Go Outside and Play!

Postcard From Paradise

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Go Outside and Play!

Well apparently it’s true. As I’ve been told repeatedly throughout most of my life by many people beginning with my father, but have steadfastly refused to believe; I am not in fact the center of the universe. I was informed of this fact once again last night.

A serendipitous encounter in the high desert just outside Cle Elum, during a brief period of clearing on an otherwise rain soaked weekend in early August; the Perseid Meteor Showers is one of the most astonishing spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. Shooting stars streaking across the sky and disappearing so fast you’re not really sure that you saw them, and other stars falling in long, graceful arcs as if something imagined or remembered from a childhood dream. So many stars falling from the heavens that after an hour you’d think the skies should be empty, completely void. And as the clouds rolled in again, and the rains again began to fall, the sky did appear dark and the earth appeared to sparkle and glisten as if covered with, well... stars.

There are a few simple and unexpected encounters in life that stand out from the rest and seem to illuminate what an extraordinary and wondrous world we live in; night-blooming jasmine, fire flies, banyan trees... this is one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars came out only once every thousand years.

         “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how

         would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations

         the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown! But

         every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe

         with their admonishing smile...”

And we watch television. Should we instead be building cathedrals, writing poetry, symphonies, hymns and prayers to the greater glory of God? Perhaps. We do seem to have lost our collective sense of wonderment, or perhaps the world just moves too fast now. Or perhaps we don’t even bother to look anymore, after all it is kind of an awful distraction from Tweeting and Twittering.

I remember Mom’s admonition clearly: “Get out of the house! Go outside and play!” I guess she was right after all.

Postales del Paraíso: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Postales del Paraíso

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Just being here is exhausting! If we still have the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe tucked away in a box somewhere you need to FedEx it to me immediately! This week is the festival of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, patron saint of all of Mexico and we are one of the few houses on the street (and probably all of Mexico) without a shrine set up on the sidewalk outside our house filled with Mexican flags, crepe paper flowers, little statues of Juan Diego and large framed pictures of Our Lady of Guadalupe outlined in Christmas lights!

The feast of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is a nine day festival (Dec 4 – 12) which overlaps with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (Nov. 30 – Dec 8) also a 9 day event, and has been celebrated here every year since the apparition of the Virgin Mary by Juan Diego on a mountain top in 1531 near the current day Mexico City, and it makes all the other celebrations here pale by comparison. 

It now takes 45 minutes to walk the three blocks to the corner bodega because you have to stop in front of everyone’s house, genuflect in front of their shrine, bless yourself, mumble the appropriate daily prayer, profess your everlasting devotion, light a candle, and then move onto the next house, or risk all the neighbors staring at you as if you’re the heathen that you actually are.  But I figure this “novena” is probably a gauntlet worth attempting. A novena (from the Latin: novem, meaning nine) is an “act of religious pious devotion often consisting of prayers repeated for nine successive days in the belief of obtaining special intercessory graces”, and I’m sure that at this point in my life I could use with the intercession of all the special graces that I can possibly garner.

Nearly every town in Mexico has a church named in celebration of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and we’re lucky enough to be a mere two blocks from the one in Ajijic. The roar of Santa Ana’s armies, three thousand strong, and the thundering hooves of two hundred cavalry echo across my bedroom floor each morning at 5:00 AM. My bed lurches from side to side as the earth rattling assault of heavy caissons rumble across my pillow, and when the cannons let loose a colossal fusillade of ear shattering concussions and staccato flashes of light it is both frightening and deafening. As I leap to my feet, gasping frantically, heart pounding, it slowly dawns on me that this is just the wake-up call for the 6:00 AM rosary at the sanctuary down the block and what I thought was a nightmare is simply the hundreds of faithful arriving at the church on foot and on horseback accompanied, as with most celebrations here, by skyrockets and marching brass bands that lead the way to the place of redemption. The difference between this celebration and all the others throughout the year is that apparently this time they’re really serious.

