Margotlog: Big Shoulder Pads Part One
Old magazines fascinate me. Especially those from World War II and the 1950s recovery period. The period during which the United States transformed itself from a player on the world's stage to one of the top two or three strutters and shapers. We're such a vast country (though hardly the largest in square miles), yet sometimes we can galvanize ourselves into united action. That was the effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the beautiful harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, where the American fleet was drawn up.
The attack on December 7th, 1941, brought the United States population to its radios listening en masse to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's call to arms. As a nation, we have an extraordinary ability to carry on rather blissfully while the rest of the world is going up in flames. It's a legacy bestowed by our double ocean isolation from Europe and Asia and by a policy of neutrality laid down at the very start of the nation. So we watched German and Japanese aggression from a distance until Pearl Harbor.
But oceans, we learned from the Japanese aerial bombing of American ships in Pearl Harbor, could no longer protect us. We had to enter the war, which was exactly what President Roosevelt announced by radio to a nation of listeners. During the subsequent war years from late 1941 to the U.S. dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 45, and the signing of the armistice in the Pacific, Life Magazine kept us informed with an exceptionally vivid photographic and advertising portrait of the U.S. at war. Photographs of war zones showed bombed cities, refugees, camps in the jungle, GIs smoking cigarettes, both at ease and ready for action, and huge ships going up in flames. But for depicting what was happening at home, the advertisements were the most revealing.
Though American women had served as teachers and social workers for a century, they entered the manufacturing and urban work force in droves during the war. Secretaries wore pencil-thin skirts and thick shoulder pads. Their shoulder-length hair was pulled away from their faces into two wings; their high-heeled shoes had open toes but rather sturdy heels. In an ad for Mimeograph duplicator with the title "When Man Power goes to War," (Life Magazine, June 22, 1942) a cheeky sailor leans across a mimeograph machine and flirts with a big-shouldered, short-sleeved lass working the machine. The lead sentences read: "We're telling a lot of the boys good-bye these days. Women and girls are taking over in offices--with a march song on their lips, courage in their hearts, ability in their hands." For the duration of the war, with Rosie the Riveter manufacturing airplanes, war ships, guns, bullets, and parachutes, American women left home, crossed country, and joined the war effort.
Even the dinner plate was considered a war zone with Campbell's Soup advertizing "This Summer...More than Ever...Soup Makes the Meal!" We learn that "One Hot Dish for summer meals is the rule...." Though nothing more specific is said, it's evident that the War Office had counseled American families to conserve energy. Everything from sugar to meat, tires to gas was rationed, and families and individuals had to present ration books to purchase these items. No one bought new cars: there were none for sale. American the steel went into planes and ships. And mother, aunt, sister, wife drove the rather short distances allowable with gas rationing. It was probably the largest four-year transformation even enacted in the United States. But once the war was won, the country began another immense shift. This too was evident in Life Magazine's advertisements.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Margotlog: Listening to Moby Dick
Margotlog: Listening to Mody Dick
Waking in the dark of 5 a.m., I realize I've been dreaming of an auditorium where the show has stalled. Behind us rises row after row of viewers equally sitting in the dark. We're waiting to hear "Moby Dick," Herman Melville's extravaganza of an 1851 whaling tale. Fittingly we're on Nantucket, the island port from where the ship Pequod will set sail under its cracked and one-legged captain Ahab. And we are waiting to listen to the novel because just before going to sleep, that's exactly what I was doing, my dream rising out of the dark intensity of Frank Muller's voice narrating this intensely factual, yet wildly literary, damned yet eulogized voyage.
My earlier readings of the book had the unfortunate characteristic of being entirely silent, nose-to-the-page renderings in my own, rather subdued, inner feminine croon. I might be able to woo a class of undergraduates, but I can't command the timbre, the thunder and lightening, the shades of masculine innuendo and invective demanded by Mody Dick. This is a whale of a book, as its most perceptive early reader, Nathaniel Hawthorne acknowledged.
It requires to be gruffed about, shuffled through New Bedford snow into the Spouter Inn, where the voice lowers to a whisper as Ishmael pauses before a strange canvas--is it the Black Sea in a snow storm, is it a whaler stove off Cape Horn, its masts about to impale the body of a "parmacetti" flying over it? With this first litany of this most questioning, most convoluted, inner and outer-voiced chronicle, Ishmael with Frank Muller's musing, contemptuous, railing, soothing, begging voice, altogether Shakespearean in its rank and file, its ability to inhabit the cannibal Queequeg who becomes Ishmael's bed partner and bosom friend, and even Mrs. Hussey, the owner of the Try Pots Inn where the two would-be mariners consume more chowders than a battalion of lubbers, even she who's learned to refuse harpooneers their weapons as they go abed, having lost one counterpane already to a mistaken infliction caused by rolling over the sharp end in the night, even she and her chambermaid are given their flighty, sharp-eyed, penny-pinching due.
Mody Dick is usually foisted off on undergraduates, or even, heaven help them, high schoolers, who in fact may have the high jinks and rapscality, the thumb-nose to the proprieties, not to mention the gods which are the stuff of Ishmael's rhetoric. But on the page, these high jinks sit there like so many thematic drawings, crowded against each other with no room to fill their lungs and tread the boards. Because that's what this book is: an entire show-company of mid-nineteenth century American fascinations, and fears; its most inordinate motley crew, its commercial expansions and numberings cheek-by-jowl with its religious imprecations and pleadings.
The problem with it, read on the page, is density. Within a single "I" Melville packs all this. It's through Ishmael's rending that we encounter Father Maple's sermon on Jonah, ditto Captains Bildad's and Peleg's cacophany of Quaker tract/damnation rant and commercial venture as the young man Ishmael signs on to the Pequod. The strategy works in the long run--as I remember enough of the book to know that Ishmael alone survives the dreadful encounter with the white whale Moby Dick and the sinking of the Pequod. But this single I, this single voice is huge: it contains oceans. It's American individualism at its most outlandish, most extravagant and many-tongued, beating Walt Whitman hands down. It's as if Shakespeare crammed the stories of Hamlet, MacBeth and Lear into one character and sat that youth in front of an audience as the funnel through which all the observation, storm and cantankerous madness poured over us.
We need an interpreter. We deserve and we get Frank Muller. I'm a great fan of books on tape, but this is a blend of intelligence and voice, text and vocal drama exceeding any other. Hasten thee to thy local library and put in a request. I started to listen last summer in Grand Marais, on Lake Superior, one of Minnesota's own immensities. Now with mounds of snow up to our Saint Paul eyeballs it seemed a good time to start again. As Ishmael suggests, when the cuffings of the daily round put you in a mood to revolt, it is time to put to sea.
Waking in the dark of 5 a.m., I realize I've been dreaming of an auditorium where the show has stalled. Behind us rises row after row of viewers equally sitting in the dark. We're waiting to hear "Moby Dick," Herman Melville's extravaganza of an 1851 whaling tale. Fittingly we're on Nantucket, the island port from where the ship Pequod will set sail under its cracked and one-legged captain Ahab. And we are waiting to listen to the novel because just before going to sleep, that's exactly what I was doing, my dream rising out of the dark intensity of Frank Muller's voice narrating this intensely factual, yet wildly literary, damned yet eulogized voyage.
My earlier readings of the book had the unfortunate characteristic of being entirely silent, nose-to-the-page renderings in my own, rather subdued, inner feminine croon. I might be able to woo a class of undergraduates, but I can't command the timbre, the thunder and lightening, the shades of masculine innuendo and invective demanded by Mody Dick. This is a whale of a book, as its most perceptive early reader, Nathaniel Hawthorne acknowledged.
It requires to be gruffed about, shuffled through New Bedford snow into the Spouter Inn, where the voice lowers to a whisper as Ishmael pauses before a strange canvas--is it the Black Sea in a snow storm, is it a whaler stove off Cape Horn, its masts about to impale the body of a "parmacetti" flying over it? With this first litany of this most questioning, most convoluted, inner and outer-voiced chronicle, Ishmael with Frank Muller's musing, contemptuous, railing, soothing, begging voice, altogether Shakespearean in its rank and file, its ability to inhabit the cannibal Queequeg who becomes Ishmael's bed partner and bosom friend, and even Mrs. Hussey, the owner of the Try Pots Inn where the two would-be mariners consume more chowders than a battalion of lubbers, even she who's learned to refuse harpooneers their weapons as they go abed, having lost one counterpane already to a mistaken infliction caused by rolling over the sharp end in the night, even she and her chambermaid are given their flighty, sharp-eyed, penny-pinching due.
Mody Dick is usually foisted off on undergraduates, or even, heaven help them, high schoolers, who in fact may have the high jinks and rapscality, the thumb-nose to the proprieties, not to mention the gods which are the stuff of Ishmael's rhetoric. But on the page, these high jinks sit there like so many thematic drawings, crowded against each other with no room to fill their lungs and tread the boards. Because that's what this book is: an entire show-company of mid-nineteenth century American fascinations, and fears; its most inordinate motley crew, its commercial expansions and numberings cheek-by-jowl with its religious imprecations and pleadings.
The problem with it, read on the page, is density. Within a single "I" Melville packs all this. It's through Ishmael's rending that we encounter Father Maple's sermon on Jonah, ditto Captains Bildad's and Peleg's cacophany of Quaker tract/damnation rant and commercial venture as the young man Ishmael signs on to the Pequod. The strategy works in the long run--as I remember enough of the book to know that Ishmael alone survives the dreadful encounter with the white whale Moby Dick and the sinking of the Pequod. But this single I, this single voice is huge: it contains oceans. It's American individualism at its most outlandish, most extravagant and many-tongued, beating Walt Whitman hands down. It's as if Shakespeare crammed the stories of Hamlet, MacBeth and Lear into one character and sat that youth in front of an audience as the funnel through which all the observation, storm and cantankerous madness poured over us.
We need an interpreter. We deserve and we get Frank Muller. I'm a great fan of books on tape, but this is a blend of intelligence and voice, text and vocal drama exceeding any other. Hasten thee to thy local library and put in a request. I started to listen last summer in Grand Marais, on Lake Superior, one of Minnesota's own immensities. Now with mounds of snow up to our Saint Paul eyeballs it seemed a good time to start again. As Ishmael suggests, when the cuffings of the daily round put you in a mood to revolt, it is time to put to sea.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Margotlog: Companions
Margotlog: Companions
An Italian-American who immigrated to the U.S. when she was twelve recently returned from visiting long-time friends in Rome, Milan, Parma, and Bologna. "They don't remarry," she said, "because they don't divorce. They find 'un companio' and have children together."
Though Catholic observance in Italy strikes me as far more relaxed that it is in the U.S., I'm probably seeing only the surface. With the Pope residing in the capitol city (though the Vatican is a realm apart from the modern Italian state), it's hard to avoid Catholic strictures against divorce.
Companion from the Latin, means "with bread," pane being bread in modern Italian too. We want some living creature sitting down with us, in that quasi religious way, to break bread, to eat together. Stretching all the way back into Christian/Catholic ritual, the bread and wine of Christ's "last supper" was transformed into taking belief and practice into our bodies, embodying a companionship of the heart.
In my mother's last fifteen years, eating at one end of her long dining room table, in her huge house in Charleston, she didn't exactly break bread with her dog Cindy. But Cindy sat on the floor beside her chair, raising soulful, entreating eyes, reminding my mother that another life depended on hers, urging her to share.
Over the last nine months or so, I've felt compelled to do the same. First it was the grim spectacle of financial collapse; then even more powerfully, the oil disaster in the Gulf with its filthy coating of pelicans (a symbol of Christian giving--more in a moment). With marshes, seabirds, and dolphins begrimed, I couldn't escape the disgusting slick of our inability to take care, use caution, reduce consumption.
It's been a while that I've known about the Christian association of the pelican with the Saviour's care. The first hint came from a stained glass window in Florence's Episcopal church, which showed a pelican plucking its breast feathers to line a nest. This image is extended in Christian iconography to link Christ with the pelican feeding its young with its own blood. St. Thomas Acquinas' hymn "Adoro Te," calls out to the Savior as the "Pelican of Mercy," as does Hamlet in Shakespeare's play, who promises to "repast" his friend like a "kind, life-rending pelican."
To me, who am neither Catholic (though a few generations removed) nor a regularly practicing Protestant, the pelican represents a different kind of companionship. It calls up from my childhood the sea smells, beach sounds, and wide wide water of early memory.
Very few of us have infinite resources. Lately I've had to cut back drastically on my donations to human and nature-helping organizations. The financial downturn has sent graduate students from my door; I simply don't have as much work as before. Though I won't starve, or even have to sell my car, I won't have as much disposable income as last year. What a nasty word "disposable" which suggests much about the throw-away culture I detest. Let's say, I simply can't give as much.
