Monday, August 31, 2009
Pete Seeger
What a powerful, principled man! What an amazing life! We just finished watching Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, and even if I'm no longer the knee-jerk liberal I was in my 20's, it made me hugely proud of my American citizenship. If you haven't seen it, get it. And when you do, watch the bonus materials, especially the films he and his wife made back in the 50's and 60's.
One thing I particularly loved learning is that on his trademark banjo, he printed the words, "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender."
One thing I particularly loved learning is that on his trademark banjo, he printed the words, "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender."
Travel
As many of you know, we don't have access to any of the American TV networks. What news we get is via the Internet and, occasionally, an English-language newspaper printed in Mexico City. Cool media. So it came as a shock to me last week, when a friend pulled up CNN on a hotel room television, and I saw the recent US town hall meetings in all their sound and fury. Where do all those frightened, angry people come from?
That same week, reading around the hotel pool, I came across this quote from Mark Twain:
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
So although it might seem like a shameless plug for our little tourist-oriented town, I'd like to say, "Hey, folks, put down those handguns, buy a ticket and come on down. We'll get you a beer and a taco and take you out to the hot springs for an afternoon, after which maybe things won't look so bad. Maybe you won't be so pissed off." Well, it worked for us...
That same week, reading around the hotel pool, I came across this quote from Mark Twain:
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
So although it might seem like a shameless plug for our little tourist-oriented town, I'd like to say, "Hey, folks, put down those handguns, buy a ticket and come on down. We'll get you a beer and a taco and take you out to the hot springs for an afternoon, after which maybe things won't look so bad. Maybe you won't be so pissed off." Well, it worked for us...
Escuela
This past week, public schools here in San Miguel opened for business. We have a primary school just up the street from as and as I was leaving the house last Tuesday, I just stood and marveled at the stream of families walking past, headed to and from the school. Not just just moms or grandmas, but entire families. I watched a young working class couple deposit their daughter then slowly walk back toward their home, hand-in-hand, sharing a liquado. At that moment, everything made total sense to me. Neighborhood, family, connection, seasons, love... Later that day, I happened past a nearby high-ticket, bilingual private school as parents arrived to get their kids. A long line of SUV's and minivans jockying for position, parents anxiously glancing at watches, kids being hustled out of the building.... Who's got the better life? Which family would I like to be part of? And thinking back, which family did my own kids grow up in? Later that evening, this little life lesson came full circle as I came across the following little couplet from the poet W.H. Davies:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
What is it indeed?
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
What is it indeed?
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
T-shirt Wisdom
My friend Mark Brown just got back from a family vacation in Hawaii. While there, he saw a number a folks wearing T-shirts with the following message.
"If can, can. If no can, no can."
His apt observation: Pidgen compresses and expands all meaning.
Monday, August 24, 2009
More from Tony Cohan..
I love this passage partly because it rings so true in our own life, marked as it's been by stretches of contented enruttedness followed by exhilarating episodes of rutbusting, but also because he manages to use "accrete," a word I've desperately wished to sneak into a conversation ever since high school.
"We accrete histories even in the places we flee to. Empty white rooms fill up with things. Dreams become accomplishments stacked like firewood or abandoned like scrap. We embalm ourselves inside passions of our own devising."
"We accrete histories even in the places we flee to. Empty white rooms fill up with things. Dreams become accomplishments stacked like firewood or abandoned like scrap. We embalm ourselves inside passions of our own devising."
Neighbors
While I was at the beach with my friend Warren this past week, I read Mexican Days, an insightful travelogue of sorts written by Tony Cohan. In a way, the book is a sequel to On Mexican Time, the must-read-if-you-live-here account of his move, two decades ago, from New York to San Miguel. Naturally, I loved the references, in both books, to my adopted home town, and enjoyed puzzling out the real identities of characters and locations he references. But his new book intrigued me every bit as much because most of the places he visits are places I too have visited over the past two years, and it was fun to see how his observations and reactions dovetailed, for the most part, with my own.
As a recent expat, (whatever that is), I found his insights about the relationship between my current and former homes especially interesting... and worth sharing.
The Aeromexico flight vaulted over the dry northern states, then westward toward the darkening horizon line of the Pacific... The plane was filled with Mexicans returning to work in the States or to visit relatives for Christmas. Somewhere below us stretched the vast, porous frontera, with its yawning expanses of desert, prairie and mountains. Geography is fate, I thought. Imagine England and all of North Africa -- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt -- sharing a common, unguarded border. Across this mythical demarcation running from Tijuana/San Diego all the way to Matamoros/Brownsville on the Caribbean, two deeply different societies gaze at each other, imagine each other, imitate each other, visit each other, resent each other, violate each other, and penetrate each other in every way imaginable. Labor and drugs and music and food flow north; money and hip-hop and merchandise and retirees flow south...
This great intercambio, involving countless millions of people and billions of dollars, often illicit, also showers hard-won blessings: a man who gets paid three dollars a day back home can make twelve an hour en el otro lado and wire a good portion of it home by Western Union -- and in one of Mexico's countless poor, stacked colonias of unsurfaced brick and cement, electricity blooms, food appears on family tables, new school or football uniforms are purchased, and a student enters the university on the hill.
