* Epiphany is the 12th day of Christmas, the day celebrated as the Feast of the Magi.

January 2001

New Job

It helps that I had taken an information management class in December before I left my previous job. The class and a year of ongoing coaching have given me some unexpectedly truly useful techniques for dealing with a deluge of emails and action items, but there is only so much that efficiency can do to manage a mountainous load of  work. I loved the people at the new job. Hated the stress. For the culmination of the stress, see April. 

Teaching Basic Faith

Liberty Update

Next year we'll be moving into separate quarters. Our new house in North San Jose has a "mother-in-law" apartment in the garage. Liberty will be renting the garage and I'll be in the house writing checks each month to meet the very large mortgage. But it's such a pretty house, pale pink, with a matching pink rosebush, a white picket fence,  and a palm tree out front. It might just be worth it.
 

Publication in a Small Way about a Local Matter

Even though I didn't say so in the press release, the latest of a long string of fundraising drives (this one called "The Vision Fulfilled") was launched around the time the hall was dedicated, after it was revealed that unforeseen conditions at the site (bad drainage and extensive digging needed for the electric connections) had pushed the cost of the hall up again, another million or so. Because of bumbling on a scale that astounds me by the parish staff, the architects, and God alone knows who else, a million dollar hall ended up costing the parish three million or more. It's a nice hall, though. But at that price, I would be expecting some of those nice marble pillars you see in churches and other public buildings  in Europe.

Breaking My Fast After Mass With the God Squad

I?ve heard them variously called, "The Golden Girls," "The God Squad" or just "The Ladies." The cast of characters sitting around the breakfast table with them is constantly changing. Sometimes the priests or seminarians or nuns working in the parish or other early Mass-goers will join the group. From time to time someone?s daughter or son will come with or without grandchildren. Some of the other customers drop by the table as they pass in and out of the restaurant.

The former mayor of Milpitas (now commissioner for Santa Clara county) joins us from time to time, as does his wife, assistant principal of the parish school.

It's the closest I think I'll ever come to what I imagine as the camaraderie of a neighborhood pub. I walked into Baker's Square this morning and retired Sister Maria Juanita VanBommel looked up and annouced, "Roseanne's here." The other women made room for me at the table.  The waitress yelled, "Hi Roseanne," from behind the divider near the kitchen. Feels like I'm living the song for the TV show "Cheers,"  going to a  place "where everyone knows your name."

When their husbands were still alive the group used to gather in the back room of old Milpitas restaurant called the Kozy Kitchen, which was featured in the 1970s locally-produced movie called The Milpitas Monster. When the restaurant's owners retired last year, the Kozy Kitchen was torn down. The owners couldn?t sell it: I hear that the bathroom was a two seater outhouse.

I Make a Stand and Pray Against a Now Commonplace Evil

The week after the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, I took part in a vigil to stand and pray against abortion at a Planned Parenthood building in Sunnyvale. Unlike the way the press makes it out in the scare stories in the media, the vast majority of the people who are against abortion aren't violent. We put themselves out to try to do something because their hearts are breaking about the horror of abortion. We see children and sexuality as a gift from God. The purpose of the vigil is to pray to try to change others hearts, prayer being more powerful than confrontation. 

When I was in a pro-life prayer group in Minnesota, I would go to the State Capitol with thousands of others on a January day, with the temperature 10 or more degrees below zero as we marched around the capitol building with signs. Our chanted slogan "Abortion stops a human heart," came out of our mouths frozen into clouds with our breath.

The day of the protest last January, the morning was cold for California. My rear windshield was frosted, something I don't remember happening in the 11 years I've been living here. The church was cold, but we warmed up after we started walking about a mile to the Planned Parenthood building, singing a stanza of a hymn between each decade of the rosary. 

In total, we said four rosaries. The voice of the monsignor from Brooklyn who was leading the march kept cutting in and out on the portable microphone, ". . . Mary full of grace, the Lord is. . .. Blessed . . . among women and blessed . . . the fruit of your womb, Jesus."

When we got there, some of us stood on two sides of the building facing our own reflections in the windows. Another row of us stood in single file across the street.

