There Are Hippies in Town

Because our all-natural, whole-wheat, no-preservative bread was stale this morning (an experiment that won't be repeated), we left home earlier than usual to buy tamales for Mason and Redding's lunch.  So instead of taking Orizaba to La Palma and seeing Marta, a 20-something woman walking her tiny, chocolate chihuahua before work; avoiding Alex, the tattooed iron worker who never takes off his sunglasses and always greets me with a low, moan-like, "Buenosss diaaas, señora;" and hearing the principal of the local public school making morning announcements over a loudspeaker at exactly at eight o'clock, we walk uphill on 20 de enero and come down over the crest towards Stirling Dickinson.  There, parked on the left side of the road, is a real-live Scooby Doo VW Peace Van, painted entirely neon and pink and light blue and yellow, flowers, peace signs, and message of love in a beautiful script.  Mason, ever the p.c. guy, shouts, "Hey, there are hippies in town!"  

What's in town is a group of Mexican construction workers sitting on the curb in front of a work site swigging huge bottles of Coke and spooning the contents of a white plastic bucket into tortillas for breakfast.  I instruct Mason that it's racist to judge people by things like their cars or their clothes or their color.  That it's just plain rude to holler out things like, "There are hippies in town."  He looks appropriately chagrined and apologizes (he hates to be called out on anything but can admit when he's wrong.)

Then the door across the street from the van opens and in the doorway are a small Japanese boy and girl, whose dad comes out from behind them and stretches on the street. I can see into their house, where their mom is back at a desk working on a computer.  Floor to ceiling are enormous, gorgeous oil paintings: Japanese anime, graphic oils of animals and cartoon characters, a wild, dark-haired boy riding a lion, a skeleton with a lizard on its head.  I don't have to make note of the door so that I can go back after school and ask to come inside and see this wonderful art up close.  The Peace Van is parked there, marking the entry.

On another day I go back with my camera; it's the Groovy Gnome Gallery and Cafe.  I think about buying one of his paintings.

Macho Men in San Miguel

I've been thinking about this subject for a while, not continuously, and not losing any sleep over it.  But I have wondered, why do all Mexican laborers carry girls' backpacks?  Or things that look like girls' backpacks?  Things with flowers, things in pink, things with polka dots and fleur de lys.  In pink. 

I first noticed this trend when helping my friends Boobie and Michelle Dutch renovate their house on Calle Hidalgo.  We hired a contractor foreman type named Chuy.  Good guy.  Darling to look at though he was about five feet tall.  Lovely bronzed skin, shiny black hair, good teeth (though he's now wearing braces and driving a Jeep Cherokee.  Maybe I paid him too much).  But every day he arrived at work on his red Italika moto, with a pink and olive-green polka dot backpack.  I noticed it, thought not much about it, but thought it a tad strange.  Looked like he pinched it off of his daughter one day before she left for primaria.  

But then I started noticing, with the help of Sam, that every guy in San Miguel in the construction business carries a girl's backpack.  Dora the Explorer.  My Little Pony.  Things in this vein.  So this morning I go into the garage to put out some trash.  What do I see?  

We have a whole crew of guys here painting the exterior of our house.  I'm a sucker.  I once hired a guy named Jose Luis Ramirez to paint some of the bedrooms.  He did a great job.  Reasonable, tidy, honest, cleaned up the site when he was through.  So he came back, a few times. Once he had his arm in a sling--had broken the whole left elbow down to the bone.  He was desperate for work, as you might imagine a painter with a broken arm might be.  So I hired him to repaint one of the rooms I had already hired him for a year earlier.  I had picked the color, never liked it.  Asking Jose Luis to redo it was just something I did to help him out.  I could have lived with it.

Then he shows up again. He's still out of work and needs money to send his kids to school. That's a very common plea.  It's not a ploy.  It's the truth.  Mexican schools, all of them, public or private, require that kids wear uniforms.  If you're living on the margins, even a pair of navy pants, white shirt, and the ever-present thick, wool track suit can break the bank.  So Jose Luis asks if I need anything painted.  He really needs the work.  And I'm happy to help. I've been thinking about recasting the exterior shade anyway, turning our rapidly fading yellow-beige-bland front into something a little more dramatic.  

