Photogallery

It’s spectacular experiencing New York again after a few years in Mexico. The best way to picture the contrast of the different images is to  imagine yourself in a Chelsea warehousegallery.  The images are displayed as enormous floor to ceiling  prints. As you turn  from wall to wall you can experience the organized chaos of both worlds – all in the same dream.

ZARRA

My first car was a 1956 VW bug that had once been light blue.  I could tell because the almost totally white exterior showed traces of the original color in 1968 when my father proudly handed me the keys.  I loved her.  Her memory brings back the smell of the exhaust heater – a kind of pipe running directly to the floorboard from the engine – an oily aroma laced with exhaust gases.  When I drove her up to Syracuse after Thanksgiving vacation the motor hummed, the fumes warmed my feet, and the Southern Comfort bottle fit neatly in the oversized pocket of my Army Surplus jacket.  Ellen had adorned the dashboard with paisley contact paper, and it was really groovy.

Forty-two years and thirty cars of various makes and sizes later, including of course a small fleet of SUV’s, BMW’s and a big Mercedes, my proudest possession is Zarra.  She’s a twenty-year old Taurus and has managed despite a nearly collapsed chassis, blown radiator hoses, and a quirky head-on collision with a horse and drunken cowboy.  But we all survived, and although somewhat worse for wear with a crushed windshield and roof into which the horse had impacted as the vaquero  exited his saddle with bags of tequila and cerveza airborn as well, Zarra eventually got bailed out of jail as did I and also lived to see another day.  Some might question whether it is wise to live in a part of the world where traffic accidents of this nature are actually possible.  The answer, as with most things here, is “si y no.”

People who move to Mexico are either very wealthy and love the lifestyle, or are very poor and love the lifestyle.  Unless of course they are running from the law, like in the movies.  But there are lots of other reasons, like rediscovering the joy of keeping a car on the road by your own mechanic’s skills (with the help of real mechanics in Guadalajara, I must be truthful about it).  It makes me feel like the teenager again who changed the oil and plugs himself in the gravel driveway those summer evenings in White Plains.  I remember the mosquitos buzzing as the fles are now on this hot Mexican afternoon.  A rite of passage then and now.  So wearing a grimy wife-beater T-shirt and working under the broomstick supported hood of Zarra appeals to me very much, although it seems to strike my wife as somewhat humorous.  The local Mexican women give me lots of compliments for my hard work; some of the Saturday afternoon drunks come over and peer at the engine knowingly.  The guy next door who’s on a bender, emerges with an armload of family photos and wants to explain every one of them to me as I wrestle with a broken spark plug lodged way deep in Zarra’s crankcase.

“For looking to here Bruno,” the excited cerveza breath gringlish in my face, “Zees my wedding and with Carmen very young.”

“Si, si, muy bonita,” I agree and turn back to cursing and banging on the wrench.  But Kayo will not be deterred, nor will his drinking buddy sidekick who almost falls into the engine compartment.

“Yes, yes and watching to this one it is me,” as he proudly extends the faded 5×7 over the distributor cap and tilts it into my perspiration fogged glasses.  “Lookin, looking zeez me was very rich on a day!”

The wrinkled photograph undoubtedly snapped by the most prominent photographer in the village nearly thirty years ago takes on the kind of soft-focus effect seen in Mexican movies of the same era, with Kayo’s blue tuxedo garrishly portraying the same feel I had experienced myself at my own first wedding.  I too had worn a blue tuxedo.

Surrounded by cerveza breath, sweat running into my eyes and feeling quite  greasy in my white wifebeater, it struck me how there was really very little difference in how I felt about things then as how Kayo was feeling right now in his stupor.  Very much the same.

“Ah, si Kayo.” I straightened up and wiped the hot Zarra grime on my shirt.  “Yo tambien (me too).” After a while I managed to loosen the plug with a final yank on the wrench and a small gouge on my ring finger.  With a repetetive song in my head gonna have to face it / you’re addicted to love. In teenagehood it might have been too many teardrops or cheri, cheri baby cheri, cheri baaaby.

And looking, I was very rich then for a day.

Elsewhere I discover several fragments of his life the way he left them: old books with dog-eared annotations, travel video guides to Greece (I imagine him watching them with his girlfriend Lynn while they sip brandy in the candlelit old living room while he sagely instructs her on the ways of the ancient Greeks); several stacks of cards and letters from his children; railway tickets to Ohio stamped 1954, his musician’s union card, fifteen paper Christmas plates, and the Santa Claus ornament my mother used to hang on the tree so long ago.

Opening the hall closet I find a dozen or so gleaming coffee makers, still in their original packaging, each one with a red Christmas ribbon attached to the corner. These gifts intended for his family and friends, stored like an elf in his pre-christmas warehouse – never to be delivered. He died with all the yesterdays in White Plains Hospital against his wishes, repeated over and over again to me during the course of the last quarter century. “Bruno, please see to it that when I shut my eyes it will be here, in my house.” My consternation at my inability to fulfill this simple request – my father’s last wish – overwhelms me.

On the music cabinet, next to several bow cases and little worn boxes of rosin, there are special bottles of violin polish. Uncapping one, the bittersweet secret aroma of the amber mixture passed down through the centuries from the days of Stradivarius fills my senses with longing and nostalgia. As a boy, I would watch as he lovingly applied the polish to his cello with a careworn square of soft white cloth, strong fingers whose tips held the secrets to unlocking the mysteries of the ages as they passed up and down on the fingerboard. He had taught me how to hold a bow with my right hand, deftly in the fingers, an art which never left me. To this day if I give in to the ancient voice urging me to “pick up the cello,” I still know exactly how to hold the bow, where to put the fingers on the strings, and who knows? With a little practice, I can dream about what might have been.