Some clinic escorts kept coming around the building to glare at us, cradling big styrofoam cups of coffee to keep their hands warm.

The escorts wear the same kind of bright-blue vest I saw the Jubilee volunteers in Italy wearing when I was in Rome the January before. Instead of saying, "I was a stranger and you took me in," like the Roman volunteers' vests said after translation from Italian, these said, "Planned Parenthood Escort."

My translation of what that means, "You are in trouble and we will take you in, take your money, and kill and scrape a dead child from your womb." Harsh words, you probably think. Here is one little story behind the harsh words.

A married former-Catholic friend of mine once scheduled an abortion when she got pregnant with the couple?s first child. The reason wasn't one of the serious ones that people think lead people to seek abortion, such as rape or incest or even severe financial hardship. She lost her nerve; when she told her husband she was pregnant, he didn't seem happy. In the weekend between when she scheduled the abortion on Friday and the day of the appointment on Monday, the pregnancy ended with a miscarriage. She went to the appointment anyway to have a D & C, a dilation and cutterage, to remove whatever might still be in her womb after the fetus had been expelled. 

When she got to Planned Parenthood, she found out that her nine a.m. appointment was like a cattle call. She had to sit in the waiting room for hours. One girl was crying with the tension. When the nurse finally called my friend over, my friend was told for the first time that she wouldn?t be seen without proof of insurance. Her husband went home, and she had to wait some more while he brought back the papers. 

They didn't give her anaesthetic. They told her it wouldn't hurt, but it did. When she talked to me, she seemed hurt in another way that the Planned Parenthood staff didn?t seem to be the caring group of people she thought they would be. 

At least because the miscarriage had spontaneously happened, she didn?t have the abortion on her conscience.

At the abortion protest we were instructed not to talk to anyone. Nobody tried to talk to us. At one point I prayed next to a woman holding an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In the early days of Spanish rule in Mexico, the appearance of the mother of God in the form of an Indian woman to a poor Indian man led to the conversion of the native peoples by the millions. Maybe the woman next to me hoped that the image would lead to conversions on that day.

One well-dressed blond woman in her forties hurried out, glanced at us, and drove away in a BMW after saying something to a big bearded man who was one of the escorts. He was the one who had come around the corner of the building and stared at us the most.

The only people I saw go in were a young woman and a young man, both wearing knit caps. The man was shorter than the girl. As the girl got out of the car, she glanced at us. None of the escorts noticed their arrival so they had to walk into the abortuary by themselves.
 

February 2001

With my sister Martha who was visiting for a month from Boston, and with Sister Maria Juanita, mentioned earlier, who is a very tall Sister of Mercy, retired from teaching, I attended a Los Angeles Religious Education Congress in Anaheim. We stayed the four days in a motel across the street from Disneyland.

L.A. Relgious Education

What I remember most of all were the daily Masses that were spectacles in the Anaheim convention center --and the role of Cardinal Mahoney, according to the nicely coifed and very well-dressed sister who organized the congress. She joked more than once in front of the thousands of attendees that she just tells the cardinal where to sit and he sits. He was sitting behind her when she said that and nodded his head in agreement. 

My pastor makes the same kinds of jokes, as part of his constant teasing of Sister Mary Clotilde Eudora, the director of religious education. Sitting across the table at Baker's Square,. Fr. Bob goads her grinning, "Sister Clotilde runs the parish." Sister Clote (her aol abbreviation is srclot) smiles. Sister Clot is a short, broad woman from the Philippines in her 50s. Father Bob is a short broad California man about the same age from Portuguese and French descent. Sister Clote's order still wears habits, while Father Bob wears ordinary clothes as often as possible. He seems to want to be seen as an ordinary guy. When he first came to the parish, he explained how to pronounce his name during Sunday homilies, "Legér, like negligée."

One image that also comes to mind from the congress is a black male liturgical dancer with a shaved head and bare feet waving a bowl full of smoking incense around the altar. It looked to me like he was making eyes at the Cardinal who was deflecting his teasing glances with an impassive face. But don't take my word for it.

