Cruz de Perdon

Guanajuato is a mecca for walkers. I'm partial to walks that have a landmark to aim for, which is pretty easy here, as most hills have a cross on top. Cruz de Perdon (Cross of Forgiveness) has not only a cross, but several gravestones and a tile surface area. It's about a 20 minute hike up from La Panoramica. I have been told that sinners, er, pilgrims, walk up together at night by candlelight once a year, but I have never found out the date.

This week, I went there two days in a row: once with Barry, the next day with Jenny, with whom I acted as guide, thereby consolidating my knowledge of where the path starts, and making the trail "mine."

At the top today, Jenny and I ate almonds and raisins and looked down at the city below. You could say we had our own Mass there.

What is it about Mexicans and bears?

So there we were, Mari and I, at the IMSS clinic in Leon, waiting for her "maxilofacial especialista" doctor. Even though she had an appointment for 3:00 and we had arrived at 1:50,there were already four people ahead of her. La Doctora finally showed up at 3:40, and Mari was seen for her jaw fracture at 4:30. The appointment lasted between three and four minutes. Then la doctora told her to come back when all the patients had been seen, around 6:00, when she would insert a brace to align the jaw that after four weeks, had not yet aligned on its own.

So there was a lot of waiting. Mari read her portable Bible, I rotated between Poemcrazy, a book on creative writing, and Buen Hogar (Good Housekeeping magazine in Spanish). She played with her cellphone, I listened to music on the ipod. We went out for a lunch of chilequillas, and a lot of the time wa talked.

Mari asked me how hiking is different in the States. I explained about backpacking, how you carry everything with you. "Have you seen a bear?" she asked.

"Oh yes." I grinned, wondering if she would be as entertained by our bear story as our former contractor, who was so entranced when we would talk about bears that Barry brought him a poster of a bear as a gift. We suspect it has pride of place hanging in his sala.

I told her the story about how a bear ate all our stash the second-to-last night of a backpacking trip in Yosemite, and how--all feminism aside for a moment--I urged Barry from the warmth of our tent to go out, protect us and make the bear go away, and how he clanged two pots to make noise and scare it, and we heard it thrashing away in the distance, and how I said confidently (famous last words), "The bear won't be back," and promptly fell asleep, and how five minutes later, we heard the bear coming back...

Mari was laughing and her eyes all lit up.

...and how there were two guys camping down the lake from us, and after we could hear the bear leaving again, we climbed out of our tent and woke them up because we still had a bit of food left and we had to re-hang the backpacks on a taller branch, further from the trunk, which we couldn't reach, so one guy, the taller one, got out of his sleeping bag, and how Barry had to stand on his shoulders to hang the backpacks in the dark, and how finally we went back to sleep and there was no more sight of the bear, and in the morning we discovered the bear had made a real mess of everything and about the only thing he hadn't eaten was our teabags.

And Mari was laughing and laughing, I've never seen her so animated, and that's how she and I whiled away five hours waiting for her appointment to materialize.

Bamboo Mural in Progress

The high ceilings of our Guanajuato house are intimidating! What to do with all the looming walls? Last winter my friend Jenny, who paints, tiles, and does other aesthetic improvements (the words for which I don't even know) helped me paint two arches on one of the walls of the back bedroom. They filled the wall and transformed the room. This season, I was ready to work on the wall above the steps leading from the first to second floor. What to paint, though?

"Bamboos are easy," my mentor advised.

Unlike Jenny, I never assume a mural will be easy, but she was right. She painted the terra cotta pot and a few reeds, and soon we were floating in leaves of all shades of green, with yellow for variety. More density to come, but it already feels like a patch of garden right in our urban home.

"Stop!" I yell when a few drops of acrylic dribble down the wall. "Stop, you!" I grab a paper towel to stanch it. Jenny laughs. "It's only paint," she reminds me. She's fearless. As for me, the fact that an object is, in theory, inanimate, has never stopped me from yelling at it if it's not behaving. (Many a rant I have had with bicycles, walls, paint).

Sometimes we paint for an hour or two; other times, on my own, I take a break from another activity and perch on the staircase, adding a leaf here, a leaf there. We still haven't figured out how we'll reach the highest parts.

I would never have thought of painting a mural in our home in the States. There's a well-known muralist in Eureka who teams with at-risk kids to create community murals. A worthy challenge, but the murals look so complex and intricate, far beyond my lowly abilities. Yet here in Mexico, anything is possible. How I could have known I'd become a mural painter?