I'm thinking of volunteering in exchange. Governor Mark Dayton has my support in many ways, recently for recommending that every able-bodied Minnesotan donate one afternoon a week to helping organizations. A while ago my daughter lured me to the Wildlife Rehab Center on north Dale. She fed injured birds, cleaned cages. Her favorites were a few trumpeter swans who'd ingested lead pellets and were being treated to leach the lead from their systems and build up their stamina. These are huge birds; wing-spans seven feet. Though I'd written about them (Minnesota Monthly) years before when the DNR first brought eggs from Canada to reintroduce the bird, I simply couldn't approach the birds at the Rehab Center. My heart pounded. I was afraid. Ditto with cardinals and mourning doves.
I think I'll stick with people. I'll join a local organization working on transitioning as a neighborhood, as a species from heavy carbon use to less damaging ways of making light and staying warm. My favorite notion, proposed by some solar engineers last summer as we sat on my porch: to gather families who share an alley; put up a joint solar collector in the alley and let the families all benefit. I've seem some of these solar collectors in the hinterlands. They're big disks. Not ugly or even ungainly, but they do need space than a narrow city lot can provide.
Companions in hope and effort. Just as we humans need our own kind around our tables; we also need each other for joint efforts of change. It sounds grand. I know it will be hard work. I hope I'm ready.
An Italian-American who immigrated to the U.S. when she was twelve recently returned from visiting long-time friends in Rome, Milan, Parma, and Bologna. "They don't remarry," she said, "because they don't divorce. They find 'un companio' and have children together."
Though Catholic observance in Italy strikes me as far more relaxed that it is in the U.S., I'm probably seeing only the surface. With the Pope residing in the capitol city (though the Vatican is a realm apart from the modern Italian state), it's hard to avoid Catholic strictures against divorce.
Companion from the Latin, means "with bread," pane being bread in modern Italian too. We want some living creature sitting down with us, in that quasi religious way, to break bread, to eat together. Stretching all the way back into Christian/Catholic ritual, the bread and wine of Christ's "last supper" was transformed into taking belief and practice into our bodies, embodying a companionship of the heart.
In my mother's last fifteen years, eating at one end of her long dining room table, in her huge house in Charleston, she didn't exactly break bread with her dog Cindy. But Cindy sat on the floor beside her chair, raising soulful, entreating eyes, reminding my mother that another life depended on hers, urging her to share.
Over the last nine months or so, I've felt compelled to do the same. First it was the grim spectacle of financial collapse; then even more powerfully, the oil disaster in the Gulf with its filthy coating of pelicans (a symbol of Christian giving--more in a moment). With marshes, seabirds, and dolphins begrimed, I couldn't escape the disgusting slick of our inability to take care, use caution, reduce consumption.
It's been a while that I've known about the Christian association of the pelican with the Saviour's care. The first hint came from a stained glass window in Florence's Episcopal church, which showed a pelican plucking its breast feathers to line a nest. This image is extended in Christian iconography to link Christ with the pelican feeding its young with its own blood. St. Thomas Acquinas' hymn "Adoro Te," calls out to the Savior as the "Pelican of Mercy," as does Hamlet in Shakespeare's play, who promises to "repast" his friend like a "kind, life-rending pelican."
To me, who am neither Catholic (though a few generations removed) nor a regularly practicing Protestant, the pelican represents a different kind of companionship. It calls up from my childhood the sea smells, beach sounds, and wide wide water of early memory.
Very few of us have infinite resources. Lately I've had to cut back drastically on my donations to human and nature-helping organizations. The financial downturn has sent graduate students from my door; I simply don't have as much work as before. Though I won't starve, or even have to sell my car, I won't have as much disposable income as last year. What a nasty word "disposable" which suggests much about the throw-away culture I detest. Let's say, I simply can't give as much.
I'm thinking of volunteering in exchange. Governor Mark Dayton has my support in many ways, recently for recommending that every able-bodied Minnesotan donate one afternoon a week to helping organizations. A while ago my daughter lured me to the Wildlife Rehab Center on north Dale. She fed injured birds, cleaned cages. Her favorites were a few trumpeter swans who'd ingested lead pellets and were being treated to leach the lead from their systems and build up their stamina. These are huge birds; wing-spans seven feet. Though I'd written about them (Minnesota Monthly) years before when the DNR first brought eggs from Canada to reintroduce the bird, I simply couldn't approach the birds at the Rehab Center. My heart pounded. I was afraid. Ditto with cardinals and mourning doves.
I think I'll stick with people. I'll join a local organization working on transitioning as a neighborhood, as a species from heavy carbon use to less damaging ways of making light and staying warm. My favorite notion, proposed by some solar engineers last summer as we sat on my porch: to gather families who share an alley; put up a joint solar collector in the alley and let the families all benefit. I've seem some of these solar collectors in the hinterlands. They're big disks. Not ugly or even ungainly, but they do need space than a narrow city lot can provide.
Companions in hope and effort. Just as we humans need our own kind around our tables; we also need each other for joint efforts of change. It sounds grand. I know it will be hard work. I hope I'm ready.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Margotlog: Behind the Bedroom Door
Margotlog: Behind the Bedroom Door
When my map of the world expanded across the Cooper River from downtown Charleston, South Carolina, to the tiny hamlet of Mount Pleasant (was there even a hill in the place?), my mother was building us a bungalow. She bought the blue prints from a contractor's book and with the help of a Citadel engineering professor, altered them with small expansions. A side porch became a narrow study for my Citadel-professor father's paper grading and lesson preparation. The upstairs dormer bedrooms for my sister and me acquired a tiny full bath where eventually I'd soak away teenage angst in solitary bubbles. And downstairs, a tiny back stoop was enfolded by a modest-sized kitchen to make a breakfast nook, so tight that only my sister and I could fit at the ends of the red formica table. (Years later, I looked up the etymology of "formica" and found it related to ants, curious source of the squiggly, red-topped brightness of the table.)
Thus, in one year-long stroke, for that is how long it took us to clear the half-acre of its brambles and small trees, and the contractor to erect the bungalow, we left behind the rental world of my parents' early marriage and joined the home-owning, American middle-class. To most born after the 1950s, it's hard to imagine the intense yearning for suburban homesteads that swept the nation after the war. As a kid, then a teen, I had no perception of this larger change, only its immediate effect on our family. At one stroke, we acquired a huge front lawn, three towering magnolia trees and a large back garden, tended almost exclusively by my mother. After the cobblestone courtyards of The Old Citadel, this green privacy, this shade and private sun, filled us for a while with bemused splendor. Swinging from a magnolia branch, I sang "Carolina moon, keep shining" to the huge globe that spread its sheen over our dark lawn. Other times our family with spades and hoes, paused from "breaking sod" for my mother's bachelor buttons and summer squash. Whether "sod" accurately describes the soft loam of decayed acorns and leaves which we dug up, it certainly fits my mother's North Dakota spirit that pushed us outside to get our hands dirty. Part recreation, part tonic for my father's nervous stomach, such yard work kept us all busy until, with teenage flounces, I peeled off to mail scented letters and drink cherry cokes "downtown" with my friends.
Mount Pleasant in the 1950s with sidewalks only on Main Street, and almost exclusively single-family bungalows was truly a suburban dreamscape for post-war America. We had left behind Old Citadel families crowded against other other in what was essentially a tenement, though my mother would never have allowed herself to call it so. She did her best to turn the huge echoing rooms where Citadel cadets once bunked or attended classes. These she made into frilly, upholstered settings for family life. But she couldn't ease our crowding, both inside and out. She couldn't rid the place of spying older children, nor give herself and my father a bedroom sufficiently removed from their two girls. At the Old Citadel our family enjoyed neither of the "two types of privacy" that social historian Tamara Hareven (1991) defines as essential to American middle-class domesticity: "privacy of the family from the community, and privacy of family members from each other within the home." By moving to Mount Pleasant, we acquired both.
This coincided with my budding teen obsessions. In my own room, I closed the door my prying younger sister and swooned to Elvis singing "Just love me." Around my four-poster bed, I tacked up movie-star photos of Tab Hunter and Victor Mature. (Really? Victor Mature? Wasn't he simply a roustabout Roman gladiator? The actor who really made me swoon played Chopin and coughed drops of red blood on the rhapsodic piano keys. Did I write away for his photo from some movie studio? Will I ever remember his name?) One summer I took a sewing course, riding the bus over the roller-coaster bridge into Charleston, staring over the sparkling water of the Cooper River as it flowed into Charleston harbor. That double solitude of traveling alone and taking flight into dazzling possibilities could never have happened had we stayed at The Old Citadel. My mother was right to remove us; it was time for us girls to have the second kind of privacy Hareven identifies. I like to believe this possibility of developing one's unique interests and talents lies at the heart of American feminism and ingenuity. And it goes back at least as far as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) when the four March sisters enjoy Jo's suggestion for spending their Christmas pittance: "Let's each buy what we want and have some fun." Though Mama March will bestow a different colored copy of the same religious tract on each daughter, it's clear that pursuing their separate passions gives joy to the girls' hard existence: Jo her books, Amy her drawing pencils, Beth her music, and Meg some pretty collar to set off her curls. They may not actually spend their dollars on themselves, but the fact that they can thrill to the idea of doing so tells how fully their private selves were developing in Civil War America.
When my map of the world expanded across the Cooper River from downtown Charleston, South Carolina, to the tiny hamlet of Mount Pleasant (was there even a hill in the place?), my mother was building us a bungalow. She bought the blue prints from a contractor's book and with the help of a Citadel engineering professor, altered them with small expansions. A side porch became a narrow study for my Citadel-professor father's paper grading and lesson preparation. The upstairs dormer bedrooms for my sister and me acquired a tiny full bath where eventually I'd soak away teenage angst in solitary bubbles. And downstairs, a tiny back stoop was enfolded by a modest-sized kitchen to make a breakfast nook, so tight that only my sister and I could fit at the ends of the red formica table. (Years later, I looked up the etymology of "formica" and found it related to ants, curious source of the squiggly, red-topped brightness of the table.)
Thus, in one year-long stroke, for that is how long it took us to clear the half-acre of its brambles and small trees, and the contractor to erect the bungalow, we left behind the rental world of my parents' early marriage and joined the home-owning, American middle-class. To most born after the 1950s, it's hard to imagine the intense yearning for suburban homesteads that swept the nation after the war. As a kid, then a teen, I had no perception of this larger change, only its immediate effect on our family. At one stroke, we acquired a huge front lawn, three towering magnolia trees and a large back garden, tended almost exclusively by my mother. After the cobblestone courtyards of The Old Citadel, this green privacy, this shade and private sun, filled us for a while with bemused splendor. Swinging from a magnolia branch, I sang "Carolina moon, keep shining" to the huge globe that spread its sheen over our dark lawn. Other times our family with spades and hoes, paused from "breaking sod" for my mother's bachelor buttons and summer squash. Whether "sod" accurately describes the soft loam of decayed acorns and leaves which we dug up, it certainly fits my mother's North Dakota spirit that pushed us outside to get our hands dirty. Part recreation, part tonic for my father's nervous stomach, such yard work kept us all busy until, with teenage flounces, I peeled off to mail scented letters and drink cherry cokes "downtown" with my friends.
Mount Pleasant in the 1950s with sidewalks only on Main Street, and almost exclusively single-family bungalows was truly a suburban dreamscape for post-war America. We had left behind Old Citadel families crowded against other other in what was essentially a tenement, though my mother would never have allowed herself to call it so. She did her best to turn the huge echoing rooms where Citadel cadets once bunked or attended classes. These she made into frilly, upholstered settings for family life. But she couldn't ease our crowding, both inside and out. She couldn't rid the place of spying older children, nor give herself and my father a bedroom sufficiently removed from their two girls. At the Old Citadel our family enjoyed neither of the "two types of privacy" that social historian Tamara Hareven (1991) defines as essential to American middle-class domesticity: "privacy of the family from the community, and privacy of family members from each other within the home." By moving to Mount Pleasant, we acquired both.
This coincided with my budding teen obsessions. In my own room, I closed the door my prying younger sister and swooned to Elvis singing "Just love me." Around my four-poster bed, I tacked up movie-star photos of Tab Hunter and Victor Mature. (Really? Victor Mature? Wasn't he simply a roustabout Roman gladiator? The actor who really made me swoon played Chopin and coughed drops of red blood on the rhapsodic piano keys. Did I write away for his photo from some movie studio? Will I ever remember his name?) One summer I took a sewing course, riding the bus over the roller-coaster bridge into Charleston, staring over the sparkling water of the Cooper River as it flowed into Charleston harbor. That double solitude of traveling alone and taking flight into dazzling possibilities could never have happened had we stayed at The Old Citadel. My mother was right to remove us; it was time for us girls to have the second kind of privacy Hareven identifies. I like to believe this possibility of developing one's unique interests and talents lies at the heart of American feminism and ingenuity. And it goes back at least as far as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) when the four March sisters enjoy Jo's suggestion for spending their Christmas pittance: "Let's each buy what we want and have some fun." Though Mama March will bestow a different colored copy of the same religious tract on each daughter, it's clear that pursuing their separate passions gives joy to the girls' hard existence: Jo her books, Amy her drawing pencils, Beth her music, and Meg some pretty collar to set off her curls. They may not actually spend their dollars on themselves, but the fact that they can thrill to the idea of doing so tells how fully their private selves were developing in Civil War America.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Margotlog: The Graveyard of Ships
Margotlog: The Graveyard of Ships
Cape Cod juts off the coast of Massachusetts like a huge hook, which used to snatch sailing ships from any hope of reaching the Atlantic. May still do. When I visited Cape Cod last spring, I headed off Cape Cod's southeastern coast, departing from Hyannis toward Nantucket, and left that hook alone.
