Yuca-Lessons

1. I worry waaaaay too much about my appearance. I could barely stand to skitter my flabby white self out to the beach in a bathing suit—the skirted tankini kind that resembles a bad square dancing outfit. But peeking out from my head-to-toe swimsuit coverup, I observed unashamed young Italian women sunbathing topless, grey-haired corpulent men in Speedo’s, and happy, blubbery, 60-something French women in bikinis.

2. It is NOT a camera trick or lens filter. Caribbean water really IS blue, and the sand really IS white.

3. I need to learn another language. At one set of ruins we visited, there’s a Mayan guide who speaks Mayan, Spanish, German and French, and he’s learning Italian. I speak fluent (mostly) English and can say, “Dark beer, please,” “Where is Wal-Mart?” and “Do you have a larger size?” in Spanish. I can also say “We’re Americans and we want to dance” in Russian, and “Happy birthday” in Korean. Pitiful.

4. Note to self: Have Ray rig up an open-pit spit barbecue, so I can make tacos al pastor at home. I’m pretty sure it’s a matter of life or death.

5. Mayans are short and stocky. I felt right at home.

6. If there are pistol-packin’ banditos in Mexico, I didn’t see them. I DID, however, encounter banditos in Houston airport’s U.S. Customs/Immigration checkpoints, who hinted that my brother might be treasonous for living in Mexico, who wouldn’t let me touch a Mexican woman as I tried to help translate for her (she didn’t understand that she had to take off her shoes and put them on the conveyor), and who made us haul our bags off one carousel and walk them 20 feet to put them on another carousel for our connecting flight.

7. In any Mexican grocery, the people in line at the ATM will be Canadians, Europeans or Americans.

8. When it’s 104 degrees, I’ll fork over every last peso for a cold Modelo Negra.

9. Burrito supremes, hard-shell tacos, and potato olés are NOT Mexican food.

10. Yes, Mayan kids as young as five work sometimes 10 hours a day or more hawking junk to tourists. Yes, you sometimes spot them sound asleep on a curb. No, no matter how tired or hungry or sweet they are, you cannot bring them home with you. You can offer them a fair price for the stuff they’re selling, or you can stock your backpack with granola bars to help keep them going.

11. Heat is a great leveler. When it’s 104 degrees, all human beings—rich, poor, Mexican, German, American, business traveler, day laborer—are just big balls of sticky sweat.

12. It’s hard to complain about your tired feet or your creaky knees when four old Mayan men are swinging upside-down above you, strung to a pole by their ankles, in full Mayan costume, in over 100-degree heat, for the few pesos you’re willing to toss in a hat.

13. The man playing his saw in the Plaza: “Where you from?” You: “South Dakota.” Saw-Man: “Perhaps you know this song?” (He plays "Somewhere Over the Rainbow.") Saw-Man: “Where you from?” Passerby: “Japan.” Saw-Man: “Perhaps you know this song?” (He plays "Somewhere Over the Rainbow.") Etc.

14. I write poems for artistic self-expression and work hard to avoid the word “love.” Eduardo writes poems in English for tourists on the beach in Progresso, in 10 minutes for 10 pesos (about 80 cents), and uses the word “love” in almost every line.

15. Note to self: All future narrow escapes, family luck, and happy outcomes will result in the erecting of a shrine.

16. This Earth is an incredible wonderland, I now have a passport, and the Big Door is wide open.

Prairie Girl Gets Yuca-tanned

Mom and I got home from Mexico on Friday, safe & sound. It was an amazing trip. We started in Merida at my brother and sister-in-law’s house for a few days. They live in Centro, the historic downtown district, in a house they completely refurbished. Houses in Centro look more like U.S. storefronts, with a front door opening directly onto a little sidewalk then the street, and long, narrow, rectangular house going back from there. Most homes in Centro have inner courtyards, so in this part of Merida at least, one’s yard is INSIDE. Most of the buildings are quite old, and regulations prohibit much updating of the facades, so you can’t tell by looking at the front of a house if it will be gorgeous inside or abandoned.

We spent the first few days taking day trips around Merida (a city of almost 800,000 people), to Mayan ruins at Uxmal, and to the nearby beach at Progresso on the Gulf coast. Since it was over 100 every day, we spent afternoons floating in the pool.

