The Shiftless Escape is making a guest appearance on Mexpatriate.
When I arrived in Bend last week, my brother asked me if I was ready for another road trip. There is only one answer to a question like that. Yes! Even though I had just finished one of the best road trips of my life -- with Dan and Patty.
Darrel's step-daughter lives in Virginia, where her husband is in the military. Her car, as Darrel puts it, is on its last tire. Coincidentally, her birthday is at the end of this month.
After Darrel put a bushel full of dollars in countering the Escape's deferred maintenance, it is running like a first-line used car. And it will make a perfectly utilitarian birthday gift for his step-daughter.
But you have already seen the problem, haven't you? The Escape is in Bend. His step-daughter is in Virginia. A lot of country separates those two points. Almost all of the country. (Here is a bit of trivia. The distance between Bend and Virginia is almost exactly the distance between Melaque and Bend -- the last road trip starring the Shiftless Escape.)
Darrel had planned on making the trip starting this Thursday. That is where I came into the picture. If I had my Red China visa in hand and had signed the trust tax documents, I could accompany him on this race across the country -- and still be back in Barra de Navidad on 25 February as I had planned. And it looked as if the conditions precedent were on a timely track.
Then, the weather decided to play a wild card. If you have been watching the news, the eastern half of The States are covered with ice and snow. And it is not getting any better.
Now, I have no concern about being in a vehicle on snow and ice -- just as long as the vehicle is being driven by a competent snow and ice driver. That is not me. I like my driving conditions to be spring-fresh. So, my presence on the trip would not rise above color commentary.
Darrel is currently readjusting his plans to steer through as much favorable weather as possible. He will be joined on the trip by one of his friends who was with us on our Baja 1000 adventure a year ago. (sea to shining sea)
I have mixed feelings. I will not miss the opportunity to be in a vehicle driving hours on end at 15 MPH over icy roads. But I will miss spending time on the road with my brother.
He needs to get down Mexico way -- where driving is a sport never impeded by snow.
Margaret Mead visited my college campus in the mid-1970s. I can still see her slowly making her way across the quad looking like a Tolkien wizard. Becaped. Rustic walking stick. She was everything an anthropologist -- or fiction writer -- should be.
I often feel as if I am Mead (absent the eccentric accessories) when I head out on my shooting expeditions to uncover the heart of mini-cultures through their public signs.
Take Bend. If you think of it as one of Oregon's old cowboy towns, you would be half-right. It is also half-yuppie. Mainly Californian yuppie. Giving the town a rather bipolar social and political personality.
It is the type of town where half of the population can support gassing Canadian geese that foul the footpaths, and the other half of the population will show up to have a candle vigil for "the surviving geese companions and families." (what's good for the goose)
That is why the sign at the top of this post is not surprising. Oregon was a pioneer in legalizing medical marijuana. Last November, the state joined Washington and Colorado in legalizing recreational marijuana. The county where Bend is located voted in favor of both initiatives.
Bend is filled with medical marijuana retail shops. What they are waiting for is 1 July 2015 when the floodgates of legal pot open.
Make what you will of this combination. (I love the speakeasy-esque last line.)
But Bend is not only about recreational drugs. It is a place that loves its animals.
I initially mis-understood this sign. The cart is sitting in the parking lot of a restaurant (in a "no parking" zone).
On first glance, I thought it was advertised containers to can cats. Instead, it combines two Oregon -- bottle deposits and content pets.
In the restaurant, we ran into a bit of old Bend.
The slogan ("9-1-1 takes too long. I re-load faster") was on the back of a hoodie worn by a young man. Perhaps, in his twenties.
He was there having breakfast with his wife and their four children. It was perhaps one of the most wholesome families I have seen in some time. There are true advantages in the freedom of the west.
Bend is surrounded by ranch country. When I saw this sign, I automatically thought the elementary school conducted a regular hay class, but it was cancelled. And that someone could not spell -- or ran out of the letter "s."
Until I saw the other side of the sign.