I had a conversation with my Mexican friend Mari recently about housecleaning. I made the point that she (as other Mexicanas I know) has a much higher standard for cleanliness than I do. She said she would feel ashamed if her house were not kept straight, and then she repeated a line I hear often in Mexico: "it is the culture."

I never hear anyone in the US explain their actions by saying, "it is the culture." People explain they do what they do because of their parents, family background, genetics, part of the country they're from, gender, birth order-- but never culture.

I don't usually think of my everyday habits as the result of my culture. It never occurred to me that having, a relaxed attitude toward the standard of organization in my home, could be a reflection on the culture I'm a part of. Maybe what it points to is that American culture is very diverse, and there is lots of freedom to be straight, messy, clean, dirty, obsessive, etc. without shame or judgment.

Back in the city of color after a six-month hiatus

I've decided to resuscitate my blog and without explaining the two-year gap, just plunge in.

Oh, my. Oh, my. My resistance to things kicked up yesterday. Dealing with things, understanding things, finding places for things, deciding about things. Please, no more things.

Even the word annoys me. Things. Or objects. No better. No poetry hidden in either word.

I brought down too many things because I couldn't remember what we have here. Now we have both more, and less, than before. More-- more spatulas (spatulae?). We must have four or five, and I hardly ever use a spatula. Tenants must have bought some. We have a new frying pan because a tenant didn't like the ones we had (which I admit were a bit scruffy, but I was fond of them!) Meanwhile we also have less...those cool clothespins that attached to the bathroom rail, handy for hanging undies: gone. Bathroom floor sponge: gone. One of my favorite bowls: gone. This is what happens when you have other people in your house, I guess.

Upstairs on one of the high windows facing the Serena hill, someone taped a newspaper at the top. And leftover bits of tape are strewn across the whole window. Why did someone need to put newspapers up there when there were curtains already? (not that anyone can see in from there) I haven't tried to get rid of the tape marks because I can't reach that high, but maybe I can with a chair. Several curtains need to be re-attached to a curtain hook. Again, with a chair later. Later too I'll try to get the hot water going. It's still dark, and easier to relight the gas in daylight.

So after a bout of irritation with things, I said, come on, sweetheart, one thing at a time. I had been helped by a blogger I like, an artist/minister, writing about how humility comes from the word humus, meaning earth. These are things from the earth, I told myself (well, all right, some of them are plastic and synthetic, but ultimately those trace back to the earth too, right?) Just take care of them one by one, I said. So I did. Shampoos (three? four?) into the bathroom. Papers and pens into my desk. Condiments, spices onto the kitchen shelf. Some objects to the throw away/ give away pile, which presents another difficulty. It's not that easy giving things away here. Oh for St Vincent's.

The computer. The monitor flashes briefly when I turn it off and back on. "Stay on!" I plead. knowing it won't. The laptop (new to me, but not to the family) starts humming noisily from time to time and this off-and-on rumbling makes me nervous. Why is it doing this?

I admire the older expat women around here who live alone, and are so independent. I am not that independent! I lean on Barry for all kinds of things, especially in the material sense of maintaining things and getting stuff to work.

But meanwhile order is slowly emerging. I am going to watch what I wear over the next few days and see which clothes I like to wear, and get rid of those I don't. And now the church bells are tolling, it's time to put a few more things into their homes. Soon it will get light and I will take a shower and head out to meditation.

One Day in Xalapa, Mexico

Dear Friends,

Barry and I are in Xalapa, a medium-sized Mexican city about an hour inland and uphill from Veracruz on the Gulf Coast. We are taking a road trip by bus around some new parts of Mexico.

We caught the bus to Naulinga, a small mountain town some 23 km from here but less trendy, much cooler (I wished I had worn my down vest) and ‘muy tranquillo’ compared to busy, car-infested Xalapa. It was Sunday morning, and that probably added to the lovely quiet. “This has to be Wales,” Barry kept saying, as we saw the rolling green fields. Naulinga turned out to be very pretty, with narrow geometric streets all fanning out from the main church. The cemetery (one of our favorite places to visit, wherever) was filled with row after row of carefully-maintained pastel-colored mini-cottages, like slightly larger dog houses. The colors were softer than the colors of the living, though not as gauzy and luminescent-looking as you see in traditional Biblical pictures.