The heat was oppressive at first. But once I decided that I didn’t need makeup, didn’t care about my pasty-white armflaps hanging out of a sleeveless shirt, and wasn’t any more or less coated with sweat than anyone else, it was fine. There were very few places with AC, so we just got used to it. Mom occasionally pasted wet napkins to her forehead, which I thought was a nice accoutrement in lieu of makeup.

On Monday of last week, we drove across the peninsula to Tulum, a little resort town on the Caribbean coast. We stopped along the way at the Chichen Itza ruins, then for lunch at Valladolid, where we wandered around a cenote, cave-like pools caused by sinkholes in the limestone. We spent the next three days at a little beach resort called Posada Meriposa.

We toured the cliff ruins at Tulum one day, but we spent most of our time at Posada Mariposa on the beach. I didn’t know it was possible to spend so much time relaxing. I read Dead in Dallas and The Alchemist between naps on my beach lounge chair, dips in the warm turquoise water, strolls on the cool white powdered-sugar sand, and beach deliveries of fresh watermelon juice by adorable Italian boys. I have a new appreciation for the expression “beach novel.” Posada Mariposa is owned by a pack of 20-something Italians, and the place is renowned for the food in its open-air restaurant. I could have lived happily on their breads & bruschettas for the rest of my life. It was all just glorious.

We flew out of Cancun on Thursday, so on our way from Tulum to Cancun we stopped in Playa del Carmen, the “Riviera of the Yucatan,” where Caribbean cruises make shopping & dining pitstops.

I came home with a positively tropical (in a freckly sorta way) Yuca-tan, silver, hammocks, starfish, a Day of the Dead nicho, and an absolute love of the people of the Yucatan. I’ll blog more about Mexico, probably obsessively so for a while. For now, I’m just re-acclimating and settling up with these truths:

* Food, customs, and languages may differ, but people are people. They work hard, they love each other, they sometimes have troubled, fractured lives, they’ll give up almost anything for their kids, they try to find meaning.

* Poverty is universal. Anyone, in ANY country, who lives in a decent house, has electricity and fresh water, and eats every day, should be a constant sappy bucket of GRATITUDE.

* The world is a big, beautiful, fascinating place. If you’re lucky enough to be able to travel, GO. If you never leave home, it’s like looking through a pinhole and thinking the little patch of South Dakota pasque flowers you see is all there is.

Why we shouldn't have read all those Cormack McCarthy novels...

Ray and I have been reading McCarthy novels lately, and the author may have inadvertently given us the wrong impression of Mexico. I know this based on Ray’s reaction to the trip I’m taking with Mom. We’re leaving tomorrow for Merida, Mexico, in the Yucatan, to spend a week with my oldest brother and sister-in-law, who live there.

Ray thinks one or more of the following will happen: (1) I’ll end up a mule for the drug cartels (‘cause pudgy redhaired pasty-white women blend in so well); (2) I’ll contract swine flu (which the media now say originated in Asia, not Mexico…gosh we’re awfully sorry about your ruined Mexican tourist industry); (3) I’ll be kidnapped by horse-thieving banditos and forced into topless servitude in a remote desert cantina (the McCarthy effect).

What will really happen is we’ll spend our mornings having coffee on the back patio or touring, and our afternoons reading by the pool. My brother thinks I may be intimidated by Merida’s hot weather, humidity, and mosquitoes, but he’s never lived in South Dakota. Bring it, I say. It can’t possibly be worse than picking and canning wild prairie plums in late July, and we do that for FUN around here.

After a few days in Merida, we’ll head for Tulum, where we’ll lie around on the beach, reading and listening to the Caribbean tide wash in (you should be hearing Enya in your head about now). The resort website says they serve fresh fruit on the beach every morning. It sounds pretty rough, but I’m willing to take one for the team.

Lest you think it’ll all be surf & sand, I’ll probably also get to experience the Mexican healthcare system when I’m rushed to the ER with severe sunburn. I’m taking SPF gazillion “for babies” with me, since some of my lily-white skin has never seen the light of day, but a recent NPR story suggested those SPF numbers are only accurate if you paste the stuff ¼” thick on every centimeter of exposed skin. Proper sunscreen application may depend on whether or not they serve rum on the beach, too.

