Sunday, 13-October-2019, 7:34 PM CDT
Hello and welcome to another edition of Poco a Poco. This week has been great. I am seeing the students improve their English, and my level of Spanish is now, more or less, communicative. I showcased my adequacy today during my apartment search/tour of Tepexi. It's not a big town, somewhere in size and population between Trevorton and Shamokin, but I walked around all of it today. If you want to learn a new language you need to practice with native speakers whenever possible. There's no greater practice than cold-calling around your new town asking if anyone knows of rooms or apartments for rent. Turns out a lot of people did.
I walked from my family's home in La Colonia to town, about twenty minutes, and just started asking people I saw. Being, I think, the only guero (white person) in town, people are interested in talking to me, which is great because that's what I need to improve my Spanish. I met two guys in a garage who were just hanging out on battered couches drinking Modelos and enjoying their Sunday afternoon. I asked if they knew of any places, and they did. They drove me around town and introduced me to several property owners. I even found some that meet the Peace Corps's strict criteria housing. Oscar had spent fourteen years living in New York City so had good English. He even knew of the many quality junkyard in NEPA. Luis didn't speak English but asked me to teach him. He understood when I told him I can only teach at TEC.
Oscar and Luis's behavior was typical for Mexico from what I've seen during my...four months here. Mexicans are friendly, hospitable, willing to help, treat you like a friend upon meeting you. I received a similar reception when I visited San Pablo with some of my co-workers on Friday.
I often accept invitations without really knowing what's going to happen wherever I'm going (think I already mentioned this buy š¤·š½). This was the case when I was invited by the business department to tour some Mezcalarias. Turns out they're wanting to start their own mezcal operation on campus (as far as I understand). I know you're asking, Constant Reader, "What is mezcal, Kory?" Glad you asked. You can find out more about it here. But basically it's like tequila except better, and I've somehow developed a taste for it.
I didn't sleep much Thursday night, so I was beat all day Friday. It was about an hour drive to San Pablo from Tepexi. A chunk of the trip was spent weaving down a sinuous mountain road. I only remember flashed because I was sleeping but occasionally I'd wake up and see turns that all looked the same. One time I woke up and there was a new person in the car, didn't even know how she got there. San Pablo reminded me of Telluride, CO. It's nestled in the mountains and isolated with only one way in and one way out. But instead of film festivals, skiing, and rich people with vacation homes, San Pablo has donkeys, tiendas, and mezcal.
It took us an hour to find someone to show us their operation. We met a man with skinny legs and few teeth who led us through his home, while inviting to return whenever we'd like, and out back to his mezcal shed. It had walls of sheet metal and smelled like a landfill. It was then I realized that mezcal is Mexican Moonshine. He's not currently producing but answered all our questions with laughs and smiles. I'm not totally sure, but I think he was a little nervous to be sharing so much in front of me, an agent of the US government. I assured him he had nothing to worry about as I have no power to initiate legal action against him for his time in the US.
We later found a guy who welcomed us with a Coke bottle full of clear liquid with the slightest golden tinge. Mezcal--the drink of macho Mexican men. While he and my co-workers talked, I listened and "played from a distance" with his children who were reluctant to approach me. As they snuck around one corner of the house for perks, I'd quickly look over and "catch" them. Then they'd run and hide. I like talking with the children here; I feel like pressure with them when compared with adults.
This new guy (forget his name too) took us to his operation, which was much more legit than the first. There was a big pit in the ground called "el horno" or "the oven" filled with pieces of piƱa. "PiƱa" is pineapple but they refer to stocks of agave ad "piƱa" probably because it resembles the tropical fruit. The owner lifted up a window flap and revealed his partner chopping up piƱas with a machete. A small TV and a single lightbulb illuminated the workspace, which included a cot for those long nights of chopping. One end of the space was filled with blackened piƱas, which also resemble the turning spits of meat known as tacos pastor aquĆ en MĆ©xico. In the next room, we saw the some later steps of the process.
