Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

In those first few months of quarantine 2020, it seemed impossible to establish a routine that felt remotely like productive life.   The idleness of my days weighed on me and, far from itching to get going on something, my energy level flattened out and I abandoned nearly all pretext of useful pursuits. My reading was my salvation; I tore through novels of Elena Ferrante and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Turgenev and Hardy, Kazuo Ishiguro and Edith Wharton. Jeff Bezos finally got his rocket off the ground thanks to my Kindle addiction, I'm sure. I finally had decent internet service, so Netflix ate up a good portion of those empty days. My laziness precluded gardening, and the weeds flourished. To my shame,  I recklessly took shovel in hand into the bright sun and tackled the offending verdure, only to collapse gasping in front of the open refrigerator after just twenty minutes. 

Last week, I received a notice from the San Marcos post office saying something had arrived with my name on it. This was earthshaking, really. The Managua airport had been closed for much of the quarantine period, which meant that no mail service from outside the country was possible. Over the past couple of months, though, some service had resumed with other Central American carriers, including some flights to Miami, so mail could trickle through. When I picked up my envelope, I had to laugh.  It reminded me that after my failed gardening effort in May, 2020, I had perused seed catalogues online to try and feed the tiny flame of interest in growing anything. I remember looking through several US-based vendors only to find that they were running out of most of the herbs I wanted to order. It seemed that Americans were not only baking sourdough bread, but also tillling up their yards to fill their quarantine days. No dill, no basil, no curly parsley.  Eventually I did find a dealer with herbs in stock, in Devon, England. So I ordered five packets of seeds at an outrageous price (that included free shipping anywhere in the world!) and, well, time passed. My garden withered. Sloth reigned, Mr. Besos built another rocket.

Pathetic, but scads of potential...

I laughed to see Devon, England on the return address. The order was dated May, 2020, and though I had long forgotten all about it, my seeds had fought their way around the world to arrive in July, 2021. In pristine condition, I might add. Heaven knows in what sack or cubbyhole in what country they hibernated for fourteen months. I wasn't even sure if they would sprout a full year after their designated growing season.

We'll see...  Basil, Italian parsley, curly parsley, dill and rosemary. I'm hoping I can update this post with luscious seedlings before too long. Fingers crossed.

Go, team, go!

And three weeks later...

Tootie Frootie on guard!

Rummage Chapter Two

 My dad was a builder who, for more than two years, spent his evenings and weekends nailing together our new house in then-growing State College, home of Penn State's main campus. I was in kindergarten in Bellefonte, and I recall feeling proud that my daddy provided blocks of wood of all sizes for my class to play with. I also remember traipsing around the construction site before our house was finished. It was located on Homan Avenue, at the time the edge of town, backing onto disused farmland.  When we moved to State College, I and my brothers used to cross over the field to an old barn to catch pigeons and scare ourselves silly at the sight of long-dead rats strung up, presumably to deter young trespassers.

Our new house was simply wonderful! It was a modern split-level, with plenty of room for Mother's piano and a Christmas tree. Because the house site had so recently been farmland, we were plagued with mice. I clearly recall spreading out to read the funnies on the livingroom rug, and watching as cute little baby mice toddled across the newspaper. My sister Anne was born soon after we moved in, and I was pretty thrilled to have a real babydoll to care for. Had I known at the time that three more babies would follow over the next nine years, I might have been less thrilled to begin my 12-year career as Mother's assistant. But when I was six, I was over the moon to have a baby sister.

Mother had five kids now, but she made time to take courses in library science at Penn State. Dad was the superintendent of construction of what was then to become the Military Science Building on the campus. Between time spent haunting the main library with Mom, and visiting the job site with Dad, the campus was a familiar second home. One year, I participated in a university-sponsored children's television show called "Keys to the Cupboard," in which my group created a whole circus tent full of clay figures of lions, horses, acrobats and highwire artists. When the project was finished, the circus was raffled and I won! I have no further memory of the tent and its contents. It probably ended up in the trash bin after being played with once or twice.

