Ex-pats

Music Education

Things must indeed be calming down a bit because our neighbors are having friends over again with their awful music playing (speakers aimed directly over our garden wall, of course), and the plumber never showed up, which tells me he has enough work now to keep him busy. Or else there’s a fiesta (Saturday night?) and that took priority. But the fact of a fiesta is a positive sign; for several weeks it has been dead as a doornail ‘round these parts.

Meanwhile it was a gorgeous day and the pool guy came so once again it was sparkling. These are the luxuries I try not to take for granted – but there they are. So I went outside and got in the water and enjoyed the brief respite from the blaring radios and racket that usually emanates from the evento place up on the highway most weekends. I had to myself the sound of the birds and the horses clopping by outside our garden walls on the street, Saturday afternoon being – since most people quit work at 2 p.m. – when the local horse folk take their steeds out for a walk or for charro training or whatever. That includes a lot of expats who have horses too, but most of them are retired and you can see them out pretty much any old time during the week.

Part of our now-weekly weekend ritual is that José, my mother’s full time and wonderful caregiver – along with his wife Sandra – stops by to give us a report on how she’s doing, and get whatever he needs from us for the week, the most important part of which is a new supply of opera DVDs to watch. José loves opera and since he quickly figured out that Arnold was not only possessed of tremendous expertise but an enormous collection, they now get together every week for their opera conversation. Since my mother is now – horribly – blind and bedridden, can no longer really talk, and sleeps most of the time, both José and Sandra have time on their hands between changing her diapers, giving her meds, turning her, and feeding her.

So José comes back with last week’s plastic bag full of opera DVDs and with a list of questions for Arnold – what is the significance of this or that in this or that opera, why are the sets and costumes so weird (this requires a long essay answer about current trends in opera production) or what was the composer trying to do here? We both enthusiastically try to answer his questions. Then the watched DVDs are returned and Arnold carefully selects this week’s crop – some old, some new, perhaps a French one, perhaps a Russian one, an early Verdi, one with something new and challenging for José, like a countertenor; maybe a vintage recording with a long-gone singer Arnold thinks was terrific. Inevitably José picks out the singer in question and when he comes back the following week for the Opera Exchange he says “Wow, that Madam So-and-So, she really had an incredible voice!” And Arnold beams as his protégé has nailed it. José has a great ear for voices, tremendous curiosity about the performing arts, and in another life, with a couple of degrees in music history or musicology, he might have been a helluva critic. He would have probably loved the experience I had, in my twenties, of working for a time for a major opera company and seeing firsthand how it all goes together magically on performance nights, with hundreds of people scurrying around that gigantic stage in the darkness, as they say, “up close and personal”.

But that of course is part of the tragedy of Mexico – so many wonderful people could have been so many different things. Our gardener, Carlos, whom we do tease about being the bearer, for good or ill, of whatever the news is in town, is actually really curious about the economy and how things work in the world. I have asked him innumerable times “Why, oh why, didn’t you stay in school? You would have been a great journalist or economist – you’re always commenting on this or that story that you’ve read in the news or heard on TV…”  To which he always replies with a sigh, “Señora, half my friends did finish their educations and none of them could find the jobs they had trained for. They also all ended up as gardeners or construction people or laborers. So I figured, I might as well get started early if I was destined to be a gardener anyway, so I could get more clients”.  (And sadly, one thing he is definitely NOT curious about is horticulture.)  When he says that, I’m never sure if that’s just his fatalistic Mexican nature and whether, if he had actually made an effort, things might have turned out differently for him. But my point of view is so terribly American, it is completely marinated in that Horatio Alger stuff that is part of my cultural legacy.  And I totally lucked out: I was also born into a family that valued education and expected me to become some sort of professional. As part of the deal, they willingly paid for my college education, as well as music, art and dance lessons throughout my childhood.

I’m aware, of course, that the America of today is also full of unemployed young lawyers and liberal arts majors staggering under six-figure student loan debt and waiting tables. But for Mexicans, who have been beaten down again and again by corruption, invading armies, ruthless dictators enslaving and robbing them in the name of “democracy” or “revolution”, it’s a whole different ballgame. So maybe all we can do is hope that the next generation makes some progress and that things are better for them as more and more are born into Mexico’s relatively new and aspiring middle class. We found out about a music education program for kids here in town, specializing in teaching them stringed instruments (easier to carry, no one has pianos anyway, and they tend to love violin because of the mariachi tradition). They have a little orchestra and we thought maybe we’d see if Baby Carlos (as opposed to Gardener Carlos) might like to try out violin lessons. I called them and they said, yes, of course, four is the perfect age to start on the violin – which I knew because that’s when my mother had started her violin studies back in the 1920’s.

So we are going to take Baby Carlos over to the auditorium on Monday and see if he likes the idea. His mother thinks he will, because he loves the little toy xylophone we got him a couple of years ago, and he has some kiddie drums he likes to play. Maybe he will grow up to be the Mexican Joshua Bell. Yeah, maybe it’ll be the NEXT generation. Meanwhile, José has a spate of new operas to listen to and we’ll just keep on lending him operas until he’s gone though Arnold’s entire collection. Each week he learns more and by the time he is ready to begin listening to them all again, starting from the beginning, he will be hearing them all with a much more finely tuned ear. If we can manage to find someone to cover for him one Saturday at my mother’s house, perhaps when the Met live telecasts start up again in the fall, we will be able to take him into the city to see one.