This room had three rows of barrels filled with fermenting piƱa. Bring your hand to certain barrels and watch all the fruit flies flee like diseases from the mouth of John Coffey in The Green Mile. Put your ear to others and hear the fermentation occurring like little slimy footsteps down a wet hallway. Put your nose to the mush and smell the bittersweet aroma of alcohol in the making. Touch the...nevermind. I didn't touch the mush, but we did have another round here. Mezcal is somehow sweet and vicious at the same time, like a puppy that bites off chunks of your ear while cuddling. Here there's a saying that translates to, "For everything bad, mezcal. For everything good, mezcal." To some, it's believed to have medicinal purposes, such as helping with digestion after a meal of spicy food mmmmmmm.
Ok now for some random stuff. I eat grasshoppers down here on the reg, and today I went grasshopper hunting with my family which was awesome. I continue to play a lot of basketball and see improvement as a baller as well as a shot-caller--I mean Spanish speaker. Our team is in the finals next week, and I hope to contribute more than I have in past games. TEC Tepexi is getting a new director, a change in leadership caused by none other than everybody's favorite necessary? evil--politics. Here it's common to put your head on the right side during hugs, whereas the left is more common in the US, no? Habaneros are spicier than jalapeƱos, but the latter cause more heartburn. Guero/a is not only a name for white people from the US but also for Mexicans who have--or used to have--light skin. I am, slowly, reading El Viejo y El Mar por Ernest Hemingway because I've read it in English and because his simple prose is a good fit for my level.
Ok. Till next time. ¡AdiĆ³s!
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Where Do Unfinished Stories Go?
6-October-2019, 6:02 PM CDT, a Sunday
I'm sitting here struggling to think of what to write. If you believe in such a thing, you might be saying, "Oh, Kory, well, you have 'writer's block'." Well, CR, I don't think "writer's block" exists. I think lazy writers exist, writers who make excuses for themselves for why not to write. One popular excuse often mistaken for writer's block is "I don't know what to write about" or, even more ridiculous, "there's nothing to write about." Writer Darren Garmin would tell you that there is in fact too much to write about and that this is the real problem. Take this post for example. I sat here for about ten minutes before getting started, staring at the blank screen and listening to sounds float into my room through the only opening window I have. Dogs barking throughout the neighborhood, trucks carrying marble or onions roaring down the nearby highway, the gaudy, muffled voice of a Mexican game show host from a neighboring window. When there's "nothing to write about," write about what you hear--or see.
The window is a deliberate hole in the rock wall, the size and shape of a marble tile rolling down the highway. I've been told Italian companies buy marble from Tepexi and sell it under the guise of "Italian marble." That has a better ring in our consumer's ear, doesn't it? Italian marble. How fancy, how luxurious, how impressive to tell your status-obsessed friends or a young couple of potential buyers at an open house. It has a more prestigious connotation than Mexican marble, or does it not? Whoever was telling me all this, asked me why I thought it was so, such a disparity in perceived quality. I didn't know. The question, of course, was bigger than just the global economics of marble.
It has a frame of aged wood on hinges for keeping out the seldom cold breeze or frequent night-wandering cockroach. A yellow piece of stained glass fills the frame and shines brilliantly in the powerful Mexican sun. The square hole is covered by a screen, its edges reinforced from the outside with strips of a soda can. The cardinal directions are represented with rectangular pieces of stained glass, and they emit an ocean green-blue when receiving the sun's rays at midday.
Windows offer grand opportunities to see through to the other side. Too many of them and we feel exposed, not enough and we feel trapped. While we're resting in our beds on a cool night perfect for sleeping, they let the outside in. When the bitter cold reins and we're warming ourselves with each other, they keep the outside out. Anybody can look through your window. Is there someone looking through it right now? Or something? Did you check? Maybe. If you're one who's willing to believe, who's afraid possibilities could sprout into realities.
Lightning cracks the sky and echoes through the land. The window allows me a better hearing of the atmosphere's battle with itself. Lightning illuminates the stained glass but only for an instant--an instant which could be an eternity.
