paulmuses

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The Cartels

For the past three Januaries, Rebecca and I have been guests in a complicated country. We’ve rented an apartment in San Miguel, a city of 170,000 people northeast of Mexico City, marked by the purple arrow on this US State Department travel advisory map.

The yellow-coded areas suggest vigilance, with the orange a warning to stay away. The color admonitions covering the entire country give one a visual image of the Mexican cartels’ tentacles throughout this country of 133 million, which includes, each year, 20 million travelers from the USA and 3 million from Canada. Roughly 20% of San Miguel’s residents are ex-pats from the USA and Canada.

So I’ve paid close attention to news from Mexico since Mexican government security forces killed ‘El Mencho,’ a top Cartel leader, four days ago in the state of Jalisco, just west of San Miguel’s province of Guanajuato, with reports of flight cancellations at the Guadalajara Airport and ‘narco-blockades’ throughout Jalisco and several other states.

An excellent source of non-sensational reporting is the English-language Mexico News Daily. This article is a good summary of what has occurred.

John, a retired minister from Washington, DC, who settled in San Miguel two decades ago, told me in an email that schools were cancelled on Monday, some businesses closed, and many were ‘sheltering in place,’ as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum counseled.

By Tuesday, everything seemed back to normal. According to John, there have been no reports of cartel-related incidents in San Miguel.

Calle San Antonio

A week before we departed, in a rumor that was later confirmed in a news report, two young men were executed in mid-afternoon in a cartel-related action on San Antonio, the street in the first photo, and an avenue we walked every day.

Here are two more photos of this major thoroughfare.

A Mexican friend of Rebecca said she walked by the scene of violence an hour after it happened. The bodies had been removed. The police were present. Rebecca’s friend, a teacher, was followed up the street by two large men. Unsure and worried, she popped into a pharmacy and hid in a back room. Later, to Rebecca, she said, “These men likely wanted information. They aren’t interested in and won’t bother tourists. It’s Mexicans that are in danger.”

Calle Aldama

When friends ask what we do in San Miguel, our short answer is we walk, around 9000 cobblestone steps each day. San Antonio is our second-favorite street; Aldama is our first. In the photo below, you see a bird’s-eye view of our daily destination, San Miguel Arcángel Catholic Church, from our apartment rooftop.

We see you have the right kind of shoes with thick soles. Follow us. We’ll give you time for photos.

“On your right, Buenos Dias.”

Rebecca at the halfway marker.

A sandwich and a cookie at Parque Juarez.

Meet our old friend. He’s a constant at this sentinel spot across from Juarez.

His owner sells beautiful pottery.

Would you believe it? Three years and not a single honk.

The Aldama two-step: learned behavior. We can live together!

You saw it here, first.

Our destination, El Jardin, the central plaza. A Mariachi Band will be by in a moment.

Sorry, on the return trip, it’s all uphill.

San Miguel

Two weeks before we left, a neighbor told us three women had been robbed by two masked men on motorcycles at knifepoint around 9 PM on Aldama. This was confirmed by two Mexican friends who said it’s likely these guys came in from a surrounding village where the poverty rate is much higher.

On that Friday evening, a younger male friend had accompanied Rebecca and me as we walked up Aldama from Johnny’s Piano Bar, across from El Jardin. Apparently, the attack occurred about 30 minutes after we passed that spot. Our friend, an artist, wanted some fresh air before he went home to work. None of us thought about danger.

Like the USA, Mexico is a complicated country. If one looks closely in both countries, there’s a lot of nastiness.

We will return to Calle Aldama next year. In fact, we plan to arrive in mid-December to experience Christmas in San Miguel — to see this tree go up as well as come down.

I don’t know enough about Mexico to put the right words to why I always feel I am a better person after a month in San Miguel. In our experience, walking San Miguel’s streets, the good overwhelms we see overwhelms the bad we don’t.

But I’ll let another American, Katherine Corcoran, speak for me. Ms. Corcoran has written a poignant and informative book, In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, A Cover-up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press, about the killing of a Mexican reporter.

I’ll leave you with her words.

Mexico was so antithetical to the American emphasis on getting ahead and a lifestyle that made me feel I was under constant stress. Among the middle and working class there was zero sense of entitlement. To an outsider, Mexicans lived in the moment. They seemed to wake every day looking not for ways to get ahead , but rather, for the necessities to survive, which made them infinitely more gracious.

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September 20, 1963, was my 14th birthday. Always the youngest in my class, I was usually the last to, well, whatever. Even then, I had a paper route. My first hidden Playboy Centerfold was still two years away.

Bob Dylan arrived on the scene that same year. 43 years later, in 2006, I saw my first concert.

In two months, with my 37-year-old son, Ben, I’ll see performance number seven.

I’m always late but eager. Like a young pup. Bursting with potential. What accounts for this dormancy?

I blame it on the Bossa Nova.

Of course, you’ll say, “Do you mean The Dance of Love?

And I’ll respond, “‘No, no, the Bossa Nova,’ the very first song I heard on my orange transistor radio, a birthday gift from my parents. They also gave me ear buds so that I could listen late into the night, esconced in the protective privacy under my covers, without waking my younger brother Peter.”