When confused, do nothing

Based on my last couple of posts, and e-mails I’ve sent to friends and family who have read about the violent goings-on both in Guadalajara and around Lake Chapala, several have expressed concern for our safety here. Suggestions range from “come back to the States IMMEDIATELY while you still can” to “Get yourself a gun and learn how to use it” to “get a couple of big nasty dogs” and so forth. Well, we already have a (useless but cute) dog AND we have just adopted my mother’s two cats (more on this later) so we now have FOUR, count ‘em, FOUR gatos, so no more animals for us; and naaah, we ain’t gettin’ no gun. First of all Mexico has stringent gun control laws not only for the general populace, but especially for foreigners. You can get an exception and get a permit but I am not about to attempt to turn myself into Annie Oakley (maybe Minnie from Fanciulla del West would be a better role for me, come to think of it) at this stage of my life. We have really high walls around our house, an alarm system we actually use, and we bolt the place down pretty securely every night.

I remember taking a women’s self-defense class waaay back in Oakland after a couple of bad guys followed me to my car one night when I’d been working late. The good news was, I was driving (as was my wont back in the States) a powerful and fast little sports car and I was able to leave them in my dust. The bad news was, even if I had had self-defense skills back then, I wasn’t able to use them. My only defense in that particular situation was to run like hell and then drive even faster.

But when the guy REALLY had a gun at my head, during the theft of my car back in 2007, believe me, I could have been the aforementioned Annie Oakley and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. He trapped me in a split second in a place you never in a million years would have expected such a thing to happen. He was trying to pull me out of the car by my arm and at that point he pulled the gun. In situations like that you do what you have to do to survive and my instincts told me to just be really nice to the guy and get out voluntarily; back slowly away from the car with my hands visible, leave the engine running, and let him have it. It was insured and I managed to stay alive.

It is true, however, that of late my undoubtedly hyperactive imagination has been tormenting me with every imaginable bad thing that could happen to us here. Undeniably, during the past couple of months the tension level here has soared for everyone. In spite of my tendency to overreact – probably justified because I still DO have some fallout left over from the carjacking  – it occurred to me the other day, that thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, Arnold is still alive.  And for god only knows what reason or sets of reasons, so am I. While I was twisting and turning in the wind, tormenting myself with thoughts of what we might do and how we could extricate ourselves from our lives here and return to the relatively safety of the States, things inexplicably may have begun to quiet down. It further occurred to me that in the “random violence” department we could, indeed, pack up and bail and head back to the Ancestral Homeland only to be mown down there by one of those nut jobs that goes berserk picking off people from a freeway overpass or something. There ain’t no free lunch, I guess.

In any event, I was startled out of my nosedive yesterday, an astonishingly clear and beautiful day, when even Carlos the gardener (whom we refer to as “the Daily Tagblatt” because he watches the TV news and obsessively reports every single crime to me each morning when he arrives) commented “You know, Señora, I haven’t heard anything really bad on the evening news for a couple of weeks now…what do you think of that?” I did think about it, and it did feel to me like the level of fear has subsided; I’ve noticed people out shopping and in restaurants again, and maybe indeed, at least for now, things are improving a bit. There is a whole new crop of white roses starting up to replace the ones I’d brought in and stuck in a vase, and Ricardo had just been by to clean the pool, which had nary a leaf, nary a dead bug, nada, and boy is it warm and nice now. Hmmm, I  thought, maybe I should forget all this cartel stuff for the moment, pour myself an Esquirt Light and throw some good tequila into it and get into the water.

Which is precisely what I did, remembering for some weird reason the motto I painted on a ceramic tray I made years ago: Fluctuat nec mergitur.

For those readers who have forgotten their high school Latin, it means “it is tossed by the waves but it does not sink”. It is the motto of the City of Paris, which surely has seen far worse ups and downs than our little village.

 

Minimum Security

Some amazing thunderheads are forming this afternoon over the lake – signaling the arrival soon of the rains, we hope! We may have our heads firmly stuck in the aforementioned clouds, but it’s possible that things may be calming down a tiny bit. The army and the federal police came in for a short while at least (until for some unfathomable reason, our state government told the Federal government that we didn’t need them here, so they may be going away….) A local Expat/Mexican citizens’ group formed that bought cell phones for the patrol cops out on the streets, and passed out the phone numbers to as many people in the community as they could, and are initiating some other community-based security measures. They have also started an anonymous denunciation telephone line that at least a few people are actually starting to use. So far two people have been arrested from tips received on that line, they tell us. We don’t dare to become too complacent but it seems as though people are starting just to rebel — anyone who knows the Spanish verb “hartar” will be hearing that word used a lot these days. In this context it means, basically, to be weary, fed up. People are just getting sick of all of this and trying to figure out how to take matters into their own hands.

I heard that a few days ago a van pulled up by a group of kids in the street right in the center of town and it was looking like they were going to kidnap a couple of them. The kids had the good sense to start screaming for help, and people came running out of their houses with bats, rocks, anything they could find, broke all the windows in their van, gave the vehicle a good bashing too, and were ready to kill the guys by stomping on them. The police arrested the alleged kidnappers but of course they insisted they were innocent, it was all a joke. Well, one will never know, but there was another similar incident in another Lakeside village where people rose up on their own and defended themselves against a real or perceived threat. This is what Mexicans are used to doing, after all (viva Zapata) historically and culturally, since the police and justice system are often so completely dysfunctional.

