Life Style Refugee

Many years ago, my brother got me a job as a receptionist at Arthur Andersen. Every day that I went to that job was a day steeped in martyrdom, and there is still no job in the world that I could be less suited for, but I was grimly determined to pay the price for having been a fabulous party girl.

And so each morning I put on some awful two piece dress from the Junior League consignment store, along with sneakers and socks and a tote bag filled with frozen Weightwatcher lunches and self help books. Then I would walk past the giant asphalt company owned by the boyfriend who had dumped me when I was a fabulous party girl (muttering to myself about how I was better off without him. Him and his freaking dough. Money isn’t everything. Hmph. ) to the subway that transported me from Virginia to Farragut Square in D.C.

One sad day I ate a banana while waiting for the train, and stuffed the peel into my bag when it arrived. Walking the final block to my office on 16th street, I saw a bag lady coming toward me. As she approached, the little details that announced her as crazy and homeless revealed themselves more clearly. The sneakers. The frumpy dress. The bag stuffed full of crazy person trash, even garbage. Look! the poor old bat  had a banana peel hanging out of…… Oh.
Exactly.

The mirrored doors.

Nothing actually happened as a result of that moment. I continued to show up at work like Jesus punching in to the timeclock at the bottom of the cross, and trying to show my gratitude to a universe that had rescued me from liver damage or a lengthy incarceration by being as miserable as possible.

What’s that, you ask? What the hell does all this have to with me living in Mexico? Well.

The other day I was walking my celebrity Mexican Street dogs, Millie and Lupi. Music was spilling out of windows like so many circles of light from the streetlamps, so that when you stepped out of the pool of cheeful mariachi, you immediately stepped into the next one of quivering bolero. Once in a while, more than one kind of music overlapped and it should have sounded like a traffic accident, but it never did.

We passed painters singing and truck drivers thumping their steering wheels in time to the reggaeton, and when we passed the mini golf course I found myself humming along to the music being played over the loudspeakers.

Let me pause here to tell you something about the San Antonio Tlayacapan mini golf course. I love it better than almost anything in this country that is full of things that I love.

When we first moved here, the golf course was just a vacant lot. Since then, there’s been a fund raiser pretty much every two weeks for the mini golf. Over a period of two years the lot has been  derocked, mown, fertilized, landscaped and beautified.

The entire village participated in creating the various hole decorations, some of which are made from gold painted bleach bottles, some from cut up tires.

And some from papier mache.

The Incredible Hulk that guards the first hole is made from newspaper, flour, water and glue, and then painted a shade of green that is reminiscent of Easter basket grass. This one hole marker alone is enough to keep the village busy all summer, which is also known as The Rainy Season.

Every rainy morning the poor Hulk is reduced to a sad pile of wet newspaper, and every second or third evening he’s back again. I suspect that the local folks just don’t want to give up on the artfully ripped trousers that he wears.

It was while passing this symbol of  optimism that I caught myself singing along with the loudspeaker. (There’s a catchy tune going around that you can hear on pretty much any loudspeaker, anywhere. It’s full of lots of No-oh-oh-oh-uh-oh’s and Ay-yi-yi-yi-ai-ayes, and impossible not to sing along with) The gold toothed lady who was throwing a bucket of water out of her front door started singing with me. And then her husband, who was working under the hood of a car, joined in as well.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly the cafeteria scene from Fame, but it wouldn’t have happened on 16th and K, I can tell you that.

By the time I got around the corner, I was singing out loud and thinking how crazy it was. I was wearing some really hideous pedal pushers that the neighborhood is used to by now, along with the crocs that Lupi has gradually gnawed into a scallop across the instep. If I had seen me coming at myself in the States, I would have reached for change and called the cops.

But walking the streets in tattered seersucker pants and chewed up crocs and singing at the top of your lungs with two Mexican mongrels is just an icebreaker around here.

Mexico rocks.

I adore my boss here in paradise.

And I admire him for his business acumen.

He was one of the first businessmen in our area to recognize that baby boomers are a cash crop and put together a team of gringos to sell real estate for him. Sometimes, when we are seated in our big marble office lobby with it’s 20 ft ceilings and tropical plants, it looks like a middle aged group of migrant workers in bizarro world.

If you see what I mean.