Living in the crosshairs of this cultural shift, I am both expression and instrument of it: double resident, hence double agent, in the service of both sides and neither. Spiritual migrant, permanent gringo, riding the tidal currents that surge across this semipermeable membrane, la frontera.
As a recent expat, (whatever that is), I found his insights about the relationship between my current and former homes especially interesting... and worth sharing.
The Aeromexico flight vaulted over the dry northern states, then westward toward the darkening horizon line of the Pacific... The plane was filled with Mexicans returning to work in the States or to visit relatives for Christmas. Somewhere below us stretched the vast, porous frontera, with its yawning expanses of desert, prairie and mountains. Geography is fate, I thought. Imagine England and all of North Africa -- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt -- sharing a common, unguarded border. Across this mythical demarcation running from Tijuana/San Diego all the way to Matamoros/Brownsville on the Caribbean, two deeply different societies gaze at each other, imagine each other, imitate each other, visit each other, resent each other, violate each other, and penetrate each other in every way imaginable. Labor and drugs and music and food flow north; money and hip-hop and merchandise and retirees flow south...
This great intercambio, involving countless millions of people and billions of dollars, often illicit, also showers hard-won blessings: a man who gets paid three dollars a day back home can make twelve an hour en el otro lado and wire a good portion of it home by Western Union -- and in one of Mexico's countless poor, stacked colonias of unsurfaced brick and cement, electricity blooms, food appears on family tables, new school or football uniforms are purchased, and a student enters the university on the hill.
Living in the crosshairs of this cultural shift, I am both expression and instrument of it: double resident, hence double agent, in the service of both sides and neither. Spiritual migrant, permanent gringo, riding the tidal currents that surge across this semipermeable membrane, la frontera.
Dorothy Parker
This past weekend fans of the Algonquin Roundtable celebrated Dorothy Parker's birth. Where did her acid-tongued wit come from? Who knows? But it amused me to read that as a young girl she was tossed out of Catholic school for referring to the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion."
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Thanks, Jen!
Today is my friend and former employee Jennifer Goff's 30th birthday. As she's a theater person, (as well as a terrific writer and all-round smart-as-hell person), she included the following quote on her Facebook page. I don't know about you, but it sure rings true for me.
"My life has a superb cast, but I can't figure out the plot." - Ashleigh Brilliant
"My life has a superb cast, but I can't figure out the plot." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Creating Memories
My friend Warren recently introduced me to Clay Primrose, a smart, thoughtful guy who recently moved down here from Austin with his wife Jennifer. Apparently they've been hosting a Friday night "salon" for interested friends and acquaintances for a number of years, first in Austin and now here. What began as a weekly reminder to attendees has now become a much-anticipated weekly post Clay writes and distributes to an ever-growing circle of fans. This past week's entry, which in part references a full-moon gathering I attended, is something I thought well worth sharing.
Five good guys, wine, Chinese food, full moon, firepit, village lights across the valley, wide-ranging discussion about things that matter.
Just another Wednesday night? Could've been. But, no, this will be remembered--a memory was created.
I have a friend who always tells me that in his life, he is in the business of making great memories. And he does it--with his family, his friends, his co-workers--always looking very creatively at how it could be done.
When I first heard that, I though--that is so smart. After all, the memories are all you get to take with you at the end of your life, at the end of a day, a week, a year. You can feel rich, satisfied, fulfilled, and brimming with life--if you create great memories.
You can feel destitute, unsatisfied, meaningless and without a life--if you don't create them. And that may be true even if a person has a ton of dough and is covered up with possessions and apparent accomplishment.
A great memory does not require money and possessions and accomplishment to be created.
But it does require some intentional thought and real engagement and paying attention to the things that truly matter to you.
Five good guys, wine, Chinese food, full moon, firepit, village lights across the valley, wide-ranging discussion about things that matter.
Just another Wednesday night? Could've been. But, no, this will be remembered--a memory was created.
I have a friend who always tells me that in his life, he is in the business of making great memories. And he does it--with his family, his friends, his co-workers--always looking very creatively at how it could be done.
When I first heard that, I though--that is so smart. After all, the memories are all you get to take with you at the end of your life, at the end of a day, a week, a year. You can feel rich, satisfied, fulfilled, and brimming with life--if you create great memories.
You can feel destitute, unsatisfied, meaningless and without a life--if you don't create them. And that may be true even if a person has a ton of dough and is covered up with possessions and apparent accomplishment.
A great memory does not require money and possessions and accomplishment to be created.
But it does require some intentional thought and real engagement and paying attention to the things that truly matter to you.
1,000-Year-Old Cactus
Last month I hung out with my friend Charles down in Oaxaca. While there, we visited their botanical garden, which contains specimens of nearly every native plant that grows in the state of Oaxaca. The prize plant: a barrel cactus they rescued from a highway project just out of town. It stood a little bit taller than me and was greeted by a near unanimous "Holy shit!"
Mutation or Miracle??
Last week I bought a dozen eggs, every one of which had double yolks. Hyper-fertile hen? In vitro fertilization gone haywire? The end of the Mayan calendar? Totally weird, but resulted in a damned good, vein-clogging omelet. Yummm!!!
