Life Style Refugee

The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there’s simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.

Close your eyes and picture the most jawdropping, heart stopping, mind blowing ocean view you can. It doesn’t even have to be one you’ve seen in real life. If you want, you can use something you’ve seen in a James Bond movie or on MTV Cribs.

Oh, come on. Is that all you’ve got?

We just visited friends at their dazzling villa on the Pacific coast of Mexico, a nearly vertical arrangement of meandering three sided apartments open from floor to ceiling in every room to that staggering view. As far as I am able to tell, with my admittedly limited education in architecture,  the only possible explanation for how this palace came into being is a seismic event that caused a sheer cliff to arrange itself into marble rooms with seashell headboards and plasma TVs. The same fluke of intelligent design somehow resulted in a floating canterra staircase winding from balcony to terrace through jungle foliage, leading sinuously through gyms and gamerooms and bar areas to an infinity pool that appeared to float in the clouds over an impossibly blue bay.

Now picture the beautiful people, the very ones you expect to find in such a setting. Good looking and intellectual, interesting and fashionable and polished. And, more unexpectedly if you don’t know them, also funny. Absurdly, preposterously, and continuously funny.

If the company had been dull, it still would have been hard not to have a good time loafing around in such a thrillingly glamorous environment.

But the company was anything but dull, a point proved every night at the dinner table. This long banquet style affair would have looked at home in King Arthur’s court, although the proceedings often took a turn that was more Monte Python than Once and Future King. Every seat was filled, and noise and laughter spilled from one end of the table to the other without pause,  no point ever quite getting made, no conversation ever finished before it segued into the set up for a joke that would turn into a new topic before it reached its punch line. Each of these dinners was a noisy, bawdy tangle of family and friends and love and shared memories that had their origins when the glossy young adults around me were just little kids.

My daughter’s boyfriend–his parents were our hosts– is one of an affable rugby scrum of boys who have been raised together, charming young turks who love each other fiercely. They like to demonstrate their affection through playfully violent pastimes that stop just short of shooting apples off each other’s heads at the table, but no one ever seems to get hurt.  They’re courteous boys, willing to pause in their mixed martial arts and drinking games to do almost anything for anyone, and the manners their mothers have taught them combined with their own roguish sweetness make it impossible not to love them. Even while they’re throwing you in the pool.

The rowdiness didn’t prevent occasional sublime flashes of a more transcendent nature. I had a transforming moment while getting a massage on a private terrace located, for the sake of modesty, around the corner from the living area where the crowd convened before dinner to play cards. These games consisted of ever more esoteric varieties of poker and ways to cheat, and anyone hearing the noise they generated would have wanted to join in the fun.

Listening to the laughter, I admired the stars drifting in an amethyst colored sky, smelling cinnamon and vanilla and hearing waves break while a masseuse rubbed satiny heated oil onto my skin. It all coalesced into a spell of contentment,  evoking a sense of well being so complete that I actually felt something slot into a groove in my soul, like the tumblers of a lock falling into place.

It happened another day at the breakfast table, when one of the family casually picked up a guitar and started singing Cielito Lindo in flawless Spanish. Coming to the chorus, he soared into the ay-yi-yi-yi’s in an aching falsetto so moving that the Mexican staff dropped what they were doing in the kitchen and joined him on the terrace to add their own rich harmonies. The spontaneity and beauty of that single instant was enough to make me want to put my forehead on the table and weep with emotion.

Stuff like that doesn’t have much to do with being in the grooviest house on the mountain. After all, VH1 puts the girls on “Rock of Love” in a place just as fabulous, and I doubt that those pole dancing doxies come away from the filming any farther along in their quest for self-actualization.

In fact,  a third moment occurred  while I was trying to thank our host. I was searching for the words to describe these shifts of the soul without sounding like I was having a seizure. He  got what I was trying to say, though, and responded with a smile, different than his signature goofy grin, saying sincerely, “It’s a good life. This is how it should be”

As I was saying…that house did not suck. It was absolutely amazing, a once in a lifetime experience. But he wasn’t talking about the house, either.

Happy New Year. I wish all of you a moment every day that makes you want to put your head on the table and cry for the beauty of it. I wish you a good life, a life that is how it should be, and that your house, any house that you’re in, will be Camelot.

January 1st, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (2)

The traditions of Christmas Eve in Mexico have the watchful quality of a vigil about them. Women and children tend to the cooking of elaborate dishes like tamales and pozole, both of which are labor and time intensive. The ninth night of Posada ends with a church service and pinata for the kids. There is, of course,  Midnight Mass. Families gather quietly at home.  At least the women and children do. The men, bless their hearts, will be absent from those gatherings, choosing to wait for the Christ child out in the middle of the street, swigging tequila and singing Mariachi songs with their friends around a fire.

If Ebenezer Scrooge had thrown open his window on Christmas morn to find someone to fetch that fat goose hanging in the butcher shop window, he would have had to settle for one of the drunk Mexican husbands lurching home from their all night bonfires.  If there hadn’t been an upright cowboy staggering by, he could almost certainly have found one crashed out on the sidewalk, one who had decided to rest up for a minute before continuing on, or whose wife had refused him entry. Christmas would look mighty different if in Dickinson’s story Mrs. Cratchett had opened her door to find a blind drunk Mexican  grinning widely enough to display his gold tooth and scratching his belly with the hand that wasn’t holding aloft the Christmas bird.

