The Price of Wafers and Wine

Let’s go back two decades to the days of the Fox Administration.

In Mexico, being a madrina or padrino doesn’t have the gravitas that it might over in El Otro Lado. Godparents can come in multiples with varying responsibilities, like paying for the wine, the candles, clothing, even the goat sacrificed for birria at a rite of passage. It’s not a pledge to provide lifelong counsel and guidance.

That afternoon we bought first Communion dresses for Maria’s twin daughters. She has worked for my family since before her daughters were born, and her husband has worked for my family long before that.

I knew she was hesitant to ask me to be a madrina, so I brought up the topic myself.  “You can buy one dress, and your sister can buy the other,” she remarked.  I wanted the girls to have their first Communion before they grew any taller and the dresses more expensive. 

How much should first Communion dress cost? Not having the first clue, I asked around what price range would be appropriate for folks of Maria’s social status and where the best deals could be had. While I didn’t want to be cheap, I didn’t want to overspend either. I’d heard about too many gringos who ended up paying more for the honor of being a madrina or padrino than they paid for their own celebrations.

Should I simply give Maria the money, or should I go with her to buy the dresses?  “Go with them, and make it a special occasion,” the trusted friend instructed. Shopping is high on my list of life’s pleasures, but I was not looking forward to this experience.

Setting off for downtown Morelia in a taxi that afternoon, just so we wouldn’t have to deal with parking, I brought along just a little more money than I’d budgeted, leaving my credit card at home. Exiting the cab, I reminded myself that this adventure was going to cost me the price of a new pair of Ferragamos.

The twin Marias announced that they didn’t want to dress alike for this occasion.

Our first stop was at a store recommended by an economical friend. Dresses, gorgeous dresses that could’ve made it to the pages of Town & Country, made to order, were $550 MXN ($55 USD) each, but I could have a 20% discount if I bought two. And while only one dress the girls’ size was in stock, another could be readied in a day or two. Maria practically fainted when she heard the price. I liked the dresses for their elegant simplicity, plain linen-like fabric with a single flower at the waist, even though they didn’t have the pearls and lace that usually mark first Communion dresses around here, but it was clear that my crew didn’t think the dresses were fancy enough.

We headed down the street to an area lined with store after store selling dresses and chazerei for baptisms, juvenile brides of Christ, quinceañeras,  and brides of living humans. I spied a pair of socks with ribbons, lace and pearls, and we made our first purchase.

Two more stores later, the girls find the dresses they like. $250 MXN ($25 USD) each, so I’m not complaining. I think the dresses are simply awful – lace spaghetti straps, satin bodice, a tulle skirt, and a tulle shawl. The store has two alike, and the girls now announce that they want matching dresses. 

“Are you sure, absolutely sure that these are first Communion dresses?” I ask, startled at bare arms. I am assured that these dresses are perfectly appropriate. Oh well, I’m not going to be wearing these dresses. 

Now to find the corona, veil, and a kit containing the candle, missal and little bag, essentials, they insisted and which I knew nothing about.  Two more stores later, we find suitable headgear. Nixing the little pearl crowns that I like, the girls settle on veils gathered by an arrangement of white flowers.  It’s their day, and whatever they want, they’re going to get.  But finally I have my way, and we add white lace gloves that reached above the elbow.

“Oh, they don’t need gloves,” Maria tells me. I insist that the girls need some showing of modesty with the dresses they picked out.

Now for shoes. They can’t wear those tennis shoes with a nice dress, so we look for white shoes that can be worn later. Two more stores, and Zapateria 3 Hermanos has some nice ones, leather Mary Janes with white embroidery on sale for 55 pesos ($5.50 USD). And they had two pairs in the girls’ size.

The outfits are complete. We didn’t buy the pearl-festooned satin dresses with puffed sleeves and crinolines that I’d imagined, but the girls and their mother ended up with what they wanted.  And that was all that mattered.

Feeling very much like my own grandmother when she used to take me shopping, buying me whatever kind of clothing I wanted without asking any questions and insisting upon one supplemental item she wanted me to have, I announced that it was time for a snack. And to celebrate old times, at least in my mind, there was no finer way to conclude a shopping trip, and, since there was no department store tea room like days gone by when I’d gone shopping with my grandmother, we headed to Woolworth, where I’d remembered that the former Templo de San Juan de Dios housed a café and soda fountain that offered up burgers and fancy desserts. Of course, it turned out that the café had been closed for years, now harboring the store’s electronics department.

Passing through the Catedral, which the girls had never seen, we headed for the portales, settling down in front of the Hotel Casino restaurant, now known as LU. Sensing that the girls had never ordered from a menu, I instructed them to read it and tell the waiter their choices: strawberry malts and French fries. The waiter played along with us, the tunas serenaded us, and the girls could hardly contain their fascination. You would’ve thought they were in New York City.

And our budget?  Well, we came in at more than 50% under what I’d anticipated.  Two girls had been outfitted for the first Communion at less than half the price of a pair of Ferragamos – or for less than 45 minutes of psychotherapy. (Ferragamo Varas were selling for about $180 USD retail back then.)

 I only thought my work as madrina was done and over with. The next week, Maria reminded me that I’m supposed to meet with the priest to go over my responsibilities as the godmother before the mass. What? Quickly, I looked up something in Canon Law which says something like “Under no circumstances are Jews allowed to be godparents,” printed it, put it in a sealed envelope, and sent it on to the priest.

At the post-Communion comida, the priest leans over to me and tells me that I could’ve been a godmother at that mass if I hadn’t sent him that note. After all, the parroquia where we live is one that doesn’t pay much heed to the rules. There’s one of those in every city, the kind of place illegitimate births get full-fledged and legitimate recognition, where there’s no waiting time to marry, where one priest openly lived with the mother of his son, and where there’s an exception to every rule and where rules are made to be broken.  Still, I was happy to dodge that bullet.

The girls didn’t want to be quinceañeras, and that came as a huge relief.

The next public ceremony I would attend for the girls would be over at the university, when both received their degrees in architecture and accounting. They’re on their own now, and their parents still work for me. I guess I did something right.

Looking for Oscar Zeta Acosta?

Back in the days of practicing law, in another century and in another country not my own, all of the juvenile court players from the social workers to the lawyers and all the way up to the district associate judge would gather for a relaxed lunch and conversation at a local diner, sometimes even a tavern, on the monthly juvenile court day. One participant was known for initiating dinner party games like one requiring each person to name something that should be in everyone’s refrigerator. He seemed to think that every refrigerator had a jar of mayonnaise and pickles. I thought everyone kept celery and variety of nuts, maybe some sesame oil, on hand at all times.  That wasn’t the only thing we failed to agree upon, and the exercise was harmless but memorable.

Last week, I approached the transfer of contents from the old side-by-side refrigerator to the new one with more than a little trepidation.

My refrigerator and freezer are like an archeological dig. You just never know what lurks behind the lettuce, berries, edamame, and frozen planks of salmon snared on sale stashed away.

Still-sealed Quaker instant grits, an unopened jar of cheap black Romanoff lumpfish caviar, and saffron reposed there. Only the latter is mine, and some still housed in a glass jar, the kind prescription drugs used to come in, from a trip to Spain in 1985. Of course, all of that went right back into the new refri. There is some stuff you just can’t throw away. After all, the grits and caviar were my mother’s, and she died only 27 years ago.

I tried to give the grits to a Tzurumútarense friend, a connoisseur of all things Southern and Confederate, but he graciously declined. And he wasn’t about to touch the caviar. It just doesn’t seem right to dump either in the trash, and, rather than overthink the situation, it’s a good bet that both will go right back on the back shelf for another few years. But then I could set them out on the sidewalk, where stuff disappears within minutes.

Let’s see what treasures I encountered:

• Dried Italian chestnuts purchased sometime during the Zedillo Administration. I’m not sure what they were doing in the refrigerator, because I don’t think even the hungriest rodent would touch them. Maybe I’ll use them this year, just like “next year in Jerusalem.”

• I must stop buying pine nuts, or at least start using them. Like a child of the depression, I fear a life without piñones.

• No less than four packages of Harina P.A.N in three iterations, yellow, white, and integral, imported from Venezuela and Colombia for arepas.

• Amid the variety of marijuana products: weed-infused mezcal, cannabis cream for inside the body and out, chocolate edibles with and without sugar, and weed in its natural state. But somehow that half brownie the freezer had harbored since Peña Nieto was president wasn’t there. And I can’t remember consuming it.

• Coconut flour, garbanzo flour, and almond flour representing dashed keto-dreams.

• And then there’s the odd stuff: galangal, mahleb, hemp hearts,  currants, garlic confit, dried garlic, bacalao, achiote, odd iterations of coconut, gluten, arrowroot, xanthum gum, three kinds of Turkish dried chile. Enough sumac to get me through this lifetime and the next.

Over on the door, in the area presumably reserved for eggs, are drugs. Macy’s supply for the next two years, snagged from the last shipment to Mexico before they were taken off the market. Milk thistle capsules for her predecessor. Some kind of analgesic for me, injectable.

Blackberry juice, pomegranate juice, and lemon juice fill two shelves of the freezer. They’ll be gone by June.

Coming from “waste not, want not” stock is not always a good thing. Or at least it is highly overrated. While I don’t wash Ziplock bags for repeated uses, those that only held bread or something innocuous go into the freezer for future use, perhaps harboring leftover chicken bones destined to become bone broth.

If you don’t know what to do with something, throw it in the freezer. That’s been my mantra for years, and it’s not something I invented. I come from those kind of people. You know, the kind who view harboring something from the freezer bearing a sell-by date of 1982 as a virtue, the kind who think expiration dates are simply aspirational. We wear that kind of frugality as a badge of honor.  Last fall, I polished off some frozen lamb shanks bought back in 2016, and they were just as tasty as they were the day they came home from Costco. There’s still one left, and I may just break down and have that for comida this week.

More proudly, I also come from the kind of thrifty stock who has an eye for sales, even calling friends long-distance to tell them about something marked down at Costco. If you’re reading this, you know who you are. My bargains have included incredibly discounted aforementioned sous vide-cooked lamb shanks, scallops, whole turkeys, and my latest score: Barky’s collagen dog treats, marked down to 97 pesos from the mid-200s. At least the dog treats don’t have to be refrigerated and have an expiration date of 2027.

There are those who’ll fondly recite the scores of every major football game in the Big Eight or the Big Ten, the stats of whomever was at bat since Casey Stengel, and there I am, reminiscing about great bargains I’ve come upon. Just don’t get me started Frost Bro’s 1989 liquidation.

But, once again I didn’t find Oscar Zeta Acosta. (I’ll save you having to look him up. He was the Chicano lawyer, disguised as a 300-pound Samoan, who palled with Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

Strangers at the Door

It was a cold December day, a Thursday afternoon before Christmas, a few years back. Little did I know that I’d come across a tale so bizarre and so sad that it just couldn’t be made up.

As I was leaving the checkout at Costco, I ran into an elderly foreign woman I occasionally met for coffee. She was looking for the English-speaking assistant manager, thinking he could give her new-found friends, who were poor and uneducated through no fault of their own, she stressed, jobs. Never mind that they were unqualified for the most menial work at Costco.

Four days earlier, two guys from a state in Mexico every Mexican will tell you is rife with criminals, came a-knocking at the door of her house in one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods. A decade earlier they had been day labor at some house down the street, the owners having long since moved away, and now they had no place to live, no family, and no work. And it was cold outside.

So, she lets them sleep over at her house. Because it was cold outside.

But it only gets better. This lady, who is too frugal, too suspicious, to hire a maid or gardener, because they might rob her, she says, is now going to let the two homeless guys stay at her house while she and her husband go to Pennsylvania for two weeks at Christmas. Right then and there, I exploded, telling the lady this wasn’t going to end well. She was not happy with my reaction.

Did I mention that she and her husband were both in their eighties?

I debated all afternoon about what to do. Should I call her son in the United States and rat her out? Should I just mind my own business? Should I go over to her house and throw the rascals out myself?

Taking the easy route, I called her and gave her a piece of my mind. The assistant manager at Costco had told her the same thing I did, telling her she wasn’t Mother Teresa. I told her, “Look this may cost us our friendship, but I’m just going to tell you what’s what. You can’t let these strangers stay at your house. What are you thinking? Did it ever dawn on you that you’re the only non-Mexican house in your neighborhood, that you’re the only non-Spanish speakers for blocks around, and that these guys have scoped you out? Are you fucking dumb or what? I’m going to send you the address of three shelters, you’re going to print that out and give it to these nogoodniks with 200 pesos, and tell them to hit the road.”

She agrees to take my advice, but in a few days “because it’s cold outside.” I tell her that there’s no heat wave in sight and that her grave would be even colder.

I follow up with an email, telling her to change the locks on her house immediately, contract with a security company like ADT, or else cancel her trip to El Otro Lado.

“Oh, the house will be safe,” she says, because the guys were sleeping when she and her husband were sleeping, and they haven’t asked for a key to the house.

The next day, I checked back in with her. She hadn’t mentioned the albergues to the pair, since they would be moving in a few days to their vacant, for-sale penthouse apartment across from the Tec de Monterrey. They are already moving some beds up there for them. But she would ask them if they would prefer to go to a homeless shelter.

I give up.

It’s such a shame they are not educated, because education is not mandatory in Mexico, she says. I tell her it certainly is, and there are primarias abiertas, secundarias abiertas, and prepas abiertas. She is so happy that Germany now has a 12 EUR hourly minimum wage, because that means there won’t be any more poor people, and there will even be free education for illegal migrants in Germany, she tells me. “No, there is no need to change the locks, since if people got into their house, they wouldn’t be able to get out.”

“Uh, what about breaking a window? No rejas fortify this house.” I tell her that not one of her neighbors has a clue about how to contact them if their house is broken into.” No one in the entire state has their contact information in case of an emergency.

“The neighbors are all stupid,” she says, but she could give me the number in Pennsylvania. I tell her that would be waste of time, since I’m going to be away myself. It didn’t matter that when we would meet for coffee, she was vocal in her disdain for the local population, proclaiming just too loudly that everything was so cheap in this country and that anyone with a brain would be earning Euros instead of Mexican pesos, careful never to leave more than a 2-peso tip. Telling her that at least half of the people in the café spoke English didn’t stop her.

The homeless duo didn’t want to move to the vacant apartment she’d prepared, and she confessed that she didn’t give the information about shelters to the pair, because they didn’t ask for it.

A few days later, the old woman’s husband drove the homeless couple to the bus station, putting them on a bus to Puerto Vallarta.

A snowstorm up north cancelled their trip to the States.

And a few months later, when it was no longer cold outside, she and her husband were victims of a violent home invasion.

Happy Birthday, Macy!

Sometimes you get something better than you wished for.  

