lords of the ring

The Maya saw life as a cycle.  Birth and death were part of the same circle.  Like sunrise and sunset.

One merely reflected the other.

I am not certain how I think about that.  Even during my Harry Chapin moments.

But I do know how much I am enjoying life these days.  Despite my edgy comments.

I have spent the last two days with my friends Ken and Patti -- and their daughter Kimmy.  I have known Kimmy all of her seventeen years.  Ken and Patti I have known since law school -- almost forty years ago.

Patti's recent bout with liver cancer has focused our relationship a bit.  But I would have spent time with them on this trip without the intervention of the disease. 

After all, the two of them are among my closest friends.  Close enough that people often think Patti is my sister.  Even my maid in Mexico drew that conclusion.

This will not be my last trip with them.  In fact, we are planning a river cruise in France for 2014.

But we are treating this as a memory tour.  After all, selling my house is a big step for our relationship.  Even though I have been in Mexico for the past four years, the Salem house acted as a fallback refuge.  No longer.

And thus the stories flow.  How we all met.  My embarrassing Spoonerisms involving Chocolate Chip Chunk ice cream and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  The series of women who have punctuated my life.  Our first cruise together.  The music nights out we enjoyed.

All of them adding up to circumstances that have helped make us who we are.  And I guess that is a variation of the Maya cycle.

Today Ken is driving me back to Salem -- to pick up the flat screen televsion I bought two years ago -- knowing full well it would never accompany me to Mexico. 

The trip will undoubtedly turn out to be one of those stories we will share years from now.

In another cycle.
 

on track with dynasty

Felipe discerns  a "new edginess" in my writing during the past few weeks.

That is a nice word for it.  I call it curmudgeonly.  And I suffered another bout on my Amtrak trek to Olympia on Wednesday.

In January I told you about my friend Patti who is dealing with liver cancer -- pulling for patti.  She underwent surgery in early February.  And I have tried to find an opening to get up to Olympia to visit with her.

When I discovered that the house closing will not be until 14 March,  I decided to head north.  On the train.
 
One of my greatest irritants with public transportation is the person who believes that mobile telephones are the equivalent of megaphones.  You know the type.  The caller believes the power of his voice makes the telephone work.

We picked up one in Portland.  This time it was a woman.  About my age.  Designer haircut.  Severe features.  I am willing to bet "Executive Director" graces her business card.

The moment she sat down, her mobile telephone was out.  Along with her outside voice.  After about 20 minutes of no-cover entertainment, the conductor asked her to step into the area between the two cars.

Before that, we learned the following facts about her non-profit public service business.  Let's call her Alexis.

Alexis wants to fire a woman named Julie.  But she is concerned that Julie may not take the news well.  Instead of just firing her, Alexis has cobbled together what she considers to be a clever plan.

She intends to hire a nurse consultant and combine that position with Linda's.  After two months, she will tell both of them that they are being let go due to "budget issues."

But Julie is not the only employee in Alexis's sights.

Fred's days with the organization are numbered.  At 68 ("looking more like he is 78"), he simply does not fit in with the cutting edge Alexis wants to create for the company.  He needs to go.

She has been playing good cop - bad cop with a manager named Howard.  Howard is the good cop.  She is the bad cop.  (No surprise there.)  Because poor Fred cannot deal with angry women.  She plans to lay it on heavy.  Until dottering Fred calls it quits.

She has a young woman in mind to fill his position.

It sounded like some terrible cliché script from a television soap opera.  The type of venomous monster many Americans fear exists in executive suites.

And there she was.  Conjuring up enough litigation to keep a silk stocking law firm in retainers for years to come.


What offended me was her hubris in discussing private topics as if her fellow passengers were merely servants in her summer home.

And why do I feel free to publish such private matters -- using the names I heard her speak?  If she carries out her employment version of the partition of Poland, I hope one of her victims recognizes himself or herself.

I will happily be a witness in what should be an interesting law suit.
  

it's my party

Last week I had a simple task to complete.  To find an appropriate birthday card for my mother's 85th birthday.

Well, I thought it would be simple.  All I wanted was a card that would sum up what a great Mom she is.

What I had not reckoned with is the shroud of narcissism that has descended on my generation.  All life seems to be funneled through the giver's sense of his or her self.  Rather than focusing on the recipient of the gift.

The perfect example is the young girl who sings at church.  She is not a good singer.  But she sings with joy and is willing to raise her voice as part of our worship service.

I thank her for adding to the service.  Recently, she asked how I liked her singing.  I told her: "It is the wrong question.  The real question is whether your song assisted us in worship.  It did."

Not satisfied, she pressed: "No, I mean what did you think of me."  The bullet could not be ducked.  I told her -- unlike the other people who have lied to her all of her life -- that she was not a very good singer.  But it did not matter.

