world which was a torment for him and an even greater torment for the rest of our family. Then there’s my mother, who absolutely refused to do the exercises prescribed by a parade of physical therapists and doctors throughout her life, as though somehow, as the Queen of the San Fernando Valley or whatever she thought she was, she was going to be exempt from the ravages of mostly preventable illness and old age.

Well, guess what, troops. She wasn’t exempt, nor was my dad. So even at the risk of being a little over-obsessed with it, I decided along the way to look the snarling demon right in his glowing red eyes and take him on. Scary and hard, when all you want is a tortilla with your chile relleno but you have – over and over again – to say no, it’s got too many carbs for me. I’ll just have a salad, thanks. (Well, I’m Atkins enough to have had a steak with my salad, to be more precise).

But the rewards are there, too, now, closer to the end of the trail than the beginning of the daunting project eight or nine years ago. I’ve lost weight more slowly than any other creature on the planet, I think, with stops along the way for various family and professional crises. But I have managed to stick with it and now, getting stronger working out three times a week, it’s starting to be more fun. I told a friend the other day “it’s odd, I look in the mirror now and the reflection I see staring back at me is a NORMAL person. Not thin, not especially athletic looking or sleek or anything like that, and most assuredly an older woman, but NORMAL. For a five foot tall girl who was pushing 200 lbs, this is weird but also undeniably kind of cool. And as I think about it from this new perspective, my hope is that at least while I’m still alive – hopefully twenty or even thirty more years – I can keep my strength and my faculties and enjoy whatever time I have left.  My poor mother could have had a much better time of her late eighties than she has had, that’s for sure.  None of us knows what fate awaits us, of course, and a bus could hit me turning a corner in the village tomorrow, but barring that, it is curious to say “here I am, at sixty-five, in the best shape of my life.”  I know others have had this experience too, from my reading, and at the end of my own life, for what it might be worth, at least I can say I tried. Not that it makes any difference if the diablo with the red eyes has you in his cross-hairs. Which he well might, knowing that we live in the land of vicious armed narcos, loco drivers who drink and text, unstoppable superbugs bedding down in hospitals, and on and on.

In any event, tomorrow I go back to my workouts with my trainer to keep slogging away at this, for what it is worth. The territorial battles of the cuatro gatos continue apace and it’s just so crazy with the yowling and hissing and chasing and god knows what that we honestly wonder if we will have to find new homes for Tabitha and Luigi in spite of our best efforts at some point. We hate to admit it, but maybe this ISN’T going to work out despite our intentions. Our original two are petite, delicate little girl kitties who have ruled their roost for years. But my mother’s two are bigger and stronger, and having been strays rescued at an older age, they were both on the streets in Santa Fe long enough so that they both can be aggressive with other cats, though they never were with any humans they encountered along the way.  We try to separate the four of them and break up the hissfests before they turn violent but today for the first time I heard some screaming while I was out in the garden, dropped my pruning shears and came running in to find a few drops of blood on the staircase. But all four kitties were by then far apart calmly licking themselves. Examined each cat for damage, could find none, checked the ears, the paws. Who knows which of the four got nailed? Now, they’re all curled up asleep scattered around the house. We are trying to be patient, give it some more time. Meanwhile, we seem to have a moment’s peace.

A domestic detour…

The last several days have been occupied with domestic matters, the most inconvenient of which was the sudden, unexpected demise of our water pump. For no good reason that we could ascertain; it wasn’t even that old. To explain why this was a catastrophe, here, the municipality gives you water whenever it has some, and it gets delivered to a big underground storage tank inside your property called an aljibe, which is usually somewhere fairly near the street. Many larger houses also have purification systems to rid the municipal water of impurities ranging from plain old mud and sand to nasty intestinal parasites, so you can actually drink it from the tap. The luckier ones among us also have a second, large rooftop storage tank, called a tinaco, which holds enough water for a backup day or two for times of drought, when the water authority only distributes every couple of days, or when there’s a power outage. The tinaco dribbles its water supply down to one’s faucets and toilets – in a teensy little stream, but there is indeed a very welcome trickle so you aren’t completely out of luck to wash your hands or whatever. It is gravity fed, being on the roof, so even if the power is out it’ll still work.

So all was not lost, we did have the water out of the tinaco, but once it’s empty, you’re sort of a goner. Thus to conserve that supply, showers, laundry, anything requiring a certain volume of water, was not in the cards for several days. The “Jewish American Princess in Mexico” irony of carrying buckets of water from the pool to flush the johns was not lost on me. My mother would have had a hissy-fit. Actually I didn’t even THINK of using the pool water; Arnold did. Which shows you what a totally urban creature I am; obviously there is a ton of THAT water out there.