A couple of hours later, we were ready to head back to Xalapa and decided to hitch-hike. I know, I know; hitch? I would never do it alone. But we find, maybe because we’re in our 50s and 60s, we probably disarm people by our age and end up having great conversations with folks. Within a minute a large SUV, Mexican plates, pulled up. “Mom” hastily got in the back with the two kids aged about 6 and 8. Dad spoke English. The family has lived in Madison, WI for ten years, but was back for an extended winter break visiting their families. Martin, the father, looked in his early 30s, and had worked in the distribution center of Famous Footwear and in different restaurants. He spoke English, not perfect, but quite good, and had a surprisingly good accent, too. The kids said their names with seamless English accents. “They speak English in school and Spanish at home,” Maria, their mom, told us in Spanish (who, we think also speaks English but was less forthcoming). I told them that my sister lives in Madison and teaches Spanish to young children.

They asked about our children, of course (question #1 in Mexico). “I find it odd,” I said. “People always ask us our where our kids are, and I always think, isn’t it obvious? They’re working and raising their kids at home. I could understand the question if we were in our 30s, but at our age?”

“See, grandparents are never alone in Mexico,” Martin explained. “They’re always with the grandkids, helping, babysitting. They’d never be by themselves.”

“But what if the kids are in school?”

“Even so.”

Actually, people of all ages are much more frequently in groups, than alone, in Mexico. Barry and I have observed that whole families go shopping together, with everyone but the family dog in tow. I sometimes wonder how introverts manage in Mexico; it’s such an intensely interactive culture.

He told us about a guy he had met in Madison who was ready to get rid of his kids, tired of paying their bills. In Mexico, you’re never rid of your kids. It was, we agreed, probably the biggest difference (among many) in the two cultures.

“Were you legal when you went to the States ten years ago?” Barry asked.

I was glad he asked. I also wanted to know, but felt embarrassed to ask, though the stigma is an American one, not Mexican. People here feel sympathy for those who fled to the States in search of a job, but not shame. Martin and Maria were not legal at first, but they are now. “If you want to emigrate to the States legally, the authorities always want to know what property you have, savings, money, and so on,” Martin said. “But if we had all that, why would we leave Mexico?”

This is something I’m always trying to explain to fellow Americans who seem to think that Mexicans are all hungering to live in our country. They want to survive, yes, and many of them feel unable to do that in their own country, but they don’t yearn to live in the U.S. for reasons other than economic.

“What is that?” Barry asked suddenly, as we passed a church whose entire roof was covered with exuberantly colored crowns and flowers.

They told us that the crowns were brought by people to celebrate el Dia de la Virgin, Dec. 12, the day Mexicans celebrate Guadalupe, their patron saint. “Do you want to see inside?” asked Maria. We all tumbled out and went into the church to see a rock painted with the image of the Virgin. Outside, the kids climbed up a pole, and Barry joined them, taking better photos of the roof, while I talked to Maria.

Back in the car, Martin said, “A guy in Madison asked me to go have a beer with him. I said, ‘Won’t your wife be upset?’ He told me, ‘She’s not my wife, she’s my girlfriend.’”

“Here, wife, girlfriend, it’s all the same. Papers, no papers, she’s still your wife.”

But they liked Madison, they said, though Maria, when I looked at her after I asked the question, looked a little uncertain. “Do you miss Mexico when you’re there?” I asked.

“Family,” said Martin. “That’s the one thing you can’t buy.”

They let us off on the fringes of town. I was glad they hadn’t tried to take us further when I saw the piles of traffic, even for a Sunday afternoon. We caught the bus to el centro, reading the advisory that today all buses would be on strike in the state of Xalapa, in protest against the federal government’s steady increases in diesel fuel.

Many Mexican towns we have visited have city centers that Americans can only dream of: safe, beautiful human-scale squares filled with people “paseando” (strolling), benches, trees, spacious sidewalks, pedestrian areas. I often daydream of U.S. cities sending their public works directors down here to learn from Mexico (dream on!). Xalapa, however, is not one of those cities, though it had enough cachet to draw us here. Some of its cachet is because it is the heart of Mexican coffee cultivation, and you actually get good coffee here in restaurants rather than the instant you’re often served elsewhere.

