dial c for chuckles

I was well into one of my hammock dreams -- wooing some beauty with crocodile shoes -- when the telephone rang.


I almost didn't answer it -- because I knew what would happen.


I had to swing out of the hammock, run across the patio and into the house, only to experience what happens with at least 90% of my telephone calls -- silence or a quick click.


In my wilder fantasies, the prior owner of the telephone number was a Mexican superhero who was repeatedly called upon to save the Republic from the forces of corruption.  Murciélago-man.  If so, my callers are obviously disappointed in their ersatz hero with his chirpy: "Steve Cotton. Good day."


I had lunch last week with an older woman from Ontario.  Let's call her Marge -- because it is not her name.  But she will immediately recognize herself in any event.


She has been coming to Melaque for over ten years -- staying between three to six months each visit.  In that time, she has learned very little Spanish.  Her reason is the same as most self-satisfied tourists: "I can get by without it."


I laughingly told her about the ten or so quick-hangup telephone calls I receive each day.  Just as a matter of conversation.  But she took it as a complaint.


"I know what you mean.  I get them, too.  What is wrong with them?"


I was a bit confused by her response.  And offered: "Maybe they don't speak English."


Without missing a beat, she raised her voice in that I'm-British-and-I-am-morally-offended tone: "If they can't speak English, why are they calling me?"


I could hear Noel Coward giggling in the middle distance.  One of his better lines was "If I have the wrong number, why did you answer the telephone?"  A line I always imagined being delivered by Gracie Allen.


But I doubt Gracie could have delivered it with any better timing than Marge -- who was offended that I could not continue eating because I was laughing so hard.


Most of the tourists are leaving Melaque for their trek north.  And it is too bad because some of them are a wealth of material for this blog.


I wish them a happy journey.  But I want them to hurry back.  There is writing to be done.

another shaggy dog story

"Are you sick?"


"Are you in love?"


It says a lot about humans that those two emotions can be confused so easily.


Several of you were concerned about my recent introspective posts over the past week.  Concerned enough to send me email or to call.


I am fine.


And, since this is confession time, I can tell you.  Yes.  I was a bit in love. 


With a dog.

 

Here she is.  Sadie is her name.


A loving dog.  Big dog. Of unknown parentage.  But golden blood obviously runs in her family tree -- just as certainly as mixed metaphors populate my posts.


I would like to say she is mine.  But she isn't.


She belongs to the people upstairs.  Canadians who have been traveling through Latin America with her for the past several months.  With a stop in Melaque for a week.


When they go out, they leave Sadie in the garden.  That means Sadie stays in the garden -- if I am out there.  But the moment I go inside, Sadie follows.  We are pals.


I must admit having her around has been very nice.  Even for the odd hour here and there.


When I first met Sadie, the first thing I noticed about her was her trim.  Her owners had given her a haircut well-suited for the tropics.


And she looked good in it.  She certainly had a better haircut than Steve Cotton.  I was starting to look as if I was auditioning for the part of Wilby Daniels in The Shaggy Dog.


So, off to the the barber I went.  Not to the fellow who gave me the unrequested Kojak cut last December.  A cut so thorough it lasted me three months.


Instead, I dropped in on the woman who has cut my hair twice before -- with rather good results.  After all, we are talking about something that does not matter much to me at all.  My hair.


When I sat down, I made it clear.  Medio.


And  medio it was.  She carefully hedged with the scissors and razors.  Cutting off just enough.


Because everything was going so well, my attention wandered to my Kindle.  I was reading about some additional horror in Japan, when I felt something I never want to feel on my head.  Warm goo.  Styling gel.


I glanced up.  She already had me looking like a well-greased axle.


There was nothing to say at that point.  But that is why I have shampoo at home.

 

But, until I could get there, all I needed was a pencil mustache and a cigarette holder to play either a gigolo or Xavier Cugat.


When I came through the gate, Sadie was there to greet me. 


And I swear she smirked.  I could almost hear her say: ten cents a dance?

crocs and clocks

Someone once told me -- most likely one of those English literature types -- that Robert Frost was the great rural poet.