To her, it did matter, though.  All of her life she has lived in a world where everyone gets a gold star and is the center of their own personal universe.

Even knowing that did not prepare me for what I would find on the mother birthday card display.  Of the 10 cards I reviewed, 9 had the same subtext.  Thank you, Mom, for all you did for me.  I would not be the marvelous person I am without your help.

Most of the cards were love letters to the senders -- with Mom acting as a walk-on cameo in their practically perfect world reflecting their personal glory.  They sounded as if they had been written by Joe Biden.

I finally found a card that was Mom-centered.  It was shunted off to the side.  As if realizing no one would be interested in keeping a Mom at the center of a birthday celebration.

Well, my Mom is just that.  The center of our family life.  If I had not found that card, I was prepared to draft one of my own. 

I just may do that for her next 15 birthdays.

If I am around to see many more of them.

dew, docs, and dusk

Mother Nature is trying to seduce me into staying in Salem.

Or so it would seem. 

This is March.  But we have had almost a full week of clear, sunny skies.  March is supposed to be the lion month -- seeking whom he may destroy.  Instead, we have been getting a series of lamb chops.

The beauty of clear nights is the promise of frost in the morning.  That ephemeral dusting of dew that spends a brief moments as a barrier on the windshield before reverting to a flimsy film.

An errand sent me out into Jack Frost land.  The lanscape was poetic.  The task prosaic.  I needed some smaller bills from the local ATM to pay the taxi for my visit to the doctor.

There is nothing wrong with me.  I merely needed to get the prescription for my blood pressure medicine renewed.  And, because it was a year since my doctor had last tapped my wallet, I was required to set an office visit. 

You may remember my rant last year on this same topic -- tossing my pills.  Nothing has changed.  If anything, this visit was more senseless than the last visit.

I like my doctor.  I like her staff.  But they are prisoners of the American medical mindset.  If you are in the doctor's office, you are going to leave far less healthy than when you entered.  And certainly poorer.

In this case, my doctor wanted me to undergo a series of laboratory tests.  When I asked why, she responded that there may be something wrong and we wouldn't know until tests were conducted.

Asked I: "And what if the tests are bad?"  She:  "Then I can prescribe medication."  Me:  "I won't take it.  In fact, I'm not certain I want to take the blood pressure medicine any more."

Her look of horror was only exacerbated as we exchanged opposing philosophies about medicine, death, and other topics that were beginning to make her feel very uneasy.  Uneasy enough to declare: "This is a terrible way to begin a Monday."

I left feeling much better than when I walked in.  I had my prescription and I had dodged the pharmaceutical bullet that makes American medicine so prohibitively expensive.  To little effect.

I will not attribute bad motives to my doctor.  But once I buy into the current medical scheme, I will end up with more medications that require more monitoring and a never-ending series of lab tests.  All at a staggering cost.

Because my doctor knows her stuff, I am not going to ignore her suggestion.  When I return to Mexico, I will ask my Melaque doctor if she sees any reason for lab tests.  If she does, I will comply -- at a fraction of the cost I would pay in Salem. 

And the chances are very good that a Mexican doctor will tell me medications simply are not required.  Her suggestion will be that I need to drop the weight I acquired during my last three months in Salem.  And she will be correct.

In the late afternoon, I felt like the weather.  The frost was gone.  So, was the dew.  And the sun was setting in a clear sky -- casting a golden glow through the windows of my almost-empty living room.

I sat there thinking about what I like in Salem -- and what I will not miss in the American system.  Primarily health care. 

And I smiled.  Because life is pretty good.

  

peeling the people

Mexico comes in last amongst the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in an important economic indicator.  And Mexico's ruling party says it is time for a change.

I am not certain it is the type of change most Mexicans will enjoy.  The indicator is taxes.  Or "revenue" -- in the sanitized Orwellian-speak of bureaucrats.  As if government produced a product worthy of voluntary contributions by consumers.

Mexico currently takes less money from its citizens than all of the other OECD nations. 18.8% of gross domestic product.  Compare that to the tax-hog rates of Denmark at 47.6% and Sweden at 45.5%, and Mexico looks like a fiscal Twiggy.

Well, the party poobahs of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have decided it is time for a change.  And that change is going to come out of the pockets of the citizens.  The goal is to increase the tax take by 6 percentage points.  A bit higher than the current tax ratio of the United States.

Mexico collects over half of its general fund revenue from its value added tax -- a national sales tax of 16%.  Food and medications are excluded.  At least, now they are.

The power barons at PRI want to change that.  Until this weekend, PRI opposed any extension of VAT to food and drugs fully realizing that in a nation where over half of the population is impoverished, the poor would be disproportionately affected by a sales tax increase.