My stepkids feel that Christmas in a tropical climate is a violation of natural law, and take every opportunity–via text message, facebook, internet phone–to explain that it just can’t feel like Christmas if it’s warm and sunny. I have feebly tried on a few occasions to point out that it wasn’t all that common to see dudes in frock coats and  girls carrying fur muffs and  wearing bonnets tied with velvet ribbons singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” in Bethlehem, hello, but they don’t care. They don’t care about Jerusalem or Brazil or Rome or even California.  As far as they’re concerned year round sunshine is a curse at Yuletide, and the residents of areas so afflicted are Christmasless pagans for their inability to take a sleighride over to join the snowman building at Farmer Brown’s.

I come to these kinds of discussions poorly equipped, my only qualifications being experience and wisdom,  notorious shape shifters both.  My little darlings, on the other hand, have the WMD of twenty year olds everywhere…unshakable certainty. It’s not because they know what they’re talking about either, as accuracy is optional, but their conviction is total. This confidence makes me simmer with envy, even while I know that they’re full of crap.

Speaking of my little darlings, one of them is on her way to Mexico as I write. It seems the ban on balmy weather only covers the 25th itself, and evaporates on December 26th. She and her boyfriend and his family are travelling to one of the stunning hillside outskirts of Puerto Vallarta, and we’re on our way to meet them.

Enjoy your ice skating. XOXO E

December 28th, 2008 | Category: Blog Notes | Leave a comment

The first time I ever saw chicken with mole sauce on a menu, I, like every other rube seeing it for the first time, thought to myself “Chocolate sauce on chicken? Ew!”

But you, reader, since you are a sophisticated person-of-the-world, probably know that Mole Sauce is a fabulously complex recipe, spicy, savory and rich, containing as much as 65 ingredients. Like all amazing food, there are several layers to it’s flavor, and though you may only taste tomato at first, if you pay attention you’ll become aware of cinnamon, and chile and raisins and yes, chocolate.

Christmas in Mexico is like Mole Sauce, and the longer I live in our little village, the more I’m aware of the layers and subtlety of celebration here, where we share our traditions with an ancient culture whose conversion to Christianity began 250 years before the Boston Tea Party.

MONDAY AFTERNOON

For example, if you had come onto the terrace of the house I was visiting on Monday, you would have spotted me across the carefully tended lawn with my forehead in my hands in an easily recognizable attitude of defeat. Our hostess had just announced that we were going to have a Yankee Swap with the $100 peso ($10 dollar) gifts we’d all been told to bring. Oh boy, Dirty Santa!

This party, at a fab house in glamorous Chula Vista, featured four long tables arranged around the pool, each one set with festive table linens and an elegant centerpiece consisting of gilded greenery and glass balls. Things had gotten kicked off with a cookie and punch exchange, a complicated business that involved husbands assembling viciously alcoholic novelty drinks and their wives swapping cookies made with almost the same ingredients, and both proclaiming the number of years the recipe had been in the family. Eventually our hostess, an Angie Dickenson look alike wearing a  ”Naughty and Nice!” sweater wobbled to her feet to explain the impenetrable rules governing the game she called Chinese Auction. Unfortunately, most of the guests had sunk into a kind of dazed stupor, the inevitable result of middle aged people consuming buckets of rum and tequila in the early afternoon on a sunlit veranda in Mexico while Andy Williams crooned Christmas songs.

The company at my table had peaked along with the rest of the crowd and were sprawled limply in their chairs by the time the maids cleared away the cookie platters, only occasionally coming to life and burping some awful pun about Christmas balls. Although the hostess had gotten a second wind, none of us managed to catch much of the complicated briefing on the rules of the gift exchange, which included some arcane variety of bingo and invitations to steal presents if they seemed  less egregious than the ones originally chosen.

I plotted and successfully executed an early escape before anyone connected me to the dumb coffee mugs with reindeer on them that I’d brought, a regift from a similar party I’d attended on the weekend.

TUESDAY NIGHT

My husband was raised in White Plains, NY, a very short drive from the Big Apple. It’s hard to top Christmas in Manhattan, and The Radio City Christmas Spectacular, the one with the Rockettes, is surely the gold standard for Christmas shows.

Along with our local bilingual school’s annual production of The Nutcracker.

There is a rumour going around that Tchaikovsky intended for this show to be a ballet. The Loyola Academy has a General Preparatory curriculum, one that, sadly, doesn’t include any dance training,but that doesn’t stop the students from energetically performing to the music during this one night only, two performance, strictly SRO Yuletide Extravaganza.

Since the one hundred members of the student body comprise grades K through 12, the trickier parts of the pas de deux are easily handled by senior boys flinging first grade girls up onto their shoulders and twirling them over their heads like propellers. Needless to say, the enthusiasm with which these maneuvers are executed make up for any lack of technique, and these portions of the show are a real crowd pleaser.

The illusion that we are at the Lincoln Center is furthered by the satin ribbons that are wound around the ankles of the cast members, and then over their crocs or running shoes. Or, in the case of the upperclass girls, 5 inch stiletto heels. But it is in the Dance of the Polichinelles that the footwear really takes center stage. All the 8 and 9 year olds who can usually be found terrorizing tourists at the plaza on those combination sneaker/skate things sail out and execute complicated choreography of their own devising that comes as close as we’re going to get to ice dancing in this part of Mexico.

