Vacation is almost over (thank god)
So, I will permit myself this one last rant before the new year, before I become the woman that I want to be… the one that I am proud of and not the pathetic one that I don’t like very much… yes, before that women re-emerges gorgeous, shining from the smoldering ash, brilliant… of course… I want to recall the last trip we took as a family, before, that is, the moving trip - which hardly counts, or has to be told some other time.
Let me preface this with a note of gratitude, a bit chagrined, but gracious just the same… Now that all my finances are back in order (more or less) I must give thanks to the wallet snatcher of Veracruz, who so kindly emailed Miguel several months later to see if he needed the contents, because his actions precluded my need to flag our credit reports this time around as it had been done last year. So there. Always something good out of something bad, I say.
Kirsten and Joe had sent the wedding information nearly a year in advance, and so I had decided that the end of August was absolutely reserved for the wedding of one of my dearest friends, despite the rocky start that she and my now husband had suffered upon her visit to Mexico when I sprung on her that I was pregnant. I say rocky, but spiny might be a better descriptor, the bristling mutual mistrust and the opposing viewpoints about what was best for me. But of course, all that was ancient history. She “forgave” me for having a baby, I forgave her for being conflicted about it and he decided that she was ok after all when she visited and my 2-month-old daughter fell asleep in her arms. To the wedding we were headed.
Meanwhile the months went on. Early mornings dragging myself from bed at 5 to shower and race outside, hair forming popsicle-like frozen tendrils that hung in spiraled shards, and heat the car or scrape the snow in mid-winter blackness. The lack of sun was compounded by my being trapped within the walls of a public institution, one in which I was supposed to be the rule-enforcer, despite my decided apathy for the upholding of all but the most basic rules of mutual respect. Honestly, what did I care if the kids wanted to smoke a joint in their car during lunch, or ditch class here and there. I would have done the same if not for the fact that I actually _loved_ class, it was all the other social crap in high school that I dreaded. I was an utter failure at cafeteria duty because I refused to harass the students about their potty-mouths (heck, fuck is one of my favorite words) or to chastise their mildly-amusing food fights or gambling ventures. Yeah, as far as I was concerned, as long as no one was injuring anyone, lunch was time for them (and me) to be free. Some days, when it was overcast, I really didn’t see the sun at all, other days, I would have about an hour between when I left school to pick up the child from day care and the sun sinking behind the pines. Travel plans always happen when one is at her most desperate. My husband was working on a degree in graphic design, and working for the State Council on the Arts as an artist-in-residence during the school year, so he and I were conveniently off for the long summer months. I debated working as an exchange-program coordinator like I had the summer before, but decided that I preferred my sanity to several thousand dollars and somewhere around mid March we decided that we would spend the summer in Mexico looping through California just in time to arrive for pre-school-year workshops and the opening of classes. We purchased the tickets through STA, conveniently discounting both students and teachers, and embarked on a 7 week vacation.
Now some people might think that seven weeks of vacation sounds like heaven, but let me tell you, there is nothing fun about having nothing to do but lounge around for seven weeks, especially when all you can do is watch your paltry bank account diminish daily. The thing about Mexico is this: the cost of living is lower, which is in line with the earning potential of most jobs – a relatively balanced economy, it would seem, BUT… that is for your basic needs, food, clothing, housing etc. All of the extras, like going to the movies or out to dinner, and travel, however, are much more in line with American prices, making these things almost inaccessible to the average Mexican, but so indispensable for us that we didn’t really realize how much we were going through until it was too late. That and of course the end of the trip required renting a car and driving it from San Francisco up to Arcata and then back down in time to catch the flight.
