My blogger buddy Kim loves big cities.
The fact that he has decided to settle in Mexico City makes a lot of sense for him. His blood runs urban.
Not mine. It would stretch the point to call myself a country lad. After all, I love visiting big cities, but, when it comes to choosing a place to live, my preference runs, as the song says, "land spreadin' out so far and wide."
I played with the idea of living in Puerto Vallarta until I realized it had all of the drawbacks of an urban area without any of the cultural amenities. So, I headed south until I ran into Melaque and Barra de Navidad.
Farm living may not be the life for me, but I am a lot closer than I was in Salem. After all, I never would have had two goats greeting me each morning if I still lived in the house on Summer Street. We even had a resident pig for a couple of days until it was invited to be the guest of honor at a big family get-together.
And then there are the chickens. Everywhere.
My neighbors have a rather off-hand approach to raising fowl. A couple of chickens are brought home to be turned lose to fend and forage for themselves. Where there were two chickens, there will soon be a flock of yellow fluff ball chicks. Those who survive will keep the cycle going until there are, as I said, chickens everywhere.
It is the "those who survive" that amazes me. The chickens have no pens or coops. They are truly free range. Wandering through vacant lots and neighbors' lots in search of anything that a chicken might find edible.
The survival rate is low. Anyone who has ever watched a line of ducklings follow her mother on a snapping turtle pond knows what I am talking about. They soon become characters in an Agatha Christie mystery. One duckling will disappear. Then another. Often a forlorn mother duck is left to paddle solo around the pond.
Chicken is on the menu for a lot of local predators. Feral cats. Raccoons. Coatimundi.
But the top hunter is Barco's dog pal Güera. A few months ago, the three of us were out on a walk together. The chickens, for good reason, are wary of four-legged creatures. But they were more intent on breakfast than running away.
That was a mistake. I have seen Güera walk right past the chickens without paying them any notice. This time, she ran at them. They scattered. That must have triggered her basic instinct. She was off after a teenage bird while the rest of the flock clucked and fled.
Güera disappeared around a corner. I called her to stop. But she was gone. I was not too bothered because the chickens appeared to know what they were doing to survive.
Güera knew better. She soon caught up to us with the now-limp chicken in her mouth. Since then, I have seen her dispatch at least a half dozen birds. Barco is impressed.
Up north, Güera would be a dead dog. Dogs who mess with livestock are just minutes from having a bullet between their eyes.
Here? The putative owner of the chickens and Güera's owner seem to accept it as the cycle of life in Mexico. After all, the chicken guy does nothing to raise the birds. I am certain he takes advantage of the eggs and the occasional fryer -- even though I haven't seen him do either.
For me, they are simply part of life and death here on my ever-greener acres.
The lot has sat empty since I moved to Mexico.
Well, not exactly empty. It has occasionally been used as a parking lot for one of the beach hotels. But the gates' stare toward the street was blank as Botticelli's Aphrodite.
No more. The gate is down and workmen are sweating away in our August heat. Something new is going to be wedged between Rooster's restaurant and the new Kiosko in San Patricio.
I did a little spadework of my own. A lot of property owners are a bit cagey about their building projects. Why? I don't know. But, they are.
My first working hypothesis was that Kiosko's primary convenience store competitor, Oxxo, was building a store cheek to jowl with the Kiosko that popped up last year. But the building footprint did not look right.
Almost anything else could go on that lot. The most obvious candidate would be a couple stories of apartments with retail space below. If I had extra pesos, that would be my bet.
But an acquaintance, who has lived in Barra de Navidad for a couple of decades and sports Mexican citizenship, has a far more novel idea. He had heard about a year ago that McDonald's was going to build a franchise in Melaque -- and this could be it.
I chuckled. That is how rumors get started.
And so is this.
The high tide of tourism is about to recede from our villages by the sea.
I have been told this is the last week of school vacations. The children will soon be headed back to their regimen of textbooks and marching.
For the past several weeks, our villages have been filled with SUVs,vans, and tour buses. Most of our visitors come from the surrounding mountains to spend a week, two weeks, or a few days sunburning themselves with pleasure amongst the waves.
Traditionally, Melaque and Barra were destinations for working class families, who would arrive in convoys of buses. They still come.
But a couple of years ago, the mix changed. Large numbers of SUVs started showing up in the first wave -- filled with the statistical average of two parents and two children. All of them turned out in the latest designer label casual wear. They were perfect representatives of a Mexican economy that was expanding. For some. And a reminder that Mexico ha the 15th largest economy in the world.
