San Pancho Vida

Come Hear

I went upstairs at ten the other night, book tucked under my arm, relishing the thought of a good eight hour sleep, maybe even nine. The house was clean and organized and locked up tight. There were new sheets on the bed, smooth and cool. Fresh sweet air wafted through the screens. I grinned at the bed as I put my book and water glass on the bedside table and went in to wash my face. 

Morning sounds: A cacophony of roosters. A clatter of plates across the street. Sweeping. An old pick-up truck starting, grudgingly. Chickens scolding scurrying chicks. A vegetable vendor announcing his wares. The music and call of the gas truck. The skritch of a rake. A woman’s voice on the loudspeaker from the elementary school.

As is my habit, I stepped out onto the bedroom veranda before I climbed into bed. It was relatively quiet, the stars clear and three-dimensional in the black sky. I noticed several cars pulling up on the road below, half a block or so toward the beach. I could see people standing around under a streetlight. They looked to be youngsters, from their body language and the way they bounced around.

At first, I thought they were holding flashlights, maybe even sparklers, from the glints of light that flashed now and then as they moved about. Then a large shape came clear: tuba. Once I noticed that, I could see that the glimmers and glints came from trumpets, too, and other shiny things held. The Banda. Our own San Pancho brass band. 

Afternoon sounds: The soft clatter of palm fronds stirred by breeze. Hollow thump of an old door blowing shut upstairs. A lone rooster, inquiring. Music drifting up from the village. Parrots chattering as they whoosh past. The clop of horses' hooves on cobbles. Birds, birds, and more birds.

We are proud, in a cringing sort of way, of our band. It’s made up of teenage boys from the pueblo who would possibly be getting into all kinds of trouble if they weren’t showing up every day of the week to practice. I’ve spoken with some of them. They dream dreams of being famous musicians, of having their band known far and wide, all over Mexico and maybe even other places.

Everyone who lives anywhere near the house where they practice is familiar with the endless monotonal toot-toot-toot of the beginning trumpeters. We witnessed the first weeks. Very early on, the band started playing around town for a pittance, that pittance going into a fund to hire professional teachers now and then. Kindly relatives and village neighbors would hire them for a tradition of playing at dawn in front of the house of a birthday celebrant. We’ve all been treated to the clamor of the baby band at ungodly hours.

Over the past year and a half or so, they’ve certainly improved. That said, when I told Jesse that I was thinking I should hire them for a housewarming party, he said, “That’s a great idea. Just be sure they’re gone before your guests arrive.”

What, I wondered in dismay, were they doing convening at the foot of the hill at 10:15 p.m.? 

Evening sounds: From the polo field, strains of Latin jazz punctuated by the strange yowl of the peacock. Sharp commands and the occasional blast of a whistle from the soccer field. Children yelling and laughing. Roosters bragging. Dogs barking across the street. Crickets starting up. Sweeping. Cries of birds returning to treetops. Trucks rumbling past on cobbled roads. A truck’s air brakes as it drops past on the highway.

I got into bed and opened my book, still harboring weakening fantasies of drowsing over a few pages and falling into happy slumber. Then the tuba started. It always goes first. It really does say, “oompah oompah”. Eventually, with immense and ragged exuberance, the remaining instruments joined in. I don’t know the songs. They all sound the same to me. Except one of them, this time, had a lengthy drum solo in the middle and all around the edges. The drummer enjoys his work.

Not knowing how long they would play, I clung to hope that each song was the last. It wasn't. I guess they were playing for someone’s anniversary or something. Given the volume level, they could’ve been in my closet. I just kept reading, although I did have to re-read several pages when my concentration was pummeled by a particularly spirited arrangement. They played for an hour, exactly. Until 11:30 p.m.

Night sounds: Ranchero music blaring from cars passing on Avenida Tercer Mundo. Women laughing. Crickets and night bugs, louder. Dogs barking in the distance. Roosters, yet unsleepy. Waves pounding the beach.

Finally, they stopped, emitting only a few self-satisfied tootles and honks as they were packing back into their vehicles. I heard car doors slamming. I put my book down and turned off the light. Pretty soon, the neighborhood dogs stopped barking at the car doors slamming. The wind shifted slightly, the snarl of air brakes on the highway fading. Then I could hear the waves, which have been wondrously loud lately, driven by the north wind. I tuned in to that sound, that lovely perpetual sound, grateful to be able to hear it at last.

I drifted off to sleep making innocent plans for tomorrow afternoon's siesta.

                                            ☺    ☺    ☺

Our fine San Pancho banda, rehearsing ~

                                                        ♥

Visitors and the Big Blue Thing

Apparently several homeowners in San Pancho, including myself, have been having bladder problems lately. 

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some disgusting health report. The bladder I’m talking about is inside that big blue thing I showed you once, which is the water pressure tank for the house water system. Mine lived in the middle of the living room floor for a while, pre-installation, but now it’s ensconced in the garage where it belongs.  