So I hire him.  Tell him I'm happy to help him and his kids.  And he's happy too.  But he wants to know right then, he's going to get started now, what color I want on the walls.  I beg for a small window: could Sam come home from work and help me with this decision. He says, sure, por supuesto, but for the rest of the morning he's pretty much at my doorstep waiting on my choice.  I pick five from a paint deck that he has in his truck.  He goes to the store, puts up swatches on the front of the house and on the second floor terrace that I'm also going to paint.  They look nice in the sun, but some are nicer than others.  One is the exact shade of the agave cactus that are growing in front of the cantera windows in front of the house.  Which is nice in principle, but agave are in fact a lovely blue-green that in a paint shade look like AquaFresh. The other is a gold that I thought would be colonial and sort of cool, but in the 12-inch square that Jose Luis has put on the front wall it suddenly looks like rawhide, like a baseball glove that's not broken in, like a Southwest casita from Santa Fe.  I can't do it.

So I find a shade called Garden Bench in the book and buy it sight unseen because the painter boss is making me nervous waiting around for my selection and Sam can't get home until 2pm.  In total it's been about three hours since Jose Luis arrived on my doorstep and when the first brush starts slapping this lovely but untested grey/green shade on my front wall.  I'm painting my house something that I've never seen before. But really, in the end, I don't care.  What this is truly about are the backpacks of his crew in my garage.  One says "Pink Style" in script and is trimmed in hot pink along the edges.  The other is a black messenger bag that could be androgynous but for the stenciled flowers on the flap.

I take a few pictures, which I'll upload later.  But I'm going to start stalking the wild Mexican laborer and get a whole collection, proof, of their penchant for weird purses.

An Article from The Baltimore Sun

Even though I stew a lot in the night, I have been doing a little in the day.  Here's a link to a recently published story in the Baltimore Sun on our life here in San Miguel.  I think I sent it to 500 people already so there's probably no one who hasn't had this thrust upon them.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/travel/bs-tr-mexico-travelogue-20130324,0,1812097.story

Also, flip through a copy of the Conde Nast Traveler May 2103 issue. Though they were whittled down to nubs, there are two Mexico hotel reviews on the Hot List which I penned. One day, I'll strike it big.

Blogger, Start Your Engine

It's 2am and I'm wide awake until four, mulling over a thousand things that make no difference by daylight, but one of which is the fact that I've written in this journal exactly twice in nearly a year. So to the sound of cars rumbling over the back wall and eventually the hum of song birds who wake up here much earlier than in the rest of the kwown world, I vow to get started. Again.  And the first thing I come up with is this:

Sam was at a parent-teacher conference discussing one of his students, skillfully laying out the positives, trying to say something nice.  "X has got a real talent for writing.  He's creative and a funny kid." Before Sam launches into areas of weakness the dad asks, "Does he seem stoned a lot to you?"

So that's it for today.  Maybe it's easier being brief.

That and that we're heading into mango season.  A bag of 8 for $1.60.  It's smoothie time.

Walking to School in San Miguel

 

After a oddly rainy September October has burst upon us with San Miguel's normal radiance.  The morning light in unbelievable.  Some times you can catch it on camera, and some times you just have to enjoy it live.  With all three kids in a new school that's walking distance from the house (La Academia Internacional) and with Sam starting his teaching job later in the day, our mornings are now easy and peaceful and start off with a stroll through San Antonio down Orizaba to La Palma, cross over the San Antonio Church plaza and downhill to Stirling Dickinson.  When we're really organized there's time for tamales and atole with Señora Margarita in her little cement courtyard.

La Palma, the little lane we head up to school.

Our dog, Nacho, running with a street dog in San Antonio Plaza.

Mason, Redd and Bo in front of San Antonio Church

Road Trip

So we're traveling through California for nine weeks this summer (suppose I should fill in some gaps between May and August later).  A lot of time in the car, without a DVD player, reminiscent of my youth where we all piled into the back of the family wagon and picked on each other for eight hours until we reached Maine and frayed every last nerve in my dad's arsenal.  Surprisingly the kids have been alright, goofing around with their Auto Bingo cards and playing Yahtzee on the Kindle.  But the inevitable wrestling started one long afternoon between Yosemite and Lake Tahoe with Bo in between Redd and Mason in the back seat.  As his brothers are beating lightly on him, Bo says, "I feel like Odysseus going between Scylla and Charybdis."  To which Mason replies, "You should feel like Caesar, getting stabbed 25 times."

Why We Live in Mexico, Reason #16

Because you can go out to a junky antique shop in the countryside to pick up old irons for bookends, a huge slab of mesquite for a table, a red metal birdcage to fill with tall candles, and afterwards you sit under a blue Pepsi tent to shade yourself from the sun and order a crazy hamburger with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise ($1.10) and two super-cold Modelos ($0.95 each) and eat them while dust is blowing across the highway and your view is of the same kind of roadside stand across the street, with its cinder block walls and its signs for carnitas and tacos and cold beer, and a truck might roar by and it will get even dustier for a minute, or two kids on a donkey may trot in front of your table, the boy at the back just five years old and barefoot, and an old man might stop for two small bags of Cheetos, leaving his wheelbarrow with its broken front wheel and filled with chunks of freshly cut wood and a machete right next to your table, and while he tries to open his bag with very bent fingers and long, dirt-filled nails you go back up to the counter and buy him a Coke and when you give it to him, before he downs it in one long, delicious swallow, he says to you in heavily accented English, "thank you."

