From Xico

What Do We Want When We Want That Place Called Home -- A Bit of a Ramble

Roger Cohen talks about the melancholy tug of place in his column today.  He starts out:

This is just one story among many, with its measure of joy and tragedy, and I recount these events not because I find anything exceptional in them but rather because I believe the pain of displacement amounts to a modern pathology.

He goes on to describe his own beginnings in South Africa where his mother was born and is commemorated and his grandparents and great grandfather are buried. He talks of his own roots there, the pull of place, his finally feeling at home in New York which he now has to leave for London.  And he speaks of what he sees as a general longing for place which he finds our technological world tends to ignore at best.

I grew up in NYC and spent many summers in Woodstock, NY (before it was Woodstock -- when it was a town with local people, an art school and colony, and weekend visitors.And when lots of people still had outhouses and pumps in their kitchen sinks) And I spent two summers in the Poconos of Pennsylvania as an apprentice in a summer stock company and two summers in Maine, near Skowhegan, as a camp counselor. It is mountainy country places like these in the Northeast which most pull at my heart. When I went to Uganda in the Peace Corps in the mid 1960s, we lived again in a verdant, mountainous place, a mix of the familiar and strange: winding roads, large trees, ploughed fields, and bananas all over, and red dirt, and dark faces and houses made of mud with tin rooves and cows in our yard and flowers, brilliant flowers which grew on trees. It awoke a painful nostalgia in me. At first I wanted to go home and move to Woodstock or some place like it and just have a small house and teach school and be AT home.  The familiar echoes in our surroundings made me feel further away than if everything had been foreign.

But as time passed, where we lived in Uganda blended into my sense of home so that when we returned to the States, to Minnesota, for graduate school, all I wanted was to go back to Uganda if I couldn't go to the Northeast, which seemed a highly unlikely possibility.

I never moved either back to Uganda which crashed into the most hideous circumstances imaginable, nor did I move back to the Northeast.  We moved from Minneapolis to Missouri.  Sometimes I drove east to visit my parents and my kids who, of all things, went to eastern colleges and now live in Boston, and I would start to cry as I got close.  Even more ironically, my first husband the Californian now lives outside Boston with his wife, the Texan because that's where they went for work.

Weirdly, I married another West Coast man who actually went to the same University my ex did and who was in the Peace Corps.  He isn't overly fond of my view of the Northeast as heaven.  Together we moved, for his job to San Antonio, TX, anything but eastern in flavor.  And weirdly for a person who craves the green of the Northeast, I really liked San Antonio and the often dry countryside nearby.

It was from San Antonio that we started to travel to Mexico.  The very first time we came to Xalapa and I felt the cool, misty rains of November on my face, and we road buses through the countryside, I told Jim it's where I could live if he couldn't live in the Northeast.  I didn't mean it all that seriously then.  But we kept coming back to visit, and it is the old ties that bind me here to our corner of Mexico: ties from Uganda and the Northeast that pulled.  Coffee and ploughed fields and bananas and winding roads and green hills and snow-capped mountains.  And people. And I start to realize it's not just the rural ties that pull, but the ties from my Bronx Jewish childhood: holding my grandmother's hand while she, in the other, carried her shopping bag or pulled her cart down the sidewalk amidst lots of other people doing the same, stopping in the butcher where meat hung on hooks and the vegetable store where produce tumbled out of crates.  Arguing with the owners who knew her name.  People sitting out on folding chairs, hanging out, yakking and kvetching. It always took awhile to get through all the little conversations that rose and fell as we passed through the courtyard of her apartment building.  Apartment buildings: not houses with yards all around.  Here, houses are mostly built right next to each other, like apartment buildings, edges right on the sidewalks.

It's not Woodstock or the Bronx here, but nothing ever could be, certainly not Woodstock which has become a colony for rich city people, as far as I can tell, and for rich arty types who can live there full time nor for the Bronx, which has fallen on hard times, I think, from which it struggles to recover. It's not so terrible not to be able to go back. People have always moved, as did Roger Cohen's grandparents and parents and Roger himself.  The people of  Africa, the people there before the Europeans, they migrated all over the place.  Here in Mexico, the Aztecs who created an empire started as wanderers from the north.

Roger Cohen closes his column this way:

 

"And now I move on again to Europe to continue this column from there. For me, it is also a return to something deep and unresolved.

"Reading James Salter’s haunting novel “A Sport and a Pastime,” full of the twinned formality and sensuality of France, I encountered this passage:

“'Life is composed of certain basic elements,” he says. “Of course, there are a lot of impurities, that’s what’s misleading. ... What I’m saying may sound mystical, but in everybody, Ame, in all of us, there’s the desire to find those elements somehow ...'