After Morgen died in November 2020, I sent out a search letter to those I thought might be in the know, describing the Doberman I was looking for and what I could offer in return. You know, the usual things like sleeping in the house, a warm bed, home-cooked meals, plenty of room to roam within a walled-in yard, veterinary care, vitamins, and strong moral values, all the stuff any decent dog owner would provide a beloved pack partner. While I was hoping for leads, all I got were adoption offers for abused dogs. I’m not that much of a saint.

Then the idea hit me to ask a dog trainer, so I got in touch with one of the leading trainers in Morelia, Juan Urbina, figuring he could find me the right Doberman, one fitting my specifications—a black male around 18-24 months old. He would know the right breeders, could negotiate with them better than I could, could spot potential problems, and would keep me from coming home with some dog that I fell in love with and whose missing limb or eye went unnoticed.

Wait until a about a month after Christmas, he told me, clueing me on the cost.

And then on January 5th, just before noon, I received a message from Urbina that a three-year-old red female Doberman was available, the owner was moving, and she was available now. As in right now. So, on the eve of Dia de los Reyes, I drove over to the owner’s house and met with a man named Jesus.  Of course, Jesus is a common name here in Mexico, but I mention it here, just because of the timing.

Jesus and his partner, hairdressers, told me her name was Mala. She turned out to be show dog quality with a perfect ear job who liked nothing more than jumping on people. No, they didn’t know where her papers were, and yes, she was a year behind in her vaccinations. She only ate a dish of croquetas and nothing more each evening.

And I ended up with the best Kings’ Day gift ever.

Within an hour of her arrival at my house, she made it hers. By day three, she’d decided that it was time for her to start sharing my bed. That bitch wasted no time moving right in.

I’d already reserved a name for this dog: Quinn. But she didn’t like or look like a Quinn. A white Macy’s shopping bag with that red star caught my eye and told me her name.

Four veterinarians and one veterinarian in training looked at her, declaring she wasn’t three years old. “More like two” and “not even two” were their responses. She did have the teeth and demeanor of a puppy.

She would go through stages. For the first few months, she was tame, tentative, polite, and as obsequious as a dog could ever be, rationing her barks to a single bark each week. In May, she started her training, which coincided with yet another personality development as she became delinquent, defiant, and well, not likely to win any good citizen awards. I came to the hard conclusion that there would be no pack partner outings for coffee at the mall or promenades down Av. Madero on Sunday mornings in our future, deciding that all of that was overrated anyway. And then right when September rolled along and her lessons came to an end, she went through yet another behavior change, transforming practically overnight into a dependable, tractable, and agreeable sort, clearly on her way to becoming yet another perfect Doberman.

Her trainer would later explain that it was likely she’d been ignored in her previous home and not shown much affection.

She went to her first and last dog show, misbehaving at a grand level in the ring, jumping on the judges, even if she was without question the most beautiful Doberman there. She probably felt sorry for those other dogs who weren’t as good-looking as she was and just wanted to give them a chance.

There are times when she seems like the late, great Morgen reincarnated, sitting at my side when I’m at the computer, demanding that I keep my left hand on her head no less than 96% of the time. And then she’s a 180 from Morgen in more aspects than she’s not.

Like Morgen, she hunts. The possums that tormented Morgen, who loved nothing more than killing them dead, have taken a French leave, which leaves us happy. Squirrels, birds, lizards, rats and mice, at least the ones retarded or suicidal enough to not follow the possums’ suit, she exterminates.

She’s a very good dog, never having stolen food or destroyed anything, very affectionate, but she’s also possessed of the weirdest personality I’ve ever encountered. She wants her food at set hours, and if I’m at home and even ten minutes late, she’ll let me know, first by being very loving, escalating to annoying, and if I still haven’t responded to her liking, she’ll take the tiniest nips of flesh before grabbing my sleeve. Enough torn sleeves and bruises on the topside of my left forearm have convinced me that it’s in my best interest to obey. I taught her to sit at her dish, not eating until I give the OK a second or two later. A couple of times, I was distracted and forgot the OK, and she was still sitting there minutes later, waiting. Just the same, I’m sure she’d start eating had I left the kitchen without giving my assent to begin.

Just as Morgen had a bit of Evita Peron in her, Macy’s favorite song could well be the Horst-Wessel-Lied. She is more than a bit of an authoritarian, and I hesitate to speculate on what role her ancestors may have played during World War II.

Did I mention that she’s a European Doberman? Clearly a 180 from the American variety.

Fireworks, thunder and lightning, gunfire don’t faze her. Macy is stingy with her barks. One or two lusty gritas are enough. She’s businesslike in her security efforts, wasting no time or energy on frivolous barking.

If I’m still downstairs when she has decided that it’s bedtime, she’ll stand at the foot of the stairs, nodding her head toward the stairs, mutely giving me “the look.”

Upon reaching our bed, she’ll stand there patiently, waiting for me to make the bed, something I never do in the morning, and smooth out her green wool blanket.

In the middle of the night, she’ll wake me up, indicating that “it’s urgent, no kidding, I really have to go out” message, and once we hit the stairway landing, she’ll double back and command a better spot in bed.

She relishes pomegranates, so much that she’s deprived the squirrels of fodder. Our blackberry harvest is down by 80%, because she plucks the berries straight from the vines.

She is the most punctual, time-sensitive dog, set in her ways. She likes to sleep late, not deigning to get up until I’ve showered and dressed and ready to go downstairs. Mornings are spent patrolling the back of the yard, keeping us safe from cats. And now she’s taken to night patrol, happy to spend the entire night outside in perpetual motion, keeping us safe from Mara Salvatrucha, lions and tigers, roving bands of Democrats, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’ve moved a chaise to the veranda, so she can have a secure and dry place to sleep while on duty.

She wasn’t the dog I was looking for, but she was the one I needed. And she is absolutely, positively perfect.

Happy 3^rd Gotcha Day, Macy!

It’s Bacalao Season Again

It’s not about the ornaments, trees, and home décor. It’s about what else that adorns grocery shelves comes the Season to be Jolly. 

Last week, I spied chestnuts in the produce area of LaComer. 420 pesos a kilo. That’s almost $25 USD for 2.2 pounds. Not as pricey as pine nuts, but expensive nonetheless.

German and Polish imports edge out candies from Spain. I ask a small group of Mexicans comparable to my station why there is so little turrón. One says “It’s the economy,” to which his wife remarked “But people buy German chocolates, and they’re even more expensive.” The rest said “It’s because no one likes turrón anymore.”

Moving on to bacalao, I recalled how huge tables of sides of bacalao announced that the Buen Fin-Reyes marathon was underway. It always smelled like someone died. Then there were no more tables of those giant sides of bacalao, just a couple to decorate the few boxes of bacalao, neatly filleted. What’s with that? One man says “It’s the economy,” to which his wife replies “Bacalao is too much trouble to prepare.” And the rest chime in “It’s because no one likes bacalao anymore.”

What’s this world coming to?

I still love bacalao, and I love making it. Be warned: bacalao falls in the category of eggplant and okra. People either love it or hate it, and there’s no middle ground. It’s too expensive to waste on the unappreciative, so it pays to vet those guests before serving.

And even though this isn’t a recipe blog, it’s still mine, and I can post whatever I like. And today it’s my non-original, purloined from various and forgotten sources, recipe for bacalao Vizcaya.

The beauty of this dish is how it can be modified to suit everyone’s taste. It looks difficult, but it’s actually very easy to prepare.

Ingredients:

2-3 lbs. bacalao (legitimate dried Norwegian salt cod, without bones). Don’t buy the flat board-like sheets. Use the thicker, more expensive filet, because there’s less waste.

4 lbs. tomato. Preferably Roma, although any kind of red tomato will work.

6 cloves garlic (or more). Maybe even an entire head if you love garlic.

1 medium or large white or yellow onion

1 red bell pepper, sliced (optional)

¼ cup raisins (optional)

200 grams almonds (or more), peeled and slivered, or at least just peeled

500-600 grams green olives, chopped. I prefer olives, with pits, because it takes people longer to eat. If using pitted olives, use a smaller amount.

1 small bottle capers (optional)

1 lb. new or very small potatoes (optional)

Italian parsley to taste, chopped

3-4 chilies güero, Hungarian wax or yellow banana peppers, pickled, fresh or roasted, cut into strips (optional)

1 glass of brandy (approximately 1/4 cup)

Neutral -flavored cooking oil. Olive oil is nice, but the strong flavors will overwhelm it, and no one will notice if you’re using canola instead.

Note: This dish requires approximately 48-72 hours ahead. Once fish is ready to prepare, plan on serving the day after preparation; the dish improves with a day’s rest in the refrigerator.

Directions:

Starting 2 days before cooking, soak the bacalao in water in an enamel, glass or non-reactive vessel. Drain and change the water every 6 hours. Or whenever you think about it.

After the final bath, drain the water again. Simmer the fish for 10-15 minutes in water. Drain. Reserve 1 cup of the cooked fish water, which may be used to thin the sofrito later.

Flake the fish, removing any bones or connective tissues, and set aside.

Cook the almonds lightly in a small amount butter, and then slightly toast them. This step can be done a day or so ahead.

Boil and peel the potatoes. This step can be done a day or so ahead.

Zap the garlic, tomato, and onion in a food processor/blender until finely pureed. Using skillet large enough for all the ingredients together, fry the blended mixture in a small amount of cooking oil to make a sofrito.

Add in sliced bell pepper. Cook the sofrito until about 75% of the liquid is gone. The sofrito can be prepared months ahead of time and frozen until needed.

Add the fish to the sofrito & bell pepper, along with the almonds, boiled potatoes, chopped parsley, raisins, and the brandy.

Stir, and cook covered just a few minutes for everything to heat up and the flavors to mix. Add the olives. If you don’t like olives, you could add drained capers. If you don’t like either, then skip the olives and capers.

Do not add any salt, because there’s still some residual salt in the fish.

Refrigerate for a day or so for the flavors to meld. If it seems a little dry, make some more sofrito and add it to the mixture. Or add a small amount of leftover fish cooking water.

Serve at room temperature with lots of crusty white bread. Or if it’s cold outside, slightly warmed.

Refrigerated, the dish should be good for about a week. This recipe makes a huge quantity! And, sans the potatoes, it freezes well.

The Independence Day Camel

The first 4^th of July party I can remember attending was a gathering of the American expatriates and locals at the American Embassy in Ankara. The food, the flag, the fireworks, and the requisite trappings of a 4^th of July event made no lasting impression upon me. But there was one aspect of that celebration that did make an impression, forever shaping my idea of what a proper 4^th of July was supposed to include.

A few years would pass, years that always have a fourth day during the seventh month, but whatever happened on those dates left no lasting memory. Finally, when I was in second grade or thereabouts, on the 4^th of July, in Los Angeles, the essential element of the 4^th of July re-surfaced. Finally, someone had the right idea about what the 4^th of July was all about camels. .And that was a ride on a camel.

The 4^th of July isn’t about barbeques and potato salad, displays of patriotism, the rockets’ red glare, or The Star Spangled Banner. Not for me, it isn’t. It’s about camels.

A 4^th of July celebration just isn’t complete without a ride on a camel. Now, I could easily swing past Morelia’s Benito Juarez zoo to see a camel any day of the week, but that’s just not the same. Riding a camel makes a 4^th of July authentic.

Why Traveling to a Country so Far from God Makes More Sense Than Ever

Beaches and desert, that’s what comes to mind when most Americans think of Mexico, forgetting it’s a vast and diverse country. Beans and tortillas at every meal. Roaming mariachis. And the ever-present U.S. Department of State travel advisory.

            Nearly three times the size of the state of Texas, if Mexico were superimposed over Europe, it would extend from somewhere off the northeast coast of Ireland clear over to the Black Sea. Let’s look at some rankings:

• Mexico is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world.
• It’s the 10th-most populated in the world.
• It’s the 13th-largest country in the world by area.
• After the United States and Brazil, it’s the third-most populated country in the Americas.
• After the United States, it’s the second-most visited country in the Americas.
• Worldwide, it’s the sixth-most (or better, depending upon who’s counting) visited country.
• Mexico is one of the top five most megadiverse countries.

Yet so many educated, sophisticated people—some reading this magazine—dismiss travel to Mexico as cheap, low status, basic, unsophisticated, somehow not meriting the attention given to just about any European or Asian venue.

            Travel to Mexico doesn’t have to evoke tired and kitschy emblematic velvet sombreros, cacophonous banda and dueling mariachis, bullfights, and rainbow-hued serapes. Forget border-town Mexico. Forget the Mexico that you learned about in junior high school Spanish class when the focus was Pedro, his burro and their piñata.

            Forget what you thought was Mexican food and Cinco de Mayo. Chimichangas and preprandial tortilla chips are to Mexican cuisine what green beer and St. Patrick’s Day are to Ireland: something celebrated only north of the Rio Grande.

            Forget that notion that Mexico’s only about beaches. Or isn’t the place to visit in the summertime, which is actually the best time to see central Mexico and where most of Mexico lives. Texans, tabbing themselves sweatbirds, and others in the know have been enjoying refreshingly cool summers in the interior for years.

            Just as the United States isn’t all about seed corn caps, hip-hop, square dancing, and Elvis Presley, there’s a real, authentic Mexico lurking behind those icons.

The case for Mexico

About 20 years ago, the Mexican Secretariat of Tourism implemented a program called Pueblos Magicos. It spotlighted 132 small towns, many in rural areas, noted for history, culture, handicrafts and folklore, nature, and gastronomy. That was followed by Mexico City’s Barrios Magicos, some 21 enchanting and interesting neighborhoods in the world’s fifth-largest city.

            Traveling to Mexico makes more sense now than ever. Whether your idea of a great vacation is focused or serendipitous, there’s something for everyone in this country.

            “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States,” said President Porfirio Diaz, a wily dictator or one of the country’s greatest, depending upon your point of view, more than a century ago. Interpret the quote as you wish, but it does capture Mexico’s inextricable, love-hate relationship with the United States.

            Mexico is close, which means you can fly here in almost half the time it would take to reach any major European venue, leaving even a smaller carbon footprint, too. There’s no jet lag issue. Even though there are four time zones, most of the country is in the central time zone. Or you can drive, which is a terrific, if time-consuming and somewhat more challenging, way to see and enjoy the country.

            Mexico speaks American. Not just your language, but the language of energy, values, and attitudes. One time, driving the famously dangerous and sinuous Espinazo del Diablo (Devil’s Backbone) between Durango and Sinaloa, a sign advertising a roadside restaurant where English was spoken demanded that I stop. The proprietress, who’d lived there for ages, was from Mississippi.

            More Americans live in Mexico than in any other country outside of the United States. No matter where you go, you’ll run into someone who speaks your language. And no travel adapters are required.