He treats us with careful respect, never revealing that his unspoken expectation of us is not what you would call spectacularly high. I think he sees his ability to harness our collective real estate sales ability as a variety of horse whispering.

It’s an interesting dynamic, considering Eisenhower was in office when the the youngest of us was born and and we mostly did okay for ourselves back in the auld country. But Jaimie is so gracefully patriarchal, and we are so contented and laid back in our second adolescence, that we cheerfully take direction from our youthful Mexican Captain of Industry.

The thing is, that for all his culture, education, and monogrammed shirts, and believe me, he’s got plenty of all three, English is his second language. As a result, even the multi-million dollar commercial negotiations can occasionally devolve into a sort of Inspector Clouseau meets Speedy Gonzales debacle.

Take, for example, our last sales meeting, which was the usual train wreck of silver and turquoise jewelry, hand embroidered shawls, cowboy boots, petticoats and bolo ties. I have no idea what he thinks of our interpretation of Mexican Attire, since he never shows up at the office in anything but carefully pressed business wear, but he must be used to his sales team dressing like they’re on their way to a rodeo at eight o’clock in the morning by now.

We went through our closings for the week and then Jaimie wrapped up the meeting with a few motivational words. In closing, he said;

” An’ choo mus remember choor fiddlesherry reppons dibollididdy”

What? What? We looked at each other in a panic, hoping that somebody could decipher what our distinguished jefe was trying to get across to us. Most of us had sorted out the beginning of the sentence, “And you must remember your….” But what in the name of all that is holy could fiddlesherry reppons dibollididdy possibly mean?

“So you’d like us to remind them of our fiduciary responsiblity!” Tony finally crowed, with the air of someone solving a puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. A collective exhale ran through our circle of realtors like a respiratory wave. Ah. Of course, fiduciary responsibility! Naturally!

And so we will. And lest you ever make the mistake that some dumb hicks do, of thinking that my boss’s elegant accent puts him at a disadvantage,um, not really.

Because while he’s up in his penthouse looking at the view and counting his money, shaking up martinis and wondering whether to weekend in Puerto Vallarta or L.A…,

you’ll be dealing with us.

 Today there was a triathalon in Chapala. I’m waiting for reports from my stringers ( a.k.a the local webboard, which I use when it suits me and then talk about with contempt, something I learned in high school. Yeah, you know who you are. )

The point is, I don’t see how the  third leg of a triathalon in Chapala can happen without  a  bunch of Guadalajaran atheletes submerging themselves in our lake.

Which doesn’t seem prudent.

Lake Chapala is our crown jewel, of course, the largest lake in Latin America and the alluring  backdrop to our picturesque villages, not to mention the moderating influence that gives us our perfect climate.

But you know, the lake, as pretty as it is, is fed at least in part by the Rio Lerma. That river runs through fields that are tilled by farmers who have other things on their minds than conservation. Or whether, when the agricultural run off of manure and illegal pesticides  reaches the lake, a bunch of well fed gringos and Tapatio jocks will be able to swim in it.

They probably hope we do.

And this just in! We can! Or so  says one peppy faction of local boosters, headed by  the very popular Mayor of Chapala.  Which reminds me of something…what is it, what is it….o0000h yeah, the Mayor of Amity in “Jaws.”

 I’ve seen Mayor Degollado in action, and it’s easy to see why people love him, whether or not that should translate into faith in his optimism about our Lago.

He and I met at a golf tournament which he was attending in order to lend a little prestige to the trophy ceremony. It started out sedately enough, a typical country club style event, but by the time we left, Hizzoner was singing Mariachi with the band and swigging tequila from a bottle that he was swinging around by it’s neck.  Later I heard that he took all the golfers to Junior’s topless bar out by the airport, but I have no eyewitnesses. The golfers aren’t talking, that’s for sure.

But Listen, I’ve got nothing against our Mayor, and the state of the Lake is not a secret. If Guadalajarans, who can frequently be seen in day-glo spandex costumes whipping along the highway to Guad on two thousand dollar bicycles ….to the utter consternation of local working folk who stoically pedal the same route while fantasizing about a Pacer or a Dodge Dart to ease the commute….. wait, where am I?