My sister lives in Boston. Visiting her over the years, I've encountered the almost tropical lushness of rhododendron and huge malvas in her south Boston yard. Yet crossing to Nantucket last May felt as cold and dangerous as a sudden Minnesota snow squall. The seas, grey and venomous, dashed themselves against the steel bulk of the car ferry, making me realize that seasickness was a possibility.
I'm not a sailor, not anymore, but when I was growing up in Charleston, it was impossible to ignore tides and waves, beaches and shrimp boats, huge tankers and liners coming into harbor. One of the last times I sat with my mother in front of her home TV, we held our breath as a pleasure yacht foundered off the Carolina coast. Winds were high; the Coast Guard was called. But nothing could save the yacht: the passengers and their craft went down.
Nantucket is a queer blend of long usage and tentative perch. More exposed to open ocean than its close neighbor Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket boasts the most numerous stand of ancient elms, saved from Dutch elm disease, of any community in the United States. Many of its colonial and Victorian homes are stately mansions, kept from any hint of decadence by glossy paint and good "bones," as we'd say of a face.
Offering obeisance to the sea, a whaling museum waits to educate visitors right off the ferry. Inside you can sit under the skeleton of a large whale. I'd like to say it's a "right" whale, the kind originally hunted by Native people just off shore, but no, it's a sperm whale that washed up on Nantucket's shores in 1998. Whaling made Nantucket's wealth, then its gradual demise, as its shallow harbor could no longer accommodate whaling ships as they expanded in size and depth. At least, that's the story you'll hear from New Bedford, whose deep-river harbor up the Achusnet River, lured the industry (odd word) to the mainland.
I came to Nantucket to learn what I could of whales, but found in addition a surprise: remnants of Nantucket's pre-Civil War African-American community. Massachusetts was the first state to oppose slavery, which in itself was an inducement to runaway slaves. But maybe as compelling was the sea. Men like Frederick Douglass who escaped slavery by being secreted on ships might take that as a sign. Whaling crews were notoriously motley: remember Queequeg from Melville's novel Moby Dick? A South Sea Islander. Native Americans and white New Englanders, and many men from the Azores, off the coast of Portugal and speaking Portuguese made up whaling crews. Atlantic whalers often stopped at the Azores to replenish stores and dump disgruntled crews.
In a small clapboard building, almost perfectly square with walls covered in canvas, I was given a short course in Nantucket's African-American settlement. Early escaped slaves became seamen and sometimes married Native American Nantucket women. Many prominent sea-faring Nantucket Quaker families gave household slaves their freedom. As the African-American settlement grew, its residents established this church which also became a school. A few young African-American women studied sufficiently to enter the essentially all-white high school. Before the Civil War, some even graduated.
I watched an interesting video made about the story; then the friendly, well-informed guide, a volunteer and former teacher, but from New York, not Nantucket, then took me next door to the house where African-American ministers and teachers had lived from time to time. More than any other experience on the island, walking through this house felt like being led into the past. With its low ceilings and huge central fire place, added-on kitchen and secret spaces upstairs, the house seemed imbued with an anxious rustle of skirts, slow tread, and quick breaths hidden behind walls. Because as elsewhere, Nantucket was periodically invaded by slave-hunters from the South, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. Though the town might spread the word of danger, though constables might put the "dog" off the track and the fugitive be given refuge within the homes of mighty ship captains, there was no denying the intent and danger of these searches.
Nantucket's "Guinea" neighborhood gives way to open lands where down a rutted road, one can find the African cemetery. Names on the graves match names in the story of education pursued and won, of sea-faring men who established families in Nantucket, and of ministers of the gospel. I'm always impressed into belief by the reality of gravestones. It was a fitting and kind conclusion to this brief education that my guide followed me in her car and now that it was raining, gathered me into its warm interior and drove me to my B&B. Later friends from Amherst would file off the ferry and we would lunch on chowder, possibly in the same street near the harbor where Queequeg and Ishmael from Moby Dick dined on haddock and oysters.
Then we'd walk in the other direction from the African community and eventually, winding up the slopes of town, discover in a wind-blown pasture the oldest dwelling, from the early 1686 , the Jethro Coffin House. It was still cold and squally. We did not linger but hurried back to the wharf and boarded the ferry to Hyannis, where only briefly when the sun shone weak as faded finery, did we sit on deck.
Cape Cod juts off the coast of Massachusetts like a huge hook, which used to snatch sailing ships from any hope of reaching the Atlantic. May still do. When I visited Cape Cod last spring, I headed off Cape Cod's southeastern coast, departing from Hyannis toward Nantucket, and left that hook alone.
My sister lives in Boston. Visiting her over the years, I've encountered the almost tropical lushness of rhododendron and huge malvas in her south Boston yard. Yet crossing to Nantucket last May felt as cold and dangerous as a sudden Minnesota snow squall. The seas, grey and venomous, dashed themselves against the steel bulk of the car ferry, making me realize that seasickness was a possibility.
I'm not a sailor, not anymore, but when I was growing up in Charleston, it was impossible to ignore tides and waves, beaches and shrimp boats, huge tankers and liners coming into harbor. One of the last times I sat with my mother in front of her home TV, we held our breath as a pleasure yacht foundered off the Carolina coast. Winds were high; the Coast Guard was called. But nothing could save the yacht: the passengers and their craft went down.
Nantucket is a queer blend of long usage and tentative perch. More exposed to open ocean than its close neighbor Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket boasts the most numerous stand of ancient elms, saved from Dutch elm disease, of any community in the United States. Many of its colonial and Victorian homes are stately mansions, kept from any hint of decadence by glossy paint and good "bones," as we'd say of a face.
Offering obeisance to the sea, a whaling museum waits to educate visitors right off the ferry. Inside you can sit under the skeleton of a large whale. I'd like to say it's a "right" whale, the kind originally hunted by Native people just off shore, but no, it's a sperm whale that washed up on Nantucket's shores in 1998. Whaling made Nantucket's wealth, then its gradual demise, as its shallow harbor could no longer accommodate whaling ships as they expanded in size and depth. At least, that's the story you'll hear from New Bedford, whose deep-river harbor up the Achusnet River, lured the industry (odd word) to the mainland.
I came to Nantucket to learn what I could of whales, but found in addition a surprise: remnants of Nantucket's pre-Civil War African-American community. Massachusetts was the first state to oppose slavery, which in itself was an inducement to runaway slaves. But maybe as compelling was the sea. Men like Frederick Douglass who escaped slavery by being secreted on ships might take that as a sign. Whaling crews were notoriously motley: remember Queequeg from Melville's novel Moby Dick? A South Sea Islander. Native Americans and white New Englanders, and many men from the Azores, off the coast of Portugal and speaking Portuguese made up whaling crews. Atlantic whalers often stopped at the Azores to replenish stores and dump disgruntled crews.
In a small clapboard building, almost perfectly square with walls covered in canvas, I was given a short course in Nantucket's African-American settlement. Early escaped slaves became seamen and sometimes married Native American Nantucket women. Many prominent sea-faring Nantucket Quaker families gave household slaves their freedom. As the African-American settlement grew, its residents established this church which also became a school. A few young African-American women studied sufficiently to enter the essentially all-white high school. Before the Civil War, some even graduated.
I watched an interesting video made about the story; then the friendly, well-informed guide, a volunteer and former teacher, but from New York, not Nantucket, then took me next door to the house where African-American ministers and teachers had lived from time to time. More than any other experience on the island, walking through this house felt like being led into the past. With its low ceilings and huge central fire place, added-on kitchen and secret spaces upstairs, the house seemed imbued with an anxious rustle of skirts, slow tread, and quick breaths hidden behind walls. Because as elsewhere, Nantucket was periodically invaded by slave-hunters from the South, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. Though the town might spread the word of danger, though constables might put the "dog" off the track and the fugitive be given refuge within the homes of mighty ship captains, there was no denying the intent and danger of these searches.
Nantucket's "Guinea" neighborhood gives way to open lands where down a rutted road, one can find the African cemetery. Names on the graves match names in the story of education pursued and won, of sea-faring men who established families in Nantucket, and of ministers of the gospel. I'm always impressed into belief by the reality of gravestones. It was a fitting and kind conclusion to this brief education that my guide followed me in her car and now that it was raining, gathered me into its warm interior and drove me to my B&B. Later friends from Amherst would file off the ferry and we would lunch on chowder, possibly in the same street near the harbor where Queequeg and Ishmael from Moby Dick dined on haddock and oysters.
Then we'd walk in the other direction from the African community and eventually, winding up the slopes of town, discover in a wind-blown pasture the oldest dwelling, from the early 1686 , the Jethro Coffin House. It was still cold and squally. We did not linger but hurried back to the wharf and boarded the ferry to Hyannis, where only briefly when the sun shone weak as faded finery, did we sit on deck.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Margotlog: Dialing Home or The Old Red Sweater
Margotlog: Dialing Home or The Old Red Sweater
Out of the darkness of dreams rises my sensation of dialing. I'm trying to form my parents' last phone number in Charleston. Area Code: 843, then 766... That's as far as I get. During my mother's last fifteen years, living alone after my father died, I visited frequently, especially after she had shingles and her health declined. Then it was every three months or so. Rising in winter darkness for a 7 a.m. Delta or Northwest flight to Atlanta, I'd rush to be ready for the taxi, steaming in the darkness. Inevitably there'd be a wait in the MSP airplane, hugging my layers, while the wings were de-iced.
Once in Charleston, stepping outside, I smelled that aroma of damp earth and flowing trees, and was flooded by momentary relief, then the blur of rental car, driving the freeway into town, crossing the Ashley River bridge, and turning into Wappoo Heights. Then something clicked: I was there. The car crunched over the gravel drive, I parked beside the dining room windows high above the ground, and turned the lock in the back door. Even if I arrived during her long afternoon nap, my mother would be standing at the back of the kitchen wearing her old red sweater, hand raised in her perennial gesture--warding off but welcoming at once.
I rarely thought of her as beautiful; in fact, she preferred comfort and energy above the demands and expense of beauty. But in those last years, with her hair gone white and longer than before, her blue eyes sparkled like winter sky framed by snow. And her furious energy was subdued to a thorough welcome. She was so glad to see me--a balm after all our years of divorce and difficulties. She put her cheek to mine, and murmured my name. At our feet, Cindy whined and batted our legs.
My memories are as fragmented as her old telephone number. Discovering that she could crack a joke as we walked toward the eye glass store. Realizing that she had a decided routine: eating her half cheese sandwich smeared with mayo, as she sat on the edge of the bed before tipping over for her nap. It took me a while to accept that after my father died, she had stopped undressing at night. She wanted to be fully clothed if something happened, like a hurricane or a rapping in the night. It was measure of her fear and determination: she would not be moved. She would stay in her own home, even as her years advanced beyond 80, toward 90.
Unlike most Carolina families, we had no cousins, aunts or uncles in Charleston. The closest was my father's youngest brother, the rascally Frankie, who moved down to Summerville with his son. But he died even before my father, and in her years alone, my mother lost track of the son. Thus, her neighbors and her yardman, Mr. Cody, became her extended family. With her persnickety aloofness, she had a louvered blind put up to block one set of neighbors, but down the block lived Diane, whose kindness extended to driving my mother to concerts until her own woes intruded. After that, Dorcas and her daughter, true New England transplants, gladly accepted my mother's offer of concert tickets if they provided the rides. Sometimes when even this connection failed, my little mother drove herself to the Sotille concerts, learning by heart the look of every corner into town and back. When I took her place behind the wheel, she called out each crossing with furious determination, and if I deviated a jot, there was hell to pay.
Every day of my visit except Sunday was filled to bursting with activity--shopping, doctor's appointments, cleaning, cooking, going over her checkbook (she rarely, almost never made a mistake), de-budding her towering camellias under her supervision. And in the evenings, serving dinner before the TV, never varying her routine of listening to the news as she ate in the living room. Sunday was blessedly different. We ate a leisurely breakfast, with something fancier than cereal--perhaps baking-powder biscuits, Egg Beaters, jam, milk, and coffee for me. Tidbits for Cindy who sat on the floor between our chairs, never barking but begging. "Throw Cindy a corner," my mother would suggest as she tore off a bit of toast and Cindy licked it off the floor.