Our mother was a musician -- she had a lovely warm soprano voice, and had been a music teacher in Boston for a year prior to her marriage. She gave voice lessons in our living room, though how she managed to keep five children quiet and out of sight is a mystery. I can still hear the fog-horn voice of one of her students torturing "Beautiful Dreamer."  Mother and her brother Bill were both excellent singers and organists at their respective churches, and sang as well with a group of madrigal enthusiasts based in State College. They called themselves "Pro Nobis," and took turns hosting evening rehearsals. I begged to be allowed to stay up when they met at our house. One December, they gathered to hear a recording of a new Menotti opera, "Amahl and the Night Visitors." The story of the poor shepherd boy who meets the Magi was utterly enchanting. Shortly after the first scene, I was sent off to bed, most unwillingly. Next morning, Mother told me that Father Hovanec, who sang tenor in Pro Nobis, had left the recording for me to keep. My first record! I wore it out over the next months, and I still get a thrill when I hear it to this day. "This is my box. This is my box. I never travel without my box!"

Our happy times in State College were cut short when my dad was transferred following completion of the Military Science Building. Near the end of third grade at Easterly Parkway Elementary, I had to leave my first friends on Homan Avenue and all of our near relations in close-by Bellefonte, to travel to Canonsburg in far-Western Pennsylvania. Today, the university campus is much changed, bigger; the town itself is vastly larger. No more farmland next to Homan, just miles and miles of suburban development. Go figure...

A Rummage in the Archives

 Long days of quarantine alone in my little house in Carazo have lulled me into meditative introspection, as they doubtless have nearly everyone with too much unoccupied time and too little human conversation. It is familiar territory by now, as mine has been largely a life of the mind for these past five years. Lately, though, I am increasingly conscious of the tenuousness of my recollections, which will surely vanish when I do. It is surely a normal preoccupation of people in the "third age," as it is called here on signs directing disabled, pregnant or elderly customers to use a designated window at the bank. 

I have been giving myself guided meditations, visiting various places in my past to try and re-experience the feel, the ambience, the smells and sensations that float up and put me in touch with my younger self. I barely recall the little row house I lived in for the first five years of my life. It is instead my grandmother's house that framed my childhood in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.

Because my parents produced their first four children in rapid succession, and I, second-born, needed the attentions of a distant eye surgeon over several years, it often fell to my Nana to take me to doctor's appontments in Sunbury, PA. She drove a large Buick, with my taciturn grandfather, "Pop," in the passenger seat, smoking. I sat behind, often wedged between sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who happily accepted a ride between convents in Bellefonte and Sunbury. Happily, that is, until my carsickness erupted and I barfed all over their neat black habits. I can still smell that awful cigar smoke, but I dared not complain. My grandmother brooked no nonsense from children. She certainly loved us all, but she was a rather starchy sort of lady with strict expectations that I knew to respect. Once I started school, Easter vacation/Holy Week became my special time to visit Nana. She was a convert to Catholicism, meaning she attended every single service and ritual, and those were some very long hours on the kneeler in the family pew at Saint John the Evangelist church. But she also took me shopping for a nice outfit and new shoes and hat, and I loved being in her gracious home, which had been one of the first to acquire electricity back in the day. Plus, Nana had a television!  My parents resisted buying a boob tube until I was fifteen. Until then, it was only at Nana's or my Aunt Eleanor's house that I could watch TV. At Nana's, that meant Lawrence Welk, Perry Mason, and Gunsmoke. Aunt Eleanor let me watch The Twilight Zone with my cousins Debbie and Katie. (O, the nightmares!)  She also had a record of the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac that I never tired of hearing!

When I was five, Nana took me to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville for the second of three eye surgeries to correct strabismus. I distinctly remember being changed into pajamas, and taken to a playroom where an older boy was dragooned into helping me eat lunch. I felt incredibly special to have his attentions, and never noticed Nana's departure. My parents were under orders not to visit me following the surgery, to avoid having me cry, I expect. My mother's younger brother Bill, unaware of the order, decided to visit me on his way back from Philadelphia, and I remember being so happy to see him. I had a third surgery when I was eight. My happiest childhood memories are of my mother reading to me during the two-week periods when I was functionally blind after returning home from Danville. She read "Heidi" when I was five, and "Little Women" after the third operation. How she wrested time from caring for four young children to read whole books to me is a mystery. But it made a lifelong voracious reader of me.

Living History

 Today was indeed history-making, and it leaves me sad that I will likely not be around long enough to remark on it once sufficient time has passed to make it history. Unlike the dreadful day in 1963, when I was 12, and the PA system at Our Mother of Sorrows school in Johnstown crackled with the word of President Kennedy's assassination. JFK had been my first political idol, and though I felt devastated, I also had a clear sense of history being made, which gave me a bit of calming distance from the horror. I stared at the images during the funeral cortege and service, wanting to memorize every detail, knowing it was a transcendent moment in my young life.