Oh, right. If they want to expand their sporting activities to include the Lake, I wish them well.  In fact, there’s a pretty intense sprucing up initiative for the Pan American Games being held in Guadalajara in 2011,  and it’s possible that we’ll all be merrily splashing in the water by then.

Without turning orange.

The solution to pollution is dilution, and the water in  Lake Chapala is at a higher level than it’s been in decades. In addition to that, the grassroots efforts of many concerned parties combined with publicity about the water quality has had a measurable effect.  Our lake used to be a regular on hit parades of the ickiest water bodies in the world, and in 2oo4 it was Global Nature Fund’s most threatened lake, but no longer. Recent water testing has been actually kind of positive.
As in positive attitude, not positive for obscenely high coliform levels.

Good news for us realtors, by the way. It’s not easy to sell a polluted lake. At this point, any agent worth their gold blazer has developed an answer for the inevitable objections to spending money for the privilege of owning property on the shores of a radioactive pond. I personally have had success with the following script, which I share freely;

“Oh goodness, Lake Chapala has never been a recreational lake, Heavens no. It’s always been a lake for the local people. And of course, that’s part of the charm, that we’ll never have to worry about overdevelopment!” Obviously, this makes no sense whatsoever, but I’ve found it to be effective.

So a cheerful prognosis for the Lake is more than just public relations puffery. And  Hizzonor Mayor Degollado has had tangible success in creating a beach and breathing life into the Chapala Malecon, significant achievements for the appeal of our main town.

This weekend there was a ribbon cutting ceremony to open up a new section of Malecon and he was joined by the Govenor of Jalisco, Emiliano Gonzalez. I’ve been meaning to write to Gonzalez ever since he bid a third of the Jalisco annual budget to make our state the location of a telenovela.

In that letter, I thought I might point out that the campesinos who toil in the mountains above us aren’t losing any sleep over the recreational swimming opportunites  that are being wrecked by their thoughtless farming.  And it’s possible that  they may not approve of spending money to be used as the location for a show named Fuego en La Sangre instead of providing them with electricity.

  And that he might want to round them up and take them to a topless bar.

Whoa, now that’s what I call a beach!

Every paragraph I’ve tried to write about the splendors of Barra de Navidad comes across as the most dreadful porn, but I can’t help it. It is hot, so hot, steamy wet and hot, and God, do I love it there.

Who cares about the Atlantic seaboard with it’s dumb boardwalks and pedal jitneys and imitation gay ninieties photos? Are you kidding? Barra is the beach, baby, coconut shells and mysterious pieces of wood washing up on the shore and the mighty Pacific crashing and rolling and stoned surfers passed out in hammocks tied to palm trees.

Actually it wasn’t just the surfers. There was a taxi stand across from our hotel. I assume the drivers were busy with fares every night, because during the day they would be sprawled limply in hammocks of their own, sleeping in a manner that suggested paralysis or nerve gas, rocking gently between “No Parking” signs.

Pah! In Ocean City we picked daintily at blue crab and complained about the flies while we watched the class of ‘08 traipse up and down the boardwalk,celebrating their high school graduations by getting their fake I.D.’s confiscated.

In Barra we wrestled with 2 kilo langostas drowning in melted butter and kicked iguanas away with our huraches and left the restaurant exhausted and full to watch a parade of …oh, who knows? Toothless old war criminals, con artists, Endless Summer types, pot smugglers, and ruthless Mexican peddlars who make their livings by selling shell jewelry and whatever else they can get their hands on.

And hovering over all of it like Cinderella’s Castle is The Grand Bay Hotel . The Grand Bay Isla Navidad is an elegant Wyndham resort that adds a touch of bling to the otherwise seductively shoddy tropical atmosphere. Separated from the rest of Barra by a moat, I mean, lagoon, it’s like a 4 carat diamond in a crackerjack box.

One of the co-eds and I took a water taxi over to the hotel for Sunday brunch when we were visiting Barra in January. On that occasion she and I idled on the verandah nibbling croissants and pretending to be Eurotrash countesses, but except for rare occasions like that, it just provides a magnificent backdrop.

I am telling you, I love it. I don’t think Bruno knows how much I love it, but I could live there, and finally, now that I’m middle aged, realize the fantasies I’ve been nursing for 40 years to be Gidget, spending my mornings surfing a longboard and my sunsets mixing drinks in coconut shells for a draft dodging beat poet named Kahuna.