I should have recognized it was in Spanish. But I have been away from Mexico for too long. Except in Taco Bell where I embarrassingly slip into Spanish with ease.
Or how about this license plate that puts the "vanity" into vanity plate?
It should be mine.
But this is undoubtedly my favorite. It pretty much tells us which political strain predominates in Bend. At least, amongst the elite.
I fully understand the anti-smoking crusade. I am not a fan of having smoke blown in my face. I will leave my libertarian comments concerning the impact of regulating the behavior of a free people for another day.
But take another look at the sign. The last word in the blue portion.
"Campus?" I know the word has become trendy. Like "iconoclastic." And both are recurringly misused.
"Campus" refers to the grounds and buildings of a university or college. In this case, the whole city is referred to as a campus.
And what does that make the citizens on this campus? The students? With the politicians and the bureaucrats playing the role of "faculty and administration?"
That is hardly a great model for a republic. What is wrong with "Tobacco-Free City?"
But, there I go again, decking myself out in cape and walking stick. Margaret Mead would be shaking her maned head.
If I recall correctly, getting away from soapboxes (and the need of having them) is one reason I moved to Mexico.
Dad was an only child. That made his side of the family a rather short branch. But not a barren one.
There was a passel of great-aunts and uncles. And a few cousins near my age. For whatever reason, they seemed a bit distant. At least, in consanguinity.
My mother came from a moderate-sized family. Three older siblings -- one brother and two sisters. The Munro kids. (My mother's name is Marilyn. You can do the math on that one.)
My uncle Wayne never married. You met him in let my people know. If you click on the link, that is him on the far right.
Over the years, you have met most of the rest of the cast. My mother's two sisters are Naomi and Berneice.
Naomi has two sons: Dennis (who I accompanied on our southern European cruise last May) and Gary.
Berneice has three children: Marsha, Dan (who I joined on our trip through Mexico last month), and Robin.
That means Darrel and I have five first cousins. If the Mexican citizenship folks discover my deficiency, I will undoubtedly be asked to leave the country.
When we lived in the mountains of southern Oregon, we saw Marsha and Dan often. (Robin is several years younger.) They lived in the big town of Myrtle Point -- what we called "down below." I would say that they lived just down the "holler" from us, but we were mountain people, not hillbillies.
We did not see Dennis and Gary much back then. They lived in exotic places like Hawaii, Long Beach, and Seattle because their father was in the Coast Guard. When he retired, they settled in Portland. My parents had moved to Portland a decade earlier.
For a brief period, Dan, Dennis, and I attended college together. About a year, I think. We then went our separate ways seeing one another only occasionally.
I am not certain when this photograph of the three of us was taken. Or where. Or during what.
We appear to be at a restaurant or a hotel conference room. What is obvious is that I have slapped a supercilious smirk on my face. Over the years, it is a simple task to identify me in photographs.
Dan brought both of these photographs along on our trip as family tribute. I am glad that someone has kept these little gems.
Marsha was in Bend this past week. It is the first opportunity, in a very long time, I have had to sit and reminisce with her about our several battles and far more numerous good times over our lifetime.
I suppose it is a sure sign of aging when we start looking back over our lives -- when we try to put the prospective into context with the retrospective. Sometimes, it is hard to tell one from the other.
One theme that has come up recurringly over the past ten months of conversations with Darrel, Dennis, Dan, and Marsha is the concept of regret. I have none. Maybe it is why Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien" has long been one of my favorites.*
Regrets are a waste of time. The past cannot be changed. The future cannot be predicted. All we have is this moment.
And that is never a thing to regret.
* -- For those of you with a good memory, you may recall my rather strange memories involving Edith Piaf and my Great-aunt Bessie (my best girl).
Valentine's Day is one of those holidays that is far more hype than hip. Almost entirely a creation of Hallmark.
That may be because I have not celebrated the day with anyone for so long I can no longer see the borders of Curmudgeonland. But I am aware which side of the line I live on.
