Photo by UkillaJJ of Cernÿ’s Peeing statue outside Franz Kafka Museum in Prague from Wikimedia Commons
When Rebecca and I met, we were just kids of 60.
Today, I’m 74.
All of me.
This is my problem, not hers.
County Roads
We’ve lived together for many years but have kept our houses in two Iowa communities, in the northeast and southwest, 323 miles apart and 5 hours and 30 minutes by car. I’ve traced our route, which includes many country roads with no pitstops.
Photo by the author of an Iowa road map
I estimate we’ve made 200 cross-state trips. On a typical journey, we stop halfway at a McDonald’s in Story City for a Mocha Frappe and the indoor toilet designated by the blue arrow.
Often, we start in the early coffee-saturated morning. Whether beginning from Clarinda in the southwest or Decorah in the northeast, I’ve got two well-scouted hidden-from-the-road stops shown by the yellow arrows. One is an abandoned building, and the other is a mound of sand. I suppose I’ve used one or the other 50 times, with most times coming in the last five years.
Rebecca holds.
I fold.
Usually, in the boonies.
Two speeding tickets thus far but no citations against Public Decency for Public Defecation and Urination, as defined by Iowa law:
It shall be unlawful for any person to urinate or defecate in or upon any street, alley, sidewalk, bridge, or public place open to public view…
Last week, it struck on a walking trail three blocks from our northeast Iowa home.
A city walking trail
Below is the crime scene defined by Decorah’s city statute, with that now familiar yellow arrow marking my spot.
Photo by the author
The green arrow points to a skateboard park, and the orange to a residential neighborhood.
The pink? Around the corner, two blocks away, sits a Montessori school in a former funeral home. I’ll tell that story someday.
Fortunately, there were no kids on skates, no one on their front porch, no escaped Montessori six-year-old, no other walkers or bikers, and no patrol car.
A friend, Mike, tells the story of being on a bike trail in Missouri, finding tree cover, and finishing up just as a Girl Scout troop appeared around the trail bend.
Phew
I asked another friend, John, who has just retired from forty years of practicing law in a community like Decorah, what the police do when they come upon older guys like Mike and me who break this law. He wrote:
If a person is just urinating because there’s no bathroom in the area, the police will more than likely let him go. For the police it’s basically a good reason just to stop and make an inquiry as to what is going on. Someone our age is 99% likely to not get even an ordinance violation.
So Mike and I can exhale, knowing our age may shield us from public embarrassment. Coincidently, this might lessen our age-related malady.
Two kinds of relief.
However, while researching this story, I encountered an incident that complicated my happy ending.
To preface, Mike and I are also white.
Perhaps you remember the story of the 10-year-old black child last year who was charged with public urination in Mississippi. You can read about it here.
Iowa is not Mississippi.
But it’s still America.
If I’m a 74-year-old black man behind that tree, I’ve now got three problems that require relief, not just two.
It happened at this intersection on a busy Saturday morning in Decorah, Iowa.
I’d just picked up this program and lanyard.
Photo by the author
Five downtown locations served as the venues for 43 free films, including the VFW, two bars, Arthaus, a home for artists, and The Hotel Winneshiek, the headquarters for the four-day event.
Program in hand, the lanyard around my neck, I had just left the hotel’s front doors to wait for the walk signal to cross the redbrick walkway.
Despite the jaywalking in the first photo, my forty-year home is George Bailey’s, Bedford Falls.
We also have an 11-mile bike trail that circles the city, a liberal arts college, five coffee shops, a nighty music scene, a large co-op, and an eagle’s nestbeamed worldwide.
All eight thousand citizens are above average, even the non-Norwegians.
Of course, we don’t all see eye to eye.
Photo by the author
And there is a murder every half-decade.
But we’re usually civil.
Especially while parallel parking on Decorah’s busiest street.
There was that episode ten years ago, also on Water, during the busy Christmas season. I had not quite started my car’s backward move into an open spot in front of our favorite restaurant when I noticed a guy do a quick U-turn to slip into the slot.
On the rare occasion, I do a You-ee on Water Street, it’s only to grab a free spot.