Note 12/19/03: I didn't mention this when I first wrote this letter, but Archbishop Weakland gave a keynote speech in which he apologetically defended his counter-cultural sense of the unique role of the priest in the Catholic parish. Into his wariness and tentativeness, I read years of his being surrounded by people who are taking the idea of "priesthood of the believer" and running with it way beyond the boundaries of magisterial teaching. Since that conference occurred, Weakland was exposed as having a love affair with a young man. Letters circulated from their affair in which the archbishop's lover was shown as trying to get the Archbishop to give him Church money to launch an artistic program, a liturgical video for kids. Archbishop Weakland colluded with his lover to allow the guy to bring a false claim of harassment against himself so the man he loved could get the money he was trying to extort. What a weak-willed old reprobate Weakland turned out to be.

At a healing Mass at the congress, I sat next to a woman in a wheelchair who had fingers growing out of her left shoulder. When I asked her afterwards how she liked the healing Mass, she said she had been hoping there would be a little more healing.

March 2001

Retreat at San Juan Bautista

I attended a 3-day silent retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola at a Franciscan retreat house in San Juan Bautista (St. John the Baptist); the retreat house has same patron saint as my parish church). The priest gives retreats for Mother Theresa's order, and he told many anecdotes about Mother. Next time I?ll look for a retreat with more of St. Ignatius and fewer anecdotes, as fascinating as Mother Theresa is.

Worries

My sister Martha went back to Boston. During her visit with me, her car had been in the long-term parking lot at Logan airport for a month, during several snowstorms. As I took her to her plane, I had visions of her getting off a shuttle bus from one of the terminals at the parking lot in the middle of the black cold night and being alone and not able to start the car. I found out weeks later from my aunt that Martha had gotten her car started easily and went on her way safely. It took me a long time to get over the fear that I had held in my mind not knowing what had happened to her. 

April 2001

As I craned my neck around and sketched, I started noticing that the sombreros worn by the acts from the differing regions were all remarkably different. The shape and depth of the brim changed significantly from act to act and region to region, as did the depth and shape of the crown. I'll never think that a sombrero is just a generic Mexican hat again. 

A Trip to El Centro

Thursday morning was the first time we got out of the resort area, which is called the Zona Dorada, Golden Zone. At 9:30 a.m. we took one of the taxis that wait in front of the hotel to downtown Mazatlan (also called El Centro) to attend All Saint's Day Mass at the 16th century cathedral. The type of open air taxi we rode in is called a pulmonia, which literally means pneumonia. 

The Spanish name, Catedral Basilica de la Purisma Conception, means Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Because the front desk clerk had reached the limits of her hotel-clerk English when I asked her to give me the Mass schedule for the cathedral for the holy day of obligation, she erroneously gave us the Sunday schedule, which has Masses every hour. The next Mass after we got there on the holy day was at noon, so we had to wait two hours in the heat until the Mass began. 

The downtown area around the cathedral with its crowded, narrow streets and narrow sidewalks was a vivid contrast to the resort. Outside of a fabric store with no permanent front wall, which was fully open to the street, a vendor with a cardboard tray hung from a string around his neck was selling the same type of rich coconut cookies that we were offered as one of our desert choices in the buffet at the Fiesta Mexicana the night before. Beggars lay in front of the gates to the cathedral, a line of people waited in the back for donations from the cathedral office, and very well off people crowded into the upscale department store across the street where we went to find a restroom after the Mass. On the way back from the Catedral, we made a side trip by pulmonia to a gigantic grocery store (aptly called El Gigantico) so Annette could shop for a dinner party she was throwing later that evening. Some of her guests were long-time acquaintances who have been coming there for 12 years -- as long as she has. Others were people that she had met that week lounging around at some of the many pools around the hotel. 

When we got to El Gigantico, Liberty and I bought several salads and other dishes from the deli for lunch. Back at the hotel, we dished up our selections, but Annette said she won't eat anything with mayonaise in Mexico. That slowed me down for a few seconds, but then I figured, "What the heck?" The gamble paid off, and our stomachs withstood the test of the deli food.