And it is very difficult for the people who work here – we went out for an early dinner at one of our favorite restaurants – early enough to get back home before dark – and there was one other couple in this big place and that was IT. On a Friday night. Before, given the expat community and the weekending  folks from Guadalajara, it would have been pretty busy. We were chatting with the very charming young man who was our waiter – since there was no one else to wait on –  and he said there was a real danger that the restaurant might not survive, throwing yet more Mexicans out of work. Even we are talking about – especially given Arnold’s new status as an official cardiac patient – finding some sort of alternative base back in the States, not only for medical care (paid by Medicare!) but in case things really do get dicey for us.  But with my mother ensconced in a rented house here with her team of caregivers and ever-so-slowly declining, we are indeed sort of stuck for now.

Still, friends are writing to us and saying “Come back! You can’t live as prisoners behind your own gates!” Well, no, but it’s not like that. We aren’t exactly prisoners; one has to go to buy groceries, to the drycleaner, to the doctor, to the dentist, just like anywhere else. They’ve just moved our farmer’s market from across town to within a couple of blocks of us and I can’t wait to check it out as now it is much more convenient. We go out to see friends and to dinner, we just try to get home by dark. And as we get older we aren’t so thrilled about driving at night anyway, so that part is okay. The Princess does have her private sessions with her personal trainer. And we do have this house we’ve put a lot of energy into, and a garden bursting with color, so it’s not exactly like being cooped up in a tiny room somewhere. Picking up and leaving all this….we still love it here in spite of all its blemishes, and it is also, let’s face it, much harder when you’re older than when you are young and it’s all just a big adventure.

For the moment, we are spending time in the afternoons lying on our poolside chaises, Arnold reading his latest mystery novel and trying to regather his wits after the insertion of his pacemaker, learning to live with the reality of the new memento mori he has ticking away inside him. We watch the swallows swoop down and just barely touch the  pool surface to drink and catch waterlogged bugs; there are flowers in bloom and hummingbirds zooming around everywhere. Our version of the minimum-security prison for Wall Street types?  Everything feels tentative, and undoubtedly our future is uncertain. Do we just hunker down and wait it out? Bail? Hard for super-cautious me to live with the “I just don’t know how it’s going to turn out” part and try to live in the moment till things sort themselves out. The Zen of the Drug Wars? We are just crossing our fingers and hope that things will somehow improve – which they actually apparently HAVE in Michoacan and even in, god help us, Ciudad Juarez.

¡Ojalá!

Considering everything….

It turned out that while we were dealing with our own issues in New York, we missed several really horrific murders and kidnappings right here in our little village. Even USA Today had an article about our lakeside retirement paradise  and how much things are changing with the ongoing battles between the various cartels who want to take control of the routes in and out of Guadalajara. Which gangs they are changes from time to time – but there’s no doubt that it’s gotten worse. So far, they have just targeted Mexicans, and left the expat community alone.

But we are all very concerned, and a number of people are pulling up stakes and heading back to the States or Canada or Europe or wherever they came from. Not good, as Arnold says pensively, not good. After several innocent young people were massacred a few weeks ago, the entire town is on edge and people are terribly frightened. Various stories are flying all over the pueblo, and some of the local expat chat boards which are usually great resources for “can anyone recommend a good barber” sorts of questions have had all references to crime shut down as there was no way to verify much of what was being posted. So now on top of the reality we have a form of censorship. It reminds me so much of Death in Venice – I do feel like Aschenbach hearing rumors of cholera, wondering if I should head back to the Frozen North away from the sun and the flowers where I’d hoped to find a sort of permanent peace.

We had our own little taste of it earlier this week: Not in our village, but in one a few miles away, one of our Mexican friends was working at the home of an American couple and four men broke in, tied them all up, bound and gagged them and covered their heads with hoods. Then they locked them all together in a bedroom. There was the couple, their maid, a little kid, and the Mexican guys working there. They left them tied up and held pistols to their heads while the robbers ransacked the house. Only the maid managed to hide in the laundry. They were ready to kill them all and one even said to the other robbers to put the silencers on the pistols. Something – maybe the little kid? – made them change their minds but  they had been told “don’t move, we will kill you if you try to untie yourselves” He then commented that the first guy he killed, he was scared, but now he’d killed more than seventy people, and it didn’t faze him at all. While all this was going on they forced the American to sign documents to empty his bank accounts and transfer everything to some Mexican account, forced him to give him the ATM cards and his passwords; it just went on and on.

They loaded up the couple’s SUV with everything they could remove from the house; they took everyone’s cell phones, wallets and car keys and had cut the power and phone lines. Finally they left in the stolen car, and the maid crawled out from her hiding place and untied them all. Their wrists are all cut up from where they were tied up; naturally they are completely traumatized. You’re never the same after something like this happens to you, I can attest from my own experience having been carjacked at gunpoint. Much to think about and none of the options are particularly compelling. In spite of it all, we really, really, don’t want to move. We love our house and our life here. But yes, there is much to think about.