As he exited his car, I hit the button to roll down Rebecca’s passenger side window and said calmly, “So you broke the law to take my spot?” I noticed two young kids in the back of his car and heard someone I took as his better half telling him he should find another place, which he did.
This is how we work out our differences in my adopted community.
Which is why what I witnessed yesterday was so shocking.
The Horns
The incident occurred several hours before I took the first photo. The culprits were long gone.
Here’s the picture again with color-coded lines to help you follow the narrative.
Photo by the author
A blue SUV had just rounded the corner and was through the crosswalk.
A white pick-up truck was starting to edge out of that 3rd parking spot.
The driver of a motor vehicle shall when reasonably necessary to insure safe operation give audible warning with the horn but shall not otherwise use such horn when upon a highway.
I just checked. Decorah plays by the same rule for its streets.
I’m sure you’ve given and received an audible warning. Where’s the horn button on your steering wheel? When you honk, do you use the palm of your hand, a finger, or a thumb?
I couldn’t remember, either, so I checked my Subaru Forester.
By the way, Decorah is the Subaru capital of northeast Iowa. Subaru’s and film festivals go together.
Anyway, the horn button is in the middle of the steering wheel, and I use my thumb.
What’s the longest period you’ve pressed your car’s horn?
To simulate, I took my car outside town to test my tooting tolerance. Naturally, I picked a location far from our eagle neighbors and their new eaglet.
My normal honk is .5 seconds.
Ten times that, five seconds, was my limit.
Blue SUV honked for 15 seconds as it swerved past the White pick-up and then was halted by the red light at the tip of the red arrow. Try keeping your hand on the horn for 15 seconds.
White pick-up reciprocated as it eased into the street behind Blue SUV in a paired, cacophonous quarter-minute bubble.
From a block away, I glanced at the stranger next to me as we shared a look of wonder, shook our heads, and walked across the street inside the red crosswalk boundary.
This morning, I checked our community’s online newspaper, Decorah News, and saw no murders were committed yesterday in Decorah, USA.
Photo of my childhood home taken in 2022 — Author’s photo
Lying has always been hard for me. And, as hard as it is to admit from the vantage point of 74, I was a bit of a mother’s boy. So, lying to my mother came at the cost of round-the-clock guilt. But, hey, I was building a self.
Grass
How do I start my story with “I remembered the sharp scent of freshly cut grass as I waited at the dining room window for Sharon” when the only photo of my childhood home is this one I took five years after my mother died and 58 years after the events I will describe?
You’ll have to imagine a lawn full of grass. It’s almost impossible, I know, given this replacement monstrosity. My story is about the sin of lying. What do you call this trespass?
I wanted you to see the first-floor dining room window on the right, my second-floor bedroom window on the left, the outdoor steps, and the brick street. And smell the grass I had just mowed before Sharon showed up.
I was the oldest of three sons, so mowing the front lawn was my first outdoor chore. At 13, my dad taught me an up-and-down system using a long cloth rope tied around the mower handle as a pulley. The first time I tried it alone, while Dad was at work, the rope slipped under the mower and was shredded. So, I put my Pony League baseball cleats on and pushed the green Lawn-Boy across the lawn without the machine and me rolling into the street.
My first teenage triumph. The second would come three years later.
Sharon
It was an early spring day, and, as you know, the smell of grass was in the air. I was 16, and Sharon and I had just started dating.
I opened the first-floor dining room window on the right to smell my accomplishment, listened for the soft rumble of Sharon’s pale aqua-blue car on the brick, and turned toward my mother.
My brother Peter and I shared a bedroom behind the second-floor dormer window on the left. When I was younger, my dad was often away on business trips. I had the bed closest to the window. On warm nights, I would open it to hear the sound of his car on the brick street turn into the driveway. Then, I would fall asleep knowing my dad was safely home and my mom would be at peace until his next trip.
“You can’t get serious about her, you know,” my mother says from the kitchen across the Sunday pot roast dining room table after I told her I was waiting for Sharon.
Sharon was Jewish and the daughter of my Baskin Robbin’s boss, Wendell. We were Catholic. By we, I mean everyone but my dad, who was raised protestant. My mom would have said the same thing if Sharon had been Lutheran.
