Memoirs -- fact and fiction, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

I met a woman, in my dreams last night

I met a woman, in my dreams last night.
Her senses are scrambled.
She touches through her eyes.
She sees through her nose.
She tastes and smells through her skin.
She listens through her mouth.
She speaks through her ears.

Speaking isn’t a sense. I know.
But this was her dream.
I only happened to walk into it.

“What a fine mess you are in,” I say.
“Or is this a path to enlightenment?
“Or a punishment? Some sad karma?” 
Mainly, she remains mute, confused.
As would I, in such a confounding scramble.

I ask her if I could walk a mile in her shoes.
“My shoes?” she cries. “Do you mean to say that I still have feet?”
Just what she didn’t need, someone else in her shoes.
“Are they still at the bottom of my legs?” she asks.

Under the circumstances, it was an unkind thing to say.

Swapping sensual responsibilities has its strengths.
Imagine listening through your mouth,
Drawing in another’s words with your breath.
Savoring them, absorbing them, digesting them.
You would actually have to listen.
Rather than think of some clever retort.

Suppose you speak through your ears.
That requires special talent well beyond small talk.
I don’t even know how it can be done.
My dream offered nothing on this.
Maybe, intently listening is a form of speaking.
Silence does speak volumes as others chatter on.

Putting your senses to work in areas
For which they were not trained
Sounds like a grueling, but potentially rewarding, exercise.
Sort of like the blind man whose other senses
Compensate by growing intensely acute.

Perhaps all senses ought to be rotated once in a while,
Like the tires on your car.
We grow lazy, only hearing through our ears,
Seeing through our eyes, speaking/tasting through our mouths, 
feeling through our skin, smelling through our noses.

Shake them up, I say!
And when, again, we grow too comfortable,
Rotate them once more!
Keep the fine treads of our senses staying sharp.

Perhaps if we employ all our senses to share the load —
Let the eyes do the speaking, let the ears do the seeing,
Let the skin replace taste and smell …

Soon, all our sensations grow muscle and power.
Newer sensations arise, previously unknown sensations.
Next thing you know, the heart and brain
Want to engage in this circus of sensations, too.
And, then, won’t things get interesting?

We are fully present in processing our environment
We are fully engaged in evaluating, understanding, inhabiting.

Deep immersion, full immersion, absorption and immersion.

Life gets more interesting because we will be, well … living.
No longer just data-processing and consumption machines.
We are higher beings. At one, for once, with the various universes.

The woman in my dream knows none of this just yet.
She is still trying to …
Touch through her eyes.
See through her nose.
Taste and smell through her skin.
Listen through her mouth.
Speak through her ears.
Find her footing.

I try to tell the woman in my dream that it will get better.
But her face is blank. She betrays no thoughts.
The woman in my dream moves on, back to the shadows.
She seems neither excited nor saddened.

I gather it will take some time.
Perhaps she will come back on another night
And show me what she has learned.

Images were generated by artificial intelligence based on the first stanza.

_______________________________________________________________________

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photography, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

An all-natural pod cast on a world wide web

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” — Pablo Picasso


Spider webs are beautiful things. Unless you walk face-first into one in the dark of night.

Then, not so beautiful. Or interesting.

My friend Sonny once sat for hours on the floor of our Cape Cod house staring at a spider as it wove a stringy orb behind a door. Sonny insisted he learned a lot from observing the construction of the web.

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photography, Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

In San Miguel de Allende, give us this day our daily miracle

I say it often, perhaps insufferably often for some people, but every day that I step out the front door in San Miguel de Allende, I expect a miracle to happen.

Oh, not a big miracle. Not always.

Just little miracles.

Like the smile on the face of a mother herding her three children toward the church.

Like the carpet of lavender jacaranda flowers worked into a patch of cobblestones.

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fiction, Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Fiction: The secret life of Gertrude Stein in America

Gertrude Stein had a problem. She’d always had the problem but it was all the more acute in 1934 when she stood before 500 people and tried to speak. 

She stuttered.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Her stutter caused obvious discomfort among her adoring fans and that caused her to lose confidence and when Gertrude Stein lost confidence, she lost her line of thought. Which was not easy to follow to begin with.

The first couple of lectures on her long-awaited U.S. tour were described in the American press as disappointing and worse, confusing.

And this would never do, as she had six months of lectures across the United States lined up, each limited to 500 people maximum and each had been sold out months ago. 

In a bit of a panic, Stein told an assistant to reach out to her good friend Mina Loy, a bohemian Everywoman sort, living in Paris. A feminist, painter, poet, playwright, novelist, designer — god knows, if it was about art, Mina had done it. If anyone could punch up a speech and clear up her, um, diction issues, Stein reasoned, it would be Mina.