Clearly getting the pump fixed was top priority.  The plumber first thought that all we had to do was replace the computerized controller which had apparently burned its motherboard out. This happens all the time here where there is tremendous variation in the current. The motherboard got promptly carted off to Guadalajara for repair, of course involving expenditure of a boatload of pesos. Then it was looking like we also had to replace a faulty valve on top of the pump itself (another bunch of pesos). Only problem with that being that our pump was a fancy model that had come from the States, and the parts were nowhere to be found in town, not even in Guadalajara. They would have to be ordered from the States via Monterrey – a couple of weeks? Naw, we thought, let’s try something else, what they call a “Mexicanada” where they just improvise something from what they have and hope to god it works, which it actually often does. I still have one toilet in my house that flushes perfectly well with a Mexicanada wire thingy my gardener made for it five years ago. Mexicanadas are what keeps all those Volkswagens running here – wire, chicle, rubber bands, string – they really do work, most of the time.

But alas, the Mexicanada approach failed with our fancy U.S. made high pressure pump. Various threaded bolts –for gas connectors, toilets, god knows what – were scrounged up or purchased and tried that were mas-o-menos the right size, but when the water in the tank got pressurized, they all leaked or flew out or just listed to starboard and didn’t seal anything, spewing water all over the place. Not only that, further examination revealed a small crack in the pump itself (weird, the whole thing is stainless steel, but oh well…) and it was obvious at that point that aside from not wanting to be without water for several weeks while waited for this dumb little valve from Monterrey, the whole unit was then going to need to be replaced entirely.

The house remained without water till we could resolve the situation, and I am domestic enough a creature so that I went crazy trying to figure out what to try next. Making things more difficult (bienvenidos a México) was that our plumber, who is usually very reliable, was nowhere to found after the repeated failure of his various Mexicanada attempts at repair. He “fixed” it, it worked for a while, he went away, then an hour after his departure, the pump went haywire again and shut down. So we needed him to come back and try something else, urgently. But his cell phone wasn’t receiving any more calls due to his mailbox being full, “out of the area de servicio“, or otherwise unreachable. We just couldn’t find him anywhere for a couple of days, while we went showerless and the dishes piled up in the sink. It just brings out the worst “What is wrong with people in this country?” xenophobic tendencies any frustrated expat might have, especially some of the people I know around here. Most of us worked pretty much like dogs our entire professional lives, promptly showing up as required and even more promptly returning phone calls from clients on phones that worked, for decades, in order to save the money for their Retirement in Paradise one day. I know intellectually that you just cannot expect Mexicans to be like Americans, you just can’t. And actually I don’t even want them to. Except when I have a plumbing emergency .

Probably it wasn’t such a great idea for me to vent to Rosa, the maid, and Carlos, the gardener, about just how furious I was that the plumber wasn’t accessible by cell phone after three days, and how Americans always return their calls (I realized the second I said this that of course it was nonsense, but it was too late). They then eagerly launched into “save the Señora’s sanity” mode and came back with a zillion suggestions as to how I should proceed, ranging from “fire him at once” to “give him a good lecture but then let him have another chance, pobrecito” with everything in between. They also brought me the cards of a bunch of other people in town they know who they assure me will be much, much more reliable, cheaper, “de confianza” (you can have confidence). The “fire him at once” option would work fine except for the fact that as in so many houses, he has done all the work around here for the past several years and knows where every single wire, cable, plug, connection, fuse, etc. etc. on our property is. Do I really want to start all over again with someone new?  For as Arnold points out, a new person will immediately come in and tell us we have to replumb and rewire the entire place – more pesos down the drain, pun intended – because everything that has been done was wrong and we are going to be electrocuted/drowned straight away. And then there was the other unfortunate fact that at that moment we were still utterly without water and I wasn’t in a mood to, as they say, shilly-shally around with someone new. But the “give him another chance, pobrecito” approach is also fraught with problems – I truly do think he’s been drinking more; something does seem to be going on with him because the quality of his work just isn’t what it used to be. Much to ponder.

But thankfully, the cavalry showed up yesterday afternoon. Finally I was able to reach him on his cell phone – he apologized and said he had had the flu; he’d be right over. Which he was, but he looked just fine to me when he got here, maybe a bit hung over, to tell you the truth. But he did show up and we were once again reviewing all the options for the poor dead pump, when Arnold saved the day by saying “just give him (yet more pesos out the door) some dough, send him to the hardware store and tell him to buy a nice, basic, Hecho En Mexico pump, nothing fancy, with parts that will be readily available at the aforementioned hardware store, and he can install it tomorrow and then maybe I can take a shower!?” We did exactly that, and this morning bright and early (both Carlos and Rosa had told him he had better straighten up and fly right because the Señora was pretty fed up with days of not knowing where he was) he was at our gate with a nice big box with a new pump in it from Amutio Hardware, the expensive place in the village that is actually pretty reliable.

