Famous Last Word

Today would have been my dad's 96th birthday.

As he lay dying nearly a quarter century ago, immobilized and intubated but still conscious, we were trying to figure out how to help him tell us what we could do for him or what he was thinking.

I recalled how he had taught me Morse code back in my Boy Scout days, but signaling dots and dashes turned out to be clumsy business for somebody not capable of much more than eye blinks.

So I just made up a chart of the alphabet and gave him a pencil to hold in his mouth as a pointer.

His first message, and also his last as it turned out, was a single word.

"Coffee," he said, and then let the pencil drop from his mouth. He didn't have the energy to focus any longer on trying to be sociable.

But he really did love coffee. A long career as a naval officer had given him a deep craving for the stuff, even the third rate swill served up in officers' messes and pilot briefing rooms.

I'm quite sure he'd have liked nothing better as he suffered his way toward his final hours than to have been able to drink a cup. At the same time he knew, and he knew that we knew, that it wasn't going to happen.

So his last word to us was both an expression of longing for what was once a commonplace pleasure, and an ironic comment, a wisecrack, on his misery and helplessness. It has struck me many times how much of himself he managed to express in two syllables.

This afternoon it was warm enough for the first time in several weeks to get in the pool, and Pam served me a margarita while I stood in the water watching Elizabeth play with some of her squeezy squirt toys.

We hadn't so much as mentioned my dad, let alone that today was his birthday, but for some reason she asked me, "Did your father like margaritas?" I had to rack my brains for a memory of him drinking one. Pam assured us that he did.

Then, once more out of the blue, Elizabeth astonished me by asking, "Did your father like coffee?" This time I knew the answer for sure.

Yes, Sweetsie, he did like coffee very much.

Lupita

That's Lupita in the red shirt, crouched on the sidewalk next to the electrical transformer. She shows up there late in the day once or twice a week, especially on religious holidays or other times when there's a lot of pedestrian traffic in the area.

It's a block or so from the iconic bell tower of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe that overlooks the town square. We'd be able to see her easily from our terrace if there weren't a couple of houses in the way.

But we can certainly hear her.

Her voice is an anguished wail that pierces through every other sound in our busy neighborhood. Crowd noise, unmuffled bus motors, band music from the gazebo on the square, the bass beat from the dance clubs, parades that pass by on the street nearby, and even the largest of Our Lady's bells -- it all fades to background noise when Lupita lifts her voice.

It's a song of suffering rising to a howl that sounds like pain, grief or a body and soul in some even greater unnamed torment. It goes on for long minutes, sometimes hours.

In other neighborhoods where I've lived, Lupita's screams would immediately bring a crowd of Samaritans and paramedics. The first time I heard her a couple of years ago, I hastened down to find out what the trouble was. She was around the corner from the location above on a darkened block, seated on the dirty sidewalk much as she is in the photo, with her legs sprawled to one side and her head and hand against her wailing wall.

I stepped toward her, but when she noticed me she became very agitated, averting her face, shaking her head and waving me off. She didn't seem hurt, and she had food. So I backed away, and after a little while I went home not knowing what else to do.

The next day I asked neighbors what they knew about her, which turned out to be not much. They said she'd been around for a long time, apparently slept somewhere else, and got regular food handouts from one or another of the nearby restaurants, including the big plastic jugs of orange soda she likes. Merchants kept an eye on her, I was told. She wasn't really in any trouble, and everybody left her alone.

Whenever I thought about her in the months afterward I considered whether, in the absence of social services that could really care for her, it might be evidence of at least some compassion that Lupita was allowed to do her disruptive thing with no official interference, right in the center of a town that prides itself on its touristic curb appeal.

Yesterday I wondered whether the guy who runs a gift shop just outside the left edge of the photo might be able to tell me more of her story. As so often happens, more facts undermined first impressions and produced a lot more questions.

My informant was able to tell me Lupita's name, and also her age, 47, actually a good bit older than I thought. He didn't know what ails her, but like me he's guessing it might be Tourette syndrome. He told me she lives with her brother and elderly mother in Ixtapa, a Puerto Vallarta suburb.

The big surprise was that Lupita lived for years in a state home for the disabled. But several years ago her mother took her out so she could help with the family business, which is begging. The mother, in her 80s, has stationed herself for many years a couple of blocks away where she accosts tourists approaching the church.

Lupita can't be contributing much to whatever her mother brings in. She runs off do-gooders who approach her as I did, and from time to time she launches feeble but still troubling physical assaults on passers-by, including my shopkeeper source. He believes at least some of her cries are expressions of anger directed at her mother, who is certainly within earshot as we all are.

He knows as much as he does about Lupita because in addition to having observed her at close quarters for quite a while, he has tried more than once to interest city agencies in resuming custody of her. They know the whole family pretty well.