            But it still is Mexico, another country not your own. It delivers value for the money. You can pay thousands of dollars a night for swank lodging, or you can pay $60 a night for middle-class but still respectable, clean, safe, and comfortable accommodations. The Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons, Waldorf Astoria, Rosewood, St. Regis, and One and Only chains have set up shop in major resort areas, and if you’re traveling on a less-lavish budget, there are even more independent properties you can afford.

            Consistently ranking among the world’s top 10 cuisines, Mexican cuisine isn’t all beans and tortillas. World-class Mexican restaurants serve up Mexican food, traditional and with worldly twists, without a single taco or enchilada. If Mexican food isn’t to your taste, international eateries abound, ranging from cutting-edge modern menus to P.F. Chang’s and Applebee’s. A meal at the fanciest restaurant in my town, featuring aged imported beef, costs about a quarter of what the same repast would go for at a Chicago steakhouse.

            No longer limited to the more-famous Baja California and the Parras Valley in Coahuila, Guanajuato and Queretaro have their own wine regions. And wine and cheese routes. The central highlands are the up-and-coming wine region, finally getting world-wide recognition.

What demands your attention

There are routes to explore the nation’s wars of independence and revolution, tequila, nature, marine life, the Copper Canyon and the Tarahumara towns, mole, convents and monasteries, Huasteca culture, Maya culture, and even hot springs and health. There’s fully as much to do as there is in Europe or Asia. More than just the Spanish settled this country, where waves of French, Italians, Middle Easterners, Germans, Asians, Mormons, and Mennonites have moved in and called the country home.

            Even after visiting the top archeological sites—Chichen Itza, Teotihuacán, Palenque, Cobá, the Templo Mayor, Monte Albán, El Tajín, Tulum, and Cholula—there are even more less-known but just as interesting ones that bear exploring. Indigenous villages, nature reserves, colonial cities and towns, markets, palaces, haciendas, castles, and even the country’s own version of Rodeo Drive beckon.

            Festivals? We’ve got them, ranging from the celebration of folk dance, mariachis, coffee, chocolate, wine, cheese, beer, carved radishes, lentils, pears, avocados, tacos, tamales, preserved foods, grilled meat, mezcal, tequila, blown glass ornaments, pottery, Catrinas, international and domestic film, international music, geraniums, Carnaval, Day of the Dead, molcajetes, mojigangas, burros, candles, wood carving, the patron saints of every burg and neighborhood, sexual diversity, storytelling, folklore, folk art, guitars, horror films, embroidery, peace, witchcraft, herbal medicine, and books.

            You name it, there’s a festival for it.

            Supposedly only Paris (or London, depending upon the source) has more museums than Mexico City, but who’s counting? Maybe it’s art that piques your interest. The Museo Soumaya is known for its knockout, over-the-top architecture as well as what’s inside. You’ll be hard pressed to spend more than $5 to visit world-class museums, a genuine bargain compared to comparable venues across the world.

Don’t believe everything you hear

Let’s pause unpaid promotion of Mexican tourism for a moment to address the elephant in the room, which has replaced, for the time being, warnings about drinking the water. There are drug cartels operating in this country.

            But the odds of the average, intelligent foreign tourist encountering or even recognizing them are slim. Most crime the usual tourist will encounter will be from the unorganized, thieving sector. But Mexico’s safer on a usual day than Mall of the Americas on a weekend. Arm yourself with common sense, leaving expensive items at home and steering clear of areas that appear hinky. There are places you just don’t venture off to in your own town, right?

            This isn’t a country to visit once and call it one and done. Mexico reveals itself like an onion, layer by layer, and one lifetime isn’t enough to figure it all out. The beauty is that the entire country is easily accessible—no tour guides or organized tourist activity are required. It’s the perfect place for the self-guided traveler.

A version of this article appeared in Experience (April/May 2022), a magazine published by the American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division.

Mexico City on $100 a Day

Compelled to read every account I come across about travel in Mexico’s capital city – pieces like 36 hours in Mexico City and Why You Should See Mexico City Like a Tourist – I’m always bemused that the authors’ touts aren’t mine. But then again if you ask the Aztecs, Mexico City is the umbilicus of the moon, and it would take lifetimes to explore this ever-expanding, never-ending megatropolis.

When you’re traveling to CDMX (aka Ciudad de Mexico), don’t forget to pack some flexibility. Be ready to abandon carefully laid plans at the drop of a peso, because you never know what’s around the corner. Massive marches and demonstrations wrecked last November’s weekend plans, so I pivoted and made other plans.

Supposedly only Paris (or London, depending upon the source) has more museums than Mexico City, but who’s counting? In addition to its standard-bearers, the National Anthropology Museum and the National Museum of History, better known as Chapultepec Castle, both of which merit repeat visits and allotting no less than four hours for each, there are a number of museums that don’t make the usual lists of places to visit. Here are some of my favorites:

Antique Toy Museum

Franz Mayer Museum

Shoe Museum Borceguí

Museum of Popular Art

Telegraph Museum

Postal Palace

Museum of the Mexican Army and Air Force

MODO, the Museum of the Object of the Object

Museum of the Tattoo

Museo Soumaya-Casa Guillermo Tovar de Teresa

Maybe it’s art that piques your interest.  The  Museo Soumaya is known for its knock-out, over-the-top architecture as well as what’s inside. Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. Museo de Arte Moderno. The National Museum of Art. The Palace of Bellas Artes. 

Culture is a genuine bargain in this town. The only admission price I had to pay to visit the museums listed here came to $4. The rest were free to Mexicans over the age of 60.

And then there are the stores. In the Centro Historico, small specialty stores can be found for just about anything, many selling only one kind of ware –zippers, buttons, string bracelets with the hamsa or evil eye, men’s belts, the kinds of corsets that no one’s worn since 1964, fake police and military uniforms, quartzes, tiny charms and doodads wholesale and retail, religious supplies, incense and priestly garb. Yet another store sells only body parts of dolls. Be a flaneur and explore. When you’re in another country or out of town, even a block dedicated to prosthetics can be interesting in an odd way. Even if you’re not there to shop, take in the architecture, step back into 150 years past, and marvel at the quotidian.

Visiting Mexico City without dropping in on one of its many public markets would be like going to Paris and not noticing the Eiffel Tower. Are you up for a lion hamburger or iguana sausage along with a glass of wine? Or maybe you just want to gawk at the array of edible pre-Hispanic bugs, exotic meats, and gourmet produce from hither and yon.  Mercado San Juan is the place to be, and right across from this market is another three-story market dedicated to flowers and another selling only artesania and curiosities.

La Lagunilla is one of the city’s largest markets, but Sunday is the day to go for its famed antiques market. Even though this antiques market is frequented by some of the city’s famous and wealthy, you’re better off leaving the good clothes and fancy electronics at home, dressing down just a bit.

If you’re not inclined to make the pilgrimage to La Lagunilla, every weekend is an antiques flea market at Parque Dr. Ignacio Chávez, also known as Tianguis de Cuauhtémoc. Some of the vendors who sell at La Lagunilla also sell here.

Wherever I go, I have to have my Chinatown fix. There are actually two. Downtown, the more established and larger one is fully two blocks long, selling the kind of Chinese food you ate in the 1950s, stores stuffed with gewgaws made in China, always crowded and everyone having a great touristy time. And then there’s yet another one, down in the Viaducto Piedad middle class neighborhood, populated by a more recent wave of immigrants, many of whom speak neither Spanish nor English.

Enough with history, it’s time to head over to Antara Polanco, a pet-friendly mall so fancy that the dogs being walked likely have better pedigrees than their owners. It was the first mall I’ve ever visited that required its canine visitors to register for a credential. The three floors of Casa Palacio, an upscale home store, will require hours to thoroughly explore everything you didn’t know you wanted, saving you from spending even more money at Hamleys (the world’s oldest toy store), Coach, L’Occitane, Apple, Dyson (Even vacuum cleaners take on magic properties at a mall like this one.), Kiehl’s, and more.

GETTING AROUND. Mexico City is a great walking city, but even the fittest need a lift around town. While CDMX has an extensive public transportation system that’s practically free, I’m at the stage where it’s just not my thing. It’s safer and easier to use a ridesharing service or secure taxi.  And you, dear reader, should do the same. You’re not in your twenties, you’re not some harried commuter, and you’re spending discretionary income to travel.

 A dozen Uber trips during a 6-day stay cost me a whopping $70. Cabify is a Spanish Uber-like company operating in Latin America, and its app bears downloading just in case Uber is swamped.

WHERE TO EAT. Sure, there the places that are included in those lists of the 100 best restaurants in the world, places like Pujol and Quintonil,  but there are plenty of others that aren’t nearly as precious and just as good.

Gardela is my latest favorite splurge restaurant, an Argentine steakhouse in Roma Norte.

One of the pioneers of the slow food movement, Restaurante Nicos, cab ride, reservations necessary, but worth the effort.

El Cardenal, a white tablecloth chain with affordable prices, serves up Mexican food at its best.

Macelleria Roma is a mid-range Italian restaurant in Roma Norte.

Jing Teng Restaurant Estilo Hong Kong is perhaps the most authentic Chinese restaurant in Mexico City. Located in the Viaducto Piedad area, it’s clearly not expensive and always interesting.

El Moro is all about churros, hot and cold chocolate, and coffee.

A block from the American Embassy is Les Moustaches, an old-school, white-shoe French restaurant.

A trek from the city center but an unforgettable experience is El Arroyo, the largest Mexican restaurant in the world, seating over 2000 diners and providing parking for 600 cars. The cost of a cab ride there is more than offset by the modest menu prices. Hosting diners ranging from campesinos to politicians and titans of industry, people dressed in everything from schmattes to tuxedos, the restaurant offers up a happy cacophony of piñatas, mariachis, and bands, but it’s best visited with a team of your own, because a party of two risks getting lost in the crowd.

WHERE TO STAY. There was a time when where I stayed defined who I was, but I’ve given that up, at least now that I’m a Mexican visiting Mexico City, no longer able to afford to sleep in Polanco and fancy venues.

Now I mostly stay at Stanza Hotel, because Roma Norte has become my stomping ground. The area is hipster central, and it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. You don’t have to worry about wearing the right eye makeup or good pearls. An upper-class Porfirian neighborhood in the early years of the last century, it later became middle-class, then dodgy, not becoming gentrified until this century. The movie Roma was filmed in Roma Sur, an adjoining, more residential neighborhood.

Fancier, more intimate, more expensive, and a favorite among English-speaking visitors is The Red Tree House in Condesa, a swank area adjoining Roma Norte, tabbed as a Magic Neighborhood for Tourists. 

Bordering Roma Norte on the north is the Zona Rosa, which is ground zero for the gay community and recent Korean immigrants.  The Hotel Geneve, a historical property was the first to offer lodging to unaccompanied women – and the first to serve a sandwich in Mexico – is the place to stay in the Zona Rosa.

And now about enjoying Mexico City for $100 a day. Last November, I spent six days in the town, staying at Stanza Hotel, wandering around, visiting museums and whatever piqued my interest, stopping in at Chinatown and Antara, and eating in my usual when-I’m-alone style of eating when I get hungry at wherever looks appealing. I did not eat at anyplace downscale, and I didn’t eat any street food. My splurge meal cost $40 at Gardela. For the first time, I actually kept track of my expenses, and the total – hotel, food, and transportation – came to a whopping $630.

Whether you’re inspired to visit Mexico City or just want to learn more about the most fascinating city in the world, take in these resources:

Jesus Chairez. His Facebook page operates as a blog for this expatriate Texas writer, artist, and man about town.

David Lida, First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century

Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

Francisco Goldman, The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle

Ilan Stavans, Return to Centro Historico: A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots

Josh Barkan, Mexico: Stories

Daniel Hernandez, Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century

Carlos Monsivais, Mexican Postcards

Jonathan Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Celebrating Freestyle

I come from a tradition of no tradition. We were happiest when we gave up the forced merriment. Wishing “Merry Christmas” to others, we weren’t exactly nihilists. If buying local poinsettias counts, we decorate, making up for years with no Christmas tree by leaving the Evergleam tree up all year around in an odd niche between the kitchen and dining room, right along with Santiago Apostol on his horse and a gallery of Octavio Ocampo art.

Hanukkah gets celebrated by frying up something, most often buñuelos, on some night, seldom the right nights but still during Hanukkah season, laughing about the time someone completely forgot to light the menorah, setting out the gold-wrapped gelt, and gathering up gifts to be distributed between then and Day of the Kings.

One year I was invited to a Christmas posada by some friends who came from an even-by-Mexican-standards large family. I remarked how unnaturally well they all seemed to get along. My hostess quickly came back with “Inviting people who aren’t in the family keeps those in the family on their good behavior. And, of course, we have family that we’ve learned not to invite.”

The most memorable holidays were marked by doing something definitely not in the holiday rulebook:

Spending the day working at the hospital as a Candy Striper.

Christmas Eve in Florence at an over-the-top doll store, successfully scoring a simple black doll over my mother’s entreaties to opt for something fancier.

Christmas Eve at Alcatraz.

Christmas Day in Iowa City, dining at Denny’s after moving into an empty FIJI house. The bar review course would start the next day.

Aloft on a plane, fleeing flyover country for Lake Tahoe, Mazatlán, or Mexico City.

Christmas Eve and sushi in Buenos Aires, heralded by fireworks and a complete and total absence of traffic, not a taxi cab in sight. And walking from Recoleta to Palmero Viejo the next day.

Taking a recreational drive through the countryside, ending up at the mall, and buying an iPad.

Exploring the local cemetery on Christmas Day.

Cooking up spaghetti because Orizaba, the Old English Mastiff, ate the entire standing rib roast.

Attending or hosting a recalentado (a casual, unstructured celebration, usually on the 25^th, of reheated leftovers, often supplemented by lasagna and a few freshly-prepared dishes).

None would be repeated, but each was memorable and enjoyable in its own way, just because those experiences were void of tradition-fueled expectations. Stepping away from tradition vastly decreases holiday tension and starring in Robert Earl Keene’s Merry Christmas from the Family.

How to Become a Champion Among the Living

We are the champions, my friends

And we’ll keep on fighting till the end

          — Queen, News of the World

Efraim would not become an American citizen until after the birth of his second child, even though he had spent eight years of his college education between Texas and New York a decade earlier. Establishing his own business meant long hours and never enough time for a family vacation, unless a weekend in Lake Tahoe or an overnight with the Indian Guides in Mammoth counted for something.

He would return to the Old Country for a year or two after university, heading back to the United States, never to see his mother or his father again. The family had been an affluent one, but he brought nothing with him, save a Rolex he bought in Switzerland, on the way back to the New World with his American bride and her daughter. Over the years, there would be not a single token or remembrance from the relatives back in the Old Country, not even a piece of silver, an ashtray, or a photograph.