People are saying things will calm down after the election in July, that this is just the cartels’ laying the groundwork for getting things arranged favorably for them by whoever gets in. But people say all sorts of different things about the brutality and barbarous ways of these thugs who kill dozens of people at a time. Who knows? And Arnold is dealing with the psychological aftermath of the pacemaker: “We can’t run away from the fact that we are indeed getting older”, he sort of says with a certain resigned air. It is all just “demasiado” (too much) for me, and as I was really beginning to freak myself out worrying about all this, tonight I decided to experiment with making some sugar-free Mexican chocolate ice cream, which turned out terrifically, if I do say so myself.

Meanwhile after three weeks “off” on our trip, I have returned to my thrice-weekly workouts with my trainer, who tells me his fifteen American and Canadian clients are now down to but three. His business is really falling apart; this horror show is affecting everyone. And starting this week I am driving the two blocks to exercise class, not walking, as I used to. And it is such a pretty walk, a great warmup going and a great cooldown coming home, down cobblestone streets with flowers cascading over the tops of the walls.  But Arnold can’t exercise for awhile yet and I am going by myself for the moment; I’m not willing to be a woman walking out there alone just now.

Will it get worse? Will it ever get better? Where will this all end, for us, for México Lindo y Querido???

The village…

A Doctor’s Excuse

I have been so neglectful of my poor blog; a million things have conspired to keep me from writing. But hopefully I can catch everyone up a bit. But I do have an excuse for my silence from a doctor, or a bunch of doctors; I really do. Our best laid plans for diverting ourselves in the big city were changed and our lives and our assumptions about what the future might hold have been altered over the past several weeks’ events  – everything looks different these days and we are still getting used to some new realities.

On May 8 Arnold and I set out for New York City anticipating a week of opera, concerts, shopping, a couple of museums – our usual New York madness. The first few days were loads of fun as we crossed items off our various shopping lists (the things one MUST have that are not available in Mexico) and walked around the city till we had blisters on our feet. But a few days into it, Arnold began to notice that he was having trouble climbing up the two flights of stairs to the apartment we had rented. At first, he thought it would just go away, and I said “maybe you should have yourself checked out”….and it really didn’t make any sense to me because we live in a two story house so one more flight shouldn’t have made any difference. And whatever difference there was should have been negated by the fact that whereas at home we’re at five thousand feet above sea level, here we were at sea level, where I was pretty much bounding up the two flights (at least after we got the luggage hauled up there).

But the shortness of breath came back and Arnold was concerned enough about it the second time around so that he said “yes, let’s get me to a hospital”. But not before he did a bit of research on the internet to find out what the best cardiac hospitals in New York were! We ended up taking him to New York-Presbyterian where they basically took one look at him, ran a few tests, and said “you need a pacemaker, sooner rather than later”.  And they wheeled him off right away to have that done, leaving me to both be scared to death about what was going on but also enormously grateful that we were there, in New York, in the States, where Arnold could speak English to the doctors and nurses, it would virtually all be covered by Medicare, and that actually, if it was inevitable, we were in the best possible place for this to have happened.

A few hours later he was back in his room with the new device installed in his chest and hooked up to a million different wires and computers. The nurses showed me how to interpret what was going on and how to read the different numbers and even I could see that once they got the pacemaker sort of adjusted in there, it was already making an enormous difference in his heart rate. It was actually kind of amazing. Every couple of hours someone would come in to check something or other out, sonograms, x-rays, all sorts of blood tests. They had him stay in a couple of extra days just to be sure everything was functioning properly, and then by Tuesday they did one more final round of tests after he’d been up and around and walking around town again. At that point the cardiologist literally and figuratively cleared him for takeoff, so we could fly home. We tore a page out of my mother’s book and cashed in a boatload of mileage so we could go the whole way back first class. It made a huge difference – no lines, wheelchairs at each stop, everyone was nice to us, we had room to stash our stuff without it interfering with Arnold’s arm, and they even fed us! (That wasn’t necessary after two weeks in New York but, well, why not be pampered?)

No matter how you slice it, though, it made us both stop and think about the fact that we are getting older, that this unexpected medical stuff can and probably will happen to both of us. It has raised a bunch of questions for us about our lives in Mexico, far from family, far from the kind of state-of-the-art medical care we received while going through this adventure. On top of the stress of going through the ordeal itself, we also were faced with a lot of other nettlesome questions about our lives and our future. But the main job for me was to be there for him and so I went off to the hospital, across town to the East Side, every day, and stay with him for awhile. I kept thinking “I think he’s officially a cardiac patient now….” and tried to grasp what, as far as our future plans might be, what this could mean.

Arnold’s doctors told him he has to take it easy for a few weeks and especially not to lift his left arm higher than shoulder height. So far, he’s being very good ! And already he admits to feeling better, and his color is better, too. What a relief. We made an appointment to go back to New York (just the excuse we needed, I’ll probably need some more makeup by then!) in October for them to do a routine check on the pacemaker. For now, we are both exhausted, but happy to be home. Reina, Rosie and Missoni all went nuts when we came through the gate after Luis picked us up at the airport. All in all, rather than being gone for just eight days we were gone for more than two weeks.  We are both relieved and hoping this means he will be around for a long time to come. Still, as they say, always something!