In the U.S. the benchmark for an involuntary committal is "danger to herself or others," and it might seem Lupita could meet that standard. But my guy says that when he suggests that a social worker come by to speak with Lupita when she arrives outside his store about 4:30 p.m., the apologetic reply is that the agency closes at 3p.

So, there's some compassion for you.

Nation Building

Back in the 1600s when my own colonial forebears in New England were starving to death in huts made of sticks and mud, the Spanish were raising structures like these all over Mexico.

I think this building was originally part of a seminary. It's in Patzcuaro, a lovely town south of Morelia known for its gracious central plaza and the scores of sellers of beautiful ceramics and textiles who line its narrow streets.

What keeps striking me as remarkable as we get to know Mexico is how vast, rich and varied the architectural legacy of the Spanish empire is all over the country and presumably the rest of Latin America.

Roman arches and Moorish filigree adorn the avenues of even modest towns. Massive and ornate cathedrals, colonnaded educational, ecclesiastical or government buildings, aqueducts, fountains and statuary are everywhere, built for the ages out of whatever rock was handy. In this case it was cantera.

In the United States, what few small buildings survive from our early years of European settlement are limited access tourist attractions long since surrounded and overwhelmed by generations of helter skelter growth.

Whereas here, people still worship, study, transact business or make and enforce the law in the oldest structures in town. Even in major cities like Guadalajara, the artifacts of Spain's colonial ambitions still dominate everything around them.

How did those busy Spaniards manage in the New World to replicate or even exceed the architectural accomplishments of their homeland while my English-speaking forebears were bunking with their livestock in hovels that have long since fallen down?

I'm only guessing, but I'll bet part of the answer was their ability to suborn or compel the indigenous population into providing much of the labor, and the fact that many of these highly civilized people were accomplished engineers and stonemasons long before their oppressors arrived.

One thing's for sure, my Anglophile history education really shortchanged the impact of Spain on my hemisphere.

I was astonished last year to pick up Charles Mann's book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" and read that long before the Pilgrims had carved their first turkey the conquistadors had made Mexico City the most cosmopolitan city on Earth and the first true center of global business.

From the site of Montezuma's former capital, gold and goods flowed not only back to Spain but west to the Philippines and then to China.

One of the features of this 17th Century opening to Asia was that when the Chinese saw the kind of furniture and fashions their new trading partners liked, they quickly made and sold copies back to them, infuriating Spanish merchants and artisans whose customers naturally preferred the cheaper knockoffs.

Sound familiar?

Viaje En Coche (Road Trip!)

We bought this little Honda Fit because our Puerto Vallarta neighborhood is a warren of narrow cobbled streets jammed with SUV's and pickups.

For zipping around town it's great, and we figured we'd make cross-country trips by bus or plane. But the tiny Fit has such a surprisingly roomy and comfortable interior that we decided to give it a try on our recent trip to Guadalajara, Morelia and the butterfly sanctuaries further east. We weren't sorry.

Here's Elizabeth enjoying a roadside vista while perched on the little portable throne we occasionally need to deploy between stops with plumbing. The Fit is aptly named. We had plenty of cargo space for all our gear and amenities, including E's folding bed, carriage and comfort station, and never felt cramped ourselves.

So we picked the right car for touring Mexico in the way we usually make our best choices, which is by lucky accident. Other travel wisdom, we picked up the hard way.

Asking Directions

Mexicans are generally helpful and hospitable, so if you ask them for directions they will give you some, even if they have little or no idea how to get where you want to go.

And even when they do have a clue, their instructions often tend to be vague and general, with usefulness further degraded by the language barrier. Estimates of how long it will take you to get to any given destination are likely to be severely understated, again in the spirit of helpfulness.

Route Markers

And yet, the need to ask for directions is often acute and unavoidable. You may follow one of the largely unmarked state highways into a town along your way but then find yourself unable to identify the way out because signs and route numbers don't appear when they're needed if at all.

There are sometimes two ways to get from A to B, the way you want to go and another way. There may be a sign with an arrow for getting to B, but it is sure to point you to that other way.

Maps

I pored over maps for days before we left, but they turned out to be about as useful as directions from strangers.

In Guadalajara, for example, we wanted to see the vast area called Tlaquepaque, where arts and crafts of all kinds are made and sold. We used our densely printed city map and our iPhone to navigate to this famous place. All indications were that we got very close, but I blush to confess we never found it. (Friends have since told us it happened to them too.)

We had similar trouble getting to our hotel, stymied as we were in Tlaquepaque by street names that didn't match up with the map and by a conspiracy of no-turn or one-way thoroughfares that kept us from reaching the place even after we finally had located it.

Next morning, after we had actually spotted our breakfast stop, it took us another 15 minutes to get to it because the streets that led there were one-way toward us and we got disoriented looking for one that wasn't.

