Old photos, especially black and white, have a nostalgic quality.
They often have no names or dates on the back, have edges that are dogeared or brown, wrinkles, mustaches drawn in with ball point pens by pranksters. They are sometimes in albums but often are tossed into shoe boxes like shells found on the beach. Sometimes pictures are artistic. Oftentimes they bring back memories, brain chemistry recreating images you can see if you close your eyes and focus, seeing people places and events that have been long gone.
These photos bring back heady dates of the 1950’s when Baby Boomers went to grammar school, Elvis brought his hips out in public, Eisenhower played golf, and Kerouac penned long winded novels, his words rolling across the page like a hot tenor sax solo by Dexter Gordon.
In Albuquerque, Blake’s Lotaburger was a place to go after we kids worked on one of our Dad’s rentals, mowing lawns, raking trash, washing windows, painting, fixing screen doors and broken windows. We would finish, load tools into a roomy Plymouth station wagon, and go to Blakes for a Lotaburger, fries, and a Coke.
With these 50’s folks there was no self indulgence, no sense of entitlement. They were working and glad to be flipping burgers for three dollars an hour and most families were supported by one income.
Blake’s in still around.
We’ve been through oodles of wars since this hamburger stand was built and we are still not at peace.
These days the proverbial tail wags the dog.
Outside the front gate of Christianville, you take an immediate right to go to Haiti Made, a local cafe, coffee and smoothie shop run by Americans.
An eighth of a mile down the rock strewn, bumpy, water puddled lane, that barely makes a foot path, is the landmark Old Well.
It is called old because it is a deep well drilled in the 1950’s when the Christianville Bible University occupied the hillside above the well. The University was taken out by one of Mother Nature’s hurricanes some years ago and all that is left of it is a concrete shell of a building at the top of the ridge, obscured by battered trees and beat down vegetation.
Often, at this well, there are vehicles, motorcycles pulled off the road while men and women fill yellow five gallon plastic jugs with water to take home for cooking, drinking, and bathing.
I splash water on my face, direct from the spigot, stopping my walk to Haiti Made for a moment.
A hurricane, taking out this Bible University on the hill, is ironic.
If the well had been taken out too, the tragedy would have been exponentially worse.
While having a God helps us survive, not having water is a death sentence.
In the 1950’s, the world was in a Cold War.
Yet, there was hot atomic testing with Pacific atolls being blown into non-existence and school children crawling under their desks at a school bell. Russia and the United States were headbutting and angry rhetoric took the place of missiles. Scientists, and what they were working on, became a preoccupation for the public.
In the 1950’s, there was also a flurry of B movies about giant insects, crabs and birds turned into threats by nuclear radiation and/or chemical injections in secret government research stations, taking revenge on humans that created them, casting fear into hearts at local theaters and spawning fantastic comic books.
One such movie production was a 1955 epic, titled ” Tarantula . ”
The plot stars a giant angry spider escaping from an isolated desert laboratory and threatening the fictional town of Desert Rock, its hard luck population, the U.S., and, by extrapolation, the world.
This real tarantula, outside my guest house in Haiti, is not to be feared.
After discussion with the kids who watch the tarantula with me, he is allowed to live, to move back into the brush. His bite would hurt but his venom wouldn’t be fatal to any watching him this morning while tree trimmers work, stirring up undergrowth.
We have more to fear from the things this big boy eats.
Scarier than tarantula’s is what science is doing, outside our purview, while promising everything is just fine.
Eggs come from a local source and are delivered when ordered.
There are 30 eggs to a flat and ten flats to this stack which makes three hundred eggs. It sounds like a multiplication word problem from one of the kid’s math workbooks stored in a plastic crate on the back porch.
It becomes more than a multiplication problem when the cook cracks a hundred eggs for this mornings breakfast alone.
Now, it becomes a logistics problem.
Multiply your own children times a factor of ten, fifteen, or twenty, and think which direction your household finances are going.
What complicates the story is these kids don’t have parents, have parents who have left them to be raised by strangers, or have been abandoned.
That turns this post quickly into a lesson in multiplication, logistics, and heartache.
Lucky has had two litters.
Her first litter was given away and taken at night when no one was paying attention.
This second litter of seven is housed in a suitcase under the front porch of the guest house. Besides the banging of mango’s falling on the roof, Scott is serenaded by puppies at one in the morning every night. Their four part harmony is mediocre but they are great at crescendos.