Tissue Flowers 

When we got back to the hotel the short smiling maid had just finished doing the rooms, and as a final touch she left paper flowers made of facial tissues on tables and counters, as she usually did. Leaving paper flowers in hotel rooms seems to be common but it might not be universal, since the chiropractor's wife who joined us for dinner later complained that her maid was not leaving any tissue flowers for them. Back in grammar school, I learned how to make a crude chrysanthamum using a pleated tissue and twisted bobby pin and tinting the edges of the chrsanthamum with lipstick. The Mexican tissue paper flowers have a lot more finesse.

A Trip to a Settlement on the City's Outskirts

Saturday morning I visited a Christian childrens? feeding center in one of several new settlements around the city of Mazatlan. The settlement I visited is called Colonia Urias, which is near the Mazatlan dump. I found out about this work of La Vin± (the Vineyard) Christian Fellowship in an ad in the Pearl of the Pacific, a Mazatlan newsletter that I found on the Internet before I left the states. 

First I walked about a mile to the church from El Moro Torro. Then I tagged along with some volunteers in an old truck with an open bed to the colonia. In the truck's bed, two white wooden benches lined with volunteers faced each other. Only one man, who is a missionary from England who now lives in central Mexico, spoke fluent English. I'd missed connecting with a group of retired Americans who live in mobile homes. I'd met them earlier outside La Vin± 's office, and they had promised to wait for me while I tried to get some cash at the bank across the street, but they had gone without me to another colonia in another truck. They weren't friendly to me in the first place, so I was better off this way. 

The Englishman missionary sat me in the front seat with a trim middle-class 40ish local woman with aluminum caps on some of her teeth and with another local resident, a nice looking young man of about 18, who will be attending the university next year. The woman spoke no English, the student spoke some, but less than the waiters at the hotel do. The young man drove. We stopped for gas and then rode for almost an hour. Somehow we kept a conversation going. I asked the woman, Isabel, about her children. The word she used to describe them sounded to me like cansada, which means tired. I said, "Cansada?" and tilted my head to the side, closed my eyes and pretended to snore lightly. She laughed and repeated the word, until I realized she was saying that her children are married, not sleepy. Oh, casado no cansada! We laughed together. 

The truck's windshield was dirty and cracked. Sometimes as I looked out of my passenger window while we first drove through poorer parts of the city near the airport and then lurched along narrow dirt streets in the settlement, I wondered if I hadn't made a mistake getting into a truck with a load of strangers within an unclear goal going to an unknown destination. But then I thought once again -- "What the heck?" 

Before leaving the paved road, we passed two cemeteries fenced with low adobe walls. It was November 3, the day after El Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. On that day, traditional Mexicans party in the cemeteries bringing offerings of favorite foods and drinks and decorations to their loved ones' graves. This day after the celebration, the cemeteries appeared to be almost completely carpeted wall to wall with bright colored paper and real flowers. 

At the Colonia Urias, as they have done at several other colonias, La Vin± Christian Fellowship has built a large hall. The wife of the pastor assigned to this colonia is a dentist and they occasionally come to the colonia and give the children free dental care. 

Every Saturday the volunteers lead the children in songs about how Jesus loves us and then they serve a meal. The day I was there, the meal consisted of a plate of fresh tortillas, refried beans, macaroni and carrot salad, and beef carne asada. Maybe because they don't have water available to wash the plates, they cover each plate with plastic bag and put the food on top of the plastic. My guess is that they take the bag off and discard it after the meal and then stack the plates in the cupboard until the next time. 

When I was introduced to the woman dentist, she wrapped her hand in a part of a black plastic garbage bag too before she would shake mine. I looked confused. She said, "It's . . ." and groped for the word for dirty. "Es Susio (dirty)?" I volunteered. [12/19/03, now I know it should be "Esta susio?] She said, "Si, susio." And we smiled at each other. I thanked her for what she was doing there. The Englishman told me that people in Colonia Urias used to make their living salvaging materials from the dump, as people still do in many other 3rd world countries. 