Rosa did laundry all day and caught up, I took a nice long shower and washed my hair (¡finalmente!),  Floors were washed, beds were changed, we put water in the flowerpots outside, all is now well in our little world. The four kitties and Reina even have fresh water in their dish.

Onward and upward.

Post-Election Update

On the saga of my new smartphone: I finally gave up on the beyond-provincial cell phone store in the village and bought my new toy in New York. After ditzing around for days with the girls in the office here, who had never heard of this particular phone, even though Telcel clearly says they carry them, I figured it would cost less and be much simpler back in the Ancestral Homeland.  Back there, acquisition of new material objects has been elevated to the highest art. Indeed it was just so much easier to call one of the big electronics stores and say “here’s my credit card number, have an unblocked, international model waiting for me when I fly in” which they most efficiently did. I got it up and running in a trice. It is hugely fun and though there is no way I can justify needing to own so much technology now that I am no longer working, the stoop has been worthy of the conquest: in short, I don’t care!

After I brought it home, we did go in to Guadalajara to a big Client Service Center and had them update my records and put a new Telcel SIM card into it, since apparently the chip that was in my old phone was an antique and the new device requires more current technology. And we just learned that in the “progress in Mexico” department, they are opening a new Client Service Center right here in town, so those treks into Guadalajara to straighten out our bills, deal with our monthly billing plans, etc., (which always involved a trip to a mall and a bunch of unnecessary but amusing shopping!) will cease and we will be able to take care of all those things now five minutes away from our house. This will be a huge convenience to everyone around here, especially the expat community.

On the arts front, Baby Carlos turned out to be decidedly NOT interested in violin lessons. After a huge effort to get him and his mother to the town auditorium where the children’s orchestra was practicing and lessons are given, he met a violin teacher, and saw a couple of kids playing various instruments. But in fact he was far more interested in playing on the stair banisters and running around the corridors. To further the musical analogy, it reminded me of the last act of Wozzeck where the little kid is intently playing on his hobby horse, indifferent to the fact that his mother has just been killed. However, it turns out that in his pre-school there is a brand-new Tae Kwan Do class being offered, and he seems to love that and have aptitude for it, so maybe we’ll see how that progresses. He is of course awfully young – we decided we would try the idea of music lessons again perhaps in a year or two.

My excuse for not writing for awhile: We were in New Orleans for a few days to celebrate my uncle’s 90th birthday. My sister flew in too and it was wonderful to see not only my uncle but my aunt, who is also in terrific shape for her age and all of us young ‘uns (in our fifties and sixties) kept saying over and over that they are our role models for aging, for sure. Active, engaged, still traveling and enjoying their family. It was a great reminder to us that some of my own parents’ awful decline and fall was as a result of choices they both made throughout their lives – painful to acknowledge that but it’s true. Too many pills, refusal to exercise, being unwilling to question and challenge overworked and indifferent doctors who were prescribing this or that medication or treatment or surgery, for decades.

While we were occupied with eating beignets and anything else NOLA could offer us that we could cram down our carbohydrate-starved gullets, back home in Mexico the elections resulted (no big surprise) in the election of the young, fabulously handsome, and telegenic – as they say – Enrique Peña Nieto. There have been all kinds of commentaries on the re-emergence of the PRI in Mexico, ranging from “they’re the same old corrupt bums they always were, they haven’t changed, they will just rob us blind” to a more nuanced “Well, we are ready for a change and hopefully he can do something to move Mexico forward and bring some peace back to our cities and towns”. There probably really was a ton of voter fraud – as Peña’s rival Andres Lopez Obrador alleges – but I also think that people nowadays, in every part of the world, are just so susceptible to the superficial that if someone’s THAT handsome and married to someone THAT gorgeous, they can pretty well count on being elected even if they haven’t a brain in their head. Clearly, Peña is no intellectual, but I’m hoping this turns out to be one of those McLuhanesque “Medium is the Message” kind of situations where what people wanted was – as was the case with Obama in so many ways, someone who LOOKS fresh and young, even if at the end of the day he will be facing the same stalemates in actually getting legislation passed that his U.S. counterparts have. Let’s just hope that the people behind him pulling the strings (NOT Salinas, por favor) do have some brains and are trying to figure out, however complicated it is, what might actually be good for the country and its people.