Every student in the school has a role in the show, from the babies to the parents, who make extravagant props and costumes. The very youngest are dressed and made up as toys, and then carried across the stage under the arms of older kids like sacks of feed and placed affectionately under the Christmas tree, where they squirm and mug at the audience contentedly until they are again picked up and lugged downstage for the Curtain Call.

This Loyola Academy Nutcracker has been running for long enough that now parents who once performed in it have children at the school. It is, honestly, one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen.

WEDNESDAY EVENING

I was prevented from turning onto my cobblestoned street by the ladders being used by local gangbangers to attach festively wrapped shoeboxes to tinsel garland suspended across the road from house to house. I immediately punched in Bruno’s number on my cell.

“Aack! It’s Posada tonight! The lady hasn’t come to sell us the decorations! What do we do?”

Luckily, Carmen was in the house, so by the time I got around the block, she and Bruno had located some empty boxes and wrapping paper. Last Christmas we were given the opportunity to purchase store bought felt snowmen to hang, so our street had a professionally decorated air about it, like a Mexican village version of Macy’s windows. I guess the village was feeling more flush last year, because this year it seemed to be every man for himself.

We got the young thugs (who aren’t troubled by any conflict between politely hanging tinsel for us and their carefully cultivated tough guy images) who had blocked my passage to come and put up our garland and ersatz packages.  In the nick of time, too, for no sooner had they moved their ladders out of the way than the throng of local kids turned onto our street for their Christmas Posada.

Posada is a Mexican tradition in which the entire village turns out into the street to reenact Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging. Every night of the nine nights leading up to Christmas Eve the villagers trace a predetermined route that leads them back to the Church at the plaza. It is impossible, impossible, to remain untouched by the magic of the children singing  along to guitars played by any who have them. The village priest walks at the head of the procession, and is accompanied by the two teenagers selected to portray Mary and Joseph seeking shelter for the Nativity.

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These are just the three engagements that happened to be on my calendar this week, and I promise you that for every event I go to there are five being held. I am struck by the tidiness of my Christmas fesitivities falling so neatly into categories of Gringo, Bi Cultural, and Mexican traditions, although, of course, that is an absurd simplification. We make merry down here with enthusiasm, but it is more often sweet than fabulous, more dear than splendid. And, in spite of the parties and on stage antics, it is relaxed.

The Mexican way, as editor Judy King points out in this month’s Lake Chapala Review, is laid back, religious and family centered. There are the Posadas, and Christmas bonfires in village streets that are shared by family and neighbor, Midnight Mass and tamales at home. It is very low key compared to Northern celebrations, but the more you pay attention, the more amazing, and satisfying it is.

Like Mole sauce!

Bruno and I wish you joy from our home in the land of sunshine and Poinsettias, and look forward to seeing you here. Feliz Navidad

December 19th, 2008 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (1)

A while ago, when the circus was in town, we got used to saying into the phone “Hold on a moment, would you? The Llamas are going by.” And then both parties would wait until the gaudy painted cages carrying the llamas or tigers or kangaroos rolled by, pulled by a truck that was announcing the sale of tickets in that one-of-a-kind Mexican Loudspeaker voice that spells death to conversation.

During the Mexican Holiday Season, which is to say, those days between Memorial Day and Valentines Day, the conversation runs like this. “Oh, crap, I’ve been dying to talk to you but it’s almost noon! Don’t move, and I’ll call back right after, okay?”

After what, you wonder? Well.

 I’m using noon as an example, since it’s unlikely that I would be on the phone at 6:00 in the morning, which is when the first of these thrice daily Mexican hi-jinks occurs. At 6:00 A.M, noon, and again at 6:00 P.M. there is a call to prayer that sounds like a re-enactment of Antietam. There’s often another noisy explosion around 11:00 at night, but that’s just an excess of holiday spirit.

The first shot in this barrage, as the hour approaches, is likely to be a single random cohete. That’s a firecracker, beloved by Mexicans in every form. There is no time or place  deemed inappropriate for setting off these horrible missiles, freaking out dogs and white people for ten miles in every direction.

One day, I had clients in the car and we were stalled in traffic behind a parade. They were a breed of cat that is actually quite rare around here, the type that kept asking “What do you do all day? Why is everything so dirty? Why aren’t those kids in school?”  And my favorite, ” Don’t the natives resent us for being so rich when they’re so poor ?” This last almost always comes from some awful old county employee type with rigidly gelled hair in that style that should be against the law for anyone except six year old boys and lesbian gym teachers, someone who couldn’t imagine  the music and passion and chaos and love contained in a single Mexican home. Never mind that the residents of that home would probably rather set fire to their own hair than trade lives with someone who collects Precious Moments figurines and wears sweatshirts with  three dimensional cat things on them …well, never mind. What am I talking about, anyway?

Oh, right. We were stalled in traffic behind a parade, and I was half turned in the drivers seat, trying to extract some conversation out of the husband, who was snappily dressed in a  T-shirt that said ‘Commie Dearest’ over a big picture of Hillary Clinton, when I heard a squawk from the passengers seat. Looking around to see what could have caused my guest to make such a noise, I saw that the raffish gang of adolescents at the tail end of the parade, which put them a few feet in front of my windshield,  were lighting  cohetes with the lit end of their cigarettes.