Why We Live in Mexico: Reason #159

Bo: "We found an old tennis ball at school today and there was just no end to the entertainment."

Do You Have The Time?

Yesterday Sam and I took our pooch, Nacho, out for a walk in Parque Landeta, a vast, arid and now incredible baked piece of land about 10 minutes from our house. It's bordered on one side by the Botanical Gardens called Charco Ingenio and on the others by campo--shepherds and country folk tilling their land and living in small pueblos.  There once was a large presa (dam) in the middle, but it's so dry here that it's completely cracked and brown and you can walk across it with its tiny yellow wildflowers blooming in the crevices.  

So we're strolling together, Nacho trying to round up a a flock of dirty sheep, though his timid barks didn't stir them at all.  We come across an old Mexican woman, brown and wrinkled, sitting under a tree in the middle of nowhere.  Though it's about 90 degrees in the sun it's shady under her mezquite tree and she has on her requisite shawl on and a plastic basket of vegetables at her feet.  As we pass she asks me what time it is.  When I tell her 4:30pm she gives me an enormous smile with the whitest teeth I have ever seen on a Mexican country person.  Sam notices too and says, "That woman had the most perfect teeth."  We keep walking.

Exactly nine minutes later we cross paths with a man riding bareback on a beautiful white horse.  He too asks me what time it is, calling out and pointing to his wrist.  I tell him, "4:39."  He thanks me, kicks his horse in the sides, and gallops off across the dry presa.  The horse is going so fast that before I know it the man is out of sight, beyond the cattails and the tall bamboo that used to grow around a small island that is no more.  Sam says, "Wouldn't you like to know where he's going, what exactly he's doing?  You know there's some story behind all of this." 

Bonfires and Biscuits at Parque Landeta

The campsite.

Tuesday Janan sent out an invite: Friday would be the first birthday of a number of sibling dogs (created when the dog she was babysitting was impregnated at the beach by a Guanajuato street dog.  Though the mama was a pure-blood champion chocolate lab, it was her one and only batch: illegitimate pups borne out of a spring fling in Troncones).  By Friday the whole gang was there--dogs, owners, dogs without owners and the requisite homeless guy wandering through the campo looking for free beer.  One of the great beauties of life in San Miguel is the fact that not one of us ever has plans.  So when there's an invite to do something fun, we're all there, often with just a few hours' notice.  When there are no organized sports, no relatives, no school functions, really, no nothing, it leaves one wide open for just about anything.

Will, Redding, Marky, Draytie, Will and Mason

Will Macdonald, getting ready to take down some cans.

Tom Macdonald manning the makeshift grill.

Gifford Cochran and Sam.

How adorable.  If only this were their baby and they were husband and wife.  (Janan Asfour and Pablo Hensley)

Like most Friday afternoons it was absolutely beautiful.  We met in an area next to the Botanical Gardens that is completely empty except for some picnic areas where a few anonymous, yet thoughtful, others put together fire pits, tables crafted from planed logs and stone circles for seating.  Sam brought sling shots (as well as his desire to grill) and someone else happily brought a 12-pack of mini Dr. Peppers. which the kids drank as fast as they could dig them out of the cooler.  Perfect ammo to hang from an acacia tree and shoot with rocks.    There were a few bikes, which the kids shared riding through the dirt trails lining the nearly-dry presa.  The grass was about knee high across the river, yellow and crispy from a winter without rain.  There were sausages and chicken on the grill, pasta salads, guacamole, mango margaritas, many bottles of red wine.  And cupcakes for the kids with little dogs on them, biscuits and rubber toys for the birthday canines.

The kids make their own bonfire, close to a source of water just in case.

Sam was very opposed to my letting the kids make a bonfire.  Which I completely understood.  But a concern that I completely ignored.  I knew they'd have a ball, and hey, it was very educational, a great team-building exercise, a lesson in safety and responsibility, and kept them occupied for the better part of three hours.  As nothing that wasn't supposed to catch on fire didn't, and no one got burned, it seemed like a stroke of genius in the end.

Bo tends the fire while Mason gathers wood and Sabina heads across the river.

Bo, the pyromaniac.

Tag across the river.

Maríu and Jorge bring out Baby Santiago.  Jenny gets a baby fix.