She slept longer naps on Sunday which gave me hours of upstairs quiet. Doing my stretches in the high-ceilinged hall above the curving staircase, I fell into a reverie of sunlight flickering on the stuccoed walls. Outside stood the two cedar sentinels off-kilter in the front yard. Mourning doves teetered on the wires. A jay might swoop down, grab a bug and chatter a departure. Red birds flashed from tree to tree. And across the hall hung a scene from my mother's North Dakota, from Papa Max's house. Framed with a deep gilt border, a small lake overhung by a willow reminded me so deeply of Lake Elsie where she, her mother and sisters used to picnic, and which I'd known in my childhood, that I could almost smell the warm weedy water, and slide across slimy stones to dip down to my shoulders in the water.
I was fully immersed, those lazy Sunday afternoons, when the sun always shone through the tall front windows and quivered on the walls. When the distances between her early and later life dissolved and the essence of her story penetrated mine. Then in the casual distance between upper and lower floors, between her sleeping and my silent alertness there was fashioned an agreement of love and continuity which I'd never anticipated in our younger, more troubled years. Now, chance and deeper affection than I'd even anticipated drew us together. What she gave me I still can't exactly name, but what I was giving her--simple support and companionship--was unprecedented. We could finally be easy together. In this, we were lucky: the last segment of her life bestowed upon us an unforeseen charm.
Out of the darkness of dreams rises my sensation of dialing. I'm trying to form my parents' last phone number in Charleston. Area Code: 843, then 766... That's as far as I get. During my mother's last fifteen years, living alone after my father died, I visited frequently, especially after she had shingles and her health declined. Then it was every three months or so. Rising in winter darkness for a 7 a.m. Delta or Northwest flight to Atlanta, I'd rush to be ready for the taxi, steaming in the darkness. Inevitably there'd be a wait in the MSP airplane, hugging my layers, while the wings were de-iced.
Once in Charleston, stepping outside, I smelled that aroma of damp earth and flowing trees, and was flooded by momentary relief, then the blur of rental car, driving the freeway into town, crossing the Ashley River bridge, and turning into Wappoo Heights. Then something clicked: I was there. The car crunched over the gravel drive, I parked beside the dining room windows high above the ground, and turned the lock in the back door. Even if I arrived during her long afternoon nap, my mother would be standing at the back of the kitchen wearing her old red sweater, hand raised in her perennial gesture--warding off but welcoming at once.
I rarely thought of her as beautiful; in fact, she preferred comfort and energy above the demands and expense of beauty. But in those last years, with her hair gone white and longer than before, her blue eyes sparkled like winter sky framed by snow. And her furious energy was subdued to a thorough welcome. She was so glad to see me--a balm after all our years of divorce and difficulties. She put her cheek to mine, and murmured my name. At our feet, Cindy whined and batted our legs.
My memories are as fragmented as her old telephone number. Discovering that she could crack a joke as we walked toward the eye glass store. Realizing that she had a decided routine: eating her half cheese sandwich smeared with mayo, as she sat on the edge of the bed before tipping over for her nap. It took me a while to accept that after my father died, she had stopped undressing at night. She wanted to be fully clothed if something happened, like a hurricane or a rapping in the night. It was measure of her fear and determination: she would not be moved. She would stay in her own home, even as her years advanced beyond 80, toward 90.
Unlike most Carolina families, we had no cousins, aunts or uncles in Charleston. The closest was my father's youngest brother, the rascally Frankie, who moved down to Summerville with his son. But he died even before my father, and in her years alone, my mother lost track of the son. Thus, her neighbors and her yardman, Mr. Cody, became her extended family. With her persnickety aloofness, she had a louvered blind put up to block one set of neighbors, but down the block lived Diane, whose kindness extended to driving my mother to concerts until her own woes intruded. After that, Dorcas and her daughter, true New England transplants, gladly accepted my mother's offer of concert tickets if they provided the rides. Sometimes when even this connection failed, my little mother drove herself to the Sotille concerts, learning by heart the look of every corner into town and back. When I took her place behind the wheel, she called out each crossing with furious determination, and if I deviated a jot, there was hell to pay.
Every day of my visit except Sunday was filled to bursting with activity--shopping, doctor's appointments, cleaning, cooking, going over her checkbook (she rarely, almost never made a mistake), de-budding her towering camellias under her supervision. And in the evenings, serving dinner before the TV, never varying her routine of listening to the news as she ate in the living room. Sunday was blessedly different. We ate a leisurely breakfast, with something fancier than cereal--perhaps baking-powder biscuits, Egg Beaters, jam, milk, and coffee for me. Tidbits for Cindy who sat on the floor between our chairs, never barking but begging. "Throw Cindy a corner," my mother would suggest as she tore off a bit of toast and Cindy licked it off the floor.
She slept longer naps on Sunday which gave me hours of upstairs quiet. Doing my stretches in the high-ceilinged hall above the curving staircase, I fell into a reverie of sunlight flickering on the stuccoed walls. Outside stood the two cedar sentinels off-kilter in the front yard. Mourning doves teetered on the wires. A jay might swoop down, grab a bug and chatter a departure. Red birds flashed from tree to tree. And across the hall hung a scene from my mother's North Dakota, from Papa Max's house. Framed with a deep gilt border, a small lake overhung by a willow reminded me so deeply of Lake Elsie where she, her mother and sisters used to picnic, and which I'd known in my childhood, that I could almost smell the warm weedy water, and slide across slimy stones to dip down to my shoulders in the water.
I was fully immersed, those lazy Sunday afternoons, when the sun always shone through the tall front windows and quivered on the walls. When the distances between her early and later life dissolved and the essence of her story penetrated mine. Then in the casual distance between upper and lower floors, between her sleeping and my silent alertness there was fashioned an agreement of love and continuity which I'd never anticipated in our younger, more troubled years. Now, chance and deeper affection than I'd even anticipated drew us together. What she gave me I still can't exactly name, but what I was giving her--simple support and companionship--was unprecedented. We could finally be easy together. In this, we were lucky: the last segment of her life bestowed upon us an unforeseen charm.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Margotlog: In Pisa's Campo Santo
Margotlog: In Pisa's Campo Santo
Stand in the green field where Pisa's Leaning Tower, Cathedral and Baptistry pose like static black and white chess pieces. Turn abruptly left and find the long low colonnade of the Campo Santo or Holy Field. Campo= field. Santo=holy. Within this huge colonnade of carved marble tombs in the Roman fashion used to reside a fresco which ran the length of a wall. Once exposed to the air, it is now enclosed. "The Triumph of Death" haunts my dreams: one of the most unforgettable dream-images of late medieval Italy.
A beautifully costumed hunting party of men and women approach a stench. The women with their crowned or brimmed hats lift handkerchiefs to their noses. Their lap dogs flatten their ears and lift their lips. Horses snort, and paw the ground. At one end a falconer subdues the gray, hooked-beaked bird clutched in his gloved hands; at the other end, the master of the hunting party points to three coffins open to the air.
How sanitized death is for us! We know nothing of decomposing bodies or coffins pried open to be plundered. Yet, there they are in various states of disarray: from a skeleton picked clean to a freshly placed corpse still in relative finery. Snakes flare from the guts. Can this be possible? Do snakes really eat the inside of the dead? Go see "True Grit" with Jeff Bridges to find out for sure what rattles from the belly of a the Coen Brothers' gold mine.
We should run shrieking from the scene. So should the hunting party. Yet they pause; the women daintily cover their nostrils; the falcon is subdued. This is the Middle Ages: Death holds court and the courtiers pay homage. Even those gorgeously arrayed, enjoying the hunt as a spectacle, must contemplate the end of earthly life, while beyond them in the hills, monks pray for heavenly redemption.
It is this essential pause which holds us forever in thrall. The artist, supposedly Buonamico Buffalmacco, neither exaggerates the horror nor ignores it. The living retain all their elegance, restraint, and lively response; the dead stay put. Only the snakes, those symbols of temptation, writhe in the air. Typical of other late medieval works, the animals capture the lively response more fully than do the humans--horses' nostrils dilate in their lowered heads; ears twitch back and forth. A lap dog crouches further into encircling arms. The falcon raises its wings ready to spring away. There is simply no avoiding the truth of this message: at the end of life, we enter the ground, our ribs a final cage.
Yet in the other direction along the fresco, exists a world of pleasure unalloyed by death's odor. Seated in an orchard, a party of women play psalter and harp. No doubt they are singing to one another, inviting their paramours to recline on the grass. In their laps, their little dogs rest comfortably, indicative of fecundity. The air is fresh, perfumed with lemon and orange blossoms.
I love this scene for its recognition of women as artistic partners to their beauty and fertility. Yes, apples may hang from the trees, but they have long been plucked, and still the grove provides its soothing freshness. Death waits at the end of life's journey, yet it is still important to enjoy the pleasures of art and love even as we recognize our corporeality. We are not banished from paradise; we suffer no guilt. Only pleasure and warning. There is something deeply sane about this point of view.
Stand in the green field where Pisa's Leaning Tower, Cathedral and Baptistry pose like static black and white chess pieces. Turn abruptly left and find the long low colonnade of the Campo Santo or Holy Field. Campo= field. Santo=holy. Within this huge colonnade of carved marble tombs in the Roman fashion used to reside a fresco which ran the length of a wall. Once exposed to the air, it is now enclosed. "The Triumph of Death" haunts my dreams: one of the most unforgettable dream-images of late medieval Italy.
A beautifully costumed hunting party of men and women approach a stench. The women with their crowned or brimmed hats lift handkerchiefs to their noses. Their lap dogs flatten their ears and lift their lips. Horses snort, and paw the ground. At one end a falconer subdues the gray, hooked-beaked bird clutched in his gloved hands; at the other end, the master of the hunting party points to three coffins open to the air.
How sanitized death is for us! We know nothing of decomposing bodies or coffins pried open to be plundered. Yet, there they are in various states of disarray: from a skeleton picked clean to a freshly placed corpse still in relative finery. Snakes flare from the guts. Can this be possible? Do snakes really eat the inside of the dead? Go see "True Grit" with Jeff Bridges to find out for sure what rattles from the belly of a the Coen Brothers' gold mine.
We should run shrieking from the scene. So should the hunting party. Yet they pause; the women daintily cover their nostrils; the falcon is subdued. This is the Middle Ages: Death holds court and the courtiers pay homage. Even those gorgeously arrayed, enjoying the hunt as a spectacle, must contemplate the end of earthly life, while beyond them in the hills, monks pray for heavenly redemption.
It is this essential pause which holds us forever in thrall. The artist, supposedly Buonamico Buffalmacco, neither exaggerates the horror nor ignores it. The living retain all their elegance, restraint, and lively response; the dead stay put. Only the snakes, those symbols of temptation, writhe in the air. Typical of other late medieval works, the animals capture the lively response more fully than do the humans--horses' nostrils dilate in their lowered heads; ears twitch back and forth. A lap dog crouches further into encircling arms. The falcon raises its wings ready to spring away. There is simply no avoiding the truth of this message: at the end of life, we enter the ground, our ribs a final cage.
Yet in the other direction along the fresco, exists a world of pleasure unalloyed by death's odor. Seated in an orchard, a party of women play psalter and harp. No doubt they are singing to one another, inviting their paramours to recline on the grass. In their laps, their little dogs rest comfortably, indicative of fecundity. The air is fresh, perfumed with lemon and orange blossoms.
I love this scene for its recognition of women as artistic partners to their beauty and fertility. Yes, apples may hang from the trees, but they have long been plucked, and still the grove provides its soothing freshness. Death waits at the end of life's journey, yet it is still important to enjoy the pleasures of art and love even as we recognize our corporeality. We are not banished from paradise; we suffer no guilt. Only pleasure and warning. There is something deeply sane about this point of view.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Margotlog: Tikal Pyramids
Margotlog: Tikal Pyramids
Getting there is relatively easy today, so I'm told, but when I visited Tikal in the late 1960s even arriving in Guatemala City was something of an ordeal. Stepping off the plane gave us a shiver of apprehension: armed and suited up military stood with legs apart, and rifles slung across their bodies as we tourists filed off the plane. There was a civil war going on, but we were there anyway. Now I know more about the U.S. supported military government, about the Quiche Mayan people represented by Rigoberta Menchu, who were being tortured, denied basic human rights, and shot for over thirty years. Knowing what I do now, I'm appalled that we took it into our heads to visit Guatemala.
Yet we did, leaving Guatemala City immediately for the more subdued colonial city of Antigua. My memory of the palm-filled open courtyard of the hotel, with its marimba and plashing fountain, includes also my first view of iguanas in the "wild," posing on our balcony with back fins raised. In the morning we left for Tikal.
Why we wanted to visit this jungle city, I can't exactly recall. Something about reading American and English archaeologists' accounts of the ancient city, which they stumbled upon in the midst of the jungle. So subdued were we in middle America, so ignorant were we both that I suspect we also stumbled into the plan. At this point in my life, in my first marriage, my political consciousness was virtually asleep for anything outside the Vietnam war and U.S. civil rights agitation. Now I realize that the U.S. government's clandestine support for the rightest military regimes in Guatemala derived from the same mind-set of fear and ignorance which kept us losing and losing in Vietnam. Is it possible that various U.S. governments and parts of the populace were so unhinged by civil disobedience that they vented their retaliation on indigenous peoples in other parts of the world?
