The little cigar making room, entered through a small corner tobacco shop in the Zona Colonia, has four men inside. One is reading the paper, another is watching the cigars being made, two men are working – making cigars, by hand, one at a time.
” He is muy rapidio, ” I remark.
” He can do 300 in a day if we don’t talk to him, ” one of the non-workers says.
By the look on both men’s faces, who are working, they must be paid by the cigar. They are intent on what they are doing, responsible for making cigars so people that smoke them won’t smoke any flaws.
This workplace smells like tobacco.Tobacco leaves, dry and thin, are clumped around a press on the floor. There are pieces of leaves on the desk of the man in the gold colored shirt, and more on the work table of the man in the blue shirt.. It appears the two workers make a team. One man makes the rough cigars, stores them in a wood sleeve that the other man pulls to his table and finishes. The tools both men use are simple and not any different from what either might have used a hundred years ago to do the same job.
I watch the finish man pick several cigars up from his finished stack to check the smoking end to make sure, once lit, the cigar will draw air and keep its combustion.
These men take pride in their work.
If I was a cigar smoker, I would like to smoke the ones they are making this day I am watching them.
Men will turn themselves into machines if it profits them, but men, bottom line, were never made to be machines.
These are a pair of Scott’s work shoes from when he used to work hard.
Instead of being covered with paint, which was Scott’s trade when public school teaching became intolerable,one of these shoes has residue from floor tile adhesive on its toe.
The problem with these shoes comes up in Caribbean or Latin American countries where shoe shine hustlers want to clean them on sight. They swoop down out of nowhere and are fiddling with my shoes before I can wave them off.
Part of travel is using precautions. Make a copy of your Passport to show to people in lieu of the real thing. Don’t wear flashy jewelry. Don’t tell strangers where you live. Don’t drink water, except bottled. Go in groups at night. Don’t do things abroad you wouldn’t do at home. Get all your shots. Use sunscreen. Use local currency. Don’t insert yourself into police business or arguments between men and women.
My newest precaution, added to this list, is going to be to clean this adhesive off my shoe.
I could wear my Croc’s but they are the worst walking foot wear ever created.
There is a Postal Service in the Dominican Republic but it is either not used, not trusted, or not helpful to the citizens in this old colonial neighborhood.
In the United States, our Post Office is maligned with carriers driving expensive Post Office vehicles, wearing special uniforms, driving to each box instead of walking, possessing good government benefits and retirements, hard to get hired unless you know someone with pull on the inside or you are a woman or minority.
In the Dominican Republic mail goes missing, and, from personal inspection, houses and businesses here don’t even have mail boxes to deposit letters and bills even if someone was delivering it properly.
Therefore, utility bills are delivered, door to door, by a tall friendly man wearing a white shirt with an electric company logo over his left shirt pocket. He stops this morning to visit his customers as he delivers their bills personally, and, if no one is home, stuffs his electric company bill into their locked security doors, rolled up like a small handbill.
For those of us who like to mail ourselves a letter to tell ourselves how great we are, the Dominican Republic is not a good choice.
The best thing is you don’t read about Dominican Republic postal workers shooting up their former workplace with automatic weapons.
Working for the Post Office, in the United States, is a job that some still continue to ” die for. ”
When I remark that I have a cold, Yuri asks if I want some ” Mama Juana? ”
” I don’t want marijuana, ” I answer.
” No, ” she laughs, ” Mama Juana. It is a local drink, good for colds. ”
Berluis shows me a jug which looks like it is filled with bark off a tree, which, it turns out, is. Research says this alcoholic drink was concocted by local Taino Indians who put rum, red wine,honey, herbs, and bark in a jug to make a happy time drink.The drink is good for colds, flu, digestion, circulation, and cleaning the blood.
” It won’t hurt me? ”
Yuri shakes her head ” no” and Berluis pours us all a little into plastic cups, not unlike my golfing crew’s ” birdie juice ” cups.
We drink to the Dominican Republic, and, happily, no ill effects have been noticed.
The alcohol content is subdued and the drink is sweet, not unlike Jamaica Tea.
” You can’t say, ” Yuri explains, ” You have been to the Dominican Republic without trying Mama Juana. ”
People don’t need to have a health reason to drink but having a real cold makes this sampling real good for me.
Learning about local traditions is always a plus, especially when they taste so good.
We listen to a lot of talking heads but this guy actually makes sense.
As an employer, you don’t have to pay his wages, retirement, medical benefits or deal with his personal issues that cost you money. Fred stays where you put him and does as he is programmed. He won’t steal from you, misrepresent what your business does, and always dresses appropriately.