Now listen, these things are not remotely related to sparklers. They look like the kind of rockets that have “Acme” printed on the side and are most commonly seen being unpacked by Wile E. Coyote in Roadrunner cartoons, a narrow cylinder with a point at one end and a long wick at the other, which is what the young thugs were lighting. Then would come a hissing noise, a sputter, and an ear splitting explosion, which caused my passengers to turn pale, thank me and exit my car, choosing to walk (briskly), back to their hotel.

Back to the interrupted phone calls,  I was saying what a festive time of year it is in Mexico, with every  holiday from every country  being celebrated with equal vigor. The Gringos have contributed a lifetime of fall celebrations that start with Canadian Thanksgiving and include Halloween and American Thanksgiving. With the typical Mexican enthusiasm for any and all dias de fiesta, these foreign imports are warmly integrated and combined with the celebrations beloved by both cultures, Christmas and New Years, and highlighted with the nine day Mexican celebration for the Patron Saint of Ajijic,  the Three Kings Day in January, and, the day that we’re setting off explosives for now, the mother of all Mexican Holidays, the Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe.

It’s in the middle of all this merry-making that noon phone calls become impossible. Because first, around 11:45 or so, there’s that random warning shot fired by some rogue kid with a firecracker.  Then, like kernels of corn  starting to pop, as it gets closer to noon more and more blasts go off, until there’s a fusilade that sounds like machine gun fire. From a really, really big machine gun. This drives every dog in the village completely batshit, so they set off their own chorus of barks and howls. That by itself is deafening, but throw in the holiday church bells and a couple of the loudspeaker trucks passing each other with their competing announcements for tamales and fresh fruit, and all you can do is lip read for fifteen minutes. So, no phone calls around lunch time.

This is very good for personal growth, because you have to relax and accept what’s going on, whether you like it or not. Powerlessness is regarded as a failing in the States, where we are raised feeling as though success is measured by our ability to make the world conform to our needs, but no such measurement exists here.  There’s no manager or Chamber of Commerce or Homeowners association to complain to. We’re stuck with explosions of noise that stun us into incoherence, three times a day during the holiday season. There’s nothing to do but shrug and laugh. And enjoy the freedom that comes from accepting the world around us just the way it is.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we have to love it. Last night I was at a party and mentioned that the First Annual Chapala Festival of Lights was kicking off after dark with a fireworks spectacular that, if the rumors were reliable,  had something to do with a bull floating out on the lake. It sounded kind of intriguing, but when I got to the words “fireworks”  I found myself talking to empty space.

December 12th, 2008 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (5)

Earlier this week I wrote:

Due to a mild cold, my general fascination with the holidays, and an unprecedented spike in local real estate, I find that the foe ( my blank computer screen) is temporarily mightier than the pen. I expect this to be a very short interruption in the stream of my conciousness, but I wanted to let you know. 

Oh, okay, alright, already. Maybe “an unprecedented spike in the local real estate scene” is  a bit of an overstatement.  What I meant to say is that I was busy presenting an offer. Unfortunately, this high level negotiation has stalled…

My buyers wished for me to emphasize that they were willing to drop a couple of hundred thousand yoo-nited-staytes greenbacks, cashola, onto the closing table in 10 days, hoping that this speedy efficiency was enough to compensate the sellers for an offer that was 20% below the asking price. I admit we based our strategy on the fact that a mud hut on the South African veldt has a better chance of selling for list price than a 4 bedroom colonial pretty much anywhere in North America, and that if, during an evening of drinking red wine with Nostradamus,  you had predicted the events that have occurred in our economy recently, he would have told you to lighten up and get some help for your paranoia.

But Ulyses Vesasquez, the agent for the sellers, disagreed. In fact, he looked shocked.  ” My dear Aye-yot, (the double ell in Elliott is a bitch for Spanish speakers) “This house, she is become worth much more because of the big increasement in the value of the land. In fact, I have the intention to lift her price!”

This is a uniquely Mexican approach, to raise the price of real estate if it hasn’t sold in a while. I don’t know if it’s to defray the cost of advertising or to keep up with inflation, but there’s a pitiful parcel on the other side of the lake that’s going to be a million dollars if someone doesn’t buy it soon. It’s been for sale since 1970, I think.

Ulysses shook his head in wonder and sadness. He’s a devilishly handsome Mexican who wears Thurston Howell the Third clothes like blazers and ascots without a trace of irony. He is lavish with the cheek kissing and soulful looks, and a master of the piripo, which is a kind of winking compliment that would earn you an immediate lawsuit in the States.

“Ulie, what the hell are you even talking about? Jesus, it’s the end of the world up there, and anyone who can find a cash buyer for a house right now should take the money and head for Puerto Vallarta! And don’t give me that dumb latin lover look, I’m too old for your shenanigans.”

 ” Ah, but Illy-hot, since the house was listed, and right in the very back yard of her, the Walmart has opened!” he delivered this knock-out punch in the same tone of voice that might be used to announce the discovery of an oil field under the scratchy lawn of the house we were talking about.  

Oh. The Walmart.

The long awaited box store has opened it’s doors, and you Would. Not. Believe. the hoopla.