"Topes"

Pronounced TOE-pays, these are speed bumps, but not like any you've seen unless you've driven around here. Some are big enough to be nearly impassable for a small car like ours. They often come without any notice or any contrasting color that would let you see them before impact.

Topes can appear at whatever spots people or creatures are likely to use for a crossing place, which means practically anywhere, in town or out. We encountered a couple on the main freeway through Guadalajara next to a big open-air chicken restaurant with tables set out practically on the shoulder.

"Autopistas"

Speaking of freeways, there is a pretty good network of them in Mexico if you're willing to pay the shockingly high tolls. There are fuel and bathrooms at reasonable intervals, although the only food service is convenience store snacks.

One odd feature is frequent placement of non-potable water for overheated radiators. But it was reassuring to see closely spaced emergency phones for calling in the free road repair and tow service that's included with your toll payments.

Watch out on the steep descents and curves though. Mexican engineers are apparently an optimistic bunch when it comes to driver prudence and skill.

Signs suggested that we yield right of way to trucks without brakes. Hard to imagine who needs such advice, but we twice came along just minutes after big rigs had slalomed to grief on a downslope.

Money

In cities, most businesses accept credit cards, and ATM's ("cajeros") are as ubiquitous as they are in the U.S.

But better not head for smaller towns or rural areas unless you're sure you're carrying enough cash. We got caught short and twice tried to ask directions to a cajero with all the difficulties described above, only to find that it was either out of cash or out of service altogether. By the time we finally located a working cash machine, we had scrounged pesos from the depths of every box, bag and seat cushion we had.


So altogether, I guess I'd have to say that getting there wasn't half the fun. But I add with haste and pleasure that the people and places at the end of our road each day more than took up the slack.

Fellow Travelers

We've never been able to get Elizabeth onto a horse, not even when the creatures only plod in circles like pit ponies in a Nova Scotia coal mine. So when we started planning our trip to visit the monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacan, it wasn't good news when we read that the recommended way to reach them was on horseback.

Ordinarily Elizabeth is a smiling dispenser of pixie dust. But in the face of anything she sees as an existential threat, such as confiscation of her iPad or a pony ride, she manages all at once to be an irresistible force and an immovable object.

Nevertheless we decided to pull up our socks and give it a try. For a week in advance of the trip, we talked up horses and their many reassuring qualities. They are trustworthy, we said, as well as loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

Maybe we laid it on a little too thick. But it seemed to work. When we described to her how she would sit in front of me on the saddle, she didn't object. I hummed bits of "On the Trail" to give her an idea of the easygoing pace we'd be setting. We interpreted silence as acceptance.

But when we completed the arduous road trip to lofty Sierra Chincua, the last mile almost too much for our little Honda Fit, and approached the stables with our guide, Adolfo, it looked like we might be in for trouble.

"I don't like horses," Elizabeth said flatly.

What to do? Pam and I looked at each other and shared a moment of despair. Then we wordlessly agreed the only way to deal with it was to pretend we hadn't heard anything. I handed Elizabeth to Adolfo, swung myself awkwardly into the saddle, reached back down for my little partner and held my breath.

Maybe she was just so ready to escape the arms of a stranger that she was willing to overlook the inconvenient fact that her familiar and beloved granddad was sitting on a horse. But whatever the reason, she came up without another murmur. Adolfo donated his sweater to make her seat behind the wide vaquero saddle horn more comfortable, and off we went.

After a few minutes she asked me, "Do you like our horse?" I said I did.

"I like our horse too," she replied.

The rest of the day was like a dream. It took the better part of an hour to get close to the small area of steeply sloping forest where the monarchs clustered, and then we had to clamber along a treacherous footpath to reach a spot where we could really see what we came to see.

They filled the chilly mountain air in thousands. Millions more massed together for warmth in enormous clusters suspended from the branches of the tall firs that surrounded us. Adolfo told us as much about them as he could without overtaxing my limited Spanish, using dead specimens picked up from the ground to illustrate the anatomical points.

It was like nothing any of us had ever experienced. We were awed and dazzled. Elizabeth clearly sensed she was witnessing one of nature's most amazing performances. She gazed silently around her, more reverent even than her horse.

The ride back to the stables seemed shorter, partly because our guide chose a shortcut that seemed steeper and chancier than the one we'd taken in. Now and then our mounts slipped or stumbled. I've been on quite a few trail rides, but this one made me nervous.

Not Elizabeth though. She fell asleep.

Get Up in the Morning at Your Own Risk

So okay, this picture wasn't taken in Mexico. But I'm quite sure there's a family on the road somewhere not far from me with the same traffic safety plan as this one.

Actually, there was a Vespa knockoff lurching along a cobblestone street near our place a couple of weeks ago carrying a family of four. Dad was driving. Big brother was perched on the seat in front of him. Mom hung on behind him with a toddler in her arms.