Meanwhile back here we are plunged once again into the increasing crime affecting all of us; the expat community’s efforts – misguided? hopeful? sometimes even a bit effective? to do something about it. And the rainy season is drawing closer every day. The brown hills and dusty gardens are just waiting, waiting, now for the first serious rains to fall.

Una Nueva Bateria

The blog has taken a back seat to life, for the past several days. It’s just been one thing after another here – totally unnecessary silliness like our car battery dying of old age; plus one of us accidentally left an interior light on which hastened its demise and left us carless for a day or two while we tried recharging it and a bunch of other things that didn’t work till we broke down and just bought a new battery for it — (stress? what stress?), complicated electrical problems with power surges in the house which are frying our appliances (bienvenidos a Mexico), some required maintenance on our pool – things that have just made life, on top of what is going on with my mother, just that much more complicated.

The process of dealing with some of these inconveniences is quite something, though. When the battery died, our choices were to have the car towed to a service station or back to the dealer in Guadalajara, an hour away, or try to find a mechanic here in town and typical of us, we don’t have some normal car for Mexico. One part of our old U.S. life — a problematic affection for distinguished, aging and finicky German cars — we just haven’t quite shaken. So of course instead of a Ford or something sensible we have an Audi, where everything is sealed, hard to find, electronic, delicate, and German. And harder to work on for most Mexican mechanics, especially village mechanics rather than those in the city. (Of course the Audi is a total blast to drive, and the perfect size for our narrow cobblestone streets, but that is the topic of another post…)

In view of all that, we weren’t sure exactly what the best course of action might be. Rosa and Ricardo – our builder who was here chipping away at the awful calcium and lime deposits around the pool tile, after hearing our laments about being without wheels for god knows how long while the car got taken care of at the dealership, both said “we have just the guy for you – let us call him and he’ll come right to the house.” So the mechanic Eduardo arrives shortly thereafter, with three younger guys trailing him as assistants. One of the kids takes a photo of the top of the battery – showing all the codes, labels, and such, of the dead battery –  with his cell phone. They all say “we are going to Guadalajara with this picture and we’ll find the right battery and bring it back to you tonight. Don’t worry about a thing, Señora!” I give them the money to purchase the new battery and off they go. I am wondering whether I’ll ever see them again but sure enough, at about 9 p.m. the gate bell rings and it’s the four of them, with a new battery, a big charging machine on wheels, a bunch of tools, and some work lights. By 9:30 I hear the reassuring sound of my car springing back to life. Whew! One domestic problem solved. The amount they charged us for all this running around was so little that I gave them a nice propina (tip).

On top of the return of automotive functionality, the further good news is that our hummingbirds are back in force, crowding around the two feeders hanging by our terraza. We sit out there and watch them zoom around with great enjoyment every year when they return. Even in the winter there are a couple of hearties that stick around but the spring always brings the whole crew back – dozens of them.  I am having to refill the feeders twice a day! They say that hummingbirds live several years, and return unerringly to the same spot every spring if they are happy there; and we believe it, because there are certain ones whose behaviors we recognize each year. There is one nasty one who perches on the edge of the feeder and is beyond aggressive in making sure no one but him can get to the nectar. There are two that swoop and dive bomb into the fountain to take their baths – just those two, none of the others seem to do it.

It IS gorgeous here, all the flowers in bloom, and it’s warmed up – the sun being now higher in the sky — so that our solar panels are now heating the pool, and we had a crew of guys come and really clean off the mosaic tiles inside it and repair some of the cracked tiles – just routine stuff – but it is much more inviting now and the water is WARM! So it’s good to go for the summer. There are friends and relatives who might like to come down for a little visit and a break – and to see my mother, or so they suggest. It is very painful, but I have to tell them honestly, there is nothing left to see. It is better for all of us to remember her as she was.

Easter According to Arnold

While I was hearkening back to my ancient Valley Girl roots in L.A. with my sister, I left Arnold home to fend for himself over the Passover/Easter holiday. (At our family seder, where half the marriages are mixed, it was referred to as “Eastover” which I thought was pretty cool! Seder one night, Easter Egg Hunt the same weekend. Kiddies get the chocolate Afikoman AND chocolate Easter eggs. Excellent.)

In any event, one of the big deals in our little village is the annual Ajijic “Via Crucis” passion play, which re-enacts the crucifixion and the events leading up to it, in a three-day festival which brings tourists from all over Mexico and even beyond. The oudoor venues for the various scenes are in town, in front of the church, up on the hills overlooking the village where Christ gets crucified, on the main plaza, with hundreds of people standing around (there are plastic chairs set up for the “ancianos”) watching the proceedings. I’ll report on the Ajijic passion play perhaps next year, but the salient point to note here is that Rosa’s smaller village down the road, San Antonio, has its own passion play, not to be outdone by neighboring Ajijic. When her family learned that I was going to be out of town for Easter weekend, they insisted absolutely that Arnold come and check it out. So, here, not terribly abridged, is Arnold’s e-mail to me describing the day’s events:   (Just couldn’t resist posting this!)

____________________________________________________________________

Sequence of events:

Rosa calls at 7:45 p.m., Danny (her son-in-law) will come and get me at 8:30.

He and Rosa show up at 8:45.