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Memoirs -- fact and fiction, photography, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Jay, Jim, me and 10 bags of chips

Jay Leno autographs bags of chips in 1987 at his Beverly Hills home. I’m the terrorist-looking guy behind him. Photos by Jim Skovmand.

Recently, my old friend and colleague Jim Skovmand was searching for some papers on his computer when he came up with these photos, which he sent to me on Tuesday. What a great way to unlock a memory!

Jim and I joined the Copley Press organization around the same time, he in the photography pool and I with The (San Diego) Evening Tribune. The photo pool then was more like a deep lake – more than 50 photographers, editors, managers, and lab staff serving the Tribune and the rival morning paper, The San Diego Union.

As Jim recently pointed out, it took five years before we had an assignment together – that’s how big the new-gathering organization was in those days.

This was the assignment we shared and it was a doozie. 

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#smwc2020, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Page turner: 18th annual SMA Writers Conference will be last for founder

Founder and executive director of the San Miguel Writers Conference & Literary Festival Susan Page steps down this year.

It seems hard to imagine, but there was a time when writers in San Miguel de Allende had no platform on which to read their works and no outlet to sell their books. 

The “dark ages” were barely two decades ago.

Two women – one who is strong on organizing and one who has the vision – noticed the void and decided to do something about it. 

And so, in 2004, Susan Page and Jody Feagan (now of Santa Fe) organized a modest literary sala where local writers could come and read from their works and talk about their craft.

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San Miguel de Allende, Writings

For 2023, I wish you a thousand little milagros

This cross sits to the right of my desk, on an empty chair. It is one of many crosses that we have inherited. Our home in San Miguel de Allende comes with crosses, cow skulls, pottery and milagros pegged to doors here and there.

Milagros are those little tin objects you see on the cross that look as though they might be Monopoly board pieces.

While I have always been aware of the cross — lord knows I’ve moved it around often enough — I never really paid close attention to it.

Until this morning.

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photography, Reviews, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

It’s Tuesday: To market, to market to buy a blue suit; home again, home again, jiggety-scoot

I do not shop. I do not wander into stores and glide up and down aisles looking for just the right … thing. I don’t compare prices. I don’t compare similar products. I don’t read labels. I don’t calculate the savings between the Jumbo and Family sizes. I don’t clip coupons.

I buy local because I’m too lazy to walk to a cheaper store. I shop to survive, not to find pleasure.

But you don’t have to twist my arm to get me up the hill to the Tuesday Market.

I love the hustle and bustle. I love the jockeying for position at a tabletop clothing dump. I love to hear the shouts of “Barata! Barata! Barato!” and “Venta! Venta! Venta!” I love the smell of the food, the fish on ice, the produce, the fresh piles of strawberries. The piles of hardware and kitchenware and racks of hats, and row upon row of shoes, and … well, just name it, there’s a pile of it somewhere.

And such a deal I have for you.

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Memoirs -- fact and fiction, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Christmas Eve, 1967–Hunting for Perry Como

To understand the significance of Perry Como passing through our town on Christmas Eve in 1967 – no, not just passing but actually stopping – you have to understand the insignificance of Brookville, Pennsylvania. 

The town that I fondly, though inaccurately, call my hometown, was in the middle of nowhere until the honking huge Interstate-80 was laid north of town and sucked up all traffic and little remaining interest in Brookville. Though you could see and hear thousands of cars and trucks pass by daily, Brookville was deeper into nowhere than ever before.

And, I think, most people seemed OK with that.

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Colonia San Antonio, photography, Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Hey, buster, who are you calling the ‘friendliest city in the world’?

News item: Conde Nast Traveler names San Miguel de Allende the “friendliest city in the world.” It beats out Dublin, Lisbon, Bangkok, Copenhagen, Mexico City, and Bruges among others. The media company previously named San Miguel the “best small city in the world.”

This can’t be good.

I was asked to respond to all this by an otherwise sharp and responsible newspaper colleague. And so …

All right, the next guy who says San Miguel de Allende is the friendliest city in the world gets a punch in the nose, see?

A city with a reputation like that could get itself hurt, see? A city could pick up a rep-u-tation with talk like that, and not the good kind, see?

Other cities start thinking it’s a patsy and start aping all that friendly stuff and the next thing you know, you’ve got a six-way tie for the friendliest city. 

And that ain’t good for nobody, see?

Why, if everybody is friendly, then what’s this world coming to?

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