"Technology is wondrous but also multiplies the 'impurities.' In the end we must go back to the things — birth, death, love and beauty — that spoke to me on that South African plateau. And we must each discover and render the elemental in our own lives."

What I think Cohen is saying, is that we have to rediscover ourselves as flesh and blood, as coming from the earth...as living creatures dependent on a living planet.

This is what I think we have found, more or less, where we live in Mexico.  I like the shabbiness, the lived-in quality, the animals that share our landscape, the air that moves through the windows and brushes my skin, the people everywhere. There are so many sad parts about this alive place, suffering is not hidden. There are deaths on our street.  Here people are laid out in their houses and you know always what has happened.  Life is hard.  I wanted to run from this, too, for awhile. But now I don't.

Now it's home.

I think in the US the tendency to confine life to measurements, to try to learn how to live by reading survey results, to determine one's life course by following advice for living longer, for rather than just doing the living,  to experience adventure through video games, to build monstrous machines to eke out a last few moments of life, to spend one's work life in a cubby in a building where the windows don't open, to buy one's food in packages and fear the fresh stuff....living like this makes us yearn for home.

 

 

 

 

 

Immigration and Global Warming, Deficits, Unemployment Taxes and Healthcare, etc. etc.

I tried not to rise to the bait proffered so generously by the anti-immigrant nazis in their responses to today's New York Times editorial about the federal judge in Arizona blocking most of the new law's harmful aspects. I managed to resist a useless effort in the comments section which would probably achieve nothing.  But having once thought that the anti-immigrant nazis must be a minority in the country, I'm really beginning to wonder.  Apparently the Democrats are afraid of addressing immigration in a somewhat reasonable if somewhat harsh-to-immigrants fashion because of the upcoming elections.  Just how strong is the anti-immigrant crowd in the US? 

For that matter, how powerful are the anti-global warming forces; the idiots who don't understand why taxes are important, at least on the rich; old folks who bask in Medicare but want the government out of healthcare; people who can't think their way through a simple arithmetic problem let alone the economic problems facing the country, etc. etc.? If these forces win in November, truly, what will happen to the country and the world?

What to do?

New Blog Design

The new photo serving as banner for this blog is one I took in Parque Benito Juárez in Xalapa's centro.  As my husband pointed out, this blog is called "From Xico," and that while I post a lot of non-Xico stuff, you'd think the banner at least would have a picture of Xico.  My arguments are as follows:  

1.  Per David Town, Xalapa is merely part of the Greater Xico Metroplex.
2. The balloon seller touched my heart.  He was an older man, formally dressed, sad and contemplative and patient.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Hospice medical care for dying patients : The New Yorker

Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying... continue reading here.

via www.newyorker.com

EVERYONE should read this moving and very important article by Atul Gawande.

Crowded spaces

As I've mentioned before, we live in a noisy place.  Noises from the street: buses, vendors with amplified tunes or sales pitches (Homemaker, let us do the work for you: we bring the freshest tortillas, still warm...). Radios and boom boxes.  Dogs barking (including our own).  Burros braying in their always-melancholy way.  The pigs in the criadora behind our neighbors' house squealing in complaint when they are bathed and in fear when they are led to the truck taking them to their slaughter. 

Even without humans, it would be noisy here, visually as well as for the ears.  Especially in the rainy season, life tumbles over itself, plants push and shove against each other slurping up water, birds sing and cackle and scold, insects hum and click and buzz, butterflies crowd each other, caterpillars devour and move on and water roars perpetually.  In the dryer months of the year, the sound of the waterfall recedes to the background.  Now, in this year of abundant rain, it is the sound of a multi-engine freight train.  But sometimes the rain slams around us with such force it drowns out the sound of the waterfall.  The night before last, it rained so hard and so long that today, two days later, our falls are still broad and white and extremely powerful.

A photo from yesterday afternoon.  Not much different this morning.

 

Yesterday around noon we took the dogs down to the bridge to go for a walk down the path we usually walk down before we go for our run, but it had turned into a stream.  We crossed back over the bridge and went down the other side. It was soggy and lush and noisy, too, with cicadas the noisiest, except for the water. Here are some photos of what we saw.

 

 

 

Usually peaceful and small as it makes its way around rocks, the river has turned into a torrent, obliterating everything in its path.  

