Monday, May 30, 2011

54 days

They left this morning. I watched them board a plane leaving Mexico City to points west at the beginning of more than twenty-two hours of grueling travel. They're going to visit relatives on Taiwan. A grandmother who has not yet seen our young daughter, and whose voice strains with aching loneliness whenever she calls across the ocean. Great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Worshippers at the neighborhood temple who hardly understand that Mexico is not a part of the United States, much less that it is nowhere near New York. An entire network of friends and relations reaching out to catch them as they land, to blush and giggle with excitement, to spend hours slurping through steaming bowls of noodles at open-air markets, to poke one another in the ribs. To remind themselves of ties never forgotten, unbreakable. My family. 54 days.







In thirteen years Sharon and I have not spent more than ten days apart. Only five days have ever separated my three-year old son from me. My daughter and I have shared each of her 142 sunrises.

Less than twelve hours have passed. I've done a load of laundry, twice. I washed one window a few times and dusted the coffee table. Still can't bring myself to move his tricycle in out of the rain.


I'll save that for another day, or perhaps 54 of them.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Still wet behind the ears

The best thing about being the new people in town is nothing tastes stale. Ok, there are some items at the local bakery we won't purchase again unless we're out of scouring pads for the oven, but that's a story from a different menu. No, the just landed need not stray far from the familiar to discover new doorways to open and exciting adventures to pursue.

We celebrate eight weeks of living in Mexico City and I find myself paying closer attention to those moments when the well-heeled veterans of this metropolis shrug off mention of a special street, a celebrated cultural attraction, or a famous family park. We've found gold in those tired hills and until the vein runs dry, we'll continue digging. Perhaps we're just suckers for the $50 Peso sombrero.
That would look really good on me, wouldn't it? The poncho is simply icing on the pastel.

The past two weekends kept us close to the nest, and yet we've been fortunate to discover interesting new doors revealing precious rooms and quaint corners that paint a portrait of this giant city that is as fresh to us as is each new day to our four-month-old daughter.
Last weekend, following the excitement of our excursion to Xochimilco, we ventured no further than my beloved bastion of satellite positioning, the American Embassy. In truth, we drove several blocks beyond the Chancery to stop at the Jardin Del Arte Sullivan, or Sullivan Art Park, or as I will refer to it going forth, Cube Park.
We had dropped off a couple of items for framing the previous Sunday, but missed the opportunity to wander through the Kcho and the Morales. Established in the late 1950s by struggling, young artists unable to display their talents at more traditional venues, the park became a meeting place and stomping ground for burgeoning promise, as well as the not-so-talented in the Mexico City art scene. Today, according to Wikipedia, partner to GPS in my core belief system, Cube Park is filled with less inspired endeavors, such as drug abuse, homelessness, and prostitution. Certainly it depends on your point of view, and one man's trash is another's treasure, but for a few hours every Sunday the art deco, the cubism, the kitsch, and the surreal crowd out the refuse to offer a bounty of loot for the intrepid explorer. One can even buy postcards there.
Most of the works are terribly over-priced. Forgive me. Rather, my bargaining skills in Spanish are horribly under-developed. I was perfectly willing to settle on $3000 Pesos for an oil-on-canvas depicting a baby in the jaws of a wolf emerging from a pineapple balanced on the head of a naked, Mexican farm girl, before my wife stepped in to remind me that for such a price our daughter would be rolling in infant formula for many months. I did not take a photograph of the aforementioned composition, but trust me, it felt like canvas.

Leave it to a three-year-old to separate the garden gnomes from the velvet posters and to make a beeline for the truly sublime.
Cubes. Lots of cubes. Surrounding magnificent pieces of utility, like seesaws and swings. Braque and Picasso surely would have enjoyed a coconut popsicle here, too.

As if our sojourn into modernism last week weren't enough, we drove into the city again yesterday and, not ones to tempt fate, parked flush against the wall of the Embassy of the United States of America. (I love a good Thesaurus, but the pickings are slim here.) Nestled behind the corporate headquarters on the south side of Paseo de la Reforma, and only a short walk from El Ángel de la Independencia, is Zona Rosa, or the Pink Zone, a moniker which undoubtedly wrestled for contention as a replacement for Jardin Del Arte, proffered by more recent, weeknight perambulators of Cube Park. José Luis Cuevas first gave it the name because, in his words, it "was too timid to be red, but too frivolous to be white." And, of course, it's overlooked by an Angel.
Zona Rosa is a perfect example of the type of place viewed with near scorn by the hardened Chilangos. It's for tourists. Starbucks, Burger King, and McDonald's have taken over coveted, corner locations. Arts and crafts, those not made in China, are exponentially more expensive than in other market areas. It's exactly the sort of rough from which we've been pulling our diamonds these past two months. Off we went.