The Señor does not ride in Danny’s truck (though I was fully prepared to hop right in), so Danny will drive us to San Antonio in the Audi. Okay, but he wants to put his truck in the courtyard, but then the battery dies, so the truck stays outside the front gates in the street.

We drive to San Antonio, where Rosa insists that because of my bum knee, that I be driven straight to the entrance to the escuela (the primary school) where the play is to be held on its little stage. And this is where Danny will pick me up when the drama concludes, as well.

Their version of the Passion Play was really much more honest, if that is the right word, maybe authentic would be better, than Ajijic’s, despite its much smaller scale. Everybody had body mikes, the costumes were incredible, and the lighting and scenery changes heartfelt and colorful.

BUT, all of it was accompanied by a L I V E orchestra, that went way beyond “E” for effort. They were in tune, in time, and it was full strings, brass, and drums, all with a conductor who kept things going. Even a boy soprano. When the nuns mopped up Jesus’ blood after the Roman Centurions did their thing, the kid was given fifty (count ’em 50) lashes, for real. The other centurions kicked him from one side of the stage to the other, and, oh, yes, don’t forget the crown of thorns–all with living catsup wounds. YUCK!

Sofia’s dance was a howl – teenage girls doing “danza Arabe” – to be the temptresses in Herod’s court – and the kids really got into it. Sofia’s choosing “Arab Dance” as her “arts elective” at school really paid off, since she got to wear a slithery costume complete with glittery bra — as did they all.

After the show: Danny brings the Audi around to pick me up, and America and Nicol appear from nowhere in their party dresses and jump into the car and off we go back to our house. As always, they love any excuse to be driven in our car.

When we got back both the girls started to play with Reina while Danny pulled out every extension cord we own to hook them all up to the outlet in the carport and charge up his battery out in the street, a la Mexicana. Once the truck was running again, off they went. As Danny left I was with Nicol, and Danny told me in Spanglish that Nicol loves the antique laptop computer we had handed down to them, and is learning how to operate it and do fun things with it, and THANK YOU!

Exhausting but fun and interesting.

BUT,  just when I thought the day was over, what do I see but (the kitty) Missoni menacing a not large, but not small either, half-moribund scorpion in the middle of the kitchen floor. I start yelling at Missoni, Rosie and Reina get very interested in what is going on, so now I’m yelling at them all. Dispatched the scorpion and so now they are all mad at me!

With all of these goings-on, maybe I should start a blog—–no, NO, NO, never.

Love

Arnold

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If you watch the video, part of the fun is that everyone in this village play is a “local” volunteer – your painter, your maid, your gardener, the guy from the dry cleaner’s, your kid, your cousin, or your plumber. Everyone gets into the act, if not on stage then sewing costumes, doing makeup, sound, music, whatever. In the dancers in Herod’s court, the tall one in blue is Sofia! Herod is entertaining his friends with food and drink and the hotsy-totsy dancers, and you can hear him say “salud!” as he offers them wine. Arnold took this video on his phone – just to give an idea of what it was like – the elementary school stage in beautiful downtown San Antonio Tlayacapan….

 

Home Again….

Back from L.A. What a whirlwind! It was wonderful to spend hours talking with my sister Wendy (especially given our mother’s slow, awful decline), touch base with my family again and to see old friends from my school days. And it is always the same going to the States and then coming back – with a jolt –  to my reality at home. Where my sister lives there are those wide, clean, tree-lined streets, houses with immaculate gardens and clipped lawns; no discarded bags and bottles lying around, no stray dogs, and it is so quiet and peaceful at night that you can actually get some sleep. Then there is the astonishing variety of stuff in every market, with lots of stores open late for your shopping convenience. So tempting and I go nuts buying waaay too much stuff every time I cross the border. Of course it’s also retail therapy and there ARE things up there I can’t get down here…like petite sizes. Essential for five-foot-tall me. But I sort of go into a trance in those stores…Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Target, even the huge and well-stocked pharmacies with all that fun drugstore makeup and other items I am sure I must have. Then when it’s time to pay, when I’ve first arrived back in the U.S., I always forget the swiping the credit card part. I stand there fishing into my wallet for cash (in Mexico EVERYTHING is cash, which is actually a very good thing, for me, at least) and they look at me like I’m crazy. Then I get with the program and prepare to fork over my credit card to the cashier and they say “no, Ma’am, you have to swipe it – over here. Just put it through the slot on the side”. Of course I know how to do this but I always forget – this is the way the stripe goes, and all that. Half the time you don’t even have to sign the little screen any more. In and out of the store, in a split second, your wallet lighter by some amount that seems very abstract.

But all good things must come to an end, and I am back home in the land of magical evenings and the riot of every flower in town coming into bloom, so it seems.  When I got back last night, Reina went nuts licking my face and Rosie and Missoni, the two kitties, purred and nuzzled and jumped on me and carried on, glad I was home. The carpenter delivered the new platform for our bed today and had a lot of fun playing with Reina, telling me his favorite show is “El Encantador de Perros” with Cesar Millan, dubbed into Spanish for Mexican television, naturalmente. I think how amazing it is that Cesar himself migrated to the U.S. to make his fortune training dogs, which he most assuredly has, (with his own foundation, even, not lost on me as a former foundation executive….) and how ironic that the Dog Whisperer show is now translated back to his native language for millions of his perro-loving Mexican compatriots. Carlos – the pool Carlos – wants to come over tomorrow and pick up the three months’ worth of payments we owe him. We keep telling him we would be happy to pay him every month if only he would drop off a bill once in a while. Gardener Carlos (we have many Carloses in our lives including Baby Carlos) worked for awhile this morning weeding and raking, but had to leave suddenly because his father-in-law Jorge called to say his truck broke down not too far from us and would he walk over and borrow our battery cables and try to get the engine started?

