Wow. Talk about landing on your feet, if only for one Saturday.
Last week, the popular Mercado Sano took a hit when an outside electrical fire forced its closing, through this weekend apparently.
What to do with the hugely popular TOSMA market that occupied the back parking and cavernous storage buildings?
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The 67th feast of flowers, new seeds, fertility, fertilizers, plants, and pots — La Feria de la Candelaria — has begun in Parque Juarez. The event continues through February 15.
A walk through the park this morning was truly transformative — for the park, and for me. How can you not be moved by the sheer enormity of gorgeous vegetation on display throughout every pathway, corner, and roundabout in the park?
While some of the 40-plus nursery exhibitors were still populating their corrals this morning, this is clearly the biggest Feria De La Candelaria to date.
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The Biblioteca resumes its series of medical discussions on Tuesday, January 31, with a topic that is near and dear to my heart:
My heart.
And I hope your heart, too.
No kidding, if it weren’t for one of these panelists, I would not be writing this today.
The 2 p.m. program in the Biblioteca Plaza is titled, “Mexico, Medicine, and Me: Cardiac Care.” And while it is free to the public, it is expected to be another full house, as we all hunger for the highest quality medical information we can find.
The panel consists of four local cardiac specialists Dr. Jorge Alvarez de la Cadena Sillas, a founding member of the Instituto de Corazon de Queretaro and in private practice here in San Miguel de Allende; Dr. Santiago Casal Alonso, with offices in MAC Hospital; Dr. Juan Francisco Melendez Alhambra, performed SMA’s first open heart surgery at MAC Hospital; and Dr. Jose Luis Romero Ibarra, a cardiac interventionist.
The moderator for the panel will be Dr. Grace Lim.
I am especially keen to have you attend, and here is why:
I was barely residing six months in San Miguel when my wife convinced me to meet with a cardiologist. I agreed although I couldn’t see the point. I was hitting the gym regularly, eating well, and feeling on top of my game physically. (As top as you can get at 66 years old.)
I did have one stent in my heart, inserted two years earlier. On a recommendation, I made an appointment with Dr. Jorge Alvarez, one of today’s panelists. We talked, a lot. He ran some in-office tests, then he convinced me to visit the Heart Institute in Queretaro for more testing.
Naturally, I thought this was all way too much attention to a guy who was feeling terrific,
Then I saw the images of my clogged-up left-ventricular artery (aka “The Widowmaker”). Even with the old stent, that thing was in bad shape. It took three more stents to re-open it. Thanks to my wife and Dr. Alvarez, I’m still around.
Yes, I was feeling just fine. Probably would have been out for a run or hiking in some canyon when the clogging hit 100 percent. Who knows?
What I know is that these folks will have some very important things to say about your hearts, and mine. Take an hour or so to go and listen. Don’t be like me and wait until everything turns critical.
Listen to your heart, but also listen to your head. If you think you ought to get a checkup … get a checkup.
You can go to this link to unload a ticket to today’s free event: https://teatrosantaana.org/tc-events/mexico-medicine-and-me-cardiac-care/
The library’s first panel brought together four general practitioners, family doctors, and internists to talk about local medical care and preparations you can take ahead of an emergency. They offered some terrific advice. You can read about it here.
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Farm to table.
Photograph taken 11/10/2022, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
This is Jerry Lee Lewis, live in England, in 1964. It is all-video, all-animal energy, all-Jerry Lee. Punk before punk was ever a word.
Like the kids in this video, I stood at the very edge of Jerry Lee’s piano while he played. Inches from the 88th key and his left hand.
The year was 1989 though, not 1964, and the setting was more subdued.
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The four good sisters were walking in tight black-and-white formation up Calle Ancha de San Antonio on Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, around 9 a.m.
That’s it. Nothing more to it. They just made me feel like smiling. Who wouldn’t smile at seeing a happy scrum of nuns?
I thought they were headed into a scrum with the tourist cluster headed down the sidewalk, but they stayed their formation and the visiting team blinked.
I’m sure pleasantries were exchanged by all. That’s just the way it is in Magical San Miguel.