It’s still dark outside, but they arrive from every direction, crowds of people many carrying torches like a town mob scene from a grade-B vampire movie, led by marching brass bands 

and followed by a dozen men on horseback launching skyrockets that invigorate the crowd, fray the nerves of the non-believers, and set the sky (and occasionally a few homes) ablaze. Members of the clergy lead the crowds through the village; the older priests plodding and solemn, fumbling with a rosary in a barely audible mumble as they wind their flock through the cobblestone streets, the younger ones rejoicing with the crowds as the bells on the old mission church ring the voice of God across the village.

The crowds here in Ajijic are amazing for a town this size but they cannot compare to the festivities in Mexico City. The cloak that Juan Diego wore, miraculously still emblazoned with the image of The Virgin Mary after almost 500 years, is on display for a few hours each day at The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and draws 18-20 million people there every year, making it Christianity’s most visited sanctuary, and the third most visited sacred site in the Christian world. The Basilica seats 10,000 people and when mass is celebrated each Sunday the church is filled to capacity. Given the number of faithful here, the Pope really needs to give some serious thought to relocating the Vatican; Rome truly is the old-world, and the contrast with the New World has never seemed so stark. Historically and emotionally the Virgin Mary is deeply woven into the fabric of life of every Mexican and many turn to her for help, for healing, and for guidance throughout their lives. Nowhere is that more apparent than it is here this morning.

The sidewalk shrines attempt to recreate the mountain depicted in the traditional legend, with Mary standing on the mountaintop and the little plastic figure of the pious Juan Diego on one knee, sombrero in hand, gazing up at her. As the story goes, Mary asked Juan Diego to build a church on the very spot of his apparition but the local bishop, skeptical of Juan Diego’s claim of having had a personal conversation with the Mother of God, asks him for a sign. So Mary tells Juan to meet her at the rose bushes. Knowing full well that there are no rose bushes on this mountain, or anywhere else given the winter season, Juan Diego none-the-less trudges back up the mountain and of course finds the bushes in full bloom, gathers all the roses in his cloak and drags them back to the bishop who, faced with the miraculous image of The Virgin Mary now emblazoned on Juan Diego’s cloak, and realizing the obvious, agrees to build the church.

It’s interesting that the mountain in the legend, Cerro del Tepeyec, not altogether coincidentally, is the same mountain that in pre-colonial times was the sacred home of Tonantzin, the Aztec earth goddess. So the current Mother-of-all-Mexicans, although now dressed up in Catholic clothes, owes as much to pre-Columbian traditions as it does to the influence of Rome. So roses are still not available in the village this time of year but with an assortment of cactus, crepe paper roses, poinsettias, and a few leftover houseplants, the sidewalk shrines are improvised and they are as wonderful and fanciful as they are unique. 

There's an evening service tonight at the church that begins at 6:00 PM. It’s still early afternoon here now so if I leave shortly I should be there in plenty of time (if my knees hold out from all the genuflecting). Getting back home again may be a different story.

Postales del Paraíso: Tortas Ahogadas

Postales del Paraíso

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Tortas Ahogadas

So Efren (our contractor) swings by the house and tells me that Luis, the stone guy, has pricing on the tile for the courtyard and has some samples of a border pattern to use with it and we’re supposed to meet him at his office in 15 minutes. So I’m thinking that Guadalajara where we met yesterday is at least 45 minutes away if there’s no traffic, but we jump in Efren’s truck and go roaring off as Efren explains that we’re going to meet Luis at the local office not the one in Guadalajara. 

So we drive down the highway for about 15 minutes and then Efren suddenly pulls over to the side of the road and stops the truck. There is no office here or anything else, just a little patch of dirt on the side of the highway with fields of corn stretching in every direction as far as I can see. Before I can ask Efren why we’ve stopped in the middle of nowhere, Luis’ truck swerves off the highway and pulls up right behind us and he jumps out smiling, a load of tile samples in his arms. So apparently this is the office; an unmarked patch of dirt on the side of the highway, just north of the junction with the road to Colima. This entire stretch of road is apparently an office park, well known to those who live here, but invisible to everyone else.  I look back down the road and now see what I had missed before; small groups of vehicles clustered intermittently along both sides of the crossroads with clusters of people milling about. I’d guess that this has been the local meetinghouse, swap meet, coffee shop, and office park for this small part of the world for many generations.