I knew this story. Before they married in 1948, Mom talked my dad into going through the Rite of Christian Initiation for adults to prepare for conversion to Catholicism. Dad gave it a try but was treated so poorly by the priest that he eventually said, “No more, not ever again.” Even at 16, I knew the religious difference was a source of tension between them. When Mom said, “You can’t get serious,” I knew she was serious.
Lying
Hearing the honk and saying nothing, I leave my mother and walk out the front door and down the steps.
Sharon and I would date for two years. That was the last time she picked me up in front of my house. And the last time I told my parents what I was up to. A few months later, we started Saturday night drive-in dates. Fortunately, by the mid-1960s, my family had two cars: a mid-size sedan and a small Fiat. The Fiat had bucket seats, so I needed the Pontiac.
I’m picking up Jerry, Ed, Pat, and Mike, and we’re hanging out.
Riding in that same car to Sunday mass burdened me with guilt and fear about whether there was any evidence of my deception.
It was all so easy.
Too easy, as it turns out.
It was early evening at Duck Creek Park’s Little League Diamond #1. My little brother Pat is playing, and my parents are sitting in the bleacher section behind home plate. My dad, in his Fiat, met us at the game. I needed the sedan for a date. I’m sitting next to my mom.
“Can I have the car?”
“Where are you going?”
“Over to Jerry Spaeth’s.”
She turned her head, looked directly at me, and said quietly,
“Paul, I know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t.”
Mothers and sons
Dody Gardner died in 2017 at 96. At the lunch after her funeral, I met one of her long-time friends. I knew John Bishop from the bridge parties my parents hosted. John, a physician, and life-long bridge player, told me my mom was the finest player he knew.
During lunch, I asked a few of Mom’s younger friends, all bridge players, about this, and they nodded. “No one was better,” Peg said.
Even as Mom was sinking into dementia, when playing solitaire, she continued snapping down cards in triumph or disgust.
Good bridge players think strategically. Mom knew my personality, that I could not rebel directly. I needed to lie to grow up. To separate myself from her and my dad. She was confident I would discard the disreputable means when I no longer needed them.
That’s precisely what happened.
The skillful bridge player had won the trick.
Dody and Paul Gardner, 1975, from a family album- Author’s photo
Have you ever thought about moving to another country?
Photo used by permission from my friend Denny Prior’s self-published memoir Growing Up Boomer
*
The marchers in the photo are protesting not only the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia but also the killing of four Kent State studentsby the Ohio National Guard the day before, May 4, 1970.
That’s half of twenty-year-old me behind the right arm of the tall, thin fellow in the middle of the photo.
America: Love It or Leave It, directed at the protesters, was a popular bumper sticker. Around this time, my gentle father used those words in a heated argument about Vietnam around our dining room table with my cousin Jim and me. I’m sure Jim and I replied with some equivalent idiocy.
Decades later, some of those Baby Boomer dissidents have decided to do just that in retirement.
Leave America.
*
Rebecca and I just returned from a month in San Miguel, Mexico. It was our first visit to this central Mexican city of about 70,000, where 10,000 American and Canadian ex-pats live.
I got to know John, a retired American minister who has lived in San Miguel with his wife for about ten years. They’ve built a house and settled in. I asked him why he decided to leave the USA.
We love the kindness and sweetness of the Mexican people. That has become more important as we age. They are reverential of their elders, in contrast to the United States.
And then he said
The anger in the U.S. is a relatively new issue. But it pushed us to move here sooner than we might otherwise. Our trips back to D.C. were increasingly depressing as we dealt with angry people in the grocery store, angry drivers, people walking in the neighborhood who didn’t greet us, etc.
Another couple, gregarious Herb and Adrienne, would talk about anything but American politics. Too painful, Adrienne said, and also one reason why they spend more time outside the USA every year.
Opinion polls tell us that 15% of Americans want to leave America. Google search interest in moving to Canada spiked in 2016 when Donald Trump won, in 2020 with the Biden victory, and in June 2022 when Roe vs. Wade was overturned (source).
Of course, even those who say they want to leave won’t. And those who do, like John and his wife, leave for more than one reason.