However, you know what they say. The first is always the most important. It sets the tone. My first song could have been Nino Tempo and April Stevens’ Deep Purple. Or Busted by Ray Charles. What about The Chrystals Then He Kissed Me?

Instead, I got Eydie Gormé’s Bossa Nova.

So I’m still trying to make up for lost time.

Dig it.

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A few minutes before 6 PM, Steve greeted, one by one, eight of us at the door. Two, with notes from grandchildren, lie on beaches.

Benji substituted, but obviously hadn’t finished the book.

We demolished two delivered pizzas, wrestled with

and lingered over Steve’s ginger snaps.

If you think our older men’s book group is too highfalutin — Benji’s charge — Ozzy Osborne’s Last Rites, is our March book.

Matthiessen’s 1965 story is a morality tale centered on four Protestant missionaries (two couples) and a fictional Indian tribe, the Niaruna, living in the Amazon rainforest. Other characters, especially a Catholic priest and an American Indian mercenary, interrogate the motives of the evangelists.

After 45 minutes of around circle feints, probes, and jabs reconnoitering our literary quarry, David settled us in with. . .

What does it mean to be called?

Six hundred years of living coalesced. Even Benji relaxed.

Until Steve brought out the treats.

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Rebecca and I just returned from a visit to snowy Marblehead, Massachusetts, where we participated in the Bat Mizvah of Rebecca’s granddaughter, Sivan. It was a beautiful ceremony at Congregation Shirat Hayam.

Four years ago, we attended the Bar Mitzvah of her grandson, Elan, on a radiant fall day.

As we walked through the Synagogue’s entrance doors, this sign greeted us.

In the summer of 2022, I took a three-day photography course. Jay, our instructor, repeated this mantra: taking pictures helps us pay closer attention to our world.

Since that class, the habit of taking photos has become a useful nudge to focus on images that help me understand what’s going on.

This article from Time Magazine details the recent rise in anti-semitism in the United States.

It is roughly 1000 powerful words.

Illuminated by these pictures.

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I believe we tell stories to make sense of the world. We write, sing, dance, act, draw, and snap to create meaning from the chaos of our lives.

A few days ago, I read this absorbing story by Maria Rattray. She reintroduced me to the word “synchronicity” and to Carl Jung’s work.

In the 1920s, Jung coined the term to highlight a coincidence that is more than mere chance.

Yesterday, Rebecca and I added up our individual expenditures from January in San Miguel, Mexico. These included Uber trips, restaurants, groceries, and cash withdrawals. In the fifteen years we’ve been together, we’ve kept separate bank accounts and shared most expenses.

For example, on January 16, she found gifts for grandchildren at this market.

In the two columns of numbers on my notebook page in the first photo, you can see my expenses listed and totalling $1418.

Rebecca’s summation precisely.

Serendipity or…?

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Rebecca and I just returned from a 44-day journey of six legs: Decorah to St. Louis; St. Louis to San Miguel, Mexico; San Miguel to St. Louis; St. Louis to Boston; Boston to St. Louis; St. Louis to Decorah.

12 stops and 6376 miles.

Let’s call it Odyssey-lite, with no Homer, no Calypso, and no Mediterranean.

But we did experience:

Five Ubers; four seasons and airports; three beds and coffee makers; two snow storms, languages and Cartel executions; one Bidet, Bat Mitzvah and Rotary Meeting; .5 Boston Benji’s, and zero travel delays.

The Cartel executions were just to see if you were reading closely — an old teacher’s trick. It happened three blocks from our San Miguel apartment. We know nothing!

Yesterday, we unpacked, sipped gin and tonics, cooked and ate broiled Salmon, were introduced to Bad Bunny, collapsed, and dreamt of terriers, rabbits, and The Godfather.

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Yesterday, early morning, but not too early, Aviv came into the kitchen just as I was jackhammering a story. I’d been up for two hours working on a tale I had started the day before. It was what I think of as a constipated product; taking a very long time, with little to show thus far.

“I’ve got a question,” he offered. Oh, oh, I thought. He’s going to ask if I’m interested in going up with him in his single-engine airplane. Or maybe today is the weekday he takes a dip in the frigid Marblehead water. Aviv is Rebecca’s son-in-law, and we are visiting for his daughter Sivan’s Bat Mitzvah.

“Are you and Rebecca interested in going to Rotary with me today?”

“Did you know Rebecca and I joined Rotary a year ago?” I replied.

“Really? Then you know there’s usually a speaker after lunch. Would you guys like to talk to our group?”

“That’s a relief. I thought you were going to ask me to go flying or swimming. Instead, all you want is for us to speak to a group of strangers. Do you have a topic in mind?”

“You travel a lot. Maybe talk about that.”

And that is what we did. Which reminded me of Popeye. More on why in a minute.

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Deanna Bugalski 💋 asks whether we are optimists or pessimists. I think people who create something every day, including writers like you and me, must lean toward the former, hopefulness. Routinely, we bring something into the world that didn’t exist before. That proves, to me, tomorrow can be different from today.