This would be a perfect trip, we decided to scout the Universidad Veracruzana, and maybe the next year would be the year we would finally move back to Mexico for good? Melissa had finished the school year, teaching with me, and had just moved to Xalapa to be with her now husband Oscar, so it seemed like a perfect plan, we would spend some time in DF, some time in Yautepec, take a course on the history of Muralism from pre-Colombian times to present that his mother, the art history teacher, had prepared for me and that I actually got to pay her with public school funds as part of my staff development. We visited with “La Comuna” we visited with family, we stayed in the apartment in Tlahuac which was part of the Villa Centroamericana – short-term housing solution to host the Central American games in the late 80’s that had somehow morphed into permanent housing for thousands. Back in Yautepec there had been a flood, the same yearly flood that used to be on a three-year cycle. The family’s house stood white and glistening next to the river, and with the rainy season, the water mark that was left arrived roughly at my shoulder. And Pepe, his stepfather lost 90% of his recent work just prior to a one-man exhibition. When we arrived there were still canvases spread all over the house, the back wrought iron stairway and the grass, having been power sprayed and left to dry in the hope of salvation. We had missed this adventure, by just one week, but its repercussions were clear in the dusty town, and they manifested themselves just a few weeks later in our very own organisms.
Days stretched out into weeks. We visited murals in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Secretaria de Educación Pública and in several other public buildings in the city. We made an excursion to Tepotzotlán to the Museo del Virreinato on our way to Teotihuacan. We got waylaid in heavy traffic in Ecatepec, the most horribly industrialized zone in all of Mexico on our way to Teotihuacan, and ended up staying, quite unexpectedly, with his aunt and uncle who work for the INAH on site in the town. It was a fortuitous accident of fate because they have spent the last 30 years on this particular archeological site and they had access to murals not open to the public. We saw the most incredible Tlalocan that was just recently restored, and for which Miguel (his uncle) was responsible, at least in so far as archiving all the images. We returned to Yautepec, a four hour drive, only to start feeling a bit ill. It was then that I got the message from Kirsten. Or rather first from my mom, that she had left a message on my answering machine sounding sad. (I think I knew then and there, there was this prescient dread that formed a knot in my stomach). She confirmed the bad news in my throes of sickness, the wedding was off, and Joe was going to become a Buddhist monk.
The weekend that was coming we were planning on the three of us going to see Melissa in Xalapa, and visiting the Universidad, but then Miguel (my husband) got very sick to his stomach. This of course is common when the river overflows, all kinds of unpleasant and foreign microbes are stirred and no one is really safe, much less those of us whose intestinal flora are lulled by insipidly safe American food. We thought he would be better in time to leave by Tuesday, but just as he was starting to feel better, both the nena and I fell very ill, so much so that I couldn’t even walk to the corner store to buy her paletas de limón for rehydration purposes (also, everyone thinks I am a freak in Mexico because giving something cold to a person with a fever is the ultimate no-no…I am just happy to get fluids into her… but then, maybe folk wisdom isn’t totally bunk? I am not yet convinced). I couldn’t even get half a block up the street to call Melissa because every time I made it to the police officer’s caseta (reminiscent of here in Santa Barbara where you can’t get into a neighborhood without special permission or a goddamn transponder, but rather more rustic) I had to turn around and make a dead sprint for the bathroom. This was bearable but the baby (ok, not so baby) had a high fever and we ended up both going to the hospital/ emergency clinic just to get a prescription for lactobacillus and some generic antibiotic that we could have gotten over-the-counter (pharmacies are a good deal more lax in Mexico). The doctor suggested that once her fever was back down, we should check her for a heart murmur. A heart murmur?! Why had no one ever caught this at her yearly physicals? Doctors… you just can’t trust them, can you?
Needless to say, our departure was postponed until Friday, we stopped in Puebla and spent a few days and then arrived in Xalapa. Sadly, the University had just closed for the summer the Friday before. We took a cab to the Facultad de letras, but, perhaps due to its lifeless state, or the fact that there were piles of trash everywhere the eye could see, we decided that Xalapa was not going to do it for us. Just goes to show you, a case of the runs can change the course of your life. I decided that I definitely did want to go back to school, and that the coming trip to California would allow us the chance to scope out schools in the bay area, especially now that Kirsten was going to come down to not be in town on the day of the wedding that wasn’t. We visited with Melissa, still struggling with adjusting to her limited earning power as an English teacher and living with her “cuñada” instead of her novio, and we left her with something of the same stomach illness that we had just barely managed to kick.