This has gotten this aging Boomer thinking about that ancient epithet:
America: Love It Or Leave It
I’ve asked myself three questions: What is America? What does it mean to love America? What should I do if America has changed so much that I can no longer love it?
My answers are likely different from your answers. Please share yours in the comments.
What is America?
The “We” in We the People is more inclusive than 1949, my birth year. That’s what I love about my country. Not the number of people but the plurality of voices once silenced, now heard.
Yet America is complicated.
What is America?
It spans July 4th to John Calhoun and Frederick Douglass; the Trail of Tears and Deb Haaland; The Wicked War and The Civil War; Jim Crow and Rosa Parks; Jewish Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 1959 and Jewish Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 1993; Kate Smith’s God Bless America and Marvin Gaye’s Star Spangled Banner; the riots after the George Floyd murder, the assault on the American Capital on January 6th, and the peaceful protests that accompanied both; exceptionally violent and exceptionally humanitarian; incredibly welcoming and extraordinarily inhospitable.
In 1970, my father and I were attached to different parts of America. I loved Dylan’s Times They Are a-ChanginAmerica with this brutal message to parents.
Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly agin’ Please get out of the new one If you can’t lend your hand
My father’s America was traditional, white, male, and Protestant.
Both his America and my America WERE America in 1970.
Both Barack Obama’s America and Donald Trump’s America ARE America today. Each represents a different vision of America.
When I watched this scene on January 6, 2021, I found myself shouting at the TV.
I have a family member I love but sometimes don’t like very much. He does things so differently from how I would do things. It’s like we live in different worlds.
Occasionally, I can withdraw into my little world and become a bit sullen. I hate this part of me. It’s marbled inside me with everything else.
Does the unlovable part of my kin cause me not to love him?
What about those parts of me I’d like to gouge out? Do they cancel all the good bits?
Both my relative and I are dense with good and evil.
Complicated.
With its 330 million people and 405-year history, going back to the arrival of 20 captive enslaved people in 1619, America is marbled with good and evil.
The late political scientist E.E. Schattschneider* puts it this way.
Democracy begins with an act of imagination about people. Not people as abstractions but the warm, breathing, feeling, hindering, loving, hating, aspiring, living beings with whom we identify ourselves.
The democratic concern for people is not selective…it takes a lot of indiscriminate affection for people as a people to run a democracy.
Indiscriminate affection is an excellent way to describe my love of kin, self, and country.
I was on sabbatical teaching in Poland when George W. Bush beat John Kerry in 2004. I recall thinking that I did not want to return to a country led by George W., Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. I felt estranged from my country.
I’ve thought about withdrawing completely from my relative. When I’m in a funk, I feel alienated from myself.
If Donald Trump wins in 2024, will my indiscriminate affection for his millions of supporters go out the window?
My home state of Iowa has become a meaner place for immigrants, the poor, and the LGBTQ community.
It would be like the sullen part of me taking over my life.
Will I follow John, Adrienne, and Herb out the door?
It’s not easy to leave one’s country, even for those in danger.
When asked why he came back to Russia, the late Aleksei A. Navalny ** said
I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs. I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.
I’m not yet ready to say no to living in America. Even though John, Adrienne, and Herb now live in Mexico, their voices and votes are still heard in America. They haven’t given up on their country.
But nothing beats bodies marching or, in this case, standing up.
A stranger took the photo on my phone in the spring of 2023.
Those standing with signs are protesting a decision by the Winnishiek County Board of Supervisors to cut a roadside management program as an alternative to herbicides.
That’s half of 73-year-old me in the red hat behind the right arm of the woman reading the petition.
We came for the weather, but San Miguel conquered us because of what we didn’t hear.
Photo by the author
Why San Miguel?
When friends ask Rebecca and me about our January in Mexico, we start with the weather. At 72 and 74, we finally decided to become snowbirds for the coldest month in Iowa, where we live. Iowa’s weather pushed us away.