Rosa took very good care of Arnold while I was away, bringing fresh tamales for him to eat and not letting him lift a finger to do anything. Tomorrow she comes again to clean though everything is spotless from when she was here Monday. She left bouquets of fresh flowers all over the house to welcome me home. I know she will want to greet me and make sure nothing untoward has happened to the house in the past thirty-six hours….and I have to rig up how I am going to present the three little bathing suits I brought back for her grandchildren (America, Nicol, and Baby Carlos)…just hand them to her in a plastic bag? Get the kids to come over and have them unwrap each bathing suit and make more of a fuss? Not sure, depends on how busy I get later on in the week. We’ve been invited to a fiesta and I have to make dessert for seventeen people. I had assumed that the worst thing that had transpired in my absence was that Arnold found a half-dead alacran (scorpion) in the kitchen which he had to dispatch because the kitties were interested in playing with it. But before he took off to rescue Jorge, Carlos told me that there were four people shot and killed in town over the weekend – actually not too far from the famous donut shop — but no one seems to be all that concerned about it because it was “entre ellos” –  “between them” – meaning rival drug factions or a drug deal gone wrong or something like that. Just glad I wasn’t here. Very glad indeed that while all that was going on I was otherwise occupied at the open-till-midnight CVS drugstore prowling the eye makeup with my sister.

The Angel of Mercy

Two hours and fifty minutes on Alaska Airlines and I am in an entirely different universe…the Ancestral Homeland, the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, where I spent much of my childhood, at my sister Wendy’s house.  Broad avenues, tree-shaded streets, houses without ten-foot walls to protect them from god knows what predator or threat. Everyone can drive really fast because – well, no cobblestones, and no pedestrians, no dogs or livestock to watch out for, no street vendors, no taco stands in the calle, and no buses. If there ARE foot-deep potholes, somehow they seem to get fixed quickly, unlike the one I hit a few months ago that blew out our right front tire and left us stranded at sundown on the side of the road driving back from Guadalajara with a car full of Costco stuff.  (As is often the case in Mexico, two incredibly nice government topographers on their way home from work on the highway above us took pity on us and stopped to help, but we’ve been wary of that road ever since).

Well, they do have buses here but one hardly ever sees them. Wide lanes, and everyone has to get wherever they are going as quickly as they can because they know that once they leave the residential area and get on the freeway, they could be stuck there inching along for hours. So where they can drive fast, they do. But it all seems to work in its weird L.A. way.

There is no noise, either, except for the sound of the occasional car starting up – some poor devil who has to leave home at 5 a.m. to get to work on time. Not the raucous morning noises of the birds screaming in the trees, the various trucks advertising their wares with megaphones, the incessant crowing of roosters (they do not start at dawn, contrary to the folklore, they start at 3 a.m., if they are worth their salt), radios, car stereos. Add to this mix insanely loud fiestas with music amplified by speakers as big as refrigerators, and the roof dogs’ barking at whatever little thing is going on below. The biggest complaint everyone seems to have here is the gardeners’ blowers to which my reaction is “and THAT wakes you up?”  So many of my gringo friends back home have learned to sleep – especially in the summer when you pretty much HAVE to leave your windows open or you suffocate from the heat – with earplugs, white noise machines, running fans. Anything to block out or at least minimize the incessant racket.

However on Sunday morning Wendy and I were sitting having breakfast when there WAS some unexpected noise – the terrified screaming of what turned out to be a baby squirrel one of her cats had captured and brought into her bedroom. Wendy ran upstairs screaming at the unlucky cat to drop his prey. Once released from the kitty’s jaws, Wendy put the baby squirrel quickly into a box where it laid terrified and trembling.  We didn’t see any puncture wounds on him, but we still couldn’t tell if it had any internal injuries or what was really going on, but suckers that we are, we were determined to save its little life if we could; even in his panic he was awfully cute. We covered the box so it would be dark and just peeked inside every so often to see if he was still breathing, which he was – his little sides just heaving in terror. But his eyes were open and pretty bright, and even though he was motionless, he was still clearly alive.

Here is what they have in my sister’s neighborhood which we don’t have back home: an outfit called The Critter Squad, which Wendy found after a few frantic calls to friends and some anxious searching online about “how to rescue an injured squirrel”.  After Wendy got in touch with the Critter Squad they sent their truck right out along with delightful young Jeffrey, a volunteer maybe in his twenties or early thirties who is, as it turned out, extremely knowledgeable about wildlife rescue. He examined the baby squirrel and actually told us what kind of squirrel he was – definitely a male. It also turned out that he was a European Fox Squirrel, a species not native to the Valley, which is running all the native squirrels out of their habitat here. Oh great, we both thought, so we should have let him die after all? This darling little baby thing is an invader? It is just so ridiculously complicated. It had been very windy, as it often is here, and his nest probably blew down from one of the tall trees or he just fell out. Jeffrey noted that usually the fall injures them or kills them, but this little guy might just have been incredibly lucky, notwithstanding his adventures with the cat who found him, probably dazed on the lawn.