But here, in Chapala, it’s still PAN country and as I write this there is a monster PAN victory party with an enormous band, going on up at the evento place a block away, with the amplifiers and speakers turned up to “window-rattling”. The fiesta is celebrating the election of our new PAN municipal president. It probably is a good thing; most of the Mexicans I know think the last PRI guy who was president of the municipality stole every peso he could get his hands on and handed out favors like they were cascarones, those eggs filled with confetti that you break on peoples’ heads.

In any event, I suspect it’s going to be a long, noisy night – we may as well get the earplugs out now. It reminds me of a telephone call I made to the local constabulary several years ago to complain – at 2 a.m. and after hours of incessant party racket, about the noise. “HOW long is this going to go on?” I demanded, in exasperation, of the young policewoman who answered the phone. “Well, señora, they have a permiso for a party (permit) until 3 A.M.” “How is it possible, I railed on, abandoning utterly my usual attempts at cultural sensitivity (mostly because I was sleep-deprived and beyond annoyed at that hour), “for the gobierno (the government) to issue a permit for a noisy party that is keeping several neighborhoods around here awake, until 3 a.m.?” She answered me patiently, as if she were speaking to a young child, “Señora, this party is being THROWN by the gobierno, all the important officials are there. It is a fiesta to present the queens for the annual Independence Day parade and celebration in September.” I felt another piece of my American sensibility sort of crack quietly within….and I just surrendered at that point. Since then, I haven’t called the police station in the village very much. For sure, I won’t be calling them tonight!

Brief Kitty Update

We dared to go out tonight to friends’ house for dinner, so Group 2 was locked up in our bedroom for several hours. Now we’re back home and they’re roaming around, having been sprung, getting in each others’ way and hissing their heads off. But at one point a rather spectacular hissfest between Luigi and Rosie (Luigi having cornered her, not such a good idea) was so loud and scary that both Missoni and Tabitha jumped up on the buffet in the dining room either to escape or to watch the show. They were completely concerned with what was going on down on the floor between the other two and didn’t realize that they were only three feet apart from each other. Is this progress?

Missoni finally jumped down when she realized, with a start, how close she was to Tabitha. Tab has been chasing after Missoni, and started after her once again, but I scooped her up and stopped her. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Maybe in a few more weeks our life will return to normal, the four kitties being more adjusted to one another, and we can resume our worrying about being kidnapped and beheaded instead of breaking up catfights. You just never know in life. Who would have ever thought we would have four cats? And my mother is now so far past being able to even be grateful that we’ve turned our lives upside down to give them a home here, or even to be aware that the cats are gone from her house, that it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter, but I look at her two cats, who are actually settling in here quite well (it’s our original two who are crazed) and think “I just really couldn’t have put them up for adoption, we will all – animals and humans – make it work somehow.”

Today it’s one year since my father died — his yahrzeit – and I remember on the day he died noting that had been a particularly spectacular day here – big puffy clouds, blue skies, the perfect temperature outside, just a hint of a breeze, flowers and birds everywhere. It was like that today too, particularly gorgeous. Once the rains start every June, things do get better.

Day of the Sacred Heart

Dia Del Sagrado Corazón

After we got back from New York and Arnold’s pacemaker adventure, he dutifully reported to his cardiologist here, who had everything checked out. The marcapasos (pacemaker) is doing just fine, but mysteriously, Arnold’s heart is still not working as efficiently as it should. The doctor said “We need to find out what’s going on” as he suspects a blockage or blockages in his coronary plumbing somewhere. So off he went this week to the regional nuclear medicine center,  PET Guadalajara, to have a PET scan done. With those images, the doctor can tell us where we need to go from here.

Arnold is of course sick of the whole thing and is not happy at all about his new identity as a cardiac patient. Nor am I, but as we keep saying, we don’t really want to consider the alternative. Whatever they figure out, it may well involve more surgery and probably a trip back to the States, where Medicare thankfully will cover much of the expense. So for the moment, we are putting things on hold until we know what he will be facing. More uncertainty, alas.