Dissimilar could be worse. However, I believe the movement toward a better world that, at times, seems glacial or, sorry to repeat, constipated, is inexorable. If I knew nothing about the who, what, when, or where I would be born again, I would choose now.

The early 21st century is better in a thousand ways than any other time period. Part of the reason is travel, where people from nation A meet people from nation B. It becomes harder to hate and to fear those whom you have met.

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So yesterday morning, Rebecca and I brainstormed about our travel talk. Among our many destinations was the tiny island of Malta in the Mediterranean, where we spent the spring of 2018 with a group of Luther students and where the 1980 film Popeye was made. Here they are outside the Vatican.

What a phenomenal group of young people, who made this four-month travel experience for Rebecca and me a peak experience. From our Malta base, we took our students to Morocco, Croatia, and Italy.

Our Rotary 20-minute travelogue, something that hadn’t existed when Aviv came into the kitchen nook, was a hit with our audience of 30, who asked lots of questions and awarded us honorary members of the Marblehead Rotary.

Our tiny drop into the ocean of human interconnections.

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Mindfulness, for example, living moment by moment, gets easier. It’s a matter of survival.

Rebecca and I are visiting her daughter, Emily, and family in Marblehead, Massachusetts, for granddaughter Sivan’s Bat Mitzvah.

Oh, to be 13 again. Or maybe not.

Two days ago, the morning after we arrived, I slipped on the first photo step from the kitchen to the hallway where the guest bedroom resides. Mind you, I didn’t fall but missed the step as my eye was on the door to our room.

Yesterday, I overlooked a similar footfall between the kitchen and the living room because I was watching the window, where I could see the new house going up next door.

Today, Emily asked me to carry two cardtable chairs from the basement to the dining room.

Before greedily grasping two, I reconnoitered the enemy territory, observing handrails on opposite sides, and adjusted accordingly.

Sigh.

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My brother Peter died four days ago, four months after our brother Pat succumbed. Peter was 74 and Pat, 70. Cancer took them both, as it did our father, Paul Sr., at 71 in 1993. Dody Gardner’s body wore out at 96 in 2017.

That leaves me.

Do you remember the scene in Home Alone when eight-year-old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), tormented by his family, wishes they would disappear?

Of course, they do, with hilarious results, but they come back.

Mine won’t, ever.

The deaths of my brothers have prompted me to think of my parents with gratitude. Here they are in 1952, with Peter and me crawling on the living floor out of sight and Pat on the horizon.

How did you do it? Nurture three such different boys to manhood.

Endings are eventually melancholic. It’s the one last standing who ponders the wonder of it all.

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Like the late James Frank Sanders

To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, four years ago, when I started writing on Medium, I was just a kid of 72 with a dream; a rookie who, like Sergeant Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes, “knew nothing” about this publishing platform.

Fortunately, over the decades, I had learned to search out mentors when entering unfamiliar territory.

I needed a Yoda.

Somehow, through Medium’s search engine, I stumbled upon this story by the man in the first photo, James Frank Sanders.

Why I Write in Crows Feet
No, it is not for the money.medium.com

What’s Crow’s Feet, I wondered? Frank offered this description: It’s a publication with editors who help writers. Its theme is aging, something I know about. All that sounded, well, professional. Isn’t that what I’m looking for? I also didn’t plan to write for money.

Moreover, I liked Frank’s conversational style. Maybe this forum values that kind of writing. Had I found a kindred soul? Perhaps there are others like him. And he’s 96 and still in the game.

So I shadowed Frank over his final year. And accumulated other guides, followers, and readers.

I’m now 76 and this is Medium story number 786. And, wonder of wonders, I’ve helped more than a few newcomers. Isn’t that what life is all about, playing decency forward.

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Later today, I will take an Uber to Hospital MAC in San Miguel, Mexico, where Rebecca and I spend January during the cold Iowa winters. I have, what is likely, a minor health issue related to constipation.

The cause of this condition, also probable, was dehydration, common among what my Mexican friends call adultos mayores, older adults. How many times did my two brothers and I say to our mother, who would live to be Frank’s age, ‘you’ve got to drink more water.’

‘But I’m not thirsty,’ she’d reply. Oh, does that sound and feel familiar. What goes around, comes around to her oldest son, with a vengeance. And why I’ve been thinking about Frank. With the first of eight glasses of water for the day close by.

One of his themes was the importance of water intake. This story is my favorite and uncomfortably prescient.

One Way to Live Longer
It is often overlooked but it is vitalmedium.com

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James Frank Sanders was the first of many Medium guides. When he was alive, his example was helpful in learning my way around this place and writing the kind of personal story that drew from one’s life in a way that made it useful to others. All Frank’s stories began with a unique anecdote, but ended with a lesson for the reader. In an increasingly solipsistic world, Frank was a giver.

Today, especially today, I’ll think about him every time I raise a glass of this nourishing clear liquid on its journey to work its sofening magic on the banks of my intestines.

Tomorrow? It’s always good to end with things unsaid.

Except.

Thank you, Mr. Sanders.