My impression this summer has been that the number of visitors was quite high. Around here, we tend to use Christmas and semana santa (Easter week) as the top benchmark for tourists. For the full school summer vacation, it appeared we were celebrating an extended semana santa. The business people I have talked with say it was a good season.
But it is now almost over. Before everyone leaves, though, there is an event we can all enjoy tomorrow night -- free.
Tomorrow will be one of the best meteorite showers of the year -- the Perseid meteors. Earth is passing through the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet. Tomorrow it will be encountering one of the thickset parts in years. The patient will be able to see up to 200 meteorites an hour.
In our area, the moon will set around 1:45 AM. That will be the optimum time to see the most "falling stars." If you stand looking true north, the best view will be slightly to your right.
Happy watching.
1:45 AM is a good time for me. We are not only in peak tourist season, we are in peak summer heat season -- or, at least, the start of it. September should be hotter yet.
Barco is struggling with the heat. For his sake, I have decided to have air conditioning installed in my bedroom.
The contractor, who built this house as her dream home, had the foresight to plumb the walls for air conditioning. Had she not done that, the installer would have been forced to drill from the roof of the pavilion upstairs, through two stories of concrete, to install the regulator in my bedroom and the compressor on the roof.
With this information, I can now hire an installer to give me an estimate. I would be less than honest if I told you I was not looking forward to reducing the humidity in my bedroom.
But, tomorrow night, I will have a good reason to be up late (along with a large group of Mexican tourists) watching one of nature's truly spectacular shows. I can watch from the swimming pool.
Barco will be asleep.
"I am willing to let any objective historian look at my record. If I can't do more than anyone else to help my country, I'll quit."
The sentence made me stop reading my Kindle to see if I had accidentally opened a political column in The Oregonian. Nope. I was still reading my latest installment in my presidential biography project. Robert Dallek's Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (an abridgment of his two-volume biography).
The quotation is pure Johnson. He had stopped in Alaska in 1967 on his way to Asia, and was reassuring the public he was the man to stop the war in Vietnam while he simultaneously wiped out discrimination and poverty in The States.
On that same trip, he visited the troops in Vietnam. While crossing the airfield to board Marine One, the Air Force protocol officer told him: "Sir, your helicopter is over here." Johnson looked the young officer straight in the eye, and swept his hand across the airfield: "Son, they're all my helicopters."
This is another election cycle where we hear political commentators, hoping we are deceived into believing they are in the know, telling us there has never been an election like this. Admittedly, there have been some odd events this year. But the oversized egos of both candidates certainly are not new.
Lyndon Johnson often makes Donald Trump's outrageous comments look entirely amateur. LBJ was a political wizard wrapped in the crassness of a Texas hill country rancher.
That is one of the advantages of studying past presidents and campaigns. It helps us to put matters in perspective.
Not that the perspective makes my concerns this year disappear. I did not like Lyndon Johnson's Great Leader rhetoric that was dialed just one notch south of being Kim Il-sung. Trump's ("I'm the guy") is not much better.
Several of our presidents have suffered from the man-on-the-white-horse syndrome. In their minds, only they can save us from the forces of evil that besiege the people. I suspect a person could not be in politics without suffering from that heresy, which is the polar opposite of the philosophy espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
And they are exactly the people who we should not choose as leaders. Both of this year's political candidates are advocates of the heresy.
By the way, I do not recommend the abridged version of Dallek's biography. Whoever edited it did a terrible job. Names pop up without any introduction. I assume the transition paragraphs had simply been removed without regard to the information they contained.
At one moment, we are talking about Ambassador Lodge, and, all of a sudden, Bunker pops up -- without any introduction. Maybe we are simply to remember the news from the 1960s.
He makes a passing reference to Johnson's belief that the Castro brothers were involved in John Kennedy's assassination, something I already knew. But Dallek offers no support why Johnson believed this interesting theory. Of course, people believe all sorts of crazy things about the Kennedy assassination, but we do not need to trot out the denizens of the fever swamp here -- or in the comments.
That now leaves me with only one more dead president biography to read: Warren Harding. And it is on its way to me in the mail.
Until I finish the project, I am going to do what I can to avoid the Punch and Judy show on offer in The States.
"Your access to your My Social Security account is being terminated."
