to run or not to run

I was waiting for the bus this morning, standing where my street hits the main street.
The bus driver must have been pre-occupied ( they often have long and emotional calls on the phone ) so it didn't stop but a fair ways away when the driver realized that I was there waving my arms frantically.

I jogged as best a septuagenarian can to get to the bus not wishing to make the passengers suffer from a long wait, and got on the bus and all was well when I got a seat and finally caught my breath.

And then I noticed that at the stops where people were waiting for the bus, and mostly gringos and mostly in my age bracket, none of them were jogging to get on the bus,  quite the contrary. They all seemed to take their time getting on, counting pesos and slowly making it down the aisle to a a seat.
What, I wondered, what in my make-up makes me think that I have to be so concerned about others?

Nobody else is.

In the future, if the bus decides to stop a distance away from me, I shall walk, composedly and with dignity, to the bus and get on without risking a heart attack from unseemly jogging.

After all, the bus is here to serve me, not the other way around, or is that too Gringo-ish for Mexico?

brotherly love

On  a lighter note there is a series of photos making the rounds on the webs; charming idea of a couple of brothers reenacting pictures from their childhood and youth. Both are now adults.

A lovely idea as it goes but if you scrutinize it a little closer there are flaws.  As I said these guys are now mature young men portraying their much younger and much less inhibited selves.  

I cannot but note that they, the guys of today, have felt that they must sport big and macho beards for no reason that I can see other than that many of the poses of the much younger guys of yesteryear were loving and cuddly and very intimate.

What better way to shush any nasty thoughts about the masculinity of these guys but for them to sport big and wild beards when taking the poses of the loving children they once were.

Cynical ?   You bet.

prices

And so I made it to my supermarket today, armed with a long list of things to buy.
One of the items was chicken and I saw that there was a sale of this critter, or rather a sale of the breast of this critter. Breast and part of the back. All this could be had for 59 pesos a kilo.
A bargain, they claimed.

?

I checked the price of a whole chicken and that you could have for 36 pesos a kilo and this would include the breast, the back, two wings and two legs plus whatever they had stuffed inside the critter ( feet and liver and that kind of stuff )  and I got to wondering

why would it be a bargain paying more for just the breast than you would buying the whole thing ?

What am I missing here ?

shorts

Sally, my rather large friend, asked me to shorten some slacks for her and make them into Bermuda style shorts. They were made of patchwork cotton and really novel.
So I shortened them and since Sally had no use for the leftover legs, decided to make some shorts for myself out of them.

I did, and I proudly told Sally when they were finished that I had made some comfortable shorts out the legs of her pants.

I watched her face get a little tight as she said ' I am sure they are very nice' and started talking about something else.

This had me puzzled for a while till one day the little lightbulb went off....
few people would be pleased to know that the lower part of their pants would be sufficient to make a pair of comfortable shorts for a grown up person.

Silly me.

I still have the shorts.  Faded and fraying but still ever so comfortable.

a dream

So there I was, a younger and more savvy version of me, standing in what appeared to be a hall of some mass transit, and having asked for volunteers for a quest was watching bodies line up.

'This', I said dramatically raising my left arm and pointing upwards.   'This is where we go, north!'.

And the volunteers who suddenly were in black and camouflage outfit all looked up following my hand.

And then the screen went blank and I woke up.

All that was missing was a sign on the screen before I woke up saying ' to be continued '.

The mind is a mysterious thing.

a word

I try to keep up my Danish by reading news on the computer, and mostly I am doing well, that is till today when I stumbled over a word in a headline.

Now the Danes like to make long words of what in English would be two or three or more separate words.

Where I ran into trouble was the word  "skovejere" which I divided into "sko" ( shoes) and "vejere" ( people who weigh things) which made the word "people who weigh shoes".

That did not make any sense at all. So I Looked at the word again, and little, very little lights went off.

When I divided the word differently I came up with "skov" ( forest ) "ejere" "owners' and that made a lot mores sense since the article dealt with the damage some storm had done to trees.

I had the good grace to laugh at myself and my, albeit momentary, mad leap into 'people who weigh shoes'.

It must be really hard on new people to learn this language.

lost

At my age you worry when you don't hear from friends for a while, so I was a tad concerned since I had not had a call from Jane for a long time.