Oh, except that I can’t surf. And I’m a recovering alcoholic.

And except for the fact that there is an instant in the morning when the heat suddenly ignites, and in that moment it goes from being just ordinarily hot to the place where water becomes steam, and if you didn’t roll into a pool that minute, you’d risk being scalded by the air. And for the rest of the day you have no choice but to stay in the pool or join the taxi drivers in their stunned torpor.

So I keep my beach fantasies to myself. On the way home, only a 4 hour drive, the excellent toll roads wind up and over the mountains. As you approach Lake Chapala, the temperature drops and the air feels fresher and cleaner by the mile. Kilometer, I mean. It’s a different world, and actually one that’s probably a little better suited to real life. For Bruno, anyway.

I’ll tell you where you can go to get a good feel for this place that I love so much. Check out Sparks Mexico page. He has some pictures that make me feel like I’m still there. Actually, there’s very little about Mexico you can’t find out while drifting around on his web page, so have at it.

The thing about living in Paradise is, it doesn’t take much to piss you off in the climate department.  Here in Chapala we’ve spent the week sandwiched between a bunch of tropical storms hovering off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, and, for all I know, the Carribean and Gulf Coasts as well.

Anyway, it’s been raining steadily for six days, and it’s become common to see normally cheerful old retired guys stalled in traffic and wearing expressions like Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining.

Nothing to be done about that, however. I don’t care how green we get, nobody asked the dinosaurs if they wanted to be extinct, and nobody’s going to ask us if we want the climate to stay the same or go to hell, either.

Um, sorry. I didn’t mean to air my carefully researched conclusions on global warming in that particular spot, I just got carried away.

 I’m more concerned at the moment…a moment of sunshine, Thank God in his Heaven above…, with my beloved stepson. It turns out, and I can’t tell you how disturbing this is to me, that he has discovered how to ”handle” me.

Twerp. You don’t “handle” me! I’m not some dopey creature  running on reflex whose responses can be manipulated by a skillful pre-adolescent.

I’m a grown up!

This came to my attention when we were having breakfast at Fonda Dona Lola’s, a cavernous restaurant that’s famous for it’s low prices and straightforward food. It’s a bit like eating in an airplane hangar with no walls and cut paper flags strung from one corner to the other.

Our party consisted of Max, Ricardo the baby gringa slayer, Karina,  who was batting her eyelashes while 12 year old Ricky helped her choose  a breakfast entree ( ah, huevos rancheros, the food of love, my darling!) and my friend David. David had innocently invited me to lunch and thus found himself in the position of Mexican Scoutmaster. He insisted that he didn’t mind, even when I waved the waiter with the check over to his side of the table.

But who cares, at Fonda Dona Lola’s breakfast for 5 still came to less than $200  pesos.

Anyway, I had no idea that my nostrils were flaring in response to some impertinence  of Ricardo’s, but I heard Max whisper to him “Oh, now you’ve done it. If you don’t want her to kill you, you better….” I didn’t hear what the antidote for me was, once I started transforming  into the Mominator, but Max had apparently figured it out.

I have to say I don’t blame him. It appears that the bar of parenting ideals can’t be set low enough for me.

 For instance, when I intend to say something self esteem enhancing like “You’re a really good kid”, no one is more surprised than I am to hear someone roar ”If you don’t get your ass upstairs and stay out of my way for an hour, you’ll live to regret it.”  What?

 Luckily, that smart boy has figured out how to calm me down once he sees the whites of my eyes start to change color, and lucky for Ricardo he was willing to share the information.

 We’re off to the beach for a week, so Max is going to get plenty of practice in keeping me in line.  See you when we get back!

Hah! Every July here in Lakeside, it looks like there’s been some kind of weird in vitro event of the sort that tabloids love ( Old Lady Baby Town! Entire Town of 70 Year Old Women gives Birth!) Of course, it’s just summer vacation for the grandkids, so out of nowhere all the old babes in town have an 11 year old or two following them around, and I’m no exception.

Except that my 11 year old is actually Bruno’s youngest son.