So said the good folks of Social Security in an email late last month. My ability to remotely open my Social Security account information was coming to an end in August.
Well, that is not really what the email said. But the tiny hysteric that lives in a condominium in my amygdala has a way of churning up glandular fluids before the better part of my brain has an opportunity to analyze it. The old Adler vs. Holmes fight.
What the email really said, in a very soothing bureaucratic drone, was that the process for getting to my data was about to change -- "to protect my privacy." We do not know if the Chinese ever plundered Mrs. Clinton's home server, but we do know that they have made a series of hits on government computers that contain personal information on current and former government employees -- and benefit recipients.
To ensure us that the Chinese will no longer be able to peruse why my Medicare payments withheld from my Social Security benefits have increased to over $300 a month (part of the humorously-named Affordable Care Act), Social Security will now require that I sign in with my username and password (as I have been) -- and then provide my text-enabled cellular telephone number.
Here's why. Social Security will then send me onetime security code to open my account.
A number of financial institutions are doing this. But most of them send the code by email. I guess Social Security decided that was not a socially secure method.
I have been doing my best to divest myself of connections up north -- especially of the financial type. All of my telephones are Mexican -- Telmex or Telcel. My experience with American institutions is they go all weak in the knees when Mexico is mentioned. So, I was disinclined to provide Social Security with a Mexican telephone number.
Fortunately, I have kept a MagicJack account active. I was going to cancel it when I bought services to allow me to call The States as part of my telephone plans. I didn't, though, thinking I might have some use for it as a backup.
And so I have. It turns out the number is text-enabled.
If I had deep-sixed MagicJack, the Social Security guys let me know that sympathy is not one of my benefits: "If you do not have a text-enabled cell phone or you do not wish to provide your cell phone number, you will not be able to access your My Social Security account."
I am willing to bet a large number of Social Security recipients are covered by that conditional "if you do not." Sorry, gramps. You paid into the account, but our use of "my" in front of your account was simply a post-modern twist of irony. It's our account, and don't you forget it.
Had I been writing the notice, I would have blue-lined the in-your-face-Mr.-Taxpayer jab and skipped to the reality: "If you are having
trouble using our new security measures, try logging onto
igotyourstuff@beijing.com.ch. While there, you might be interested in
reviewing your FBI file, any information the NSA has collected
concerning you during the past 10 years, and your voting preferences in
the last two election cycles."
And, now, about that triple increase in my Medicare premium --
P.J. O'Rourke once wisely observed: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
He could say the same thing about Barco and garage door openers.
For the last few days, I have been suffering from one of those gastrointestinal episodes that keeps me within running distance of a bathroom and collapsing distance from a bed. When I sleep, I slip into what seems like a diabetic coma.
This morning (around 1 or 2) I was awakened to a man's voice calling my name -- Estiv! Estiv! When I looked up, sure enough there was the silhouette of a man standing in my bedroom entry.
This is the point where I should say I jumped up to defend this intrusion of my castle. After all, my Mexican neighbor had only recently reminded me that the streets in Barra are not as safe as they once were.
Instead, I just stared in repose -- trying to make some sense out of this Ibsen moment that had invaded my life. And then I realized who it was -- the neighbor who had given me the earlier warning. He was saying something about Barco being outside, the door was open, and my neighbor's wife was worried about me.
I wrapped a shirt around my waist and accompanied him to the front of the house. Sure enough the garage door was open. A couple of months ago, I had made the mistake of putting the remote control in my pocket and accidentally opened the door. I thought that was what had happened.
Nope. The remote was in the car, and the car door was locked. That left only one possibility -- what seemed impossible had occurred.
I have a backup remote in my bedroom. On a shelf. Which I thought was out of Barco's reach.
Sure enough, it was gone. I looked around the courtyard and found the cardboard box and the plastic bag that once encased it. Both were shredded.
It was obvious that Barco took the remote, tore open the box, and started chewing on the remote -- for the sole reason that it is plastic. That accidentally opened the garage door.
I fully expected to find the remote near the door where he would have run as free as Steve McQueen. But it wasn't there.
Because it was late, and I was wearing a shirt as a skirt, I decided to wait until the morning when the light would be better. But I knew myself better than that. I could not sleep knowing that the magic key to my house might be somewhere on the street.
There was only one thing to do -- think like Barco. It turned out not to be that difficult. When he gets away from me, he heads to the same place, the pile of garbage on our corner.