He and his children’s mother would spend years divorcing, and when he was nearly eligible for Social Security, he would find a new wife, some two decades younger than he, from the Old Country. With age, his relationship with his progeny deteriorated, marked by more than the usual dissent found in most families. Cordial yet distant was the best characterization that could be placed on the ties. His eldest’s decision to adopt and embrace a religion, consume massive quantities of pork, and declare himself a Northern European, just like the family he’d married into, broadened the chasm between a father and son who never were close. Telling his youngest that, if forced to choose, he’d pick his new spouse over her any day did little for that father-daughter bond.

Before long, Efraim was in the middle of his ninth decade, and the realization that his plans to leave everything to his child bride would mean there would be no remembrance left for his own children. Somewhere along the line, he’d bought into a doctrine that his spouse should receive his entire estate and his issue nothing.

It was time for a plan. The only way he could leave anything for his children would have to come from current income, maybe bolstered by a home equity loan. And he knew that his two children wouldn’t go along with the plan unless their half-sister, the child of Efraim’s late ex-wife was invited. After all, he had known her ever since she was less than a year old.

He would take them on a trip to Spain to explore their family roots. It didn’t matter that there were no ancestors to look up, everyone having been ejected during the Inquisition. It didn’t even matter that no one could name a single ancestor who might’ve hailed from Spain. It was just the homeland, a place where people looked more like you than not.

Bird and Lark, the natural children, were reticent. After all these years, wasn’t it sort of ridiculous to get together and pretend to be one happy family? The stepdaughter, who loved nothing more than planning trips and searching for deals, would get on a plane just about anywhere if someone gave her ticket. Efraim approached Lark first, followed by her half-sister. Having enlisted those two, his next step was to ask them if they had a problem with their somewhat estranged and recently widowed-brother, Bird, tagging along, knowing they were in no position to refuse.

The stepdaughter took on the chore of researching flights, creating itineraries, finding lodging, and making plans. Efraim wanted everything planned out, day by day, in advance, and he wanted to pay for everything in advance with a credit card. No sense in losing the opportunity to pick up some miles. Armed with the credit cards, the stepdaughter spent winter evenings searching out deals, checking out Google Earth street views, logging on to Renfe’s website at some odd hour to snag the best discount precisely 60 days prior to departure. More emails circulated among Efraim and his children during these four months of planning than ever before, and binders were filled with confirmations and directions.

Finally, the perfect Madrid apartment appeared: 4 bedrooms, 5 baths, 4,000 square feet, a doorman building, décor straight out of Four Seasons, and a balcony overlooking Paseo Castellano in El Viso, walkable to Santiago Bernabéu Stadium and El Corte Ingles.

Lodging arranged, it was time to start booking tickets for the Prado, the Palacio Real, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, the Alhambra and the Nasri Gardens, bullet trains to Sevilla, a slow train to Granada, another bullet train to Cordoba and then on to Madrid, a commuter train to Segovia, the obligatory flamenco shows, limos to and from the airport and everywhere else. Directions to Mercado de Chamartín and Carrefour were mapped out.

Nearly a month of togetherness was something this quintet had never experienced, and yet it somehow worked out. Never in their lives had that many meals been shared in succession, and there was the perpetual search for whole wheat baguettes, copious amounts of fresh fruit, and ham-free restaurants. Amazingly, the sojourn in Spain went off without any of the usual fights that accompanied prior visits, even if it did start to resemble a continuously looping My Dinner with Andre, punctuated by the only running game all five knew: canasta.

Efraim ended up spending the price of an average mid-70s Southern California tract house on the trip, but it would be money well-spent.

There’s a moral here: spend your money creating experiences and memories. All of the estate planning in the world means nothing if there are no warm and cozy memories behind it. Nothing can put the decedent into a less-than-favorable light, shattering families, than purse strings controlled from the grave. Frequently, the bequest might not be more than the price of a new car, something your heirs might’ve bought without that gift from you. Inheritances almost never solve financial problems.

The sterling that’s been stashed away in the bank safety deposit box so long that the fees exceed its value means nothing to today’s generations. If you love that precious silver and fine china so much, then get it out and use it daily. Each piece that might break is one less for the next generation to deal with. Enjoy it while you can.

Your hand-carved dining room furniture is only slightly more appealing to Gen Xers and Millennials than a Naugahyde Barcalounger, which is about as valuable to them as your grandmother’s mid-century modern television console was to you. Gen Xers and Millennials’ disdain for your crap isn’t a command for you to liquidate those prized possessions. Take pleasure in what you have, but realize that yours is likely the last generation on the planet to appreciate your worldly possessions.

Maybe travel isn’t feasible for you and your intendeds. Or it isn’t your thing. Spend the money creating new skills, memories, or even making a fantasy approach reality, both with your family and separately. A surprise and unaccompanied trip to Machu Picchu or New Zealand, serious music lessons, a harp, cooking school, or even new (and wanted) dog or horse, gifted while you’re still living, will leave your mark on the recipient longer than any bequest. And you’ll be around to share in the joy. You’ll be a hero instead of just a run-of-the-mill testator.

You might even be able to repair some the fissures that time may have inflicted upon your relationship with those loved ones. And you could become a champion in the process.

Now, let’s return to that trip to Spain just once more. You know how some moments are Kodachromed into our memory? May 13, 2012 was more than just an ordinary Sunday night. Plácido Domingo would perform during Real Madrid’s season-ending celebrations, and Efraim and his son were never happier that evening, walking on air back to their apartment, singing “We Are the Champions” in a language neither spoke. No amount of estate planning could ever conjure up that kind of bond.

Is My Stuff Worth Moving?

“Everybody’s gotta have a little place for their stuff. That’s all life is about. Trying to find a place for your stuff.” — George Carlin

You spent half your life acquiring stuff, and then once you hit that third age, egged on by the likes of organizers and ephemeral sensations like Marie Kondo, you’re supposed to get rid of your stuff. Downsizing, they call it, as if it were some kind of virtue. Or Swedish death cleaning, decluttering like there’s no tomorrow out of consideration for those left behind.

More than a few schools of thought come into play. One says to divest yourself of everything, pretending that you like minimalism and are happy, with enough possessions to furnish a modest monk’s cell. Some like to buy new, starting all over again.  Others see themselves as conservators of precious artifacts, handed down from since-forgotten ancestors. The frugal and utilitarian can’t jettison perfectly good stuff, like that never-used orange fondue pot. And then there are those who view their stuff as part of themselves, a continuing project.

Langley Wakeman Collyer saved newspapers so that his lawyer brother, Homer Lusk Collyer, who had gone blind, could catch up on the news when his sight returned. They both died, buried beneath their largesse of junk, which included some 25,000 books and fourteen pianos, in 1947. For a literary account of the Collyer brothers, see E.L. Doctorow’s novel Homer & Langley.

Will it fit wherever you’re moving?

If you’re moving from a four-bedroom three-story suburban house in the Midwest to a one-bedroom Miami apartment, you might have a hard time fitting your lifetime accumulation of stuff in. And even if there’s no shortage of space, some items might be as useful as a snowblower in the tropics.

What will it cost to move your stuff? Can you afford to move it?

Let’s answer this one with a question. Will you be moving with a rental truck, doing the driving yourself, or will you call a moving company? Will your move be local, long-distance, or international? Brace yourself for some wildly-ranging estimates.

Will you be insuring your stuff during the move? Is it even insurable?

What is the replacement cost of your stuff? If it’s irreplaceable, is it even worth replacing?

Is that stove a 1949 Chambers stove or a Viking range of just about any age? Does the replacement value exceed the cost of moving – and do you even like those stoves?

Do you like your stuff?

If you like your stuff, you can keep your stuff. Or at least, you should.

Your stuff doesn’t even have to be useful to merit retention. If three sets of sterling silver flatware mean something to you, even if you never use some of it, keep it. It doesn’t take up that much storage space. That Pony Club trophy from 1964 may hold meaning only for you, and if you like it, you should keep it.

Kayla moved across the country from 3-floor townhouse to a single-story house, only moving a few items. Handing over already-read New York Times bestsellers to friends, she doesn’t store books. Her tastefully decorated abodes are always magazine-worthy, minimalist and featuring the year’s fashionable color. Even her Le Creuset® cookware is the right shade: mist grey.

And then there’s Rima, whose collection of books and magazines are her pride and joy, lining the walls of a house that blends mid-century with shabby chic, her décor inspired by John Waters and Amy Sedaris. A life-size flamingo and a bronze chimp compete for attention with a chair covered in bottle caps.

Or are you keeping it out of a sense of obligation?  Two decades of harboring that etagere late Aunt Hattie left you is enough if you hate it. And the same goes for those awful Hummel figurines. You’ve earned a full release.

Are you holding on to stuff, because you view yourself as the custodian of family heirlooms? Let’s get real. Unless you really fancy antimacassars, even the ones crocheted, tatted, and embroidered by some long-forgotten ancestor, it may be time to pass those on to the natural objects of your bounty. And if they don’t want them, and if you don’t want them, it’s time to re-home those relics.

Sometimes heirlooms are just meant to die. My mother’s pool room harbored a non-performing, ancient Christmas cactus. While she was in Mexico and the cactus under my care, like most house plants, it up and died. Driving her back to her home in Iowa one spring, bracing for a lecture about my irresponsibility and failure to respect others’ property, the same lecture I’d heard for four decades, I waited until we were an hour or so away, driving along the two-lane blacktops of northwest Missouri, before I broke the news to her. “Thank God you killed that damn cactus,” she replied. “I hated that plant, your grandmother hated that plant, and all we ever heard was ‘don’t kill the Christmas cactus’ from your grandfather’s mother who gave it to her, like it was supposed to be some treasured heirloom.” Now I get more mileage out of having killed the Christmas cactus than if the damn thing was still alive.

Is there anyone who would actually want your stuff? 

In the February 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, Patricia Marx sets forth avenues for getting rid of stuff in A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything.

Seduced by Antiques Roadshow and 1stDibs, spying a 1950s lunchbox at a thrift shop that’s just like the one that held your first-grade lunch, you may think you’re sitting on a gold mine. Chances are that you’re not.

In certain markets, your stuff might be valuable, but time and place may make it practically worthless. No one seems to want pianos these days. Goodwill in San Mateo County doesn’t accept furniture as donations.  No one wanted my father’s like-new green velvet sofa or plaid wool love seats. But in my neighborhood, definitely a mixed one, socio-economically, anything left, even a broken toilet, on the sidewalk will disappear within minutes.

Ten years ago, no one wanted LP records. Now LPs and flip phones are popular again. No one wants the Waterford, Limoges porcelain, Lalique, Murano glass, linen tablecloths, or the Ranch Oak furniture your grandfather bought in the 1940s, but that could change in the next decade. Today’s trash, tomorrow’s treasures.

Twenty-five years ago, I moved from Iowa to Mexico. In the decade preceding, I would wear out a Suburban, stuffed with more loot than the Jed Clampett brought with his clan from the Ozarks to Beverly Hills, road trip after road trip, maybe four years road trips a year, shipping books by mail. The bids that moving companies gave me were shockingly ridiculous, one ignorant mover insisting that Mexican cities were accessible only by dirt road and another saying the household goods would be shipped by rail to New Orleans and then by ship to Veracruz, and then overland to Morelia, which was just plain crazy. I finally landed on a company in Laredo that would contract with Mexican movers to move my stuff across the border and another thousand miles to Morelia, but it would be up to me to get the household goods shipped to Laredo.

And so, I hired professional movers to pack my worldly belongings in the largest truck Ryder rented, a car trailer hitched to that, and embarked on the most exhausting thousand-mile drive ever, driving the largest vehicle in my life.

You already know the rest of the story. That moving van contained all my stuff that I didn’t sell or jettison: a 1959 Evergleam Christmas tree, two leather sofas, old chairs, the damn Ranch Oak furniture, a dining room table and chairs, wrought iron patio furniture, more books, enough kitchen wares to stock Williams-Sonoma, a health and beauty belt massager, copper trays and Turkish artifacts, my grandfather’s tuxedos, sewing machines, my childhood bedroom furniture, Chinese Coromandel lacquer screens, a Turkish brazier, a samovar, an antique pine primitive corner cabinet that my mother bought at a thrift store long before I was born, most of my typewriter collection, an Ironrite Model 85 mangle and a Philco TV console older than I am, computers, printers, oriental rugs, an antique garden hand plow cultivator, a 1959 Encyclopedia Britannica, the J. Peterman Company 1988: Owner’s Manual N°. 1, a 45-rpm record of Witch Doctor and assorted LPs, and clothing spanning generations. And even more stuff that I’ve since forgotten about.

I left behind paintings of ancestors I didn’t recognize and that Coke bottle filled with oil from my grandfather’s foray into the oil business back in the 1940s.

Would I do that again? Sure. Unquestionably, I am a shameless maximalist. I have no plans to change. After all, I’ve got the makings of a museum of the mundane, which will surely support me in years to come.

Salad Days

Salad gets a bad rap. At best, it’s viewed as a perfunctory and pedestrian part of the meal, highlighted only during hot weather. Or as a course for dieters and dainty appetites. Go to a restaurant and order only a salad, maybe accompanied by an appetizer, maybe not. And you’ll get that look that says “Is that all you’re having?”

When was the last time someone asked for a second helping of salad?

Lettuce, tomato, maybe a slice of avocado, a touch of grated carrot doused in some glutinous slop masquerading as French, Italian, Ranch, or Thousand Island masquerading as dressing that just tasted like food-grade Drano, that’s the kind of salad my mother made every night, always served on the same wooden salad plates or bowls. Or chopped cabbage drowning in mayonnaise.

Could there be anything worse than Waldorf, a gooey mixture of apples, celery, grapes, and walnuts, in some kind of creamy mortar? Only Caesar gets that touch of theater.

There may be only 2,493 ways to make a meat loaf, but there are a gazillion ways to make a salad, none of them evoking sour, limp greens, dripping in oil.

Restaurants that would never think of serving tainted chicken or over-the-hill fish don’t give a second thought to charging customers for wilted greens, brown at the edges, ingredients better suited for the compost pile.

My favorite go-to restaurant serves up the best beef between here and Chicago, mastering creations of potato and conjuring up fabulous desserts, but it’s still serving the same three ho-hum salads since its opening a decade ago. Most restaurants just give salads short shrift.

And that’s why I took to making salads at home, lavishing the kind of attention that some might give to beef Wellington or a chocolate cake. Before long and before I started sharing the salad of the day on Facebook, I became known as the designated salad person, the one people would ask to bring a salad to any guest-sourced food gathering. What a score! You see, before then, any self-respecting potluck host would ask me to bring something store-bought instead of anything I might’ve made myself.

Netflix-famous cooking queen Samin Nosrat tells us that it’s all Salt Fat Acid Heat, but she doesn’t always get salad. She’s compelled to add cheese to nearly everything, which just ruins it for this cheese-hater. Don’t get me wrong: I still worship her. To the Samin’s holy quartet of salt, fat, acid, and heat, I’d add sweet, crunch, and surprise.