I’m planning to blog at least once from Mexico, also depending on the sunburn & rum. Don’t read any McCarthy while I’m gone, and take care of each other till I get home…

Squeezing in Summer Fun

By this time of year, I usually remember one of the reasons I teach for a living—summer. South Dakota summer is an annual celebration of sunlight & nature, a brief release from Jack Blizzard’s deepfreeze and the perpetual browns and greys of winter. Prairie folk can squeeze an amazing amount of temperate joy (both literally and philosophically, ‘cause we don’t cotton to that loud, wild kind) out of a relatively short season, maybe because the winters here make us so grateful for warmth & color.

Over the past couple of weeks, Ray and I have finally been getting the flower gardens cleaned up and mulched, deciding to settle for the “wild prairie gardens” look, since lambsquarter sprouts up instantly behind us as we go along pulling and hacking at weeds.

The peaflock is in summer mode, too. Our three adult males (Ramon, Francoise, and Junior) have split the farmyard into small kingdoms, and all three are parading, dancing, and fluttering for all they’re worth, in spite of the fact that the hens too young to nest would rather eat bugs than pitch woo. The big boys occasionally take time out from strutting to run at breakneck speed after the three young males (Zorro, Zarathustra, and Zachariah), who evade by flying up on the pyramid roof. It’s not unlike college kids on a Friday night at Carey’s (our favorite hometown bar).

Two of the older hens (Wanda and Mitzi) have been skirting the farmyard with three new chicks each. Ike, who is either sexually flexible or is really Izetta, made a nest this year but soon abandoned the responsibility in favor of sticking closer to She Who Gives Corn (me). Ike’s the tamest of the bunch and she follows me when I mow or ambles around the patio when I sit outside. At least one hen is still nesting, although a loud pea-ruckus yesterday makes me think her eggs were hatching—often a hen will give a certain honk when eggs are hatching, then the flock will raise cain as if to draw predatory attention away from the nest. If we end up with 18 surviving peas this summer, we will have tripled the pea-population in the three years we’ve been here. We may have to buy up a few more acres and plant them in corn.

A summer favorite on the prairie is the potluck. I’ve been to several so far, including our semi-monthly Sisters of Perpetual Disorder women’s dinners, a wedding shower at Carey’s, a wedding dance, and going-away gatherings for Little Town U. faculty. At potlucks, one can sample a variety of traditional SD foods: “loose meat sandwiches” or “barbecues” (any meat-on-bun combo), “bars” (we called them “brownies” growing up in NE, regardless of color/flavor), and hot dishes (we called these “casseroles”). I know...it took me a while to learn South Dakotanese, too.

My friend Millie and I head for the beach when we can work it into our busy summer schedules. We go to Lewis & Clark state park, an impressive recreation area on a dammed section of the Missouri River in Yankton, SD. The river & river bluffs, dam, lake, aquarium, and campgrounds always surprise people who picture eastern SD as merely a waterless expanse of flat cornfields. Millie and I are casual beachgoers, mostly laying out (although with red hair and freckles, I’m usually slathered in SPF 9000—not sure you can really call that laying out). When we get too hot, we laze in the water on our floaties.

Another SD summer favorite is the street dance. Small town downtown streets are roped off, someone hauls in a flatbed for a stage, the street is lined with picnic tables, and a great time is had by all. We went to our first summer street dance last night to hear two Norfolk, NE bands (pronounced “nor-fork” for reasons as mysterious as the SD pronunciation of state capital Pierre as “peer”). Jim Casey and the Lightning Band played old rock and country, and Smoke Ring, a horn band, played old R & B. We danced, a special treat for me since my dance partner is usually the band’s drummer (for those old enough to remember, I believe the woman in the white shirt was a former Shindig dancer).

In Little Town, Fridays mean Happy Hour at Carey’s. Two or three of Ray’s band mates play old standards, and in the summer, they’re out on the patio. It’s a great time, and the 5-7-ish time slot gets us midlife partiers home in plenty of time to doze peacefully in our Lazygirls after all the sun, wind, dark beer, singing along, visiting and laughing.