Frost did go on and on about roads not taken, mending fallen walls, swinging birches.  You know the stuff.


I suspect we all know this bit of bucolic reverie.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

Well, I live in the country.  We have horses.  But very few woods.  And certainly no frozen lake.


We do have a laguna -- that was starting to look more like a pasture than a lake until the town fathers breached the dunes and swept all of the surface-clinging vegetation out into the ocean.


I have written about our Sisyphean battle with the water hyacinth and water cabbage in flowers in the mud.  Last year, we cleared out a large portion of the inlet in front of my garden.


It looked nice.  New birds came to hunt.  Fish started showing up.  And our little crocodile, Alfonso, could get up on the bank to sun himself.

But times change.  We knew that battling the hyacinth and cabbage would be an ongoing fight -- and the fighting is in rounds.  During the winter, they both made a good comeback, as you can see.  Mainly the cabbage.

 

Mexico is not a place to wait for someone else to do something for you.  If it needs doing, you need to do it yourself.


On Monday, I grabbed the grappling hook we used to pull the vegetation out of the laguna last year and headed down to the shore to take on the water cabbage -- the lime green plants.


But I am not an idiot.  I know there is a crocodile in those waters.  He was not on the bank.  And I could not see his telltale snout and eyes floating like some toppled Frostian birch. 


So, I felt smug.  It is far easier to get close to the edge of the water to toss the grappling hook.  Better angle.  Better distance.


I had been dredging the living cabbage corpses on shore for about 45 minutes when disaster struck.  Nope.  I still have both of my legs and arms.  But almost as bad.


The grappling hook embedded itself in a tangle of water lilies.  I thought a couple of good tugs would free it.


They did.  But they freed the rope from the hook.  And the hook remained stuck in the laguna.


And this is where I start looking like an idiot.  I know there is a steep drop-off at the edge of the inlet.  And the floor of the laguna is Louisiana mud deep.  One step and you sink up over your knees.


But the hook was only a few feet out.  I almost went out on my own.  Fortunately, I had enough good sense remaining to call my landlady.


She stopped by and talked to our neighbor who has another grappling hook.  With less than ten throws, he had ours on shore.


But when he started throwing, I saw a familiar sight.  A pointed head attached to an armored body.  The crocodile had been in the water no more than ten feet from where I was harvesting cabbage.


Now, let's stop here for one moment.  You have heard me talk like a proud father when the topic of Alfonso comes up.  He was a small, timid crocodile.


But when I returned from Yucatan in November, he appeared to be gone.  In his place, was a much larger crocodile.  At least, seven feet -- if not more.  And with a far more aggressive nature.

There are several theories about the sudden appearance of this big boy.  The most popular is that Lumpy (the new crocodile) either killed Alfonso or scared him away.


I am the dissenter.  My guess is there is no new crocodile -- other than in a Freudian sense.  I suspect Alfonso went through puberty -- and he has now come into his own.


Either way, it was a bit unnerving to realize, my little crocodile was stalking me as a gordito gringo snack.


But I am not one to be deterred.  I drove to Manzanillo.  Bought a length of sturdy nylon rope, and returned to my task of pulling out the cabbage.

When I started, there was no crocodile to be seen.  But within three tosses, there he was.  Just past the cabbage field.

Then he swam closer and closer until he was within range of the hook. And never once did he flinch when it splashed in the water near his head.


His presence did not bother me too much.  I will confess, though, I was not at the water's edge.  I was standing on the malecon -- a good six feet above the water on a steep bank.


I did not finish my task -- and not because of the crocodile.  A much smaller foe drove me away.

 

I either piled the cabbage on an ant's nest or I brought an ant nest out of the water on the cabbage. 


I felt something on my legs.  It would be an exaggeration to say they were covered, but at least 40 ants were running around angrily.  And they were everywhere on the cabbage.


With only a few ant bites appended to my war record, I retreated.


But I decided that was enough rural life for the day.  Robert Frost and his little horse could stop by their frozen lake as long as they liked.  They didn't have to contend with tropical wildlife.