On the way back from the office we stop for lunch at another one of those roadside stands along the highway. This one is smaller and less formal than the one we stopped at yesterday but you’d never know it from the convoy of trucks lined up along the side of the road. The place is small and easy to miss, but there are two clues; first you’re overcome with the acrid smell of burning rubber as you drive down the road and then just beyond you see the reason for this; a patch in the highway ahead that is almost completely black from the skidmarks of all the trucks that also almost missed this place. 

To call it a restaurant would be an overstatement. The place consists of a series of tattered blue tarps hanging over a bunch of mis-matched plastic tables and chairs, two plastic coolers, with half of an old oil drum serving as the fire pit. It's run by a woman and her husband from Tlaquepaque and all they serve is Tortas Ahogadas (literally; drowned sandwich). They’re called “drowned” because the entire sandwich is submerged in a sauce made primarily of a dried chili pepper called chili de árbol.  Ahogadas apparently are unique to Guadalajara, and like fine French pastries or great Champagne cannot be produced just anywhere. The sandwiches are made with individual loaves of birote bread (again a local specialty that, like tequila, is made only in Jalisco), which has a somewhat hard, very thick, and crunchy crust and a softer interior similar in texture to a seat cushion. The bread is sliced open and filled with an assortment of deep-fried pig-parts and then slathered with cheese and beans. The entire sandwich is then completely submerged in the sauce until no bubbles emerge (affectionately referred to by the clientele as waterboarding). The unique texture of the bread is all that keeps it from dissolving in the sauce. The whole thing is served in its own warm puddle on an individual styrofoam tray and garnished with onions, radishes and avocados (and of course more chilies).

Apparently eating ahogadas, like most manly things, is meant to be accomplished bare-handed (this is a truck stop afterall). There are no forks or spoons here and when asked, the only response from the gruff and sweating face behind the eye-searing smoke of the bubbling hot oil drum is a look of disgust that clearly says, “Spoons! (spat in the fire) We don’t need no stinkin’ spoons!” So I pick this thing up and despite the rivers of red chili sauce dripping from my elbows onto my knees, manage to actually take a bite and to my astonishment find it’s one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted! The sauce (at least for a brief moment) is not nearly as hot as I’d expected, the pork is moist and tender, and the mix of spices is almost sweet and tastes of oregano, cinnamon, cumin and something that tastes like harissa.

Efren tells me that the place was started about 30 years ago by the mother of the woman who currently runs it, and that her sons run day-long shuttles of buckets of chili de árbol and loaves of birote from her home in Tlaquepaque. He says the place moves up and down the highway throughout the year depending on where the rains wash out the roads, or where the Federales come expecting a free lunch. I suggest that she perhaps move down to the office park, but maybe it's already too crowded down there.

I’m too embarrassed to ask for napkins (unmanly?) or a hose to clean myself off but I make a mental note to be sure to bring rubber gloves and a yellow slicker the next time I have to make a quick run out to the office.

Postales del Paraíso: Dia de los Muertos

Dia de los Muertos

So nice that Mexico has declared a national holiday in honor of my birthday!

However, confronted with an apparent conflict of interest, I’ve contemplated either no longer celebrating my birthday on November 2^nd as I have all my life, or alternately not celebrating Dia de los Muertos (Day of The Dead), one of the most revered and significant events here in Mexico also celebrated on the same day. However, eventually realizing that one of these events inevitably leads to the other, and that I will be dead for much longer than I’ll be alive, I’ve decided that some form of reconciliation is in order.

The entire country is celebrating today, but perhaps not (only) for me. The dead apparently return to this earth every autumn after the harvest, and this entire week is a series of extraordinary celebrations culminating with the Day of the Dead. Before moving here I never had any inclination to spend my birthday in a cemetery, but on this day I do.

