Biography in Flannel

 A quarter-century ago when I first took up cohabitation with my wife, she sewed me a wonderful lightweight robe in a bold red-and-blue flannel as an apt and thoughtful welcoming gift. And I am still wearing it in good health and connubial joy. What could be better? It is a part of the warp and weft of my days, so to speak, enfolding me in another morning of my quick passage through this vale of light and shadow, like a familiar arm across my shoulders, a comfort in my dotage, my accustomed armor against the chances of another sunrise. 

Naturally, as it's cotton and not chain mail or rubber, it's worn thin in places over the interim. In fact a detractor might call it downright shabby. Each morning I tie around my waist its third belt. It drapes loosely now, the fabric in places a mere tissue, in other places it is no longer. It fails to cover everywhere, it is copiously patched until now there is no patching it since the flannel no longer has the structural integrity to hold the patch. It is in short become a classic, like the thousand-year-old kimonos that are a palimpsest of the time and labor of forgotten souls, ancient narratives of alien fabrics, repairs and loving reinforcements.

But now, within a scant quarter-century I hear murmurs of replacement, gentle yet persistent urgings from the other room to look at a new fabric (how about a nice gray plaid for a gray head?). So what, I protest, that the seat has been patched thrice, that the front is worn through, that the shoulders are so attenuated that they will not support the rest of it on a hanger, or even that the patch across the back is worn through again? It has been only twenty-five years; no need that it should last a thousand. It's fine. I'm fine. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't crawl back into it each morning. It has shared my morning surliness and my unfocused negativity ever since our first halcyon days in one another's company.

At a certain age, different I suppose for everyone, a person acquires a personal museum - a mental catalog of favorite things, or moments, or friends, departed pets, a favorite bicycle or doll or song, perhaps one's signed copy of The Critique of Pure Reason. An iconography of the self. In my own museum this robe will hang in the entrance hall like the feathered cape of a Kwakiutl chieftain or the leathern armor of Genghis Khan.

Kay

 Our friend and neighbor Kay died yesterday, the day after Valentine's Day. She was her husband's valentine, and he held her hands until the end, when she slipped through his fingers in answer to an inexorable and exacting summons. This little world of Alamos is suddenly quieter and diminished. Geriatric diaries can become raddled with a litany of departures that leave friends standing in the airport lounge and not expecting anyone coming in on the next flight. 

Kay could sometimes be like a small stone in one's shoe. Sometimes you just had to sit down, remove the shoe and ask what exactly would you like right now? Missouri had given her some bracing edges which she deployed with great relish and telling effect. Dave's equanimity was always exemplary - legendary maybe - but Kay would always look over her glasses and grin at the others in the room after a particularly vigorous dressing down of anyone who had excited her impatience. All in good fun and no offense taken.

She was a confirmed atheist and so never felt the need to discuss further any spiritual encumbrances imposed by ideas of divinity. But at the end she agreed to see a local pastor, an apparently kindly woman who would come for an hour, speak quietly with Kay, sometimes play the guitar. On one of her last visits Kay looked up in her owlish way at the woman and asked, "Are you always this serene? Or are you just fuckin' crazy?" With Kay there were never any two ways about it.

Goats Can't Type

'Owners of a farm in Lancashire, England, said that they had earned as much as $50,000 by booking goats as guests for Zoom calls, including Lisa, who specializes in “passive-aggressive bleating.” '   Harper's Weekly Review, Feb. 1, 2021

In the new regime of virus sequestration and remote work, with the attendant loneliness and isolation, the Zoom meeting seems the sole podium remaining for the lone voice crying in a wilderness of neglected laundry, pet hair, badly-worn slippers, unopened mail, empty vodka bottles, a drift of weekly shoppers' guides strewn across undusted tables, yesterday's bowl of soggy cornflakes - the general wrack of lives edging toward the abyss. 

One might anticipate in the circumstances that Zoom would provide an ideal soapbox for the lonely loggorhetic bore, precisely the sort who even in first-person encounters mostly fails to perceive gentle cues like fidgeting, glazed eyes, yawns, glances at watches, flatulence, lint-picking and other such signs that it's time to sit down. Apropos is a tale a friend tells me of a young fellow of his acquaintance whose father pulled some strings to get him employment with reasonable pay. Came the epidemic and the ascendance of Zoom, and in meeting after meeting a fellow Zoomer inevitably held the (virtual) floor, droning interminably about his personal situation, his "issues," his hopes and dreams. At some point early-ish in the young man's career trajectory he lost patience and launched himself into an obscenity-filled rant. The ensuing silence in the Zoomfest was his cue that he had failed to hit the mute on his laptop. I understand he is in search of an alternative career path, though one can only sympathize with his pique and his momentary lapse from the passive to the aggressive.

