Morgan writes:

Ok, I don’t speak the lingo and it is embarrassing. Was never good with languages and know many musicians for whom it is difficult. Why is that? But it is a beautiful language and not as difficult as some to learn. If I come back,  I’ll give it a go. Just did half of my walk for the day, one hour +. Down to the school with Patty and on to The Instituto and then to Juarez Park and up the hill to our casita. The park is very beautiful with all sorts of plants. On the way there one can eat at a Texan’s barbecue joint. No thanks. 

On the weekends the town becomes crowed with visitors from Mexico City and many other places. Very festive with bands in the park. By the way, Doc Severson of the Tonight show back in the, “Here comes Johnny” (Carson) days lives here and we’re told that he has a wonderful group comprised of trumpet, violin and guitar. We hope to hear them. 

The Mexican people here are warm, kind, gentle, forever ready to return a big open smile and beautiful. And yes, they are slow. Very  civilized like some other cultures like the French for example. Their priorities include an enjoyable life and not part of the “rat race” of cultures like their friends north of the border for example. Of course there are exceptions. Mexico is a beautiful country. I have traveled a good deal of it starting back when I was in college and traveling with bands to El Paso and crossing the border to get cheap brandy, etc. Border towns, as we know, do not represent the country well. My first trip into the interior of this magnificent country was with my first esposa, Jane, together with Jim and Sherry Lewis over forty years ago. We drove the Lewis car and   it was a fabulous trip. We traveled from Brownsville, TX through many beautiful villages and cities all the way to Manzanillo, when it was still a small fishing village on the Pacific coast. We spent about two weeks in Mexico and spent maybe two hundred dollars a couple. A couple of years later Jane and I came with Don and Nik Owens. It was then that we discovered the beautiful city of Guanajuato, high in  the mountains about 40 miles west of San Miguel. It was a crazy drunken trip and also most wonderful. Jane and I took our beautiful young daughters to Monterry sometime after that. On the two prior trips, my mother and father kept the girls in Graham, Texas. I did stop here on the way to Mexico City in the late 70’s when Lucinda and I took a train from Laredo, stopping here in San Miguel for the night. There were no hotel  rooms so we shacked up with some college kids in one big room. It was Christmas time. There hasn’t been train service to here for 20 or more years. We spent new year’s eve in an Italian Restaurant in Mexico City, then flew to Oaxaca, another of my favorite cities in Mexico and from there to Merida and drove to Cancun and took a ferry to Isla Mujeres.

Patty and I traveled  in my father’s old Dodge from Dallas to Laredo to Saltillo in 1982/83 where we were but a fraction away from being slammed into by an oncoming semi truck as the old Dodge slid on wet pavement past an alto sign onto the bypass. Our lives were spared and at about the same moment my father went into a coma in a Graham, Texas hospital. He died on January 1st while we were in San Blas, a Pacific fishing town. Later in the 80’s P and I went to Cozumel, wonderful island, and some time after that to Cabo San Lucas, which we did not care for – both during Christmas vacation times.

After all the trips to Europe over the many years, Mexico is still the dearest to me. 

Morgan and I took the one and a half hour bus ride to Guanajuato via the Primera Plus–$8. The bus was smooth, new, clean, and showed a Korean art movie with Spanish subtitles on the six or so screens distributed throughout the bus. I’d love to know what that movie was, having missed both the beginning and the end of it. A young boy lives with his mute grandmother in a rural wasteland that looks like Mexico (but isn’t), but the 7 year old boy is using a play station (a hint that this is not Mexico, but Korean) in his hut while the grandmother, bent double, hauls a load of sticks. (Ah, so! They’re not speaking Spanish–another hint that this isn’t Mexico :-). [The movie is: The Way Home, I discovered.] So you have the old and the new in Korean culture on the screen, as the super-bus rolls along the road and out the window we see the hilly beshrubbed arid countryside where a man drives a one bottom plow pulled by a horse, a burro is grazing over there, a cow and calf over there. A mix of new and old. Both inside and outside.

We meet two wonderful daring young women, traveling through Mexico and they’re delighted to hear that I hitchhiked through Mexico in the late seventies with a girlfriend. (I wouldn’t do that now). One of these pretty girls is in graduate school doing a poetry degree, and the other just graduated with a double major in Spanish and international relations. A research trip. Yes!

Once in Guanajuato, we find that the bus station is way outside of town so we get a taxi. I ask the driver where there’s a hotel for $50 (500 pesos) or less. He takes it upon himself to not just show us, but takes us inside a dark cave of a hotel, but we say, no, no windows. No problema, he says and takes us to another. This one costs less money–$30. But the taxi driver charges us 100 pesos and wants a tip, of course, for helping us. He wants another 100 pesos, but I give him 50. To get to this second hotel room we pass ladies, at the unmarked entry, selling the bric a brac of cheap jewelry, beads, cosmetic junk and continue through a dark corridor up two flights of not-very-clean stairways and to a room which has a window. It’s a little scary and I wonder if they’re going to harvest our organs just as Lisa Lund would think, but, hey, I used to sleep on floors, on beaches, in cars, I’m not a wimp. So I say yes. (Morgan leaves it up to me, of course). (Do I appreciate that? Not altogether. It’s fine with him. Okay, it’s fine with me.)