That is until yesterday. I celebrated the day with my mother and brother.
We did not go out to a fancy restaurant. Instead, we dug into plates of one of my favorite meals -- shepherd's pie. Well, it was really cottage pie because we used beef, rather than lamb. But this is Valentine's Day where I will even cut myself a bit of slack. Probably, just enough to hang myself.
Because she is the grande dame of the family, Mom received a large vase filled with yellow roses. And, yes, I know the color is supposed to be red. But we Cottons tend to be a little perverse in beating tradition to death with a different drummer.
And the entertainment? An evening of chamber music in Bend's restored Tower theater.
It was a rather short program -- with the contrived conceit of presenting music for lovers. The group was the Crown City String Quartet. A southern California quartet with roots in the Pacific Northwest.
I would hate to put together a program of chamber music designed to fill a theater with paying customers. Especially, on a holiday based far more for its fluff rather than its substance.
The group succeeded with its limited target. None of the pieces required much work from untutored ears. But the pieces were good choices. All of them readily recognizable and accessible.
During the summer of 2013, I told you in old times there are not forgotten, I had been re-considering Aaron Copland's three categories of how we listen to music:
the sensuous plane --
our emotional response to music where we let it wash over us (often
while we are engaged in other pursuits; the way everyone experiences
music at a rather basic level)
the expressive plane -- where we try to determine what the composer's music means
the sheerly musical
plane -- where we listen to the music as an abstract art form; or, in
Copland's words: "the notes themselves and of their manipulation"
I suspect most people who attend concerts these days fall into the first category. And that is fine with me. I would rather have people listening on that level than not listening at all. Without those listeners, live music would be as dead as Moussorgsky.
Anyone who has a nodding reference with chamber music will recognize the three pieces the group performed last night.
The first was Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade. I suppose the piece was on the program because of the adjective. After all, if you buy into profiling, you know Italians are romantic.
It turns out Wolf added the "Italian" modifier after the work was completed. It is about as Italian as Queen Elizabeth is English.
But it is a perfect piece for string players to show their chops. Its lilting pace gives each performer a shot of presto-digitation and some rather snappy bowing.
The second piece is also a regular: Mozart's String Quartet No. 19 in C Major. It is one of six string quartets composed in honor of Haydn.
But that is not what makes it such an interesting concert piece. Its nickname is "Dissonance," and it is well-named. The cello's opening C is met with a series of dissonant chords from the viola and two violins in the first 21 bars that set the theme for the rest of the work.
Some "experts" of the early 19th century were so unnerved by the dissonance that they concluded Mozart had made transcription errors. Their solution? Fix the errors. These people still walk amongst us as politicians and regulators.
The group did a great job of adding new life to this warhorse. Rather than try to move across the dissonance quickly, they reveled in it. To ears accustomed to Schönberg, the tonal battle seems mild. I can only imagine how it sounded to 18th century ears.
To our ears, it was joy.
The final piece was a perfect choice for Valentine's Day. When Alexander Borodin wrote String Quartet No.2, I am certain he had no idea he was providing raw material for 1950s Broadway.
What he did produce was a brilliant piece of lyricism and contrapuntal structure. But, I will admit, as hard as I tried, it was next to impossible to keep the score of Kismet from intruding. The theme lifted by Wright and Forrest as "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads" underlies the Scherzo. And the main theme from the Nocturne comes to us as "And This is My Beloved."
Neither tune, of course, has retained the magnificent variation of texture and chordal construction as the original. And, even though hearing the show tunes felt as comfortable as slipping on a set of ragged underwear, what we heard was something far more challenging and beautiful.
Did I leave the theater feeling as if I had been pushed to learn something new about the abstract nature of music? Probably not. It was not a level three listening experience.
But it was a great night to celebrate Valentine's Day with my two closest relatives. And that is good enough for me.
"Pictures of pets adorn the façades and menus of restaurants in Nam Dinh,
a city in a part of northern Vietnam where cats and dogs are commonly
consumed."