Cupcakes for the kids.

Redding Hillers.

Grace and Mary Walker.

Janan, the master organizer and cupcake queen.

Sam and his best friend, Nacho, wearing his party clothes.

Nightfall in the park.

First Day of New School

Sam, Bo and Redding started a new year at the Victoria Robbins School.  Sam is teaching Government and World Politics, and English Reading and Composition.  The boys are not in official grades: Redding is in the Littles, Bo is in the Big Littles.  Higher up are the Middles, the Bigs and the Texas Techs.  Mason is back at the Waldorf School in second grade.  Here is Sam's classroom.

Out front of Vic's School

Carpool in San Miguel.  At least they're wearing helmets.

The Funeral

Mason and I were driving home down Ancha San Antonio and the traffic was particularly slow. Coming up the hill we saw why: a typical Mexican funeral procession was making its way south through the historic district to the Panteón, San Miguel's main cemetery. Like most funerals there was a black car in front (except for when the pallbearers carry the casket down the street and there's no hearse at all). Behind it was a wide crowd of people dressed in black jeans and t-shirts, carrying umbrellas, sheaths of long white flowers wrapped in newspaper, and two-liter bottles of coke. Every procession has a group of walkers heading to the grave site. There are no strings of cars, their headlights shining on out of respect, policemen directing traffic. Lower-income Mexicans don't have cars so they do what they do every day: they walk to the cemetery, as they walk to work, as they walk their kids to school (sometimes two miles each way), as they walk to shops and bus stops. Mason and I pulled over and waited. It was a young crowd but there were not a lot of tears. Mason waited until they passed and then said to me, "I hope he lived his full life."

There's a Dead Body in the Shower

The narcos haven't arrived in San Miguel, but you wouldn't know this by the appearance of a dead, skinned creature curled into the fetal position in my shower.  He's inside a plastic wash tub, a small bit of blood leaking out of a crack in the side.  His legs are folded one over the other, his head tucked down into his chin so that he can fit snugly into the tub.  Without skin he's just a hive of muscle, blue veins and rosy, raw flesh.

Sam got it in his head on a Wednesday that he wanted to cook out over the weekend.  So what do you do in Mexico when you want a specialty item quickly?  You ask around.  In this case, Israel, our gardener, came through.  I asked if he might know where we could find a lamb for a cookout.  Without batting an eye he said, "I can get you one.  My friend has a ranch. I'll get it tomorrow."  "When can we have it?" I asked him.  "I'll kill it on Friday.  I need to drain the blood.  And you can have it for Saturday."  All in Spanish of course.  I asked a bit incredulously, "You will kill it?  Tu vas a matarlo?"  "Si, señora," and he drew his hand across this throat.  "No problema, señora."  

After drinks on the Macdonalds' terrace on Friday afternoon (where Israel also works), Sam and Tom walked with Israel down to his house in Tecolote, just below Balcones.  He showed them with pride his handiwork--a perfectly skinned, 30-inch tall lamb (probably more of a sheep, un borrego), telling them he kept the skin to use as a rug.  After Sam gave him a little extra for the effort, Israel invited them in to see the rest of his home, and the pots of plants, trees and flowers he grows in his backyard to bring to our gardens.  It was your basic, unfinished, cinder block home, rebar poles sticking out from a tin roof, open rooms facing a cement courtyard.  With pride Israel showed Sam and Tom his little dog, Chiquitita, whom he rescued from an abusive master three years ago.  The dog, a chocolate-colored Chihuahua on Dachshund legs, was tied up inside of a plastic oil drum, about three feet high.  There was no place he could go, as the walls towered above him, but still, like most Mexican animals, he had to be chained and confined.  

So the lamb came home in the back of our Honda but where could we store it overnight to keep it from the feral cats who prowl our yard, crawling down the high walls on the boughs of the jacaranda tree, or the evil possum who lives in the bodega under our porch, whom even Israel, master assassin, hasn't been able to kill?  There was a dead sheep in my shower overnight.


Sam had the coals going by 7 o'clock Saturday morning, the head removed by his own hand and machete.

Two hours later Luzma, our housekeeper, arrived.  With obvious gratitude she accepted our offer of the head for her own family, but first she got busy with her cleaver, chopping the skull into parts (removing the eyes and tongue for specialty tacos) and making consomme.