 

The dam in dryer times is very visible and with parts not covered by water at all.  You can usually walk part way across it.  Now it is hidden.

Today, the day after our walk, the morning is bright and sunny as it was yesterday morning.  Last night it only drizzled a bit, enough to create drapes of fog on Acamalín. Sunny mornings are deceptive.  It could storm tonight again, enough to wake the gods.

  

  
   
 

Scientific Reconstruction of Ancient Woman Found in Mexico Suggests Diverse Migration

Today's News

via www.artdaily.org

This is an interesting article. The variety of appearances of people in Mexico is enormous.

The real numbers on illegal immigration : The New Yorker

When the topic is illegal immigration, some of our political leaders reliably produce more heat than light. On April 28th, in a letter to President Obama, seventeen members of Congress, most of them from the Southwest, demanded immediate action to increase border security, noting that “violence in the vicinity of the U.S.-Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate.” Two days earlier, Senator John McCain, of Arizona, in a floor speech defending his state’s newly passed law requiring local officers to investigate individuals’ immigration status, described “an unsecured border between Arizona and Mexico, which has led to violence, the worst I have ever seen.” He went on to cite numbers for illegal immigrants apprehended last year “that stagger.”

via www.newyorker.com

Democracy doesn't work when it is controlled by demagogues and when citizens can't tell the difference (or don't want to) between demagoguery and facts.

Clausura de fin de cursos: Areli

This past week marked the end of the school year in Mexico.  It also was a time of clausuras for a number of children in our neighborhood.  Clausura is the term used here for graduation, and it means closing in the sense of completion of, for instance, high school, and and also closing ceremony. Right in our corner of the colonia, there were three people who finished secondary school, one who finished her bachillerato, the level after secondary school, and one little guy who finished kinder -- the two years before primaria.  We went to the ceremony for Areli who finished her bachillerato, the three years post-secondary school which prepares kids for higher education, and to her party.We also went to her party and the others' parties, too.  Areli, whom I've written about on the blog before, has decided she wants to be called Areli, her middle name, rather than Blanca.  

When I first got to know Areli, she was a sad child of 13 who had threatened never to go back to school after a bout with the flu. She had been at the receiving end of bullying because she came from one of the poorest homes in the community, had no extended family here and, perhaps the crowning blow, was extremely bright.  After managing to test out of all secondary school requirements except math, she ended up transferring to the somewhat bigger and less intensely local school in San Marcos for her bachillerato.  She is now a lovely 18 year old who has just graduated from the bachillerato program in San Marcos and is going to start training to teach in an underserved rural area as part of a program that is like perhaps a combination of Vista and Teach for America in the US.  She will serve for a year, possibly two, supported by the community she is assigned to with the government providing her with a scholarship for university or other study when she has finished. 

So we went to the clausura as her invited guests while her mother stayed home to prepare the post-ceremony fiesta.  We took pictures so Doña Viki, Areli's mom, and Rosa, her younger sister, and other guests at the post-ceremony fiesta  could get a good idea of what happened.  

Below you see the opening ceremonies in the large covered space which serves the San Marcos schools for ceremonies and sports.  On the left are the students in the lower levels of the bachillerato program; at the back you see some of the white-covered chairs awaiting the graduates with faculty behind them; to the right are some of the family and friends.  

 

The color guard and the singing of the national anthem.

 

The graduates enter.  Areli is third young woman from the right among those entering.  As  you can see, they are all dressed in shades of purple and lavender, a bit distorted on the screen I suspect, formal and semi-formal dresses for the young women, ties and shirts for the young men. No robes here.  They come in to slowish dance music and walk in rhythm and in step.

 

The school's dance group presented two different dances.  The first, a melange of music from the fifties to the present.  They dropped their skirts at one point to dance in shorts of a modest length. Shorts are quite new here.  Tight clothes aren't.  But somehow modesty prevails for most of the girls even when they wear tight pants and low-cut tops.

      

The second dance had an indigenous flavor.
 

Areli in the second row, middle, smiling.

 

Areli was a member of a singing group at the school that blossomed over her time there.  At this point, it not only performs at the school but in regional competitions.

 

The speakers' and honored guests' dais, at the front of the ceremonies.  The speeches stressed the need to work hard for family, community and country.  Some points included the importance of not giving up in the face of adversity because indeed there would be adversity. And counter to that, the fact that hope was the best defense against adversity.  One of my favorite parts was when a speaker said that the students were never alone because they were surrounded and supported by all of history and only had to look around to find Socrates and Jesus and Leonardo and a whole bunch of other people who could provide them with comfort and guidance and ideas and hope.