Start your salad by settling upon the two or three ingredients that will be the base of your salad. There isn’t an item on the produce aisle of the local supermarket or greengrocer that can’t find its way into a salad. Maybe shredded beef or chicken will be the salad’s focal point. Use vegetables not usually associated with salad: zucchini, okra, grilled peppers, roasted radishes, cooked winter squash and sweet potatoes, chayote, or raw corn. Berries, cherries, mango, melon, pineapple, and jicama are all fair game.

We all love carbs, and you can’t go keto or paleo all the time. Add a spoonful of bulgur, quinoa, farro, barley, Israeli couscous, wild rice, brown rice, garbanzos, white and other beans, roasted corn for a change of texture, to sate that carb craving, and to provide an interesting contrast.

Everyone knows that the probability of a pistachio, macadamia, or cashew ending up on your fork makes each bite of salad exciting. One thing that Samin never mentions is the importance of some sweet nugget in salad: hard candy in Xmas salad, praline pecans, raisins, dried fruit, candied ginger, silver dragées. A handful of pomegranate arils. Add something interesting and unexpected to salad – nasturtium seed pods can double as capers, green or unripe coriander or cilantro seeds, bougainvillea, marigold, rose petals, squash flowers.

Zhuzh it up with horseradish leaves, radish leaves, mint, fennel fronds, nasturtium flowers, or fresh pea tendrils. A few toasted pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, or sesame add excitement and crunch.

Let’s move on to the acid and fat. Be miserly with both.

Living in Dorothy Lynch country can drive a person to desperate measures, so about a half century ago, I became a fan of Girard’s Champagne Vinaigrette, thinking that it was a sign I’d arrived, given that it was just about the fanciest offered up on the shelves of Dahl’s in Des Moines. And then I realized I was paying $5 and more for canola and soy oil, water, vinegar, sugar, salt, and seasoning, all of which I could conjure up easily from my own pantry.

The fat doesn’t have to be EVOO or even poured out of a bottle. Nuts, bacon, cheese, tahini, avocado, anchovies, and tuna are all sources of fat. Keep that in mind when you reach for a bottle of oil. I prefer to spray or sprinkle the oil lightly and directly on the salad.

Acid doesn’t have to be vinegar. Citrus juice is acid. A splash of wine is acid, and so is pickle juice. Tomatoes, nopal, pickled ginger, and other vegetables are acid. So are honey, pomegranate molasses, crema balsámica, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, rose water, and dairy. You get the picture. You can drop the acid, or you can microdose. The decision is yours.

A little garnish always makes a salad special, whether it’s freshly zested citrus, gomashio (a Japanese seasoning of slowly-toasted sesame seeds ground with sea salt, sending forth a buttery, oily, salty sweet flavor), toasted nori, or even the crumbles and dust from the bottom of a bag of barbecue potato chips or Fritos.

Make your salads interesting and exciting, and become the person known for your salads. Experiment with your salad. Play with your food. Get creative. Make others crave your salads. And remember that you can also order in Chinese food or Domino’s if you fail.
But since all food pieces are supposed to include a recipe, here are three, each yielding enough salad dressing for a small army:

Pomegranate Molasses Vinaigrette

by Victoria Challancin

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
2 tablespoons unflavored rice vinegar
1 tablespoon agave nectar or honey
A squeeze of fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon ground sumac
Sea salt and fresh pepper to taste

Nora Ephron’s Really Good Vinaigrette

2 tablespoons mustard, either dijon or champagne
2 tablespoons good vinegar (I really like Noble’s Tonic No. 4)
1 small shallot, minced evenly
6 tablespoons olive oil

Villa Montana Salad Dressing

1 medium onion, diced
3 medium cloves garlic
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/8 tsp. pepper
3 tablespoon sugar
2 cups oil
3/4 cup apple or cider vinegar
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon parsley, chopped
1 teaspoon celery, chopped

Put all ingredients in a blender and stir until well blended. Makes 1 quart.

Note: this recipe was created in the 1950s, when oil was oil, and vinegar was vinegar.
 

Same Place, Next Year

The urge to fill my passport with more stamps than the person standing in line next to me might have had at immigration is over. I’m done with seeking out new places to visit. The days of thinking others might be impressed by what’s on my passport or a recitation of the number of countries I’ve visited are long over.

While that may mean that I’ll never see Vietnam, China and New Zealand, there’s still plenty of desire and opportunity to go back to places I’ve been to before. And that’s just what I do, returning time and again to the same place.

No longer is there the need to venture to far-flung corners of the globe to buy shoes of Spanish leather and Middle Eastern cooking tools and ingredients. All of that’s readily available, even at 3 a.m., courtesy of the Internet. Even biber salçası, the Turkish red pepper paste, and Lipton Yellow Label tea are available from Mercado Libre, Mexico’s version of eBay and Amazon. The department store sells purses made in Italy, French-made bras and Czech tchotchkes. Lebanese halvah and Polish chocolates can be had at the grocery store.

It didn’t happen overnight. It might’ve started with circumscribing my travel world to places where the people looked like me. That ruled out most of Asia, most of Africa, and most of northern Europe. Then I’d narrow it down to countries where the people spoke Spanish. Or maybe it didn’t.

It might’ve happened because I like to conserve time, energy, and money, which are in increasingly short supply. It might’ve happened because the older I get, the more I like to cut to the chase.

But the real motivating factor was none of the above. I wanted to go deeper, learning more about my destinations than If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. I wanted to use what I’d learned from previous visits, avoiding vaunted attractions not worth my time, peeling back layers, and going beyond. I wanted to own that destination, if only in my own mind.

My world didn’t shrink. It just became more concentrated.

Each time you return, you’re upgraded, just like those people who keep returning to Las Vegas. The upgrade might be physical — to a suite from a standard room at a hotel or a better table than someone just walking in off the street for the first time might snag — but the upgrade can also be mental, just because you know your way around a little better the second, third or sixth time around. A few times around the block, you’re no longer at your first rodeo.

The deer in the headlights look of a tourist gives way to acting like you know where you’re going.

There is something about visiting the same museums over and over again, each time taking them in through a different lens. Of course, there are always those temporary exhibits, but it’s always refreshing to revisit what you’ve seen before in the permanent collection. Las Meninas, housed at Museo del Prado in Madrid, looks much different at the age of 60 than it did when you were in your thirties. I can’t get enough Fernando Botero, no matter where his work appears. Each time I return to gaze at a Diego Rivera mural at Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, I see more and different details not evident the time before. And you never know what’s newly in stock at the museum store.  But then I’m also a huge fan of museum cafes and restaurants.

The vendors at the Sunday flea market in Usaquen, a Bogota neighborhood, recognize me. And so did hotel bell staff at Diez Hotel in Medellin. I’ve learned which vendors at La Lagunilla Sunday morning antiques market sell pukka and which sell factory-fresh family heirlooms.

Not more than an hour after settling in, I’m at a café, pretending that it’s my usual haunt. In my mind, I’m a local.

A decade or so ago, I would spend a few days in Uruguay, returning a year later. The first time left me baffled, because it wasn’t as expected, having sort of an old, forgotten feeling about it all, a general sameness, not unlike old and yellowed linen from someone’s grandmother’s closet. But all of that gnawing feeling would draw me back a year later, when I found myself enjoying it for what it wasn’t. The sepia landscape of the year before was still not the technicolor of Buenos Aires, but it was also an oasis of calm, Argentine pretense erased. This time around, it made sense.

“Why are you going to Mexico again? You’ve been there so many times before. Why not go to Hawaii or on a cruise?”

Are my odd habits really any different from those who’ll visit Disneyland or Disney World year after year or who return to that same old cabin on Golden Pond?

I bask in the familiarity of it all. And assurance that things will be the same. You return to Whole Foods and a favorite restaurant in your own town over and over again. You might go to Chicago three times a year, seeking out the same Greektown restaurant and revisiting the same steakhouse. Why, there are even people who’ve been known to watch Turandot multiple times.

Once you’ve traveled a fair amount, you realize that the world’s all the same, but different, and the oner of travel just isn’t worth it. Comfort supplants adventure.

Never having been to Hawaii, at least not until I was well-settled in Mexico, nor having been on a cruise since the time we crossed the Atlantic in search of America on MV Britannic in the 1950s, I would return to Mexico several times a year. Landing in Mexico City, staying at the Camino Real Polanco, I would have my hair done at George the Jordanian’s beauty shop like the fancy ladies. There was no need to get out a map or even ask directions to Liverpool and El Palacio de Hierro. And I already knew my way around Chapultepec Park.

An airline strike one winter sent me driving to Mexico, which then became habit, and before long, I would find myself spending ten days or so several times a year at the Hotel Villa Montaña in Morelia.

And before you knew it, one thing led to another, which made all those repeat trips to Mexico so very worth it: I get to live here.

Recovering big-time gonzo labor lawyer Jim Karger, a denizen of San Miguel de Allende for the two decades last past, sums it all up in his blog, Slouching into Oblivion:

Travel is overrated. Most people travel not to experience new places but to talk about their experiences, or what they wish their experiences had been. Travel is a status symbol like a Mercedes. No one cares what you drive and they also don’t care where you have been.

Previously published in Voice of Experience: June 2022, American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division.

A Quadranscentennial to Remember

25 years ago, Virginia Rose left this plane, her ashes finding their final resting place a year later at Lago de Zirahuén. Read on here.

Today is Guadalupe’s

And now begins the Guadalupe-Reyes Maraton, which I expanded a few years back to the El Buen Fin – Valentin Maraton. This post is recycled from 2017, but we need Guadalupe more than ever. Here’s to you, chica!

We Mexicans don’t often agree on a lot of things. We’re like Jews that way. Put six Mexicans or six Jews together, and you’ll have eleven opinions. Nothing — tacos, nopal, the tri-color of PRI, not even the eagle and the serpent — will put all Mexicans on the same page. But there is one dame whom every Mexican venerates, right down to the atheists and the evangelicals and the Mormons and even the testigos de Jehová, and she’s the Virgen of Guadalupe. No one brings us all together like she does.

The holiest day of the year, bigger than Christmas and Easter, is Dia de Guadalupe, the 12th of December.

You’re heard the saying that only 82% of all Mexicans are Catholic, but 120% of us are Guadalupanos. Being Mexican (or even living in Mexico) and not appreciating the Virgen would be sort of like being Episcopalian and eating shrimp cocktail with the salad fork. It’s one of those things that’s just not done. The Virgen’s not just a saint – she’s the mother of our country, the icon of Mexicanidad, and she knows no borders. There is no woman in all of the Americas more powerful and more venerated than she.

So, if you’re going to be a real Mexican, her visage will adorn more than few rooms in your abode. I’ve got her image on a shopping bag, and an enameled version of her accompanies my car keys at all times. Several more Virgens show up here and there, done up in glitter and ribbon, most likely purchased during Mes Patria. It was only natural that I’d pick up a giclee on canvas reproduction of Octavio Ocampo’s Virgen de Guadalupe about a decade ago.

And then we just couldn’t take our eyes off of Ocampo’s Virgen. There was a magic in this one, new details revealing themselves each time I looked at it: faces inside of roses, campesinos on her eyelids, angels on her robe, a man caressing her left cheek, the new Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and the old one on the left, a red brick gothic church that looked like it would be right at home in Germany on the right. And wait, it’s not just a painting, but a metapainting on a canvas being held up by an almond-eyed Juan Diego.

Image by Deb Winarski

Our research about the background of this work went off and on, since we’ll never be confused with serious researchers, much less art historians. Ocampo created this work, measuring some 1.70 meters in height, on commission in 2000 for St. Nicholas Roman Catholic Church in Evanston for $60,000 USD. And it wasn’t just happenstance that brought Ocampo’s work to this church. The Saint Nicholas Parish had been a polyglot church longer than it hadn’t, its parishioners going from mostly speaking German to speaking mostly English to speaking enough Spanish that its website is now bilingual. Its Mexican parishioners were mostly drawn from Celaya and Salvatierra in the state of Guanajuato, Ocampo was born in Celaya, and everyone from the Bajio has a cousin in Chicago.

Images by Dale R. Granchalek

Dr. Fernando Vizcaíno Guerra of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México political science faculty does much better job of explaining the Ocampo Virgen and how it made its way from Celaya to Evanston in his article La Virgen de Guadalupe y la Identidad en una Parroquia en el Area de Chicago, which appears in La Frontera de las Identidades.

But we still couldn’t envision how this painting looked in living color, so we searched the church’s website until we came upon Dale R. Granchalek, who graciously went out of his way to provide the photos shown in this blog post, recruiting his colleague, Deb Winarski, to photograph the single image of the painting.

My little 12 x 18” pirated version of Ocampo’s Virgen seems paltry in comparison to the real thing, but it led me to the real thing and the story behind it, so that makes it important and valuable to me.

Meanwhile, my small, cheap reproduction now resides in a country house on the road to Guanajuato, Grace Slick having begged me to loan it to her, since her house lacked a proper rendition of the Virgen. So, I extracted a blood oath from her, a covenant to protect the Virgen, returning her unharmed to my house after she performs the necessary and appropriate miracles in her new location.

Bad Santas

Bad Santas seldom start off with evil intentions. At least, that’s how I’d like to think. But there are times when you really wonder whether the givers’ brains were on hiatus. Why not just settle for giving your loved ones a stick or a lump of coal and get it all over with? Or just nothing? It would have to be cheaper and kinder in the long run.

It’s so easy to fall into that trap of giving someone what we would want to receive. Or what would make the recipient what we’d like them to become.

Maybe I’m being too kind. We can write off gifting fails as acts of the clueless and the cheap bastards, and then there’s unadulterated malice.

There are funny gifts. There are gifts that can be genuinely appreciated only by the recipients. And then there are gifts that are just plain cruel.

The initiation fee on a golf club membership. Not only do I hate golf, I couldn’t afford to pay the monthly maintenance charges and had to let the membership go. The donor may have thought the membership would put me with a more desirable class of people, but it was money wasted.

Diet aids, exercise equipment, and self-help books. “But I was only trying to help.” In my family, this comes naturally. My grandmother gave my mother a three-month membership to Vic Tanny’s, good only during the last three months of her final pregnancy. My own mother couldn’t help herself when it came to throwing in cheap exercise equipment along with excesses of stuff I really wanted.

Clothing that is obviously too small or too large for the recipient. Now, no one expects every donor to know every recipient’s size, but it’s a fair bet that those who shop Eileen Fisher seldom come in size 4. And folks with size 7 feet rarely will grow into a 9.5.

Framed photos. I already know what you and your family look like, and I don’t need to be reminded. Do you really think I’m going to prop that up on my mantle? Since you adore those images of yourself so much, how about I blow up a really bad photo of you, put it in a cheap frame, and give it to you on your next birthday?