And tonight I will probably be dreaming that I am Captain James Hook hearing the sound of that blasted ticking crocodile.

losing liz

Lord Byron was not speaking of Elizabeth Taylor when he wrote: "She walks in beauty like the night."


That would have been far too subtle for an actress who was literally a force of nature -- somewhere between the warmth of the sun and the destructiveness of a hurricane.  Whose face filled movie screens as fully as her bosom filled her bodice.


I had just crossed the border into teendom when I fell madly in love with her.  She represented everything I knew would get me into trouble for the rest of my life.  The woman whose beauty and presence would freeze frame any room she entered.


And then, of course, there was the obvious sexuality.  Which she wore as a tool of conquest.  For a boy raised on some very fundamentalist principles, she was the very temptress of Proverbs.


I did not know her when she was a young actress.  That would not come until the release of Cleopatra.


I have already introduced you to my rather eccentric younger self.  One Saturday afternoon, I put on my James Bond white dinner jacket and called a taxi to take me to the Paramount theater in Portland.  I was 13. 


When I got in the cab, the driver looked back at the house expecting an adult to accompany me.  To this day, I am convinced, I leaned forward and told him in a rather imperious tone: "Drive on."  Too many Leslie Howard movies, I fear.


In the movie, Cleopatra makes her first appearance when rolled out on the floor from a carpet.  Watching her transform from that rather ignominious entrance into the queen of Egypt addressing Julius Caesar was enough to set off my young testosterone.  I had bonded.


The movie is not a very good vehicle to show off acting skills.  Too many sets.  Too many costumes.  Way too much Roman Empire.


But none of that mattered.  The fact that she seemed to end up playing the same part with the same skills in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? or Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew did not register on me. 


She was Elizabeth Taylor.  The Woman.  The Earth goddess.  And no one would ever live up to her.


At some point, Hollywood started hiring actors rather than movie stars -- and she moved into that odd category of celebrity.  The world of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Paris Hilton, where talent is not important.  

Better yet, she received America's greatest accolade.  She was now known by a truncated version of her first name: Liz.  Universally.


She even took a short role acting as the wife of a United States senator from Virginia.  I can still see her at the head table of fund raisers lecturing her celebrity husband.


But supporting roles were not for her.  It was just one of her seven divorces.


I last saw her in the 1990s at a movie premiere.  She showed up in one of her trademark caftans looking like a ship under full sail.  But she still had the grace of her younger self.  Liz had arrived. 

 

It is far too easy to remember her in her odd stage.  As the defender and good friend of Michael Jackson.  Or acting as his date at the marriage of one-name Liza to the even-odder David Gest.  A photograph that still causes my spinal cord to suffer frost bite.


But none of those images are what I remember when I think of her.


She will always be the lonely figure at the top of a golden pyramid carried through the streets of Rome in triumphal entry.  A woman determined to take on the entire Empire to restore the power of Alexander the Great.


The perfect woman.  Strong.  Beautiful.  Independent.


And now -- gone.


Good-bye, Liz.  It was a good run.

birding on the cheep

I returned from Oregon with three bird books and a flock of good intentions to get out in the countryside to watch my little feathered friends.


So far, I have made it to my hammock. 


But it is a start.  My garden attracts a wide variety of birds.  And it is a good place to hone my watching skills.


My skills need honing.  But, my back yard may not be the best whetstone. 


The birds in my back yard fall into two categories: birds I recognize from years of bird-watching, and birds that can hide faster than the brother-in-law who owes you a hundred pesos.


The best example of the first category is what I call the English sparrow (though it is neither English nor a sparrow) -- what more-educated people call a house sparrow.  They seem to be almost everywhere north of the equator.  For all I know, they may also eat bananas in Ecuador.


And even the birds that are new to me, like the American robin's Patty Dukeish Mexican cousin, the rufous-backed robin, are easy to identify.  For some reason, the familiar birds seem to hop around in public as if they were part of a local circus.


It is the second category that baffles me.  I get all sorts of warblers flitting through.  Along with several varieties of vireos.  Not to mebtion the Greta Garbo doves -- like the one in the photograph above.