My immediate impression was that everyone was well dressed, clean, and well fed. They are not as rich as we are, but they are not abject. The tiny adobe houses on the dirt streeets are clean and pleasant- looking enough, even if they lack most amenities that we think of as necessities. I remembered that when we driving in, I caught a glimpse of two men sitting together on overturned plastic barrels, talking seriously over a small motor one man held in his hand. 

I thought about my belief that the worse thing that ?charitable? people can do is to make people see themselves as pitiable. My beliefs in that area were formed by being on the receiving end of institutionalized charity. I remembered how my widowed mother used to take me and my two sisters to Christmas parties thrown weeks ahead of Christmas by the firemen of Boston for fireman's widows and children. Even as a very small child, I didn't appreciate the events or of the charity. To my thinking, it wasn't really a Christmas party because it wasn't Christmas yet. And it wasn't personal.

Think of the difference between being given a party at work as a member of a large group and being given a birthday party by people who love you. Most people I know try to get out of work parties that are given during non-work hours. I think that other people subconciously feel the same way I do that even if such a large group event includes food and entertainment in luxurious surroundings, a good time isn't good unless affection is included in the mix. 

At events like the one I was witnessing, generosity and self-sacrifice and a desire to help are evident, but there was little if any personal contact or affection. I speculated that the kids might come to the hall out of boredom, it?s the happening place every Saturday, as I watched the goings on. 

When I came into the hall the Englishman offered me to a white plastic seat like you'd buy at WalMart for outdoor seating. Not knowing what else to do, I took it and sat on the sidelines. I thought maybe I could do something useful by just getting to know some of the people there personally. Some of the volunteers set to work and prepared the meal and some dispensed lemonade from a big orange and yellow plastic MacDonalds container of the same kind I've seen at other large church functions back in the U.S. Other volunteers lined up in front of me, facing to my right towards the clump of over a hundred children who were squirming in their white plastic chairs. These volunteers were struggling to capture and keep the attention of the kids to lead them in the songs. 

The pastor's wife who is a dentist put her hand to everything, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in the group of song leaders, sometimes at the lemonade dispensing table. In the line of four or five volunteers leading the songs, one bearded pastor had a tee shirt saying in English "Get a Life. Meet Jesus." A woman volunteer's sports shirt had the Corona beer logo on the back topped by a gold crown (corona). Instead of the name of the beer, the shirt reads, "Sola El SÂnor Salva," "Only the Lord Saves." 

My observations in no way mean that I think any way negatively about these nice people going out of their way on a Saturday morning to try to be of service. 

As soon as I sat down, I quickly became surrounded by a half circle of kids in chairs and two baby strollers facing me directly. Unfortunately for politeness sake, this arrangement put the kids' backs to the songleaders. A nine year old girl, Anita, was the first to join me. She sat next to me on my right with her 14 month old sister drawn up facing me in a stroller. Anita then introduced her 7 year old middle sister, who pulled over her chair facing me also, followed by her 10 year old brother with another chair. We all chatted in Spanish as best we could. 

During the time I sat with her, I let Anita take some photos with my camera, and I took some too. When I complimented a nearby 20 something woman (also with aluminum caps on her teeth) on her pretty 18 day old baby, she joined me too, pulling her chair and her baby stroller to my left side. The baby was dressed in a brand new immaculate pink dress and frilly pink headband. 

In Spanish, the mother told me proudly that her baby's name is Brianna and that her baby's Bubbie is Americano. When I asked she said that Bubbie means Padre (I think Bubbie is a diminutive like Daddy). Later I think she said she met the father in Las Vegas. When I looked more closely, I noticed that the baby had fair skin and blue eyes. When she wasn't nursing, the baby slept happily in the heat and the noise and the admiration of her mother and me. And it goes without saying, in the love of God, her Bubby in heaven. 

Part way during our time at the colonia the woman volunteer that I had been sitting with in the truck, Isabel, came up to me where I was sitting and said some things I didn't understand. But she also said we were Hermanas, sisters, and I understood that. I know we are all sisters and brothers because we are sons and daughters of God, and I love to find others who recognize that very real kinship. 

