Just off Colon Plaza, straight east past the Pizzerella pizza parlor, Juan Voight shows up to work every day.
He says he has been an artist since he was a little boy, teaches at the college just behind his little outdoor work space, and makes his living as a full time artist. He works deliberate. Watercolors demand precision, a good sense not to let the brush stay too long in one place, be too wet or have too much color in the bristles. Watercolors can be quirky, like water itself.
Juan’s items for sale include originals, but, also popular, are postcards he runs off in series of 100 and sells three for $10.00 U.S. His prints are of scenes one sees in the Zona Colonia – the Cathedral, the Plaza Espana, the Parque Colon, the Alcazar de Don Colon.
Juan remembers me from an earlier conversation and takes the time to make me a special carrying pocket for my postcards, carefully recording his name and instagram gallery url on the outside.
I remember the studios of Carlos Paez Vilaro, the Uruguay artist ,and Roberto Ibarra, in Montevideo, and Ann’s studio in Granada, Nicaragua, and my mother’s studio in the downstairs of our home in Albuquerque, paintings in all stages of completion hanging on walls till they were shipped to competitions or hung in galleries.
I remember the Cerulean Gallery in Amarillo, Texas.
I remember street art everywhere.
Juan’s works are a combination of creative spirit tempered by the hands of a craftsman..
The medium you work in makes demands and determines your process and product.
Scotttreks postcards average two hundred words each.
You can’t say too much in two hundred words,but you never want to say too little.
Every time I pass, I see customers at this little empanada stand – ordering, sitting in these plastic lawn chairs,visiting, stopping a moment in life, standing, moving away, replaced in moments by someone else.
It is all very random. The process is like those parts of the atom scrawled on our high school Biology board – the protons, electrons, neutrons and all the things not up there that we still don’t know about, and may never know about.
The empanada menu here is extensive and all are less than one U.S. dollar apiece. This morning, for breakfast, my order is a ham and cheese empanada, a pollo empanada and two orders of pineapple juice naturale, served with ice in a dixie cup.
I should have tried these empanadas earlier in the trip but stuff always crowds you on trips, distractions and diversions, side trips and just plain not getting around to it. The point is, there are always places to get a quick bite within walking distance of where you are staying, if you look.
I appreciate fine dining with exquisite tastes and beautifully designed plates served on white tablecloths with a candle and the best silverware, but I always regret having to pay for a meal and then having to go buy more food to feel full.
If I lived here, I would be a regular and D would give me the local price, like anyone else.
At night, when it is cool, Santo Domingo neighborhood people, in the Colonial District, congregate in front of the local mini market and watch sports on a big screen television.
This group of grown men and women, on the closest corner to the the LaPuerta Roja Guesthouse, are watching an American basketball game on television this midweek evening. Some men are on their cell phones, others are talking about something other than the game in progress, the rest of the congregation are watching equally grown men in under- shorts running up and down a hardwood court, tossing a ball into a basket, and getting paid millions.
Anything that gets people out of their house and visiting their neighbors can’t be all bad.
Sports and competition run deep within all cultures.
We all like to be entertained and mildly challenged but when things get too serious or too hard, many take their ball and go home to bed..
Spectator sports have long been one of the world’s biggest enjoyments.
Sitting out at night under the stars watching a big screen television on a working night, and not spending a dime, is beginning to make a lot of sense.
Words, bless their little hearts, can say a lot of things. They can take the form of a contract, come firing out of mouths like an old gattling gun . They can make people love or hate us, and, in the right mixture, sooth and calm the most indignant customers.
This afternoon, words escape me, as a young woman carries a basket of baked goods for sale atop her head, past me on the sidewalk.
By the time i turn to get a photo she is past me, only a fleeting mortal being moving across a busy Zona Colonia intersection.
At this moment, the only words that some to mind are ” Poetry in Motion. ”
In my mind, she will always be frozen in time, beyond words.
Dirty laundry catches up with all of us.
Only bringing a carry on suitcase this trip, and looking at my pile of dirty clothes on the bed, I am down to my last clean socks and shirt. I could have brought a bigger suitcase but I wanted to travel as light as I could. Doing with less always takes more imagination than taking the kitchen sink.
In my neighborhood, this lavenderia takes my dirty clothes in the morning, gives me a receipt, hands my clothes back clean, folded neatly in a plastic bag, after lunch. The charges are six bucks, which seems high, but, then again, someone has to deal with my clothes by hand. Putting them into the washer and dryer, unloading them, folding them nicely, putting them in a plastic bag, writing up the receipt, taking my money, takes human time and human effort.
It turns out, when I get back to the La Puerta Roja guesthouse, where I’m hanging my hat this trip, they have a washer and dryer I could have used for free, just paying for the detergent I use.
Since dirty laundry is a traveler’s constant companion, I resolve, next time to be patient, to ask before taking my dirty duds off the premises.
After all, dirty clothes don’t care how long they sit in a pile on the floor or whether they ever get clean.
Dealing with dirty clothes is one of life’s dirty little chores our mother’s warned us all about.