At the moment, it’s the symbol for all the post-construction and probably endless tweaks that houses here (and everywhere, in my experience) demand. It’s also this week’s symbol for letting go of expectations and going with the flow -- if you have a flow, which I don’t at the moment.

If you recall from last week’s blog, I had visitors this past week. My sister and brother were here, their first visit to the casa, as was my excellent caretaker/housesitter/sister-in-love Juanita, having a reunion with Denise after nine weeks apart.

You can just imagine how much fun it was to have the Big Blue Thing intermittently overpressurizing and venting hot water through a joint in the casita water heater, thus spraying steaming agua all over the garage walls and ceiling and the RAV4 and necessitating shutting the system down, then dumping water from the garage water tap to get the pressure back down where it belonged before everything exploded.

You’d think, with all that excess hot H₂O, that we would have had plenty of hot water in the kitchen sink, wouldn’t you? You would be mistaken.

You’d think, with all that excess hot H₂O only a few feet beneath the casita, that we would have had a regular supply of hot water in the casita shower, wouldn’t you? Once more, you would be mistaken.

Fortunately, all my guests are troupers, to put it mildly.

Thus, the preoccupation with the bladder of the big blue thing. Myriad conversations around town during the last seven days have included words such as backflow and pressure switch and air lock, along with discussions of the innards of a water pressure tank. Many potential causes and cures have been proposed and dissected over many cocktails and copas de vino, well into the noche.

For example, is the pressure tank actually overpressurized or is it underpressurized? Jack came by yesterday with a tire gauge and a bicycle pump to see what he could see. His diagnosis was too much pressure, so we relieved some. So far so good, as I putz (happily) around waiting for the famous Manuel the Plumber/Electrician to arrive, which he was supposed to have done three days ago. And three weeks ago. And last month.

I was interrupted here by the arrival (do I hear trumpets??) of Manuel, with his faithful sidekick. He was highly distressed at my distress -- I was venting some steam myself -- and promised to stay until he finished everything. He’s not here now, though, as he has driven lickety-split back into Vallarta to pick up the piece that he has diagnosed as the culprit in the whole Big Blue Thing Escapade, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with the bladder. We shall see.

In the meantime, his faithful sidekick, who is very nice but not (to use an extremely apt cliche) the brightest bulb in the chandelier, is at work on other miscellaneous problems. I just went up to check on one of them, in the master bath, where I had one switch that was installed correctly beside another that wasn’t. I now have two switches that are installed incorrectly. Oh well, when he’s done changing the wrong light fixtures in the garage for the correct ones (I hope), I’ll send him back up.

Ideally, I'm musing, the plumbetricians would have arrived before my guests left, but there ain't a thing we can do about that. 

So Manuel has returned with the part and installed it. I'm pretty sure he called it a capacitor. He showed me the pieces that were causing the pressure system not to shut off when it reached forty pounds.

That one there on the right is what they're supposed to look like. The three on the left are my malfunctioning ones, and you can just see why.

 

He assures me that the problem is fixed. I can't help it, I believe him. He is just such a nice guy. What was it that Allyson and I were laughing over the other night? Our irrepressible and insidious idealism against all odds, was it?

He cleaned out all my faucets and hoses of sediment, and there is now strong hot water in the kitchen sink. We have removed any additional flow restrictors we encountered in my faucets brought in from the USA.

He has left me with his phone number and the phone number of his brother, Juan, and tells me he'll come muy pronto when I call, from Guadalajara or Vallarta or Manzanillo or wherever he's been assigned. Idealistic I may be, but I'm still going to find a back-up plumbetrician. With alien installations like the big blue thing to keep operating, I need all the resources I can summon.

The truth is, in the long run, my visitors and I paid a lot more attention over the past week to another big blue thing, that being the big blue sea stretching out before us from beach and roof garden. It rewarded us with whale spouts and whale backs and whale tails and even a whole whale once.

So right now, my own personal flow restrictors have been removed. My capacitors are snapping and I'm feeling no excess of pressure. Besides that, the sun is just setting behind the hill in all my favorite colors.

I probably forgot to ask Manuel to check something, but I don't really care.

The next big blue thing I want to see is the night sky lit by the full moon, la luna llena. And here it comes now.

 

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Everything Goes

            Wednesday, Feb. 9, 11:20 a.m. PST

            Somewhere over southern California or northern Mexico

Here I am, up in the air again.

My sister Denise sits beside me here in first class. I used my Alaska Airlines mileage to upgrade us. By the time our brother Greg decided he wanted to come along for the ride, first class was full on this non-stop flight. So he is ten rows back on the other side of the partition, but I brought him a Bloody Mary, compliments of our flight attendant. We’ve never flown together on a plane, all three of us: this is a first. It will also be my sister’s first time to San Pancho, my brother’s first time to see Casa Luz de Luna.