Now, that is a good sentence. From this week's edition of The Economist.
It catches your attention. And, no matter how you feel about the ethics of eating cat and dog, that short sentence compels you to say: "Tell me more."
Well that is not going to happen if you pick up Oliver Pötzsch's The Ludwig Conspiracy. One of the fun things about my Kindle is its recommendation of books I might find interesting. The list shows up at the bottom of the home page.
After finishing off my electronic magazines earlier this week, I started looking around for something to read. Because I have a history background, I am not usually interested in historical fiction. There is a tendency to re-write the past through the artifice of bodice-ripping prose. Bruce Catton meets Barbara Cartland.
But I have long been fascinated by the death of Ludwig II. And that sentence sums up the basic problem of writing about Bavaria's Fairy Tale King.
He is far more interesting in death than he was in life. I will not bother telling you why, but if you have read that sentence, you essentially know the plot of this plodding piece of pedantic prose. I have saved you a painful read.
I started to say that Pötzsch came up with an interesting idea and then lost it in execution. There is no doubt the idea was lost in execution (and I suspect neither his editor nor his best friends told him that the book stank worse than Ludwig II's corpse.)
But even the idea is not that interesting. We all know people who are simultaneously self-absorbed and just a bit loony. Adding the simple fact that the subject is a monarch (Yeah, I know. But I am leaving it alone.) does not make the person's story any more interesting.
So, let's say you are willing to forgive the author for building his story around one of the world's greatest boors. Isn't it more important to determine if the author can pull it all off by writing an interesting page turner filled with clever prose?
Maybe. But that is not this book. Remember the sentence from The Economist? The one that caught your attention? Compare it with this phrase:
"While the sun rose in the sky, a glowing red globe to the east, ..." Is there anything in that sentence that causes you to react any other way than to ask: "Did you type this on a computer screen, with its glowing white light melting the creativity right out of your head?"
I started to keep a list of the clichés that drain the life out of each paragraph, but I realized that would necessitate copying most of the book. And I do have a life to lead.
Pötzsch comes from that school of historical fiction writers who conjure up a grisly murder to be solved by an amateur through a series of clues that will lead us all to discover a secret of the universe. In other words, a Dan Brown wannabe.
And like Dan Brown, Pötzsch serves up thin gruel tarted up as a banquet, and then slips out through the kitchen just as the bill arrives at the table. We tend to fall for it every time.
The good thing about buying one of these books is the cost. They are the type of fare one once found on the remainder table at Crown Books.
In this case, I wasted $2.99 and about five hours of reading. That seems a bargain. After all, in the bargain, I uncovered lots of material for an essay.
Well, yesterday was certainly a day of mixed messages.
Remember citizen steve? When I chirpily told you about rendering unto the Mexican Caesar and related a quaint anecdote about my dad. "My dad once told me: 'It
is an honor to pay taxes. And, then, you need to watch those shifty
politicians like a hawk to make certain they don't squander your
money.' He was a realist."
I am not certain how much I feel like a realist right now. "Cranky" may be the word.
While my brother was out on a computer call, I sat down to complete my federal tax returns for this past year. Filling out the forms is no longer the chore it once was -- when dads locked themselves in the den for hours.
I have been using TurboTax for years. Combined with my rather neurotic record-keeping in Quicken, completing the form portion of the ritual is now a lark.
Well, maybe not a lark. But it is simple.
I was fully prepared for the rather staggering figure that popped up as the amount the treasury expects me to voluntarily pay for the surcharge of being an American citizen. But being prepared for bad news does not sweeten the adjective.
$13,000 -- and change. That, of course, is in addition to the much larger amount that was properly withheld during the year. ("Withheld" is such a gentle word for what it truly represents.)
That amount is certainly not like being told you have one month to live. These things must be put into perspective.
I put myself in this tax pickle by cashing out a deferred income account all in one big gulp -- to assist in the purchase of the house with no name. Here is the sad news. I had federal tax withheld when I withdrew the amount. But, as Harvey Fierstein said -- not enough.