Next on to el Puerto de Veracruz… and this is where it happened. The mid-August heat was oppressive, especially coupled with the thick humidity that left rivulets of sweat running down your neck if you stepped outside. Our money was quickly vanishing, and so, beyond having lecheros at La Parroquia, we were trying to fly low on the radar. We found a hotel with a pool on the interior patio, but our stinginess was outshined only by our bad luck. We rented a non-air-conditioned room, for several hundred pesos a night less, but the sweltering heat made it almost unbearable and by the third morning all we wanted to do was be back at home. Home home, not California, but good old Manchester, NH in our microscopic two-bedroom apartment, with our own stuff and pillows and bed and air-conditioning. Alas, that very morning Miguel’s wallet was nowhere to be found. When we replayed the events of the evening before, leaving Sanborn’s, escaping food that made us feel ill, he was putting his wallet away as we walked into the open-aired central plaza, a gorgeous plaza, the oldest colonial plaza in Mexico. It was there, we decided, that a young guy who brushed by him, managed to snag his wallet. Thank god I always keep his green card with travel documents (even though he is supposed to have it on him at all times says the unpleasant man at customs). The closing shots of Veracruz, are of me, at a public phone, shouting hysterically at my mom, asking her to contact the bank because I can’t get through and canceling all of his credit cards, Isabella pulling at my skirt, Miguel looking really pissed and impotently so, and the sweat and blinding heat…
We spent one more week in Mexico, arrived in San Francisco, spent three nights in Oakland, me driving everywhere in the rental car, Miguel having no license to drive – gone, too, with the mystery wallet. I visited some universities and we decided that California was definitely a possibility. We met Kirsten at Berkley, and we all stayed with Becca and Adrian at their house in Concord. On the day of doom and gloom we went sailing on a lake inland and Kirsten has all my respect and admiration as a human being, she not only held up amazingly well, but made a joke about the whole absurd situation over ice-cream on the way back. Two more days and we spent the last night at a motel near the airport. We were exhausted but decided to go out for Indian food. My last night of rental car nerves, and we drove fifteen minutes to San Mateo, pulled into an open spot. Got up from the car and my wallet was not in my purse! Oh my GOD! I can’t take it. We turned around, in a state of near panic, I raced up the flight of outdoor stairs, hands smacking the whitewashed railings. I opened the motel room door with such force that the curtains lifted with the vacuum I had created. There it was, beautiful, shining, black. My wallet was still there. Anger was once again averted or converted into laughter. We drove back to the Indian restaurant, sat down and indulged, very much like this evening.
And the next day, it was all over. Thank goodness for work and the end of vacation!
Let me preface this with a note of gratitude, a bit chagrined, but gracious just the same… Now that all my finances are back in order (more or less) I must give thanks to the wallet snatcher of Veracruz, who so kindly emailed Miguel several months later to see if he needed the contents, because his actions precluded my need to flag our credit reports this time around as it had been done last year. So there. Always something good out of something bad, I say.
Kirsten and Joe had sent the wedding information nearly a year in advance, and so I had decided that the end of August was absolutely reserved for the wedding of one of my dearest friends, despite the rocky start that she and my now husband had suffered upon her visit to Mexico when I sprung on her that I was pregnant. I say rocky, but spiny might be a better descriptor, the bristling mutual mistrust and the opposing viewpoints about what was best for me. But of course, all that was ancient history. She “forgave” me for having a baby, I forgave her for being conflicted about it and he decided that she was ok after all when she visited and my 2-month-old daughter fell asleep in her arms. To the wedding we were headed.
Meanwhile the months went on. Early mornings dragging myself from bed at 5 to shower and race outside, hair forming popsicle-like frozen tendrils that hung in spiraled shards, and heat the car or scrape the snow in mid-winter blackness. The lack of sun was compounded by my being trapped within the walls of a public institution, one in which I was supposed to be the rule-enforcer, despite my decided apathy for the upholding of all but the most basic rules of mutual respect. Honestly, what did I care if the kids wanted to smoke a joint in their car during lunch, or ditch class here and there. I would have done the same if not for the fact that I actually _loved_ class, it was all the other social crap in high school that I dreaded. I was an utter failure at cafeteria duty because I refused to harass the students about their potty-mouths (heck, fuck is one of my favorite words) or to chastise their mildly-amusing food fights or gambling ventures. Yeah, as far as I was concerned, as long as no one was injuring anyone, lunch was time for them (and me) to be free. Some days, when it was overcast, I really didn’t see the sun at all, other days, I would have about an hour between when I left school to pick up the child from day care and the sun sinking behind the pines. Travel plans always happen when one is at her most desperate. My husband was working on a degree in graphic design, and working for the State Council on the Arts as an artist-in-residence during the school year, so he and I were conveniently off for the long summer months. I debated working as an exchange-program coordinator like I had the summer before, but decided that I preferred my sanity to several thousand dollars and somewhere around mid March we decided that we would spend the summer in Mexico looping through California just in time to arrive for pre-school-year workshops and the opening of classes. We purchased the tickets through STA, conveniently discounting both students and teachers, and embarked on a 7 week vacation.