Besides being comparatively pampered, the best thing about upgrading to first class is that you get to check two fifty pound bags for free. I’ve tried to take full advantage of that, toting a hundred pounds plus carry-on nearly every flight I’ve taken from Seattle to Puerto Vallarta. Imagine my joy this time, realizing that my sis could check a hundred more, and my brother (for a measly $40 total) a hundred more than that.

I wish you could have seen our son’s vacant former bedroom, left un-staged at my request last week, with six big suitcases ranged about, every inch of new carpet covered with piles of stuff to pack. Unfortunately, I was too obsessive/frantic to remember to take photos of any of the process.

Some of the suitcases were old, one new, and one purchased for me by Greg for $15 at Value Village (or Valoo Villazh, as we prefer to call it). It’s a hideous pink floral, but boy, is it ever roomy! And it has zippers and wheels that work, which is important for a bag destined to carry fifty pounds.

When we all checked in at the airport, with the bags all assigned and tagged and locked with TSA locks, I was a little dismayed to discover that most of the suitcases weighed closer to forty pounds than fifty and I had wasted a potential sixty pounds of baggage, but I guess our backs will be better for the omission.

I worked that room like a dervish for two and a half days. I got everything in, too. Now, sitting here on the plane, I’m trying to remember what the heck I packed.

I know I have two whole new rolls of that puffy white perforated rubbery-plastic shelf liner from Bed Bath and Beyond. It was on the top of my “Take to Mexico--Feb” list. I brought a roll down last time, and I was impressed by how well it worked on concrete shelves. It makes them all cushiony so glass and pottery things don’t bang or clank (or break) when you put them down. Plus there’s the air circulation factor. I just had to have more.

I have a brand new really fancy Mexican Train domino set that Dick bought me for my birthday. It has 91 colorful tiles and a center thingy that makes choo-choo and chicken sounds, or so the box says. I packed it unopened. It’s very heavy, so I put it in Greg’s suitcase.

I also have a couple of other games, one rather largish, and some presents, but I can’t tell you what they are yet. Some of them are heavy, too.

I have a clock. Two clocks, actually. One is a neat little blue bedside alarm with "nightime display", but the other one is a Clock.

Last week I went into TJ Maxx, a store I should avoid, looking for a suitcase. I did not find a suitcase, but I did accidentally find two pairs of shoes and a clock. I wasn’t even shopping for a clock and had no idea I wanted one until I saw it. It’s big and kind of old-fashioned looking, with an authentic round clock face with real numbers. It was only $14.95, or maybe $12.95, I can’t remember. But it was love at first sight. I could just see it hanging in the casa. It’s packed at the top of one of Denise’s suitcases. It’s so big, it just barely fits.

The other suitcase she checked (the pink floral -- she is so not a pink floral type person that I knew she just had to carry it) is filled with feathers. And stick-on roll-y eyes and brightly colored pipe cleaners and white paper sandwich bags and all kinds of other stuff for making hand puppets, which I plan to do with the San Pancho children this spring. You wouldn’t think that stuff could possibly weigh forty pounds, would you? It probably doesn’t: I must’ve stuffed other things in there, but I don’t know what. My giant plastic bag full of feather boas couldn’t have added that much weight.

Oh, yeah, I remember: tools. I found a gorgeous hundred-piece drill bit set on sale at Lowe’s that I just had to have. And a few more flashlights I found around the house. I also filled a small wood cigar box with...something heavy. What was it? Little nails? I’m not sure. I do know I have four brand new metal and plastic clamps to hold the Yamaha cargo box on to the roof of the Rav4. Dick also bought those for me for my birthday. They were not that easy to find, either. I have visions of cruising around greater Mexico filling that box up with all kinds of roadside goodies.

When the gas furnace guy came to clean and inspect the furnace, he pulled the gas stove out from the wall to change a fitting for me as a favor, and there was my favorite wooden spoon behind the stove! It’s kind of stained from spaghetti sauce which my mom (and maybe even her mom) stirred with it for many, many meals. I was so happy to see it, I added a few more favorite utensils and such to keep it company in the suitcase.

All the sidepockets of all the suitcases I stuffed with papers and flat things at the last minute. I have well-used and dripped upon recipes that will translate well into Mexican product availability. I have files of receipts, of important information, of New York Times crossword puzzles clipped out of the Sunday paper. I have my collection of Mexican watercolors, all of streets and dwellings, that I’ll frame in Mexico and hang upon Mexican walls.

Those last few days at the Seattle house were as you’d expect: nuts. I met my deadline like a crash dummy meets a brick wall. But it’s done. Everything packed, dispersed, or disposed of. The house is on the market, waiting for its new family to claim it.

As for me, I’m going to sit here on this jet, order another Bloody Mary, and prepare for a graceful landing on the runway of my new life.

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Time Out

Here's the thing: I found myself in desperate need of some R&R, so I went dancing instead of writing my blog post.

I knew you'd understand.

I feel like I'm in the middle of a tornado at the moment. I know I'll make it through to the rainbow, not worried about that at all. Not there yet, though. A few more days.

I'll be in touch. In the meantime, here's a song for you.

xo

C

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