The tiny plane that flew us from Antigua to Tikal contained Mayan women in their embroidered huipuls and long multi-colored skirts. They brought cages of chickens and baskets of vegetables and other foodstuffs onto the plane which had its seats arranged along the two sides with an open space in the middle. The plane had to land at Lake Atitlan, a huge lake shaped by volcanos, and dotted with Mayan villages along its shore. The plane rattled and shook: we were frightened, though the other passengers seemed not bothered at all.
Setting down in Tikal we seemed about to decapitate the tree tops. The air strip suddenly appeared, in the midst of the jungle, nothing more than open grass. Someone was criss-crossing two flags; the pilot nosed down the tiny craft, and we were bumping along uneven ground before the propellers slowed to a stop. By this time we were two of the four passengers; the other two were American archaeologists who'd brought in a movie from Guatemala City.
Yes, the main temples were immense, still encrusted with vines and grasses. We had to pull ourselves up the main staircase to the tall comblike top from which we could gaze across the trees. Our guide, who also served us meals in the thatched dining area, took us deeper in the jungle where mounds with trees growing out of them indicated temples and other buildings of the once imperial city, waiting for excavation. I remember intending never to forget the huge serpents carved in block-like elegance around door posts; the warriors and gods in profile with huge flared nostrils from which hung rings. I intended never to forget the enormous butterflies and bees, some broader than my hand as they swooped down in brilliant blue and black or various oranges and yellows across our jungle paths. Or the howler monkeys so high in the trees that we never saw them, only heard their hootings.
But more than any of this, I remember midnight terror, lying under the thick thatch of our cabana, when I awoke and heard scratchings and scrapings. Sure some bat or lizard was about to plummet down onto me, I tied a scarf around my hair and pulled the sheet just under my nose.
In the morning, talking to our guide whose English was better than my Spanish, but not up to answering my question: how often do you show movies? Because he'd been describing the treat we had in store for us that evening. We could attend their movie, shown outside on a sheet. It was something with Rita Hayworth, I seem to recall, and his dark eyes gleamed, and he licked his lips.
"How often do you show movies?" I asked in English. He understood. He stopped, leaning over to refill the coffee cups. Then he straightened: "Cada quince," he said. Over and over I had to have him repeat this. Until finally it registered: quince was a number, it probably meant 15. The phrase signaled "every two weeks."
We didn't stay nearly that long, taking the tiny plane out a few days later, with a stop at the huge lake again, where Mayan people crammed on board. We were the only gingos.
Getting there is relatively easy today, so I'm told, but when I visited Tikal in the late 1960s even arriving in Guatemala City was something of an ordeal. Stepping off the plane gave us a shiver of apprehension: armed and suited up military stood with legs apart, and rifles slung across their bodies as we tourists filed off the plane. There was a civil war going on, but we were there anyway. Now I know more about the U.S. supported military government, about the Quiche Mayan people represented by Rigoberta Menchu, who were being tortured, denied basic human rights, and shot for over thirty years. Knowing what I do now, I'm appalled that we took it into our heads to visit Guatemala.
Yet we did, leaving Guatemala City immediately for the more subdued colonial city of Antigua. My memory of the palm-filled open courtyard of the hotel, with its marimba and plashing fountain, includes also my first view of iguanas in the "wild," posing on our balcony with back fins raised. In the morning we left for Tikal.
Why we wanted to visit this jungle city, I can't exactly recall. Something about reading American and English archaeologists' accounts of the ancient city, which they stumbled upon in the midst of the jungle. So subdued were we in middle America, so ignorant were we both that I suspect we also stumbled into the plan. At this point in my life, in my first marriage, my political consciousness was virtually asleep for anything outside the Vietnam war and U.S. civil rights agitation. Now I realize that the U.S. government's clandestine support for the rightest military regimes in Guatemala derived from the same mind-set of fear and ignorance which kept us losing and losing in Vietnam. Is it possible that various U.S. governments and parts of the populace were so unhinged by civil disobedience that they vented their retaliation on indigenous peoples in other parts of the world?
The tiny plane that flew us from Antigua to Tikal contained Mayan women in their embroidered huipuls and long multi-colored skirts. They brought cages of chickens and baskets of vegetables and other foodstuffs onto the plane which had its seats arranged along the two sides with an open space in the middle. The plane had to land at Lake Atitlan, a huge lake shaped by volcanos, and dotted with Mayan villages along its shore. The plane rattled and shook: we were frightened, though the other passengers seemed not bothered at all.
Setting down in Tikal we seemed about to decapitate the tree tops. The air strip suddenly appeared, in the midst of the jungle, nothing more than open grass. Someone was criss-crossing two flags; the pilot nosed down the tiny craft, and we were bumping along uneven ground before the propellers slowed to a stop. By this time we were two of the four passengers; the other two were American archaeologists who'd brought in a movie from Guatemala City.
Yes, the main temples were immense, still encrusted with vines and grasses. We had to pull ourselves up the main staircase to the tall comblike top from which we could gaze across the trees. Our guide, who also served us meals in the thatched dining area, took us deeper in the jungle where mounds with trees growing out of them indicated temples and other buildings of the once imperial city, waiting for excavation. I remember intending never to forget the huge serpents carved in block-like elegance around door posts; the warriors and gods in profile with huge flared nostrils from which hung rings. I intended never to forget the enormous butterflies and bees, some broader than my hand as they swooped down in brilliant blue and black or various oranges and yellows across our jungle paths. Or the howler monkeys so high in the trees that we never saw them, only heard their hootings.
But more than any of this, I remember midnight terror, lying under the thick thatch of our cabana, when I awoke and heard scratchings and scrapings. Sure some bat or lizard was about to plummet down onto me, I tied a scarf around my hair and pulled the sheet just under my nose.
In the morning, talking to our guide whose English was better than my Spanish, but not up to answering my question: how often do you show movies? Because he'd been describing the treat we had in store for us that evening. We could attend their movie, shown outside on a sheet. It was something with Rita Hayworth, I seem to recall, and his dark eyes gleamed, and he licked his lips.
"How often do you show movies?" I asked in English. He understood. He stopped, leaning over to refill the coffee cups. Then he straightened: "Cada quince," he said. Over and over I had to have him repeat this. Until finally it registered: quince was a number, it probably meant 15. The phrase signaled "every two weeks."
We didn't stay nearly that long, taking the tiny plane out a few days later, with a stop at the huge lake again, where Mayan people crammed on board. We were the only gingos.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Margotlog: Romance with a Car
Margotlog: Romance with a Car
Think of a family as a pyramid: I'm on the phone with my oldest relative, Eleanora, 93, who lives in Dover, Delaware. She bought her first car in her late 30s, "after the war," as the family saying goes. We both know she means the Big War when her husband Dick was killed in the Pacific. After that Big War, she and her youngest sister Sadie found jobs in Washington, D.C., and their mother, the adorable Josephine, came from Pittsburgh to live with them. Eleanora's car payments cost (am I remembering right?) $100 a month. It was only after prolonged study of their joint budgets and after borrowing on the insurance she'd gotten when Dick was killed that this family of women took the plunge and bought a car. "God will provide," Josephine had assured them. Josephine's God, gentle and loving, held them tenderly for years in cupped hands.
Eleanor's last car, a Toyota Corolla, she sold, reluctantly. Her affection for this machine has always astonished me. Sadie never drove, and certainly not Josephine, so tiny she couldn't have seen over the wheel. But Eleanor loved to drive, and held onto the Corolla well beyond becoming too bent to sit comfortably and maneuver the wheel. Having a car meant freedom, becoming the head of their family and driving to visit friends up and down the East Coast. It meant starting a mid-life romance with motion, authority, and command--virtually a man's romance with a car.
On the phone Eleanor and I are talking about where her mother and sister are buried across the road from Arlington National Cemetery and about my parents' graves in Magnolia Cemetery on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly, the pitch of her voice rises and she's launched into the story of "Leonard Driving the Bridge." It's one of our set pieces, rousing the blood, making us laugh and feel joined across half the continent.
My father was a terrible driver--that's the bedrock reality. He and his three brothers grew up a block from Eleanor and her two sisters in Pittsburgh--the families joined by their mothers, Rose and Josephine. Thus Eleanor and my father Leonard knew each other from childhood and, in their jokey, loving way, kept in touch over the years. Eleanor doesn't have to convince me that Leonard was a terrible driver. Year after year when we lived across the "Roller Coaster Bridge" in Charleston, he drove my mother, sister and me across the Cooper River to our bungalow in Mount Pleasant.
Charleston is a magical city laved with tidal waters--two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, which, so natives like to joke, meet at the tip of Charleston, to form the Atlantic Ocean. When I was a girl and we still lived in The Old Citadel, smack in the middle of the peninsula, I could hear the big ocean freighters boom. The rats that scurried behind our garbage cans came off those huge ships, said my mother. Then when I was starting 8th grade, we moved across the Cooper River to the small community of Mount Pleasant.
The Roller Coaster Bridge, built in the 1930s, rose in dizzying height to one tall span, dipped fast and curved, then rose again over the river's other arm until with a clunk we reached solid ground again. Even now, as I write this, my insides cramp and my breath comes ragged. "Sadie was sitting in the front seat with your mother and father. Mother and I were in the back," comes Eleanor's excited voice, describing a visit long after I left home. "Your father lifted his hands off the wheel and gestured. He looked back at us with that smirk of his. Mother gripped my hand. We could see the water below!"
I'm a girl in the back again, furious at my father's dangerous behavior, terrified we'd plunge through the flimsy railing into the river. It had happened before: a freighter came loose from its moorings and broke a hole in a span. A family of five in their car fell through and drowned. For years this early terror has sat me rigid in front seats, behind other steering wheels. I'm almost phobic of cars. Intensely resentful of my father's for his antics.
"On our way back into town," comes Eleanor's voice, "Mother whispered to Sadie and me, 'We'll all three sit in the back. Then if we go down, we'll go down together.'" She's laughing. I'm laughing. They're doing the only thing possible, offering each other the comfort I never got from my mother who sat stoic and silent in the front, or from my whimpering younger sister beside me in the back. It's their loving kindness in the midst of terror that redeems my resentment and eases my fear of driving. Having a romance with this kind of fear isn't possible, but knowing some in my family could find comfort in its midst lights a tiny candle. It's no wonder Eleanor and I tell each other this story over and over again.
Think of a family as a pyramid: I'm on the phone with my oldest relative, Eleanora, 93, who lives in Dover, Delaware. She bought her first car in her late 30s, "after the war," as the family saying goes. We both know she means the Big War when her husband Dick was killed in the Pacific. After that Big War, she and her youngest sister Sadie found jobs in Washington, D.C., and their mother, the adorable Josephine, came from Pittsburgh to live with them. Eleanora's car payments cost (am I remembering right?) $100 a month. It was only after prolonged study of their joint budgets and after borrowing on the insurance she'd gotten when Dick was killed that this family of women took the plunge and bought a car. "God will provide," Josephine had assured them. Josephine's God, gentle and loving, held them tenderly for years in cupped hands.
Eleanor's last car, a Toyota Corolla, she sold, reluctantly. Her affection for this machine has always astonished me. Sadie never drove, and certainly not Josephine, so tiny she couldn't have seen over the wheel. But Eleanor loved to drive, and held onto the Corolla well beyond becoming too bent to sit comfortably and maneuver the wheel. Having a car meant freedom, becoming the head of their family and driving to visit friends up and down the East Coast. It meant starting a mid-life romance with motion, authority, and command--virtually a man's romance with a car.
On the phone Eleanor and I are talking about where her mother and sister are buried across the road from Arlington National Cemetery and about my parents' graves in Magnolia Cemetery on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly, the pitch of her voice rises and she's launched into the story of "Leonard Driving the Bridge." It's one of our set pieces, rousing the blood, making us laugh and feel joined across half the continent.
My father was a terrible driver--that's the bedrock reality. He and his three brothers grew up a block from Eleanor and her two sisters in Pittsburgh--the families joined by their mothers, Rose and Josephine. Thus Eleanor and my father Leonard knew each other from childhood and, in their jokey, loving way, kept in touch over the years. Eleanor doesn't have to convince me that Leonard was a terrible driver. Year after year when we lived across the "Roller Coaster Bridge" in Charleston, he drove my mother, sister and me across the Cooper River to our bungalow in Mount Pleasant.
Charleston is a magical city laved with tidal waters--two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, which, so natives like to joke, meet at the tip of Charleston, to form the Atlantic Ocean. When I was a girl and we still lived in The Old Citadel, smack in the middle of the peninsula, I could hear the big ocean freighters boom. The rats that scurried behind our garbage cans came off those huge ships, said my mother. Then when I was starting 8th grade, we moved across the Cooper River to the small community of Mount Pleasant.