Now some people might think that seven weeks of vacation sounds like heaven, but let me tell you, there is nothing fun about having nothing to do but lounge around for seven weeks, especially when all you can do is watch your paltry bank account diminish daily. The thing about Mexico is this: the cost of living is lower, which is in line with the earning potential of most jobs – a relatively balanced economy, it would seem, BUT… that is for your basic needs, food, clothing, housing etc. All of the extras, like going to the movies or out to dinner, and travel, however, are much more in line with American prices, making these things almost inaccessible to the average Mexican, but so indispensable for us that we didn’t really realize how much we were going through until it was too late. That and of course the end of the trip required renting a car and driving it from San Francisco up to Arcata and then back down in time to catch the flight.
This would be a perfect trip, we decided to scout the Universidad Veracruzana, and maybe the next year would be the year we would finally move back to Mexico for good? Melissa had finished the school year, teaching with me, and had just moved to Xalapa to be with her now husband Oscar, so it seemed like a perfect plan, we would spend some time in DF, some time in Yautepec, take a course on the history of Muralism from pre-Colombian times to present that his mother, the art history teacher, had prepared for me and that I actually got to pay her with public school funds as part of my staff development. We visited with “La Comuna” we visited with family, we stayed in the apartment in Tlahuac which was part of the Villa Centroamericana – short-term housing solution to host the Central American games in the late 80’s that had somehow morphed into permanent housing for thousands. Back in Yautepec there had been a flood, the same yearly flood that used to be on a three-year cycle. The family’s house stood white and glistening next to the river, and with the rainy season, the water mark that was left arrived roughly at my shoulder. And Pepe, his stepfather lost 90% of his recent work just prior to a one-man exhibition. When we arrived there were still canvases spread all over the house, the back wrought iron stairway and the grass, having been power sprayed and left to dry in the hope of salvation. We had missed this adventure, by just one week, but its repercussions were clear in the dusty town, and they manifested themselves just a few weeks later in our very own organisms.
Days stretched out into weeks. We visited murals in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Secretaria de Educación Pública and in several other public buildings in the city. We made an excursion to Tepotzotlán to the Museo del Virreinato on our way to Teotihuacan. We got waylaid in heavy traffic in Ecatepec, the most horribly industrialized zone in all of Mexico on our way to Teotihuacan, and ended up staying, quite unexpectedly, with his aunt and uncle who work for the INAH on site in the town. It was a fortuitous accident of fate because they have spent the last 30 years on this particular archeological site and they had access to murals not open to the public. We saw the most incredible Tlalocan that was just recently restored, and for which Miguel (his uncle) was responsible, at least in so far as archiving all the images. We returned to Yautepec, a four hour drive, only to start feeling a bit ill. It was then that I got the message from Kirsten. Or rather first from my mom, that she had left a message on my answering machine sounding sad. (I think I knew then and there, there was this prescient dread that formed a knot in my stomach). She confirmed the bad news in my throes of sickness, the wedding was off, and Joe was going to become a Buddhist monk.