The stained glass that adorns the window, wonderfully cut and installed by Tio Benji, was crafted by a man whose name escapes me right now. He used to live in Mexico, around JuƔrez I think but again am not sure. This man travelled the world for the middle portion of his life, searching for interesting things to add to his collection. Nobody knew where he got his money form, or even if he used money to acquire his things or not. Odd things he acquired on his travels--shrunken heads, turquoise rocks the size of softballs chiseled into skulls, clay vessels from pre-colonial trade routes, chain mail, samurai swords, stuff that belonged in a museum, you know. By the time he was in his seventies, he had found himself, and his vast, valuable collection, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, settled into odd shop whose name also eludes me but is written somewhere.
One day he was sitting at his desk near the back of the shop translating an old Latin bible he'd found years ago in Albania. A boy walked in. His name was Ryan Cullen Fledge. While his mom was at the laundromat, he had gone to the library to return some books and get some new ones. He was a voracious reader at what? ten? eleven? years old. On his way to the laundromat, he had passed the same empty shop with dirty windows that had always been there. There had always been, for as long as he could remember anyway, a sign on the door that read, "CLOSED. Be back when the winds of Sereway blow cold once again." RCF had always thought this a peculiar message for a store owner to give. Where's Sereway? He had asked the long-time librarian--I don't know if I gave her a name, I'll have to check later--where Sereway was, but she had told him there was no such place. Why was the owner waiting for the "winds to blow cold once again" in this place? If it were somewhere on the UP, he surely would've been back by now, for the winds often blow cold off of Huron, Michigan, and Superior. Yes, the abandoned store on Main Street in..."Rupert" had always been a mystery to RCF, and as he was walking in, he was thinking that the mystery would finally end, that he'd finally get the chance to meet the owner and ask him--or her--where they'd been all this time, and what was going on in Sereway. His mind was so imbued with the curiosity children possess, an insatiable yearning to know more that too many adults lose somewhere along their walk through life.
When he heard the bell above the door ring, the old man set aside his work and moved his glasses from the tip of his bulbous nose to the top of his resilient head of long silver hair. Like RCF, he too had waited for this day. He walked slowly but on firm legs to meet the Savior of Sereway.
RCF didn't noticed the old man at the desk in the back of the shop. He was mesmerized by all the strange things in the odd shop. The boy might have been admiring a knight's helmet when he jumped at the soft voice behind him--and above him. When he turned to see the owner of the voice, books pinned against his little chest, he was eye to thigh with the man. His mouth opened involuntarily as he craned his neck to look up at the ancient mountain. At first, RCF was scared and felt like he was somewhere he was not allowed to be. Little did he know, he was right where he was meant to be, right where Sereway needed him to be.
As was everybody who encountered the old collector, RCF was enchanted by his mere presence, and sat enrapt in an old electric chair as he recounted his tail of the Chupacabra en las afueras de la ciudad de JuƔrez. When Ryan told the man he had to go meet his mom, that he was already ten minutes late and that she would be worried, the man told him that all the cool stuff on the shop floor was nothing compared with the treasures that waited behind the back office door. Ryan's mom was raising him to be responsible and wary of strangers. He had a funny feeling in his tummy about following the old man away from the exposure of the storefront windows. But that feeling just turned out to be curiosity, a harmless, natural feeling, right? A feeling, no, an intuition that when followed never yields any extraordinary consequences, whether they be good or bad. Deciding that he was experiencing another instance of curiosity, the same stirring that caused him to choose The Boy Hero of Canaan by Darren Garmin earlier in the library, he followed the old man to the back.