After we got back to town, I went off to get a cappuccino at the café that Ana, the 25-year-old Physics student who we met yesterday through couchsurfers, had taken us to.

I settled into a corner and began to color in my art journal. I was totally engrossed by the woman with an enormous crown of hair emerging on the page--hair curling in every direction like winding country roads, plants sprouting from her head. Judy Wise, a web artist who unbeknownst to her is one of my art mentors (and who is indeed wise) says every picture you color is in some way a self-portrait. If so, who is this woman and how is she me? I pondered. I often ask the question and never get a linear answer; my task, according to Judy, is to “study that vast mystery and absorb it.”

Meanwhile, below her, what was this? A bra! A pink bra with rhinestone, starry nipples. Jung with would have a field day with my art pages. They undeniably express the Feminine: breasts, nipples, vulvas, pelvises, all things rounded, soft. But I’m also obsessed with frames and borders. Always have been, ever since junior high school when I would doodle connecting cubes on the margins of my Algebra 1 pages.

Suddenly I looked up. “Oh! Are you closing?” I asked the waiter in Spanish. Yes. Unfailingly, sometimes oppressively polite, they hadn’t told me. “Waiting for me?” Almost, but there were a few other customers. “I’ll get my stuff together,” I told him. But meanwhile a young boy of about 10 was eyeing my woman on the page, my “Mother Mexico,” as Barry later pronounced her. “Are you painting?” he asked, very seriously.

“Not painting,” I said. “I use color pencils, colored pens, and I glue pictures from magazines. A mix.” I showed him a couple of pages.

“Collage,” said a man sit nearby. They use the same word in Spanish.

“Do you have an art teacher? Do you take classes?” asked the boy.

“No,” I said. “Well, I’ve taken a few workshops, but never any long courses. It’s taken me years to develop an approach.”

“Do you speak English?”

“I do.” I smiled.

“Will you tell me some English words?”

I helped him with, “how are you, my name is, what’s your name, how old are you, where are you from.” Unfortunately, English in Mexican schools seems to be pretty hit-or-miss.

He was an interested student. Last week, in another town, I inadvertently stumbled on a group of youngsters waiting for their English teacher, and I gave them an impromptu ten-minute English class. When they would practice a statement in English, I would make them speak up, because they spoke almost inaudibly, similar to my experience with Latinos in US trainings. “Voz alta!” I exhorted the group as I left.

I sometimes wonder if I should teach English to kids when I’m in Guanajuato. The business consulting I had hoped to do in Mexico is not jumping off much, and I feel anxiety/pressure about it on many levels (questions about the business itself, my good but inconsistent mastery of Spanish, and my own chronic self-doubt), but whenever I’m with kids, I feel relaxed, light-hearted, and easy. Is there a message here, I wonder?

I left the café and joined Barry at VIPS, a tacky Mexican chain restaurant similar to Denny’s or Shoney’s or Hardee’s on the East Coast, its saving grace being that it has wireless. Barry’s carrot cake had just arrived, complete with tufts of real carrot on the icing. It would be a café night, which was fine, since it was now raining seriously with temperatures that felt like Humboldt County. I called my sister Arabella in New York on Skype (yeah, technology). From VIPS I adjourned to the pasta/pizza restaurant we had found a couple of days earlier, where I found that the non-house wine cost half what the “house wine” we had ordered before. I guess “vino de la casa” doesn’t mean the same in Mexico. I finished my coloring there, thick into the tendrils of Mother Mexico’s hair and the question of whether to add a border to the page or not.

And from there, back to our Hotel Limon, where we have the best room in the house, the only room with a balcony and fresh air. Many Mexican pensions are built around a lovely courtyard, which is aesthetically pleasing, but which means the rooms have windows facing in with air from the larger hotel space, but not necessarily fresh air, and a lack of privacy. Our hotel room with private bathroom and balcony is costing us a mere $16 a night. One of the curiosities of the economic crisis (“la crisis,” as it’s called here) is that the Mexican peso has fallen against the dollar, which is good for Americans but terrible for Mexicans.

I settled into bed and my nighttime reading, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman. A heartbreaking, beautifully rendered story involving culture, medicine, psychology, and international politics, about a child with epilepsy, as we would define it, but named, understood and treated radically differently by her Hmong parents.