At the Jardin Botanico in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, it is lunch time.
On the menu is one part indigenous people, one part Europeans, one part Hispanics, one part black Africans. Combine the European, African, Caribbean and Dominican recipe and you have a spicy melody served up with lots of spirit and joy.
The motto here is ” Don’t worry – Be Happy. ”
Most who live here try to live up to this motto.
Whether being happy is a genetic accident or learned behavior is a question learned psychologists are still trying to sort out.
I kept repeating the island motto over and over, and start feeling much better.
Much of what we worry about never happens anyway.
Before seven in the morning, a kid passes me on his old bicycle, carrying a five gallon plastic bucket, with bait and tackle inside, on his bicycle handlebars. His fishing pole sticks out of an empty milk container secured to his back bike fender with a long bungee cord.
When the kid, who whizzes past me, makes a left turn towards the water, a block further down, I know for sure he is going fishing and joining another fisherman friend where the water meets the land.
There are fishermen on this jetty every morning, just at sunrise, and sometimes in the evening, at sunset. While you can catch fish other times of day, fisherman tell you exactly when the time is best to bait a hook, cast out, and wait for the fish to bite.
This Santo Domingo park, by the Napolitano Casino, will soon have its walkers and exercise people. City crews are putting down new sod and walkers, taking fresh air on a cool morning, can use a new swing set installed the other day by the parks and recreation department work crew. I watched some of the workers test the swing out, laughing, happy because it was almost quitting time.
At the end of the concrete jetty I am heading for, these two compadres already have their lines in the surf and are watching the sun come up over a not too distant shipyard as a ship steams past us towards the west.
Fishermen are eternally hopeful.
If you don’t try to catch anything, you won’t catch anything.
The kid’s bicycle is laid on the rocks close to him, and, if he is lucky and is using the right temptation, he will take some fish home for breakfast this morning, in his five gallon bucket with his bait, tackle, and pole still sticking out of the milk crate.
This little plaza is dedicated to an important poet with a simple stone inscription.
Pellerano was a man who moved to the Dominican Republic from Curacao, stayed, and also raised a daughter, Luisa Castro, who was one of the most influential woman writers of Latin America.
” La Nuestra, ” is a glowing statue in the plaza of a Dominican born poet and activist, Judith Burgos, who died of pneumonia in Harlem at the age of 39 who was, likewise, a shooting star.
Little niches pop up in the Colonial Zone as you walk, with simple signs on walls saying this was the residence of a past President, this was where a playwright wrote his searing social criticism, this was where a priest was martyred for his beliefs, this was where the first hospital in the New World was established.
Poets use few words but the words they use must fit exactly, contain enough punch to outlast time with time’s changes of culture, etiquette and politics. Poets write about grand things as well as things as minor as a cup of tea, a morning walk, or a cat sitting on a window sash as the sun rises on a bougainvilla bush outside the front porch.
This is a quiet little plaza towards the south of the Zona Colonia. on the same street as the Larimer Museo and the Cathedral at Parque Colon.
Societies recognize their fleeting spirits, the ones who touch clouds, see deeper and farther than the rest of us.
This plaza is a small intimate poem you read out loud to yourself on a warm March morning as you stroll the shaded walkways.
The main water supply line from the street to the house is accessible from the sidewalk. You lift a little metal door in the sidewalk and quickly find a leaking coupling that joins the city part of the water line with the homeowners part of the water line.
This plumber has removed the old connection, a rigid piece of PVC, and is replacing it with a flexible, expandable, temporary PVC coupling.
This plumber has an audience with the lady of the house watching him through her wrought iron front door, and a neighbor and me making sure he knows what he is doing.
Water continues to bubble out of the break as he works.
When he closes the little door, the leak fixed, he might be the only one in this entire city to solve a problem today.
What I’m wondering is when is someone taking out the flexible coupling and installing the meter that measures the water usage of this household?
Water, last time I looked at my bills, wasn’t free.
I’m guessing, as I leave, that, before long, a long bill will be sent and paid.
In the end, we always have to pay, and, leaks that aren’t fixed ,cost us dearly.
Games of choice on the neighborhood streets seem to be dominoes and chess but I have also seen checkers and card games with money on the table.
This street corner game, in progress,even has an official scorekeeper who shouts out the score at the end of each game and visits his cell phone often. Some of us pedestrians stop to watch. This is likely an ongoing game between friends who have money and/or bragging rights involved.
The men don’t talk much. They slap their dominoes on the board when they make a play. When they shuffle the dominoes to start each new game in the series, it sounds like feet hitting the floor in a salsa dance.
It is quitting time, with darkness starting to move in, and the most conspicuous thing missing is rum.
When this tournament is over, the players and onlookers will go into the nearby colmado and take care of drinking business.
It doesn’t cost much to sit on this corner. When one tournament is over, different players take seats at the table and start another. There is luck involved as well as skill. You can have good dominoes but it you don’t play them right they aren’t worth a damn
No one says anything about my picture taking, and, I wouldn’t expect them too.
These guys wives, and girlfriends, know where they are.
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