When you walk in Tulum, you become accustomed to meeting bones.
There are full fledged skeletons sitting on park benches, skulls with sunglasses and jaunty caps on shop shelves, brightly colored ceramic skulls with smiling teeth and bulging eyes. It is February and Halloween has long since been packed away in warehouses.
In Mexico and other warm climates, death is never packed away. It is on display and in your face as you sip coffee, have a pina colada on the beach, drive in a taxi to a tantalizing tourist adventure.
I sit next to this fellow and have a conversation about the best beer in town.
He tells me he misses drinking,going fishing, his wife and kids.
He tells me he doesn’t have much advice, but his all time best advice is that ” people hang themselves in their own nooses.”
I ask him, gently, what noose caught him?
He turns and smiles at me with good teeth, and says, ” You got an hour? ”
Today, the exchange rate is nineteen pesos to a dollar.
Along the Hotel Zone strip, ATM’s, when they are working, dispense pesos or dollars. If you need money, you walk, bike, or drive to a little pitched roof shack on the main road not far from the Hemingway Eco Cottages.
At the bottom of the front barred window in the shack is a little slot through which the girl behind the window pushes me a small cardboard box just big enough for my dollars. I push the box back through the slot to her and wait. Inside, she has a calculator, a money box, a chair, papers and a pen balanced on her right ear. She counts out pesos, puts them in the cardboard box along with a printed receipt on top of the money, and slides the box back out to me.
The U.S. dollar is strong today so the exchange rate is nineteen to one. The weakest currency is the Canadian dollar. The strongest currencies are the British pound and the Euro. In this money game, the more pesos I get for my dollars, the cheaper vacation I get.
When the girl in the booth sees me, I get a bright smile from her.
I always leave her a tip and she hasn’t made one mistake.
Is handling money all day and not getting to keep any the same as walking in the desert with a canteen and not being able to drink
Tulum has two faces.
There is the Hotel Zone which is a strip of bars, restaurants, hotels,and retail shops along the main road running along the beach all the way south to a biosphere nature preserve called Sian Kian. Then there is the Mexican town of Tulum where locals live. You can find tourists in the town of Tulum and locals in the Hotel Zone, but each is a different slice of Mexican pie.
This restaurant,Matteo’s, is in the Hotel Zone, towards the north end, and features, according to the sign, ” The Best Fish Tacos on Earth. ”
When questioned, these two kids maintain that the tacos are really the best in the Universe, but agree this would be difficult to prove since Mexico doesn’t send up space ships to verify.
In mid day, the restaurant is doing good business and fish tacos are swimming out of the kitchen.The kids give a thumbs up and let their picture be taken. I’ll be back for the best tacos on Earth.
Who would turn down such an opportunity?
Shuffleboard is more cut throat than it appears.
Before these players take a shot, they consult, put chalk on their hands,look at the weather, visualize their stride.
You are the one responsible for propelling your disc down a slick, treacherous court. You live or die by your own hand.
In this game, strength is not needed, but steady nerves, strategy, and touch are critical. Your only uniform is a good pair of tennis shoes, loose fitting clothes and a cap.
There is no crying here because these are grownups who know the odds, and the score.
The only thing harder than playing shuffleboard here is playing shuffleboard on a cruise ship, with rough waves.
I wouldn’t play shuffleboard against any of these old people, man or woman.
I know sharks when I see them and old sharks are particularly dangerous.
We spend lots of time waiting in our lives.
We wait to be born and wait to be buried, wait to graduate, wait to raise kids, pay off a mortgage, retire, serve and be served,break par, get money back on our taxes.
If we are lucky the line keeps moving and we have more people behind us, than ahead.
This line started forty five minutes before six, the scheduled time for the chili fundraiser for the Lapidary Club. In the auditorium, attendees visit old friends and make new ones. You would think that with less time left in their hourglass old people would be in a bigger hurry.
The Chili Fundraiser is a success.
The chili isn’t spicy enough for some but we’ll wait till next time to see if the chefs get bolder. The older we get the more bland our food has to be.
Raising funds is always a challenge, but tonight they SOLD all their tickets.
People watching beats television any time.
Desert nights get cooler than desert days.
In the winter, day temperatures can rise to the eighties, but, at night, they can drop to the forties. Park models have propane or electric heat and RV’s are not immune from Mother Nature’s mood swings. When the sun drops you need a jacket, a flashlight, and a heater.
” Call this number and put it where the delivery truck can see it, ” are my Tuesday morning instructions at the RV park office.
I am given a four by six inch piece of orange card stock with a place to write my name, my space number, and the date of my request.