San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico, promised an average daytime temperature of 73 degrees Fahrenheit. I took the first photo at 4:17 pm in shirt sleeves on January 3rd from a balcony outside our bedroom. San Miguel fulfilled its weather promise. This turned out to be a typical day.*
Around this time last year, as we were considering warm-weather options, friends Peter and Mary highly recommended San Miguel, which they had visited yearly. While their stories helped seal the deal, we mostly wanted respite from frigid Iowa.
Throughout 2023, Rebecca polished her Spanish daily on Duolingo. I intermittently thumbed Moon’s San Miguel travel guide. When family and friends heard where we were going, they asked if it would be dangerous and what we would do there.
Moon’s excellent guidebook confirmed what Peter and Mary had told us about San Miguel’s safety. Plus, we knew 10,000 American and Canadian ex-pats lived in this community. Throughout our month, we never felt threatened.
We never had a good answer about what we would do in San Miguel. Rebecca said she would use her Spanish. I added what I could remember from Moon’s section on The Best of San Miguel. The weather was our default.
We could have said, “We would let San Miguel work its magic on us.”
We didn’t.
But San Miguel did.
It seeped into our pores.
Quietly.
And that’s why we’re returning.
No Honking
I took the first photo from our apartment’s 3rd-floor balcony, which you can see in the image below. We spent hours on that veranda, especially late afternoon, with gin and tonics.
Photo by the author
Across Aldama Street was Parque Juárez, a popular park. Sounds from the park included the giggle of children in a playground, the thump-thump from a basketball court, and, on Fridays, the romping rhythms of a Mariachi band playing the Sea Snake Dance at a wedding reception.
And, constantly, in the background, the heavy rumble of cars on Aldama’s cobblestone pavement. You can see the stone covering in the lower left corner of the photo.
What we never heard, not once, was a honk.
On January 31, our last day, we were picked up by a van shuttle service to take us to the Guanajuato International Airport in Leon, about an hour away. Ten minutes into the airport journey, traffic slowed to a crawl on the two-lane highway. All the four passengers in the van could see was a long line of slow-moving cars in front of us. Our driver didn’t seem concerned since we had plenty of time to catch our flights.
After twenty minutes, we passed through a town, crossed a highway intersection, and our van began to speed up. Now, on our right, down the other highway, we could see what had slowed us down — tens of bicyclists following a pickup truck with a religious icon sitting on a pedestal.
There are always a few with fraudulent birth certificates
Photo by the author
*
The 39-year-old James beat a rookie nearly half his age off the dribble, blew past another young, spry athlete and powered up for a strong attack on the rim. He drew the foul and, punctuating his spectacular night, swished a pair of free throws to give the Lakers the win, 145–144. James’ 36 points, 20 rebounds and 12 assists in nearly 48 minutes indicted his birth certificate for fraud. (Marcus Thompson II, “Lebron James vs. Stephen Curry is Still the NBA’s Best Theater.”
81-year-old Joe Biden
In 2016, 71-year-old Donald Trump brushed aside Republican Presidential challengers like they were fleas. Fifteen were squashed until only Ted Cruz was left. Poor “Lying Ted.” It wasn’t pretty. He was 45. (source)
Seasoned, at 69, Hillary Clinton lost a close contest.
In 2020, incumbent Trump faced no in-party challengers.
Chomping at the bit, twenty-nine Democratic Party Presidential wannabes approached the starting line. (source)
Experienced, at 77, Joe Biden beat them all. He then selected one opponent, Kamala Harris (55), as Vice President and another, Pete Buttigieg (38), as a member of his cabinet.
After defeating a sitting President by 7 million votes with the largest popular vote total in American history. (source)
In 2024, 77-year-old Mr. Trump will coast to the Republican nomination again, beating much younger opponents. Only Nikki Haley, 52, remains at this writing.
To face off with the 81-year-old incumbent.
80-year-old E. Jean Carroll
In addition to President Biden, Mr. Trump will confront other opponents this year. You can read a summary of the criminal and civil cases against the former President here.
Trump rarely loses in court. He’s been sued over 4000 times. (source)
But he has been beaten soundly twice in the past year by E. Jean Carroll, 80, a woman he sexually abused 30 years ago. Thanks to Ms. Carroll, Trump has been legally outed not only as a sexual predator but as a liar. (source)
What does age have to do with beating Mr. Trump?