Holiday gift baskets, loaded with cylinders of dried meat that a rat wouldn’t even touch, cheese cultured from toe jam, stale crackers, and worse. Is there anyone who really is impressed by an assortment of sample-sized nut bars and a few lousy bananas? Why not just send over a sack of dry dog food and a couple of cans of Alpo? If you really know the recipient well, you can deliver the same thrill and for a lot less money by simply wrapping up a box of Kraft non-deluxe dinner and a can of SpaghettiOs.

Tuition at a science conference and a check made out to a math tutor. That kind of gift demands reciprocity of no less than a scholarship to Betty Ford.

A donation made in my name to your favorite charity. How fucking dumb do you think I am? I know you’re taking the tax deduction.

The free travel liquor valise with pictures of liquor bottles, umbrella, and other shit you got for buying office supplies. A family member once gave that to my mother. Wisely, she handed the gift right back as a going-away present no less than 24 hours later.

A yellow lace baby doll peignoir. When was the last time you saw me wearing anything like that?

A gift certificate that would barely pay the sales tax on the cheapest item available or the tip on the cheapest item on the menu. Really, do you think that anyone could use a $5 Zabar’s certificate or a $10 gift certificate good at Canyon Ranch? The only one benefitting from this certificate is the vendor who never has to redeem it.

Books that have absolutely no useful purpose in my life – not even as donations. How about the Children’s Favorite Fables of Utah? Or a coffee table book about the most interesting gas stations in the San Fernando Valley? Surely there’s something more interesting in the remainder pile.

A jeweled dog collar, signifying a promise to buy a poodle. Really, what is a college student going to do with an unsolicited dog?

Medical devices. Oh boy, just what I always wanted! A sleep apnea pillow. A box of Depends would be easier to wrap. Why not go all out and give someone a year’s pass to the local STD clinic?

Used tacky Christmas ornaments, particularly when given on Christmas Day.

Tickets to an event which was held yesterday. Even worse would be tickets to tomorrow night’s Morelia boys’ choir concert for someone living in Uganda.

A toilet brush.

A wood flute and a concertina. Someone could’ve saved a lot of money just by buying an LP of the Lennon Sisters singing the von Trapp Family favorites.

Gifts that the donor thinks may spark some new hobby interest. Like macramé or stamp collecting. People over the age of 9 are seldom spurred on to new avocations.

A stick in your stocking. Yes, this did happen in my family. Even if he may have deserved it, and even though he received everything else he wanted, it still cast an unpleasant pall to that Christmas. No wonder he remains frozen when it comes to giving Christmas presents: expect one of those crappy gift baskets from him.

Are you tempted this year to give someone a gift certificate for paternity testing? What gifts have you received that just made your want to sit down and cry? Or plot revenge by blogging about them?

Who Doesn’t Love Dogs Playing Poker?

While waiting for a repairman to arrive, I wisely invested my time searching for monkey paintings on eBay, which then caused me to search for renditions of Botero’s La Noche on MercadoLibre, which then made me think of the Franklin Mint, which reminded me that I’d written earlier about that. So, please enjoy this blast from the past, penned during the last year of the last Republican Administration.

Red Shoes are Better than Bacon

Some of us would be mortified if anyone found out what was on our iPods. Go ahead and admit it: if you’re reading this, you probably have some Herman’s Hermits and country western lurking on that tiny hard drive. Since I have no pride, I’ll tell you that I’ve got David Seville’s Witch Doctor on mine. (The 45 rpm record was the first one I ever bought with my own money, back in the summer of 1958.)

A generation ago, we decorated their squalid college apartments with black light posters (yes, I still possess some, stashed away in the bodega), lava lamps, and marijuana paraphernalia. A poster of Disney characters engaged in sex acts inspired me to write a law school piece about droit moral and Article 6bis of the Berne Convention, which ended up making me more money than I’d ever made in my entire life up until…

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Cheap Thrills Away From Home

Nick proudly announces that he’d never paid more than $100 apiece for Broadway tickets. Marty insists that $409 for a single ticket to a single seat for Book of Mormon was a real bargain. That was still above my comfort zone, given that amount’s darn close to a partial pair of Ferragamos. Or a week’s worth of Skechers. Or maybe a sack of items at Sephora. I’ve got my priorities, you know. Debt and the kind of culture that generates reviews in places like The New Yorker just aren’t among them.

I’m not part of the lumpen proletariat, I do have an American Express gold card, have flown first class, have bought a Gucci purse or three, have owned French and Tumi luggage, and always check my baggage, frequently more than a single piece. I’ve never stayed at a hostel or Airbnb, because that’s just too close to camping. I prefer to stay at nice hotels, and if I can’t do as well or better than what I have at home, there’s no point in leaving home.

People are always asking if I caught some high-culture event or ate at some restaurant in TripAdvisor’s top ten when I’ve left home, even those who know me well enough to know what my answer will be. Upon returning from San Miguel de Allende, about 150 miles up the road from home, friends will ask about the great restaurants I ate at, only to roll their eyes when I tell them about the take-out grilled chicken from a roadhouse or a tapas bar at a swank grocery store.

My holidays are filled with regular things, regular meals at regular places, and souvenirs are just as likely to be regular stuff. What did I bring home from my last trip to Medellin? Shelf-stable fruit purees, cotton hand towels, antibiotics, some bar soap, a book about Frida Kahlo’s love affair with Trotsky, and a pair of porcelain monkeys. Plastic storage containers, odd condiments, bobèches, hot pads, wire whisks, hair brushes, eyeliner, and unique kitchen tools have found their way into my baggage on other trips, each bearing a tale guaranteed to bore any listener.

Shopping malls may be dying in the United States, but they’re thriving in Latin America and elsewhere. And they rank among my favorite destinations whenever I’m away from home. I’ll research what shopping malls to hit, because the mall is my version of high culture, a sporting event, and a self-guided tour all rolled into one. Malls are an opportunity to see ordinary people, local folks doing quotidian things, even if sometimes there might be a free concert, seldom lasting more than 20 minutes, which is long enough for musical entertainment anyway. Malls are microcosms of society, town centers, and harbor much more than mere mercantile.  Nail salons, beauty parlors, art exhibits, coffee shops, and nice restaurants beckon. At least one full day will be spent at a mall, no matter where I’m going.

Buenos Aires’ Patio Bullrich, Galerías Pacífico, Paseo Alcorta, Alto Palermo, El Solar de la Abadía. Montevideo’s Punta Carretas Shopping, Town Center in Boca Raton, Medellin’s El Tesoro Parque Comercial, Queretaro’s Antea Lifestyle Center, The Galleria in Houston, Honolulu’s Ala Moana Shopping Center, Denver’s Cherry Creek Center, Bogota’s Centro Comercial Andino and Hacienda Santa Barbara. I’d rather spend hours at any one of them (and have) than at the Met or the Getty Center. And advance reservations, long lines and admissions never come into the picture.

Even down-market malls have a certain appeal. The Centro Comercial Palacio Nacional is in the heart of the downtown Medellin harbors an amazing collection of the tackiest merchandise you’ll ever see, but the stores aren’t the point. Because it really did start out as the national palace, you’re really there for the architecture.

Give me a day at El Corte Ingles, and I’m better entertained than I would’ve been at the Prado. Far more exciting than a museum, a wander through Harrods’ Egyptian Hall and Crystal Rooms costs nothing. The architecture of the flagship El Palacio de Hierro in Mexico City is breath-taking. Even high-end drug and dime stores like Boots and Sanborns harbor treasures I know I won’t find at home.

I’m impelled to search out Chinatowns wherever I go: Chicago, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Calgary, London. San Francisco and China don’t have the franchise on Chinatown.

Even grocery stores, ranging from little corner abarrotes, bodegas, kioskos, to supermarkets and all the way up to Carrefour, are mustn’t-miss cultural attractions. It’s fascinating to explore new produce items, puzzle over why the meat department is filled with tons of cured meat, chuckle over the offerings over on the gourmet aisle (Pace picante salsa and hard taco shells, anyone?), gaze upon twelve kinds of quinoa, inspect interesting crackers and cookies.  I’m still sporting shopping bags from Carulla with the same pride that attaches to those from Draeger’s Market and Trader Joe’s.

Always beckoning are antique stores and thrift shops, even more entertaining when I’m on a mission. I shop for monkeys, most often the ones impersonating humans. One friend is always on the prowl for Hawaiian shirts, another for antique brandy snifters, and yet another has yet to see a Breyer horse that she can’t pass up.

Finding yourself in an odd part of town filled with stores you never knew existed – one specializing in belts, another in dog collars, one selling zippers and only zippers, and yet another specializing in cabinet pulls with a door knob store next door—is magic. I’ve taken taxis clear across town to visit a Home Depot-esque places in foreign countries, just to see what’s selling, satisfying my curiosity about what a stove might cost, pawing through the garden department for seeds not sold where I live.

Street vendors call out to me. I rarely buy, but I always gawk. A cure-all made from live snail ooze, battery-operated electric flyswatters, lighted walking sticks, a pistol that shoots soap bubbles, cell phone time, pirated merchandise, sponge rats, fake eyelashes in fantasy colors.

The organ grinder mesmerizes me, always evoking the memory of one I saw years ago with live bear tethered to the organ.

Hippie and flea markets may be the same the world over, all surely run by some worldwide hippie market syndicate that prescribes the essentials: candles, soap, odd oils and potions, incense, chocolates, tisanes, herbal remedies, musical instruments made out of gourds by political prisoners, patchouli and El Condor Pasa wafting through the air, indigenous clothing, and some craft made from recycled materials like vinyl records or wooden lasts.

There’s a blessing somewhere for those fortunate to watch a living statue set up at the beginning of a shift and deconstructed at the end.

And then there are the hardcore markets: Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, Mexico City’s La Lagunilla Sunday antiques market, which means donning combat clothing, checking anything of value back at the hotel. These are living, breathing museums where all sorts of treasures are for sale.

I don’t understand why people take guided tours when striking out on your own is so much more fun. There’s no cheaper and more interesting way to see a city than by hopping on a commuter train or bus and riding to the end of the line or until boredom sets in and then dovetailing back.

Sunday tango in the streets of San Telmo, a Cuban a capella concert in Merida, a dog show in Sevilla, the juggler playing a harmonica while riding a unicycle in Amsterdam, and a bazaar of new designs and a clown workshop in Bogota all provided lasting memories without costing a dime. Even right here in my hometown of Morelia, fascinating and free entertainment abounds. Grown people, some of them even doctors and lawyers, painting designs on fabric, the stuff I’d roll my eyes at, at least until I realized the participants, chatting away, and having a great time doing what they were doing, left me happier just for watching them. Orchid shows, caporeia exhibitions, dancing horses from Apatzingan, and the Sunday art market in Parque Las Rosas, and book fairs compete for my attention.

And then there’s the matter of eating. Too many friends plan their travel by restaurants and TripAdvisor ratings, and I’ve even accompanied them on those jaunts, forced to stand in line for the opportunity to shed far more money than the dining experience warranted.

Don’t get me wrong. I like to eat, and I like to eat well. I just resist planning and spending outrageous sums of money.

Now, I’m no fan of food trucks or street food, and where I can comfortably plant my derriere is just as important as what goes down my gullet. It’s not all about the cheap; it’s more about the timing and convenience. The rest is just serendipity.

A cup of regular black coffee served in a china cup, along with a domino cookie, for less than a dollar in a sidewalk café populated mostly by city hall employees in Envigado. A Monday meatloaf special in a New Orleans diner of no memorable name. The best cochinita pibil in Merida, located just by asking two lawyers on their smoke break where they would have an ordinary lunch. Those great and incredibly inexpensive meals are still fondly remembered more than some expensive repast at a destination venue like Commander’s Palace or The Russian Tea Room (which I dearly loved for the décor).

When I’m traveling, just as at home, my main meal is midday. The menú turístico (tourist menu) has never let me down, and it’s usually an opportunity to enjoy several courses at a fixed price for far less than a la carte. Upscale grocery stores usually have a deli with an eating area, often a great opportunity to pick up something tasty for a light supper. I’ve enjoyed duck tacos, Lebanese platters, Peruvian ceviches, and pastel de choclo from grocery store takeout.

Food fairs, gatherings of regional cooks, celebrations of traditional cuisine, even charity barbecues have served up great food at affordable prices, and each of those was even better, because I’d just stumbled upon those events.

Even for those who aren’t fast food franchise fans at home, McDonald’s in Lima and Pizza Hut in Madrid command visits for intercultural exploration, fueling their passion more than Astrid y Gaston and Botín.

That Swarovski-encrusted car at Centro Comercial Andino in Bogota remains far more vivid in my mind that any Bruegel art, and I’m sure I’m not alone in finding Kinky Friedman more appealing than Phillip Glass. Call me easily entertained.

Previously published in Voice of Experience: June 2020, American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division.

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Six Feet of Summer Socializing

Three arms’ length, two and a half baseball bats, two golf clubs, two shopping carts, two end-to-end Doberman Pinschers, the width of a Honda Accord, or half a parking space. That’s six feet, give or take a few inches. And that’s the current standard of social distancing, which still means something even if businesses have started to open again and protestors march in the streets.

It’s the 2020 version of the gym teacher, armed with a ruler, separating couples who were dancing too close at the junior high school dance. What we called cooties back in the fifties are back today as COVID-19.

Ball games, barbecues, picnics, outdoor concerts under the stars, libations around the fire pit. Those were yester summer’s fun, but COVID-19 changed the rhythm, setting, and style of socializing, creating New Rules, new normal, and new ways of entertaining ourselves in the company of others.

And now that the Boston Marathon, postponed to September 14, has been cancelled, what are you going to do? We all know how hard you had been training for that while you sheltered in place.

You can play board games and Animal Crossing: New Horizons only so long. You’ve become sick and tired of decorating focaccia and making sourdough. Even fermenting vegetables has become old. How can you get out of the house, socialize with other sentient beings, and remain in an acceptable risk zone? Surely, there has to be some way to have fun, socialize, and still maintain acceptable social distance. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, in “From Camping To Dining Out: Here’s How Experts Rate The Risks Of 14 Summer Activities” gives some useful guidance. You can still have fun while maintaining that safe, healthy, and social distance.

Manhattan Beach, California, lawyer Brian H. Cole, whose beach forbids setting up chairs, limiting activity only to “active” pursuits like swimming, surfing, and walking, has been having “driveway dinners,” both at home and at friends’ homes. Two or three couples gather, sitting at appropriate distances apart, and enjoy take-out from a nearby restaurant. Even friends with health challenges have been willing to engage in these driveway dinners, since everyone gathers in fresh air without getting too close.