And, for the honor of using my own money for my own purposes, I also owe penalties and interest -- in addition to being bumped back into the land of estimated tax payments. I tried the "but I am only a poor pensioner trying to make his way in a confusing world." TurboTax was not impressed.
To stop the penalty clock running, I decided to pay the full bill today. I know. I know. I am losing interest on what I do not need to pay until 15 April. My answer? What interest?
Here is where I differ from my father's tax philosophy. I long ago parted with the federal government's philosophy on spending. That probably happened somewhere in the early days of the First World War when the Wilson administration bayoneted the notion of a limited federal government in the trenches of Verdun.
I now estimate that around 90% of the federal budget is spent on things I do not believe it should. Inadvertently, I have probably just offered additional proof of Sturgeon's Law.
At least, I am done with my federal tax dilemma this year. My money is no longer mine -- and I will leave it to others to spin arguments for its moral application.
It is one less thing I have to accomplish on this trip north. But several other major projects loom before I return to my courtyard in Barra de Navidad. Where the living is easy and the taxes are easier.
There are three kinds of people: those who feel morally superior to Walmart, those who feel socially superior to people who shop at Walmart, and my people -- those who see Walmart as a shopping haven.
Don't get me wrong. I have found more than a few moments of levity while avoiding cleanups on aisle 27. I have even shared a couple with you -- mostly on my visits to Bend (opposites attract; cultural spills on aisle 1).
But when a shopper needs something (and the other hoity-toity shops cannot help), there is always Walmart. I may not classify Walmart as high in its social value as Homer Simpson rates television ("Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover."), but I can almost always count on it to come through for me.
During my six years in Mexico, I have discovered, when I come north, I buy fewer things to take south to Mexico than I once did. My suitcases once looked as if I were attempting to import some of my worst shopping choices to Mexico.
I no longer need to do that. NAFTA has done it for me. As have some rather enterprising young Mexican men. One, in particular, runs a boutique grocery (Hawaii) in Melaque that caters to the northern crowd in the winter months and to middle class Mexicans in the summer months. My friends in San Miguel de Allende and around Lake Chapala tell me his stock is better than anything available to them.
That means that the type of merchandise I once muled across the border now regularly shows up on the shelves of Hawaii. What I cannot get there, I have learned to do without.
To a degree. Because, if I have some empty space in my bags, I still shop around for those exotic items that will elude the best shopper in Mexico.
It turns out they may elude the best shopper in Oregon. I stopped at several of my usual haunts in hopes of finding something "honorable" (as Auda Abu Tayi put it in Lawrence of Arabia) to haul back to the house with no name.
Costco. Safeway. Whole Foods. Fred Meyer. They all disappointed me. The special items they had once carried was occupied by a vast vacuous void.
In an attempt to convince me all was not lost, Darrel suggested a stop at Walmart. He had spotted two pound loaves of Tillamook 3 year old extra sharp cheddar cheese last week. He had me hooked at "3 year old."
I was a bit surprised that Walmart would carry such an esoteric (and expensive) product. After all, the cultural stereotype is that cheese means Velveeta within the walls of the Walton empire.
It turns out the wise Walmart shoppers had already stripped the shelves of that particular ambrosia (the Tillamook, that is; not Velveeta). So, I went searching for the other items that the High street stores failed to stock.
And I batted almost 1.000. I couldn't find any Carr's roasted garlic and herbs water crackers. But I can learn to live with the pain.
Walmart in Mexico was once one of my favorite shopping stops when I would drive to Manzanillo. I seldom go there now. Not out of any misguided political pique, but because Hawaii has cleverly utilized free market tools to fill that gap and save me a two-hour round trip.
But Walmart in Bend will undoubtedly keep me stocked with the few things I now take back to Mexico.
And what happens when I stop making these trips north -- when Darrel and Christy move south? I will do what everyone else does. Find a substitute or simply learn to deal without.
Until then, I count Walmart as a place to witness a good story and to get a good buy.