If age has in some ways been a hurdle for Ms. Carroll to overcome in this case, I’d like to think that it was also age that let her see it through to this conclusion. That it was age and wisdom and the confidence that comes along with it that allowed her to make the genuinely audacious claim that an 80-year-old woman still has good, creative, vivacious, maybe even profitable years ahead of her.
“I couldn’t have done it back then,” she once told me, of coming forward sooner. “I didn’t have the guts.”
But now? “It was just time. It was time,” she testified.
This is an excerpt from Jessica Bennett’s New York Times article “The Audacity of E. Jean Carroll.”
Age can bring wisdom and courage.
Joe Biden ran for the American Presidency two other times, in 1988 and 2008. When he announced a third run in 2019, he said Trump’s reaction, there are good people on both sides, to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017 was the deciding factor. (source)
We are in the battle for the soul of this nation. If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.
Rebecca and I have just returned from four weeks in San Miguel, Mexico. The beaten-down white Volkswagon Beetle in the photo was parked in a different location outside our apartment every day. It was driven by someone who had a food stand in the park across the street.
It looks its age, has experienced every conceivable road condition on the cobbled streets of San Miguel, and is still running after many of its contemporaries reside in landfills.
Even Lebron James will someday be too old to play in the NBA. The average age of an NBA player is 28. Most retire before they are 30.
James is an exception.
His declining physical skills are more than matched by the experience and wisdom culled from 20 NBA seasons.
The same is true for the two people who have proven Donald Trump can be beaten.
Photo by the author of Maurice Harron’s Hands Outstretched Across a Divide Sculpture in Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland.
Healing a broken society takes time
I took this photo in 2018 on my seventh visit to Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland.
Six trips were with college students, and in 2018, I was accompanied by twenty-four adults aged 50 to 80.
Everything in this little statelet of under two million people is contested, including what to call its second-largest city. Catholics prefer Derry; Protestants Londonderry.
Historically, Catholics identify as Irish and with the Republic of Ireland.
Protestants as British, and with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
It is a conflict about national identity more than religious dogma.
The killing goes back 800 years.
Many wars, with The Troubles, from 1969–1998, the most recent. (source)
Wikipedia’s Dog with a Stick search produced many options.
I liked the first photo.
I’m a serious writer and don’t need no dog or cat photo tricks.
Besides, I don’t like cats, except for Wilbur and Orville, who are in the family — or cat stories, except for Cat in the Hat.
A red check.
Roz also urges us to “get to the point.”
And “put the reader in the scene.”
OK.
I’ll start with my tiny butt.
Photo of the author, by the author, and for the reader.
To compensate, I wear low-rise, close-fitting, stretch pants that conform to the contour of my body.
Have I put you in the scene?
*
Rebecca and I reluctantly began our journey back to cold Iowa from warm San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, two days ago. For the first time, we had become snowbirds, spending January away.
The only thing we had to check through customs were two colds I wrote about here.
After checking our bags and getting our boarding passes at the Guanajuato International Airport in Léon, we proceeded to Security.
Moving through airport screening has been smooth since we got Global Entry passes five years ago, making us eligible for TSA PreCheck.
So smooth it is easy to get sloppy.
I put my coat, backpack, phone, and hat in the tray and lined up to go through the X-ray scanner.
The female Security Officer motioned me through, and we heard the beep.
My belt, I thought.
She said, while my hands were in the air,
Sir, I need to see what’s making your right pants pocket bulge.
With my right hand, I felt this package in my pocket.
*I have worked on stories twice with Roz. But not this one. Please don’t blame her. She is a terrific editor. Below is one of her stories that includes a link to a beneficial tutorial.
**And, of course, there’s this line attributed to Mae West: “Why detective, is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me.” I first heard a version of this joke from a college friend, Tom, who said that a girlfriend once said it to him as he approached her. Bad form, I know. He was politically incorrect before the term was created.
Fortunately, we arrived early at the concert to position ourselves inside the exit door for her likely exit.
To a cafe chair just outside the little venue with the door propped open.
All [her] troubles seemed to fade away.
