“El Grito” (the “shout” or “cry”) was the name of the website we designed and maintained for the duration of our family sabbatical.  The website included photos and blog entries on a variety of topics.  We include some excerpts here.

Moving to a new place; adjusting to a new pace.  As our pace slows, so do our minds and bodies.  We take deep breaths and feel our brains expand with each exhalation.  We inhale the colors; vivid blues and dusty ochres, pastel pinks and bloody burgundies…the Mexicans aren’t shy about calling attention to their buildings, their clothes or their art.  They’re polite but exuberant, warm and tolerant.

Hammers pound, maids sweep, fireworks burst, birds call, roosters crow, machines wash, breezes whisper through orchids and calla lily leaves, children wrestle, bells chime, cars honk, men yell, loudspeakers blare, drums march, garbage trucks clang, women laugh, burros bray, and the part-dog, part-coyote howls mournfully next door as we settle down to dinner each night; these and more are the sounds of our life in San Miguel.

The Parque Benito de Juarez is a ten-minute walk from our home on the way to Cleome and Asher’s school.  It’s impeccably maintained with clean swept dirt paths to stroll, fountains, gorgeous flowering shrubs and most importantly, a playground for the kids.  We spent an hour there this morning, smiling awkwardly at the other parents, attempting a word or two in our lame Spanish and playing on equipment, which would have been banned as too dangerous in the states.  Each piece of equipment has a “surprise” as Michael calls them.  A too narrow walkway, a hole in the center of the platform, a high rope bridge with no railing, a large metal tortuga sizzling hot to the touch…kids learn quickly here to be attentive, agile and fast.

We eat simply here and the most basic foods have the most amazing flavors.  Fresh corn tortillas, prepared right in front of you by old women or their daughters, handed to you by the media kilo wrapped in brown paper and best if taken right home and eaten immediately.  Fresh flour tortillas that are more like crepes, thin and flaky.  When filled with beans, lettuce and cheese and topped with salsa verde, these are Cleome’s favorites.

We’re in avocado heaven.  Aguacates.  We found several different varieties at the open-air market and the seller assured us they were perfect for eating para hoy, today.  She was right.  They were perfect.  Yielding to the touch, neither mushy nor stringy with a consistency like thick cream and a rich, almost cheesecake-like taste.  We top them with a sprinkle of salt and spoon them in our mouths hungrily, like kids eating ice cream.  Only better.

El Grito #2

We spend a lot of time shopping for food at small, family-owned tiendas specializing in meat or cheeses.  Panaderias where you use tongs to choose your bolillos, small baguette-like rolls, and a multitude of sweets.  You place them on a sliver platter to be bagged up by the owner who grins as Asher begs for a bite of bread now!  Ahora!  There’s the open-air mercado; verdant with flowers, and fruits, and vegetables.  Indian women serve delicious fresh tamales along with a variety of viscous lukewarm beverages flavored with chocolate and cinnamon and something black, all out of five gallon pails that used to hold motor oil .  We buy school shoes for Cleome and plastic balls for Asher.

Asher and Cleome started school this past week.  Asher attends a jardin de ninos  (daycare) for a half day at the same place Cleome goes to school.  Cleome wears a uniform each day (our little Mexican/Jewish/Catholic schoolgirl) and winds around the cobbled streets downhill to her school, about a 15-minute walk from home.  The school is a bilingual private elementary school with perhaps 40 students.  There are three other students who are also Norte Americanos.  Later in the day, it’s a much harder 20 minute walk uphill, dodging cars, elderly Indian women, and the ubiquitous dog poop, all with Asher nodding off and drooling on your shoulder.

Some mornings, we buy cups of strong coffee and walk to the shady zocolo, the main square.  We find a bench in the sun and spin tales of now and future possibilities.  Ifs and what-ifs.  How can we stay here?  How can we come back?  We’ve only been here a little more than a week and already we can’t imagine ever returning to the chill and “nice” of Minnesota.  We’re here for months longer but it’s hard to believe that reality.  We’re still adjusting to the length of days here.  The hours feel like years and the minutes move like days.  Time is peculiar here.  The day stretches on and on.  It feels like weeks since we’ve arrived.  We fit so much activity into each day that we’re a bit relieved when the cloak of evening falls, a cool breeze begins to curl down into our courtyard, and we can sip our wine, let our eyes dilate into the deep shadows of palm and bougainvillea and just sigh.  Repeatedly.

It’s very laid back here.  Peaceful.  Last night…the kids watched a DVD upstairs on Michael’s new laptop and we drank wine downstairs with candles lit at the table in front of the open garden doors.  Soft Latin music echoed in the terracotta rooms as a wind blew gently through the orchids, lilies, and palm fronds in the garden two steps away.  The night was clear, as always, with stars that seem much closer than back home.  After we put the kids to bed we lit a fire in the living room and sipped more wine in the dark cool of the evening.  How did we get here?  How did we find our way to this magnificent house and city?  What forces magically came together and set us down here in this warm and friendly place?

Next week…another installment.  It appears we’ll be here for awhile.

El Grito #3

So we’ve been here more than a month now.  Those idyllic first days where everything was absolutely fresh and new and strange and disorienting and yet-to-be-explored seem like a year ago.  It’s always amazing to me how time stretches to fit around the shape of one’s experience.  That first week seemed to last an eternity: we experienced more each day than we would in a normal week back home.  In the evenings we’d recount our day to each other—as though we hadn’t been side-by-side the entire time—so unique is such an experience for each person.  Each subsequent week has gone by a little more quickly; time is beginning to regain its composure from those first giddy days.

We’re settling into a routine of sorts—which is good and bad.  So much of the value of traveling is simply in disrupting routine; the opportunity presented is less one of experiencing new things than in experiencing things anew.  Not that we can’t do this wherever we are, regardless of how long we’ve been there.  It’s just that we don’t—or at least tend not to.  And it’s not that easy to steer out of the well-worn furrows we trace each day.  There are always those moments when some fortuitous and seemingly insignificant coming together of the world—some chance meeting or puzzling coincidence or fleeting peripheral impression (things that used to be accorded a place at the margins of understanding as omens…)—causes us to pause and wonder, or just pause.  Moments that inject a rift into our days, that offer a mere glimpse of something else, of something other that we’d expected; of something that by virtue of its very inconsequence and the fact that it has momentarily captured our attention shocks us with the realization that we hadn’t really been expecting anything new at all.  And perhaps for that moment our antennae are up, sensitized, vibrating in synch with the plethora of signals that are normally filtered out as we go about the day just trying to get things done.  For a moment everything seems new, or if not new, then subtly different, as aglow with an otherness as an old familiar word that suddenly feels like gibberish in your mouth; or as though you are tickled by some memory trying to materialize, and the entire world is prompting you, pulling for you to remember—this steaming cup of coffee, this glinting spoon of sugar, this cloud of swirling cream…c’mon, c’mon!... 

And then it passes; it has past; we move on and resume the ceaseless and mostly thankless (or is that thankless and mostly ceaseless?) work of being this person in this place who knows and does and says just these things in this way…  Yes, the routine is necessary.  After all, what are we as persons if not this sum total of little rituals by which others may recognize and count upon us…and by which we might recognize ourselves?  Only saints and madmen may wake up everyday to confront this light and these hands and this body as for the first time, tearfully proclaim it a gift or a curse, and wander off aimlessly into the eternally new.

Most of us are fortunate enough to be in thrall to an arrangement which allows us to maintain a sense of identity and continuity amidst the storm of new world through which we pass each moment of each day—but that arrangement comes with a price: Routine.  The big filter that makes all of this possible is also the same thing that mostly keeps us from really showing up at the party to enjoy it.  And for the most part, that’s fine.  But... please—not all the time.  We should all of us be issued a refrigerator magnet with a flippable dongle that reads “the Filter is On/ the Filter is Off” just to remind us that turning it off is even a possibility (however remote), as well as to warn those with whom we share a fridge in this life in the event we decide to take a break from being ourselves.  We (those of us writing this) of course have essentially flipped the dongle and are making a valiant attempt at leaving the building, but beyond being a dramatic and symbolic gesture, we also understand that as furiously and as furtively as we attempt to break port, we will always set sail with a hold full of rats to contend with.