But these guys are practiced politicians.  To grease the skids (and perhaps a few palms later in the game), the plan is to increase the tax and then dedicate some of the proceeds for programs to help the poor.

That's right.  Take the money from the poor and then give their money back to them -- giving politicians an opportunity to take credit for being compassionate.

And why should an old expatriate care about this topic?

To start with, I have no problem with paying more taxes in Mexico.  I use services that are financed by taxes -- and I pay very little.  It would be nice to see an improvement in infrastructure.

Of course, there is a tradeoff.  Mexico will become a costlier place to live.  An immediate 16% increase in the cost of food and medicine will be a big hit for some expatriates who currently live on the border of their pensions.

But this is the discouraging news.  Remember that reference to increasing the governmental money grab by 6%?  Well, putting food and medicine under the VAT will raise the revenue rate by only 1%.

Expatriates may well start wondering where that extra 5% is currently hiding.  But the wondering should be short-lived.  Expatriates in Mexico cannot fill much of that gap.  There are too few of us -- with far too few resources.  As a friend in Morelia says, we are merely a rounding error when it comes to economic impact in Mexico.

My libertarian heart would be happy to see taxes as low as possible.  Coming in last in this sweepstakes sounds like a win to me.

signing out

I have a fascination for signs.

Not the signs of augury.  Being elbow deep in lamb entrails is not my idea of a good time.  I will leave that hygenically-challenged task to the Chris Matthews set.

The signs that fascinate me are the ones that sprout up on doors and roadsides.  Such as the vaguely fascist "no smoking outside" sign I shot in don't smoke 'em -- even if you got 'em. 

Once you start looking, you can see them everywhere.  Especially, north of the Rio Bravo.  And, yes,there are plenty of signs in Mexico, but my neighbors know how to deal with them.  They ignore them.  Especially the roadside signs that instruct drivers to obey the signs.  But that is another post.

For now, let me share two of my recent finds.  The first is at the top of the post.

The vaguely arts-and-craftsy hand-written sign is on the door of the Play Boutique -- a daycare center where parents who desperately want to be upper middle class pay money to park their children for the day.  Apparently some parents are so reckless that they arm little Nancy with a deadly peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Now, I know that some Americans and Canadians suffer from food allergies -- or, more accurately, food sensitivities.  But the rare exception now seems to be the basis for all of our social intercourse. 

When I was a kid (yeah, I know: tell us a story Grandpa Cotton), I do not recall any of my friends who had allergies.  There was the kid who was allergic to bee stings -- and we looked out for him.  Without all of these First World Problem hysterias.

And then there is this one.

The warning in the first sign begins to make sense.  If 40 hunks of deep-fried chicken serves 4, that means that a McDonald's serving of chicken is 10 pieces. 

I like thse Chicken McNuggets.  But I doubt I could eat 10 pieces at one setting.  That does not seem to be the case for most of the people I see waddling into McDonald's these days.  And that is coming from a guy who is far too big for his own britches -- and shirts.

But this is Oregon.  A pioneer state of the medical marijuana movement.  So, I will leave you a final sign.

sinking the sale

For those of you who have been astounded at my good luck in selling my house, get out your schadenfreude calculators.

Let me bring you up to date.  The buyers of my house have been looking at it long before I had decided to sell it.  When the sign went up, so did their hands.

While I was in Mexico, the house inspector and the appraiser came through and found nothing surprising.  Well, the house inspector found nothing surprising.  The appraiser found something that did not exist.

A little back story may help.  The owner prior to me was an amateur photographer.  Back in the day when photographers still used film.  Her husband built a very nice dark room for her.  In the basement.  Complete with a stop bath sink.

I never used it as a dark room.  Instead, it turned into an all-purpose storage room.  And that is how matters remained until last month.


The appraiser failed to recognize the room as a darkroom.  Now, I realize darkrooms were unusual in homes before the advent of digital photography.  They are now rarer than buggy whips.

Instead of a darkroom, he saw -- wait for it -- a kitchen.  A kitchen!  The only thing the darkroom has in common with a kitchen is a sink.  But the slant of the sink looks far more like an autopsy table than it does a kitchen.

Grasping for support, the appraiser noted a freezer was two rooms away in the basement.  Along with a washing machine and a dryer.  I am surprised that the appraiser did not conclude I was running a Chinese laundry in my basement.

His error has stalled the closing process.  Until the freezer is removed and someone checks the room for surreptitious natural gas outlets (outlets that exist only in his fevered mind), the closing cannot proceed.

On Monday, the Oregon Energy Trust will drag the freezer out of the basement -- and the closing process can get back on track.

Unless, of course, the appraiser uncovers a Communist spy cell in my basement.