When they arrived, the collector stepped aside and gestured for RCF to stand square in front of the door. In the middle, near the top, Ryan saw a window just like the one you saw in the Facebook post when you followed this link, just like the one I gaze through when I don't know what to say next. Lights flashed on the other side of the door. He could see it when the stained glass flashed with its snap of illumination. On the other side of the door he heard the rumble of hooves and the stifled battlecries of valiant warrior atop huge and exotic beasts. Golden light also shone through the crack at the bottom of the door. A breeze wafted out from there, carrying with it the aromas of sweet grass and freshly-hunted boar turning on spits, dripping grease into fire, causing flames to dance even more. Ryan felt fire in his belly, too. He craved the meat, the tea brewed with the sweet grass, the feeling of a tame beast, his beast beneath him. He could not deny the allure of what lay beyond the door. It was the mystery as much as the sentient sensations that urged him forward. His mother ceased to exist, his little brother, the fledgeling, as well, the old man behind him and the books that had fallen to the floor. He forgot it all as he opened the door and walked into Sereway.
So. Where do unfinished stories go? Nowhere. They stay set in the disarray of your memory and wait loyally for your return. Just as the denizens of Sereway waited for the unknown savior to come when they so needed him.
I'm sitting here struggling to think of what to write. If you believe in such a thing, you might be saying, "Oh, Kory, well, you have 'writer's block'." Well, CR, I don't think "writer's block" exists. I think lazy writers exist, writers who make excuses for themselves for why not to write. One popular excuse often mistaken for writer's block is "I don't know what to write about" or, even more ridiculous, "there's nothing to write about." Writer Darren Garmin would tell you that there is in fact too much to write about and that this is the real problem. Take this post for example. I sat here for about ten minutes before getting started, staring at the blank screen and listening to sounds float into my room through the only opening window I have. Dogs barking throughout the neighborhood, trucks carrying marble or onions roaring down the nearby highway, the gaudy, muffled voice of a Mexican game show host from a neighboring window. When there's "nothing to write about," write about what you hear--or see.
The window is a deliberate hole in the rock wall, the size and shape of a marble tile rolling down the highway. I've been told Italian companies buy marble from Tepexi and sell it under the guise of "Italian marble." That has a better ring in our consumer's ear, doesn't it? Italian marble. How fancy, how luxurious, how impressive to tell your status-obsessed friends or a young couple of potential buyers at an open house. It has a more prestigious connotation than Mexican marble, or does it not? Whoever was telling me all this, asked me why I thought it was so, such a disparity in perceived quality. I didn't know. The question, of course, was bigger than just the global economics of marble.
It has a frame of aged wood on hinges for keeping out the seldom cold breeze or frequent night-wandering cockroach. A yellow piece of stained glass fills the frame and shines brilliantly in the powerful Mexican sun. The square hole is covered by a screen, its edges reinforced from the outside with strips of a soda can. The cardinal directions are represented with rectangular pieces of stained glass, and they emit an ocean green-blue when receiving the sun's rays at midday.
Windows offer grand opportunities to see through to the other side. Too many of them and we feel exposed, not enough and we feel trapped. While we're resting in our beds on a cool night perfect for sleeping, they let the outside in. When the bitter cold reins and we're warming ourselves with each other, they keep the outside out. Anybody can look through your window. Is there someone looking through it right now? Or something? Did you check? Maybe. If you're one who's willing to believe, who's afraid possibilities could sprout into realities.
Lightning cracks the sky and echoes through the land. The window allows me a better hearing of the atmosphere's battle with itself. Lightning illuminates the stained glass but only for an instant--an instant which could be an eternity.
The stained glass that adorns the window, wonderfully cut and installed by Tio Benji, was crafted by a man whose name escapes me right now. He used to live in Mexico, around JuƔrez I think but again am not sure. This man travelled the world for the middle portion of his life, searching for interesting things to add to his collection. Nobody knew where he got his money form, or even if he used money to acquire his things or not. Odd things he acquired on his travels--shrunken heads, turquoise rocks the size of softballs chiseled into skulls, clay vessels from pre-colonial trade routes, chain mail, samurai swords, stuff that belonged in a museum, you know. By the time he was in his seventies, he had found himself, and his vast, valuable collection, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, settled into odd shop whose name also eludes me but is written somewhere.