I knew all about it of course. My maid and her ancient mother had slunk into the house on a Tuesday, which is not her day to work. They hung around for a few minutes with  hopeful looks until I ascertained that they wanted a ride to the grand opening, explaining to me that they had heard it was a huge fiesta.

 When we got there, the cars had spilled out of the parking lot and lined the the nearest streets, the way that overflow does at big football games. Approaching the store, pairs of gigantic speakers were placed every few yards, and the music that came thundering out of each set was cranked  to a level beyond distortion and completely unrelated to the song playing at equally high volume from the next pair. On top of this cacaphonous background, minute by minute announcements of specials were shouted over a loudspeaker, and hucksters outside the store had their own megaphones which they used to shout promotions at the crowd of people in the bottleneck at the front door. 

This noise had not the slightest effect on the crews of edicanes, slender doe eyed Mexican girls in 2 piece lycra outfits and belly button jewelry that hand out brochures for Tel Cel and Sky TV and give nightmares to self respecting feminists everywhere. 

Nor did it affect the army of smiling clerks with trays of free samples. These trays of goodies closely resembled the kind of treats that are served up at Halloween parties and meant to pass for zombified body parts, except these  ambulatory looking chunks of meat speared with toothpicks were the real McCoy. I wouldn’t have tried one if I was starving to death.

Between the music and the crowds, opening day at Walmart reminded me of open air concerts at the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, but it was clearly the event of a lifetime for Carmen and the abuela. And about a million other people, or so it seemed. I ran into everyone I knew trying to get Carmen past the produce and back into the parking lot.

Ulyses and I are still hammering away at the deal. My buyers looked a little confused when I brought them a counter offer, but I encouraged them to get the deal done as soon as possible.

Because if the Walmart has caused the property values to shoot up,there’s no telling how Ulie’s going to respond whe he finds out what Pancho, who manages the inventory at Superlakes, has done to retaliate …. I just read on a local webboard, in a thread that had 53 posts and 1350 views in less than an hour, that he’s made an arrangement to start stocking  Krispy Kreme donuts.

Better get in on the ground floor.

December 5th, 2008 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (3)

…Would land me in Guanajuato, not Grandmother’s house.

There is something special about celebrating these major holidays in an expat community. Part of it is a sense of relief.  I have always thrown myself into the preparation, decorating, cooking, and the internalizing of infinite media messages until no amount of festivity was magical enough, and I would end up feeling a little depressed at my inability to create the joyous celebration that meant happiness for everyone in my known world if I could just get it right.

I mean, I’m fifty years old, and my step-children (children being a key ingredient to the whole holiday magic thing) spend these days with their mother, or, in recent years, various combinations of parents belonging to their signifs, a situation which always left me feeling vaguely martyred in spite of myself. I did used to browbeat my own family into coming over every other year or so, complete with it’s symphony of discord and echoes of loss, and I enjoyed the whole mess of it tremendously. I think. I did my best, and I loved what I was doing, but couldn’t escape a feeling of frustrated nostalgia, a memory just out of reach of something I had never experienced but kept trying to duplicate.

By this point in the holiday ramp-up,  I would have already spent weeks poring over womens magazines and finding the websites that gave minute by minute schedules of how to have a stress free dinner on Thanksgiving. Those sites I would look at regularly and ignore completely, as by the Monday before Thanksgiving they would usually start recommending that I polish crystal and practice setting the table. Now that’s a holiday custom that I definitely have no real memory of.

I liked the cooking, though, and made so much food of so many kinds that one year a sauerbraten got hidden behind a swinging door and wasn’t discovered until after dessert.

The first couple of years in Mexico I continued to make absurd spreads of food, compulsive, determined, my yearning for that intangible holiday magic now disguised and compounded by homesickness. The maid and gardener were forced to sit down like guests, eyeing the plates overflowing with strange mushy food with misgiving,… stuffing, casseroles with mushroom soup, jello salads, the traditional favorites must have looked like old peoples food to them. But they could tell it was important to me that they enjoy it, and they tucked in, pouring liberal amounts of the hottest jabanero chili sauce over everything. Having been here for a while now, I know that they were probably longing for a taco and some cucumber spears.

I’m not going to be doing that big  production this year, but we’re not going to go without dinner. If you live here it’s hard to avoid multiple invitations to drop by and eat. It’s fun and relaxed and a reminder of what a comfort community is.  I plan to go to the AA headquarters, among our other stops, confident that those who don’t drink throw a lot of energy into eating.

I  snagged a turkey breast at Superlakes before Pancho sold out, and I’m going to cook it on Thursday so that our house will smell like the commercials look. On Friday, some kids ( which kids? Who knows? I think they belong to my maid’s family. Most of ‘em, anyway) are coming over to decorate my tree, and I have an idea to make turkey enchiladas with mashed potatos and mole sauce.

It’s going to be a bit slapdash, and I’ll miss my family. But I’ll be counting blessings as the week unfolds. My friend Pat, a fellow realtor who’s also thinking about moving to Mexico, recently sent me an email. In it, in all caps, she wrote;

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LUCKY YOU ARE…

But I do. I really do.

November 24th, 2008 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (5)

In the 50s, San Miguel de Allende started gaining ground in the collective unconcious of the beat generation. A fabulous colonial city where the 1950 dollar stretched far enough to include tequila, lodging and dames, arty types and ex servicemen began to show up to smoke dope and play the bongos while attending  school on their GI bill.