So good and bad…a bit of the initial shock and wonder has receded: the beauty and foreign-ness of this place, as well as the fact that we were able to pull this off at all.  For good or for ill I began to recognize myself again in the mirror the other morning (“so it is you…” reaching tentatively toward the glass, fingertip to fingertip…)  Even weirder—I finally realized with a shock that that beautiful women I’ve been so lucky to be sharing a bed with for several weeks now is actually my wife!  Imagine that…

But the good part of routine is returning as well: we know where we will be sleeping tonight; we wake up (finally!) to a predictably good cup of coffee; the confinement of our meager possessions to a box or bag or satchel has been relaxed and they have been furloughed to spread throughout our new space, to colonize shelves and tabletops, drawers, closets, ledges and nooks.  (I still can’t find my sunglasses: we’re almost back to normal!)  The seemingly random and incessant clanging of the myriad surrounding church bells is beginning to acquire a reassuring consistency. 

Raphael, our fruit monger, can distinguish us from the other gringos and always cracks open a juicy mandarino for the kids when he sees us coming.  I understand that the man walking down our street banging two hunks of metal together is not just trying to give me a headache, but is an avant garde for the garbage truck down at the corner and I have about fifteen minutes to go hand our basura up to the gruff fellow in the back of the truck.  There is a growing familiarity to the way the light falls through the streets at different times of day; the faces of clerks with brooms standing in doorways; the cats that loiter on the roofs and parapets; the feel of cobblestones through my shoes, and the acquired habit of knowing where and when to look so as not to trip or step in shit; the feel of the language in our ears and the warm, saturated ochers, the cool cobalt filling in our eyes, and the smells of cooking and diesel and cleaning water tossed from buckets and evaporating from the stones…

El Grito #4 Michael and Elisa dialogue

Michael asks:  Just what do we think we are doing here, Querida mia?

We have decided to “risk” (what risk?) a complete reorganization of our lives in order to do something we feel very strongly about, to address some rather vague but chronic sense that the more magical possibilities of this one-and-only life could easily slip away amidst the noise and clutter and haste of daily existence as we’ve come to know it.  We could undoubtedly agree on a general list of what it is we hope to accomplish during our “family sabbatical” (even though one of those “things”--for me at least, and in particular--is to find my way through to a place where the drive to accomplish itself might be checked and gradually supplanted by the drive to love, of which it is a mere perversion.)...

Por supuesto, we want to read and write and play more, be together in fresh and leisurely and uncontrived ways, liberate ourselves to wander and noodle and daydream and digress, luxuriate for a time in just being just where we are, and in not having to know what comes next—in just not having to know…in just not having to all the time.  Perhaps by making repeated forays into this realm we might be able to smuggle back more and more of it to that other place where our days are weighed and measured.  Either that or we’ll discover a way to just stay there; or we’ll lose our way and forget there was ever another place to which to return.  But probably not: better to leave utopia for others, elsewhere.  More than likely we’ll continue to make the pilgrimage, and thereby come to a deeper understanding and acceptance of these contradictory impulses that in their tension make life and consciousness possible.  We’ll keep living in the past and in the future, keep working to change ourselves and the world, and keep reminding ourselves that despite our ceaseless efforts, everything is, always has been and always will be just fine the way it is.

But I digress.  What I’m really interested in here is exploring with you more specifically the relationships between the various things we are trying to do: spending more time together—recognizing and savoring this brief and fleeting time we have been given—as a family; reflecting upon, from this peculiar fulcrum here at the midpoint of our lives, just who we are as individuals, where we’ve been, and where we think we may be headed; and establishing a regular practice of writing.  What do you think is significant about doing these things together?  How do they reinforce or detract from each other?  We’re a few months into this project, and I’m curious to know how you feel we’ve changed or adjusted the objectives we brought to it at the outset.

Elisa responds:
Well, my love, what has not changed so far is your ability to write rather thick thoughts that leave a syrupy residue in my brain after I’ve read them.  You have so many words in your head no wonder you can’t lay down until two or three in the morning.  But, to (try) to answer your many musings…I’m a bit surprised at how little has changed so far.  We very quickly settled into a routine in terms of the writing and the kids’ schedules.

Much of it makes sense since I’m a totally ineffective writer without serious discipline.  And the kids do much better knowing what each part of the day will bring.  Part of me is saddened, however, that we can’t be doing more of a spontaneous traveling thing like we did when we were sin ninos; those days of moving from café to café and museum to museum without regard for anyone’s desires but our own.  I think we’ve both been yearning for a bit more of that.  But the times we’ve tried to travel here with the kids in that sort of untethered way have been sheer hell.  Days of nonstop whining for ice cream and treats; of searching out bathrooms and balls to kick.  I was much more willing to believe that all kids act like this until I moved here and watched in amazement as the Mexican kids proved me wrong on every count.  They barely whine, ever.  They don’t fight with each other.  They sit patiently beside their mothers for hours on end amusing themselves with whatever’s on hand.  Next to these adorable, cherubic and unfailingly polite youngsters, our kids resemble vacationing Visigoths stamping their feet and shaking their fists for attention.

I think it has to do with, and you’ve discussed this already, the set of expectations we introduce our kids to the moment they escape the womb.  Everything is quick this and hurry that because we have to get to “it.”  Whatever we’re doing at the moment isn’t really “it.”  Whatever “it” is, is waiting somewhere else so let’s find some conveyance, a bus, a merry-go-round, a joint, to take us there....

Our children come to consciousness watching us fret and frown about not measuring up, not accomplishing this, not arriving here or there…it’s a consciousness of lack.  Something is always missing.  Maybe it’s ice cream.  Maybe it’s writing a best-selling novel.  Whatever we need is somewhere else.  It’s certainly not this puddle of cool, creamy chocolate melting down my shirtfront.  That’s what this time away is about for me.  Leaping off the bus for awhile, leaving behind the merry-go-round and its horrible music so that I might “unclutter” enough to see that this is “it.”  Stepping up to the ice cream stand wanting nothing else except a single scoop of that sweet, frozen puddle.  If our kids can truly see us at ease with the moment, content with walking to the Jardin and that being our only destination, nothing else coming next…perhaps they’ll find it easier to relax into the moment and be content with listening to the Mariachis and staring at the stars. What an immense gift that would be for us and our children.

Now, have we moved closer to this goal?  Perhaps a little.  I sense that we’re feeling incrementally more at ease with stepping off the merry-go-round.  Having to walk everywhere helps enormously.  No television or newspaper helps.  Warm nights and days help.  But we’re still filled with a leaden sense of lack that weighs us down, causing us to worry that we won’t…(fill in the blank)….finish a book, explore enough of Mexico, learn to speak Spanish, enjoy our children, pull together as a family.  Blah, blah, blah.  It’s all still swirling here in our heads, the dull, tiresome sound of the merry-go-round and it’s still hard to hear the Mariachis over all that noise.  But at least there are Mariachis and oh so many stars, and we’re in the Jardin with nothing else to do but sit and listen.

El Grito #5

The kids go off to school—Cleome first to meet her friend Sierra for the walk down the hill, then Elisa takes Asher and heads off to her Spanish class at the Instituto Allende; I get left with the house and garden and the entire cool morning to write and ponder before I need to throw some clothes on and fall out into the sun-warmed streets to trot down the hill and pick Asher up from daycare by 12:30.  The ad hoc hand-to-mouth come-what-may cobbling together of each day that can be so refreshing and invigorating for awhile is giving way to a more stabile, predictable, reliable world which allows for us to move beyond being mere voyeurs here, to actually become a part of it all.

Sort of.  But not completely—which brings us back to why we are here in the first place.  The whole point of this sojourn is to enhance creativity: in our lives, our relationships, our work…in everything.  It’s about having the space in which to awaken to the possibilities not just in our lives—but of our lives—and developing the skills to act upon and within and out of those possibilities.  Establishing ourselves in an environment with a controlled mixture of the familiar and strange, of comfort and alienation, is a crucial part of this effort. 

Creativity is simply possibility in action; and possibility is about what happens at the boundary between the known and the unknown.  Too much or not enough of either, and nothing much happens: too many dreams, too much reality, and that’s all you get: one or the other.  But as with a flame, the right mix will result in a new entity, energy and light will be liberated, and the process will perpetuate itself.  At least for a time—which is all we can hope for.  What we have found here—in Mexico, in each other, at this point in our lives—is a situation that we believe provides us with all the right stuff to establish this mix.  Now it’s up to us to do the fine tuning, to shepherd all the constituent elements to some point of concentration, and to provide a spark.  Whatever that means.  And whatever that means is precisely what we are here to explore. Somebody’s got to do it.