I did an OMG double-take. But from the above I now see that, relatively speaking, they were paragons of prudence. The bike above is carrying four adults and five kids including the one in the bucket seat. Asia has much to teach us.

We've been adjusting to Third World notions of risk allocation since the day we bought our home here back in 2005. That was when we learned that our little 7-unit condo building doesn't have any liability insurance on it, and not much insurance of any other kind either.

In a zone exposed to hurricanes and also prone to earth tremors, I observed mildly to the owners association president that this seemed incautious, although the word I choked back was "foolhardy." In response I got a prim lecture advising me to take a page from the Mexican Book of Wisdom and purge myself of the litigious "culture of blame" that prevails so unpleasantly north of the Rio Grande.

So I've been trying.

I scarcely turn a hair now when I encounter busy uncontrolled intersections, broken staircases without any railings, electrical transformers that I know are apt to fail explosively squatting at ground level next to crowded sidewalks, refrigerators standing in the beds of pickup trucks, restrained with one arm by a man balanced on the side rim, city buses driven by the criminally insane, unrefrigerated meats heaped on tables in the supermarket, etc. etc.

A few weeks ago I joined a popular hike along the coast south of here between Boca de Tomatlan and Animas Beach. It turned out to be a series of steep climbs and vertiginous cliff walks, all without benefit of warning signs, reliable footing, or anything to keep anyone whose mind or foot wandered from tumbling to the rocks below.

During the rainy season, big chunks of the trail are obliterated by mudslide. Our guide, an energetic Canadian woman, collects 50 pesos from each of her followers. She pays the money to a man who lives in the hills near the trail to build little bridges of sticks and rawhide to get us over these chasms. Many hundreds of people make this walk every year, but nobody else seems to care whether it's passable.

Not that it really is anyway. Last year somebody on this hike did trip on a root or a bit of protruding boulder and took a fatal plunge into the vertical rain forest that lines most of the coastline around here.

Tragic, but that's the culture of blame talking.

I realized recently that I'm finally beginning to silence that annoying voice. I was hanging a wind chime outside our bedroom when I dropped a large pair of scissors and saw it clatter to the bedroom balcony on the floor below.

Our neighbors had rented it to some nice people from Ohio. I went downstairs to collect my fallen shears.

"Ho, ho," quipped the tenant. "That's some pretty good liability for me to collect."

"Ho, ho, yourself," I replied. "Not around here."

Hay Que Festejar

Me and Elizabeth are about to walk out the door to go to a birthday party for Argelia, one of her "amigos" at school. We had no idea what we were in for.

Argelia has just reached the age of three, which turns out to be a very important passage here in Mexico.

I was grateful we had a nice present and wrapped it prettily, because this wasn't just another cake-and-candles affair. There were at least 300 family and friends there, about evenly divided between kids and adults.

We gathered at the Casa de Arbol, a party place with a covered patio and a playground surrounding a banyan tree with a trunk the size of a large elephant and a canopy that rose fifty feet or more overhead. Halfway up there was a wooden deck with a playhouse, linked by a swaying rope and plank bridge to another playhouse from which little party animals could slide through a plastic tube to the ground.

Not far off was a trampoline enclosed with a net. There was an art table with crayons, play doh and paints for anybody who cared to take a seat. There were adult and kid food lines, seating with tablecloths and napkins, sideboards piled with candy, custard and cakes.

When it was time for the piniata, there were four of them, one after the other, so there were plenty of swings for the whole crowd, and certainly plenty of treats and toys to scoop from the ground.

There was even a face painter to put seahorses, shells and hearts on anybody who could sit still enough for it, which Elizabeth could. A hired photographer documented all.

I commented to somebody standing next to me that it was more like a wedding than a birthday party, mentally calculating that if this was what a birthday calls for around here, we'd have to rethink our family economy.

But Pam told me later she'd heard that the tradition of big third birthday celebrations dates from the 19th Century in Mexico, when three was the age at which a child was deemed to have survived what was then a very high infant mortality rate. Apparently expressing communal joy over anyone younger was thought to be tempting fate.

Mexico's infant mortality rate today is well below the world average, and in any event Argelia herself certainly has little to fear from it. Her parents and grandparents are doctors, and the extended family surrounding her last Saturday looked glossy and prosperous.

Elizabeth bustled from venue to venue for four hours, pausing only to stuff herself with grease and sugar. None of the attractions looked UL approved, so I stayed as close to her as I could while exercising my meager Spanish on anyone who looked polite enough to tolerate it.

When we collapsed exhausted into the car at last, Elizabeth sighed contentedly as she waited for me to unwrap one of her lollipops for the road. "Was that party for me?" she asked.

I just told her I was glad she'd had fun. What hostess wouldn't be thrilled to know she sent her guests home feeling that way?