Several days ago, we learned this positioning lesson from another event in the same public venue at the San Miguel library.
Believing our coughs could be controlled by Vicks 44 and cough drops, we found two seats at a lecture on “The Soul of San Miguel” in the front row of the crowded venue far from the exit door.
At Rebecca’s first cough, the man at my left leaned slightly forward and briefly tilted his head toward her. At her second, he added a sigh and a lengthier glare to the repertoire. I wanted to give him a roller derby elbow, but he looked a decade older. Besides, Rebecca was already working her way down the aisle and out the exit door.
Throughout the 90-minute lecture, I coughed four times. I counted 20 or so additional random coughs in a room of 150 people, including one from the guy on my left.
After the concert, I joined Rebecca for a coffee at the library cafe. We sat, sipped, occasionally coughed for about an hour, and noticed two people at a neighboring table get up and leave before their food arrived.
The Conflict
As the first photo suggests, we feel pretty good, even before the Margaritas. I just took a COVID test, which told us what we already knew. Our bodies are fighting a cold virus. Rebecca’s cough is her dominant symptom. I have mild congestion and a twice-an-hour cough. We are operating at about 70% energy capacity.
Because this is the last of our four weeks in San Miguel, we don’t want to be cooped up in our tiny apartment.
We’re managing the symptoms and staying hydrated.
Photo by the author
We canceled a dinner with an older couple we’ve become friends with in San Miguel because we didn’t want them to catch this virus.
This experience has brought us back to those COVID disputes. We played by the rules, masking, distancing, and vaccinating. Today, Rebecca and I are among the 22% of American adults who have gotten the latest vaccine. (source)
And we resented those who chose not to do these things, thinking them selfish or wrong-headed. I’m sure I matched that concert guy’s glare more than once at maskless people in closed places in the summer of 2020.
You might ask, why didn’t we wear masks at the concert and lecture?
There are two reasons. We’ve gotten out of the habit even though we have them somewhere in our suitcases. And we both find it difficult to breathe with a mask on, particularly with our colds.
Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I wore the mask. Further, I sometimes resent community members who still wear the protection in public. I feel judged.
Just as Rebecca and I felt convicted by the glaring man and the couple who left the cafe.
However, the glaring man has a powerful point, reinforced by our decision to cancel the dinner with 87-year-old Herb and 81-year-old Adrienne. Despite our hand coverings, our coughs do spread germs. Out in public, we can’t confine the harm to ourselves.
During COVID time, I masked, distanced, and vaccinated for you as well as me. And it became the norm in our community, strengthened by laws.
But that’s a long time ago.
And it’s our last week in San Miguel. We have sites to visit. And our apartment is small. And, if our germs found their way to the stranger sitting next to me, well, he’s a stranger. He’s not Herb or Adrienne.
Caring for strangers is not easy when it costs us.
Rebecca and I love the pancakes we make from Krusteaz pancake mix and were surprised to see it on the shelf of a grocery store in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
It looked like a Krusteaz package, but what were those black stop signs plastered over the brand?
The translation was easy: the labels warned against excessive sugars and sodium. Mexico’s Health Department has required those warnings on the packaging of unhealthy foods since 2020. (source)
Mexico and other Latin American countries are fighting an epidemic of obesity. One regulatory tool is the front of the package warning label.
Of course, the food industry fought the labels.
Do the warnings work?
Jonathan Levi Rito Medina, a general practice physician in Hildago, says about 20% of his patients ask about the labels. For those with diabetes or hypertension, he tells them “to avoid the black label products completely.”
Mayelela Lopez runs a grocery store in Hildago. She’s observed that about two out of every one hundred mothers tell their kids they can’t buy the black label product.
Like Mexico, America has a severe health problem.
It’s estimated that 42% of Americans are obese, and that includes 20% of its children. (source)
In recent years, The Food and Drug Administration has required food producers to provide more explicit messages about Nutrition Facts. The font is more significant and bolded. And it includes a new category, added sugars. (source)
For those interested and concerned about what goes into the food products they consume, it’s all there and easier to read than ever.
Some American health advocates want the FDA to go further and require Mexican-style-front-of-the-package warning labels.