After the meal, I talked with some more children at the table and tried to communicate by showing them some sketches I had in my travel sketchbook. I also asked them their names and asked them to write them down. In my sketchbook, I now have proof, their signed names, that they are literate. Isabel was very interested in my sketches of Milpitas car wash, a picture of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child from La Mision del San Carlos Borromeo de la Rio Carmel, (the Carmel CA Mission church), a floating manger scene in a canal in Venice . . .. I told her that I sometimes wish I could be a travel writer and illustrate my travel stories with my drawings and photographs, and that interested her also. 

Back at La Vin±, as we were preparing to go our own ways, Isabel told me through the Englishman that even though she didn't know me before that day, she very much enjoyed our conversation, and she hoped that somehow we could meet again in the future. Writing that now makes me think I took part of a small miracle -- in which two people were able to speak heart to heart without an adequate common vocabulary. 

I fumbled around in my wallet but I couldn't find my card or anything to write on, so I reluctantly had to leave Isabel without exchanging addresses so we could keep in touch. (I really wish I could write her. I still write occasionally back and forth with the local woman who fed the group the best food I ever ate -- at a yoga retreat in Corcasonne France in 1995.) Before I left, I gave a donation to the pastor and some pesos to Anita. And my prayers are still with them all. That was Saturday, one of our last days there. 

Buying Gifts 

As I walked back to the hotel in the baking hot mid-afternoon I searched for things people had asked me to buy for them. Hint to friends and family, if you want a gift tell me. I hate to buy things without knowing that the person will want and use them. In one shop I was cajoled by a charming clerk, a college student who is studying English and dying to travel around the world. 

Against my normal tendency, I splurged on an artist-designed, signed, one-of-a-kind table fountain that looks like a small version of a fountain you might see in a town square with painted tiles and a Madonna statue under an arch--as a gift to myself. (The next day I brought Liberty back to meet the salesgirl, she was so cute and smart and nice and Catholic, but nothing came of it except a photo I took of the two of them smiling and looking a bit uncomfortable.) 

As I neared the hotel bearing my packages, a salesman carrying a display box of jewelry on the street kept walking alongside of me asking me to buy something. When I said I'd spent all my money, he said he knew I hadn't. He told me, "You can get more when you go back to your hotel room." I was surprised to say he was right. "You're right, I'm lying, but I don't want anything." He told me nobody was buying anything that day. He took out two silver bracelets and laid them over my right wrist. With packages in both hands, I didn't have a hand free to remove them. That weakened my resolve. He offered them to me at $5 each, then $3, and then finally $5 for both. I finally gave him $6 for both. (Did I mention that the tide of bargaining seems to go against the normal course with me sometimes?) 

When I brought the bracelets back to the condo, I started thinking they would make nice souvenirs and that I should buy some more for the women I have breakfast with after daily mass and for my sisters and nieces. So I looked for the salesman Sunday morning and afternoon but couldn't find him. 

And when I offered other vendors the same price for the same style of bracelet they were offended! Amazingly I'd actually gotten a steal, $10 bracelets for $3 a piece. My search for more bracelets finally ended on the beach while the sun was setting on my last day. In haggling with another vendor for more bracelets of the same quality, I told him I wanted 15 for $45, the same price offered by the other man. And $45 was all I had. He too told me that if I wanted to I could come up with more money from my hotel room or my husband. He would wait for me down on the beach. 

The lowest I could get him down to was $7 each, far above what that desparate man on the street had been asking. I give in easier than I might do otherwise because I am starting to realize after all my years of bargain hunting and penny squeezing that the point is not to make sure you get the absolute bottom price, but the point is to remember that when you spend money you are helping other people make a living. You can spend lovingly, not just give lovingly. You can demean people or you can try to see things their way too. 

Senor Frog's 

One night Annette said we absolutely must go to Senor Frog's, a famous night spot. It's so famous that four stores in Mazatlan are exclusively dedicated to selling Senor Frog's merchandise. Somebody must be buying and proudly wearing that stuff! The night we went to Senor Frog's I asked the pulmonia driver how much it cost to go to the restaurant. He said Trenta (30 pesos). I said Viente (20 pesos). He countered with Trentaycinco (35 pesos). I burst out laughing. Bargaining was once again going against me. It was a good joke on his part too, I had to admit. 