At times I find it difficult to be on the road, I worry that I’m being self-indulgent, that I “should” be doing something more worthwhile, though what exactly that is, I’m not always sure. But after a day like yesterday I feel grateful. It is good to be outside Guanajuato, a place I love, but where I feel somewhat insulated, where I too easily can convince myself that I know Mexico. When I’m away I remember I’m just a beginner, and that’s good.

A Mexican Family Watching TV

I visited my friend Lupita yesterday. Lupita runs a pension in Guanajuato with one of the most spectacular views in a city filled with spectacular views. She's a good old girl. About 40, she was married for years to an abusive husband, finally got up the gumption to leave him, and now has a full-time clerical job while managing the pension. Her recent erstwhile partner was nice enough, but a freeloader, so awhile ago she ditched him. I remember once he took us to the airport, waxing romantic about an upcoming pilgrimage he was going to walk, how it offered time for reflection. "What about Lupita?" I asked him. "Is she going?" No, she wasn't. She would stay back at the pension, washing and cleaning and readying the rooms for the next guests, while he "reflected." Why wasn't I surprised?

We sat at her dining room table and caught up. I admired how she had rearranged furniture.

Next to us sat a family from Mexico City watching TV. They are staying at the pension for two months while the dad has a short-term business contract.

While Lupita went to the kitchen to get me a glass of water, I inconspicuously studied the body language of the family. The armchairs and sofa were in a U-shape configuration. Dad sat in one chair, holding a boy of about three. At right angles to him, on the sofa, sat Mom, holding a baby swaddled in a blanket. Her and her husband's fingers just reached between their seats. Next to her perched a son of about six, sitting close to Grandma on his other side. In the armchair opposite Dad, sat a daughter of about 12.

Six of the seven family members were touching or sitting close to each other, if not on each other.

Even while watching television--that great enemy of intimacy--this family seemed to be a tableaux of warmth and affection.

On the Other Hand...

Oh dear. Once again we are leaving Guanajuato and I am filled with ambivalence.

I love hiking and being places, like Guanajuato, where I have both a regular everyday life, and I can start walking in beautiful hilly country right from my front door, no car, no bus, no nothing necessary. It's not like I'm on a special tour or a vacation set up for it-- it's just ordinary life. This is freedom!

While in Guanajuato, I feel less alive thinking about Eureka. On the other hand, I like the area around Eureka. Barry and I can venture out on fun van outings and go cycling on our cool folding bikes. We can go backpacking. The fall season is within spitting distance and I daydream of bicycling and hiking amid glorious fall colors.

And I am not ambivalent about having my new wetsuit and swimming in the bay.

Still, I hate leaving here and wish I had set it up to stay longer. Yes, I could stay longer, but it would cost a bundle to change the airline reservations, and flight costs are so high as it is. If I stayed much longer I'd also have to change several appointments in Eureka which I am reluctant to do. One is with a client who is notoriously hard to schedule with at all. I'm ambivalent about the contract I hope (?) to set up because it would tie me to Eureka on a monthly basis. On the other hand (I have a lot of hands), I always enjoy doing the work. Meanwhile I'm also ambivalent about getting the Mexican work visa I'm applying for because the process is long and tedious and filled with pitfalls and I'm not sure how commited I am anyway.

I'm ambivalent about being ambivalent, at least. Isn't that an oxymoron?

Shopping Everyday

My sister Jane and my 16-year-old niece, another Louisa, visited us in Guanajuato last week, and the subject--as usual in my family--turned to food and related topics, like cooking and shopping. We discussed the dramatic differences in our kitchens. Jane, who is raising three children, keeps much more food around than we do: baskets of fruit, dried fruit, cereals, bread. Not a lot of starch or junk, but a generous amount of food you can nibble on without having to cook or prepare. Our kitchen looks anorexic by comparison.

But it's not that we deprive ourselves. If I want munchies, I will go out and buy it, but I don't routinely keep stuff like that lying around the house because I'm likely to eat all of it. And we don't buy a lot of fruit at one time because it goes bad quickly.

The beauty of Mexico is that within 2-3 minutes of our home are a variety of shops selling the foods we like. They are open early and late. I buy my almost-daily 35-cent bag of raisins at one shop, Barry buys his granola-based cookies at another shop. We can buy an ice cream cone at various shops, fruit and vegetables at a produce store, rolls for Barry (I don't eat bread) at the bakery.

It's the ideal way to have your snacks and eat them too.