 Those days of renegades and bohemians are as distant and enveloped in romance as the Spanish Conquest from modern day San Miguel, which has evolved into a south of the border Westchester County for rich Texans and socialites.

We have our own colorful past here in Ajijic, although the colors come in lighter shades. The Old Posada, where you can go dance to cumbia music and syrupy cruise ship rumbas, used to be the scene of some pretty good rumbles on the weekend, dope smugglers, knife fights, that sort of thing. Natalie Cole used to drink there, and Elizabeth Taylor found her way over from Puerto Vallarta every now and again. But for all our wishful reminiscing about the glamorous and colorful old days, there’s always been a streak of provincialism here in the village. Once we had a chance to claim Bob Dylan, but the owners of the house he was interested in refused to rent to hippies.

Perhaps the bourgeois streak can be attributed to the fact that one of the original demographics here was retired military,  the career kind.  Accustomed to houseboys and elevenses at the Officer’s Club, retirement in the Midwest proved to be a hollow reward, and Mexico an agreeable substitute for being stationed overseas. That gang has a very different effect on society than the G.I.s who did their stint in Korea and then came to Mexico hoping to drop peyote and discuss the meaning of life with Jack Kerouac.

There are still people here from the old days, although, in the natural way of things, they are growing fewer.  Provincial or not, it took an adventurous spirit to settle here in the 60’s. I love to listen to the stories of power going out for days at a time, or waiting years to get a phone line or everyone in town lining up at whichever shower was working on a given day. Those of us that live here now cling to that reckless spirit, even though most of us consider it a hardship when our cable goes out for a few minutes, never mind having to traipse to a friend’s house for a bath.

Back in the day, the folks that had  driven over the one lane, unlit highway before you were a valuable resource. They knew the ins and outs that would help you avoid minor inconveniences such as no water, or major ones, like going to jail. Perhaps you would be invited to join a caravan that was running to the border with empty coolers to stock up on impossible to find goodies in Laredo, like root beer or bath towels.  Back in the day, it was easy to know everything there was to know about moving here…everything wasn’t that much. 

Considering the complete inability of the human race  to pass up an opportunity to band together, paint stripes on its face, and start throwing its weight around, combined with the bridge club and ladies auxiliary tendencies of retired military wives everywhere, it can be no surprise that in 1955 the Lake Chapala Society was formed.  In it’s first year, there were 21 members who formed two commitees, and also practically killed each other. One of the committees was a more formal approach toward bossing newcomers around, which called itself The Information Service. The other was The Mosquito Control Committee. According to the LCS itself, this first year of the inmates trying to claim the key to the asylum was rocky, and in fact it nearly did not survive. The Information Service is described as being only ”moderately effective,” a lukewarm compliment that can safely be interpreted as “hideous failure.’  This has since become tradition, and  accurately describes the information being handed out today. I think that it’s possible that the mosquito control was even less than “moderately effective,” but that’s a different subject.

 If they had trouble getting along when there were only 21 members, you can imagine what it’s like now that the membership tops 3500. As a matter of fact, the LCS is weathering a scandal of pretty impressive proportions, a top down cage rattling, as I write. There have been firings and recalls and financial scrutiny, the works.  It seems that the old guard, some of whom have ossified into position since they first got here, when Bobby Darrin was topping the charts, kind of  lost track of who was minding the store. When it became apparent that the non profit was about to run about of pesos, these crack entepreneurs took immediate action and fired the only three paid positions in the organization, causing such outrage among the volunteers that they quit en masse.

Since then there’s been a tsunami of petitions, letters to Editors, votes, recalls, counts and recounts.

A showdown over there won’t do any harm, and may liven up the place. Certainly the Society is vulnerable to the syndrome most accurately described as ”It was true when I got here.”

 Most of us, when we first arrive in Mexico, are like infants. We careen around to seminars and orientations and learn  at a furious rate, determined to do enough research to avoid making any mistakes. Once we’ve settled in and given up on all that hysterical Boy Scout preparing, we pretty much quit caring about making mistakes. What’s the big deal about a mistake anyway?

 And since Mexico is an emerging country, emerging fast, emerging at the speed of light, hopeful newcomers still in the careening stage get hopelessly  obsolete information from the that old guy manning the moderately effective information booth.

 But as I said, things change quickly around here, and it looks that old guy is about to be a casualty of progress. Oh, don’t feel too sorry for him…one of the things that doesn’t change is Tom’s Bar, and that’s probably where he wants to be anyway.

The LCS  celebrated it’s Golden Anniversary a couple of years back, and I’m confident it will survive the present shake-up. I hope so, because it is more than just a monument to the Gringo story here in Lakeside. No matter how mired in who’s-got-the-raffle-money and my-bromeliads-should-have-won it gets, it is also a love letter and a thank you note to the Mexicans that have always welcomed us into their midst.