The Roller Coaster Bridge, built in the 1930s, rose in dizzying height to one tall span, dipped fast and curved, then rose again over the river's other arm until with a clunk we reached solid ground again. Even now, as I write this, my insides cramp and my breath comes ragged. "Sadie was sitting in the front seat with your mother and father. Mother and I were in the back," comes Eleanor's excited voice, describing a visit long after I left home. "Your father lifted his hands off the wheel and gestured. He looked back at us with that smirk of his. Mother gripped my hand. We could see the water below!"
I'm a girl in the back again, furious at my father's dangerous behavior, terrified we'd plunge through the flimsy railing into the river. It had happened before: a freighter came loose from its moorings and broke a hole in a span. A family of five in their car fell through and drowned. For years this early terror has sat me rigid in front seats, behind other steering wheels. I'm almost phobic of cars. Intensely resentful of my father's for his antics.
"On our way back into town," comes Eleanor's voice, "Mother whispered to Sadie and me, 'We'll all three sit in the back. Then if we go down, we'll go down together.'" She's laughing. I'm laughing. They're doing the only thing possible, offering each other the comfort I never got from my mother who sat stoic and silent in the front, or from my whimpering younger sister beside me in the back. It's their loving kindness in the midst of terror that redeems my resentment and eases my fear of driving. Having a romance with this kind of fear isn't possible, but knowing some in my family could find comfort in its midst lights a tiny candle. It's no wonder Eleanor and I tell each other this story over and over again.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Margotlog: Up to Code
Margotlog: Up to Code
No one ever inspected the old Isla ferry riding like a double-decker, open-air church across the bay from the Cancun mainland to the heavenly body of Isla. Later, hydrofoils would compete, rising high on their hunk of spray, zipping across so fast they obscured the approach to salvation. Give me the slow, old way.
On the slow boat, a band of tuba, trombone, guitar and rat-a-tat helped get us there. We recognized a large blind man on tuba. With his companion, a tight-knit black fellow, he tap-tapped along Isla streets or sat by the pier, waiting to convey us out, which was the last direction we rode with him because the next year, the old ferry had departed for more celestial realms. Maybe somebody decided it was not up to code. But the first years, we rode with breeze and spray on our cheeks, dolphins cavorting off one flank, and the mystery of faces opposite, looking like ancient Mayan carvings.
This slow boat transported us from fumes and combustion into another medium: half sea, half immense sky with frigate birds so high they looked like tiny scissors cutting across the castle clouds. Our lives, reduced to a slip of wood bouncing along a changing surface.
I want that reminder: that we are mere spindrift, sparkling for an hour, then gone. Because for that brief moment, our connection is made plain. There is so much above and below we can only spy--grey, sleek backs; scissor wings. The humans traveling with us shine forth their mysteries, ones we do not need to solve or command. Only gaze at with quiet astonishment.
Should I relate that, with the old ferries gone, dolphins no longer followed our passage to Isla? It was impossible to catch sight of frigate birds since the hydrofoil windows were smeared with spray. Yes, we occasionally got sick during our visits: we didn't drink water from the tap; we ordered beer or colas or coffee. We lugged up to our room at Maria's a huge bottle of purified water. The sickness didn't happen every year, only a few times--the sudden rush. Reminder that our insides weren't acclimated to the local fauna.
Did we care enough to stride off in a huff? Seek more sanitized American amenities--like the huge pleasure palaces in Cancun? Never. Though one year, I was bitten by a spider. The bite, once we were home, rose into a huge enflamed knot. Soon flat dots of red began to emerge over my trunk, arms, legs. Purpura, which means the blood was seeping out of its veins toward the surface, sign of a serious allergic reaction. Treatment? The local docs were mystified until a visitor from Indian happened into the emergency room: yes, she confirmed: spider bite. Steriods plus waiting. I recovered but for several years remained very reactive to any kind of bite. We didn't visit Isla the next season, went instead to Savannah where in a high canopy bed we watched the Academy Awards on TV.
Sometimes I parse our national fascination with codes and sanitation: we are a very litigious people, we sue at the drop of a hat. Despite the current furor against government regulation, we want our lives purified, regulated and protected. To this end, oh how we encase ourselves.
A friend once related that a charter school, devoted to environmental education, had to move because parents in the wealthy suburb were very nervous about letting their children loose in the local woods. "Is it up to code?" inquired one anxious mother. Hmmm, what is the code for woods? Can one legislate against spiders, hawks, ticks, rabbits? Not exactly, but with a "code" sufficiently stringent, one can systematically remove, replant, reduce, until habitat resembles not its natural, rather wild but balanced, indigenous self, but instead a garden catalog.
There is a place for gardens to grow vegetables and fruits, but often they thrive best when a mild accord is allowed between what is naturally present and possible and what the gardener desires. We call that kind of farming "organic." During our first few years on Isla, we were closer to the organic life of the place. The T-shirt hawkers almost apologized for encouraging us to purchase; they hadn't learned about "Blue Light" specials; they didn't stride into the street and yell in our ears. I know: progress comes in many forms. Yet, when I think of the best times in my life, I've slowed down, given over, stopped rushing. It's a different kind of code.
No one ever inspected the old Isla ferry riding like a double-decker, open-air church across the bay from the Cancun mainland to the heavenly body of Isla. Later, hydrofoils would compete, rising high on their hunk of spray, zipping across so fast they obscured the approach to salvation. Give me the slow, old way.
On the slow boat, a band of tuba, trombone, guitar and rat-a-tat helped get us there. We recognized a large blind man on tuba. With his companion, a tight-knit black fellow, he tap-tapped along Isla streets or sat by the pier, waiting to convey us out, which was the last direction we rode with him because the next year, the old ferry had departed for more celestial realms. Maybe somebody decided it was not up to code. But the first years, we rode with breeze and spray on our cheeks, dolphins cavorting off one flank, and the mystery of faces opposite, looking like ancient Mayan carvings.
This slow boat transported us from fumes and combustion into another medium: half sea, half immense sky with frigate birds so high they looked like tiny scissors cutting across the castle clouds. Our lives, reduced to a slip of wood bouncing along a changing surface.
I want that reminder: that we are mere spindrift, sparkling for an hour, then gone. Because for that brief moment, our connection is made plain. There is so much above and below we can only spy--grey, sleek backs; scissor wings. The humans traveling with us shine forth their mysteries, ones we do not need to solve or command. Only gaze at with quiet astonishment.
Should I relate that, with the old ferries gone, dolphins no longer followed our passage to Isla? It was impossible to catch sight of frigate birds since the hydrofoil windows were smeared with spray. Yes, we occasionally got sick during our visits: we didn't drink water from the tap; we ordered beer or colas or coffee. We lugged up to our room at Maria's a huge bottle of purified water. The sickness didn't happen every year, only a few times--the sudden rush. Reminder that our insides weren't acclimated to the local fauna.
Did we care enough to stride off in a huff? Seek more sanitized American amenities--like the huge pleasure palaces in Cancun? Never. Though one year, I was bitten by a spider. The bite, once we were home, rose into a huge enflamed knot. Soon flat dots of red began to emerge over my trunk, arms, legs. Purpura, which means the blood was seeping out of its veins toward the surface, sign of a serious allergic reaction. Treatment? The local docs were mystified until a visitor from Indian happened into the emergency room: yes, she confirmed: spider bite. Steriods plus waiting. I recovered but for several years remained very reactive to any kind of bite. We didn't visit Isla the next season, went instead to Savannah where in a high canopy bed we watched the Academy Awards on TV.
Sometimes I parse our national fascination with codes and sanitation: we are a very litigious people, we sue at the drop of a hat. Despite the current furor against government regulation, we want our lives purified, regulated and protected. To this end, oh how we encase ourselves.
A friend once related that a charter school, devoted to environmental education, had to move because parents in the wealthy suburb were very nervous about letting their children loose in the local woods. "Is it up to code?" inquired one anxious mother. Hmmm, what is the code for woods? Can one legislate against spiders, hawks, ticks, rabbits? Not exactly, but with a "code" sufficiently stringent, one can systematically remove, replant, reduce, until habitat resembles not its natural, rather wild but balanced, indigenous self, but instead a garden catalog.
There is a place for gardens to grow vegetables and fruits, but often they thrive best when a mild accord is allowed between what is naturally present and possible and what the gardener desires. We call that kind of farming "organic." During our first few years on Isla, we were closer to the organic life of the place. The T-shirt hawkers almost apologized for encouraging us to purchase; they hadn't learned about "Blue Light" specials; they didn't stride into the street and yell in our ears. I know: progress comes in many forms. Yet, when I think of the best times in my life, I've slowed down, given over, stopped rushing. It's a different kind of code.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Margotlog: Tripod Dog and the Mexican Beach
Margotlog: Tripod Dog and the Mexican Beach
On Isla, coming as we did only once a year, many things transpired whose consequences we recognized but without knowing their origin. So, with Tripod Dog. He resided, as far as we could tell, across the boulevard from the Naval Station, with its array of flags, low-slung barracks, and big guns painted naval gray. Missing one back leg, Tripod Dog could carry his black and white, short-haired body only so fast. Perhaps one of the Isla red taxis had hit him as it gunned around a push-cart of fruits. Perhaps he'd been wounded in Hurricane Gilbert, like the huge hulk of a ferry, grounded and rusting off shore.
It's odd how one reacts to injured people or animals. Perhaps because we felt vulnerable on Isla--knowing only a bit of Spanish, reveling in the island's natural beauty but stymied by tourists' careless trashing of the beach and sea, and bothered by local poverty--we bonded with Tripod Dog, and looked for him as a sign of the island's health. Its mascot or icon. Word eventually reached us that the sailors at the Naval Station had adopted him and fed him. Perhaps they'd also paid to have his shattered leg amputated. Or in the mysterious ways of nature, perhaps the dog had healed himself. He was not fawning or overtly friendly. And we, as we approached, slowed so as not to frighten him. He would cross the boulevard as we advanced, waiting in the median with its flowering hibiscus and nascent palms, then once we had walked beyond, he'd recross to his spot of brush along the beach. He may have been eating washed up fish as part of his diet.
Another denizen of the beach was the Monkey Man. Tall, elegantly bronzed, wearing only a brilliantly white sarong, he flipped back his sun-bleached hair and strode from his cabana to the waves where he launched a wind-surfer (if that's the right term for this peapod of a boat with its sail held erect by the rider). Every year, we would eventually locate him along the turquoise strand at the north end of the island, the beautiful white sandy beach where some tourist women and men took off all their clothes, and lay baking in the sun. Was Monkey Man a native Isleno? Certainly he was taller than most of the Mayan people, and his insouciant swagger suggested not only that he knew how to use his beauty but cared not a whit for the admiration of transient underlings. One year he acquired a tiny monkey on his shoulder--thus the name we gave him. Occasionally we'd pass him walking from the beach into town, still clad in his sarong with the monkey about his neck. Only much later in our last few years on Isla did we encounter him fully dressed, and by then we had acquired shreds of his story.
About halfway through the almost twenty years we visited Isla, we moved from Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse to a beautiful complex on this tourist beach: Maria del Mar. Maria's offered many choices of residence: the tower of three or was it four stories with motel-like rooms and balconies overlooking either the lush garden or on the bay and beach; cabanas for family groups, then across the sandy road, another lower tower above the breakfast place. The gardens were maintained by a wizened man, with the courtesy of a gentle soul. His hibiscus, rubber trees, purple passion vines, banana and orange trees, and many other flowers and bushes I can't remember were carpeted with heavy green grass--maybe the only grass that held its own against the salt and heat and sand of the island.
Who knows why we fell in love with Maria's? Perhaps the painting in each room, rather crudely done, of a damsel in white dress and flowing dark locks walking the beach; or the painting's look alike who greeted us wearing the typical Mayan dress, a white huipul over a white petticoat. Or perhaps we fell in love with the garden where tiny Mayan doves descended in small flocks, where we'd spy orioles and darting wrens and warblers, and pure white pigeons cooed companionably from their dovecote. There wasn't as much noise at Maria's because the main boulevard didn't pass that way, though one season our floor of the tower swarmed with Philadelphians who stayed up to all hours partying. Fran had gotten fatigued of the "Uno, uno, uno" and the cock crowing near Posada: the first from an elementary school; the second from servants' houses behind the hotel.
We rarely swam at the turquoise beach--something about the competitive display of tourism depressed me. I never felt my body in its black swim suit could past muster. Instead once we discovered the Mexican Beach almost midway down the island, that's where we went to swim and to eat the huge grilled fish called, I believe, coronado. It was a family-style beach on the bay side, reached from the road by crossing a lagoon where for a number of years we encountered exotic wading birds like oyster catchers with their red beaks and tuxedo bodies; or ibis rather clumsily maneuvering orange chopsticks, or several times, roseate spoonbills and pelicans. But only once flamingos, lifting their claw-hammer heads out of the water to make us ohhh and ahhh.