Since all of the local websites have pretty much shut down any talk of crime (some of them being sponsored by local real estate agencies, of course), many people are happy that things appear to be calmer now after the horrible spate of random kidnappings and murders we had last month. People are slowly creeping out of their houses and resuming their habitual routines. The streets are no longer deserted; there are fiestas resuming on the weekends and expat community leaders are urging everyone to start patronizing local restaurants and businesses again. There is much musing about the best ways to help our Mexican neighbors recover from the recent crime wave by sending some pesos their way, from “Get out and eat at the restaurants” to “Donate to the funds we have set up for victims’ families”. Whether it really IS any safer out there now, who can tell?  Most of the expats around here don’t read Spanish well enough to check the Guadalajara metropolitan dailies; but sadly, even a superficial glance at those will tell you that there is more than enough crime to go around. But if it’s true – as they say – that after the elections things may calm down, perhaps it won’t be all that much worse than what you’d read about in Detroit, or Chicago, or insert-name-of-crime-ridden OTHER city of seven or eight million people. Who knows? But undeniably, the rival gangs are still kidnapping and extorting and robbing and murdering out there.

The unspoken question always hanging above our heads, like one of those cloud comic book balloons, is whether our little expat colony persists in living in a dreamworld convincing itself that they will continue to leave us alone. But in fact, thus far – unless someone got themselves mixed up in the drug scene somehow – they have. Or, as has happened to an unfortunate few, you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. But then I always come back to the crazies that slaughter people in beauty parlors or malls or wherever back in the States. In this day and age, how you meet your maker seems to be increasingly random – and now I am beginning to suspect that with the economies of much of the world collapsing or going through, at the very least, very tough times, it’s going to get shakier and more unpredictable everywhere. People are getting killed all over the place. I could change my tune tomorrow if there is a resurgence of random violence in our village, but right now I’m thinking that one might as well stay in a place where you have flowers and hummingbirds to distract you all year round, your house is your own, not some crooked bank’s, and the coldest it gets makes you put on socks and a sweater.

You don’t have to be reading the morning news to be a nervous wreck, however. Cartels and American psychopaths aside, Arnold is also balancing on the edge of a knife blade just because of what is going on inside his own body – no murderous thug need apply to give him sleepless nights. So we are putting our fretting about being massacred in a balacera (gun battle) aside long enough to try to figure out what we are going to do about Arnold’s heart situation and – to the extent that anyone can relax knowing that they may be facing heart surgery – to enjoy the arrival of the rainy season. Everything is turning lush and green, almost overnight, as it does every year. We were sitting on our terrace the other day, watching not only dozens of hummingbirds racing around, but the big yellow-and-white Great Kiskadees (they call them Kiris here) with the wonderful black racing stripes on their heads, some gorgeous orange, yellow and black orioles, and a couple of brilliant red Vermillion Flycatchers swooping around our fountain.

Then suddenly we heard the remnants of a procession passing by the house in the street outside our garden walls, accompanied by the strangest and most compelling sort of pre-hispanic or medieval melody you can imagine; I thought it sounded like a flute but I’m still not sure. I’d never heard anything quite like it. They’ve been setting off cohetes (rockets) all over town, too, scaring pets and rattling everyone’s nerves even more than they have been rattled by recent events. But cohetes are a big part of the culture here, so their return wasn’t entirely unwelcome; a tenacious tradition reasserting itself in spite of it being a dangerous time. The unearthly music floated around the neighborhood for quite awhile, and whoever was playing it was either in a trance or practicing very hard to get it right, because it was repeated over and over again, almost like a meditation.  The street had been decorated with red and white crepe paper, too. “It’s got to be some sort of religious holiday, doesn’t it?” Arnold said. “Yeah, but which one is it?” I wondered.

Then it dawned on both of us, when we remembered the June date, and that the red stood for blood, the white for purity, that it was Dia del Sagrado Corazón, Day of the Sacred Heart.  It is a actually a very serious holiday for these folks, marked by somber prayers and processions, acts of consecration, the recital of novenas and so forth. It is probably going to turn out, when we see the doctor, that it will have been a pretty serious holiday for us, too. Prayers for us, for those who pray, may well be in order, in fact.

One sees a variety of images of hearts – both sacred and profane – everywhere in Mexican art, from the pierced and bleeding hearts (symbolizing the travails of the Mexican people) of the great muralists to the most naïve and delightful folk art.  Even Arnold’s cardiologist, whose black-and-white office is as sleek and modern a place as you can possibly imagine, in an equally sleek and modern glass tower in Guadalajara, has a wonderful handmade metal tree on the credenza behind his desk – hung with dozens of enchanting, translucent red glass hearts. So while he is telling you that you need to have your chest cut open and your heart patched up, you can enjoy this wonderful piece of folk art. Mexico has come a long way since the day when, instead, they would have cut your heart out and offered it up to the gods as a sacrifice.

And so, still waiting for the results of Arnold’s twenty-first century PET scan, we have passed this year’s Día del Sagrado Corazón. We will see the cardiologist, and his delightful metal tree, in this office this afternoon.