Today, summer is cranking up the heat again, and the recent rains left swirling clouds of newly-hatched mosquitoes, driving us inside. So this will be a knitting day (I’m knitting a lace scarf out of soy silk), grocery shopping later, something on the grill for dinner, and a nice wine, one that complements Deep Woods Off.

The Heat is On

In his poem “The Cutting Prow,” beat poet Ed Sanders wrote, The last blue iris blooms at / the top of its stalk. Sanders was writing about painter Henri Matisse, but he could have been writing about Uncannery Row.

Spring was merely a fleeting tease at the Row this year, just enough to trigger our urge to plant enough jalapenos to supply the upper Midwest. The iris and climbing roses are a fading memory, and although Solstice/Father’s Day is barely past, Sweltering Summer is already visiting her pent-up wrath upon us. It’s been in the upper-90’s for the past couple of days and has “cooled off” to the upper 80’s today. And after the rain and storms of the last couple weeks, I could throw sage on the patio and the Row would be one big sweat lodge.

The heat is good training for Mom’s and my upcoming July trip to the Yucatan in Mexico. We’ll spend about 10 days visiting my expat brother, exploring ruins, and dipping our pasty-white feet in the Caribbean. Their daily temps can be in triple digits this time of year, so we may do a lot more dipping than exploring. As part of my training, I’ve also been brushing up on essential Spanish: Quiero una cerveza oscura, por favor. Donde está el baño? Lléveme al aire acondicionado, ahora.

The peacocks are feeling the heat, too. They find a shady spot of bare dirt, usually in one of my gardens, and hunker down for most of the day. They will sometimes head for the dirt floor of the loafing shed and kick up a nice dust bath, which probably helps them fend off our new gnat population. Two of the three nesting hens are spooking around the edges of the farmyard with brand new baby chicks, so now we are 19. We named the new babies (two groups of three) Wynken, Blynken and Nod, and Larry, Moe, and Curly. Any minute now, “crazy peacock lady” pinfeathers will start poking out of my ample armflaps.

In spite of the recent rain and 100% humidity, the heat means I have to water almost daily, while the dogs stand like garden statues in their patio baby pool. And I need to tackle the flower beds, which have turned into tropical jungles of lambs quarters and creeping whatever. It was too dry to weed for a while, then too wet. But now it’s too hot. So really, I only have two choices: Hide in the AC and knit up something wonderful with the luscious white alpace yarn I’ve been saving, or turn on Animal Planet for the dogs & parrots, and head to the beach with frozen water bottles, SPF 9000, and a floaty. Ah, Summer.

The Real Irish Blessing: Love, Food, Diapers

We went to a wedding in Minnesota this weekend, 50-something friends whose magnetic Irish genes, love of music, and appreciation for a good yarn (the blarney kind, not the spun wool kind) pulled them together.

During the wedding, I got to hold the couple’s newborn granddaughter, Layla because, well, I’m pushy and just took her, and because I ADORE babies. The sheer miracle of a baby makes me weepy and weak-kneed, and I would probably be popping out #13 or #14 of my own by now had I not discovered shortly after after my third was already here that ALL humans turn 16 eventually.

Off-topic: Looking for fool-proof planned parenthood education & motivation? Instead of having junior high kids carry around little mechanical dolls to babysit for 24 hours, have them be totally responsible—physically, morally, financially—for a real 16-year-old for a week. Voila.

As I jiggled baby Layla, I had an epiphany about the simplicity of the human condition: we all just want food, someone to love us, and someone willing to change our diaper (the most intimate expression of love).

Think about it. Wars over land? Food. Religious wars? Someone to love us (god/God) and possibly someone willing to change our diaper (god/God). Marital strife? Jealousy? Greed? Lust? Fear of old age? Love, food, food, love, diaper. Facebook? Sex? Petty crime? Love, diaper, food.

I could see this triad at work the next day at the wedding dance, too. At least six groups of musicians played over the course of the day. These men (and a couple of women) in their 50’s and 60’s rocked, polka’d, or reeled out, some reliving memories of their glory days, some musically reconnecting with old friends they hadn’t seen in ages. And I know it’s about the music, but that little craving to perform seems also to be a craving for love.