But the moment I train my binoculars on them, they disappear.  Getting my camera close to my face is a sure sign for them to do their Amelia Earhart impressions.


I thought I was going to be clever with a little avian chumming by throwing out some stale corn flakes on the compost heap.


It worked.  I had a full cast of house sparrows and grackles.  Birds that I can see by simply looking out my window whenever the sun is up.


It was like opening a bar to attract single women.  Only to have a bunch of drunk men show up.


But it was not just house sparrows and grackles who took me up on my generous free lunch.  While on ant patrol that same night, I discovered a thick line of leaf-cutter ants transferring the cereal to their nest.  Perhaps they had run out of Rice Krispies for the queen.


There are times I can be stupidly optimistic.  My first thought was perhaps the ants would now leave my plants alone.  After all, they had an alternate food source. 


Of course, that was nothing more than recycled Chamberlain appeasement.  Feeding the Sudetenland to Hitler did not save the rest of Europe from invasion.


(I think that last paragraph may be an exception to Godwin's Rule.  But I can never tell in these name-calling days.)


I am done with chumming.  If I want to see timid birds, I will need to find a good place to sit -- and watch -- and wait.  Another opportunity to learn patience.


Or I can just be happy watching sparrows -- and the occasional dove.

losing my cool

Spring is Mama Nature's menopause.  At least here on the Mexican beach.


Hot flashes.  Cold flashes.  Constantly changing.


And never with any warning.


This winter has been pleasantly cool.  Long pant, jacket cool.  Never lower than the 60s.  But we beach people are weather sissies -- we cannot sleep with anything separating our skin from the night's warmth.


The cool is a thing of the past -- as of this week.  I have no weather data.  But the days are warming.  And the nights are more humid.  It is fan time.


Within a month I will be longing for the cool.


But not yet.  There is still time to stretch out in the garden hammock.  To watch the birds trim the bushes of errant insects.  To indulge in my role as the lazing author.


Dorothy Collins sings in the living room -- competing with my neighbor's mariachi tape.  Dorothy is holding her own.  Even though she is telling us she is "Losing My Mind."  I feel her pain.


She sings at my request.  For some reason, I associate the song with my year in Greece.  Auditioning young women to be the next ex-Mrs. Cotton.


But that was a callow fellow I no longer know.  The guy in the hammock has enough spins on his odometer to fully appreciate that life sometimes leaves us "standing in the middle of the floor."


And, sometimes, it is A-OK to just stand there -- knowing fully well that you are not losing your mind.


Like Mother Nature, we will go hot and cold.  And life's cycle will continue to roll.

totting up the future

Adventure comes with costs.


A year ago (almost to the day), I broke my right ankle ziplining in Puerto Vallarta (one foot in the gravy).  And, even though that fracture decreased my mobility, I have been on the move ever since then.


Starting with my seven month stint in Oregon to train my successor in my old job.  Followed by the Bloggers' Conference in Mérida and a trip through the Yucatan Peninsula with Islagringo.


When I finally got to Melaque, I ended up taking the three bus tours we have been discussing for the past two months.  To Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Morelia, Pátzcuaro, and Mexico City.


And then I was off to Oregon again for a week to settle some tax matters.


This past week is the first quiet time I have had in my apartment for almost a year.


It has given me an opportunity to think about my adventure here in Mexico.  And what I should be doing with this blog.


But all I have been doing is thinking.  As far as I know, a new press secretary is not waiting behind the current to make any news-shattering announcements.


What I do know is that I have been having great difficulty writing over the past two months.  Part of that is due to my travels.  It is hard to construct an essay that hangs together while enjoying sights in the highlands.


We will see what happens this week.  I have a long list of topics I want to write about.  All I need to do is find my wandering muse.


Because I have plenty of tales to tell.  Just as I have my own story to live.


There is a Mexican national myth that the author of the lyrics of the national anthem, Francisco González Bocanegra, was able to write the lyrics only after being locked in a bedroom by his fiancée.


I have no one to lock me in a bedroom -- for any purpose at all.  But I intend to spend this week spinning tales of the local area.


Let's see what happens.  Maybe Thalia has some surprises in store for me.