ARIZONA PROPANE takes up most of the card space with barely room for their phone number and website. I call, give credit card information, get scheduled for delivery on Wednesday between eight and ten.
Wednesday morning at ten forty five, the delivery truck pulls up and its driver runs a hose to my propane tank, fills it, and writes a ticket for the minimum charge of five gallons and a five dollar service fee. The bill is $20.00.
” That will keep you warm, ” the kid says, as he rolls his supply hose back onto a reel on the back of the company truck.
From my space he pulls across the street and services a three hundred thousand dollar recreational vehicle.
Being warm for twenty bucks is a bargain.
Spending three hundred thousand for anything on wheels seems like a walk on the wild side.
Most people love trains.
Just to the southeast of the main office at Rincon West RV Resort,in Tucson, runs the Rincon Railroad.
Sitting on a little hill, train conductors sit in lawn chairs with wireless controllers and run their trains through their make believe town. A train schedule is posted at the station, and, on this day, an engineer is trying to figure out why his train loses power in the turns. His wife is adding little plastic people to displays of Old West scenes in the miniature town, scenes that are now mostly found in kid’s books.
Trains helped settle the west and in early morning hours, in South Tucson, you hear real train whistles as big boy trains speed through pulling box cars of coal, shipping containers, and empty cattle cars.
In receding light this evening, this choo choo is not running much longer. The conductor and his wife need to fix dinner, sit around their front porch with neighbors talking about old days, listening to Glenn Miller on an old radio prized by antique hounds.
At the Rincon West Railroad Club you take a stroll back in time,
Playing with trains is something little kids and big kids have in common.
By eight in the morning, on a Saturday, a tournament is humming along.
The game is simple enough.
Each player has three discs and a stick. Each turn, a player pushes one of his disks down a slick court with his stick and tries to make his disc stop in one of the scoring areas marked inside a distant triangle. Each disc that stays in the top portion of the triangle is worth ten points. Further towards the base of the triangle, the points awarded are less. A player has to play offense, getting his disc in high scoring areas, and defense, knocking an opponent’s disc out of a scoring area.
” Each court is different, ” one of the onlookers tells me, ” and they break different ways. ”
This is a tournament between the Voyager RV Resort, on the other side of town, and the Rincon Rv Resort.Cursing is kept to a minimum because women are present and all know that tomorrow is another day. As players take their turns, scores are tallied. When the tournament is done there will be certificates awarded and losers will buy beer.
The throwing motion is slow and deliberate. A disc is cradled into the U shaped handle of the stick, the player pauses, takes two steps and leans forward, extends his straightened arm towards the distant triangle. It is a soft motion and the stick, properly used, never leaves the surface of the court. After your throw, you stand back and hope your opponent, who throws after you, doesn’t erase your effort.
This is a game one would think a five year old could play, but they aren’t skilled enough, or devious enough.
Old people might be old, but they aren’t without experience in duplicity.
It takes smarts to get to old age and no one, with any smarts, wants to spend winter in a cold place.
This winter I’m in Arizona again but I don’t try shuffleboard because I’m not old enough, yet.
In the San Francisco Convent Museo are a series of paintings that chronicle Nicaraguan history.
The paintings start with aboriginal peoples who first inhabit lands before they are claimed by anyone but God. Then paintings move, in book style, through discovery and founding, colonization, building and commerce, fights for independence, reconstruction and modernization.
These paintings wait for the arrival of a brand new brother or sister.
Maybe the next painting born will be of a new Panama Canal, through Nicaragua? Maybe the next will show the country moving from Socialist/Marxist group ideology to free market small business capitalism, the way the United States used to be before it lost it’s way.
People all over the world these days seem weary of their leaders.
People following their own drummer seems a healthier recipe than falling in step with someone else’s twenty year plan.
Ann’s art studio is also a gallery, a meeting place, a classroom, a resource of information, a great place to pick up a brush if you have an itch.
Studios, as opposed to galleries, are works in process.
There are finished and unfinished compositions on the walls, stacked in corners, left on easels. There are cans of brushes and rags, solvents and photographs of scenes that interest pinned to boards.The discussions here are about color, line, proportion, texture, what you want to say, how to put paint on a flat canvas to get a three dimensional shape and how to create art people want to buy.
Some of the works here have Nicaraguan scenes while others channel European or American traditions.
A studio is a place of discovery.
All these projects are around me, whispering, laughing, demanding attention, asking me to purchase them and find a place at home to show them off.
The pursuit of art is noble even if it gets messy and expensive.
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