One day he was sitting at his desk near the back of the shop translating an old Latin bible he'd found years ago in Albania. A boy walked in. His name was Ryan Cullen Fledge. While his mom was at the laundromat, he had gone to the library to return some books and get some new ones. He was a voracious reader at what? ten? eleven? years old. On his way to the laundromat, he had passed the same empty shop with dirty windows that had always been there. There had always been, for as long as he could remember anyway, a sign on the door that read, "CLOSED. Be back when the winds of Sereway blow cold once again." RCF had always thought this a peculiar message for a store owner to give. Where's Sereway? He had asked the long-time librarian--I don't know if I gave her a name, I'll have to check later--where Sereway was, but she had told him there was no such place. Why was the owner waiting for the "winds to blow cold once again" in this place? If it were somewhere on the UP, he surely would've been back by now, for the winds often blow cold off of Huron, Michigan, and Superior. Yes, the abandoned store on Main Street in..."Rupert" had always been a mystery to RCF, and as he was walking in, he was thinking that the mystery would finally end, that he'd finally get the chance to meet the owner and ask him--or her--where they'd been all this time, and what was going on in Sereway. His mind was so imbued with the curiosity children possess, an insatiable yearning to know more that too many adults lose somewhere along their walk through life.
When he heard the bell above the door ring, the old man set aside his work and moved his glasses from the tip of his bulbous nose to the top of his resilient head of long silver hair. Like RCF, he too had waited for this day. He walked slowly but on firm legs to meet the Savior of Sereway.
RCF didn't noticed the old man at the desk in the back of the shop. He was mesmerized by all the strange things in the odd shop. The boy might have been admiring a knight's helmet when he jumped at the soft voice behind him--and above him. When he turned to see the owner of the voice, books pinned against his little chest, he was eye to thigh with the man. His mouth opened involuntarily as he craned his neck to look up at the ancient mountain. At first, RCF was scared and felt like he was somewhere he was not allowed to be. Little did he know, he was right where he was meant to be, right where Sereway needed him to be.
As was everybody who encountered the old collector, RCF was enchanted by his mere presence, and sat enrapt in an old electric chair as he recounted his tail of the Chupacabra en las afueras de la ciudad de JuƔrez. When Ryan told the man he had to go meet his mom, that he was already ten minutes late and that she would be worried, the man told him that all the cool stuff on the shop floor was nothing compared with the treasures that waited behind the back office door. Ryan's mom was raising him to be responsible and wary of strangers. He had a funny feeling in his tummy about following the old man away from the exposure of the storefront windows. But that feeling just turned out to be curiosity, a harmless, natural feeling, right? A feeling, no, an intuition that when followed never yields any extraordinary consequences, whether they be good or bad. Deciding that he was experiencing another instance of curiosity, the same stirring that caused him to choose The Boy Hero of Canaan by Darren Garmin earlier in the library, he followed the old man to the back.
When they arrived, the collector stepped aside and gestured for RCF to stand square in front of the door. In the middle, near the top, Ryan saw a window just like the one you saw in the Facebook post when you followed this link, just like the one I gaze through when I don't know what to say next. Lights flashed on the other side of the door. He could see it when the stained glass flashed with its snap of illumination. On the other side of the door he heard the rumble of hooves and the stifled battlecries of valiant warrior atop huge and exotic beasts. Golden light also shone through the crack at the bottom of the door. A breeze wafted out from there, carrying with it the aromas of sweet grass and freshly-hunted boar turning on spits, dripping grease into fire, causing flames to dance even more. Ryan felt fire in his belly, too. He craved the meat, the tea brewed with the sweet grass, the feeling of a tame beast, his beast beneath him. He could not deny the allure of what lay beyond the door. It was the mystery as much as the sentient sensations that urged him forward. His mother ceased to exist, his little brother, the fledgeling, as well, the old man behind him and the books that had fallen to the floor. He forgot it all as he opened the door and walked into Sereway.
So. Where do unfinished stories go? Nowhere. They stay set in the disarray of your memory and wait loyally for your return. Just as the denizens of Sereway waited for the unknown savior to come when they so needed him.
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