A Seattle lawyer participates in Zoom cocktail parties with other lawyers, Zoom wine tastings, and even split a bottle of wine with a long-time, trusted friend, physically separated by at least eight feet on the deck of his house, overlooking a lake. For a real change of scenery, he ventures forth to his office, distancing himself from the sole other occupant, his secretary. And then there’s always Costco.

Practicing out of a high-rise condo in the Philadelphia city center for a dozen years, Miriam Jacobson’s not socializing in person at all, having no plans to do so for a long time, but that doesn’t mean she’s living the life of a hermit. The plays, movies, restaurants, and meetings which were part of her pre-COVID-19 life are no longer on her agenda, nor are the doctors’ appointments which had been part of her social life.  But she’s neither idle nor lonely, using Zoom as her lifeline, participating in tai chi, yoga, pranayama, and Qi Gong breath classes, attending bar association meetings in different locations in her living room and dining area, participating in a group that is trying to bridge the cultural difference between Jewish and Muslim women, and enjoying dinner with friends. She says her list of Netflix and Hulu offerings is probably longer than her life expectancy. Hot weather, crowds of unmasked people on narrow sidewalks, and protests have kept her from taking outdoor walks for now.

Jacobson senses that in some of the Zoom meetings, people are more willing to share intimately, adding that some the discussions have taken on more open and authentic dimensions, perhaps because the focus is upon the participant’s faces instead of the backs of their heads that we would see at in-person classroom settings.

So, what has this writer been doing? Life is not terribly dissimilar from pre-COVID-19 days, because there’s plenty around the house and yard to keep me occupied and entertained. I participate in competitive cooking with friends in North and South America, I garden and read, and I snidely complain to others about the indecency of the unmasked masses. I venture out to Costco, the beauty shop, and to my favorite steakhouse, which I’ll keep on doing.

This is the age of consent and establishing boundaries. Close friends have always had social codes of conduct. Some are just common sense, like not wearing white shoes after Labor Day or serving shrimp cocktails with salad forks at a Passover seder. Whether it’s a hike with friends, a dinner party, or coffee and dessert, establish ground rules for all participants. Just as there once were tacit agreements about smoking, over-drinking, using recreational drugs, and discussing taboo topics, the New Rules require an understanding of everyone’s tolerance level of masking, washing, disinfecting, sharing, and sane distancing. And those agreements can easily extend to a ban on bringing uninvited guests. What might’ve passed for faux pas or just bad manners last year are matters of life and death for many today.

Relax, and remain flexible. You may have set out enough supplies of hand sanitizer, tissues, disposable facemasks, spray cleaners, disinfectants, and trash receptacles to outfit a MASH unit, but no matter how careful everyone tries to be, sooner or later someone’s going to break the New Rules. Consider it today’s equivalent of spilled wine or a broken glass, break out the Clorox wipes, and move on. A breached bacterial barrier isn’t worth stressing over. Your hospitality zone would never be mistaken for an operating theater anyway.

Everyone’s risk aversion level is different. Try to understand their needs and concerns, accommodating them without compromising your own health standards. If someone insists upon wearing nitrile gloves and a plastic face shield, topped off with a foam pool noodle, at an in-person dinner party, don’t comment. After all, it’s not as if they were wearing black socks with sandals or eating with the wrong fork. If others require you to wear a full-on plastic face shield, play along in good faith. It’s only for an hour or so, and it can’t look any sillier than you were at that Halloween party back in 1999.

And if you can’t commune with other humans, you can still get close to nature. Go out for a hike, plant a garden, landscape the yard. Breathe in some fresh air, and let the sun restore that Vitamin D. Walk your dog, go horseback riding, maybe even take in a botanical garden or zoo.

Ten years ago, MOOCs (massive open online courses) were all the rage, fell into disuse, but COVID-19 has put Coursera, Udacity, and edX back in style again. Take a course with a few friends, just to make it a meaningful and safe social activity. The Johns Hopkins’ course, “COVID-19 Contact Tracing,” offered through Coursera might not lead to new career opportunities, but it will make you conversant about a new topic.

Sheltering in place, self-isolation, and quarantining don’t have to mean social exile. Keep in touch with friends – and even strangers – by phone, on social media, by e-mail, and even by old-fashioned snail mail. Staying socially connected is essential to remaining sane in interesting times.

Previously published in Voice of Experience: June 2020, American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division

 

 

Covid Tales

This morning at Banorte’s bank of ATMs, a tidy, well-dressed, bald, bare-faced customer works the machine, methodically wiping it down with a white disinfecting wipe, as if preparing it for surgery, inserting his card and extracting his money, and then wiping his fingers and the machine down afterward. There is another machine available, but I decide the one the bald man has wiped down is clean enough for me to use second-hand.

Paying attention to which digits I put into use, I note that only the tip of my left index finger touches the machine and its keypad, the same index finger and its adjoining thumb only put into use to pluck the card from my purse’s outer pocket, sliding it in and pulling it out, along with the cash. Perhaps as much as an eighth of a centimeter of my skin touched where others had gone before.

Stuffing my money and debit card back into my purse, I douse my hands with gel, making sure that I smear it all over the bottle for good measure as I walk back to my car. Maybe I was thinking that those viruses and spirochetes were in a mad race to my elbows.

But the story starts in my vestidor, before I took off for the bank, as I make up my face, opting for the good eye shadow, the good eyeliner, telling myself that it’s more necessary now than ever, that I don’t need to be stingy with makeup, because I can buy more when this is all over. Even if my face will be mostly covered and my eyes shaded by dark glasses, it’s important that I know what’s underneath. I draw the parallels with wearing the good underwear and slathering on the good body cream on an ordinary day. No one but me knows it’s there, and maybe that’s what makes it all the more important.

*****

Will we all become super-aware of germs when this is over? The polio years left its mark on many of us. When I was 15, a girl who would go on to become a homecoming queen picked up my drink, supposedly by mistake, and I could not touch it after she had. God only knows what had been in her mouth the weekend before, and I wasn’t taking any chances. She and her pack of wannabees made fun of my germaphobia, and I lost rank that day.

In time, we would get over the ickiness of germs as we passed around joints, took hits from the same bong, and swilled from the same Almaden bottle being passed around. And if a McDonald’s coffee stirrer wasn’t available, a rolled-up Ben Franklin touched more than a few nostrils.

Will the next generation do that?

*****

Masks do more than create a germ barrier, shutting out bad breath as well as emotions.  You can’t see another’s smile, their teeth, whether they’re baring their teeth, grimacing, or sticking their tongue out at you. What will happen to lipstick? And what about white teeth? Will masks be the death knell for porcelain veneers? Will orthodontists be put out of business? Will women stop bleaching their mustaches and plucking those pesky chin hairs? Will people stop trimming those nose hairs?

Earrings and masks don’t often work well together. And those nose rings and studs? Wasted efforts.

Will we start looking into others’ eyes more carefully for signs of life?

And when The Late Unpleasantness abates, will those of us who’ve come to resemble Botero people be back in style?

Or is it all a plot to get everyone into nijabs and burkas?

*****

Back to the bald man with the disinfecting wipes. Assuming, he wasn’t wiping the ATM down with coronavirus, he was showing concern for the next user. Maybe it was just a public version of wiping off stray sprinkles on a toilet seat or putting it down after using it, but it was a gesture that didn’t go unnoticed. And that took me back to thinking about how the masks aren’t about protecting the wearer, but showing respect for others.  And that’s what I tell myself when I put on my eye makeup.

 

 

 

Gleaming Forever

Over on the Highway to Heaven, which just sounds better than Avenida Juan Pablo II, across from the Universidad Vasco de Quiroga, just on this side of the Gordon Bodenwein Benedictine Monasterio, which is a story for another day, stood a solid red Christmas tree just outside of a large assortment of trees imported from Canada, never mind that there’s a thriving Christmas tree industry right here in Mexico. Six days later, the glimpse still in my mind, I had to return to check out that tree. Never mind that I never bought a Christmas tree in my life. Or that I’d sprung just the day before for nine of the most beautiful fuschia nochebuenas over at the state forestry department Christmas bazaar.

And that solid red Christmas tree was even more beautiful than the first time I’d seen it. In close second place was an all-black frosted tree. I could be happy with either, but they just couldn’t compete with what I already have.

My Christmas tree came in a box, an original silver Evergleam, grown in the forests of the Aluminum Specialty Company in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, during the second term of the Eisenhower Administration and the first and only term of the López Mateos, a golden and growing era for both countries. It’s so beautiful that we leave it up all year round, topped off with a Doberman angel, handcrafted by nimble Orvis elves. Hand-blown glass ornaments came from Tlalpujahua, some filled with filament, others with feathers. The only thing missing is that revolving color wheel light, which was more exciting to watch than any ordinary Christmas lights and no doubt set the stage for those hours we’d spend a decade later gazing at posters under a black light.

The Evergleam is an heirloom one, purchased by my grandmother during the one year she didn’t have the florist make up a Christmas tree in something like all-turquoise flocked pine with matching ornaments, which would all be hauled away after New Year’s to prevent her descendants from inheriting Christmas ornaments. My grandparents were always the first in town to have whatever was the newest and latest, so they used that tree once and hid it in a storage closet until more than two decades would elapse. By then, I’d opened my law office, and she suggested it might look good in the waiting room, instructing me that it should be decorated in ornaments of a single color, preferably blue, since that was her color. So, the tree got put up a time or two in the office, and then it found itself shipped to Mexico to my mother, who was living here at the time, who declared it too ugly for words, shoving it back into the bodega, where it would remain for another decade or so. In due time, I would move to Mexico, and in the years following, I would take it lovingly from the original box, carefully releasing the branches from the original paper sleeves, and erect it with red and pink ornaments. Friends who drop by are rendered speechless by the sight of this tree, but I know that deep down, they’re just envious. This tree has seen more holidays than my grandmother ever intended, but I think it’s beautiful in that 1959 pink Cadillac with fins kind of way.

This year, the Evergleam aluminum tree will be 60 years old. And it’s still emblematic of an era when the world was bright, filled with energy, when people of all stripes and faiths could cheerfully wish one another “Merry Christmas” and mean it. And that was the year when Santa Claus brought me double holster cap guns which I proudly wore over a red smocked dress with a red net petticoat underneath.

Melania may have had those stunning red Christmas trees last year, but what she’s missing is an Evergleam.

The Call of Colombia

Let’s get this out of the way: there is no U in Colombia.

“Colombia? That’s the last place in this hemisphere I’d want to go to for vacation,” warns Gabriel, my dentist of 35 years, a well-traveled, sophisticated kind of guy who thrives on adventure and whose very own father came from Ecuador. “You couldn’t make me go there.” Never mind that we live in one of those places that’s on the U.S. State Department’s no-go list. You would’ve thought I’d suggested a winter holiday in Detroit. But then his reaction mirrored most of my friends’.

When I pitched this piece to the Voice of Experience editorial board, you could practically hear the eyes rolling. You’d think I was urging travel to Venezuela or Somalia. Let’s just say the board’s enthusiasm about Colombia piece was less than audible. Colombia has long been the poster child of the unruly society that many associate with Latin America.

“But you’ve already been there,” other friends tell me, issuing the same refrain I’d hear forty years ago when I kept returning to Mexico. Never mind that these are the same people who return to France and to Italy and even to Disney World year after year.
Upper-middle class bachelor parties in Mexico have started opting for a long weekend jaunt to Colombia instead of old-time standbys of Cancun, Cuba, or Las Vegas. It’s been making the New York Times lists of up-and-coming places to visit, and it’s got Lonely Planet’s endorsement.

“The only risk is wanting to stay!” A little over a decade ago, the Colombian export commission and tourism ministry launched an advertising campaign explicitly intended to ameliorate the country’s “most dangerous” reputation in South America. But the odd logic practiced by the U.S. State Department would continue to play Chicken Little, issuing a Level 2 Exercise Caution advisory for Colombia with a Level 3 Reconsider Travel advisory for some regions. Forget what you saw on Narcos, Romancing the Stone, and Scarface, will you? Like the readers of VOE, I’m not traipsing off into FARC territory or trying to score illicit sex and drugs. There’s no question that Colombia is security-conscious, but frankly, I’ve felt more danger lurking right in front of Neiman Marcus on N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago on some random Tuesday afternoon.

Twice the size of Texas and France, four times bigger than Italy, this country packs in loads of landscapes—two coastlines, the Andes, Amazon rainforest, deserts, big cities, middling villages, rivers, lakes, jungles, valleys, and savannahs—and the second-highest biodiversity in the world. It consistently rates as one of the happiest countries in the world, according to the World Happiness Report. Its position near the equator means that there’s very little variation in temperatures throughout the year, although the higher elevations are cooler than the lowlands. In Bogota, it’s possible to experience all four seasons in the span of an afternoon. This is a place where the sun rises early and sets early with very little change throughout the year.

Colombia’s first allure to me was its ease of access: a 4-hour affordable flight from Mexico City. Even from the U.S., flights to Colombia are relatively inexpensive. High quality and good value would come later as selling points.

My favorite venue, and consequently the site of most of my travel in Colombia, has been in the Andean Region. Bogota, Medellin, coffee and quaint towns, all at an altitude, are my idea of a great holiday.

Retail Therapy

So many visitors to Latin America are enchanted by traditional markets, dancing natives, folk art, nature hikes, and visits to coffee plantations. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed that stuff, too. But nothing fascinates me more than a visit to the mall, and Latin America has some of the best ones in the New World. Arlene Dávila’s El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America explains how and why Latin American malls are light years from Mall of the Americas. They’re for more than just shopping because malls create and host a Main Street, a cultural space, restaurant venues, events, and plenty of opportunities to just people-watch. Whether it’s Bogota’s Centro Mayor (the largest in South America) or Centro Andino or Medellin’s El Tesoro Parque Comercial, I just can’t get my fill, easily spending the better part of a day easily entertained at any one of them.
And then there are the treks to antique stores, flea markets, hippie markets, pop-up stores, and even grocery stores, all sources of never-ending exploration.

Getting Cultured

Just as Buenos Aires calls itself the Paris of South America, Bogota is tabbed the Athens of South America, and for good reason. Bogota boasts over fifty museums, all at prices ranging from free to only a few dollars. This is culture at a price I can afford. In Bogota, the Museo del Oro, the Museo Botero, and the Museo Nacional are right up there with the best anywhere. Medellin has the Museo de Antioquia, with its world-class Botero collection, the Botero sculptures scattered throughout the city, El Castillo Museo y Jardines, the Museo del Agua, and the Museo Casa de la Memoria. But what is really memorable is simply stumbling across some museum housing something that you’ve never really thought much about and then visiting it just for a clean bathroom, some shade, or to bide time, only to be pleasantly surprised. I still chuckle at how I came across and actually enjoyed museums dedicated to philately and numismatics, subjects I’d never really considered interesting.

