Tuesday, June 30, 2009
A Dose of Real Life
Our friend Warren just returned from several months at the beach, where he and his wife Tuli have been supervising construction on their beachfront condo. In mid-May he sent us this chilling first-hand account of a family tragedy. [NOTE: If you get emotional about pets, you might not want to read any further.]Today, Saturday almost noon we are in our condo looking things over. Suddenly we hear a child’s terrified shriek. Then screaming...children…adults…panicked shouts.
We look down (the mangrove is just below us) and see Panchita [the resident one-eyed crocodile] spinning in the water below. Clearly she has a black midsized dog in her mouth. A woman is screeching and wanting, trying, to go in the water to save her pet from the 15-foot-long croc. Two kids, a boy 10 and a girl 12, stand nearby, mortified.
The father comes running up, with him a golden retriever. The retriever immediately goes into the water to save the black dog. The second dog is in the water before anyone knows it and now there is a din of screaming, “Oh my god!!!” As the lab approaches the croc another croc leaps up and attacks it, taking its face in its mouth, trying to spin. As it spins it loses traction on the retriever's face. The dog pulls free, turns and somehow, miraculously, makes it to shore as the other croc pursues.
The woman steps forward to fight the croc and he turns towards her, but goes back into the water. Shrills, shrieks, screams of horror fill the air as the father takes the bloodied retriever away from the water. The woman, beside herself, is emboldened and wants to enter the water to somehow rescue her black dog, who is of course dead. We are screaming, "Don't go into the water!" She comes to her senses and just screams at the top of her lungs, "Fucking crocodile!" The kids are beside themselves with horror -- crying, mortified. Everyone is in shock.
For a long while we stand there watching this most unbelievable sickening tragedy. Panchita just sits, nose and eyes above the water like the croc in Peter Pan… waiting for a second course.
We do not let Kurt [
Thanks, Peter
"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it." ---David Foster Wallace
Anais Nin
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not possibly born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing."
Eccentric Misfits
As y'all probably know, it took less than a week for me and Mizzy to become "smitten" with San Miguel and decide to move here.
To anyone who's been in San Miguel de Allende for long, this is a familiar story, kind of a cliché
"I call it a tribal thing. I really do believe that certain people who arrive here are just part of a certain tribe. I call us eccentric misfits. We arrive in San Miguel and we feel for the first time in our lives that we belong."
"We're really a bunch of aliens that have been off on a mission, and now we've completed our mission and they've sent us to SMA for R&R. At any moment they're going to beam us back up."
Thanks, Warren, for your insight.