I felt the same distance today from the absolute joy I wanted to feel at the historic events in Washington. The end of Trumpism and the swearing-in of Kamala Harris, who covers so many "firsts" in our history all by herself, was overwhelmingly emotional, yet tinged with the certainty that dear old Joe has a mighty long row to hoe. And I want to live long enough to see if the country emerges stronger, healthier, and more unified from what will take years, perhaps decades to accomplish. IF it happens at all. My confidence in the basic good will of my fellow Americans has been deeply shaken, and for every step in the direction of equality for all Americans, I see a two-step backlash. That half the citizenry would gladly follow a proven grifter, a shameless corrupt and incompetent huckster, mystifies and frightens me. They have fallen wholesale for the notion that Democrats are (shudder!) socialists, which has been effectively conflated with communists, and they cling to the thread-like hope one day to become part of the one percent at whom all those tax breaks and business deductions are really directed.

Not only do I sense this historic distance from today's events, I also feel the geographic distance as an ex-pat living in one of the ten worst-governed countries, according to La Prensa. My income level insulates me from the worst the dictatorship has wreaked on daily life for most Nicaraguans, but I have eyes and ears. Notably, jingoism and rampant nationalism are not in evidence here to the degree I see in the U.S. Racism either. Crimes of need, sure. Femicide, in a culture of machismo, yes. But nobody wants to interfere in another country's business, nobody feels entitled to crow about exceptionalism of any kind. And like most Americans, people here want decent housing, food on the table, reliable utilities, education, and healthcare. The rest is gravy. And why should they not aspire to gravy? And decent governance. 

Well, Joe, work to do. Work to do.

And then, she woke up...

 After ten interminable months in quarantine, not to mention four years of trumpian tyranny, something finally made me feel like posting anew. Nothing special has happened to warrant this sudden and unexpected turn, save for a technological earthquake of sorts, for the better. My online life of the past two years has been limited to the snail-speed of a used HP mini-laptop I purchased when my other machine died. Not only was it used, it was used in Spanish, and though it converted to English with little fuss, the keyboard functions were unfamiliar to me. Although I did eventually sort out semi-colons and dashes, parentheses and slashes, I never felt unconstrained by my clumsy fingerings and those exhausting delays, waiting for pages to load, or websites to appear. I dare not estimate how many days, nay months, of my now-limited life I have wasted watching the little round loading arrow spin and spin and spin.

My plumeria blossoms -- Sacuanjoches - were wonderful in 2020!

Yesterday, masked and washed, I ventured out to Managua for the first time since last February. I needed to visit the Office of Immigration to inquire about renewing my five-year residency, which expires this April. (Where have these five years gone already?) My wonderful driver Julio -- who has ferried me to the bank, the grocery, and the electric company since last March, (when riding the bus became dangerous to health) -- took me and my lawyer Noel to Imagracion, then to Wal-Mart to pick up duct tape and light bulbs, and then to Metro-Centro, the big shopping mall in the old downtown section that had been leveled by the 1971 earthquake. Metro-Centro is a popular site for demonstrations, which sometimes turn violent. Except that now a daily presence of riot police with shields and guns are on prominent display at the entrance. So, no demonstrations yesterday, but I did finally break down and buy a new computer. More on that in a minute. We capped off the visit to Managua with a rum-and-Coke-fueled lunch with my friends Ivan and Erlinda, whom I have missed for the past year of enforced solitude. What joy, to laugh and talk and catch up on news. I had almost forgotten how nice it is to visit a restaurant and meet up with good friends. It rocks, really! Lordy, I hope Covid did not find me...

Then this morning, I rediscovered the dizzy delight of surfing from one site to another in the blink of an eye, of listening to NPR without losing the audio everytime I added a tab or opened a document. Oh, how I have missed the ease of connection I now enjoy. And I have shelved the replacement keyboard I've had to use since the HP mini's gave out a year ago. And all of a sudden I felt like expressing myself a little. I have no idea if this impulse will last, but for the moment, I almost feel as if I have something to say. 

Stay tuned?