We’re about three months in and this place is still as beautiful as ever.  For a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that we like San Miguel, we’ve decided to stay put for at least another six months (moving to a different house and neighborhood) after our lease is up here on July 15.  There’s actually a good chance we’ll spend the entire year and half here (with a month or so break from our break away at the beach next winter).  We’ve found a lovely (and much cheaper) house on the outskirts of town in a very Mexican neighborhood (that is, grittier and more desolate—though we prefer to think of it as more authentic) called Colonia Independencia.

The house we’re living in now is gorgeous and we’ll especially miss the lush courtyard and sunken garden (at the moment we’ve got a white Bird of Paradise blooming among all the orchids, amaryllis and calla lilies—we didn’t even know there was such a thing!), not to mention the handful of scorpions and museum-quality cockroaches we’ve encountered and dispatched in a variety of heartless ways.  But we’re looking forward to living among more Mexicanos and speaking more Espanol on a daily basis.  While we’re making steady progress with the language, and are actually beginning to find ourselves conversing in somewhat complete (though undoubtedly flawed) sentences about more than just food, restrooms and bus tickets, there are (alas!) just so many gringos here, especially in our current neighborhood, that it’s hard to avoid lapsing into the mother tongue.  Where do they all come from?!

The new hacienda is a three-story, three-bedroom, three-bath house with two studio/writing/guest rooms and a roof deck with a cantina and industrial-sized barbecue from which there are sweeping views of the desert and mountains to the west, and the most picturesque part of San Miguel to the east, laid out in all its glory, climbing the hillside to which most of it clings.  Perhaps best of all, there is an autonomous little casita out back with a cot and running water for Elisa’s mother to stay in while helping to care for our adorable children.  This means that the Don and the Signora will get a bit more “contemplative time” on the weekends, as well as an opportunity to get out of town more frequently for grown-up adventures.  A dimension of this experience that has so far been sorely lacking…!

Our various projects are coming into focus (mostly writing, though it is not uncommon in the wee hours to find Michael noodling around on his guitar in a somewhat fruitless and masochistic pursuit of the perfect pop song) and this has influenced our decision to stay put for the time being.  While we could write just about anywhere, picking up and moving this whole circus to a new town again, however stimulating, would require another significant period of adjustment, taking precious time away from the work.  Monthly forays out to different parts of el Bajio will just have to suffice.  We are hoping to get some samples of work up on the website in the next month or two.  Also, due to the increased availability of high-quality, pirated software down here, the Webmeister has announced his intention to overhaul the entire site yet again in the not-too-distant future.

The kids continue to thrive.  Cleome has blossomed into quite the savvy shopper, becoming adept at stretching her 20 peso allowance at the mercados, puestas and tiendas.  She’s also become, by dint of our relative isolation, something of a ravenous bookworm, and is already halfway through her second reading of the entire Harry Potter opus.  Asher, approaching three with a distinct burst of testosterone, has decided that bad guys are more interesting, believes he’s a pirate, and has made us buy him a sword so that he might commune on equal terms with his favorite equestrian statue.  Their grasp of Espanol, like ours, is coming along; though their vocabulary tends rather lopsidedly toward issues of dulces, galletas & helados. 

Both will change schools next year.  Cleome will enter a Mexican public school and be immersed in Spanish all day long (she’s currently at a bilingual school with an emphasis on teaching English to Mexican kids).  And we’ve found a wonderful little Jardin por Ninos for Asher right in the Centro, an easy bus ride from the new house, with 3, 4 and 5 year olds all set up in little classrooms.  He’ll probably be the only little gringo there (as he is now in his daycare) and we think he’ll do very well there in his little red uniform (if for no other reason than to warn people that he’s coming…).

We’ve had a consistent influx of visitors and it’s been great to have friends and family here to experience Mexico and this gorgeous city with us.  It looks like our next sojourner will be Michael’s mother in June for a couple weeks.  After that, we’re not sure.  We’re hoping to see Elisa’s brother Dan and family in August, as they weren’t able to make it over spring break, and then Grammy Arlene joins us at the end of the month once school starts again.  We’ll still have room for visitors in the new place—in fact, more—so…you might want to think about getting on our calendar.

With the departure of our last guests and our ears still ringing from the last exploding Judas to culminate the alternately solemn and raucous celebrations of Semana Santa (Easter Week), it feels as though we’ve come to the end of the beginning of this thing, and to the beginning of what we hope will be a long and productive middle.  The easy thrills of nonstop novelty and picture-postcard adventure are pretty much a thing of the past.  The visceral compass, calendar and clock that never really believed we wouldn’t be returning to Minnesota any time soon have all quietly made the necessary adjustments so that when we wake up in the morning we are now here, and here now: for the time being this place is home.  Some things have changed, but not much really.  We’re pretty much the same people, living out the same quotient of pleasure and pain, encountering the same set of obstacles and opportunities by which we’ve come to recognize ourselves for some time now—we’re just doing some different things, and some things differently, and eating a lot more beans and rice. 

It’s kind of interesting after spending most of a lifetime as an overgrown adolescent, always ready and willing to throw oneself back out into the world just to see what happens, to wake up one day to find oneself rather fully formed, an adult at cruising altitude passing over but relatively unaffected by the local changes in weather and geography below.  From here on out it seems the changes will be slow and subtle, and if worthwhile, probably somewhat hard-won.  I suppose we can unbuckle our seatbelts now, drop our traytables, push this seat back into the knees of the guy behind us: the little lights just went off...

El Grito #7

“The tattered, oft-consulted, never-to-be-correctly-folded-again roadmap of the world only ever seems to yield up the small red bullet indicating ‘YOU ARE NOT HERE.’”                    — M Roehr

Hola!  Well, these last few months have passed about as quickly as the first couple weeks had passed slowly and, as you can see, our website has languished a bit along the way, waning in priority as our life here has gently but firmly come to supplant our life not there.  In retrospect we can see that the first couple months here were spent just arriving: getting adjusted and finding our way around, building new routines like sandcastles out of the seemingly endless beach of days, taking up the easy slack in a new language--every new dumb word an accomplishment, everyone we met a new friend.  We appeared to be here but were substantially still very much there, or rather notthere: we were not working, not huddling half-frozen huffing into cupped hands, not hermetically sealed indoors looking out, not driving maniacally everywhere and nowhere, not traipsing the aisles of Target and Rainbow dutifully every weekend.  Being not there was the spice which made this strange new dish not merely interesting, but truly damn tasty.  Then, after the last of an initial flurry of visitors left and our email slowed to a trickle, we found ourselves a bit like a small research expedition watching our supply ship recede slowly over the horizon, marooned with a few beat-up crates of hardtack and toilet paper, our backs to the jungle of our fantasies and before us yet all the work of transforming a big lazy dream into some sort of reality.  Granted, somewhere in those crates were some little paper umbrellas for our drinks…

Now the clock was ticking and there was work to be done.  We passed a couple weeks in doubt about just how to proceed: this sabbatical was no longer the vast blue sky dream of pure possibility we’d lived with for several years of preparation, but had coalesced now into a definite, circumscribed, thoroughly time-bound mortal reality along with all the limitations that that implies.  We had to begin watching our money; we’d picked up enough of the language for it to begin to get difficult and frustrating and to feel acutely just what novices we were; we’d been without our friends and family for long enough to start missing them; we were spending a lot more time with our children than we’d anticipated and consequently a lot less time out having adult adventures than we’d naively expected; we had only just begun to write—or write again—and hadn’t enough time nor work under our belts to trust in the process and not fear that the few good pages we’d managed to eek out wouldn’t be the only ones forthcoming.  A familiar nudge and wink of mundane concerns and insecurities reasserted itself, plopping smugly down on the bench beside us like some poor beggar we thought we’d successfully ditched a ways back.  We haven’t been able to entirely lose him again, but even he seems to have relaxed a bit, shed a couple pounds and lost that ghastly pallor to the sun.

But all that too shall pass, and has.  Mas o menos.  When push came to shove, it never took much of a shove to remind each other (with a Carol Merrill wave of a hand) where we’d landed (door #1—ooh!), how we’d gotten here (door #2—ahh!) and just how fortunate we really were (door #3—squeal and cover  your mouth and jump up and down and kiss the host).  Correction: we are.

