Larimar is one of Earth’s creations, formed by great pressures, huge temperatures, great shiftings of the Earth’s crust over millions of years. It is found only in the Dominican Republic where it is mined, cut, polished, and fashioned into fine jewelry.
One of the shops off the Parque Colon in Santo Domingo is the Museum of Larimar which is both a museum and retail shop that sells larimar, as well as amber, another Dominican Republic treasure.
This little upstairs museum has English as well as Spanish descriptions in its history of how Larimar is created, how it is mined, and how it is used by it’s devotees. The sales ladies are low pressure and the soft blue and white gemstone is pleasing to my eye. Any of these necklaces would look well around a dainty woman”s neck, dressed for a nice dinner engagement with the person of her choosing.
There are street vendors in the Zona Colonia who have propositioned me to buy their stones. They hold a cigarette lighter with a flame up to their pieces to show their product is real and not plastic. Buying the gem in this museum, however, gives me a written guarantee and certificate of authenticity for not much more cost, which makes it a better bargain.
What is hard is seeing worn photos of tunnel rats who dig deep to find the gem. Their faces, in these photos of the exhibit, are dirty and their mining implements simple, shovels and pry bars and even bamboo sticks.
Most things we covet have tales of hardship behind them.
Shouldn’t these real gemstones, millions of years old, wrestled from the Earth, polished and turned into jewelry, be worth more than the pieces of paper we purchase them with?
Will we ever get all the men out of the tunnels?
Halloween has crawled out of the grave for another year.
At a local Starbucks, Freddie doesn’t have to bone up on store policy, customer relations, or how to work the register. He hands out coffee and keeps his mouth shut because he rattles when he talks. This morning his fellow employees have a close hold on him and their cell phones, and, right now, are as dead to their employer as he is.
Mostly, these days, people are hooked up with their cell phones, deader to the world than even Freddie,and you can’t communicate with them unless you call them.
The boneyard, I glean from this morning’s Starbuck’s experience, is closer than I’d like to be and Halloween is definitely here.
Rubbing elbows with skeletons is not my usual cup of tea, but, in here, we don’t get to choose who we have drinks with.
What I really want to know is whether Freddy drinks Starbuck’s coffee, who is he dating in here, and what kind of golfer he is?
The saying used to be ” An apple a day keeps the Doctor Away. ”
In 2017, there were 27,339 Starbucks stores globally.
Back in World War 2, coffee kept pilots awake on long flights to targeted cities, helped wives and girlfriends who watched the postman walk up to the front door with fear. On Route 66, coffee was served in diners for five cents a cup to wash down blue plate specials, chicken fried steak with mixed vegetables, potato’s and gravy. Coffee was a working man’s drink.
At a recent European Cardiac Society Congress,however, coffee was recognized as having significant positive correlations with keeping coffee drinkers alive. According to their most recent scientific study, older people drinking two cups a day of Joe had a thirty percent reduction in mortality rates. Coffee was discovered to lower one’s risk for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, liver disease and Parkinson’s.
This sign, says, with certainty, that ” three cups a day keeps the Doctor away.
With Doctor’s track records, mortality should be on every patient’s mind.
If drinking coffee made us young again, Starbucks would triple in size overnight.
McDonalds was one of the first corporate giants to infiltrate American communities with cheap hamburgers, fast food, employee training programs, marketing strategies, toys for the kids, drive up windows, extended operating hours. You can dine in any corporate or franchise store and get sameness.
McDonalds leapfrogged across the United States leaving stores wherever its arches touched ground. Their business formula is so profitable the company has planted its logo worldwide and a generation of kids choose Egg Mc’muffins over frosted flakes.
Now Mickey’s has a new employee – the Big Mac Kiosk.
Machines make great employees. They aren’t late, don’t do drugs, don’t have fights with their spouse, don’t steal, don’t need a health care plan.
How does a society survive when its people are replaced by computers?
The Big Mac Kiosk shows the State of the Union better than a President’s speech.
This wind sock, inflated early this morning, has flailing arms and an ambiguous smile on its face.
Creede hasn’t awoken yet, but June, the lady who lives in her parked Tiny House and sells food from her trailer cafe, is cooking already, at eight in the morning.
” I like your house….. ”
” It has everything I need, ” June says as she sips her morning cup of hot chocolate, turning on burners and slicing onions, looking at me like a suspicious pirate.
She has a big pickup for pulling her home away in a month when the first snow hits Creed, Colorado. Her truck plates are Texas but she volunteers to me that she will pull her rig to Florida and sell smoothies to tourists in swimsuits and bikinis, wearing hippie bracelets around their wrists and ankles.
You can see this blue sock from blocks away and it has big black eyes and long Ichibod Crane fingers snapping the air.
Big multinational corporations sell using Madison Avenue advertising agencies packed with employee’s with MBA’s and degrees in Psychology, Sales, Marketing and Sociology. Once they turn us into cookie cutter people and make their products our choices,their job becomes easier and more profitable. In Creede, and most of Main Street, where we live,this wind sock is more than enough advertising to get the point across.
Inside June’s Tiny House, there is room to stretch out, fix dinner, watch her big screen television, read a book, have special people over, clean up, curl up on the couch, let sunlight crawl through the window blinds.