My husband had the chicken pox when he was in his 30’s. Typically, those types of childhood illnesses are particularly dreaded by adult men because of the possiblility of being made sterile. No such luck for Bruno, although it did render him diabetic. So he has four kids, two ex-wives, no money, and has to take insulin shots at the dinner table.

Wait…what am I talking about? Oh, right.

Max is here. Er….., Yay!

At the moment I’m recovering from the flood of adrenaline that surged through my veins at that last little eye roll of my precious darling’s. I suggested to him in a voice that sounded like it was being filtered through a mechanical device that he might want to go upstairs and reflect on the valuable lessons I was teaching him.

But just between us, I’m relieved that he has turned into such a big pain in the ass. He’s always been a sensitive kid, with the manners of a miniature museum curator.  Last year I was a little worried that he was going to grow up to be a weenie, scared of noises and thunderstorms and strangers and going to bed at night.

And of course, because I’m so experienced in child rearing, I have no doubt that being scared of the dark is the first step on a path that leads inevitably to spinning under a mirror ball with mascara in one hand and a bottle of poppers in the other.

His new passion for firearms and WWII games wasn’t enough to completely reassure me, either. I saw Silence of The Lambs. There’s no rule against homos being psychotic mass murderers, as far as I know.

So, okay, I admit to a sense of relief that he doesn’t have any interest in my wardrobe of ballroom dance costumes. ( Not that there’s anything wrong with that) But boy, did I underestimate how incredibly galling a little 11 year old smart mouth can be. I thought I would be glad when the sensitive phase was over, but I know I’ll be glad when this age passes.

He’s made friends with a young Mexican American boy who inherited a flashing grin and easy machismo from his Dad, a well known gringa slayer from back in the day. Ricardo has only just turned 12, so he’s got plenty of fort building and games of tag left in him, but I noticed a gleam of interest when he realized that we lived next door to 11 year old  Karina, too.

In fact when the daylight faded on their outdoor games during a recent sleepover and the boys went upstairs, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of conspiratorial whispering going on about a subject that appeared to be deeply, deeply, intriguing. And I think I heard Karina’s name once or twice.

Not that I was eavesdropping.

Later, the three of us took the dogs out. Ricardo was clearly at home on the cobblestone streets of our village, greeting passersby with familiarity and heading toward the plaza with an unconcious homing instinct. For the first time ever in his young life, Max crossed the street with his pal to put a little distance between us. And when they crossed under one of the streetlights with it’s cloud of bobos, just for a second, some trick of the light gave him the broad shoulders and narrow hipped slouch of an older teenaged boy.

The next time I get mad at that kid for being a smart mouth 11 year old who won’t pick up after himself and who keeps forgetting that guns belong outside, I hope I remember how I felt in that moment. Sunrise, sunset and all that.

But you know what? He’s going to be a gringa slayer, too.

I started writing this blog to describe life in Mexico to people who were interested in someday making the same transition that Bruno and I have done.

More often than not, though, I lose track of my original mission because I’m so busy being baffled and delighted by the comings and goings in my little village.
But here’s something you might like to know. Every now and then, but still pretty often, one of us will look at the other and say “Goddamn, I love my life.”

Honestly, I just don’t think I ever did that when I lived one traffic jam away from the most powerful city in the world, waiting for my foot to be blown off by a terrorist bomb so I could die when my  $1500.00 a month health insurance company refused to cover treatment, insisting that a terrorist bombs constituted a pre-existing condition. Oh, did I just say that? Sorry. Let’s move on.

I’m not much of a club person. Clubs tend to require showing up at a regular time, and I can’t ever find anything that I consistently feel enthusiastic about when the meeting is scheduled. I am often excited about it the day before, or raring to go the minute after, but at the scheduled time? Usually not.

So it is with some surprise that I report to you that I have become a member of C.A.S.A, the Culinary Arts Society of Ajijic.

It’s the local cooking club. And every time I say that I’ve joined, someone asks “Oh, do you like to cook?”

Not particularly. I mean, I do, but Jesus, not in the way these scary Bon Appetit types do.

While cooking is not necessarily a passion with me, I do like to eat once in a while, and I’m here to tell you that the monthly banquet hosted by the CASA is a wonder to behold, by far the best and cheapest meal in the village.

In order to take part in this monthly extravaganza each member agrees to submit 4 dishes a year in competition, in any category that appeals to them.