Lucky, diligently, stays up all night barking at threats to her brood but sleeps all day on the tiled front porch floor, in the shade.
This morning, Ms. Sue’s girls are coaxing Lucky back to her puppies by laying down a string of dog treats. They lay one down and Lucky walks to sniff it, then gingerly eats it. They lay another bite, just a little further, and Lucky follows them. No smart dog is going to turn down a snack.
Back at her suitcase, she is reunited with her kids, each one named by Ms. Sue’s children.
Their names, as chosen by committee, are Lacy, Lucy, Larry, Lalo, Lily, Lewenski, Lemenski.
No one is sure where the last two names come from but they are on a handwritten note given to Ms. Sue. The note has a big heart drawn on it and all seven names are printed neatly in a little girl’s hand.
How anyone will put the right name with the right puppy is yet another miracle?
Gecko’s are ubiquitous, strutting on television commercials, hiking up walls, screens, lounging on tree branches around my Haiti home.
This gecko doesn’t stay long enough for introductions and moves away quickly as I approach. In a shutter click he is off the screen and down into the underbrush,his green body lost in thick vines. His best feature is his unrelenting hunger for mosquito’s.
Mosquito’s are a Haiti problem, as well as the diseases they carry. Besides dengue fever and zika, mosquito’s carry malaria. Most volunteers with church groups from abroad pop big orange malaria pills, started two days before a visit and carried on a week after getting home. We are all shot full of strange potions and wipe ourselves down with insect repellent first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
This gecko has eaten his fill on my porch screen, and, for that, is a master of pest control.
I will celebrate his return this evening as he runs up and down my screens like a freestyle rock climber.
I really love the fat lizards who don’t care about looks and wag their tongues, like fingers, as if to say, ” You ain’t gonna eat more than me tonight. ”
Gecko’s are not reptiles that everyone hates.
They have style.
“Watch out for the stone, ” the short order cook says, as he slides my meal across the counter to me. ” It is very hot.”
I look at a dark stone shaped like a huge pill on my plate, then look at my under cooked meat next to it. The hot stone, it appears, is used to finish cooking the little slices of steak, as us customers desire them. By placing each slice on my own hot stone, I can cook my steak rare, medium, done, or well done, just like I like it. I am not just a consumer of a product, but a participant in it’s preparation.
I’m sure this cooking technique has been around for thousands of years in Japan, but it is new to a trail tired New Mexico cowpoke.
The whole process makes it twice as long to finish my dinner,as it usually takes ,but I enjoy my food more.
Hearing meat sizzle on the stone reminds me of summer backyard barbecues and cooking over a campfire.
At the end of this meal, I am happy with my steak, and, if I have to blame anyone for it’s cooking, it has to be me.
That, I figure, is the final exclamation point of this entire culinary and writing exercise.
These two parakeets are new to the front porch.
The two birds and cage were a thousand pesos, about $20.00. The two of them sing, preen, watch the world from their small enclosure.They are confined, but they are safe.
Sitting below is one of Alma’s cats, looking up, calculating ways to reach them.He caught a mouse yesterday and played with it in the dining room before making it a meal.
Morning sunlight pours into the porch and the green blue white tropical birds share love poems.
This cat is out of luck, but yearning.
These are the makings of a country western song.
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.
Coconut trees make pretty pictures, but they make money too.
On Marinduque, coconut trees grow up the sides and over mountains, in valleys and in flat areas that have been cleared of brush to make orchards, rows of the trees standing like sailors at morning muster, in a line, Irish pennants clipped and shoes spit shined.
All the land on this island is owned and coconuts are harvested every two to three months, those that survive typhoons,rainy seasons, and wind storms.The coconuts are harvested by hand and families supplement their income by working in the groves when the time is right, bringing down coconuts for sale to local agents to ship to Manilla, and, from there, around the world.
Uncle Estoy works on the first step in the harvest process, using a long stick with a hooked curved blade on one end to cut the neck that attaches the coconut to its tree. The coconuts look like clusters of grapes from the ground but when they fall you need to stand back because they feel like a bag of rocks if they hit your head.
The rest of the team, once the coconuts fall to the ground, carry or toss them to a burning station where the skin is burned off.
These guys work most of the day, and, when they walk home, the colorful T shirts wrapped around their heads make them look like tired but happy pirates.
By the end of the day, they harvest over a hundred coconuts ready to go to Manilla. Everyone is tired, but all are safe, and it is a job well done.
You wouldn’t want to do this every day.
Then, it would really be work.
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