Saturday, February 28, 2009

In the United Sates...

Everything is measured in pounds, grams and kilos are so much easier, get with the metric system people...I never have to carry cash, it´s scary...no one fills my gas tank up and wipes my windows, what the hell ever happened to full-serve, this sucks...every store has a parking space right there for you...televisions in the check-out line are ridiculous and wrong, don´t mind-numb me as I wait...no one cuts in front of you in line...the "fresh fruit" is a joke...mega-stores give you access to one sop shopping but not quality...the trees are big and beautiful...the lawns are big and beautiful, and freshly mown grass is a scent I have sorely missed...homes are shades of grey, taupe and beige - go wild folks,pick magenta, it may improve your life...I can choose from 20 different tampons and hundreds of shades of lip gloss from Target(!)...no one knows each other...constant news...constant chatter that I actually understand (and wish I didn´t)...Home.

Yes, This transition is difficult, what transition isn´t?. But if you haven´t ever left what you know, consider what is alien about your own culture to others. My kids are baffled, I am baffled. We will make our way but Houston, re-entry is a problem. Do you copy that?

Thursday, February 26, 2009

The Pan American Highway

As we traveled up Highway 57 to bring us to Texas, my eyes drank in the scenery in case I don´t travel the road again for awhile. The absence of billboards is something I appreciate as is detracts from real life, this is what we did see...

A very large bull meandering in the highway, nothing stops traffic like a 900 pound animal in front of you. Tierra Quemada, the name of a town, it means burned earth and I think I wouldn´t want to live there. Real de Catorce rising like a giant. Las Palmas in it´s 1960´s wonderfulness. "Vulcanizadoras cons pistolas a las 24 horas" and that would be tire repair dudes with pistols 24 hour service, I´m never traveling the Pan-American Carretera at night. Men driving donkey carts on the dirts roads of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. The skinniest horses I have ever seen were in the alti-planos of San Luis Potosi, the land there is high in the mountains and arid...how anything thrives there is a mystery. Coyote roadkill with giant swooping vultures on the side of the road to clean up. Vendors with casacabel skins every few kilometers, yes people (mostly women and children) make their living selling the sketletal remains of rattlesnakes they have killed. There are a hell of a lot of rattlesnakes for sale in north San Luis Potosi and the "homes" by the stands are built of scrap pallets, corrugated cardboard, threadbare blankets, a piece of tin if you are lucky...it´s third world living at the edges of a fancy highway. Pozozs de Santa Ana, and I wondered if the misery of revolution had lived here and been left broken, to whither out. Ancient adobe walls abandoned for 20th century building scraps. Land being cleared of Huizache and Mesquite trees and the trees were just set on fire, no collection of firewood, no conservation but the air smelled like they should be smoking ribs and it was a scrumptious smell.

When we arrived in Monterrey the smog hanging over the city hit us in the face and the smell burned our nostrils. Monterrey is like Gary, Indiana in the 70´s, pumping out the nastiest fumes that even your air conditioner cannot conceal. Isabel remarked "I have to get out of this city, it stinks so bad I have a headache!" She was right, Monterrey is another place I don´t know how anyone survives because of the carcinogens being released into the air. Entire mountains are cut away to harvest materials for concrete, the entire ecosystem around the city is marred from production of industry. Sebastian wondered how the mountain didn´t fall down on "all these people, look at this mom, it´s so dangerous." My eight year old sees it, my six year old smells it in the air, why can the adult reapers/rapers of the land acknowledge what is wrong with that brand of progress?

As we exited Monterrey I composed some poetry while driving:

huizaches drenched
with yellow blossoms
and the air, oh the air
moving the sweetest of smells...
of spring
beneath mountains
gouged by industrialism
and the cloud
of the 21st Century
saturating an entire
valley
choking everyone
below


I haven´t written poetry since 10th grade high school, and the teacher thought I had copied some beatnik poetry (because she said it was too good for 10th grade literature, ego boost.) Whether it´s good or bad, I don´t really care, that is Monterrey in my minds eye, a hopeful wasteland, waiting to be reclaimed. Drive the Pan-American Highway 57 for yourself and observe, the cloud of what the United States does not want in their back yard is waiting there for you to witness.