Indeed as we were getting our biology lesson on squirrel species and habitats from Jeffrey, the baby began to crawl around in the box and it seemed  that – un milagro! – he was going to be okay. We just put ourselves into Jeffrey’s hands and asked “what will you guys do with him now?” Not to worry, invader or not, he was a tiny terrified living thing who apparently had nothing wrong with him beyond being traumatized. Without expecting a penny from us (though we did make a contribution), The Critter Squad would take care of him, feed him the correct formula for a baby squirrel, and if he had no injuries from his fall that would prevent it, at the appropriate time he would be released back into the wild. If, however, it turned out that he had a bum leg or something like that, he would become part of their education program for kids. So, I joked with my sister, not only did they come promptly to the house, rescue him, and promise him therapy, but he may well have a job offer with a lifetime contract! What a deal! Soon the box with the baby squirrel, wrapped gently in an old towel because he was cold and dehydrated, was whisked away in the gaily painted “Critter Squad” van to his new life. No, Dorothy, we are not in Mexico any more.

It occurred to usually cynical me that our morning had all the lessons of an adventure of mythic proportions. Here was pure evil, in a sense – an overfed house cat who probably could live on the Friskies stored on his body for months trying to kill a little baby thing for the sheer instinctual pleasure of it. One gets it that “that’s what cats do” but it doesn’t make it any more fun when they bring the terrified and helpless tiny creature into your house. Wendy and I both see ANY baby thing and go “awwww” like so many people do.

But then, as we frantically try to figure out what to do on a Sunday morning – call a shelter? Call a vet? Who would be around to guide us? —  we find out about this wonderful outfit. Within an hour the Angel of Mercy arrives at the house and the evil is outshone by pure goodness as the baby’s life is saved. It is so indiscriminate and weird . Here a life is saved by this wonderful young man in an exquisite act of compassion, giving up his Sunday morning to help us, and how many people in Mexico, Syria, god knows where else, get randomly mown down today?

The philosophical lessons implied in this adventure were all too complicated for us to fathom so after we returned to our morning coffee  (a bit like Scarpia going back to his dinner with Tosca after arranging for the torture of Cavaradossi, though with a far happier outcome), we decided we needed some trauma treatment ourselves, and planned a therapeutic visit to the mall. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi!

The Baby Squirrel!

A visit to the funeraria…

I am busy getting myself ready to decamp for the States for a couple of weeks, and inevitably we are faced with the reality of my poor mother’s ever-so-slowly deteriorating condition. It is awful to see her lying in bed, blind, incontinent, unable to speak, and with just enough dementia so that she is pretty confused about what is going on when she briefly emerges from her fog. The rest of the time – which is the majority now – she just sleeps. She has the world’s best care and when she is able to speak – just a tiny little whisper – she reassures us that she is not in any pain. So we just wait, and watch, and try to keep her comfortable.

If “something happens” to her (what a weird euphemism for “death”) Arnold will be left having to deal with the arrangements, at least till my sister and I can get back here. So I got in touch with the funeral home that handled the arrangements for my father a year ago. I said “I’m leaving town, what documents will you need from us in case “something happens” to my mother.  The owner of the funeral home reminded me of what I needed to bring (passport, some other items) and I said I’d run them over to her today, so I gathered it all up, stuck it in an envelope with a cover letter, and off I went into town.

I parked and walked a few blocks to the funeraria and when I went in, there was an entire family – maybe eight people – clustered around the various coffins on display – the kids running everywhere and playing. They were picking out a coffin and making arrangements about someone – but they were either very happy this person had finally croaked or they were just – well – evincing the Mexican attitude toward death, which is so different from our own. It’s destino, when it’s your time, it’s your time, and that’s kind of IT. In any event, there was much laughter, much chattering back and forth, much tsk-tsking of the little kids for being too irreverent darting around the stacked coffins. After I walked in and waited for a few seconds, the owner stopped her conversation with the bereaved family, and ran over to greet me when she saw me, throwing her arms around me and welcoming me into the shop. No black suits and white boutonnieres here; the funeral director herself was clad in skin tight white short shorts (it WAS a bit warm out today!) a hoodie, a baseball cap with her long ponytail sticking out the back, and pink sneakers. Her niños were hanging out in there too, running around with the bereaved family’s kids.

I handed her all the documents and she said “This is all fine, this will make the whole process very simple when the time comes. Don’t worry, Señora Jillian, we’ll take care of everything.” Which I know she will; while everything was definitely “a la Mexicana”, they were a model of efficiency when my dad died. He would have howled with laughter at the slightly bashed-up white hearse (with angels painted on the back) that took him off to the crematorium in Guadalajara. And the two older sons – in jeans and t-shirts – that loaded him –with as much solemnity as two teenagers could muster – onto the stretcher and into the back of the hearse. Mexico is a never-ending “take your child to work day” sort of place. But they were indeed prompt and efficient and respectful. It is a family business and those boys will be the directors themselves one day, I’m sure. Unless they go the way of much of the Mexican middle class and become doctors or lawyers. But maybe not. After all, the family owns a completely recession-proof business, which is probably a good thing in these crazy times.