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.
Continue reading
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?
_____________________________________________________________________
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.
And I turned to you and I said No guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature And the father in the garden
–VAN MORRISON, “IN THE GARDEN”
So I sit here in the garden, in the early summer light
A cup of coffee grows cold beside me
In the stillness that morning brings, fleeting stillness
The workers next door have not yet stirred to break the silence
With their hammers and saws and boisterous shouts.
There is still room for the birds in the dense green
To sing their songs, perform their magic,
Find love among the branches.
I don’t know the geography of this garden by name,
Only by the heart, defined by what my eyes take in:
The delicate flowers, the flirty birds, the twisty vines,
The shaded coolness of the branches. So many voices
of green, vying for my attention. I know
Only that it is too beautiful for me to rise and exert my will
Where it is unwanted, unasked for, upon another day.
An empty bag awaits upstairs with a ticket to somewhere far
And I only know I don’t want to leave the garden.
I want to sit here in the peace, in the coolness,
Listening to the plants breathing ever so lightly
Parsing out their secrets ever so lightly
Unlocking a state of grace ever so lightly,
Grace I can not achieve no matter how hard I try.
Outside, mothers and fathers walk their children
Hand in hand to school as church bells chime,
A touch of grace all its own.
I see their shadows pass on frosted windows,
And I sit and listen to the plants.
And listen to the birds.
And listen to the silence.
And my coffee grows cold for I dare not move
I can not move,
I don’t want to move.
I want only to become one
With the stillness.
In the garden.
While there is still time.
You want to hear about how my IT wizard supercharged my streaming media speed so that I can actually watch a movie uninterrupted (sometimes) off my FireStick?
Nah. Me neither.
How about the coming Sriracha shortage because drought conditions in northern Mexico are killing off the chiles harvest and the hot-sauce factory has closed?
You already know that one, huh?
Continue reading
Leopold Bloom poses a tantalizing puzzle in James Joyce’s epic novel “Ulysses”: “cross Dublin without passing a pub.”
Thanks, I suppose, to computers, GPS, and Google maps, that puzzle has been solved many times over. Why you would want to do it, is a puzzle to me. When in Ireland. …
Here’s a tougher puzzle: Walk across Dublin and not see a reference to James Joyce – be it a photograph, a statue, a quote on a wall, a bookstore window, a mural, a pub name, a simple conversation, or a T-shirt in a tourist shop.
It feels like Joyce is Dublin and Dublin is Joyce, and though he has been dead these many decades, the full ripe glory of his passion for this city is everywhere.
Continue reading
Our man Mick picks us up at Corofin Country Lodge on Sunday morning and drops us off in the center of Ennis, as promised. Thirty euros all.
Mick looks like Jason “The Transporter” Statham. All efficiency and business. The man in black. The car in black.
Unlike Statham, Mick likes to speak. He’s quite a conversationalist. I think. Mick speaks in a thick accent that may have been a mix of Gaelic and English. His words came in phrases, in short rapid bursts like an assault rifle.
Continue reading
It is the last day of The Burren Way and we are walking from Carran to Corofin through a rocky wonderland in a gentle misty rain.
You know it is going to be an interesting day when our B&B host Julianne’s directions include the phrase, “Turn right at the castle ruins.”
She also urges us to detour from the route to visit the triple ringfort of Cathair Chomáin, built on the edge of a cliff around the year 800 A.D. It was excavated in 1934 and 2003 but still holds much mystery about its origins.
Over coffee and toast – Julianne offers us a full Irish breakfast (part of the B&B fare) but I am thinking of the consequences of a full stomach and the six-plus hours of walking ahead – we learn some of the history of her cottage which has been in and out of her family since the 1800s. It is decorated in the comfy Irish style – family photos cover every wall and horizontal surface. Books cover what is left.
Continue reading
We’ve been dodging in and out of the rain since we began walking the Wild Atlantic Way in County Clare four days ago. This morning, awakening to the steady patter of rain on the windows of the Wild Atlantic Lodge in Ballyvaughan, it feels like we’ve run out of dodges.
Did we really want to walk to Carran — or Carron? It is spelled both ways, often side by side, and nobody seems to really care. I asked. “Either way,” is the most common response.
One of the Burren walking guides calls this leg “extremely rewarding and scenic …”
Well, that is encouraging. Except it is dumping buckets outside.
But wait, there is more.