Hmmm, no toilet paper. I go downstairs and ask, Hay el papel para el bano? (I have no idea if this is the correct term, but you have to be creative when your grasp of the language is as limited as mine). Then I look under the stained blanket at the sheets. Agh. Wet spots and dark hairs. I return downstairs and complain. Ah, he’ll have the sheets changed, he says.

We leave our backpack there at the hotel, which is in el centro, or so we’re told. We find theMercado Hidalgo, which is a huge medieval covered structure, two stories, which isn’t as Morgan remembers it, but that was 40 years ago. Inside they sell cheap Mexican ceramics and chickens and pigs feet and a load of plastic wrapped Chinese-made Guanajuato souvenirs. The market in SMA is so much more…Mexican. Or Mexican as we think of Mexico. We continue up the street and now it’s getting more attractive, and there’s the Plaza del Paz. And we check out about a half dozen beautiful hotels which cost $150 or so a night. Looking for the Diego Rivera Casa Museum, on  Calle Positos, we find a hostel for $20 for 2 and are thinking this would be better for us. And then we find Meson de los Poetas. It’s a hotel built up a hillside (as is all of Guanajuato), and the lovely man who speaks Spanish slowly (bless him) takes us up winding, spiraling, red-earth tile staircases, past rooms named for Spanish poets—Octavia Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Ramon Jimenez–the maize of corridors and little stairways occasionally open to the air and water drips down the rock walls and into hidden courtyards. And after much climbing and winding abou, the man shows us the garret apartment which has views of the city on three sides. We HAVE to have Antonio Muchados, (the name of the room and a poet who I don’t know, but I’ll find out.(http://www.greeninteger.com/pipbios_detail.cfm?PIPAuthorID=1089) The room costs $90. Fine. It’s my birthday tomorrow. Morgan suggests we just lose the other and stay here two nights.

But I want our money back. So we go back to fetch our back pack and I politely say to the proprietor, “Quisieras nuestra dinero– 300 pesos. Salimos.” And an argument ensues, but in the end, we get 200 pesos back because he says we were already here for 2 hours and the taxi driver got his cut. Fine. 200 pesos. From here on out Guanajuato is heavenly. 

Walking is a great pleasure in this town with its cobble stone narrow streets, up and down the hills – no level ground here. While looking at houses for sale with Veronica, Jim Lewis’ realtor, and driving down from atop the hill to the east, I said to Jim, “If you walked down and back up this hill everyday of your life, you will be a healthy man.” I know that he was thinking, “If he were to do that, I’d be dead in a week”. But Veronica told us of the 85 year old man who has walking up and down that hill for years.

Houses are beautiful inside and some outside, some with great views. For gringos they range in price from $150,000 unfinished to several million. At the pot luck yesterday at Warren Hardy’s estate, we experienced his–perhaps in the million(s) range. The local gringos are very happy to report that taxes on such a place is just a few hundred dollars a year, low utilities and there is no need for insurance as they are made out of stone, bricks and concrete. And good tequila is cheap. San Miguel, where the living for the rich is easy, where maids, cooks and gardeners make maybe ten bucks a day and we pay $2.50 for taxis for a ride home from the many parties of the white people. I like this place, but could only live here if I were a Mexican or at least lived like one, hmmm $10 a day, that’s a bit less than I make as a musician. Hell, I don’t even speak the language. Jim is trying to learn and knows enough to get around. Patty is doing very well with it. All of this while I walk, practice Jim’s trombone, consider composition and sitting on my ass watching Wimbledon. I doubt that I could ever feel at home here. I see no gringos working for mexicans. I lived in Portugal with my family in 1972-73 for about six months while on my first sabbatical, writing music. A maid came with the house and she scolded us for doing any work in or around the house. It was very awkward for us. Against the advice of all gringos, we treated  Maria as “part of the family” and at the end, she wanted to come home with us and we would have liked that. Her husband was a fisherman who sailed out with the fleet at dusk and returned at dawn, then sat at the cafe drinking espresso and spirits. He slept in the afternoons while Maria worked.