I’ve already been kicked out of one women’s club this year for non participation, so after two months of not showing up at the CASA feast, I thought I’d better start doing my duty. At about the same time, an email was sent out asking for submissions, as so many people were out of town. The category? Brunch.

Perfect. I have a Paula Deen recipe for French Toast Casserole, that, like all her recipes, require very little more than to mix together a kilo each of sugar and butter. To make it a French Toast casserole, you insert some sliced bread into the sugar/butter. I have made it before for our office meeting and received rave reviews.

Of course, I forgot for a moment a fundamental fact, which is that realtors will eat anything, and if it’s free, they’ll rave about it.

Anyway, I made the casserole the night before with the idea that I was doing my club a bit of a favor, since they were struggling to fill the entries. To tell you the truth, I presumed that there might be a certain leniency in the judging, since I was doing them such a big favor. In fact, since the realtors, those starving garbage cans, had enjoyed my dish so much, I must confess that I may have entertained a thought or two of walking away with a ribbon of some color or another.

I was mistaken on every count.

I won’t bore you with a play by play of every rule that I was cited on. Jesus, who knew so much could be done wrong by bringing a dish of food to a pot luck?

 I will share that after El Presidente asked me to take the bottle of syrup off the table, she told me I couldn’t leave the casserole sitting on the bath towel I had wrapped it in to keep it warm.

And I will also tell you that the big homo who submitted the exact same casserole decorated with a variety of local fresh berries in a talavera dish won a prize. But just wait til next month! I’ve got a taste for the competition now, and I’m going to read the rule book cover to cover. The next competition is going to be for French Cuisine.

I intend to submit the same casserole.

Goddamn I love my life.

So, where have I been, you wonder? Turning 50, that’s where, and let me tell you, a lot of folks lost bets when I did.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been home for two weeks now. Even harder to believe that we forgot the San Antonio Feast Days, a mental twitch that I can only compare to woman’s ability to dull the memory of giving birth enough to ever do it a second time.

Why God, why, did we not stay up North for just four more days, rather than descend into the mayhem of a Mexican village having it’s annual fiesta?

Tired and beat from travel, we arrived at our casa at about 1:00 in the morning and were  startled awake at 5:00 by cohetes, those goddamn firecrackers that our Mexican hosts are so in love with. Over in the church yard, a bunch of tequila sodden cowboys were lighting fuses with the lit ends of their cigarettes, hollering and singing and chirping the way no one but someone raised on chiles and Mariachi music can.

Later that day I was restocking our pantry at Super Lakes, the shopping emporium that folks travel from Mexico City to shop in, because Pancho the proprieter is so canny about the gourmet and American products he stocks for homesick gringos.

Trying to negotiate a nine point turn with the child size shopping cart in the narrow aisles  overflowing with Pop Tarts and Hellman’s Mayonnaise, my eyes welled up with tears at the memory of the American supermarkets, with their two lane highways and dispensers of handwipes by the immense shopping carts, and  the immaculate shelves stocked with 74 different choices of pickle to buy. What a great effing country.

  But at 7:00 or 8:00 the next morning, I woke up in a different frame of mind after a good nights sleep in my own bed. Next door, my maid’s husband and his cronies were enthusiastically harmonizing to the Frito Bandito song  and pitching beer cans into the street. When I stuck my head out the gate, they gave me a cheerful welcome and offered me a shot of tequila from their bottle.

I shook my head at  them, but it made me laugh and forget all about wide grocery store aisles.

Viva Mexico, y’all.

“Aw, no, hon, I don’t think we have anything like that“

Oh.

Well, if there was no internet available, the shade of aquamarine eyeshadow the cashier at the coffee shop wore must have been mail order. It was most definitely not being sold at the local Rite Aid. Because, that color of eye shadow? Hasn’t been mass produced since 1964.

In fact, this little pocket of Maryland, with it’s waterman culture and beehive sporting waitresses, makes my Mexican village seem pretty cutting edge. At least we have the wi fi, for God’s sake.

 God knows that Latina women never get tired of glamming themselves up, and they are very damn good at it.   But when they rock the turquoise eye make-up, the effect is totally different than when it’s combined with pruny lips and cats-eye glasses and floral polyester, I’ll tell you that.