The first time we discovered this beach, and sat under the long gallery of a restaurant there, I ordered a club sandwich. Fran chose the fish platter. It was the exquisitely right choice: not for the "sides" of canned peas and dry rice but for the huge, aciote-flavored grilled fish. From the open gallery of the restaurant, we could spy the large grill where men tended the catch, more than a yard long. It was the best fish we had ever eaten on Isla or "nel mondo." And the people saved it for themselves.
We weren't the only gringos who discovered this inexpensive, delicious meal, but we were among the few. Among the local family groups, children raced around the gallery, adults watched with their elbows on the tables, talking and gesturing in Spanish. We tried not to stand out, but of course we did, playing Scrabble after we ate. But eventually, one at a time, we entered the warm, shallow water, floated way out, occasionally testing the bottom, passing a pelican or two also paddling about, while overhead, the sky built up huge castles of white clouds and far up in the blue, a plane flashed its silver bottom. We were very far from home, lulled into believing we belonged here just like the kids splashing and their parents standing up in the water, still talking.
On Isla, coming as we did only once a year, many things transpired whose consequences we recognized but without knowing their origin. So, with Tripod Dog. He resided, as far as we could tell, across the boulevard from the Naval Station, with its array of flags, low-slung barracks, and big guns painted naval gray. Missing one back leg, Tripod Dog could carry his black and white, short-haired body only so fast. Perhaps one of the Isla red taxis had hit him as it gunned around a push-cart of fruits. Perhaps he'd been wounded in Hurricane Gilbert, like the huge hulk of a ferry, grounded and rusting off shore.
It's odd how one reacts to injured people or animals. Perhaps because we felt vulnerable on Isla--knowing only a bit of Spanish, reveling in the island's natural beauty but stymied by tourists' careless trashing of the beach and sea, and bothered by local poverty--we bonded with Tripod Dog, and looked for him as a sign of the island's health. Its mascot or icon. Word eventually reached us that the sailors at the Naval Station had adopted him and fed him. Perhaps they'd also paid to have his shattered leg amputated. Or in the mysterious ways of nature, perhaps the dog had healed himself. He was not fawning or overtly friendly. And we, as we approached, slowed so as not to frighten him. He would cross the boulevard as we advanced, waiting in the median with its flowering hibiscus and nascent palms, then once we had walked beyond, he'd recross to his spot of brush along the beach. He may have been eating washed up fish as part of his diet.
Another denizen of the beach was the Monkey Man. Tall, elegantly bronzed, wearing only a brilliantly white sarong, he flipped back his sun-bleached hair and strode from his cabana to the waves where he launched a wind-surfer (if that's the right term for this peapod of a boat with its sail held erect by the rider). Every year, we would eventually locate him along the turquoise strand at the north end of the island, the beautiful white sandy beach where some tourist women and men took off all their clothes, and lay baking in the sun. Was Monkey Man a native Isleno? Certainly he was taller than most of the Mayan people, and his insouciant swagger suggested not only that he knew how to use his beauty but cared not a whit for the admiration of transient underlings. One year he acquired a tiny monkey on his shoulder--thus the name we gave him. Occasionally we'd pass him walking from the beach into town, still clad in his sarong with the monkey about his neck. Only much later in our last few years on Isla did we encounter him fully dressed, and by then we had acquired shreds of his story.
About halfway through the almost twenty years we visited Isla, we moved from Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse to a beautiful complex on this tourist beach: Maria del Mar. Maria's offered many choices of residence: the tower of three or was it four stories with motel-like rooms and balconies overlooking either the lush garden or on the bay and beach; cabanas for family groups, then across the sandy road, another lower tower above the breakfast place. The gardens were maintained by a wizened man, with the courtesy of a gentle soul. His hibiscus, rubber trees, purple passion vines, banana and orange trees, and many other flowers and bushes I can't remember were carpeted with heavy green grass--maybe the only grass that held its own against the salt and heat and sand of the island.
Who knows why we fell in love with Maria's? Perhaps the painting in each room, rather crudely done, of a damsel in white dress and flowing dark locks walking the beach; or the painting's look alike who greeted us wearing the typical Mayan dress, a white huipul over a white petticoat. Or perhaps we fell in love with the garden where tiny Mayan doves descended in small flocks, where we'd spy orioles and darting wrens and warblers, and pure white pigeons cooed companionably from their dovecote. There wasn't as much noise at Maria's because the main boulevard didn't pass that way, though one season our floor of the tower swarmed with Philadelphians who stayed up to all hours partying. Fran had gotten fatigued of the "Uno, uno, uno" and the cock crowing near Posada: the first from an elementary school; the second from servants' houses behind the hotel.
We rarely swam at the turquoise beach--something about the competitive display of tourism depressed me. I never felt my body in its black swim suit could past muster. Instead once we discovered the Mexican Beach almost midway down the island, that's where we went to swim and to eat the huge grilled fish called, I believe, coronado. It was a family-style beach on the bay side, reached from the road by crossing a lagoon where for a number of years we encountered exotic wading birds like oyster catchers with their red beaks and tuxedo bodies; or ibis rather clumsily maneuvering orange chopsticks, or several times, roseate spoonbills and pelicans. But only once flamingos, lifting their claw-hammer heads out of the water to make us ohhh and ahhh.
The first time we discovered this beach, and sat under the long gallery of a restaurant there, I ordered a club sandwich. Fran chose the fish platter. It was the exquisitely right choice: not for the "sides" of canned peas and dry rice but for the huge, aciote-flavored grilled fish. From the open gallery of the restaurant, we could spy the large grill where men tended the catch, more than a yard long. It was the best fish we had ever eaten on Isla or "nel mondo." And the people saved it for themselves.
We weren't the only gringos who discovered this inexpensive, delicious meal, but we were among the few. Among the local family groups, children raced around the gallery, adults watched with their elbows on the tables, talking and gesturing in Spanish. We tried not to stand out, but of course we did, playing Scrabble after we ate. But eventually, one at a time, we entered the warm, shallow water, floated way out, occasionally testing the bottom, passing a pelican or two also paddling about, while overhead, the sky built up huge castles of white clouds and far up in the blue, a plane flashed its silver bottom. We were very far from home, lulled into believing we belonged here just like the kids splashing and their parents standing up in the water, still talking.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Margotlog: Hurricano Gilberto
Margotlog: Hurricano Gilberto
After returning to Isla several winters, transferring to Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse, we were forced to pause in planning winter break among the Mayan palms and turquoise sea. Hurricane Gilbert struck the Yucatan in September 1988, the second most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record. Messages filtered north about "our" island: feet of water had swamped it. Everyone was evacuated across the bay to Cancun, or am I making that up? I closed my eyes on the sadness: lovely Isla twisted and wrung out. How many were dead? Would anything be left? We waited. Eventually word came north that the cerviche restaurant with its picture window was intact; even showing a video of the destruction. We phoned Posada and booked a room for late February.
The street of palms along the bay side of town sprouted fledgling green: all the big palms were gone. Our first hotel was smashed: one corner caved in, and sliding glass doors on the ocean-side punched through. Yet, Tony still patrolled the streets in his green-roofed golf cart; chickens still pecked in the sandy street by his once functioning hotel. But Rope-dog had vanished.
Even more dramatic, and oddly welcome: the imposing ocean-front hotel, El Presidente, as arrogant and fancy as a Vogue advertisement, no longer sent white-coated Mexican waiters out to palm-topped cabanas with iced drinks. The beautiful marble floor of the disco was scored with rocks and sand. The stepped roof, mimicking an ancient temple, broken off in places. Yet, El Presidente had reopened, hadn't it? And the waiters adopted several pelicans, injured in the storm, who followed them around like puppies--Rope-dog's descendants.
Taxis had somehow emerged from the churning sea and now could take a gringo or local to the other end of the island in under 10 minutes. There over the next decade fancy new hotels in perfect centipede lawns would rise out of the jungle. As we watched the video of Gilbert's howling, thrashing passage (how anyone had captured such footage, only the Weather Channel could explain), we pressed each other's hand in relief. None of the graves had washed away; no human Isleno had been lost. But the place had received a sudden pruning. It would take years for the colonnade of palms greeting tourists off the ferries to grow tall enough to be recognizable. And the tiny temple to the goddess, a fake we had to admit, was swept away.
One afternoon as we strolled along the street of T-shirts, a bearded mariner suddenly bolted from his table and accosted my husband, shaking his hand vigorously and ruffling his beard with pleasure. It was Chester Anderson from the University of Minnesota. When he looked lower and recognized me, he did a double-take: why, he'd taught both of us, years apart: Fran as an undergraduate, and I in my Ph.D. program. By the time I arrived at the huge University, the wave of Vietnam protest had subsided. My daughter wasn't born yet, and Chester was ruffling his beard over Yeats, Frost and Plath (or was the triumvirate different?) Who could have guessed that he would link me with a man I hadn't yet met, wouldn't meet for another fifteen years, a man who'd gone to prison as a draft refuser, not simply a conscientious objector but absolutely refusing to participate with his draft board in any way. Yet, here we stood, in the Isla sunshine, waving into the shade where his wife sat, probably used to her husband's storm of friendship, and later at dinner, perfectly happy to recall my husband's early impact on her: this youngish man released from prison who was writing sketches of other prison inmates.
They introduced us to the best ice cream I had ever tasted--they, who had been on the island only a few days! My favorite flavor was coconut, creamy, absolutely authentic with real coconut woven through the sweetness. A few days later, after the Andersons had left, and we were shopping for a mask to take home, I paused before the floor-to-ceiling array in the "mask lady's" shop, which hadn't been destroyed by Gilbert, even though it hung above the rocks on the ocean's snarling side. There were snake and lizard-men, wooden fangs opening around the human face; there were wooden mermaids, their tails exotically sequined but their faces oddly impassive. And there were bearded mariners with blue glass eyes, staring vacantly across eons of ocean. It was no surprise to me that they looked like Chester Anderson, handsome and rugged, with their European hawk-beak noses, and long curly beards such as no Isleno with smooth Mayan features could even produce. There, too, were the compelling profiles of Mayan warriors and gods such as I'd puzzled over years before in the jungle temples of Tikal. And jaguars, with orange cat faces dotted with black and whiskered with porcupine quills.
We chose a metal sun fiery red, embracing cooler bluish rabbit moon because our waiter at Posada, whose English far outshone our Spanish, had informed us that to them, there was no man in the moon, which had risen warm and soothing above the placid water, but a rabbit. The combination of heavenly bodies seemed perfect to express our relief at rejoining Isla and at reuniting briefly with Chester Anderson and his wife. It was as if a comet with fiery mane had lit up our past which even then had been slowly moving toward an embrace.
After returning to Isla several winters, transferring to Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse, we were forced to pause in planning winter break among the Mayan palms and turquoise sea. Hurricane Gilbert struck the Yucatan in September 1988, the second most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record. Messages filtered north about "our" island: feet of water had swamped it. Everyone was evacuated across the bay to Cancun, or am I making that up? I closed my eyes on the sadness: lovely Isla twisted and wrung out. How many were dead? Would anything be left? We waited. Eventually word came north that the cerviche restaurant with its picture window was intact; even showing a video of the destruction. We phoned Posada and booked a room for late February.
The street of palms along the bay side of town sprouted fledgling green: all the big palms were gone. Our first hotel was smashed: one corner caved in, and sliding glass doors on the ocean-side punched through. Yet, Tony still patrolled the streets in his green-roofed golf cart; chickens still pecked in the sandy street by his once functioning hotel. But Rope-dog had vanished.
Even more dramatic, and oddly welcome: the imposing ocean-front hotel, El Presidente, as arrogant and fancy as a Vogue advertisement, no longer sent white-coated Mexican waiters out to palm-topped cabanas with iced drinks. The beautiful marble floor of the disco was scored with rocks and sand. The stepped roof, mimicking an ancient temple, broken off in places. Yet, El Presidente had reopened, hadn't it? And the waiters adopted several pelicans, injured in the storm, who followed them around like puppies--Rope-dog's descendants.
Taxis had somehow emerged from the churning sea and now could take a gringo or local to the other end of the island in under 10 minutes. There over the next decade fancy new hotels in perfect centipede lawns would rise out of the jungle. As we watched the video of Gilbert's howling, thrashing passage (how anyone had captured such footage, only the Weather Channel could explain), we pressed each other's hand in relief. None of the graves had washed away; no human Isleno had been lost. But the place had received a sudden pruning. It would take years for the colonnade of palms greeting tourists off the ferries to grow tall enough to be recognizable. And the tiny temple to the goddess, a fake we had to admit, was swept away.