There were many ex-patriots there, mostly from England. I met not one Englishman who had anything good to say about the natives and treated them with much disdain. Perhaps they were still angry because Portugal was never  one of Their colonies, or was it. After Portugal, we went to England and found the English there, wonderful. After that, I thought much about ex-patriots. Perhaps it is because early on mine was a poor ($) family which had few possessions of any kind that I find the ex-patriot, by in large, unappealing if not appalling. —   My friend and colleague Ed London reminds us that Apostle Paul was appealing and Apostle Peale (Norman Vincent) was appalling. — Or perhaps it is because my father and mother, liberal democrats from Texas back when Texans were yellow dog democrats, taught me to closely observe the rich and the poor separately AND alongside each other. It has been a life study for me. Selfishness, which is usually, but certainly not always, associated with the rich and “powerful” is our sorriest trait and generosity our best. I think of the actions which come from that, like the ability to forgive or not, to love or not, and so on. “If you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

Here the public schools are deplorable because of little or no taxes. The financially well off send their kids to private schools. I can hear it now, “Well, that’s just the way it is and has always been and will always be. C’est la vie. Well, Durwood Cline said, “You’ve got to give half-a-man a chance.” But Durwood, Doesn’t giving a man half a chance require a measure of  generosity from the haves to the have-nots, say nothing of giving them a full chance? And if so, and if we want to give that man even a half a chance, then, “What’s holding up the delay?” as you also said, Durwood.         Ask George W., he can make it uncomplicated for you.

One of the benefits of travel is that one’s contact with a different culture promotes questions and lets one reevaluate ideas. It is said that if you are content and pursue happiness, stay home. If not, get moving. I’ve never known nor heard of a great artist who “stayed home”. What about Emily Dickinson?  Her feet were planted while her mind was on the move. Yep, traveling is not simply a matter of geography. 

Okay, I didn’t know what to title this, I just wanted to say Ay Chihuahua. Let’s say this post is about food and fiesta and I’ll try to stick to those themes.

Mangos. At least one a day. Why eat fruit in Illinois, I often wonder. When I buy a mango at home in Illinois I follow the mediocre experience with dental floss. Not so, here, where the fruit is picked ripe each day.  Purchased at the mercado, the orange, rose, and green skin is marred with a few black dots. Hey, it’s probably organic and is not a candidate for a photo op. Slit it lengthwise, twist the halves apart. With a spoon, scoop out the juicy orange flesh from the pitless half, pry out the pit and just keep going. Then you must gnaw at the pithy pit. All right, I admit, the gnawing part requires that I floss my lower teeth. Morgan from our tiny blue tile kitchen, just declared his mango, out of sight.

Mostly we cook dinner (cenar) at home and eat it on the terrace overlooking the city–Morgan, Jim and I. But yesterday we went to the Warren Hardy school potluck at their otherworldly hacienda. Various whimsically painted little buildings are built upon the hillside, and on a lower level is a blue Mexican-tiled free form pool. Very colorful, very lovely, and all built with cheap Mexican labor. I told Warren I was happy to help fund his paradise, which he graciously appreciated, but I would never be able to live luxuriously amongst the very poor. Many of the guests–students from the school–are rich Americans living in San Miguel. When admiring a dish of pulled chicken in a red sauce, its owner replied, Oh, I didn’t cook it, the maid did. This is a class of people who have maids, many of them. Guess I’m too much of a peasant myself to feel comfortable with servants–working at a wage fit for a slave.

Gotta finish this so we can go to the mercado for café, leche, jalapeños, pepinos, tostados, esparragos, but not before I go up the hill to the club, which is funky and lovely and where I swim—or play in the water–every day. Adios Amigos.

July 1st

The dogs are barking the cocks are cocking but we can weather the storm, da da da da daaa

There is music everywhere here. Dogs near and far – roosters wait till the morn. Even the cars on the cobble stone streets have a wonderful irregular rhythm. Reminds me that every snow flake is unique. It also reminds me, thank you Mr. Cage, that music is everywhere. We humans are not needed for its creation.

But we are here as is the wrinkled old man who walks the streets of San Miguel, short and bent over, shuffling six inches per two steps. He wears a baseball cap turned backwards, workout pants, sneakers, shirt and sweater —- same every day. He shuffles and occasionally sits in the jardin, but, he never stops singing this intense sad song within a confined high register. His expressive phrases are remarkably long and complex. He must have been trained at The University of Texas by Jeanne Sasaki. I can’t let myself move on without absorbing his every sound. Every day he sings the blues, shuffling and singing IS his life as it seems to me. He is in my opinion one of those very few (one in millions) who is one of a kind and typically, everyone ignores him or is amused by him. That’s the way of the “one in millions”, the one of a kind who sings his/her song without expectation. Sing your sad lovely song old man, not for yourself, not for anyone, just sing and let us mere mortals be moved and amazed at a god on earth, where gods can only be.

.

Last night we tangoed right here on the patio of our casita. Kevin and Barbara are pros and are so gorgeous together. They are elegant and fierce and smoldering. I’m wondering if somehow tango means tangle because their legs strike and wrap, shoot and entangle. But before their demanded performance, Kevin taught me tango for an hour. And we tangoed. Yippee aye ay. I’ve gotta get way into this. He’s so freaking good, that I can do it, I mean, he’s got it analyzed, and I listen, and I apply, but mostly it’s body intuition on my part. But I’m going to have to find a partner who will dance tango with me.

Morgan was wonderful dancing salsa the other night, but it was really a little more like swing than salsa. So Kevin and I figured that Morgan would dance swango. And, I guess, swalsa.