Something has happened to the Surf City USA of my memory, in which Ocean City, Maryland is the epicenter of beach culture, with tanned lifeguards and beautiful blonde girls at the water’s edge, and The Beach Boys Greatest Hits playing in the background. 

Um, not. I just saw some surfers, and they were wearing NASCAR tee shirts, for the love of God.

Was this always such a small fishing town, so full of  purse lipped, squinty eyed,  and suspicious small fishing town characters?

Yew know wot, hon? I’ve got a feeling it was. Demonstrating yet again the richness of my fantasy life.

And I’m glad, because now that I’m, er,  more mature, I find myself interested in activities that don’t require me to look good in a bathing suit.  I never knew there was so much stuff to do here once you get away from the beach! 

 For which I thank God.  I now have three twenty somethings of my own, and they each have a twenty something of their own, and  when the whole mess of them are so freaking gorgeous and hip and on their way to the hottest bar in town to lord it over lesser humans of their age group, I guess it’s time for me to give up on the dream of being asked out by a life guard and just go antiquing.

Which I can totally do  here!

I’m a step in my family, a married in, and although no one would dream of conciously excluding me from anything,( actually, on the concious level there is some possiblity of me being included when their beloved Dad is not….)

Wait, what am I talking about? Oh, right, the invisible and inpenetrable bond that exists between father and children. There is a forcefield of DNA that I imagine I might bounce away from if I got too close as they walk, heads bent toward each other to share an umbrella. I am a willing enough outsider, content to amble along behind and admire the invisible tie that binds families, no matter how much time or distance separates them.

But lest I give you the wrong impression,  it’s not always a hallmark card around here. The endless ride from Northern Virginia to our present ( and last, at least of the Joachim tour 2008) location outside of Ocean City Md, should have taken four hours. In point of fact, it only took about four and a half of real time hours. In Joachim family tension time, however, it took about two years.

 One of those years occurred after we finally discovered the neighborhood our rental house was located in, a well groomed subdivision of vacation homes for people who had earned a little leisure after crabbing for forty years, or finally turning their Dairy Queen franchises over to the kids.

 My stepdaughter, the adored coed, stiffened with the outrage for which she is well known when she realized that she had signed on for a week of isolation with her parents in a house in a working class suburb, with no way to get to the beach other than be driven by a parent.  A circumstance, she reminded us in an icy tone of voice,  that she hasn’t been in since 2001, and which she didn’t tolerate  at all well back then.

The gloom in the car deepened in proportion to the drive as we continued deeper and deeper into the forested subdivision, farther and farther from the area of fun things to do.

I have to admit to a certain amount of stiffness ( if that’s the word we’re using for panic attacks), myself. After all, her sister, both boyfriends, her brother, his girlfriend and one or two other kids to whom we owe hospitality are slated to arrive at various times during the week.  

I like to picture myself as the center of surprised and admiring conversation about how awesome I am for finding such cool places to rent  for vacation weeks.   Frankly, it was kind of hard to keep the hope alive as we  finally located our  cottage. Tucked away in a man made forest, surrounded by a vinyl picket fence , it was just a short drive away from the neighborhood “yacht club” which, beneath it’s gables and wings, looks suspiciously like a double wide trailer.

Thanks a lot, VRBO.

Chattering brightly ( and duplicitously) about how convenient it was to “Just drive over the bridge! Look, just a few miles, and then turn left and over we go! Oh. Okay, and then across this other one, and then look! there’s the skyline!  That’s the beach! There, that’s where!”

My coed rolled her eyes and looked apathetically out the window in the manner of Joan of Arc waiting for the flames. Tonight we took her  to a special treat, an all you can eat Seafood Buffet, a luxury meant to lull her into complicity.  I’ve kind of blocked out the memory, but it seems to have been a hundred different variations of breaded surimi in palm oil butter on a steam table. Awful.

Its a few days later…

And  I have been won over by this suburb of the beach and it’s variety of things to do fully clothed. Most of the kids are here now,and the rest are arriving tonight. The weather is great and Bruno and I are mellow and pleased to do driving, designated or otherwise, to ferry them to the ersatz Jamaica that seems to be this summer’s big draw for the drinking set.

