From Xico

Goodbye, gentle Jocko

Jocko was with us for a little over six years. You can read about how he came to live with us here and here.

 

Last October Jim and I noticed that Jocko had a somewhat swollen belly and otherwise seemed thinner even after we had given him is anti-parasite medicine. We first took him to Liliana, a good general practitioner veterinarian in Coatepec, a gentle woman, tall and slender, with careful, capable hands.  She looked Jocko over and palpated his belly, Then, sadly, and softly, said that he didn't have more than a couple of weeks left.  All we could do was to make his last days as comfortable and pleasant as possible.  

But lo and behold, he was still doing okay a couple of weeks later, still coming to the door to walk with us, now and then prancing a bit, eating voraciously.  Maybe, just maybe....So we decided to ask for a second opinion.  We brought him down to see Marco Antonio Pérez Cortez, a friend and the senior veterinarian in our area.  We had hoped he wouldn't, but we were not terribly surprised when he confirmed that Jocko had very little time left. "But, but..." I said. "He eats so well, he eats so much.  He has a wonderful appetite. I thought people with cancer lost their appetites."  "No," said Marco Antonio. The tumor is a ravenous being.  You are feeding the cancer." There was no denying the changes in his belly where delicate blue veins traced new paths along his pale, pink skin to the tumor. Marco Antonio mentioned the kind of cancer he was pretty sure Jocko had and also told us the only thing we could do was make him as comfortable as we could, do what he liked, feed him food he liked, not bother him with things he didn't like.  He prescribed Prednisone and with a sad shrug gave him days to a couple of weeks. 

Amazingly, Jocko survived until the beginning of February, more than three months.  Slowly, slowly he lost strength, but he continued to seem content.  He came with us for walks until a few days before he died.  In the last month or so, we confined them to an easy path along a river near our house.

Here are some pictures from that walk. 

 

Jocko 

 

This is the only house on the walk, right at the end of the road before it turns into a narrow path. Jocko used to like to stop here and wait for the two black dogs who lived there to come down to see him.  

The path ends at a rock-strewn shore along the river.  Here is our dog Happy making her way across the rocks.

Daisy Maisy (also known as Little Guy) is fearless.  You can see here that she is very short.

Not to be outdone by the dogs, Jim goes further than any of them. 

 

Rita and Daisy on the return walk. 

The bright red stem of a plant along the way.

Marco Antonio had said we would know when it was time to have him put to sleep.  How? How on earth will we know?  Finally Jocko couldn't stand without Jim helping him, hung his head, made soft, sad sounds. Was no more than skin covering bones. There was no mystery to it after all. Marco Antonio and Maty, his wife and also a vet, came out to our house on Monday morning.  Jocko was lying on the floor. We had tried to warm him because the weather had been chilly for a number of days, but he didn't want to get on a blanket or a pad. Perhaps he was feverish and the cool of the tiles felt good to him.  

Jocko seemed calm and ready as they prepared their injections, a tranquilizer and the toxic dose of pain medication.  Jim said he looked as if he knew what was happening and didn't mind.  Maty agreed. 

And it was over, quietly and, I hope, painlessly.  We buried him in the backyard next to Cosi.

 

 

Jocko, we love you.

 

 

 

 

 

A Demonstration in Our Neighborhood

The buses in our area are privately owned but supposedly regulated by the government of the state.  Recently Autobuses Excelsior had planned to raise fares from Xico to points in the mountains west of Xico, heading into Cofre de Perote  and away from Xalapa. Excelsior is the only company covering those routes.  An agreement had been reached between the government, the Movimiento Social Campesino de las Faldas del Cofre de Perote and Excelsior to establish rates considerably lower than what the company wanted: the highest fare would be 25 pesos (about $1.80) instead of the 40 pesos (about $3.00) Excelsior was planning.  

When there was no evidence that this agreement would be enforced, campesinos decided to demonstrate by closing the road between Coatepec and Xico. They included a demand that another bus line be able to provide services at a lower rate to encourage competition.The routes they were concerned about serve a largely rural population of farmers and small shopkeepers and herders, not rich people by any stretch, so even the fare of 25 pesos is steep. An average minimum wage for the area might be at best around 90 pesos a day, or $6.79.  It is lower than that for the many people who work in the informal economy.

Demonstrators show their banner and posters in the photo above.

Jim and I became aware of the demonstration because we had to drive the very definitely back road to Coatepec on one of the days. The demonstrators let emergency vehicles through in case you were worried. And after two days, they did get attention and the lower rates they sought. 

On this map the red marker indicates Matlalapa, close to the end of the bus line.Los Pocitos is a little further. You can tell the roads aren't exactly major.

The demonstrators were peaceful, but as someone noted, most of the campesinos wore their machetes. They always do.  If you look closely, you may be able to spot one in the photo below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Worrying and the Value of History

Note: I cut and pasted the segment staring with "As Voltaire memorably remarked".  The underlined pieces of text from that point on are therefore not live links.

Richard Feynman, mentioned below, was a theoretical physicist. Look him up in Wikipedia via this link. Not only should he not be forgotten, he should be enjoyed. And while you're at it, do lookup Brainpickings.