It doesn’t take a lot to entertain me in Colombia. Just wandering around can be entertaining enough, but coming upon an unexpected event, like the Bogota International Book Fair, a bazaar for new designs, a clown workshop, a dog adoption fair, or an exposition of women-owned small businesses, is always a highlight. Planning a trip around some event means higher prices and higher expectations, but just picking up the local newspaper to see what’s going on doesn’t.

Victuals

Because I’m usually travelling alone, I never plan meals at some destination restaurant or even one well-ranked in Trip Advisor. I just stop at whatever looks good when I’m hungry and in the mood. Some of the most memorable meals have been at restaurants I couldn’t even identify again by name, simply because they were situated within a museum or recommended by the owner of some ratty antique shop as a good place for lunch. The $2.50 chicken fried steak and a $.65 cup of coffee (freshly baked cookie included), both consumed in Envigado, a suburb south of Medellin, stand out in my memory as much as the $20 steak I enjoyed later in the day in El Poblado.

Colombia isn’t the place to go looking for fine wines. Carulla’s liquor department had a lonely bottle of Colombian wine. But it is the place for artisanal beer, coffee, fruit of every hue, bread, and, of course, arepas. There are the fancy restaurants, the world-famous Andres, Harry Sasson and Leo, and just about every ethnic cuisine under the sun. Traditional Colombian cuisine comes across first as bland and well-fried, but upon reflection, it eventually all comes together as simple, honest, and straightforward fare, devoid of pretense and harboring no mystery ingredients. It’s just home-cooking: Ajiaco, a chicken, corn, and potato stew, and Bandeja Paisa, a platter filled with pork-flavored beans, rice, ground meat, chicharron, plantain, chorizo, hogao sauce, avocado, and lemon. Even the traditional breakfast dish, Recalentado, made up of last night’s meat, reheated with some rice and beans, is surprisingly satisfying, reminiscent of the Spanish rice many of us remember from our childhoods. If you like beer, cheese, and charcuterie, Colombia’s the place for you. Liking none of that, I spend my time looking forward to fruits not easily accessible elsewhere, like lulo and mangosteen, and the coffee.

Getting around

Bogota and Medellin both have excellent public transportation systems and traffic that would make Mexico City’s traffic problems look Lilliputian. But taxis are plentiful, safe, and cheap. Uber and its kin are just as available.

Domestic airfare is a real bargain once you learn to book on the airline’s site as if you were in Colombia, paying in Colombian pesos. Doing that will deliver an airfare that can be more than 50% cheaper than booking on the U.S. site in U.S. dollars. And you can still use English on the website. You may need to notify your credit card issuer that you’re virtually in Colombia ahead of time when you’re buying plane tickets that way.

Money

The rate of exchange for the Colombian pesos to the U.S. dollar is 3,284 to 1.

Foreigners visiting Colombia as a tourist are exempt from paying the 19% hotel tax. This doesn’t apply to tours and some package plans.

Foreigners also are eligible to receive a refund of the V.A.T. for certain purchases.
A 10% tip is automatically added to all charges for food and beverage, even at Starbucks, but it is optional, as is explained on the additional 8” of every receipt that accompanies a purchase.

For convenience and to avoid ATM fees, many of us are accustomed to withdrawing the maximum possible from each visit to an ATM. Colombian ATMs routinely limit the transaction to the equivalent of $125 USD. Only Colpatria and Citibank have more generous limits: $265 and $375. Use your credit card whenever possible to cut down on the need for frequent trips to the ATM.

You are going to love the place. It is as if the Germans were running South America. And I mean that in a good way, too. Think about tranquility, well-mannered tidiness, red bricks, and even fried food. Just don’t talk about Pablo Escobar.

Intentional Tacos

 

Growing up, Saturday lunch was usually tacos, which my mother insisted were chalupas, since that’s what she’d eaten when she went to college in Texas, some time before Pearl Harbor. We didn’t know any better, never mind that we were only about 20 miles from Tijuana. We ate what we thought were tacos on Saturdays, because they were something the Indian (Native Americans weren’t around back then) maid, who shared a surname with the Mexican president known more for the eponymous laws that set off the Cristero Rebellion than any of his good deeds, could quickly make before leaving for the weekend. Fried corn tortillas, canned refried beans, hamburger cooked with chile powder, lettuce, onion, and tomato. My job was to slice the scallions. At least the tortillas weren’t those pre-fried taco shells.

Today I’ve become one of those people who treks all over town in search of the esoteric, organic, and delicious, hitting La Ruta Natural one Saturday, and 8 days (which for you Estadounidenses, is a week) later, the organic market at Paseo Altozano, occasionally faced with a double-header if the first-Saturday-of-the-Month Mercato DaVinci beckons. And then there’s the every-Wednesday-while-school-is-in-session Mercadito CEM, which now conflicts with my passion for ordering up groceries from El Arbol over on Av. Cuautla, now that I’ve learned the secret handshake.

And then all of this hunting and gathering leads me to Sundays playing cook in my kitchen, getting out my toys for a purpose other than making MorgenFood in the Instant Pot and agua de pepino with the mandolin, coming to the realization that a food stylist on staff could be useful and that I ought not give up my day job, as if I had one. I’ll get into one kind of food, and then I’ll run it into the ground. Verdolagas were last year’s cheap thrill. At the moment I’m into tacos. Not the kind we grew up with, of course, but the kind that would photograph well, since the only purpose in creating something attractive on your plate is to upload it to Facebook, right?

So now I present you with the tacos du jour: Instant Pot pulled pork, Las Tias mango habanero chutney, Thai basil, and tomatoes, all wrapped up in tortillas de flor de jamaica, courtesy of Roberto Gomez, purveyor of all things jamaica. Everything that went into this plate came from Michoacán. Lamentably, germinado jamaica (hibiscus sprout) wasn’t available, and that would’ve been so essential. Maybe by summer’s end I’ll get this designer taco thing perfected.

A rabbit from last Sunday’s Feria Alternativa de Urandén reposes in the freezer. Butter rabbit (murgh makhana) on blue corn tortillas, anyone?

Michael Warshauer, Q.E.P.D.

One of Patzcuaro’s icons had a major change of address two days ago.

Michael Warshauer, born in the sunset year of the Silent Generation in Brooklyn, died in Patzcuaro at the age of 76 years. He would call a lot of venues home – New Jersey; Montreal; some place in Ohio which might’ve actually been some place in Pennsylvania or maybe both; St. Louis; Columbia, Missouri; Overland Park; Mountain View and Little Rock, Arkansas – before settling in along the shores of Lake Patzcuaro in the fall of 2005.

An English major at Mizzou, he’d sell his textbooks to pay for caving, along the way meeting Susie, who’d picked up the spelunking habit in Wales and whom he’d go on to wed. And spend even more time exploring subterranean paradises. And sometime amid all of this, he found time to serve in the Army National Guard, keeping Missouri safe from the North Vietnamese.

Susie and baking came first in his life, followed in short order by the holy trinity of Apple, Costco, and Amazon.

Michael was panos@aristotle.net when we first met around 1997.  I thought I’d met him on Usenet, but he insisted it was on Mexconnect. Ni modo. He would go on to be known as Anonimo and Don Cuevas.

He could hold forth about what went into good cooking, the science and art of it all, and he could also acknowledge that sometimes things just went south, despite the best of efforts. He could analyze ingredients, and he could go into great detail about all kinds and grinds of flour, rising times, shapes of bread, oven heat, and baking times.

He would publish blogs at Surviving La Vida Buena and My Mexican Kitchen.

Pecan cinnamon rolls. Stracotto. Gingersnaps. Almond Danish. Gingerbread. Knishes. Health salad. Plum sauce. Kimchi. Brisket. Latkes. Dim sum. Chinese dumplings. Char Siu. Scallion cakes. Biscuits. Bear claws. Rugelach. Dressing. Fried chicken tenders. Stuff wrapped in hoja santa. Challah. Rye bread. Ginger beer. Pho. Vietnamese beef jerky. Gravlax. You name it, and he’d make it. Well, he did draw the line at hamantaschen, just because he claimed not to like them. Did I mention gingersnaps?

A gracious host, Michael could tell everyone to get the hell out of his kitchen when he needed to concentrate. And we gladly complied. And unlike so many foodies and cooks, he was a gracious guest, cheerfully downing whatever you offered in your home without suggesting how you could’ve avoided one of your usual culinary disasters. He knew when to politely keep his mouth shut, a talent rarely practiced by much of today’s society.

He had this native ability to ferret out treasures in the places you’d least suspect, and anything close to food became his mission. Only a year and a half or so ago, he raced ahead of us to Mercado Medellin in CDMX, wending and maneuvering his way through the aisles with the fine-tuned agility of a cutting horse.

In all the years that I knew Michael, I don’t think I ever saw him behind the wheel of any motor vehicle. I knew he knew how to drive, because, well, he did have a driver’s license. But always sitting shotgun as copiloto, he tabbed Susie as his chauffeur,

There wasn’t a food website he didn’t visit, and he loved to forward links to “Can you imagine how bad this must be?” items as well as stuff that actually did sound good. And the restaurants. Ten lifetimes wouldn’t be enough for Michael to visit all the restaurants he would’ve liked to. You might idly let it drop that you’d been to a good enough Chinese restaurant in Bogota, and he’d quickly let you know that it was only ranked 168 among 857 restaurants in the entire capital of Colombia. One of my last emails from him, not even a month ago, mentioned his desire to visit La Conspiracion de 1809 in Morelia, adding that they could go there by taxi. But by then, you just sort of know that he’d never make it there.

And then there were the puns. He could pop off puns at popcorn speed. Some were great, and some were real groaners, but that didn’t stop him. If Michael wasn’t making a pun about something, you just knew something had to be wrong.

And as he slowed down on his usual blogging activity, he became a YouTube enthusiast and a devotee of Mark Weins and Trevor James. And just when you’d had enough of some foodie praising the food of Pakistan, Michael would redeem himself by sending a 29-minute video of some guy cooking a steak, just because he knew that would captivate whomever was on the receiving end.

Michael Warshauer, you had style and class, and without question, you were extraordinary. You made all of our lives richer through your friendship, and you will be missed. Good night, Panos.

AMLO Cardenas

July 1, 2018

Today was the biggest election in Mexican history.

My thumb is inked, which means that I’ve cast my vote. So, I’m standing in line at the casilla at the public school three blocks from my house this morning, even before my morning coffee, thinking I’d walk over to OXXO and get a free cup for showing my thumb, joined by the rest of the neighborhood dressed in their Sunday best — Skechers and sweats– when an ignorant middle-class woman ahead of me in line asks if I’m Mexican. “Do you think I’d be standing waiting around here if I weren’t?” She chimes in with that usual “You don’t look Mexican,” never mind I look like half the people waiting in the schoolyard. I am so tempted to tell her “You don’t look like you can read,” but I don’t.

She leaves a few minutes later to go to the Sunday tianguis.

My line isn’t moving, even though the schoolroom is staffed with the election personnel. The vigilantes de los partidos – observers from each of the political parties – haven’t shown up yet, and the party can’t proceed until they’re all there. That always seems to happen in the P through Z line.

There are 25 people ahead of me in line, the head of which is marked by a woman in an orange headscarf and another with platinum-streaked hair. A couple one person ahead of me are passing the time playing pat-a-cake pat-a-cake baker’s man; the man directly ahead of me, dressed in black and white from his ball cap all the way to his Skechers, black Bermuda shorts, a white t-shirt under a black vest, checks his iPhone, clad in a black leather case; the girl behind me with neatly applied lipstick and good eye makeup is getting one call after another on her smartphone; and the reigning doyenne of the organic market is four people behind her, stylish in khaki slacks and a white blouse, which I’d say came from Palacio de Hierro. I have on purple Skechers (2017), black Adidas pants from Nordstrom Rack in Honolulu in 2006, a grey t-shirt from Nordstrom’s in San Mateo (2014), and a purple appliqued hoodie. And freshly dyed hair.

Finally, an elderly nun, her thick white hair neatly coiffed, a giant cross hanging from her neck, emerges, raising her inked thumb in victory, proclaiming “I was the first!” as she practically dances across the pavement. She was one of the happiest nuns I’ve seen in ages.

And before long, my turn at the polls arrives. I hand over my INE card, the election worker reads out my name but not before asking “What is your last name?” My surname appears in the same spot on the card that everyone else’s does, but it’s confusing, since my last name is all too often confused with the first. Still, since the card only reveals two names—a first and a last—you’d think he’d figure that much out. He reads off my name, five workers checking their rosters to mark my appearance, and one poll worker after another rips a ballot from their book. I enter the booth with a handful of ballots – one for each of the five races.

There may be tacos (multiple ballots folded together), but there will be no hanging chads. All of the voting is done with paper ballots, voters using the same ballot from Tijuana to Cancun.

And after marking each with an X in the same spot to cast my free and secret vote, I exit the voting area, folding my ballot to deposit in the box marked in a different color for each office. I go on to pick up my INE card, getting my right thumb indelibly inked. Just so I won’t vote twice.

And I stride, victoriously, from the school yard. It’s no secret that each of my votes went for the PRI candidates. That’s just how I’m wired.

August 5, 2018.

My candidate for president came in the third. It wasn’t all that surprising, even though I still maintain that he was the best-qualified for the job. During his concession appearance the evening of the election, he almost seemed relieved. His wife unquestionably had to have been relieved. And both will surely lead much saner, less complicated lives during the coming six years than the man who won.

It seemed a given, no matter whom you might’ve asked, that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, AMLO, would win. What rankled me more than anything were the attitudes of many voters, smugly declaring that it was time for revolution, that they were somehow the anointed ones for supporting him, and how much so many of them bore that same scent of those who had supported Hillary Clinton.

AMLO shouldered the victory with just as much class and style as José Antonio Meade Kuribreña handled defeat. At least publicly, hands reached across party lines for a show of unity and moving on.

There were no public meltdowns, no ninny snowflakes crying in their Kool-Aid, and life went on just as always. No one donned silly pink knitted hats. The peso became stronger. The sky didn’t fall.

Sure, there were burned ballots, and little frauds committed here and there, just as there is in every democracy, everywhere. But none of it was sufficient to change the final result.

Estadounidenses could take a few lessons from Mexicans about how a mature nation operates. A year and a half have now passed since Donald Trump was inaugurated, and Estadounidenses still can’t get their acts sufficiently together to realize that it’s about respecting the office as much as the one who occupies it. It’s dangerous to admit to Estadounidenses that you voted for Trump. Five years from now, AMLO’s visage may be on the Judases that we all blow up just before Easter and exposes will be published, but for now, he’s being treated as the second coming of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (Mexico’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and that’s just fine. (I’d rather have seen the second coming of Adolfo López Mateos, but there’s always next time.)

May AMLO turn out to be a great president. He’s already exceeding my expectations.