As a traveler, Fred gives me information I can use, and, he is easy to walk away from.
As a watcher of trends, Fred seems, to me, to be a harbinger of our coming dystopian future.
When we listen to ” fake people ” we have already been positioned where someone else wants us.
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” Tumbling Tumbleweeds” is a Roy Rodgers cowboy song, sung around the campfire with fellow cowhands on a starry night, with a crackling fire, when the herd is quiet and coyotes are howling harmony.
The song’s lyrics are plaintive as the western landscapes shared by cowboys, Indians, outlaws, and cattle.
” See them tumbling down/Pledging their love to the ground/Lonely, but free, I’ll be found/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
Cares of the past are behind/Nowhere to go, but I’ll find/Just where the trail will wind/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
I know when night has gone/That a new world’s born at dawn/I’ll keep rolling along/Deep in my heart is a song/Here on the range I belong/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds… ”
The last lines of the song crawl into my tent and bite me.
We all have songs to sing, but tumbling is what I like to do the most.
My last conversation with a skeleton was at an Albuquerque Starbucks, on Halloween.
Before that, I shared a sidewalk bench one sunny afternoon, with a man of bones in Tulum, Mexico.
Today, outside the Kaktus Brewing Company in Bernalillo, New Mexico, another set of bones greets me.
I wouldn’t swear to it but I believe this skeletons right toe is tapping to the music in perfect four four time.
Good blues can bring back the dead, but they often make us feel like we want to die first.
It’s always bad luck to walk past a skeleton without tipping your hat.
This rock, more than a stone but not a boulder, in Embudo Canyon in the Albuquerque foothills, has been moved onto the trail, by something other than wind, water or wishes.
It appears to have been lifted from a nearby mound of dirt. Where the rock used to be, on the mound, is a small hole that matches it’s size perfectly.
” Let’s move it back, ” Alex laughs.
If we move the rock back will some cosmic order be disturbed? Has moving rocks become against the law in an open space monitored by cameras and posted signs? Maybe the rock likes it here closer to the trail and doesn’t want to go back to where it was?
We keep walking quickly through this crime scene.
This situation has man’s dirty fingerprints all over it and I’m not putting things right.
Not wanting to get involved is a perfectly normal thing to do these days.
This group belongs in cabarets in Berlin, London, Paris, after World War 2, without the smoke, SS Officers and floozies.
A first response to new music is often to discount or find faults with it because it is new. Another response is to recognize new music as new, overpraise it, and find no faults at all.
I leave criticism in my back pocket. If all music were the same, or all posts, or all websites, or all opinions, or all people, it would be a sadder world.
During one of the songs, vocalist Tina Panera, holds a hat up and sings a sad song about ” this old hat..”
I am enchanted.and drop a crisp bill into Tina’s old hat so she can buy herself a less comfortable new one.
Musicians know lots about tip jars, old hats, sad songs, war and peace, love, injustice.
You hear some great music in airports when you least expect it.
I’m getting whisked back on a time trip in the Albuquerque Sunport International Airport and I don’t even have to go through security or board a plane.
Wars experienced vicariously are much better than those you have to fight in.
Starbucks in my city are ubiquitous.
For a couple of bucks for fresh coffee I can mingle with tech savvy people who lean towards globalism, free healthcare for all, living wage checks from Uncle Sam, electric cars.
This morning, in my local Starbucks parking lot, a horned toad occupies a Toyota car hood waiting for his chauffeur to bring him a Frappe.
The truck has a locked security cover over its bed because Albuquerque is a “Breaking Bad ” city and wise people here lock their doors, always.
Crime, these days, is on all our lip’s but the conditions that breed crime here won’t be fixed soon. Crime was once a morality problem but it is now talked about as an economic/social problem. Our Mayor assures us that If we pump enough money towards our crime and homeless issues, and do better with rehabilitation, things will be hunky dory.
This little guy doesn’t nod at me as I go by. He reminds me of a green gecko I once glued to the hood of my painter’s truck, a synthetic stuccoed Mitsubishi ” Mighty Max. ” He reminds of the beautiful green gecko on the front porch screen door of my quarters in Ms. Sue’s Haiti Children’s Home.
Why, I keep wondering, do I keep running into the same things, the same people, the same ideas, in different places, across time?
I’m sure this horned toad has an answer, but this morning he doesn’t share it.
If a horned toad likes Frappes,though, I’m believing I should give them a try.
Trying to get through the day without coffee, for horned toads and humans, is fraught with disappointment.
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