A second attendant difficulty with zoom meetings, aside from the incidence of masturbating under the desk or Zooming naked, is the tendency to zoom in bathrobe and pajamas. My grandson's middle school guidance counselor was constrained to call the lad's parents and let them know that the young on-line scholar was attending classes while supine amongst rumpled bedclothes like an adolescent Hugh Hefner.

As I have no business to conduct, I have only attended Zoom meetings with family members (friends don't Zoom friends). Most of the preliminaries involve trying to 1) get an audio connection, 2) get a video connection, 3) get both signals simultaneously, 4) ascertaining who isn't present, 5) ascertaining whether those absent might eventually be present or why they can't be, 6) ascertaining why someone .of the party has a glare in their video feed, 7) someone explaining that they have just had to reboot their connection and could the aforegoing several minutes be repeated.

If the pandemic radically alters the notion of a workplace, if such platforms as Zoom become the usual forum for the conduct of the world's business, then why not, after all? Entropy is the law for the ages and the world seems to be slipping no less smoothly into the abyss even in the absence of face-to-face transactions. I foresee a rosy future in which entire military operations are transacted exclusively over Zoom, like a "World of Warcraft" for Proud Boys and other really serious adults.

The goats-who-Zoom are on hire as an antidote to "Zoom fatigue," the Python-esque syndrome for the modern age which includes such symptoms as boredom, lowered morale, loss of good humor (see above) - the "existential alienation" of the 1950s repackaged for the digital age. And there are other domesticated beasts at least as photogenic and vocally endowed by their Creator as is the goat. Someone innured to a caprine charm may respond more promptly and favorably to the bovine, or to the jackass, the burro, or any member of class Ungulata. 

An entire presidency has been conducted over a Twitter feed; where were these goats when we really needed them? 

Notes Toward a Cultural Anthropology (3)

Winter quarters here in southern Sonora are a small casita inside the walled grounds of a larger villa, which sounds exactly as comfortable and peaceful as it is. The back wall of the casita forms a length of the wall surrounding the property and abuts the street along the property front. In fact, all the residences along Durango are similarly walled from the street in a continuous and varied stucco and brick parapet, save for a large tract of vacant, scrubby ground immediately across the street, the holding of an old tequila factory (now a residence in its own right). The street, with its stretch of unoccupied ground, stretches about 100 meters, up to the corner where it makes an ell and continues along another outside tract of trees and cactus.

I mention all of these particulars because in Mexico such places are known as "Tailgate Heaven: An Amazing Free Party Venue." The ell at the corner, with vacant space on the outside of the bend in both directions, forms a comfortable nook for six or eight vehicles, many of them cumbered with the sound capabilities of a national soccer stadium or the Nuremburg Platz in its heyday.

The ell tends to draw a crowd after about 9:00 p.m. ("gringo midnight") on any holiday. And holidays are frequent here - the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is more than a harmless if cloying Christmas carol, it is a confirmed and pernicious custom, something to be taken literally. According to some perverse gloss on the gospel account, it took the three wise men exactly twelve days to track down the young spawn of a miscreant deity, and to offload their cargo of luxury items (which have apparently been subsequently absorbed into the Vatican treasury). As a consequence, the Nativity in Mexico stretches on for an interminable span, culminating on the twelfth day, when every good child gets to explode its gift of fireworks in the street outside my window.

The generous disbursal of holidays throughout the calendar offers an instructive lesson in the cultural relativity of time, both as a general concept and as an arena within which people conduct their daily comings and goings. Time in Mexico is not (yet) the same as money. Time is a flexible, ever-slowing and quickening stream, an arena in which the tempo changes according as the gods may pipe the dance. The clock has little say in the matter, and the calendar, as I say, is studded with the lacunae we call Navidad, the Day of the Magi, the Day of the Dead, the feast of one or other of the vast necropolis of saints, angels, Benito Juarezes and other fathers of the nation.

Winter is a slow time as I have just explained. In winter also comes the Day of the Dead, another quasi-religious celebration. (Mexico is somewhat encumbered by its religion, though blessedly little with theology.) On my first visit to Alamos, nearly a decade ago, I spent a month in a camping park that abuts the local cemetario, its own village of sarcophagi in which a bevy of tearful angels vie with Blessed Virgins of Guadelupe for majority. The resident dead, you'd expect, would be quiet sorts, and so they were until the weekends when, each Friday and Saturday night, the locals would invade the peace of the graves and roister well into the next day. The old caretaker at the trailer park, Firmin, was a regular at these Tecate-cum-tequila bouts, and would often appear at his post late the following day, looking and moving more like an honoree than a participant in the weekly Dia de las Muertes.