November 17th, 2008 | Category: Blog Notes | Leave a comment

Although it is only a  hazy dream-like memory now, in the early 2000s  there was a hysterical run-up in the price of any piece of real estate that could claim proximity to a big city. Caught up in a land rush, I needed help with our housekeeping, so I hired a cleaning service which turned out to be a team of unhappy looking  unibrowed matrons  that showed up twice a month and collected a ransom of $200.00.  On the initial visit, their squat Portugese crew boss arrived  with a list of those cleaning tasks that I could expect them to accomplish during these drive by appearances, and based on the brevity of that list of chores, the bi weekly schedule seemed a little excessive. So limited were their duties, in fact, that once every couple of weeks was all they would have needed to clean the White House.  The list of what they would not be doing, on the other hand, was much longer.  Windows, obviously. Dishes in the sink. Clothes on the floor.  When I got home every other Friday, after a hideous day in the trenches of metropolitan real estate, I tried to be grateful for the orderly rows of vacuum tracks in my carpet, often the only evidence that the maids had been there.

You know where this is heading, right? 

Domestic help is so readily available in Mexico that our maid comes three times a week. Since we are two casually employed adults (real estate is no longer taking twelve hours a day, and  blog writing even less ) with no children in a two bedroom house, anything more seems a bit on the Romanoff side. But it’s been 24 hours since Carmen last came, and it’s requiring a bit of effort to skirt the pile of dishes in the kitchen, so it doesn’t seem that we can get along with less. Wash them, you say? Well, I could,  I suppose. But let’s not be hasty. Perhaps, at $35.00 pesos an hour, which is somewhere under $3.00 U.S.,  Bruno and I will have to consider asking Carmen to drop by and do the dishes on her off days.

 Carmen, who you may recall is our next door neighbor, is the second maid we’ve had. She’s a square, placid woman who, like her mother and her grandmother, was born and raised in this village. She once told Bruno that Mexican women who don’t like to work are doomed to go crazy with  aggravation at their worthless drunk husbands, and the day after the election, in a game attempt to participate in the events of the larger world,  she asked who had won, “El Americano o El Negro?, ” causing me to have a sputtering anxiety attack.  

 Our first maid, Magdalena, was more modern,  of the latin spitfire variety. Magdalena is some obscure relation to Raphael, the niece of a cousin perhaps. On days that she came, our phone would ring incessantly, and gravelly voiced Mexican men would leave whispered messages on the answering machine. She would often end her shift with a shower and forty five minutes of primping upstairs that completely undid any cleaning she might have gotten done between phone calls, and when she came down she would be transformed into a vision of tumbled curls and chocolate brown lip liner, the kind of hot ticket that chews gum and calls men Papi.

We loved Magdalena and enjoyed spoiling her with cheap jewelry and once, after a trip to the States, a pair of appalling pink glitter platform shoes that she treasured. But she had her sights set on something bigger than cleaning houses, and eventually left us for the bright lights and big tips of the Pemex gas station, which has a reputation among the spitfire types as a good place to meet men.

Luckily for us, Carmen stepped into the vacuum, and because she lives so close, she’s able to keep our house whipped into shape without even the trouble of a bus. There is nothing she won’t clean, and often, long after we think she’s done for the day, she’ll return with a stack of mending she’s done, or come back to take the clothes down off the line, fold them and put them away. I was dazzled the first time she unpacked my suitcase after we’d been on a trip, and have come to rely on her for the performance of absurdly mundane tasks.

Carmen takes pride in the efficient management of domestic affairs that extend well beyond cleaning. It has never crossed my mind to tell her what her duties are. I couldn’t care less, really, since she regularly takes care of chores whose existence I couldn’t guess at . Once or twice there’s been so much going on in her life that she had to send over one of her daughters to make sure that this corner of her homemaking empire runs smoothly, and she has always refused the days off I try to give her. “No”, she says. ” It’s better to work.”

The other day I gave her a ride to Soriana, which is a big supermarket in Chapala.  Like everyone else in town, she was trying to hold out for the Grand Opening of Walmart, an event of historic proportions. Still, she needed a mop, and she didn’t trust me to pick one out for her. In fact, when we got to the store, she examined the mops with the care of a billiards player selecting a pool cue, and only reluctantly allowed me to splurge on some bleach. She drew the line when I tried to buy her some of the superb rotisserie chicken, looking at me like I was crazy. “Too expensive!” said Carmen, and went on to describe several alternative ways to get chickens for less. She is thrifty.

And she has dignity, a trait that is shared by all the villagers, no matter how wacky it may get around here. Magdalena had it, Raphael has it, too. It  springs from a source that by it’s nature is a mystery to me, something to do with dark Mayan rituals and prehistoric roots. It has nothing to do with station in life or the kind of work you do.  For one inspiring example, the ancient old ladies with brown corrugated faces who toddle up and down the streets, rebosos wrapped around their head and elastic stockings slipping down their legs…when one of those toothless old babes greets you, they do it with a serene bow of the head,  not unlike the type that beauty queens dole out from parade floats.

Carmen and her family take care of us and our pets and our house in a fashion that we couldn’t possibly pay for, certainly not at the going rate for maids around here. Even the special things that we do to try and show our appreciation,  trips to the circus, a holiday party for the kids, are inadequate. But I have found something to give her for Christmas  that I know she’ll love. Glitter platforms? No, no, our Carmen is no spitfire.

But  ACA,  a local organization that provides training in organic and sustainable farming for the local campesinos, has a program that will allow me to buy a pair of live turkeys that are in the family way, and have them delivered next door. Carmen is going to love raising turkeys. And I’m going to go buy some rotisserie chicken.