Please don´t get it in your head Mexíco is ugly or worthless. There is untold beauty of heart and miracles. The most luscious land I have ever seen is in Urupan, home of avocado export to the world. The most gracious people one could encounter, and my standards are high as I grew up in the mid-west and expect a "hello, how are you today?" with chatty banter, live in Mexíco. The Pan-American Highway really isn´t Pan America at all, it is a desolate fast stretch of highway that takes you through places you´d never go to get to where you want to be. Mexíco is where the hearts of my children lie because it is beautiful and forgiving while giving and with mysterious otherworldiness of the town we lived in and loved. But that chapter closed during 947.8 miles (including when I went the wrong way and had to go back.) That our last memories should be on that toll-road driving from the unknown to the unknown sucks.

Before I have said, my children are brave and fierce (also annoying). In traveling Highway 57 I could not have chosen better, more attentive companions. Constantly they pulled me out of my torpor from driving to look and see the wonder in the wasteland. The beauty in the breakdown.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

As I lose all my regrets

These days I wake up wondering if I have just lived a lifetime in 24 hours, some days I have. This year has begun with endings and I would be grateful for a beginning in the near future, just in case anyone is answering prayers. My last 3 weeks in San Miguel were more painful than the time I caught typhoid there...I deal better with strange temporary diseases than saying goodbye to this temporary permanence.

How, I don´t know, did I accumulated so much in 2.5 years in Mexico? That question was asked alot when moving it. My time left, in this place others come to enjoy, was spent in labor of moving; people, boxes, lives. During this time I was able to visit my iPod with beautiful sites and beautiful people and I became attached to a song, of course, during all this shuffling of everything-and-nothing-at-once. Twilight has always been my favorite time of day, the closure and the beginning, with soft golden blues that make me shed tears when I see the sky spreading out before me. One night as I drove down the mountain at twighlight time "Set the Twighlight Reeling" by Lou Reed came on. Now I know lots of people that find their comfort in God, but nothing put me at comfort that twilight time like Lou Reed´s cracky, edgy voice...he saved me from many bad mama incidents in my last weeks. Though this video version isn´t the sound quality of my iPod and Lou singing to me, Elvis Costello is a nice consolation prize and I hope you all enjoy a musical adventure.

My gift of strength while I packed up a formerly happy life into boxes was to gather this woman of strength in me. I did dread moving but part of me looked foward to it also, to get on with this life and not live in these disjointed boxes of life alone and married life every once in awhile. Now I am finding it difficult living with another adult after all this independence. Perhaps I should say all this dependence, on only myself, to make it through the next moment, which leads to the hour, day, week. There were moments I needed a guide and there was no manual for success or failure, surely there are years of therapy involved for my children on the dreaded move from Mexico...but we all found bravery.

When you leave something you love and you know it´s this slow departure, you have time to taste the sweetness. Things you once found negligible begin to take value. Since I was driving most of my days, my delicacies come in one line on scraps of paper: cobblestone roads, a cantalope moon, the Parroquia, losing Roarke´s glove and retrieving it from the mirador, giant ficus trees at La Concepcíon, tiendas, a dusty construction worker blowing me a kiss, the all permeating dust , sweet tears, kissing lovers, twirling batman acrobats in the last circus, yellow huizache blossoms, Guadalupe (always Guadalupe) and twilight. My sweetest last moments driving on the obnoxiously bumpy roads of San Miguel de Allende. Of course always my children, with me, sharing this journey. How did I earn the blessing of these three beautiful humans that I am supposed to care for? Simultaneously I am irritated and brought to my knees in thankfulness.

So many times it was commented, *you can´t do all this by yourself*, *you have to do it this way...*, *you need help*. Advice given in love and sometimes as if to say I wasn´t capable of delivering. Times came when I accepted help and then you simply have to step up, for yourself and the people you love, and say I will do this and I can. At the end of it all; the shuffling of things, boxes in Mexico, vehicle left in Mexico, still plans to arrange...I did what had to be done. Nine hundred miles between children and their father was covered to give them a family and some security and to let go of the regrets at leaving geographical points on a map. Yes, I did set the twilight reeling.