Jane, who is not so mobile anymore, used to call and chat about once a week or two.

And then I had my problems with the phone going belly-up and telephone lines being down and a host of other disruptions and I realized, one day, that I had not not had my call from Jane for a long time.

 I started to worry a bit, enough to send out smoke signals to people we knew in common to see if they had information, and I went on a mad search for a phone number as the one I had just sent me to a voice mail collector.  Most stressful.

I finally got a response from a friend of Jane's whose email I had found on a mail Jane sent to a bunch of folks when she took a trip to Alaska in 2008.

Hallelujah.  Jane hs uprooted herself ( again ) and is now living in Indiana where her youngest son lives. 

Now all I have to do is to call. That is a major part. But I will.
At my age you try to hold on to your friends and your health and your mind.

Sunday

And so it is Sunday, and Sunday is different from all the other days of the week because..........

well I don't really know.

Somehow one is brought up to thinking that Sunday is special and surely it was special as a child when someone, many times father, would go to the local bakery and bring back a bag of all kinds of different breads and rolls and pastry for breakfast;  but only on Sundays.

Which begs the question....what makes Sundays special for an old geezer such as I, who is not spending this late part of his life working nine to five and hence no real reason to welcome Sunday as a day of rest and worship.  What ?   But it still is special and I ofttimes I make something different to break the fast, this one day of the week.  

Maybe one does something special to celebrate the end of a small cycle, the week, or, more likely, one just remembers the good old times as a child when dad would go to the bakery and come back with all kinds of wonderful stuff but only this once a week time, Sunday.

Whatever the reason, it is Sunday and I am looking forwards to yet another week.

rain

It is raining here in Mismaloya.   It is not supposed to be raining here in Mismalaoya.
The rainy season, well defined, is from 15 June to 15 October, give and take a few days but, most assuredly, not in December or January.

And so I am looking for someone or something to blame for this mess, for surely someone/thing is to blame.

I have decided that most likely the blame for this lies with the fat governor of New Jersey and the 'Holier-than-thou' governor of Utah.

One for suspending traffic on the busiest bridge in the country out of miffedness with a mayor who did not endorse him and the other for refusing to recognize more than a thousand same sex marriages all performed in a window of legitimacy due to a ruling by a federal judge and inadequacy of state legal coucil.

Surely the smallmindedness and meanspiritedness of these two guys--and their minions--is the reason many good and decent folks are hurt and that we, here in Mismaloya, have unseasonable rains.

What else could it be ?  Climate change ?  Bad luck ?

I prefer to blame those two guys. It makes me feel a bit better.

The Match

'I am calling you from Malmo', Jeff said the other day. ' I am watching a hockey match on Millie'.
Millie is his sweet, overweight black Cocker Spaniel.

I admitted to being confused. Only a day ago he had called me from his condo here in Puerto Vallarta and never mentioned a word about going to watch a match in Malmo.

It turned out that he was watching a game that took place in Malmo; the 'on Millie ' part I never quite understood. The closest I got to getting it was that he was taking Millie for some exercise which consisted of him sitting on a chair watching the game on his smart phone whilst Millie was roaming around in the flowerbeds of the condo green area.

'Malmo is in Sweden'  he told me.
I assured him I was aware of that fact.

'It is close to the whatchamacallit...Koppenhaken' he said.
Again I assured him that I knew it was close to Copenhagen.

'I can't remember if I have been there' he said and this time, through gritted teeth, I told him he would have remembered if he had ever been there.

'Anyway' he said, ' I just wanted you to know that Canada is playing against the US'.

And this left me one big gaping question mark. I do not care for sports and the sports I care less than less for must be hockey for its brutality and cricket for its absolutely non understandable rules, so I have no idea why he thought he had to share this little bit of hockey information with me, aside from the lesson about Malmo .

But I am a good person so listened till I had a very sudden and very urgent thing to do and hastily bid him a good day and then, drew several deep breaths to restore my inner calm. Sort of. Till next time he calls to tell something I have very little interest in.

And I will listen again because maybe one day I will be the person in need of a friendly ear and then it will be payback time.

I, of course, can always vent my spleen on my blog.  Like now.  And it works fine.