The weekend that was coming we were planning on the three of us going to see Melissa in Xalapa, and visiting the Universidad, but then Miguel (my husband) got very sick to his stomach. This of course is common when the river overflows, all kinds of unpleasant and foreign microbes are stirred and no one is really safe, much less those of us whose intestinal flora are lulled by insipidly safe American food. We thought he would be better in time to leave by Tuesday, but just as he was starting to feel better, both the nena and I fell very ill, so much so that I couldn’t even walk to the corner store to buy her paletas de limón for rehydration purposes (also, everyone thinks I am a freak in Mexico because giving something cold to a person with a fever is the ultimate no-no…I am just happy to get fluids into her… but then, maybe folk wisdom isn’t totally bunk? I am not yet convinced). I couldn’t even get half a block up the street to call Melissa because every time I made it to the police officer’s caseta (reminiscent of here in Santa Barbara where you can’t get into a neighborhood without special permission or a goddamn transponder, but rather more rustic) I had to turn around and make a dead sprint for the bathroom. This was bearable but the baby (ok, not so baby) had a high fever and we ended up both going to the hospital/ emergency clinic just to get a prescription for lactobacillus and some generic antibiotic that we could have gotten over-the-counter (pharmacies are a good deal more lax in Mexico). The doctor suggested that once her fever was back down, we should check her for a heart murmur. A heart murmur?! Why had no one ever caught this at her yearly physicals? Doctors… you just can’t trust them, can you?
Needless to say, our departure was postponed until Friday, we stopped in Puebla and spent a few days and then arrived in Xalapa. Sadly, the University had just closed for the summer the Friday before. We took a cab to the Facultad de letras, but, perhaps due to its lifeless state, or the fact that there were piles of trash everywhere the eye could see, we decided that Xalapa was not going to do it for us. Just goes to show you, a case of the runs can change the course of your life. I decided that I definitely did want to go back to school, and that the coming trip to California would allow us the chance to scope out schools in the bay area, especially now that Kirsten was going to come down to not be in town on the day of the wedding that wasn’t. We visited with Melissa, still struggling with adjusting to her limited earning power as an English teacher and living with her “cuñada” instead of her novio, and we left her with something of the same stomach illness that we had just barely managed to kick.
Next on to el Puerto de Veracruz… and this is where it happened. The mid-August heat was oppressive, especially coupled with the thick humidity that left rivulets of sweat running down your neck if you stepped outside. Our money was quickly vanishing, and so, beyond having lecheros at La Parroquia, we were trying to fly low on the radar. We found a hotel with a pool on the interior patio, but our stinginess was outshined only by our bad luck. We rented a non-air-conditioned room, for several hundred pesos a night less, but the sweltering heat made it almost unbearable and by the third morning all we wanted to do was be back at home. Home home, not California, but good old Manchester, NH in our microscopic two-bedroom apartment, with our own stuff and pillows and bed and air-conditioning. Alas, that very morning Miguel’s wallet was nowhere to be found. When we replayed the events of the evening before, leaving Sanborn’s, escaping food that made us feel ill, he was putting his wallet away as we walked into the open-aired central plaza, a gorgeous plaza, the oldest colonial plaza in Mexico. It was there, we decided, that a young guy who brushed by him, managed to snag his wallet. Thank god I always keep his green card with travel documents (even though he is supposed to have it on him at all times says the unpleasant man at customs). The closing shots of Veracruz, are of me, at a public phone, shouting hysterically at my mom, asking her to contact the bank because I can’t get through and canceling all of his credit cards, Isabella pulling at my skirt, Miguel looking really pissed and impotently so, and the sweat and blinding heat…
We spent one more week in Mexico, arrived in San Francisco, spent three nights in Oakland, me driving everywhere in the rental car, Miguel having no license to drive – gone, too, with the mystery wallet. I visited some universities and we decided that California was definitely a possibility. We met Kirsten at Berkley, and we all stayed with Becca and Adrian at their house in Concord. On the day of doom and gloom we went sailing on a lake inland and Kirsten has all my respect and admiration as a human being, she not only held up amazingly well, but made a joke about the whole absurd situation over ice-cream on the way back. Two more days and we spent the last night at a motel near the airport. We were exhausted but decided to go out for Indian food. My last night of rental car nerves, and we drove fifteen minutes to San Mateo, pulled into an open spot. Got up from the car and my wallet was not in my purse! Oh my GOD! I can’t take it. We turned around, in a state of near panic, I raced up the flight of outdoor stairs, hands smacking the whitewashed railings. I opened the motel room door with such force that the curtains lifted with the vacuum I had created. There it was, beautiful, shining, black. My wallet was still there. Anger was once again averted or converted into laughter. We drove back to the Indian restaurant, sat down and indulged, very much like this evening.
And the next day, it was all over. Thank goodness for work and the end of vacation!
posted by ilana at 8:53 p.m.
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