Almost everyone we met from Mazatlan showed evidence of having a good dry sense of humor and of being refreshingly frank. 

We started with dinner at the restaurant, and the waiters were surprisingly funny. They performed little jokes, tricks, and routines. For example, at the end of the meal two young waiters came over to us and started making roses out of a stack of small square white paper napkins they placed in the center of the table. In mock earnest, each waiter stretched and formed the napkins to construct his own style of rose. After finishing the first rose and presenting it to my friend, one of the waiters started making a second something out of another napkin. In the meantime, the second waiter finished his rose and presented it to me. 

A third waiter came by, eyeballed the thing the first waiter was making, looked disgusted, and then mimed an exaggerated guffaw worthy of Harpo Marx. He bent over, slapped his knee and opened his mouth in a big mocking silent laugh in the other waiter's face. The waiter whose creation was being scorned assumed a dramatically hurt expression, and his eyes seemed to well up with tears. He paused for a second, and then petulantly flung down whatever he was making on the floor and started stomping on it. The other two waiters joined in the stomping. 

They cracked me up. Also contributing to my reaction I'm sure was the marguerita I drank that was in a glass the size of a small mixing bowl. Annette too had one of those margueritas. Meanwhile Liberty was drinking a 3 foot deep glass of something called Sex on the Beach, and to my amazement at his capacity had two more before the night was over. They had their second and subsequent rounds of drinks after we moved from our dining table to the Senor Frog's bar. Annette, who hardly ever drinks, had a few more margueritas, but I had to shift to water. 

I was actually very uncomfortable from sunburn and my hot day in the city, but I endured three more hours in the bar with the smoke and the music and the tasteless rock videos on display in a rare attempt to be a good sport. We stayed at the bar until well after midnight. Senor Frog's clientele shifts according to the day of the week, the season of the year, and whether the cruise ships are in. The Thursday night we were there it was full of handsome young Mexican couples and singles from a gas company convention at our hotel who were either just standing around or dancing almost-imperceptibly to the extremely loud music. It was hard to tell which. I got the impression that what they were doing actually was dancing, and the style had evolved because it was not considered cool to move around too much. Or maybe it was just because they were too darn hot. 

One 30ish American who had apparently already been in the bar a LONG time before we got there would from time to time launch himself away from the bar and glide in a solitary dance around the floor. His arm motions were big and exaggerated and he glided around with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. Quite a different style from the local dancer/bobbers. 

Part way through the long hours in the bar, a Mexican man maybe in his mid-thirties sat next to me on the bench for a few minutes and suddenly touched my arm and said, "Would you like to sleeping with me?" Something something. "You will have fun." There were other words mixed in, but those are the only ones I thought understood. But I wasn't sure. I said, "No comprendo."

When he said it again and motioned toward the front of the restaurant, (did he mean we should leave by the front door?) I smiled and said, No. And he smiled too, and that was the end of that. See, I don't say "What the heck?" about every risky choice that is presented to me. If I'm right about what the guy was saying, I have to reluctantly admire how very direct and to the point he was. He skipped over the small talk, past the "Hello. Come here often?" 

This reminds me of the time a tall friend of mine went to a Club Med in Mexico. She was approached by a shorter than her Mexican man whose opening line was "What's your signal?" Instead of, "What's your sign?. . ." 

In the bar's bathroom there was a lot of graffiti that I didn't read. But one sentence in English stays with me, and I sometimes think about the girl who must have wrote it: "I hope I find someone." The cry of the human heart. I hope she finds Someone too. 

Painting and Drawing

Another thing I really enjoyed was doing some sketches, a pastel painting of the blazing midday sun on the water, and some quick watercolors of the two islands in the Sea of Cortez directly in front of our balcony. 

I barely tapped into the whole suitcase full of art supplies that I brought with me, but at least I put the pastels, the small watercolor set, some of the paper, and a charcoal pencil to good use. 

Parasailing 

In the pastel drawing I included a couple of parasailors.