Flower power along the busy Calle Cuna de Allende, next to the Parroquia de San Miguel de Arcangel in Centro.
In the doorway of El Alcazar restaurant and hotel, a couple painstakingly added real roses to the living floral doorframe.
Who wouldn’t want to walk through such a door on their way to dinner? Be it ever so fleeting an experience.
The gorgeous frame was created on Friday and gone by Monday.
Several doors down, this floral frame at Uri Zatarin Art Gallery was built to last, out of silk flowers. It was still there on Monday evening, as beautiful as ever.
A reader pointed out yesterday that my blog post on flowers which included some from Cape Cod and Newport, Rhode Island, was sorely lacking, in his opinion.
He essentially asked, How can you post pictures from these two places and not include a single ocean view?
In the writer’s own words, “No cape or Newport there..no ocean in site.”
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In San Miguel de Allende, we call this the rainy season.
Many days, the clouds will roll in during the afternoon and by 5 p.m. or so, there will be rain, thunder, and lightning.
It is happening right now as I write about it. A little early in the day, 1:30 p.m. but nobody ever complains about the rain.
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Sometimes, you just have to go with the material that is right in front of you.
Today, it is nothing more than clouds.
Just clouds.
“You should see the clouds,” Rose calls out to me. I am in my favorite chair, in a cool dark room, battling ignorance and mean people on Twitter. “They’re really beautiful.”
She is right. Rose knows her clouds.
Big beautiful fluffy, floating, languid, lazily hithering and dithering clouds.
Not “looks like rain” clouds. Not trouble-ahead clouds. Not massive gray-dark sheets of roiling angry wetness.
Just legions of marshmallow clouds floating over San Miguel de Allende on a summer’s afternoon.
The kind of clouds in which you can see famous faces, clowns, ghouls, horses, funny dogs, dragons, elephants, and cars.
The kind of clouds for which soft fields of grass were created, so you could lie on your back and see famous faces, clowns, ghouls, horses, funny dogs, dragons, elephants, and cars.
The kind of clouds that inspired Joni Mitchell to write “Both Sides Now.”
The kind of clouds that John Constable painted in sprawling vistas like “The Hay Wain” and “Wivenhoe Park.”
Where would poets be without clouds? Looking at you, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Maybe they are the same clouds, just recycled two centuries later?
Still hanging around, but posing now for iPhones.
Or, the kind of clouds under which young people fall in love and old people fall into reminiscing.
The kind of clouds for which the word “chiaroscuro” was invented.
Nobody can say that, back in the day, they had better clouds than these.
I’ve seen the evidence.
The best clouds ever — and always — are the ones that capture your imagination for a moment, just before morphing into whispy cotton candy swirls.
Timing is everything with clouds.
Pull your head up out of your cell phone, your busy works, your depression, your self-obsession, your shoe gazing — and look up.
Don’t let a day go by without observing the clouds, no matter how many or how few.
Don’t compare them to clouds past. That is not why they are here.
This is no cloud fashion show.
Clouds appear because they are trying to tell us something.
Seek out their shapeshifting secrets.
Learn their names, understand their reasons.
Follow the shadows they cast upon the ground.
You won’t find a pot of gold.
Maybe something better.
Love?
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Thirty things I can not do — according to the 876 e-mails that I just deleted — now that my only debit card has been hacked and terminated by my bank:
I also can not:
Pull pesos out of an ATM machine.
Order a new book from Kindle.
Pay for a meal in a restaurant.
Buy a case of wine.
Load up on dwindling medications.
Get U.S. dollars when I fly to Boston today.
Pay for a hotel room.
Pay for the rental car I reserved a month ago
Pay for gas when I drive to Rhode Island.
On the other hand:
I can sit and read a book
I can write to people
I can call family on the phone and chat
I can sit in the courtyard and ask the birds how they managed before the Internet.
I can turn off, tune out, and drop out.
I can go for a long walk in the countryside.
I can sit in the Jardin and listen to Mariachi bands as the sun sets.
I can sit on the roof terrace and watch the sunset.
I can count the church bells and make sure they are keeping proper time.
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 