And there it was, on a spoiled banana. Barco apparently had been stuffing himself on rotten fish parts at the midnight buffet.
For me, the hero of this story is my neighbor, an owner of one of the most popular taco stands in our part of town. He and his wife were concerned enough about me that he took the extra steps of entering my house to check on my welfare.
And, for those who see no utility in speaking Spanish in this area, this episode would not have played out the way it did if I had not been able to establish a neighborly relationship with this family. When I realized how worried they were, I even felt a bit misty-eyed. Of course, I put that down to my medication.
As for Barco, the last time I saw him, he was driving my car to Acapulco with my garage door opener still stuck in his mouth.
It is. But, it is not the apocalyptic type with horses, scrolls, and trumpets. (Even though that is always a possibility.)
The end that is nigh is my project of reading a biography of each dead American president. Now, if you have been following my trek through the presidential timber these past two years, you might notice a new adjective in my project. I have decided to limit the biographies to dead presidents.
Let me tell you why.
While reading Charles Rappleye's biography of Herbert Hoover (Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency), I realized a very important point about presidential biographies. It has taken over 80 years for a biography to be written that is balanced between the hagiography and villainization treatments of President Hoover. It takes time to let the glandular partisan impressions to settle.
Biographers are not journalists. Well, some are, but, as biographers, they are exercising a completely different set of writing skills. Without perspective and a certain sense of objectivity, biographies can easily turn into another political slur by Occupy Democrat or Ann Coulter. And that usually takes the passage of time -- especially for politicians caught in circumstances beyond their control.
Hoover was such a man. Economists are still uncertain what caused the Great Depression. What they do know is that none of the governmental economic programs put in place by Hoover and his successor Franklin Roosevelt pulled the United States out of its economic malaise.
Both men tried very similar methods to get the economy moving again (Roosevelt's boldest mood was taking the country off of the gold standard -- a move that, in the long run, did nothing to help alleviate the depression.) The big difference between them was leadership. Hoover tended to lecture Americans that they were not doing enough to help themselves (much as Jimmy Carter did in his infamous energy speech). Roosevelt made people think he was in the battle along side them; that he was doing something.
Rappleye's book could not have been written when I was young in the 50s. My mother idealized Hoover; my father idolized FDR. Memories were still too raw for objectivity. With the passage of time, we can see Hoover as a real person -- a man with the perfect résumé to be president -- who turned out to have exactly the wrong personality when the economy went south.
To test my theory, I read Douglas Brinkley's Gerald Ford. I was correct. The wounds that were opened in the 1976 primary with Ronald Reagan and the campaign in the general election against Carter were still too raw. At least, for me. I was neck deep in the campaigns that year.
Brinkley works valiantly to remain neutral, but there are far too my pejorative adjectives flung around to save the pretense of objectivity. The events are just too near in time to us.
For that reason, I will not seek out biographies on Carter, both Bushes, Clinton (the one who has been president), and Obama. There would be little sense. Not only is objectivity a concern, they are five men all still adding pages to their biographies in life.
So, here's the score. There have been 43 men who have served as president. Five are still living. That leaves a total of 38 biographies -- of which I have read 36. The only two awaiting my roving eyes are Warren Harding and Lyndon Johnson.
My friend, Al French, is mailing a Harding biography to me. While I await its arrival, I will take on Lyndon Johnson's life. I had considered reading Robert A. Caro's four volume set on Johnson's life. But his work currently ends in 1964 -- and a lot happened to LBJ after his landslide election that year.
Instead, I decided to start reading Robert Dallek's Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President -- an abridgment of his authoritative two-volume biography.
Reading these biographies has taught me one thing: journalists are wont to say that the election this year is something completely new. It is no such thing.
The nation has suffered far greater divisions in its politics. During the 1800 election where name-calling and mutual distrust became a normal attribute of American politics. The elections of the 1850s, culminating in 1860, where the nation could not find a political solution to slavery -- and resorted to the crudest of all weapons in the civil war. The populist revolution of the 1880s and 1890s where tariffs and the gold standard were every bit as divisive as abortion and free trade. The election of 1968 where the nation was on the verge of revolution.
Knowing that we have been here before is not comforting. But it is certainly not something new. History rhymes.
So, for now, I will work through two more presidential biographies. And my project will be done. For now. At least two of the former presidents will be dead before too long. But it will be at least a decade or two before decent biographies will be written about their accomplishments and failures.
By that time, the end may have drawn nigh.