El Grito #8

So we’re pleased to report that it’s taken us so long to write this next posting because we’ve been busy…mostly writing.  Our various and sundry projects have taken off over the last couple of months and have become REAL—or…fiction, rather.  We each find ourselves with a solid start on a central project and have gotten beyond “mere” groping for a subject to becoming deeply enmeshed in issues of character, plot, voice, etc.  We’re actually doing it.  Writing books.  Every morning, all morning, five days a week, sitting in our respective corners, staring strangely off and stacking word against word like some boardwalk out over and into the boggy regions where there once were none.  At this point the outcome matters little, how soon or even whether they’ll be finished.  It’s a practice and a process and touchstone.  It’s incredibly gratifying to discover ourselves engaged in such a process as the centerpiece of our day.  Like plunging into a chilly river each morning for a strenuous swim and then toweling off afterwards and feeling your skin tingle all day long: how lovely.  We’ve even managed to begin sharing and critiquing each other’s work—a pair of very different coming-of-age stories—without thoroughly alienating each other: a real breakthrough. 

Pues…we wake, coffee, get the kids up and out.  Our days pass, a couple/few pages at a time, our mind fogged with characters being born into situations still grading to black at their edges; we switch with precision at noon to a choreographed tag-team shuttling of children up the hill from school, a nap for Asher if we’re lucky, Elisa helping Cleome with her homework while Michael clanks around in the kitchen gathering comida; study a bit of Spanish from the myriad books strewn evenly about the house; read in fits and starts, vying for a spot on the only comfortable piece of furniture—a squarish modern loveseat. 

After 3 or 4 o’clock things relax a bit…we head out, Cleome slapping the flagstones out front in her sandals, Asher on Michael’s shoulders like a midget camel driver, perhaps to the Mercado for some veggies or flowers or some goofy thing Cleome insists she needs for school; to the Biblioteca once or twice a week to refresh our books and kid vids, or spend an hour at a bilingual conversation table; maybe to grab a chicken or two for Shabbat from one of the sidewalk vendors with ancient, squealing rotisseries that look like a last consoling carnival ride for the ill-fated birds; perhaps to stroll through the Jardin in the town square to kick a ball unpredictably around the cobbles or chase lazy pigeons in front of the parish church, the Parroquia, finally succumbing to a compulsory helados for the kids.  We get the kids down between 8 & 9 and then fairly collapse with a book in bed, occasionally finding the will to rise again and catch up on a few emails or get some beans soaking, perhaps even sneak up to the roof for a dose of night air, reduced to a pleasantly exhausted silence we break only to remind ourselves to get out the star chart some day. 

Weekends could be just about anything—dinner with Kim & Andy (neighbors from Chicago with 3 boys), a video for the kids, swimming at a hot springs or a nearby hotel pool, a video for the kids, a day trip to some nearby town (to look for more helados), and last but not least, a trip to Gigante, San Miguel’s only large modern grocery store, bussing there and catching a cab back with a trunk load of groceries and a couple treats to be fought over in the back seat.  And then maybe a video for the kids…

Speaking of kids: they finished school June 28 and did great.  Cleome just started a month-long arts camp at the Instituto Allende.  Every morning she gets to speak only Spanish and work with resident artists on various projects.  She’s also taking a dance class twice a week from some high school dance students here from the states working with local Mexican dancers.  Part of their studies includes teaching dance to younger kids. (These student-teachers are involved in the same program for which Elisa is teaching her class.

June and July are birthday months for the Bernick-Roehr household.  Asher turned 3 on June 30.  Michael turns 43 on July 8 and Cleome turns 8 on July 15.  Asher had two birthday parties, one at school and one at home with Michael’s mom (Julie/Oma) in attendance.  We had a great time whacking the huge shaggy green dog piñata.  We broke three different sticks trying to get to the candy.  For the first time since leaving Minnesota, the double whammy of the end of school and her upcoming birthday really has left Cleome missing her friends and family.  But her cousins Ruby and Sam, and Uncle Dan and Aunt Sara are coming down for a visit to save the day.  They’ll arrive August 5th and spend ten days or so with us.  Cleome’s decided to hold off and celebrate her birthday when they’re here and we’ll undoubtedly have a blast.

Cleome will start a major intense adventure on August 19 when school begins again here.  She passed an entrance exam (in Spanish!) and will attend third grade at a private Mexican (very Catholic) school and will take every subject (even English) completely in Spanish.  She will be the only non-Spanish speaker at a school about the same size as the one she was attending in MN.  It will be an amazing learning experience (we’re talking nuns here) on many levels, difficult in many ways and equally rewarding in others.  Most likely she will speak Spanish quite fluently by the time she’s done, and be the one to help us maintain our Spanish once we return to the States.

El Grito #9

Asher is transforming from tot to kid before our very eyes.  Among his proudest achievements to date are holding his breath underwater (“like Mimi does”) and wielding one of the fastest and flashiest sticks in San Miguel.  He gives extensive explanations for why he needs a particular weapon (the stick) to “shooted” somebody.  He’s very into shooteding.  Our walks down these steep hills have turned into a wild west affair.  He stops all of a sudden and holds whatever stick he’s picked up that morning to his eye, sights his prey and then lets go with a barrage of noise and elaborate hand motions.  Afterwards, when the car or person or burro has gone by he announces with great satisfaction “I shooted him.  He’s dead.”  How charming. 

The boy chatters endlessly in an intriguing mix of English and Spanish and an intermediate nonsense language with more esoteric conjugations than both of them put together.  He’s full of stories that typically involve pirates, swords and monsters (after a brief bout with a series of fantasies in which he insisted he was the “kitchen maid.”)  He’s a bumptious, mercurial combination of sweet and tough, soft and wiry.  He’s losing his little boy belly but still has those chubby little feet and problematic toenails. (You never knew that, did you?) 

Although he’s loved his escuela these past months, he’ll also be attending a different school next year.  We stumbled upon a Spanish Montessori program that appears to be on par or even better than anything we’ve found in St. Paul, with real educational facilities (as opposed to a collection of motley, abused daycare toys), an excellent director, and best of all—grass!  Grass is hard to come by in this part of Mexico, so finding a place with a large grassy playground is a real boon.

A few miscellaneous novidades:
Elisa was hired to go to sunny & funny Acapulco for a week to play journalist (with the dangled opportunity to interview Vincente Fox!) but at the last minute the gig was cancelled.  It was very disappointing not to be able to escape her family to go loiter at poolside and beach for a week with a permanently refreshed cocktail in one hand and a pen in the other… but it was a huge relief to Michael (who despite the prospect of keeping both kids alone for a week was very supportive).  She got paid anyway, which eased the pain considerably (please send some more of those jobs her way).  One of her colleagues on that aborted mission of excess and vicarious cliff-diving turned out to run a summer arts camp for visiting gringitos here in San Miguel and subsequently hired Elisa to teach a creative writing course, which she’s currently engaged in.

Michael went with friend Andy to Mexico City for a boy’s weekend getaway.  An ex-customer of Andy’s recycled plastic insisted they use his driver, so who were they to say no?  So after arriving on the bus, they settled into a fast and furious couple days of sightseeing.  They managed to get through the National Anthropological Museum–a handsome mid-century modern edifice w/ hints of Brasilia--with its vast holdings of Aztec and related artifacts, the rather intimate and round Modern Art Museum (both in the immense, green Chapultepec park), as well as the Palacio National—seat of government on Plaza del la Constitution in the heart of the city—with Diego Rivera murals depicting the rise and fall of the Aztec empire and the arrival of the Spanish (w/ considerable political commentary), the huge adjacent national cathedral, and between them the excavation and museum of the Templo Mayor—the spiritual (and political) heart of the city at its peak under Montezuma when Cortez arrived—and then on through the Bellas Artes (Arte Nouveau palace and home of the Ballet Folklorico). 

They saw murals by Rivera, Orozco & Siqueira side by side, and stumbled into a fabulous exposition called “ABCDF” –“DF” being Distrito Federal, another name for Mexico City—in which hundreds of artists were asked to create pieces about the city.  It was the perfect alternative, impressionistic introduction to this unfathomable city of 30-40 some odd million inhabitants.  The culmination of the show was a black-box space in which the entire floor was an illuminated aerial photo of the city, full of people wandering around looking for their neighborhoods…or hotel.  They also stumbled upon a great little traveling exhibition of Santiago Calatrava’s (Spanish architect perhaps best known in the US for his recent addition to the Milwaukee Museum of Art) models and drawings along with an interview film exploring his process.  Elisa will be going back with Michael this fall to have a look around herself…

El Grito #10

The big splurge phase of this mission is winding down as we prepare to leave this truly amazing house with its spacious rooms, exquisite gardens and walls of glass unimaginable in a northern climate.  We will move into a new house and a very different neighborhood on July 15.  We’re starting to say goodbye to things we may not experience (ever) again for a long time.  Goodbye to the gardener and king-sized bed.  Goodbye to four bathrooms and the bidet.  Goodbye to the sunken tropical courtyard garden with flowers that have been a constant exotic delight--with birds of paradise, callas and orchids of every variety, as well as the huge old Jacaranda dominating it. 

We’ve lived with that tree through its spectacular and messy bloom of large lavender flowers and now into its full, feathery leafed-out whooshing and sighing summer self, lumbering over our back yard, nudging and nosing and rippling in the breeze like the coat of a old bear vanquishing horseflies.  There’s a flowering plant in this garden that we can’t yet identify although the owner says it’s related to the Christmas Cactus.  It stands maybe fifteen feet high and has extravagant white blooms that last for only one night and are like nothing we’ve ever seen.  Truly stunning and ever so fleeting.  Sort of like our stay in this place.  Sort of like life.  It’s been a piece of heaven to lounge each afternoon amidst the colors and fragrance of this cool little chunk of jungle.  But our ever dwindling bank account demands that we move to cheaper digs.  For those who have visited us here, we’re glad you had the chance to experience this place with us. 

For those who will visit us in our new house (and please do), it is a very different and yet another lovely place with a wonderful roof deck/barbecue/bar and great views of the city.  It just won’t be the utter luxury this place has been.  A step down from utter will just have to do.  It’s smaller than our current place, but the space is much more efficiently organized and usable for our purposes and for putting up guests.  The neighborhood is mucho mas authentically Mexicano: off the beaten path of most gringos.  We will still have a maid that comes with the house (de rigueur in San Miguel).  The kids will each have their own rooms, Michael and Elisa will each have their own project studios and…most importantly…Elisa’s mother (Grammy Arlene) will have her own separate casita out back with bed, bath and kitchen.  We expect Grammy Arlene to move down from CA (after recovering from surgery in July) sometime this summer to come and learn Spanish and hang with her grandchildren for the rest of our stay.  Life will change radically once more and we’re looking forward to it.

We’re meeting more friends--and more Mexicanos--through Spanish conversation groups, parents of Cleome and Asher’s friends and just by happenstance.  We’re recognizing and being recognized by the veterans and full-timers, ever more distinct from the waves of tourists passing through.  It’s good to feel like we’re becoming a bit more entrenched in the community.  There are a lot of interesting folks down here, each with a fascinating story to tell of how or why they made their way here and why they never left. 

There are also those less desirably interesting, though no less important--like big-haired skinny-legged Memmo who looks like a bobble-head doll handed out by AA, and turns up next to you on the bench with entirely too much to say just as you’re settling into your book; or Big Ann, who yammers on in a disturbing mix of bark and baby talk and who has fortunately returned for the time being to New Mexico to run as a (very) dark horse candidate for Attorney General; or perhaps the Sweeping Evangelical, who showed up in the Jardin several months back with mouth sores and a bedroll sent on a mission by God from somewhere in Ohio to convert Michael (with little success—“listen, dude: didja ever consider that this whole god thing might not just be the work of the devil?”) and who subsequently healed and lost his Ohio pallor and was last seen in a nice used Stetson shadowing the blaze orange-clad municipal maintenance crew with his own little broom, appearing somewhat content, having found his true calling…and then he disappeared—poof!  God’s will be done…

San Miguel has a way of doing that to you.  You come for a week and still find yourself here two years later, never quite managing to make it back to wherever you used to call home (don’t worry, we’ll be back next summer).  People tend to either find it or lose it here.  We’re doing a little of both.  Part of it’s the climate, which is nigh perfect.  Part of it’s the city itself which is quite Mexican but offers enough culture and creature comforts that Gringos como nosotros can feel very much at home.  And part of it is the energy from the long history of revolution and art emanating from this part—the heart--of Mexico.  We’re here for almost another year and we expect it’s going to be one full of reflection, good work and a lot of fun.  If you get a chance, come on down and hang for awhile! 

Elisa:  OK, Senor Raro…(I love the fact that by giving your name a Spanish twist I’m actually renaming you Mr. Strange)…there are certain things here in San Miguel that impress me enormously and I wonder if they strike you in the same way.  For example,   every nook and cranny here, every ruin, every square foot of sidewalk is used for some type of commercial industry.  A couple weeks ago I noticed that a burly Indian woman with a long thick braid and a colorful serape had set up shop a block and a half from our house on a little patch of (what passes for) sidewalk.  She spends the entire day beneath a makeshift umbrella patting out thick handmade tortillas and frying them up on a little tin burner with chilies and meat which she sells to passersby for five pesos a piece.. ...Or that new little tacos al carbon place around the corner.  For several months a street near our house had been closed down for repair (actually rebuilding) which they did completely by hand, fitting each cobblestone in a sand base and carefully pouring a dipperful of concrete around each one to set it in place.  It was absolutely fascinating to watch this crew of about a dozen men making their way down this steep hill painstakingly rebuilding this road with only their hands, shovels, and a wheelbarrow.

On one side of this street is an enormous ruin.  For weeks, all you could see walking by was a thick stone wall and a large wooden door that would occasionally be left open to reveal concrete steps leading to an overgrown lot with chunks of rooms lying about and an abandoned stove near the entrance.  But a couple weeks ago, as soon as the road reopened, and I mean the instant it opened, I noticed a little sign sitting out in front of this ruin advertising tacos al carbon.  I looked in the door and from out of nowhere this little rustic café had materialized overnight with several tables sitting in the overgrown lot, strategically placed around the huge chunks of rooms still lying about.  The abandoned stove is still on its side near the entrance, while a cheerful Mexican woman in an apron stands behind a portable steam table everyday preparing what smells like mouthwatering tacos.

Does she know the owner of this property?  Is she the owner?  Does it matter?  I love that about this place.  There’s so much industry here.  Half the town seems to be working nonstop (while the other half just seems to slouch on street corners in perpetual siesta).  What about you, Senor Raro?  What about this place has struck you as being especially impressive or fascinating?

Michael responds: Perhaps what is most fascinating to me is that after quitting our jobs and our lives in the fast lane we still barely have any time or opportunity for some of those mouthwatering tacos al carbon awaiting us just around the corner…

But more to your point: I too am very much taken with the laissez-faire way that business seems to get done and space gets inhabited — colonized — around here.  I don’t understand the regulation or apparent lack thereof of business or food vendors here in Mexico, but it seems that with such a low general standard of living, it behooves the powers that be to allow people to do whatever they can to survive.  And they do.  Every opportunity and skill seems to be deployed to generate just that little extra bit of income that will make the difference between whether or not the family will get a little pollo with their beans and rice.  Indian women sitting on corners making little dolls out of woven palm fronds and a few scraps of colored yarn, selling a few handfuls of homemade sopes or gorditas, a small harvest of home grown vegetables or flowers laid out in neat little piles, a basket of strawberries or a few cords of firewood hauled from door to door on the backs of a couple burros…the whole world appears engaged in the equivalent for us of a lemonade stand.  Everyone has a basket or tray of something for sale.  But that’s about it: they sell that basket’s worth in order to afford another basketful, and have a little left over for tortillas, rice, beans, and a 3 peso bus ride home.  So much so that when you actually see somebody merely extending a hand for alms you know that they must be in pretty bad shape.  Even those higher up the food-chain who maintain a store or taqueria, puesto or tienda, do so in a very different way than we’re accustomed to. 

For us Norte Americanos, owning a business means building a business, growing it and using it to get ahead.  I imagine that owning a business here in Mexico is more a matter of treading water—still more along the lines of a kitchen garden that generates a little extra income than an agro-business one might acquire and grow and sell for some obscene profit, allowing them to eventually retire in, say… San Miguel de Allende, for instance.

What I hear you talking about is the generally more organic pace of life around here.  Nobody’s really in a hurry--things get made and bought and sold and swept and mopped and moved around with a pace that suggests that--unlike the same activities in the States—nobody’s trying breathlessly to get all this over and done with in order to move on to the implicitly bigger and better thing that we are eternally striving after and that presumably awaits us.  They see (everywhere) the thing that inevitably awaits them somewhere between the ubiquitous dancing skeletons and the benevolent the guise of the Blessed Virgin, and as wonderful as all that may be, no one appears particularly anxious to get there just yet.  Things happen much as they did yesterday and will tomorrow; nothing much really changing from day to day for a traditional people having lived and died in the same place for generations. 

This continuity, this groundedness, only heightens for me the vague sense of unease I feel at life in the US (really the “modern” western world in general), where more and more everything seems to be a simulation of something else, a series of transient, hastily assembled masks attempting to exploit our addiction to novelty (which, like any addiction, is itself a perversion and a parody of desire: in this case, the desire for an authentically new.)  Our rootless restlessness and impatience has generated this stage-set of abundance, this world of excess in which everything is merely a prop, in which we are merely actors trying to convince ourselves that we are real and that the canned laughter filling the silences isn’t all that remains of our discarded, inconvenient, authentic selves. There is a very real sense in which our wealth leaves us bereft, and the apparent poverty of those around us here is a treasure. 

Of course, this is not to say that I would blithely give up my “wealth,” nor that they aren’t working ceaselessly to escape from their poverty.  Simply that it would be foolish to think that our apparent gain has not also cost us something--something perhaps essential to our ability to fully enjoy our bounty, as though we had traded our eyes for something worth looking at.  I’ve believe I’ve understood this intellectually for a long time, but down here it’s less a thought than a feeling, a dull ache or the itch of a phantom limb.

So I am intrigued with this energy and activity and resourcefulness, and it speaks to me of some fundamental difference between how we live in the “modern western world” and how much of the rest of the world still lives, and how this difference is a not merely the easily understood conflict between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, haves and have-nots, but a more difficult and sublime tension between ways of being in the world.  Can we be modern, freethinking, liberated individuals without succumbing to the maelstrom of emptiness our culture represents?  Can we participate in the wisdom of traditional cultures without being bound on some level by the superstitions and belief systems that bind an individual to the collective?  Is our idealization of these traditional cultures one more self-indulgent western projection of our insatiable desire to be rescued from our condition of isolation?  Is there some possible hybrid of these ways of being in the world, or are we “doomed to freedom?”  Can somebody at least turn off the laugh track?  Please?

Elisa responds: Jesus…can you sum that up in 25 words or less?  I would have thought that climbing all these hills everyday at 6300 ft would have left you a bit more winded but you seem to have plenty of hot air left…

You raise some good points and it seems to me (is anyone still reading this or have you gone out to find the next “authentically new” thing?) that we are searching for a bit of that “groundedness” that you sense here, hoping that it will somehow inform our sensibility and even alter us in some profound way.  And I think we can’t help being changed by this place, but that these changes will be so gradual and organic that we won’t have a keen sense of them until after we arrive somewhere else.

When we first arrived, the differences between back home and here were so striking because the lens we looked through was constructed by completely different hegemonic machinery (see, I know some big words too).  Going out for a look around felt like we were wearing someone else’s glasses.  The colors, the language, the building materials, the air, the mountains, the food, the history, the culture…wasn’t “ours” and the clash of our expectations against what was all around was incredibly jarring.

But our (myopic, in my case) lens is being subtly altered.  Measured and ground differently by machinery built in a very different place and time.  As we learn more Spanish, get a better sense of the rhythm of life here, become accustomed to sounds and smells…we’re being changed at some molecular level, without our awareness, without words…

I’m not saying that the laugh track is going to disappear.  But soon, it will have a distinctly Mexican twang.

December 2002: Wildlife Update: Polyphorbus moths (I’m not sure how you spell this but they have amazing wingspans, they’re as big as bats), walking sticks and praying mantises.

I wrote this a month ago and because Michael’s been taking so damn long to write his tortured portion, I’ve had the opportunity to revise it (in tiny ways) as things have subtly changed in the last few weeks.  First of all, I can barely believe that we’ve been here for ten months and that we have only another six to go before we return to Minnesota.  I feel like we’ve arrived at a particularly lovely balancing point.  It truly feels like we’re living here now.  We’re not not living in Minnesota and we’re not marking time until we go back to Minnesota, which we may start to feel a few months before we return.  It ultimately (thankfully) feels like the perfect amount of time for our sabbatical.  Any shorter and it would feel like it was ending just as it was finally starting.  Any longer, and our kids would mutiny  ..It’s really only been in the past few months that we’ve found a balance between the novelty of arriving in this new spot on the globe and finding a way to really work here.  Partially, it’s that our writing has picked up steam.  Partially it’s moving to a new house, outside of the busy center and away from the tourists and distractions.  And it’s also that we’ve become more comfortable with the city and culture.  Things that initially astonished us have now become familiar and while on some level this means the wow factor has receded, it also means we’re freed up in significant ways to concentrate more deeply on our creative pursuits.

Our original vision of stepping off our path for a time to discover ourselves in a new place involved a more dramatic sense of epiphany, I think, than what is actually occurring.   The “epiphanies” such as they are, are minor, and involve realizations like “I really like being able to write every day.  Let’s engineer our lives so we can do that back home” and “No matter where you live or what you’re doing, life with young kids involves the same challenges (and boring domesticity) that really wears down the soul.”  The more dramatic life-changing events we encountered while traveling in our teens and twenties seem rather unlikely given our sense of comfort with ourselves and a relatively clear sense of our desires and objectives.  This is on some level reassuring and on another, horribly dull and disappointing.

Perhaps it’s more that things are being confirmed rather than discovered.  The effects of this experience are subtle and hard to identify.  The processes (transformations?) we’re undergoing as a family and as individuals are largely invisible and will remain so, perhaps, forever.  How can we possibly know or even anticipate the long-term impact of Michael being such a significant force in Cleome and Asher’s lives this consistently and in such a domestic fashion?  He remarked the other day how cool it was to be putting together a puzzle with Asher at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday.  Back home he was lucky to spend a few hours a day with them.  Here, he’s lucky to escape them at all.  I suspect this will ultimately strengthen their bond but who knows, it may contribute to some kind of family murder/suicide thing when Asher turns sixteen.  In the same fashion, it’s hard to judge the effects on the kids of this type of exposure to another culture and language.  They may have an affinity for learning Spanish or another language as they grow older or not.  This may enhance their sense of how wide and interesting the world is…or not.  It’s impossible to know what seeds are being planted and how they will come to fruition.

Interestingly, I can’t say that Mexico itself is doing much to inform my sensibilities or writing.  In a recent New York Times interview, Sam Shepard discussed the fact that he never writes about the place where he is.  He finds it necessary to remove himself from a location to write about it and I think there’s definitely something to that.  More than living in Mexico, I think rather it’s our lifestyle, this paring down of our activities and this concentration of our energies on the creative rather than the mundane that continues to inform much of what we do.  Although it’s been a surprisingly difficult and gradual process (like everything else), I do think we’ve slowed down our lives in some basic ways.

Back home, time moves in snippets.  Daily life is like a poor man’s version of Oprah magazine: a befuddled search for peace while at the same time picking out new drapes, driving the kids to soccer practice and worrying about the morning’s alarmist headlines.  Here, we have so few distractions that we’ve finally stopped feeling like one activity is just a prelude to the next.  Time moves in chunks rather than snippets and frankly, this slower pace made us really nervous at first.  We’d wring our hands and feel an uncomfortable mix of boredom and panic.  What’s next?  What now?  Shouldn’t we be doing something?  But…we’ve relaxed into it now. 

Being without a car has helped enormously (as has, obviously, being without jobs).  We walk everywhere and hurry nowhere.  The daily 45-minute walk from Asher’s school is spent doing nothing more than moving our feet homeward and pondering the writing waiting upstairs.  We read books for hours instead of minutes.  We shop for food (and liquor) and other supplies once a week.  We make an occasional run to the Papelaria for school supplies and even more occasionally, we head to the Indian market to replace a worn out shirt or engage in another fruitless search for cotton socks (which they simply do not have here!). We are wearing the same few clothes we arrived with and, as you can imagine, we’re an amazingly threadbare, ragtag bunch at the moment.  We hit the hot springs outside of town every now and again and roam the ancient hills for ice cream or a roasted chicken but we’re doing progressively less of everything.  We study.  We read. We write and talk about writing and the endless process of sifting through the debris of our minds to somehow find the nuggets hidden therein.  (Please tell me they’re hidden somewhere and it’s only a matter of time before I discover them!)  We sip wine and watch the sunset from our oh so amazing rooftop deck.  And we watch our little pot of savings dwindle each month. 

We do, at times, wish we had more money so we could travel and take advantage of the concerts and restaurants this city offers in abundance.  But even more often I think about how lovely it is to boil life down to this tiny box of money, thoughts, activities and belongings.  I suppose that’s actually the most Mexican of anything we’re doing.  I feel like we’re slowly reducing our sense of entitlement and acquisition; those American habits of assessing each situation based on what there is to take, buy or own.  We spend money and expend energy on “getting stuff” only when we must and it’s quite a freeing sensation.

The kids, at times, feel deprived of specific things but they also seem to have a greater overall sense of contentment with what they have.  We brought along very little and what they have accumulated is barely more than that.  Grandparents, aunts and uncles (bless them!) have recently contributed a few more books, toys and videos but by and large, living away and living lean has cut the extras to almost nothing except the very experience of our daily comings and goings.  Cleome talks a lot about missing her beanie babies and in retrospect, we should have pressured her to bring along a few more toys to populate her room and imaginary worlds.  We’ve tried out some dance classes and treated her to a horseback riding lesson a couple months ago but we don't have the money or interest in lugging either of them around town to extracurricular (“enrichment”) activities other than Spanish tutoring.  Cleome contents herself reading or playing Zoo Tycoon on the computer, they watch an occasional video (we dumped cable after trying it out for a month), and Asher fashions his necessary guns, swords and arrows ("pins and fire") from found objects including sticks, tools and even pieces of toast on occasion.  I suspect that once we return, in the short term at least, unpacking those boxes of toys in the basement will truly feel like discovering buried treasure.

Deprivation aside (Oh, the poor babies.  Having to rely on their imaginations for fun), the kids have settled in well to their new schools and Cleome, in particular, has turned out to be nothing less than amazing in her adaptive abilities.  Her best friend now is a girl from her class (Mexicana) and it’s thrilling to hear them whisper secrets in Spanish all night long during sleepovers.  The results from Cleome’s recent batch of tests came home yesterday (get ready for some parental bragging) and she scored such high marks that her picture was posted in the “Quadra de Honor” the “Square of Honor” on the school courtyard wall.  Remember, everything (even English) is in Spanish.  We were astounded and she was pretty proud of herself as well.

Asher, cute and spunky as ever, is potty-trained (ecstatic cheers) and is thriving in his Montessori school.  He’s got a wild imagination filled with “mad guys” and monsters, who leap out of seemingly innocent corners (from under tablecloths and inside pajama tops) to grab him by the throat and fling him to the floor where he spends a lot of time thrashing around and wrestling them into submission.  He also continues to be our little Minnesota memory jar.  We’ll be riding the bus to school, bouncing along the cobbled streets while he stares out the window at passing burros, 500-year-old churches, and busy tamale stands when he’ll suddenly turn and say thoughtfully, “I love the JCC, mama.  Remember the JCC in Minnesota?”  It’s not that he doesn’t greet each day here with a huge smile or even that he asks to go back home (he doesn’t).  I think it’s more that he’s just making sure we don’t lose track of where home really is.  Trust me.  We haven’t.

We remain inspired by the weather (we’ve heard the Twin Cities is suffering through a dismal fall), by our Mexican and gringo friends with whom we Margarita ourselves into oblivion weekend nights up on the roof deck while the kids duke it out downstairs, and also by continuing to learn a new language.  Michael, in particular, studies Spanish daily and converses at a relatively advanced level.  For myself, I study intermittently and continue to plow through daily conversations sprinkling infinitives here and there when a conjugation or verb tense fails to surface.  On any given day the phrase, “I have to run and pick up my daughter at school” might actually emerge as, “I must to run and collect the daughter at the school.”  David Sedaris eat your heart out.

As you all may have noticed, this web posting has taken a bit longer to put together than we’d hoped, and it’s entirely my fault.  Elisa came through quickly and efficiently with her mid-point assessment of how things are going for us down here.  That’s her style.  Mine is unfortunately too often to try and reinvent the wheel—which I’ve attempted repeatedly over the last 6 weeks, with some very bumpy results.  The fact that the mid-point of this sabbatical pretty much coincides with what is ostensibly the mid-point of my -- perhaps naively -- presumed ideal life span, which places the entire enterprise precisely at the fulcrum of all that has come before and that is yet to come—that is, at the crease line of the switch-back fire stair of eternity—has burdened the exercise for me beyond all hope of completion.  If anything could provoke a crisis, this should’ve been it: the mother of all mid-life crises. 

And this realization did provoke a frantic search for the life-altering revelations and epiphanies that were supposed to have accompanied our daring escape from the spiritually obfuscating noise and blur of our lives back in civilization as we’d come to know it.  I thought and thought; I thought some more; I tried not thinking; I tried not not thinking; I walked and talked to myself, and occasionally talked back; I wrote in feverish bursts in between long bouts of gazing soulfully out over my computer screen into the misty recesses of the foothills cradling the ancient tumbledown village we currently call home; I sipped cold coffee and almost made myself believe that I might find an answer in the grounds that had escaped the high-tech osmotic filter of our coffee maker and come to settle in a suggestive pattern at the base of my mug: but I found nothing.  Nothing.  It was as though I’d developed macular degeneration of the third eye.  Where ever I looked for insight, the center of my field of vision was blank, and it occurred to me -- now that I’m writing regularly, exploring fiction as a way of getting at something true, daily bumping up against the primal rift at the base of language that requires us to call different things the same -- that a meaningful truth is necessarily a peripheral vision: looked at too directly, the world dries up, dies and turns to stone. 

That realization conflicts with the part of me clinging to a naïve hope that underlying all the distractions of the world is another world that is complete and sufficient unto itself, as obvious as it is mysterious; that if and when this infernal carnival ever pulls up stakes and rolls out of town, the wholeness of the world would invariably reassert itself.  It is a hope that I actively deny in my intellectual life—this metaphysical urge for the one true truth that tends to lead people to all sorts of silly conclusions, appearing little more than a vain, last-ditch effort to find something—anything!—that might escape the bewildering just-thereness of time and chance—but which nevertheless follows me around like an importunate, doe-eyed stray dog I just cannot shake: for I can’t seem to help but hope I’ll eventually find that thing that I don’t really believe exists, win some spiritual lottery, stumble upon the fabled Unified Theory of Everything that might finally relate a persistent 60 cycle hum with truly mysterious things like boredom and a perfect créme brulee. 

But looked at directly, instead of revelation, insight—truth—I invariably find that in the calm that remains there is simply…calm; instead of reality, beyond the splintering reflections of ripples in a disturbed pond there is only…more water, and perhaps the fleeting glimpse of a pebble sinking.  If anything is happening to me here, it is probably more akin to the infinitesimal but incessant wearing smooth of a stone in a flowing river.  The jagged edges of the peaks and valleys of youth are slowly abrading; perhaps revelation is a young man’s game; perhaps an older man’s game is coming gradually to a re-collection of the myriad revelations of youth one has squandered or forgotten or simply misplaced. 

Truly, when I consider it, the core of my conscious belief system, or—not wishing to burden such a ragtag collection of hunches and inclinations with anything so lofty or keenly mistaken as the notion of a system—let me just say, the way I think about stuff, was complete in all its essentials from the time I was 12 or 13.  If the last couple thousand years of philosophy has essentially been just a footnote to Plato, then similarly all my personal philosophy is pretty much just a footnote to the revelations of Puberty.  These revelations, when we have them at that most sensitized moment in our lives, the awakening of the sense of grandeur and complexity and stupefying simplicity—of the heartrendingly unique opportunity of a world that you see most adults have just gone on to genericize and fuck up—are worth more than, and give the ultimate lie to, any subsequent systems of belief we go on to devise and discover and distort our inmost natures to attempt to abide by. 

So by this point in the game, were I to have anything resembling a revelation, it would have to take the form of a remembering: remembering that I already know everything I need to know—and that the trick now is much harder: acting upon what I already know.  I don't need to know more: in fact, I may need to know less.  All this knowing can just get in the way.  As Henry Miller never tired of pointing out, literally or otherwise, it’s not merely a question of remembering—it’s remembering to remember—that becomes the more difficult and subtler of spiritual exercises as one’s time wears on. While one way to end a search is to find something, another is to cease looking; for some quests these ways of concluding may not be so very different.  And if I’m not quite prepared to stop searching yet, I am spending less time squinting off into the distance and more paying attention to things closer at hand.

Now where did I put those sunglasses?  Some things never change...

In the past few months we’ve had great visits from Elisa’s brother, Dan and his family, Michael’s friend Sean and his daughter, Elisa’s dad who visited at the end of October and Michael’s dad and stepmom, who left earlier this week.  We’ve got some travel plans of our own this winter as well.  In early December, we’ll be heading to San Antonio on a 16-hour overnight bus ride in order to cross the border and re-enter Mexico to renew our visas for another six months.  After a couple days and nights spent exploring San Antonio (which sounds like a pretty interesting place), we’ll head back down on the bus for the 16-hour return trip.  Sounds like a gran dolor de cabeza but after doing some preliminary research, we’ve come to the conclusion that the whole ordeal will ultimately be less of a headache than dealing with the Mexican and American authorities down here trying to renew our existing FM3 visas.

More exciting and less grueling will be our two-week stay at the beach from Dec. 20-Jan. 4 (yes, we’re taking a vacation from our vacation).  We’ll be staying at our landlord’s beach house in a tiny village on the Pacific Coast called La Manzanilla.  We understand that it’s located at the foot of some dramatic cliffs and that it has one road, a gaggle of roosters, a single restaurant that serves amazing seafood, a lagoon on the outskirts filled with alligators and a marvelous expanse of beach and sea.  What’s not to like?  It’s about three hours south of Puerta Vallarta and not far from Barra de Navidad.  It means another long bus ride but at least the beach will be waiting at the other end.  Turns out (yes, it is a small world) that some friends from Minnesota will be spending a week at a beach not far from ours during that same time period, so we hope to cross paths with them before we return.

Hey…if anyone wants to come visit San Miguel over Christmas (when the city will be in gran fiesta mode), our house is available.  We, of course, will be gone.  But even without us (perhaps even because of that), San Miguel is an undeniably wonderful place to hang.

After that, it’s the downhill slide home and yes, despite some major regrets on my part, we’ll be heading back to St. Paul.   This may come as a surprise to some of you who’ve heard my moaning and groaning about MN winters.  Since moving here, I’ve been lobbying to rent or sell our house in St. Paul and move somewhere warmer; perhaps a little beach community on the central California coast we’ve been inquiring about........... (continued) .Living in San Miguel has truly brought home the full corrosive effects of MN winters on my creative energies; as has the marked change in tone of recent emails from those of you already moving into cocoon/larval stage.  All your buoyant, optimistic and energetic emails tapered off to a trickle by about mid-October.  Since then, the emails we receive sort of drag their feet across the screen, lay down and sigh heavily.  It’s not only the catastrophic political events that have wreaked havoc upon the state this fall, it’s the weather!  What a difference living in a consistently lovely climate (and eliminating a constant media bombardment) can make to one’s sense of well-being.  Last winter here in San Miguel I wasn’t plunged into the usual five months of sensory deprivation (absence of smells, light, sound etc.) that I’m accustomed to in MN.  And, amazingly enough, instead of gaining three pounds and trudging through the world with a deadly pallor (as our visa photos taken last December attest to), and spending long depressed hours staring out the window at my frozen garden or at my computer with thick wads of gray cotton in my head…basically, instead of feeling like shit for several months in a row…I thrived.  I walked everyday, toned my body, lost my pallor and started writing a novel.  Hallelujah!  The weather is not a minor consideration for me.

Michael, however, has been very resistant to the idea of moving away from the Twin Cities.  This has to do mostly with potential career opportunities that would be impossible to duplicate elsewhere in the short term.  He wants time to explore these opportunities in Minnesota and I certainly respect that.  Also, and very significantly, he’s designed a kickass plan for a new house addition to our current tiny St. Paul bungalow (check out Michael’s design plans elsewhere in this posting) and he wants a chance to execute it.  I can’t blame him for that and frankly, it’s exciting to think we could actually build and live in a house with enough light and space to preserve, in the short term anyway, a bit more of my creative sanity during the winter.  It would also allow us to stay near friends, family and the kid-friendly amenities we’ve developed a brand new appreciation for (after living in a place where we know almost no one and where grass, playgrounds, quality public education and libraries are almost unheard of).  Michael’s house design attempts to achieve these goals at the lowest possible cost and would also give him the opportunity to design and build a signature project to promote his architectural vision (read: to attract clients).

There is also the minor matter of arriving home broke.  The reality is that we couldn’t just pick up and leave without a serious influx of funds, dealing with house matters etc.  It would take us a year or two to get out of MN no matter what.  Entonces, our plan is to move back home and try to continue something akin to the lifestyle we’ve carved out here: more emphasis on creative work and maintaining a distinctly slower pace. This sounds deceptively simple (simpleminded?) but it’s going to be extremely challenging.  After not having worked for a year and a half and arriving home profoundly broke (and armed with plans for a groovy, new addition), the temptation will be to jump right back into the fray, start making money a priority, and ultimately end up with a couple of nice rugs, a tortilla press and a bunch of unfinished songs and manuscripts to show for our time in Mexico.  And unfortunately, most of the families we’ve met here doing similar “sabbaticals” leave Mexico and do just that.  Within six weeks they email us these frantic, despairing messages with the subject lines “It’s like we never left” and “We’ve been sucked back in by the money monster” etc.  They detail their harried work schedules and the various soccer games, art classes, dance lessons and scout meetings they spend their lives ferrying their children to and from and then discuss the one or two aspects of their Mexican sojourn they’ve been able to duplicate back home: such as walking more and searching out fresh tortillas.  Obviously it’s not going to be easy to continue to live the lessons we’ve learned here or to resist the pervasive messages at the root of American culture.  Consume. Compete.  Hurry.  Achieve.  Want.  Get.  More.

But we’re going to try.  We intend to arrive home without any firm work plans and relax into whatever money-making opportunities present themselves and continue to work as hard as possible on our books and other creative pursuits.  Then, after a year or two, we hope to add a significant addition to our house.

Now how, might you inquire, will we continue to write/make art, and make enough money to live on and build a new totally cool addition?  Good question. We’re not sure.  Let us know what you come up with.  Actually, our plan takes into account our blessedly low monthly house payment and the fact that we paid off all our outstanding debts before we left.  Any money we earn, after our minimal expenses, will go into the house pot and we hope that within two years, we’ll be building the addition.  The major difference between before Mexico and after is putting our creative activities at the center of our lives, instead of trying to fit them in and around work and our kids’ endless demands for distractions.

So, the upshot is, Michael’s talked me into staying in MN for who-knows-how-long with the promise that we’ll move forward emphasizing creativity in our lives.  Not that I’m abandoning my plans to leave Minnesota winters.  I plan to get the hell out of MN during the winter for as long as possible each year.  I’m just not sure how to swing it yet.  I will also continue to research job possibilities in warmer climes and income opportunities to further my cause.  Everyone we’ve met who manages to live out of the states for extended periods does so by some kind of real estate investment and we’ll probably look into doing the same. If the house addition pans out and I find ways to escape at least part of the winter, I think I can remain somewhat content (if not exactly sane) for five or seven years until it’s time for our next sabbatical, or until we move permanently to someplace warm.  Whichever comes first.

Walking In Mexico With My Son
Every morning we walk
My platinum blonde gringito and I
To his Mexican preschool.
We take the shortcut down Callejon Suspiros
“Alley of Sighs” renamed “Poop Alley”
For the donkey and horse shit lying among the ubiquitous dog turds.
Stepping carefully
Past a tumbledown shack
We count the cats asleep on the roof.
Uno, dos, tres, quatro…
Cinqo mama!  Cinqo gatos!
Then we sing Don Gato.
Senor Don Gato Was a Cat
On a high red roof, Don Gato sat.
He was very, very merry, meow, meow, meow
Going to the cemetery, meow, meow, meow
It was the end of poor Don Gato.
Those aren’t really the words.  But that’s what we sing.

One morning as we sing
Asher in my arms
A bicycle wheels up behind us.
I step nearer to the wall
But the rider swerves closer
Grabs a painful chunk of my ass
As he rides past.
What do I yell after him?
What Spanish words can I use?
(With Asher in my arms
Ready to report everything
To cheerful Miss Gabby only five minutes away).

Asshole!  Shithead!
I scream inside my head.
Jerk!  Idiot!
I scream out loud.  No esta bien!
Asher dutifully yells
Jerk!  Idiot!  No esta bien!
Long after the rider is out of earshot.
We walk to the end of poop alley
My ass still hurting
Nasty words raging in my head.
At the tiny plant nursery
Where we name the colors in Spanish
Asher presses my cheeks between his pudgy hands.
Look at the flowers mama
You’ll feel better.
I do.  And I do.

But at home
I look up “asshole” and “shithead”
in my Spanish/English dictionary.
Miss Gabby be damned
I’m ready for that pendejo manana.

We’re in our last month.  I knew we’d eventually arrive here and I feel we’ve arrived right on time.  May is gorgeous here.  Hot and dry.  Like a late August summer day with no humidity.  Around every corner there’s a multitude of shockingly bright Mexican flowers that hang onto your eyes and change your thoughts completely. 

This city is lovely and I’d like to come back.  It would make a fantastic February escape except…a beach would be even better.  So, we’re still on the hunt for a warm place to aim ourselves sometime in the future.

Right now, we’re aimed home.  And that feels fine.