Maybe when we've lived here long enough, after the luster of the unknown has worn dull and the colors don't appear so vivid, we'll find ourselves in conversations with recent arrivals and we, too, will look down our noses at familiar haunts around local corners.


Until such time arrives, however, we'll revel in our naiveté and look with childish wonder down every curious lane.
And we'll remember to ask ourselves, "what's behind that door?"

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Coyoacán

Nothing is easy with two small children. Leisure becomes a luxury more often forgotten than enjoyed. Mornings break a little earlier. Dinner wears the rigid uniform of a domestic taskmaster. Bedtime and sleep tease playfully, cruelly, just beyond your exhausted reach.

This is how our first Cinco de Mayo in Mexico began today. The evening of the fourth wrestled with Sharon and me a couple of rounds and tested the limits of our training. Our daughter tossed and turned an extra forty-five minutes before settling down. Her older brother developed a sudden and intense desire to drink water, gallons of it, after his beloved nighttime story. Stress took root and pushed tranquility out of bed and downstairs onto a lumpy sofa that's always two inches short of a full stretch no matter how you play the angles.

Nevertheless, we met the day head on and with big smiles, larger plans, and enough laughter to make the neighbors nervous. (The upside to having kids is immeasurable, but more difficult to describe in writing without eyes glazing over, and entirely impossible to gripe about.) We were making haste for Coyoacán where we would visit La Casa Azul (the Frida Kahlo House), the Diego Rivera Museum, and the Leon Trotsky House Museum. Méxicana, Murals, and Marxism. It sounded better than knocking back a six of Coronas with lime.

My earlier complaints regarding a lack of sleep and the hardships of parenthood were put in stark relief with a bit of history I learned today. Frida Kahlo was described in her time by a fellow artist as "a ribbon around a bomb."
Today I discovered that, "...on September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries as a result of the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. Also, an iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability. The accident left her in a great deal of pain while she spent three months recovering in a full body cast. Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she had relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time."

If that's not enough, she contracted polio when she was six years old, which left her permanently disfigured, and historians have also debated whether or not she suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease which affects spinal and leg development.

Now, what was I whinging about? Nothing. We never made it to Rivera's murals, nor did we relive the Bolshevist movement here in Mexico City. La Casa Azul and La Plaza Hidalgo in Coyoacán filled our day splendidly.

The Frida Kahlo house is really blue. Very, very blue!

The colors here in Mexico City--when one is not railing against the gray, polluted sky; as I most certainly was not, today--range from sunflower yellow, to Georgia red clay, to Tyrian purple. Bright splashes of charm and warmth live down nearly every lane and they appear to be lovingly maintained with fresh coats year round.


Even those less fortunate, neglected bursts of color reach out to greet passersby. Mexico City is a town of barrios, colonias, and plazas, and each one seemingly works overtime to outdo the next in terms of brightness and local appeal, regardless of age or wealth.
So, we found ourselves in La Casa Azul, mesmerized by color and again startled by palpable calmness and serenity. Aren't there nearly 25 million people living here? Where did they all go?



Even in El Jardin Centenario, in La Plaza Hidalgo, on the day which commemorates the Battle of Puebla, we were confronted once more by relative peace and quiet. I could get used to this. I came to Mexico with visions of Asia in my head: shoulder-to-shoulder on every pavement, battling for a flat surface on which to rest a bowl of noodles, fireworks for breakfast.

I was wrong. Yes, of course, there is mad traffic here, gridlock that can turn gray hair white. But daily we are reminded of Mexico's Spanish heritage. There is the village square with fountains, gardens, and enough seating to accomodate old men playing chess and young lovers alike.

Cathedrals peer around each corner, ancient and wise, recipients of generations of knees, prayers, smiles, and tears.
Cobblestone streets and handicraft markets tucked away down little alleys. What is it about cobblestone that captivates me? Does it work the same magic on other Americans? Why do a few rocks in the roadway inspire me to work on my family tree and study foreign languages just a little bit harder?


There is a simple elegance and a timeless grace in these plazas and on these streets. One senses the original architects and builders felt it, too, before even laying the first cornerstone. Perhaps, while they hacked their way through the forests and jungles, and up these overwhelming plateaus, they reached certain landmarks, or maybe just a divergence in the trail, and something called to them. Something compelling, old, and wild. Something which bid them stop and take measure. Build a home. Create a village. Here is a foundation. Or, maybe their GPS told them they had reached El Dorado. Hallelujah! Let's put up a church!

What I do know is Sharon and I have a dinner date set for an undetermined time in the future. Cobblestones underfoot or not, Mexicans know how to eat and how to enjoy their meals.
Oh, and our daughter fell asleep as I waxed poetic about the Conquistadors and their benign inclinations. Looks like I'll have another long night on the couch.