In the wonderful newsletter called Brainpickings(www.brainpickings.org) there appeared today an article called Big Thinkers on the Only Things Worth Worrying About. There are snippets from a variety of Big Thinkers", and much presented ruefully, because worry is endemic to our species.  One particular segment caught my eye because the writer talks passionately about the importance of reading about HISTORY which of course I agree with. She talks about 'presentism', the tendency these days to dismiss the past as irrelevant and the consequences, grave indeed, of doing so. She includes a quote from Noga Arikha.

 "As Voltaire memorably remarked, “Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” Without appreciation for the Feynmans of the past we duly don our presentism blinders and refuse to acknowledge the fact that genius is a timeless quality that belongs to all ages, not a cultural commodity of the present. Many of our present concerns have been addressed with enormous prescience in the past, often providing more thoughtful and richer answers than we are able to today, whether it comes to the value of space exploration or the economics of media or the essence of creativity or even the grand question of how to live.  Having “living heroes” is an admirable aspiration, but they should never replace — only enhance and complement — the legacy and learnings of those who came before.  Below is a tiny piece 

"Indeed, this presentism bias is precisely what Noga Arikha, historian of ideas and author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, points to as her greatest worry in one of the most compelling answers. It’s something I’ve voiced as well in a recent interview with the Guardian. Arikha writes:

´I worry about the prospect of collective amnesia.While access to information has never been so universal as it is now — thanks to the Internet — the total sum of knowledge of anything beyond the present seems to be dwindling among those people who came of age with the Internet. Anything beyond 1945, if then, is a messy, remote landscape; the centuries melt into each other in an insignificant magma. Famous names are flickers on a screen, their dates irrelevant, their epochs dusty. Everything is equalized.'

"She points to a necessary antidote to this shallowing of our cultural hindsight:"

'There is a way out: by integrating the teaching of history within the curricula of all subjects—using whatever digital or other means we have to redirect attention to slow reading and old sources. Otherwise we will be condemned to living without perspective, robbed of the wisdom and experience with which to build for the future, confined by the arrogance of our presentism to repeating history without noticing it.'

 

 

 

 

A Bit about Avocadoes

Foto copied from La Jornada, 10 febrero 2013. Photographer is Alejandro Pavón.

Avocadoes are my favorite fruit. I try to have a ripe one available every day.  I like them really ripe, so that they are smushy when I squeeze them gently.  Then I can spread them on tortillas or bread, whatever. I like sandwiches with smushed avocado, tomatoes, onions and sometimes a touch of something hot like hummus with chipotle, a Mexican hummua variant. Sometimes I put in some cold sliced chicken or maybe a piece of a fish filet.  Also, smushy avocado is an excellent mayonnaise substitute.  AND you can top off almost anything with a couple of slices. 

One product that boomed in Mexico because of Nafta is avocadoes.  In 15 years, the production has multiplied almost 200 times because of access to the US market where  the taste for avocadoes has  also been growing, in good part thanks to the presence of Mexican-Americans or Mexicans in the US who not only eat themselves but have awakened gringos to their voluptuous wonderfulness. Although the US has imported 83% of available avocadoes, they are not alone. Japan, Canada, Russia, Ukraine and China are starting to eat them.  This is a link to an article in today's La Jornada with this and more avocado information.

The state of Michoacan is the number one producer of avocadoes and many people have been able to profit from them.  

In our colonia, I know of  three avocado trees.  One is next door to our other house.  It produces a small fruit and the leaves which are used to make polvo de aguacate, avocado powder, which is used in cooking beans, among other things.  One is located in an alley up the street.  That one produces tons of avocadoes which all rot on the ground.  For some unknown reason, the tree's owner won't let anyone take them.  The third is in front of our house.  It has been "growing" for eight years, but has never managed to produce fruit.  By now it should have given us a couple of harvests, but we don't spray it for pests of any kind.  My philosophy as a gardener is basically if it can't survive on its own, then that's too bad.  This tree has survived but not thrived.

 

 

Mexico and Detroit, Diego Rivera and the Fords

In an effort to deal with bankruptcy, it had been proposed that Detroit sell its fabulous art collection to meet city pension fund obligations of roughly 800 million dollars.  I wrote about this here  and provided an update link here. More recently, at the end of January, private funds and government sources had come up with pledges that come close to the 800 million dollars needed for the pension fund so that it would not be necessary to sell the art.  A BBC article provides vivid reminder of just what not having a pension fund would mean.  This would be a cruel bind, a killing blow to the city’s retired workers. It would be hard to justify keeping the art if it turned retired city workers into paupers.  

Part of the plan would turn the museum over to a private not-for-proft organization instead of continuing as city property, thus, hopefully, saving it from being a pawn in future municipal budget difficulties. None of this is certain yet.  But it is a promising start.  If it succeeds, I hope the Institute will expand its reach into Detroit communities, so that it becomes a living presence which all kinds of citizens can be part of. 

I knew nothing about the Institute until I realized that among its most valuable treasures was a huge mural created by Diego Rivera the famous Mexican muralist, called Detroit Industry.  Far from being hoity toity art, this mural is a passionate and beautiful portrayal of working Detroit. I haven’t seen the original, but even online it is impossible that it not draw you in.

Today’s economic situation in Detroit is not altogether different from what it was during The Great Depression when Diego Rivera created the mural.  And the mural reveals roots of today’s crisis.  In some subsequent posts, I’ll talk about this as well as about Mexican connections and about how art and our lives really do go together.