Everywhere I go dead people are staring back at me, trying to take me arm-in-arm and dance me down the street to the tune of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, zombies shudder in the night as they serve cocktails at the local bar, corpses casually smoke cigarettes on the street corners, skeletons rattle their way to the checkout line at the grocery store, intricately decorated skulls stare back at me from the behind the glass cases of the pasteleria, dismembered appendages adorn cakes and cookies, even our daily bread is decorated with bones.

November 2^nd is All Souls Day or Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead). All the streets around the cemetery are blocked to traffic and the crowds are so dense you can walk down the cobblestone streets without your feet ever touching the ground. Food stalls and flower vendors, fruit stands, and candle makers line the streets. Walking through the cemetery is like walking along the midway at the local carnival. The air is filled with confetti, fluttering paper streamers, and billowing smoke from candles, incense and BBQs. Giant plush bears, dolls, and balloons adorn the graves. Riotous color is everywhere. Flowers everywhere. Enormous bouquets of lilies and gladioli of every color and description, some elegantly arranged in traditional urns, others placed simply into cut-off plastic Coca Cola bottles fill the cemetery grounds. Huge standing sprays of real and artificial flowers in garish colors, some still wrapped in cellophane like your grandmother’s lamp shade, stand almost one atop another jousting for space on the small and disorderly plots. Candy skulls and sugar crosses, prayers and offerings adorn each grave. The names of loved ones are carefully spelled out on the grass with pungent, orange marigold blossoms. Photographs of loved ones, offerings of food, flags, prayer books, rosaries and images of the Virgin Mary are everywhere. The remnants of last year’s celebrations lay raked and stacked into enormous ragged piles against the cemetery walls, evidence of the frenzied weeks of preparation that preceded the opening of the carnival.

In many ways Dia de Los Muertos seems not unlike our own Memorial Day (only on steroids); families clean and tidy the graves of loved ones, wreaths are laid and flags are planted, photographs are kissed and placed alongside names etched in stone, speeches are made, prayers are whispered, mourners cry and laugh, and the 24 mournful notes of the bugler echo across the evening sky.

In Mexico it is all this and more. The cemeteries are absolutely jammed full with people; the entire town crammed into the equivalent of four square blocks. Families hire musicians to play the favorite songs of their departed loved ones, so the air is filled with the Mariachi music of 20 different bands, all playing different songs and all within 50 feet of each other. People are singing, talking, laughing, and telling stories and jokes among themselves and with their departed loved ones. They picnic, dance, and sing. They pray, and cry and remember. It truly is an extraordinary celebration.

Our own services and celebrations by comparison seem impoverished. Increasingly it seems we don’t know what to do with our dead. Many now eschew formal religious traditions and are looking for an alternative, perhaps more personal or less expensive approach to the burial plot and memorial stone, others believing that ever increasing cemetery acreage is simply unsustainable opt for cremation with their ashes divided up among the family, pressed into keepsake jewelry and bowling balls, or strewn about in various favorite places, some become organ donors, still others choose to be freeze dried apparently in the hope at some point of coming back around for a victory lap.

All this is fine perhaps, but unlike the concept inherent in traditional cemeteries, strewing your ashes around in various locations leaves no place in the community for life and death to come together. No communal bonding, sharing and understanding, no songs or hymns sung in communion with the dead and the living, no annual remembrance made, or stores told; life and death remain eternally separate.

Our memorial services have seemingly left the traditional cemetery behind, and are instead increasingly being transformed into Celebrations of Life, YouTube videos, or Facebook pages, events that may include a gathering of friends and relatives, business partners and bowling buddies, everyone except the deceased, lest the presence of an actual body break the illusion of a cloudless celebration, spoil the contemplative mood and reveal the awful truths about grief, loss, life and death that our thinned-out ceremonies cannot bear.

Life and death are inseparable here. Life and death are at once a joyous, raucous, and communal celebration… one that I’d be honored to share on my birthday… or otherwise.