Tailgating?

What have you seen for sale out of the back of someone's pickup truck parked on the side of the road? (Bullhorn optional)

-fish
-coffee
-tonics
-used clothes for the whole family
-bread
-ice cream cones
-all manner of fruit (mango, coconuts, papaya...)
-all manner of vegetables (corn, squash, garbanzos, lettuce...)
-raw meat (there's nothing like seeing cow carcasses bleeding on the tailgate to make me whip out my wallet!)
-tacos
-blankets
-mattresses
-children's furniture
-wooden chairs
-pirated dvds
-shoes
-sombreros
-wood planks and poles
-metal pipes
-raw shrimp

Piñatas

The thing about piñatas is that when the treats begin to fall children swarm, with no concern for the child or adult who is yet wielding the bat, and may still be swinging.

Yesterday we witnessed countless near misses as the shiny-eyed, hopped-up-on-sugar, candy-greedy pack of children rushed the four-year-old girl with the aggressive swing and relentless determination to see Piñata Diego go down!

Two Wheeled Love Affair

The last time I was on a bike I was nine months preggo.

The closest I've come to cycling in the last ten months was pedaling my baby's legs around to help him pass air. But today Hernan decided not to sell my bicycle (yet) and went to retrieve it from the man who thought he was buying it. (Yeah, I don't really know. That's just how it works around here.) We irresponsibly threw Hanix into his carry pack on Hernan's back and took off for Jocotepec.

Let me just say that we fell in love all over again. Me and my bicycle, I mean.

We rode to Joco on the newly paved and newly widened highway. We're still waiting for them to finish the ciclopista (bike path) alongside the highway, but in the meantime the road is pretty nice. They widened the highway so that now there is a lane and a half going in each direction. This extra half lane is, I assume, to make passing easier, and so that slow moving vehicles like old trucks, tractors and donkeys can stay to the side.

Hanix loved the ride. He smiled and watched the world go by, and then conked out and slept the rest of the way.

And mama loves bike rides too.

Once we came up on Jocotepec the roads got uglier, full of potholes and speed bumps and gravel, and traffic was much more chaotic. We bought bags of juice, drank them in the plaza, and then rode home again.

Good day.

The end.

Sick, Skinny, and Toothless

I've mentioned before that I'm a terrible mother to my baby, and I'm regularly reminded of this by well-meaning family. That they tell me this doesn't surprise me, because on other occasions I've heard things like "I didn't like you at first, not at all. I said, 'she's too gringa for him. She'll never last.'" and "My kids are really ugly. They're so dark-skinned." and (to a cousin of the family) "Your older daughter is very pretty, but the younger one is kind of ugly, isn't she?" I've even heard a relative tell a mother her baby was ugly. Tell a mother her baby is ugly!? Isn't that a universal taboo? Not here!

So, I've been ready for the criticism. Here are some of the recent critiques directed at me.

He has ONLY two teeth. He's coming up on 9 month now, so he'd better hop-to. I mean, yeah, I agree that he'd better grow some more teeth at some point. It would be a sad thing to go through life with only two itty-bitty teeth. Can you imagine the teasing? He'd have a heck of a time getting a date. But I'm not concerned that he doesn't yet have a mouthful of teeth. My lack of concern, however, is just a sign of my negligence. I was recently told that not only is it alarming that he doesn't have more teeth, it's also a direct result of my bad parenting. First, I should have started giving him solid foods at three or four months to encourage the onset of tooth growth, because tooth growth only occurs if there is sufficient demand for it. Had I given him chewing gum, I assume, he'd have a whole shiny set of teeth by now. And second, he "isn't getting enough calcium". His near constant nursing plus all the food he eats (and holy smokes does this kid eat!) apparently have left him with a calcium deficiency, which his body has dealt with by putting tooth production on hold.

Nearly our whole household has been sick this month. We're nine people here, and all of us have been sick except the 96-year-old-strong-as-nails grandmother and my been-on-another-drinking-binge-for-two-weeks alcoholic-father-in-law. Go figure. The rest of us able-bodied young folk: sick. This includes my baby boy. And yet, even though all of us are sick, it's clear that he's sick only because I refuse to dress him in sufficiently warm clothing for the near-arctic temperatures we're experiencing. I'm totally nuts in thinking it's hot here, and my refusal to bundle my baby in hat and coat is clearly the reason he now has a runny nose. Poor darling.

Finally, he's not nearly the chubby wonder he was during the first seven months of his life. That's right, Mr. Tubby Rolls has slimmed down. Oh, he's still a heavy weight. The Internet informs me that he's still in the 98th weight percentile for his age, like he has been all along, but he recently grew longer and has been very active with his standing and walking and wounded-soldier crawling all over the house. So, you know, he has a neck now, and I no longer have to excavate the body lint out of his fat rolls. Still, this is a sign that I'm not feeding him enough and he's malnourished.