Bereft

In 1977, I was part of a creative team at Pittsburgh Laboratory Theater. We were planning a production of The Ruling Class, and I was stage managing. The central character was played by Bingo O'Malley, who immediately became one of my closest friends. During the run of the play, I took over a bit part and had the sublime pleasure of doing '"The Varsity Drag" number with Bingo et al. Over the ensuing years, Bingo and I enjoyed my free passes to Pgh. Pirate games, studied sign language together, joined his large raucous Irish family for Sunday afternoon Steelers' broadcasts, went rafting down the Youghiogheny white water, formed a scene study group called Stage Left, Pittsburgh, which also produced a few plays. Those years were especially precious, as our splendid circle of friends packed so much enjoyment into the monthly meetings, which absolutely included good food, juicy gossip, occasional tears, and plenty of laughter.

Bingo was a gifted actor whose instinctive artistry created layered performances in every role he took on. He and I played a warped husband and wife in an absurdist nightmare by Boris Vian called The Empire Builders at the Lab Theater. Some years later, I directed him in The Subject Was Roses, during which he became ill with what turned out to be hepatitis. He refused to quit rehearsing, all the way through final dress. The play never opened. He nearly died.

I left Pittsburgh in 2000, focusing on raising my son and spending my parents' last years close by near Johnstown. I kept in loose touch with Bingo. When his sister Kathleen died unexpectedly, moments after a joyful reunion as Bingo returned from a stint in a Kentucky production, a mutual friend called and urged me to contact him. Bingo was devastated; he never could handle the idea of death. And Kathleen had been a rare joy of a sister and best friend. Once, when I bought my first house, I had a pre-moving-in party at a time when Bingo had (shockingly) shaved off his beard to play the Pittsburgh artist John Kane on PBS.  Kathleen was enjoying the party, and spent some minutes talking to a new friend before she realized he was actually her brother, unrecognizable without the whiskers!

I saw Bingo a couple of times more when I would happen to be in Pittsburgh. His theater career flourished, including a tour of Ireland in a Brian Friel play, which must have been an ecstatic experience for him. I last saw Bingo at a one woman show by our mutual friend Barbara Russell. Being with him was as stimulating and satisfying as ever. Intervening years vanished and we caught up on each other's news with gusto. His charm and playful manner had never dimmed, and I distinctly recall telling him how much I loved him as we hugged goodbye. Somehow, I guessed that I would not want to leave that unsaid. The next few years passed. He stopped performing in his 80s, and I moved to Nicaragua. And yesterday came word of his death.

I had contacted a mutual friend through Facebook to get word of Bingo's status a few months ago. I guess that friendship has withered, as I never heard back. (Fuck you, Chris.) And now, this world is a much poorer place without my extraordinary friend Bingo, with his steely, frequently twinkling eyes, his impossibly erect posture, his truthfulness, his intense loyalty.

I've turned my house over vainly searching for a favorite photo taken in the Pirates' dugout just before I threw out the first pitch one summer evening. Bingo and I were chatting with manager Chuck Tanner, both of us giddy with excitement at sitting in the dugout! Here instead is a snapshot taken at Pittsburgh club Graffiti, when Luis Clemente, son of the great Roberto, was performing with me and my friends to raise money for my Nica sport project. Here we are together, in 1990, I think, in a badly lit, but precious memento.

16 February 2020 --
Found that photo -- note: I have just been taught how to hold the ball with forked fingers... we are both listening intently to Chuck Tanner explain the meaning of life. Miss you so much, Bingo.

Losing My Virginity

When, in April, 2016, I moved into this house in the Carazo hills, I had hooks installed on the front porch for my hammock, which I had bought in Masaya on a shopping trip with brother Bobby.
Then, my new housekeeper suggested I keep the hammock inside the house when I was not using it, as some unscrupulous ladron might help himself to it under cover of night. I ignored this advice as  it would have resulted in my never using the hammock at all. That was nearly three years ago.

July 2016 - My friend Ivan and his son Parzi, with Susie and Brynn, at our 4th of July party.

Last night, the ladron finally showed up. I feel certain that lovely hammock is today worth much less than when this photo was taken. Three years' dry season dust accumulation has rendered the hammock a grungy grey, and our latest puppy, Lolita, has found the decorative fringe irresistible for gnawing, chewing and pulling apart into glorious shreds.

In truth, my robbery record in Pittsburgh dwarfs this solo event. Over 12 years in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, I was burglarized five times. That works out to five stereo systems (Yeah, I know. "What's a stereo system, Mom?"), four televisions, various cameras and lenses, a microwave oven. And my cherished medieval lute. Sigh.

My garden hose is also AWOL this morning.  I can pick up a new one when I go shopping for a bear trap to set nightly as a welcome mat for my next nefarious visitation. Now that my robbery-free record has been stolen, can the next time be far off?