It is Sunday morning.
Sun squeezes through delicate spider webs by an old stump.
Water seeps through screw holes in the tin roof of the guest house.
Children sing songs at Ms. Sue’s.
When you have little, you are happy with what little you have.
On this day, Gwen graduates from kindergarten at a local community center.
It takes some urging to go on stage with her aunt April, but she walks on and is recognized.There are recitations by some of the kids, comments by teacher’s and invited guests, a small lunch afterwards.
We have no crystal balls to know the future.
We hope Gwen has many graduation ceremonies, has dreams and achieves them, takes advantage of her abilities, compensates for her shortcomings, finds the people she needs to find.
By the end of the ceremony, balloons are broken or fly up and away into the coconut trees.
Proud parents and relatives walk home with one hand on a paper certificate, the other holding the hand of their future.
March is one of the dryer months on Marinduque but, even in March, it rains.
This is a morning rain that lasts an hour, steady. Rain runs off the tin roof and puddles in the yard. After thirty minutes, soil turns to a mud so thick you can’t shake it off your shoes.
We stay indoors and wait.
I listen to the rain make drumbeats on the roof.
Nature makes good music.
These guys and girls aren’t going hungry.
They are fed in the morning and in the afternoon with snacks in between meals to help them put on weight. They will eat as much as you give them and they always behave as if they are starving.
Alma washes out their cages several times a day and they get hosed down with well water to cool them down. Pigs are fair skinned and mosquitoes bite them awful so a little fire burns in front of their roofed, cinder block pens, the smoke chasing mosquito’s away.
When you come up to their cells the big ones stand up on their back feet,put their front feet on the top of the cinder block wall, stick their snouts towards you and oink. You have to be careful touching them because they can bite.
After pigs eat, they sleep for hours, and grow like babies, fed with dry food scientifically formulated for fast growth, lean meat, tasty meat.
When they get 90 kilos they will go to the market, but not to shop.
Not knowing your fate is a good thing.
If they knew they were going to become barbecue ribs, they would lose their appetites.
Trumpets are not quiet instruments.
In the Cancun Airport, Terminal Three, a trumpet and guitars serenade travelers arriving and departing from Mexico. The terminal is full of duty free shops, and, if you didn’t pick up gifts before, this is your last tax free shopping opportunity.
Mariachi music belongs to Mexico though Mexican taxi drivers often listen to Willie Nelson and Classic Rock. This knob of Yucatan, Mexico has more in common with the Caribbean than Mexico but this fiery Mariachi group plays their Mexican style music, in tune, with great expression and distinctive costumes.
Being a neighbor to the United States is like sleeping next to an elephant. When it rolls over you become sandwich spread.
I don’t want Mexico to become the United States and I don’t want the United States to just be a continuation of Mexico.
Maintaining your national identity, in an increasingly homogenized world, is a true work of love and an expression of freedom.
This music at the airport seems to capture the extroverted flavor of our southern neighbor in a nutshell and I sing along with the musicians in English, as they croon in Spanish.
There is room on the planet for all of us, and our differences.
Across the road from the Hemingway Romantic Eco-Cottages is an open air bar with picnic tables covered by Mexican tablecloths, salt and pepper shakers made with small Corona bottles, pithy signs and a cooking area where a chef makes tacos, a specialty of the house.
This VW bus, from the 60’s, has been painted, gutted, and parked in a visible location. Inside it, our waiter writes down our order, sits a moment on a small wooden bench, stands, adjusts his glasses, and, in due time, hustles his ticket over to the chef who is cleaning his grill.
This VW bus was driven down here in the 60’s and never made it home.
There are still people living in Tulum who came down, lost their passport, credit card, money and hangups, and stayed to the drum roll of the waves.
Fish, beef, chicken and pork are the four tacos featured tonight.
Joan has one of each and I have the rest.
Coming to Tulum was her idea, and it is a good one.
I call this jaunt a sparkling interlude moving to the bridge in a typical jazz standard with an AABA form.
At dinnertime, a pelican begins his dive.
He circles his target, turns himself into a projectile by tucking his wings to his body,and disappears head first into the surf. When he comes back to the water’s surface, he shakes his wings and recomposes, a fish struggling in his enormous beak.
Not long after, a fisherman wades into the pelican’s same fishing hole, net in hand, and the pelican takes off like a seaplane from an Alaskan lake.
The fisherman moves slowly, studies the waves, the light, the wind.
Positioning himself, he casts his handheld net with both hands,lets his net fall to the bottom, then draws it back towards him with a rope line, hand over hand. When he drags his net onto the beach it holds silvery fish twisting in the bright sunlight.
He and his friend transfer fish from the net into a plastic bag, then lift up and climb back on their bicycles and pedal home, the net draped over a bike’s handle bars to drip dry.
If you live simply, how much of the day needs to be used up working?
What is so important to us that we work sixty hours a week?
The sea changes like a model’s face.
One moment it is smooth as glass all the way to the horizon, the meeting of water and sky straight as a pencil line drawn by laying a ruler down. The horizon is so straight that you believe the world is flat like old explorers believed and imagine their fear as superstitious sailors neared the edge of their world, as they knew it.
On good days, the water is turquoise, clear, and you can see white sand twenty feet underneath blue waves.
Palm trees move in the wind like a sea of jungle ants scavenging on the jungle floor. Leaves in the canopy move all directions and it is difficult to see what direction the wind comes until you look at the slant of the tree trunks.
It is no lucky accident Mayan royalty built their retreat here but they had no idea it would become a tourist zone for foreigners looking for paradise outside their own urban concrete and steel jungles.
The Mayan’s couldn’t totally duplicate, in their culture ,the richness of what they saw around them, but they could and did pay homage to the God’s that led them here.
Imitation is, a famous wit once explained, the greatest form of flattery.
Elvis Presley was a star and shone bright in Tinseltown for decades. In his Elvis impersonator show, Danny Vernon croons, tells jokes, moves his hips, loves on the audience.
Some of these fans saw Elvis himself in Las Vegas, watched his hips while he turned Rock an Roll into a money making machine. A good impersonator brings back old magic and Danny gives glimpses of the King.
This show is almost two hours and Elvis would approve.
Afterwards, Danny poses for pictures with the ladies, like Elvis did.
The ladies, old enough to be grandmothers, are giggly and reach for his sequins.
Even after death, Elvis casts a big shadow.
Some people grow bigger than life, even after they have vanished.
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