So there you have it. Bad mother.

On the upside, his great grandmother tells him he's very pretty and she will teach him to sew and that he'll be very good at making tortillas. So there's hope for him yet!

Soundtrack To My Life

The beer store across the street from my house opens around ten in the morning. Usually it's either the woman with the hyena laugh working there or a teenage boy who REALLY likes to blast Soulja Boy on the store stereo. On repeat. His record is "Kiss Me Through The Phone" twelve times in a row. Awful song. Makes me want to chuck beer cans at the store and yell crotchety old lady things, like "Turn that racket down" and "You call that music? It's a nuisance!"

Today the beer store is quiet.

BUT the new car parts store next door is filling the sound void with their music. They even have a speaker out front of the shop, because there's nothing like 80s pop hits from the US to compel motorists to pull over and stock up on motor oil and car fresheners.

Ah well. I'll take the variety of 80s pop hits over Soulja Boy on repeat any day. So, no complaints.

And, yes, I did say "out front of" once again. It seems this is wholly grammatical for me.

Contrail

When we lived in Mountain View we were close to so many airports that at any given moment we could find at least one plane in the sky. Often, looking up, we could spot two or three, along with all the criss-crossing white airplane skid marks they left in the sky. I remember that the sky was never free of these.

A few weeks after we moved to San Juan, a cousin grabbed me one day and pulled me outside to show me the plane flying overhead. "It's a plane!" she explained to me. She was clearly excited.

This morning I looked up at the sky during breakfast through one of our "windows" (a.k.a. "hole in the ceiling") and saw a white airplane trail in the sky.

It took me a moment to remember what it was.

Fregar Los Tepalcates

I like to get my dork on down here with words from Nahuatl and other indigenous languages. Many are place names, like Huejotitán, Tlaquepaque, and Ixtlahuacán. Aren't those just delicious words? Say it: Ixtlahuacán. Yummy. (Or, as Hernan would say, "Jummy".)

Other good examples are tlacuache (opossum), mapache (raccoon), zempasúchitl (marigold), chapopote (tar), and molcajete (mortar - as used in the kitchen to make delicious salsas). Many words are now a part of not only Mexican Spanish but also of English and of many other languages in the world. Consider tomato, chili, jicama, tequila, avocado, guacamole, chocolate, and chipotle. Not all borrowed words are about food, (e.g. coyote), but I'm hungry right now, so those are the ones that first come to mind.

This morning my mother-in-law said she was going to fregar los tepalcates, which means "wash the dishes". I'd heard neither fregar nor tepalcates before. Fregar is not from Nahuatl, but apparently tepalcates is. Besides "dishes", it also means, she explained to me, "broken shards of clay", as from a clay jar. She said when she was a girl she was always told to fregar los tepalcates. Now she usually says lavar los trastes..

Nearby in San Juan is an orphanage, she said that sometimes some girls come down from there to buy items from her shop. Some speak a "dialect of Spanish", which is how people around here refer to the indigenous languages. She said she'd mention to them the next time they come that I'd love to learn their language. If the opportunity presents itself I'd be happy as a lime wedge in a gin and tonic to dork out on a regular basis.

VapoRub, Lime Juice and Chamomile Tea

I've posted before about Vick's VapoRub and its cure-all properties. Well, I bet you didn't know that it also cures cold-sores, callouses and muscle cramps. That's what they tell me, anyway. But that's not all.

Hernan woke up yesterday, and one of his eyes was a bit red. He said it felt a little dry, so his mother recommended he rub a little VVR on it to fix it up fast.

Let me be clear in case anyone has stumbled upon this blog in search of an eye remedy. I am in no way suggesting anyone ever put VapoRub in or around their eyes. In fact, I suggest you do not.

Her other suggestion for him was to put chamomile tea in his eyes, which he did do. He said it felt wonderful.

Chamomile tea has been recommended to us for many things. It might be the runner-up in the cure-all contest. We were told to give it to Hanix as a newborn to quench his thirst, to cure his tummy aches and acid reflux. We were told to put it down his nose to clear out the boogers. Apparently it also goes in the eyes.

Speaking of eyes, a man came to Hernan's job site yesterday to solder some iron beams. He did this without protective eye wear. Hernan was incredulous, because he always wears protective eye wear (a.k.a. his Fox sunglasses. A man's gotta look good while he's building a house.) He told me the man admitted that sometimes he would get metal splinters in his eyes. WHAT!? Shards of metal in his EYES! And he doesn't wear goggles or a mask or anything?

Then the man said that he would have to go to the doctor to get the metal removed, but since he's been going so often he's started having his wife do it for him. WHAT?

I'm a bit incredulous. But then he followed up with, "But sometimes when I just have a lot of dust or limestone in my eyes I just clean them out with lime juice."

