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.