One afternoon as we strolled along the street of T-shirts, a bearded mariner suddenly bolted from his table and accosted my husband, shaking his hand vigorously and ruffling his beard with pleasure. It was Chester Anderson from the University of Minnesota. When he looked lower and recognized me, he did a double-take: why, he'd taught both of us, years apart: Fran as an undergraduate, and I in my Ph.D. program. By the time I arrived at the huge University, the wave of Vietnam protest had subsided. My daughter wasn't born yet, and Chester was ruffling his beard over Yeats, Frost and Plath (or was the triumvirate different?) Who could have guessed that he would link me with a man I hadn't yet met, wouldn't meet for another fifteen years, a man who'd gone to prison as a draft refuser, not simply a conscientious objector but absolutely refusing to participate with his draft board in any way. Yet, here we stood, in the Isla sunshine, waving into the shade where his wife sat, probably used to her husband's storm of friendship, and later at dinner, perfectly happy to recall my husband's early impact on her: this youngish man released from prison who was writing sketches of other prison inmates.
They introduced us to the best ice cream I had ever tasted--they, who had been on the island only a few days! My favorite flavor was coconut, creamy, absolutely authentic with real coconut woven through the sweetness. A few days later, after the Andersons had left, and we were shopping for a mask to take home, I paused before the floor-to-ceiling array in the "mask lady's" shop, which hadn't been destroyed by Gilbert, even though it hung above the rocks on the ocean's snarling side. There were snake and lizard-men, wooden fangs opening around the human face; there were wooden mermaids, their tails exotically sequined but their faces oddly impassive. And there were bearded mariners with blue glass eyes, staring vacantly across eons of ocean. It was no surprise to me that they looked like Chester Anderson, handsome and rugged, with their European hawk-beak noses, and long curly beards such as no Isleno with smooth Mayan features could even produce. There, too, were the compelling profiles of Mayan warriors and gods such as I'd puzzled over years before in the jungle temples of Tikal. And jaguars, with orange cat faces dotted with black and whiskered with porcupine quills.
We chose a metal sun fiery red, embracing cooler bluish rabbit moon because our waiter at Posada, whose English far outshone our Spanish, had informed us that to them, there was no man in the moon, which had risen warm and soothing above the placid water, but a rabbit. The combination of heavenly bodies seemed perfect to express our relief at rejoining Isla and at reuniting briefly with Chester Anderson and his wife. It was as if a comet with fiery mane had lit up our past which even then had been slowly moving toward an embrace.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Margotlog: Isla Circus
Margotlog: Isla Circus
Horoscope, December 31, 2010: "Part of the reason you love to travel is that the unfamiliar environment makes you feel brand-new. Getting lost and finding your way out is exhilarating."
What is this precision?! Does the StarTribume's "Holiday Mathis" have an inside track to the stars? I take this both as a prediction for the day, the year, my life, and a summary of all past travel pleasures. And suddenly I'm remembering Isla. Fran, my husband, went there with me even before he was my husband, there being Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancun. Isla hadn't been discovered yet, not really, though acquaintances recommended a cerviche or cold seafood cocktail at a certain corner with a picture window. How we chose the hotel, I can't recall, but it was ocean-front, three stories of salt-clogged sliding glass doors onto rusty balconies, and rooms with queen-size beds made with rumpled green sheets. Every day the owner Tony's wife removed our towels, washed them, and hung them in the courtyard to dry. Showers had to occur before 10 or after 4; otherwise we'd have to air dry. Did we care? Not much. We were youngish, giddy, in love and startled into enchantment by Isla's lazy, sand-clogged way of life.
Along with chickens and a few constantly crowing roosters, "Rope dog" wandered the sandy street into town: low to the ground, with plume of tail and floppy ears, an animated pot-bellied dog statue like the one I'd bought a decade before in Merida, in my first marriage. Mayan dog, who'd broken free from constraining rope, Rope Dog bayed at us as we slogged toward the street of T-shirts and breakfast. The restaurants were still serving conch and turtle, that first year we escaped Saint Paul snow and ice. Before ocean advocates helped put a stop to conch and turtle--tortuga--I tried conch. Nothing could persuade me to eat endangered sea turtle. As sat upstairs in another corner restaurant, amid breeze and palm-frond clatter, I put conch in my mouth: tough, almost unchewable, with no taste: the first and only time I attempted the innards of those beautiful spiky shells which as a girl I'd collected on South Carolina beaches.
We did feel brand-new on Isla, new in the skin of togetherness, new in the easy-going local manner of Isla, squinting through dazzling light toward brilliant turquoise sea. Isla held no geographic challenges: with perhaps only a mile width at the town-end, two at its widest midsection, and five miles long, Isla was easy to circumnavigate on bicycles. In the bramble-and-mosquito-infested interior, we followed a hand-lettered sign to "Mundaca's." According to legend, a pirate named Mundaca had "discovered" Isla Mujeres, Island of Women, in the early 19th century, but of course, even as we recognized the fallibility of "discovery," another legend insisted that Isla was named for Women because a shrine to a Mayan goddess stood at its slender southern tip.
Overgrown, with small trees poking their heads above the roofless hacienda, Mundaca's slumbered in its enchantment. Below the oyster-shell house, low wide steps led to an overgrown garden with weedy rosebushes still pushing out a few dispirited red blooms. The benches with oyster-shell backs were shaped like tall biscuits, rounded into two breasts at the top, with low arms and oyster-shell skirts. It was as if a fabricator of fantasy had defeated boredom in the daily construction of these dream benches where no one would ever sit. Legend had it that Mundaca settled Isla, in love with an Island woman, where he died and, yes we would soon attest, was buried in the town cemetery under a skull and crossbones. His overgrown plantation was the only vestige of Spanish conquest we found on Isla. And it was giving way to brambles: a real ruin, those first years we visited Isla, until a surge of money after a major hurricane in the early 90s, punched the place into shape, gave the hacienda a new roof, cleaned out the brambles, founded a little zoo nearby, and charged admission. We visited once in its newness, not nearly so fresh as the original ruin.
That first year, we also met a butter-eating parrot at a breakfast place on the square. Isla breakfasts delighted the glutton: pancakes Americano, with maple syrup poured from a Log Cabin bottle, but also huevos rancheros, local eggs cooked with peppers, onions, and tomatoes; toast soaked with butter, more than you could ever eat, and delicious fruit: pineapples, mangos, papayas, bananas. The parrot lived in a wicker cage with a bell and mirror and "breakfast" strewn on its floor: cut-up apple, nuts, seeds. We'd seen the huge car-ferry dock daily, with local boys unloading crates of foodstuffs, so we knew where breakfast Americano came from. The mangos, bananas, and papayas hung from local trees. The eggs walked around on two stiff legs, waiting to be laid.
A tourist stood at the parrot's cage, feeding the huge beak from a paper of butter. The parrot squawked and jingled its bell. Amid the mild uproar I was startled to identify Minnesota voices, with their slightly lilting speech which, now, after years of living in the Twin Cities, brings me home. But I wasn't home. What were these OTHER tourists doing on our island? Much the same as we, it turned out as we swallowed our pride of first discovery and agreed to join them for dinner, same place eight hours later. They were from "out-state"--Bemidji, Brainerd, Little Falls--flown into Cancun just as we had, but staying on the bay side of town at a place called Posada del Mar. Who could resent anyone who'd located such a beautiful place to stay? "It's got a lighthouse," one woman told us. Thus began their rendition of discovery--sheets, towels, spiders as big as quarters, dogs, pelicans, fishermen who pulled in their catch on that calmer beach, plus tidbits about the ferries and local musicians. Soon they were talking snow stories, ice-fishing, local sheriff-and-cafe scandals. We had little to contribute, aware that living in the midst of the state's biggest city, had fed us few tales to contribute to this round of exaggeration and deligh. Amused, shivering a bit at hearing what snow horrors we were missing, we decided that for our next few days until we had to return, we would avoid these reminders of what we had hoped to escape.
Horoscope, December 31, 2010: "Part of the reason you love to travel is that the unfamiliar environment makes you feel brand-new. Getting lost and finding your way out is exhilarating."
What is this precision?! Does the StarTribume's "Holiday Mathis" have an inside track to the stars? I take this both as a prediction for the day, the year, my life, and a summary of all past travel pleasures. And suddenly I'm remembering Isla. Fran, my husband, went there with me even before he was my husband, there being Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancun. Isla hadn't been discovered yet, not really, though acquaintances recommended a cerviche or cold seafood cocktail at a certain corner with a picture window. How we chose the hotel, I can't recall, but it was ocean-front, three stories of salt-clogged sliding glass doors onto rusty balconies, and rooms with queen-size beds made with rumpled green sheets. Every day the owner Tony's wife removed our towels, washed them, and hung them in the courtyard to dry. Showers had to occur before 10 or after 4; otherwise we'd have to air dry. Did we care? Not much. We were youngish, giddy, in love and startled into enchantment by Isla's lazy, sand-clogged way of life.
Along with chickens and a few constantly crowing roosters, "Rope dog" wandered the sandy street into town: low to the ground, with plume of tail and floppy ears, an animated pot-bellied dog statue like the one I'd bought a decade before in Merida, in my first marriage. Mayan dog, who'd broken free from constraining rope, Rope Dog bayed at us as we slogged toward the street of T-shirts and breakfast. The restaurants were still serving conch and turtle, that first year we escaped Saint Paul snow and ice. Before ocean advocates helped put a stop to conch and turtle--tortuga--I tried conch. Nothing could persuade me to eat endangered sea turtle. As sat upstairs in another corner restaurant, amid breeze and palm-frond clatter, I put conch in my mouth: tough, almost unchewable, with no taste: the first and only time I attempted the innards of those beautiful spiky shells which as a girl I'd collected on South Carolina beaches.
We did feel brand-new on Isla, new in the skin of togetherness, new in the easy-going local manner of Isla, squinting through dazzling light toward brilliant turquoise sea. Isla held no geographic challenges: with perhaps only a mile width at the town-end, two at its widest midsection, and five miles long, Isla was easy to circumnavigate on bicycles. In the bramble-and-mosquito-infested interior, we followed a hand-lettered sign to "Mundaca's." According to legend, a pirate named Mundaca had "discovered" Isla Mujeres, Island of Women, in the early 19th century, but of course, even as we recognized the fallibility of "discovery," another legend insisted that Isla was named for Women because a shrine to a Mayan goddess stood at its slender southern tip.
Overgrown, with small trees poking their heads above the roofless hacienda, Mundaca's slumbered in its enchantment. Below the oyster-shell house, low wide steps led to an overgrown garden with weedy rosebushes still pushing out a few dispirited red blooms. The benches with oyster-shell backs were shaped like tall biscuits, rounded into two breasts at the top, with low arms and oyster-shell skirts. It was as if a fabricator of fantasy had defeated boredom in the daily construction of these dream benches where no one would ever sit. Legend had it that Mundaca settled Isla, in love with an Island woman, where he died and, yes we would soon attest, was buried in the town cemetery under a skull and crossbones. His overgrown plantation was the only vestige of Spanish conquest we found on Isla. And it was giving way to brambles: a real ruin, those first years we visited Isla, until a surge of money after a major hurricane in the early 90s, punched the place into shape, gave the hacienda a new roof, cleaned out the brambles, founded a little zoo nearby, and charged admission. We visited once in its newness, not nearly so fresh as the original ruin.
That first year, we also met a butter-eating parrot at a breakfast place on the square. Isla breakfasts delighted the glutton: pancakes Americano, with maple syrup poured from a Log Cabin bottle, but also huevos rancheros, local eggs cooked with peppers, onions, and tomatoes; toast soaked with butter, more than you could ever eat, and delicious fruit: pineapples, mangos, papayas, bananas. The parrot lived in a wicker cage with a bell and mirror and "breakfast" strewn on its floor: cut-up apple, nuts, seeds. We'd seen the huge car-ferry dock daily, with local boys unloading crates of foodstuffs, so we knew where breakfast Americano came from. The mangos, bananas, and papayas hung from local trees. The eggs walked around on two stiff legs, waiting to be laid.
A tourist stood at the parrot's cage, feeding the huge beak from a paper of butter. The parrot squawked and jingled its bell. Amid the mild uproar I was startled to identify Minnesota voices, with their slightly lilting speech which, now, after years of living in the Twin Cities, brings me home. But I wasn't home. What were these OTHER tourists doing on our island? Much the same as we, it turned out as we swallowed our pride of first discovery and agreed to join them for dinner, same place eight hours later. They were from "out-state"--Bemidji, Brainerd, Little Falls--flown into Cancun just as we had, but staying on the bay side of town at a place called Posada del Mar. Who could resent anyone who'd located such a beautiful place to stay? "It's got a lighthouse," one woman told us. Thus began their rendition of discovery--sheets, towels, spiders as big as quarters, dogs, pelicans, fishermen who pulled in their catch on that calmer beach, plus tidbits about the ferries and local musicians. Soon they were talking snow stories, ice-fishing, local sheriff-and-cafe scandals. We had little to contribute, aware that living in the midst of the state's biggest city, had fed us few tales to contribute to this round of exaggeration and deligh. Amused, shivering a bit at hearing what snow horrors we were missing, we decided that for our next few days until we had to return, we would avoid these reminders of what we had hoped to escape.
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