Lime juice! In his EYES.

Apparently everyone else on the site agreed, saying that sometimes they put lime juice in their eyes to "clean them".

It seems Hernan got off easy with the chamomile tea.

The Nap

My baby is asleep. He's 8 months old. He normally has two naps during the day, which range from 20 minutes to an hour. At night he wakes up every two hours. Like some kind of adorable but evil clock.

He's been asleep now for 2 hours and 14 minutes. He must be sick or something.

I already checked to make sure he's alive. He is.

Obviously I don't know what to do with myself. I wasn't prepared for this kind of freedom.

Wow. I wish this happened every day.

Gay Marriage Legal In Mexico City

Woo-hoo!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8549400.stm

Land, Huejotitan And The Internet

One way in which life in Mexico is different from life in the States (at least how I lived it) is that down here my friend The Internet knows far less than my friend The Internet up there. "How can this be?" you ask, "isn't there but one Internet?" ("And what are you doing fooling around with the much dumber Mexican Internet when your true love waits for you up North?") You see, it works like this: down here in Mexico we don't use the Interwebs for every little thing (for a variety of reasons, but principally because most Mexicans don't have a computer.) It's been my experience that we also don't use the telephone much (both because it's costly and because not everyone has a phone.) Instead, we have to go someplace, or many places, to find a person to talk with, or a variety of people, who, by the way, might all tell you something different.

Consider, for example, the GDL craigslist page: sure it exists, but it isn't the well-used resource for finding a job, used cars, roommates, dining room tables, WWII sniper gear, and adult-size Dora costume that, say, one might find in SF. There are other websites, like MercadoLibre, but the culture of finding what you need online just does not exist down here.

And the same goes for information. If you want to find out how to renew your vehicle permit, for example, you may have to drive to the border because everyone down where you live will give you wrong and incomplete information, and even though you beg and ask The Internet to tell you what to do it just keeps giving you the finger and telling you you have to drive all the way to the border to get a straight answer, and then you get to the border and find out that all of the government employees in your own state were telling you the wrong thing and now your whole trip was in vain and you wasted a lot of time and money for nothing and why can't they goddamn well put ALL the information you need online, or, now here's a thought, make the permits renewable online too, it's not as if Mexico is a small country and driving to the border ain't no thang for crying out loud! Just an example, mind you.

So, naturally, when we needed to find out more about my late grandmother-in-law's properties and the process for transferring the title we went not to the World Wide Web of Information, but rather to Huejotitan.

Huejotitan is a small town north of Jocotepec, off the highway that leads to Guadalajara. It's the town my mother-in-law was born in. When she was about five years old her father killed a man, and the family relocated to San Juan. At some point the law caught up with him, and he served six months in prison before coming home again.

But that has nothing to do with The Internets.

We still have family in the Huejotitan, like Hernan's grandfather's cousin, a spry old man with few teeth who we went to visit Monday. You see, to answer our questions about the land, we went to the town with jurisdiction over it. We then needed to find the town mayor, and to do so we went in search of an ally who could introduce us. That was "Uncle Chano".

He took the men (Hernan and his uncle) to visit the mayor (men's work), and us women (me and my mother-in-law) were left to walk around the town.

It's a very pleasant town. I noticed that there was very little graffiti anywhere and the people didn't gape at us like San Juanecos do. (Even my mother-in-law doesn't like walking through San Juan because, she says, the people are so nosy.) I saw the house that my mother-in-law lived in as a girl, and she pointed out how much had changed.

When she was a girl they had no outhouse. They did their business in the grass by the mango tree. They had no electricity; not until she was married did she live in a house with lights. And men could pick a wife by riding off with her on a horse.

Meanwhile, using the old-fashioned method of talking to people face-to-face, the menfolk discovered that of grandmother's 12 hectares along the highway, only four remain. The other eight have been claimed by "the communists", because the cousin in charge of maintaining the lands hadn't been doing his job.

We also learned that we have to get the title straightened out under the name of just one uncle, whoever is first in the list of succession. To discover who this is, my mother-in-law and her sister will go to an office in Guadalajara, show their birth certificates, credentials, and a letter they have in order to open a "sealed envelope" and discover the list of successors. (It's all very mysterious and reminds me of that little envelope in the game of Clue.) Then they will tell that person, probably an uncle in California, to come down here and square away the title so that no more land gets converted into community lands.

And now back to the internet. I must have become used to living down here because I was thinking about how one might go about doing this kind of thing in the US, and I couldn't remember. But then I thought that at the very least one could look up online the phone number or location of whoever you need to talk to. You probably wouldn't have to drive to another town and find yourself someone who might know someone who could tell you where to find the mayor so that he could tell you where to find an office in another city where they can tell you who needs to then fly in from another country to go who knows where to get the title in order.

But that's how we do it.