While the bands played, we party-goers were busy worker ants, marching single file to and from an endless supply of amazingly delicious cakes—table to chocolate cake to table to white cake to table to carrot cake. Food. Okay, maybe love too—it IS cake, after all.

On this joyous occasion of two human beings finding each other amid the chaos, it became clear to me that the happy couple had, like Ray and I, been blessed with a social arrangement that provides each partner with the basic three: FOOD (income, cooking skill, the good sense to come home with take-out every now & then), SOMEONE TO LOVE US, and SOMEONE WILLING TO CHANGE A DIAPER (our baby’s initially and, more importantly, our own eventually).

Off-topic: If life really comes to down to these three basic needs, we should be thrilled and grateful for any adult—straight, crooked, gay, lesbian, mentally challenged, transgendered, gender-reassigned, old wrinkly women, ancient crotchety men, even English teachers—lucky enough to find another human being willing to help provide for those needs. Thinking we can dictate who provides for whom is really just jockeying for power & control, which is really just fear & insecurity that maybe we won't find enough love for ourselves.

Off-topic note to young people: Roll your eyes, snicker, and pooh-pooh the old geezers while you can. But know that Depends are in your future, too, and then, lemme tell you, it won’t be about career, philosophy, politics, religion, or technology. It won’t matter how fast you can text or how you look in a tube top. When you’re old (or middle aged, cuz I already FEEL like this some days), it’ll be all about whether or not you can lie back, look up at the ceiling, and smile & coo like baby Layla. And THAT will all depend (yuk yuk) on love. And food. And a clean diaper.

(art by Jane Duke, http://www.janeduke.com/)

Sisters of Perpetual Disorder

I attended the June meeting of the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder last night. These are monthly (mostly) gatherings of midlife women (including two mother/daughter sets last night!). We rotate to a different member’s house each time (so no one will have to clean two months in a row), and we have a loosely-themed potluck dinner, drink a few bottles of wine, chat, laugh a LOT, drink a couple pots of coffee, divvy up the leftovers in recycled yogurt containers, and adjourn.

At last night’s meeting, we were joined at the table by our constant midlife companions, Nostalgia and Confession. But these are not the sappy, sentimental pals one might expect, because one of the best things about middle-aged women is that if you get a bunch of them together, all pretense of propriety and dignity (at least in terms of storytelling), goes out the window.

For example, there’s one well-traveled woman’s story of two ex-lovers—one with whom she’d dallied in the Midwest, one with whom she’d cavorted in South America—and how the two men happened to meet at a base camp in the Himalayas and, over dinner later, discovered they had HER in common. Take that, Kevin Bacon.

Or another woman’s story of drinking too many dirty martinis at a wedding reception because Jennifer Aniston said they were her favorite drink, so she wanted to try them for herself. A few tries later, she missed her chair to find herself on the floor, carried on conversations she only knew of from reports she got much later, and eventually snuck off to the kitchen to beg a lobster from the chef. She packed the lobster in her suitcase among her clothes, and the next morning, she and her crustacean leftovers flew home.

Or another woman’s story of digging her scrapbook out of a box one day to discover that she’d been to a Grateful Dead concert in the 1970’s. There were hand-written comments in the margins of the scrapbook next to the ticket stub—who she’d gone with, what she thought of the opening band, how the Dead boys sounded, etc.—and she recognized the handwriting as her own. She was both thrilled to know she’d seen the Dead play live, and utterly disappointed to have no memory whatsoever of having been at the concert.

Or another woman’s stories about dating a cockeyed Missouri hillbilly guitar player until she took up with the Irish bartender. No kidding.

Or another woman’s story about waitressing in the 1970’s. She’d stopped to pick up glasses from a booth table and found the occupants of the booth had not, in fact, left the building. They were under the table, on the floor, naked, engaged in boisterous carnal “discovery.” Talk about last call.

Young people, if they could listen at the keyholes, would be shocked & horrified to learn that these delightful, sensible and wise, gracefully aging women were once (and still are occasionally) wild young people, too.