The stereotypical picture of a Mexican holiday used to be the lazy tourista lulled into siesta time by the strains of a gentle guitar quartet serenading below the balcony. Maybe a mariachi group strolling amongst the tables in a cantena. Not that I'd particularly look forward to that, but I can imagine the all-inclusive-resort-and-cruise crowd thinking it was quaint. Back at the ell the music and the party go on until someone calls the police, who obligingly move the revelers on. And perhaps the noise would be less objectionable if it were not car radios pumping out Mexican rap and tech-Mex pop and the dreaded ballads with a section of horns and oompah-pah tubas. 

These are merely cultural observations, you understand. I'm not really complaining, I hope. Still, I never thought I'd ever say the words, "Give me a high school band playing Sousa." I haven't said it. Yet.

Notes Toward a Cultural Anthroplogy (2)

The city of Alamos, like Belle Epoque Paris, still employs a brigade of street sweepers who deploy through the barrios each morning with brooms, dustpans on short poles, and large black trash bags. They clean up the bottles, broken glass, empty cans and gutted snack food wrappers from the night before. But mostly they are there to gather up the considerable deposits of biomass left by the city's innumerable band of street dogs.

The dog population here may or may not be domiciled - most dogs are generally free to roam at will, to skulk, bark, menace, cower, amble or in the other more tangible way to express their inner beings. Most of them by all reports are regularly and forcibly innoculated against rabies. They remain nonetheless reprobate, uncivilized, generally indifferent to people and to the hour of the day or night in which they live, move and have their being. They only incur one anothers' wrath when they wander, unwittingly or not, into an adjoining barrio and are identified by their resident fellows as interlopers.

I say they are mostly indifferent to humans, though a cyclist pedalling through the narrow streets can occasionally be surprised by the sudden noisy onrush of a heel snapper from a dusty doorway. Generally a kick will dissuade further intimacies, but they're elusive, cagey, and it can prove difficult to effect a solid human connection. 

The dogs in the countryside are more persistent and less easily distracted from their hellish intent. There is nothing in their immediate surrounds more interesting than a pair of hairy legs at eye level; there's nothing they'd rather be doing; it's basically their territory, especially if they're up the road and dozing under the occasional sparse tree; and frankly, there's nothing else, or better, in a barren landscape to talk over later. It's all in good fun.

It may be that the bicycle is distraction enough - most of the people I know who have suffered a bite have been on foot - slow-moving target with no machinery interposed. I don't mean to test this theory by any extensive research. I'd rather think it may be correct than discover for a fact that it's based on an insufficient sample or fails to fully appreciate the reptilian responses of our putative best friends.

Lowells, Cabots and Gringos

 And here's to the good town of Boston, 

The home of the bean and the cod, 

Where the Lowells speak only with Cabots, 

And the Cabots speak only with God.

There are Cabots here in Alamos, reputedly scions from the Boston stock of Cabotry. They live within a large walled estate with a Mexican family in residence on the grounds as caretakers, about a quarter-mile from Miguel's humbler bespoke villa. I do not entertain hopes of enjoying their nearer acquaintance and should probably only stammer should chance bring us together. 

The late lamented Rip Torn owned a villa in the old centro - a grubby streetside wall of peeling stucco surrounding a courtyard rubbled with chunks of cement and capsized palm fronds, still much as he loved it and left it when he departed, though his quarters within were perfectly habitable during his sojourn here. Carroll O'Connor once lived just around the corner in a fine manse at Avenida Chihuahua and El Chalaton. Further down El Chalaton is a hotel once the home of the Mexican actress Maria Felix. All departed.

Alamos, with a sizeable population of resident gringos, is itself a simulacrum of the cultural divide within the United States. It is not that the Lowells speak only with Cabots (and none, by all the available evidence, speaks with God). It is that the Republicans speak only with Republicans, so far as they can manage it, and the same is true of the Democrats, although they generally speak to Mexicans as well, and in a wider range of voices than the imperative or the diparaging. The Canadians seem above it all, having their own peculiar troubles. And the French have all stayed home.  

Cultural Divide

The population being considerably smaller and people generally remembering one another from before the days of le toxicite mauvais, everyone makes some effort to get along. No one is perfectly anonymous, as they can be in the larger gene pool to the north, and consequently there is less gratuitous hostility among the factions. But the divide has appeared and persists nonetheless. The unfolding Senate runoffs in Georgia are being tracked here as raptly as in the U.S., the Congressional post-election charade plays here, just as across the border, as shabby street theater, but mercifully muted. All the impoverishment of human character in the national capital seems distant and not very urgent.