Annette had gone parasailing once herself, and her now 23 year old son had done it often, his first time as a 10 year old sitting on the lap of Raoul, the handsome parasailing vendor who is still working on the beach. The parasailor would be strapped into the parasail, a boat would pull away towing the parasail behind, the wind would lift the parasailer up up up as the boat made a circle and as the light of the setting sun cast its color on the waves. The parasailor would have a view of the beach for miles, the colored sea, the islands, the marina, the mountains, and the setting sun while hovering up there. 

Sometimes they would have another type of view. In Annette's bathroom the coating on the window is reversed. One day a parasailor saw her in her shower and waved at her as he floated by. She wasn't upset, but now she keeps a towel over the window. 

When the parasailor is supposed to come down, the pilot aligns the boat near the shore. Raoul unfurls a big yellow flag and the parasailor is then supposed to pull a cord that opens a specially-designed opening in the parasail. This results in the parasailor slowly drifting down to the beach -- where two waiting men catch him from below and gently bring him to a soft landing on the sand. 

Final Malaprop of the Trip

During the trip to the Mazatlan airport on the way home on Monday. I sat in the front seat next to a grandfatherly taxi driver, and while we were talking in Spanglish, he asked where I was going that day. I said "su casa." I didn't realize what I'd said until he dryly said, "Gracias," with a twinkle in his eye, and then I realized I said his house instead of "my house" and he was making a wry little joke on me. 
 

And Now for a PostScript on the Mazatlan Experience

While I was in Mexico, my company, Sun Microsystems, laid off 4,000 people. It was expected, and I was relieved that I was going to be away while the ax was being wielded. Two engineering managers that I'd worked with closely were replaced by anther man I'd never met before, a man in his mid 30s or a little older named Mark. Jumping into the project late, Mark has a lot of things to learn. When I returned a call from him one day, I asked him how he was doing, and he said, "Ummmm." I said reassuringly, "I know you'll swim. You won't sink." And he replied, "But I know I'll be swallowing a lot of sea water in the process." 

Then to explain where he got the vividly recalled experience of swallowing a lot of sea water, Mark launched into an amazing story about what happened to him the day he came into Mazatlan on a cruise ship and went "parasubmarining." 

Mark was in his twenties at the time. When I mentioned our experience at Senor Frog's, he told me that the wildest party he ever attended in his life was at eleven o'clock in the morning at Senor Frog's. I said, "On Wednesdays all the cruise ships come to Mazatlan. All the people from the cruise ships must have been there." And he agreed, since he was one of them. After leaving Senor Frog's that Wednesday in Mazatlan 10 plus years ago, Mark went parasailing. 

He started from a little dock a ways out into the ocean. Mark rose quite high into the air and was enjoying himself up there-- when the boat stalled. Mark and the parasail came down into the water. To understand what happened next, it would help if you can visualize the famous painting of Pieter Brugel, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." In Greek mythology Icarus was able to escape from a labyrinth where he was imprisoned with his engineer father Dedalus by flying out with wings that his father fashioned using wax for glue. His father cautioned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but Icarus was having so much fun he flew close to the sun anyway. The wax softened, the wings failed, and Icarus plummetted into the sea. The "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" shows many people going about their daily business. A fisherman, a plowman, a shepherd, everyone in the picture is oblivious. Icarus' legs are protruding unnoticed from the sea as he dives into the sea headfirst. 

Like Icarus, Mark's descent was unobserved, at least by the pilot of the boat. The pilot assumed that the stall hadn't lasted long enough for the parasail to drop, and he never looked back to check his assumption. He started the boat up again and kept going. That's when Mark began to swallow a lot of seawater. 

The boat was pulling Mark one way and the parasail was dragging in the water behind him and pulling him another way. I don't know how he got out of it, but it's good to know he lived to tell the tale. And that's how I found out this week after I got back to work in Newark CA that parasailing isn't always the lovely idyllic danger-free sport I observed during those sunsets from our balcony in Mazatlan. 

December 2001

Things are better at work as the year 2002 starts in a few days. I only am coordinating and writing about two products, code-named Monterey and Carmel. With names like that, they  might sound like they could be secret weapons projects, but they are simply  disk storage devices.

It's been a good year. 

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