Continue reading
I have a subscription to The New Yorker, the print edition. It is the one magazine that I like holding in my hands while reading.
Circling unfamiliar, fanciful, and inventive words is part of my reading habit. Circling whole paragraphs. Underlining brilliant turns of phrase. Highlighting exciting writing. This magazine feeds that habit well. The writing is occasionally above my fighting weight, and I appreciate that.
Every time I read The New Yorker, I come away feeling a little smarter, a little more informed, and definitely motivated to keep writing.
Living in Mexico, the New Yorker can arrive two or three weeks later than it should. More often than not, it is the only thing in my mailbox. Late delivery didn’t matter when the content was less topical. Good writing is good writing and it is timeless. I always valued the New Yorker more for its literary content than for its news.
Even the front-of-the-book calendar on events happening in New York City is entertaining, even when those events occurred several weeks ago. New Yorker writers are like the city — bright, challenging, acerbic, engaging, chatty, witty, savvy and, above all, never dull.
The New Yorker is trying to be more timely and that works against my cross-border mail delivery universe. It is still some of the best writing around but by the time the magazine reaches my hands, the rest of the world has moved on. Now, when I pick up a copy, I find that I’ve read most of the stories online.
I also have a large stack of old New Yorkers that I am reluctant to throw out. It feels like hoarding.
So, I thought, time to switch to an online subscription.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I went online and found that my print subscription expired March 1, 2015.
Is that even possible?
For years, the New Yorker has been arriving faithfully, sometimes two at a time after especially long delivery droughts. And I’ve never once paid my subscription?
For once, I am moved to use two words I despise to describe this moment: existential crisis.
My prized subscription, my only subscription to a printed thing – and I’m what? A glitch in the operation? A bug in the system? A ghost in the machine?
This is a computerized universe. We are a data-driven society. Marketers can tell when your stomach is growling or when you are leaning more Democrat — and swiftly rectify the course of things with ads uniquely chosen for your predicament. To say we are living our authentic lives today means that we are jogging beside a digital stream that knows our every need, predicts our every whim — and responds accordingly.
Usually, an alert arrives well before a subscription expires. Most offer automatic renewal if you choose to take no further action. My online newspaper subscriptions work like that. Convenient, timely, and seamless.
I am not the most conscientious bookkeeper when it comes to my bank accounts. Most times I don’t even think about it. The pension and Social Security come in and the bills get paid. If there is anything left, that is gravy.
I don’t recall an expiration or renewal notice from the New Yorker‘s data grinders. That would have gotten my attention.
Recently, The New Yorker did send me a rejection letter for an essay that I wrote for the magazine’s Shouts & Murmurs section. I sent it in about six months ago and they did warn me that the backlog was horrific. (Ie: “Don’t hold your breath.”)
It was my first New Yorker rejection and didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it might. It wasn’t even an, um, existential crisis.
I actually felt at the time that the humor in my essay was more topically in tune with David Egger’s McSweeney’s magazine. I had a momentary dream of submitting to both, having both simultaneously accept the article, setting off a fierce bidding war that resulted in publicity to all the right people and a three-book publishing contract with an embarrassingly frothy advance.
Instead, I thought, let’s give the New Yorker a chance. It was, after all, my first love, in a literary sense.
So, months after submitting, and forgetting like a furtive one-night stand, I found out that I wasn’t ghosted. I was rejected.
In fact, it felt pretty good. How many people can say they got turned down by The New Yorker?
Real answer: Lots. And often.
Getting published follows the same rules as winning the lottery. You have to buy a ticket to win. And most likely, you’ll need to buy lots and lots of tickets before you get a winner.
Many writers are rejected dozens of times before a submission is accepted for publication. The magazine is that good. Cartoonists have it even worse. They can be rejected 30 or 50 times before making it into the magazine, although I believe the cartoon department is set up to more quickly reject a submission than other sections of the magazine.
I don’t really think I’m New Yorker material as a writer but you never know.
The trouble is, I’m in the Grandma Moses phase of my literary life. (Look it up, kids.) I don’t know how much is left in the tank and how much of it is worthy of rejection by prestige publications.
By now you might be thinking, “This is all well and good, Bob, but I think you are avoiding the existential crisis that initiated this essay.”
And you are right.
And I don’t know what to do.
I feel like I should submit this to “The Ethicist” column in the Sunday New York Times.
But wait. I’d better check and see if my NYT subscription is up to date.