While little Lamby slowly roasted, Sam and I went out for party fixings to a local market in San Luis Rey, Luzma's colonia on the northern edge of town. She had told us this was the place to shop for vegetables and fruits, trucked in each Saturday morning from Comonfort, 30 minutes west of here.  Here is what we brought back for $15:

The Saturday afternoon fiesta was a roaring success.  Janan's dad from Palestine made the perfect hummus and babaganoush to go with lamb, and two women got so drunk they couldn't walk home.  The adults were all having such a good time that we forgot to feed the kids.  It was bedtime and they were asking what was for dinner.   Normally I answer that with, "What you ate an hour ago?  That was dinner."  This time I just said, "Oh, sorry.  I'll make you a really good breakfast.  Good night."

Returning to San Miguel

Returning to Mexico, after three weeks in the States--$227 for an afternoon at the aquarium, days spent in a minivan visiting friends and relatives, 19-degree weather the morning we left--was a tonic for the American soul.  There was a deliciously familiar sense of arrival as soon as we left the Mexico City airport and we're steaming along Highway 57 northwest to San Miguel.  Had there been Oxford-blue skies it almost would have been too much to bear.  Instead, this January day, there were fat clouds nearly on the ground, the color of dirty water, but ringed by a silver band with the mountains rising behind them.  The countryside was flat and dry, but the campesinos were in the fields, their horse-drawn drays parked along the road, boys on bikes carrying loads of bundled sticks, women with pyramids of mangoes and avocados sitting on little wooden chairs along the shoulder.  We pulled into San Miguel at dusk, the gold and red tinsel banners for Feliz Año Nuevo stretched across Ancha San Antonio, shiny and shivering slightly.  A man on a Clydesdale sauntered uphill, his best gaucho shirt pressed, his black pants creased, and his hat and boots new and stiff.  The air outside was absolutely ambient, neither cold, nor hot, nor humid, nor wet.  I thought, "This is what a heartbeat might feel like if you could take it out from your wrist."

Sam and I sat out on the lounge chairs by the pool. Overhead the black grackles circled and flew in and out of the three palm trees in our yard.  Trucks clattered beyond our wall, out of sight, and even a few roosters made their presence known.  I closed my eyes to better translate a conversation among a mother and father over the wall, out on Calle 20 de enero, and laid there under a full moon, with the bougainvillea blooming on our aqueduct and plants of bright orange flowers growing in my neighbor's rooftop pots. Two glasses of wine sat on the little stone table between us, Mason was building his Lego before he even went to the bathroom, and the other boys were running around in the yard with our new little dog, Nacho.  A sense of such utter completeness hung in that still air that I knew I was home.

Mason's Day in the Campo

Mason's school, Los Charcos, is holistic and spiritual and natural (and if you're a vegan, you'll be in good company).  So when the class takes a field trip to a parent's country land you know it will be wholesome and beautiful.  The day was stunning--one of those 9/11 blue skies that anyone who was in New York recalls from that morning.  For the first time in two and a half years we actually saw leaves, and heard the crunch of them underfoot.  The kids went crazy, jumping into what they called "the swimming pool of leaves."  They built a three-story home for a dying beetle with a jacuzzi, dining room, and an umbrella to shade him from the sun.  They climbed all along the horizontal branches of deciduous trees and found a tiny green frog in the pond where Jenny's dogs, Indie and Luna, were romping.  They rolled stones down cliffs and broke out into spontaneous song while sitting in a circle having their lunch.  And father David played his flute.

A Night Underground in The Thermal Baths

It's a little blurry but notice the carved statue of Saint Michael in the grotto on the right.

We'd been hearing rumors for a while of some super padre spot out in the countryside where parties raged underground in this subterranean hot spring.  So, naturally, we had to check it out.  While we didn't actually rage like the hipsters who do frequent the Archangel Baths, we did have an amazing evening with a number of other couples.   The place is all Ali Baba-ish, lit by hundreds of votives and lanterns, with a series of stone passageways you walk through to arrive at the pools.  There's a bartender in one cave, serving up tequilas, vodka tonics, beer, whatever you like, and a buffet in another tunnel with antipastos, breads, sauteed mushrooms, cheeses, desserts, and little roast beef sandwiches.   Everyone's in a bathing suit and a spa robe, either hanging out in these stone dens, or slipping into the naturally heated waters.  The tunnels are laid out like a big cross, with one end taking you into a yurt where the hottest water is blasted out of pipe in the stone ceiling.  Another branch leads to a private massage room (even Sam got one), and a third long tunnel leads to an outdoor infinity pool. Here there is nothing but black sky and stars over your head.  Incredibly magical and beautiful.

The hottest grotto.

The outdoor pool with the moon on the horizon.

Is that Scott Guerkink lurking at the end of the tunnel?

Sam in the grotto bar, hanging out in his robe.

The massage room, accessed only by water.

Opposite the massage room, the common area with oriental rugs, couches and the dinner spread.