The coed has spent the week tanning and being bribed with new outfits and bronzing makeup, and now that her boyfriend has arrived  she is able to bask in the noble glow of having sacrificed a week of her life to filial duty. Combined with the satisfaction of his stunned reaction to her new golden skin and blonde highlights, she is as contented as a pretty cat and  I bless that boy a thousand times.

Bruno has played golf every single day at a great variety of Maryland courses, reasonably priced and challenging. I have shopped and shopped and I’m sated for another year. It’s been wonderful. And I’m ready to go back.

As I drove yesterday, (and drove, and drove, and mother-effing drove, son. There is seriously a ratio of one hour of driving for every half hour of getting anything done. It’s insane. ) I searched for a connection to this land of asphalt and ferny green deciduous landscaping, but it feels distinctly foreign. Or alien, maybe, is a better word.

 This area has been my home, off and on, for 40 of my 50 years. I was married here in the church that my Mom still attends and where my father is buried. I came here in my early sobriety to start over, and I have victories and failures that echo in almost every suburb  around the Capitol beltway. I went to high school here, wore a cheerleading uniform,  drank my first beer. I came here and met Marty during my legendary (-ish) career in ballroom dancing,….. came back here after that relationship imploded, met and married Bruno, relived my high school years a whole lot more successfully through my step kids. A lot of my life is here, and the landscape should look familiar.

But it just seems weird and overlit and harsh. And, vaguely, as if I’m in an episode of Star Trek.

Or the Jetsons.  

The point that we’re in a high tech corrider is made when you pull up to a gas station and find a flat screen tv broadcasting the news on top of the pump. Which, is cool, I guess. I’d rather find a person who would keep me from having to get out of my car.

Although the prices are high enough to make us do  a cartoon double take every time I pull into one of these gas-slash-t.v. stations, it seems that the trend is to eliminate people from places where I’m kind of used to seeing them.

I don’t mean the gas station, I haven’t  had anyone pump my gas in this country in fifteen years, but I do feel kind of abandoned when it comes ringing up my own groceries. Frankly, it’s pretty scary, and I have yet to complete a transaction without being told by the machine to wait until someone comes to assist me, which totally makes me feel like  I”m being set up to get arrested for shoplifting.

It is breathtaking, I’ll admit, in it’s beauty and newness and spotless efficiency. Somehow, after Mexico, even the red brick and ivy buildings from Virgina’s colonial heyday  look like cutting edge architecture.

Part B

Bruno is painting the front porch of my childhood home, and we are all entering my Mother’s house through the back door.

This is a minor inconvenience, barely noticeable. It is the kind of house where you might have to hold the shower head on to the pipe while bathing, or lean against the diswasher to keep the plates from tumbling out on a whitewater of Electrosol. It’s just that kind of house.

When I come in I look around for a safe place to leave my keys, and then go through several mnemonic tricks to be sure I don’t forget where, in the escalating piles of 49 card bicycle decks and  keychain flashlights  and shopping bags from  an extinct species of department stores like Woody’s and Garfinckel’s and knitting magazines from the seventies, they have been laid down.

There’s always a sense of psychic phenomena here, as if my belongings will be absorbed into the fabric of the house when my back is turned.

In contrast, last week I stayed at my friend Char’s house, an opulent mansion in a part of Fairfax County reserved for movers and shakers in the government or global software giants.

Char herself is as long limbed and slender as the trees that decorate the sylvan acreage she and her husband, a  distinguished smoothie whose laid back benevolence belies the fact that he’s a beltway jungle cat  to be reckoned with, call a back yard. But where the trees waltz with airy tranquility in the breeze, she is swing and tango and cha cha cha, baby, a rhythm section of super fabulousness, a sovereign territory of South Beach glamour.*

 Almost magically beautiful, she’s also a swell hostess, and they couldn’t have made us more comfortable in their palatial island. We lounged around eating high end chocolates or munching on popcorn in their movie theatre (really!) and slept like babies in our inviting guest room.

So, do I mind moving back to the house of my misspent youth, wading through the debris of every era of my families history to get to the tiny twin beds in the room that Bruno and I share across the hall from the bathroom?

 Well, on the one hand, I’m finally feeling that connection to my past, hearing the echoes that I thought might have disappeared.

On the other hand, duh.

* Char designs and sells amazing jewelry. You can see for yourself by clicking here