 

If you look hard, you can see that AREli is getting her diploma.  Another student is walking towards her comadre -- her sponsor who presents her with flowers and sometimes a gift and escorts her to have her picture taken and then back to her seat.  

 
 At the end of the ceremony, the graduates perform a dance.  This is true of every graduating class in every school, I think.  Here Areli is with her novio Valente.

 

After the ceremony, we went back to Areli's house for the party.  More on parties later.
 

 
 
  
 

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David MitchellI was sucked into this book the way I remember being sucked into books when I was young. It is like a 19th century novel updated to current tastes, but not completely: it is very talky as old novels are. But I liked that. It has one fairly gruesome thread which may offend some people. The main characters especially are fully developed and complicated and nuanced. The hero is a true hero, though a quiet one, as is the heroine.

I should add that it takes place at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century mostly off Nagasaki.  Mitchell handles these historical cultures without  (as far as I can tell) resorting to stereotypes. 

Portrayals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, replite with filth and smells and dirty bodies, are, I expect pretty accurate.  I like having characters who are so richly drawn and so unAmerican in their hygiene.  But even more important is the rich humanity, complexity, duplicity and sometimes cruelty of these representatives of such disparate cultures as the Dutch, the English and the Japanese.

Small Things Completely Revised

Around noon last Saturday Jim and I and the dogs went down to wander around the ruins the Canadian had left.   We tramped through heavy, humid air under a deep blue sky  which billowing clouds were just beginning to  impinge on as they seeped over the ridges and peaks surrounding us.   Our skin was slick with sweat even though we didn’t feel particularly warm.  Sometimes a burst of flower perfume would penetrate the warm earthy smell that is so omnipresent that I have to stop and think to notice it.

As winter drifts into the dry heat of April and May it’s easy to forget how overpoweringly, densely tropical (well, neotropical) this place becomes.  Our colonia is a village in a rural settomg: houses and beneficios and stores and people and chickens and cattle and geese and roads and cars and coffee and bananas and in April and May, dust. But now, a month into the rainy season, life crowds us, even in our garden. Guillermo takes his machete and hacks without mercy at ferns and hibiscus, bougainvillea and arrowroot and ginger and roses and the big-leafed plants Jim favors. They are pushing shoots up again the next day.

Down along the little river where the Canadian tried to build his shrine to hemorrhoids, vines clambering over each other, a tangle of grasses.   A kaleidescope of leaves. Flowers. Rot underfoot and  fungi dotting the ground as delicate mushrooms or draping in scallops and ripples over dead bark.  And of course, insects.  This is a feast beyond gluttony for the insects.  Everywhere I look, they are feeding silently, incessantly . T The plants are greedy, too.  New buds and leaves overwhelm their predecessors skeletons.

  

The dogs scamper and stop to sniff, lick water from muddy puddles, slip down to the river’s edge, flop into the water and bound back.  I follow Jim.  He is the guide, I the student. He says insects are starting to  develop an affinity for him.

 

 

He can see caterpillars and insects that are invisible to me without his pointing them out.  They are not shy, retiring types, hiding in the colors o their hosts.  How could I miss them? 

The white with a black fringe in the picture at the right is called perrito in Mexico.  It looks like a fuzzy little   puppy.  In San Antonio, it was called an asp, which sounds more appropriately sinister to me. Sometimes it is known as a puss caterpillar or a southern flannel caterpillar.  it seems to yearn for me to stroke it, but I don't.  It is definitely dangerous and can cause not only a painful contact rash, but can cause generalized illness.  This one appears to be eating a smaller, thinner caterpillar.

The bristly fellow in the picture of leaf skeletons above seen below up close:

This one was on our car tire:

 

Below a spider in his rather interesting web.  The more traditional web can be seen outside the white mat the spider sits on.  the spider is camouflaged by his web.

 

As you can see, life is creeping back on the wall that the Canadian gouged out on the upper level.

A creature camouflaged by nature and also bad photography.  

This is a mysterious thing, and I really regret the photo isn't sharper:

 A cocoon:

We wandered back to the almost-invisible road.  The dogs were glad.

They headed for the water.

 

 
This is the furthest Giaco has ever gone in water.

Floribundia hanging over the stream:

    

This is a picture of a plant producing leaves.  I thought the buds were insects at first.

Cosi and some furled giant morning glories:

 

There was so much more.  This is enough for now.   It has been raining heavily.  Our falls looked like this yesterday through a telescoped lense.

 
 and from our balcony with a non-telescoped lense: