Nostalgia lives on a cul-de-sac. And it is easy to get stuck there.
I felt a bit like that after wandering down my Oxford memory lane yesterday. Because there is the danger of thinking of Melaque as a cultural sinkhole -- to Osterize my metaphors.
Well, it can be. But that does not mean I cannot get in my car and motor down the road to Manzanillo -- where there is a multi-screen movie house.
When I was in Manzanillo last week, I almost decided to stay for the new Star Trek movie. But it did not start until after 4 -- a three hour wait. I passed.
Monday afternoon, I decided to return. And I am glad I did.
It s a rather good movie. At least for character development. And that is usually the weak point of this genre. The last three Star Wars movies are great examples. They gave cardboard a bad name.
Of course, these prequel movies always seem to be far more prescient than they truly are. After all, they get to create a back story -- while we rubes sit there with jaws slack and mutter: "Gee. I always wondered were she came from." And now we know.
Actually,we get a lot of those threads here. Tantalizing canapes that have developed into full stories on the television series or in earlier movies. It lets the viewer indulge in the hubris of the rare success in psychotherapy.
I, for one, simply enjoy seeing the younger version of characters I have grown up with. It is a fun film.
What is not so much fun are the special effects. They manage to be both flat and tired. The flatness must come from the 3-D process. If so, it is ironic that new technology makes film look more primitive.
And tired? This movie does nothing original with special effects. Instead, it indulges in grave robbery. Having fighting adversaries jump from moving machinery is about as old hat as a movie can get. I almost expected Tom Mix to show up.
While I was laving, I ran into another geezer in the lobby. I suspect he started talking with me because we look as if we could belong to the same VFW post.
He was upset that all of the non-dubbed movies start after the matinee prices expire. He was convinced that it was discrimination against white people. After all, they are the only people who attend non-dubbed films.
I thought he was joking. I told him I was just in a subtitled movie and everyone other than me was Mexican.
He was not interested. He was convinced that he had been discriminated against solely because of his skin color. And the great discrimination? He would be charged $57 (Mx) rather than $44 (Mx). $4.60 (US) rather than $3.60 (US). And, for all I know, there may (and probably is) a very good reason for the difference.
The conversation reminded me of one I had recently in Melaque. An acquaintance told me she would not return to a local restaurant known for its great food because she went in twice alone and other parties were served before her. Her conclusion? The restaurant discriminates against single women.
One of the things I do not miss from The States is the rampant victimhood worn proudly by citizens. I am sorry to see it here. But our neuroses travel as easily as do we.
The drive home made me quickly forget about the Two Grouseketeers. And of plays in Oxford. I rolled down my window to enjoy an evening and setting I could never find in Oregon or England.
And that was culture enough for me.
I have been a bit slow lately.
A persistent cough. A slight fever. One day of swollen lymph glands under my right arm. And fatigue. A draining fatigue.
Fatigued enough that I put myself on the couch and decided to watch something mindless. Downton Abbey seemed to fit the bill.
I have never understood the allure of these PBS costume dramas. If you are one of the few people in the Western world unaware of the series, it is another upstairs-downstairs English Edwardian tale of manners and manors. What Barbara Cartland might write. Soap opera in period dress.
One thing I have found fascinating among my friends is that there seems to be an odd correlation. The further left one travels on the political scale seems to increase a love for British aristocratic life. Perhaps harboring some sort of hope that an earldom is just waiting out there to be inherited.
Even the presence of my beloved Maggie Smith could not keep me interested. So out came my only Gilbert and Sullivan CD -- a rather good performance of Ruddigore. My full vinyl collection went into exile at Goodwill when I sold the Salem house.
The tale -- like most of Gilbert's work -- is a bit of whimsy rapped around a serious core. In this case, that core is the corrosive power of evil. It is not quite Faust, but there are obvious musical joking references to Don Giovanni.
The last time I saw a production of Ruddigore was when the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company came to Oxford in the mid-70s. I had joined a group of fellow students at their dining club.
They suggested we head off to the playhouse for the night's performance in our white tie getup. And so we did. (Quite a bit different than my far more casual music-listening underwear on Sunday evening.)
At the interval, I was standing off to the side in the lobby when a matronly woman approached me, and asked, in that polite inquiring voice of the English: "Could you tell me where I could buy some chocolates" -- obviously confusing me with the ushers. I, just as politely, responded: "You might try a sweet shop."
The worst fear of the English -- at least, the English I knew in the 70s -- was to commit a social faux pas. Even though I did not intend to embarrass her, the woman was literally chagrined. I could tell by the look on her face that she wished the ground would open up and relieve her of her shame. Because she was positive her "I am so dreadfully sorry" was not going to repair the mistake she just made.
And, so there you go. I start by complaining about the leftist lust for costumed social drama, and I take pleasure in telling you a dress up tale of social manners.
Telling this tale makes me realize how much I thoroughly enjoyed those days of being an American at Oxford -- where my nationality gave me a passport to break through the barriers of what were then very clear class lines.
We didn't have Downton Abbey. However, we did have an amazing ride.
And I did get a title out of it.
But that certainly is a story for another time and place.
If you read the comments from this morning's post, you have probably figured out that the photograph above is not of my dog.
It is Raji -- the love of my friends Ken and Patti. And their daughter, Kimmy.
Kimmy gave me the photograph on one of my visits to Olympia this year. I found the perspective interesting.
The moment I saw it, I mistook poor Raji for a wall-mounted trophy. But that is not his style. He is a bundle of energy. The antithesis of poor old Gomez.
Thank you for playing alng with this little game. We will be back to our regular programming tomorrow.
OK, class. Here is your assignment.
If you are so inclined, how about a comment on this photograph? A caption? A short story? It is all up to you.
Have a great Sunday.
Recycling has come to Mexico.
Can you think of any sentence steeped more in gringo hubris than that one?
Mexico, like most other places in the world, has long been a land of recycling. If something breaks in an American suburb, it gets thrown out as trash. If the same item breaks in Mexico -- or on a family farm in eastern Washington -- it will find new life somewhere else.
I am not certain who came up with the idea originally around these parts, but there has been a big drive to recycle plastic bottles. From an aesthetic vantage, it is a great idea. Beach towns are magnets for people who see nothing wrong with tossing bottles and wrappers whenever and wherever they are empty.
To counter that trend, someone has installed large collection areas for plastic bottles. And people actually use them.
But, some of us also collect our plastics in smaller containers. In my case, I save plastic bottles and aluminum cans for the maid. She takes them away when the bag is full.
And this is eventually where all ofthe plastic ends up.
I have been told that most of these bottles are shipped to China where the plastic is remolded into various products -- and then sold around the world. I do not know if that is true, but it makes sense.
During the recession, when China's exports slowed down due to lack of demand, you could see a very physical example of the economic slowdown. The plastic bottles started forming Himalayas of waste. It was Lucy in the chocolate factory all over again.
Now that the world's economy is back on track, the mountains are mere hills.
The reason we recycle in Mexico? There is money in it. Without the Chinese market, I suspect our beaches would be forming plastic bottle islands before long. And then we could float them to China.
Just like latter-day Thor Heyerdahls.
Summer is here.
Now, I know the pedantic will point to the calendar. Proudly counting that I am five weeks too early.
But we all have our own ways of declaring the start of summer here in Melaque. For some it is the arrival of the land crab migration. For others, the start of the rainy season.
For me, summer has begun when the heat and humidity combine to make it too uncomfortable to sit on the patio without a floor fan. Thursday afternoon was summer for me.
I have no idea what the temperature was nor how high the humidity climbed, but I could not read about one more Plantagenet tragedy without schlepping the fan outside. Even Gomez the Foster Dog abandoned his shady corner to join me in the electronic breeze.
The start of summer means it is time for another tradition in my little casa. The water in my shower is gravity-fed from a storage tank on the roof. That water is pumped from a cistern on the property. The cistern water comes from the pipes in the street. Before that, I have no idea where it comes from.
But whatever the source, by the time it gets to my shower head, it starts gumming up the works. Once a year, I take the screen off of the shower head and clean it out. I will spare you the description of the large hunks of debris I find. What interests me most is the calcification.
In just one year, the holes in the screen are almost completely closed by mineral deposits. Almost as if I were showering in Carlsbad Caverns. It takes me about 15 minutes with a brush and solvents to strip the crust and clear the holes. I suspect the screen looked a good deal like my teeth as the dentist cleaned them earlier this week.
But that task is done. The cleaning does not increase the water pressure, but, at least, the water does not spray everywhere other than where it should.
And I can now get ready for the land crabs and the rain. They cannot be too far behind.
After all, it's summer.
Mexico is getting a new 50 peso note in June.
The note is a bit more colorful than the current version. And it has several new security measures to foil counterfeiters. It is a credit to the Mexican economy that counterfeiter's find it worth their effort to print up money worth about $4 (US).
What has not changed is the portrait of the Mexican War of Independence hero, José María Morelos y Pavón. Morelos remains ageless.
That is the hallmark of a republic. The portraits on the currency are as unchanging as the principles on which the republic is founded. At least, in theory.
The portraits of Juárez, Morelos, and Hidalgo act as the reverse of Dorian Gray's portrait -- just as constant as the portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and Jackson -- with each updated series of bank notes.
That, of course, is not true for nations ruled by monarchs. British pound notes and coins have followed the queen's aging process. Even if there is a little time lapse between the ravages of real time and the representations of the engraver's knife.
I recently ran across a file that contained my expired passports. I have no idea why I retained them. But it was amusing to see how passports have changed over time. And how I have changed along with them.
The year was 1974. I had been living in Greece for almost a full year. And because I were there on NATO orders, I did not need a passport.
My cousin, Dennis, and several friends were on their way to Greece to visit me -- and to take what would be my first cruise. A passport was in order.
As was an unfolding war between Turkey (two of our ports) and Greece. The passport arrived. The war didn't.
That 24-year old guy looking back at me seems a bit too serious. At least, for how I remember those days of pure freedom of driving around Greece as if my tail feathers were on fire.
But the passport itself speaks of another era. A clerk in the Athens Embassy has typed in all of the information. And the photograph is merely pasted on the page. I am warned to avoid Cuba, North Korea, and North Viet-Nam.
That passport expired just about the time I graduated from law school. And there was little need to renew it until 1984 when I started traveling on behalf of the Department of Defense.
I look like a junior bank executive. But I was playing the role of a youngish lawyer. A role that did not assuage the difficulties I had with British Immigration during the 1980s.
For reasons that are the elements of another story,I had ended up on an IRA watch list (the Irish terrorist group, not the retirement investment instrument). I quickly learned patience in my hours of standing in front of Her Majesty's warders of the border.
In a mere decade, the Charlie Brown-Ziggie face you now know had started forming.
But, in my mid-40s, I was starting to slip into the best days of my professional life. I had narrowed down my practice to one specialty (workers' compensation) and had been hired by a company that allowed me to do a variety of work.
When this photograph was taken, I had moved on from trial work to appellate work. My second favorite legal position of my career. Life was good.
And it got even better. The photograph is from 1999. I had just retired from the Air Force Reserve and my work style had changed from coat and tie to shirt and sweater.
Of course, times do change. And the passport format reflects a different world. No more paste-on photograph.
The new photograph is so filled with holograms that scanning it is next to impossible. Of course, that was the government's goal. To find a way to get around the new tools of counterfeiters -- scanners and computers.
For much the same reason that the 50 peso note is getting a facelift. And this was before the nation (and much of the world) fell into paranoia after September 2001.
And what do I look like now? Well, you all know the answer to that question. Even though the photograph is a couple of years old, that is me -- up there in the right hand corner.
Chuckling that Oscar Wilde never discovered a way to capture my aging spirit on canvas.