A home base doesn’t have to be anchored to be a home.
A chalkboard street sign on Creede’s Main Street reminds us all to, ” Follow your soul! It knows where to go.”
June follows her soul, and the wind sock, this morning, says her soul is open for business but heading to Florida as the first snowflakes fall on the windshield of her big Chevy truck.
Haiti Made is a local countryside Cafe and Gift Shop.
If you walk outside the Christianville front gate, past the security man sitting in a chair with an automatic fully loaded weapon by his side, you make a quick right and follow a single winding lane road into the countryside until you get to their front door.
Less than a quarter mile, past the Old Well, you can drop by Haiti Made, grab a smoothie and visit with locals and foreign tourists in the heat of the day.
Displayed on tables,walls and pallets are handmade items made by local men and women who are part of the Haiti Made’s craft co-operative.
Jan is in court today and works the register, takes orders, meets friends who come in with pitches for various community projects. There are Americans living full time in Haiti and many have Christian intentions and charitable goals.
Love and Grace are operative words today and the smoothies are truly smooth. My favorite is banana cherry, but some of the kids like banana peanut butter, or cherry lime. They are all made with real fruit and thick enough you can use a spoon to scoop them out of the glass..
On this hot afternoon, with heat rising and the feel of rain in the air, going to Haiti Made makes a good comma in another long drawn out Faulkner sentence about hope and fear in a desolate Garden of Eden.
If a smoothie isn’t your cup of tea, you can choose a cup of coffee and have a muffin.
On a hot afternoon, it feels good to sit under the shade trees on the patio and swing in an old tire swing that hangs down from a tall sturdy branch above it by a thick thick rope that only a hangman would love.
The Mogpog market is a place we return each day, more than once,
By lunch most of the fresh products have been sold, fisherman have returned to sleep in their berths after a night on the waters. There are newly slaughtered hogs carried into the market throughout the day, loaded on tables and butchered in public..Flounders look at you with both eyes, flat as pancakes on a diner grill. Chickens, plucked and washed, lie in neat rows, headless. Vegetables look like a Monet painting with their colors bright and bold, splashes from Mother Nature’s paint pot.
Today, we shop for a graduation party and look for a Barbie doll for little girl Gwen.
The market is a kaleidoscope of images, a cacophony of sounds, a security blanket of the familiar.
We find Gwen her Barbie and she carries it home, in the box, happy as a new mom.
Most villages, towns and cities, small or large, old or new, have a Main Street.
Main streets support shops, offices, hotels, restaurants, government compounds. Some have divided boulevards for traffic, bike paths, sidewalks for pedestrians. Main streets are where towns were conceived, the center of an onion that keeps growing outwards as people move away from ground zero in search of more room, privacy, quiet, better schools, less crime,more new, less old.
This morning, the jungle pushes against the main road on both sides.
This route would have been used by Ancients who built the palaces to the north that have been neglected and fallen into ruin, as well as other pyramids deep in these Central American jungles. This main road would have been more narrow then, would have been swept with palm fronds by slaves of conquered tribes. There would have been pageants here with elites wearing feathered head dresses parading to their quarters in the palaces for religious ceremonies and political celebrations.
As this day begins, this Main Street of Tulum, Mexico is still checking its own pulse, waking up to the sounds of tropical birds and breaking waves rolling onto white sand beaches.
It is not as grand as it once was, but peaceful, these days, is much better than grand.
On the wall of a shop,these Cupid twins smile lustily, with a trace of the Devil in their expressions.
Cupids are often known to have smiling faces, flowing blond hair,rotund bodies. They fly in the air with ease and are particularly in evidence in palace gardens where men and women socialized in times past, held heart to heart talks on shaded benches and exchanged beautifully penned letters.
In this shop, the twins share one arrow and one common purpose – to release their arrow into unsuspecting humans and send them into the tizzies and trifles of love.
Poets, from Shakespeare to William Carlos Williams, extol the virtues, joy, pitfalls and pratfalls of love, a human condition celebrated on Valentine’s Day with flowers, cards, gifts, fond words, grand gestures.
None are immune from Cupid’s arrows and these grinning faces already have plans for this evening when they will fly out a partially opened window, buzz the town, and find victims.
Once shot by an arrow the results are not fatal, but wounded lovers sometimes yearn for death instead of living with the pangs of love.
Love and lust have little in common but they often bump each other in the night.
Along the Hotel Zone main road in Tulum, Mexico there are diversions.
There are small coffee shops that sell Mexican coffee, flavored with sugar, and delicious pastries for individual palates. Restaurants push seafood, Indian food, Italian, Chinese, Vegan and Mexican cuisine.Bars serve late at night and hotels have Vacancy signs hanging where they can be seen. Boutiques display designer clothes for women who need to look good, always, whether they are on the beach, dancing in a disco, taking kids to soccer practice or listening to pickup lines in the grocery.
Moments before this photo is snapped, a long legged woman in red, positions two mannikins on the street in front of her shop.She carries one out to the street under her arm and stands it next to the other.
With both mannikins positioned she turns and strides back to open her business. It is early in the morning and only a few vehicles are on the road. Light filters through trees and through her loose fitting dress that moves seductively as she walks.
It is not difficult to see who is and who isn’t a mannikin.
Movement shows life.
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