At Walmart

November 10th, 2008 | Category: Blog Notes | Leave a comment

I was reflecting recently on the annual controversy in the donut shop over whether or not we should let the Mexicans have Halloween. Yes, it is just as ridiculous as it sounds, but at least it’s something to talk about other than whether the Walmart should be allowed to open.The Walmart is cheerfully bussing in personnel to stock the shelves, and the construction on the building has marched forward at a breathtaking pace, but the conversation about whether it should be here shows no signs of slowing down.

The villages that I live and work in and write about are strung on a narrowish band of land that surrounds the the largest lake in Latin America. The narrowness of the band is emphasized this year, because the lake has long since overflowed last year’s highwater mark, submerging parks and informally sprung up restaurant terraces. The mountains that create our scenery and the climate for which we are famous rise up in a dramatic vertical thrust, forming a barrier that’s unlikely to be going anywhere, so there’s no room for expansion in that direction. The  main road that connects the villages runs parallel to the lake.

Like a Capitol letter and the period at the end of a sentence, the villages begin with the bustling burg of Chapala at the East, and end with Jocotopec to the West. Oh, don’t send me a bunch of mail if you live beyond those two towns. I know that there is a world that includes Vista Del Lago beyond Chapala and Roca um,um, Azul,yes, that’s it! beyond Joco, but you yourselves know perfectly well that where you live would be illustrated with infinity edge oceans and sinking ships and gorgons and other symbols of scary desolation if it was on one of Cortes’ maps. In other words, it is beyond the known world.

But never mind my petty snobberies, let’s get back to geography. Because the main road runs through all the little villages, there is a bypass road that we call the Libramiento. It cuts up into the mountains and joins the highway to Guadalajara above Chapala. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t live for the moment, returning to Lakeside, when they crest the final hill returning from the airport and see the lake spread out below them, dotted with it’s necklace of pueblos.

And now, the jewel in the center of the necklace is going to be the Walmart.

I bet you can imagine the volume and intensity of the criticism that’s been leveled against having the megastore open up anywhere among our picturesque little villages. The most common protest is that it will put the tiendas out of business. But that objection wouldn’t be made by anyone who had ever shopped at one of these small Mom and Pop stores that exist in the living rooms and front halls of village homes. If they had, they would know that as soon as the Walmart opens, the 24 packs of toilet paper that are broken down and sold by the individual roll will say Walmart instead of Kirkland, and the folks at the bottom of the food chain will actually benefit by the elimination of the trip to Guadalajara to get it.

No, I’m afraid it’s us, the foreign community, who wish that the village would remain forever just the way it was when we first saw it, no matter when that was. We have cars that we can drive to Costco and Sam’s Club in Guadalajara and we can afford roundtrip tickets to the States a couple of times each year to stock up on items that will never be sold in the tiendas, so the popular crusade to preserve the Mexican way may not be as beloved of the Mexican inhabitants of this area as it is by those of us that have moved here.

Nobody can complain about the improvements to the movie theatre, though!

There may still be some folks living here who can remember when movies came around like the circuit judge or the priest, which is to say, erratically.  Back then, the sound was broadcast over truck loudspeakers and the show was projected on the side of a building.

Later, an outdoor location was designated as the movie theatre. Once or twice a week cinema buffs would carry their beach chairs and cushions to the site of what is now Ajijic Tango, universally agreed upon as the best restaurant in town, to watch movies on sheets that were suspended for that purpose.

In the sixties, a real movie theatre was built at the plaza, where the Exotica Disco now reigns on Saturday nights. It had wooden auditorium seating and a balcony that was always full of Mexican teenagers furiously making out in the only location in the village not likely to be shared by hordes of disapproving relatives. Below, gossiping expats dodged candy wrappers and popcorn being thrown at them by the adolescents unlucky enough to arrive stag, and shouted greetings at each other over a soundtrack so garbled that moviegoers relied on subtitles when it was necessary to follow the action.  The featured films, however,  were either left over from the American silent era or of the weird Zeigfield Follies-slash-Cowboy variety typical of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, so help in following the plot was seldom required.  

By that incarnation, the cinema experience included Carolina’s restaurant in the lobby, and if you dropped your order off for tacos or pie on the way in to the first feature, it would be ready by the intermission before the second film started.*

The theatre has moved yet again, and the old location became a disco. For many years, the dance floor sloped crazily toward the far wall, a reminder that there had once been a screen there showing the flickering image of Pedro Infante.

The new cinema is a multiplex of three theatres that was built to showcase the Ajijic Film Festival. The festival started with a bang in 1999, but wasn’t able to live up to it’s original momentum.  It still carries on, but it has moved to Guadalajara, and our good fortune is that the modern multiplex built to host it remains behind.  It’s even being renovated to keep up with those Guadalaja Joneses, and when we went last night we were floored to see the new snack bar in the lobby, complete with dancing soda cups.

Now. If I told you that I sat down to write about the Circus and our Halloween fiesta, would you be surprised? Jesus. See you next week.

* For some great material about the movies back in the day, I have to thank my friend Tommy Faloon, long time resident of Ajijic and the farthest thing you ever saw from a story telling old grandpa. But he can tell stories, and he is a grandpa. Thanks, Tommy

November 2nd, 2008 | Tags: Ajijic Wal-Mart, Chapala, Shopping Ajijic | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (4)