Strangers in Paradise

When you're retired in a foreign country relying on meager language skills and fading powers of concentration, life is full of small humiliations.

One of mine came several years ago during happy hour in a fancy boutique hotel just up the hill from us, actually the place where we were staying when we bought our home.

The owner was having a margarita with us, special attention bestowed because I wrote a travel piece on her business the previous year that brought her a cataract of customers.

A small mariachi group was providing background music as they did every evening in those pre-recession days. They paused at the end of a set and invited requests. Nobody spoke up.

I was well into my second drink and forgot, again, that not every silence needs to be filled by me.

"'Las Mañanitas'," I said brightly. Not a tune I really wanted to hear, but it was the only Mexican song title I knew, dredged up from my primary school days in south Texas. More recently I had heard children singing it frequently in the school on our street.

"Oh, is it your birthday?" the head mariachi asked. That's when I realized the song was the Mexican "Happy Birthday." Instead of just saying "yes," I glazed over and mumbled, but they chuckled and played it anyway.

How I envy Elizabeth, the top of whose head can be seen here at lower left as the assembled student body of La Casa Azul sings "Las Mañanitas" for Gabriella, the school's director.

There's a cake on the table whenever Elizabeth sings that song, so she'll always know exactly what it's for. And being culturally and linguistically clueless is normal experience for a toddler, so adjusting to Spanish for her is easier, or so I presume.

Besides, her classroom amigo Riley, whose father is Australian, sometimes translates for her. Que caballero!

I think that might loosely translate to something like "What a gentleman." But I guess I should run it by Google Translate before I try it on him out loud.

Homework

Elizabeth is back at La Casa Azul, where several of her former amigos have also returned this year and were thrilled to see her again. They gathered around and gave her hugs. One had even made her mother come up with a little welcome gift.

But yesterday afternoon when I picked E up after her second day, Gabriella the school’s director had one of those assignments for me that I’ve learned to dread. That’s it in the picture.

Last year’s test of will and stamina was E’s costume for the Christmas pageant. We were told she needed green hair ribbons, elastic bracelets with jingle bells on them, and a plain green T-shirt with no designs or text.

It took us days, especially the shirt. You can’t buy a plain T-shirt here. They’ve all got iguanas or palm trees on them, or jokes about being drunk or horny. But we did finally locate one in a high-end department store with nothing on it but a small brand logo, also green.

We were so pleased, until the night of the pageant when nobody else had come nearly as close to spec as we had, and we felt as if we’d tried too hard. 

This year’s ordeal was about school supplies.

The note above says: Elizabeth. Please bring for tomorrow 2 notebooks, professional size, with white pages (i.e. no lines or graph paper), Thanks!

It sounded simple enough, but it turned out to be another treasure hunt seemingly designed to torment gringos. 

On the one hand, we’re driven by our natures as anxious overachievers, and by our desire as foreigners to fit in, to follow instructions to the letter. On the other hand, we are crippled by our lack of local knowledge and our mediocre language skills.

I read the little paper carefully and repeatedly. It said I must find two notebooks. They must be professional size, which is a term of art in the office supply business. Their pages must be white. I must bring them tomorrow, which is now today.

Oh, there was another specification, which Gabriella explained to me when she handed me the note. The notebooks must NOT be spiral bound. They must have glued binding like a book.

Yesterday afternoon I went down the hill to a little stationery store but found it was closed for siesta. I decided we could pick up the books on the way to school this morning.

Silly me. E and I stopped at the Mega supermarket, which has a vast school supply section. There were hundreds of notebooks, but the few with white pages were spiral bound and too small.

Luckily there was an Office Max right next door. And they had the right notebook. But there was only one left, and the shelf stocker couldn’t find any more in the back. By that time, we were in danger of being late to school, so I dropped E off with the one notebook and then headed for Office Depot.

They had a notebook that looked right, but on closer examination it was not “professional” size but a “kid’s” size slightly smaller. My helper said the store carries only one brand, and they don’t make a professional notebook with unlined pages. In despair, I asked him where I might find what I was looking for.

As I’ve said before, asking for this kind of help in Mexico is hazardous, because people are naturally helpful and will give you information regardless of whether they actually know anything. But I was out of options.

The young man told me he thought there was a store that would have my notebook near Freddy’s Tucan, a popular downtown breakfast spot. So I drove there not expecting much, and sure enough I saw no likely looking store when I arrived.

Wearily, I asked inside the restaurant and was given a zigzag path to follow for about three blocks to a place called Papeleria Limon. It looked from the dusty storefront like a place that sold nothing but cheap knicknacks and faded gift wrap.

But there in the back was a little office supply section, presided over by a smiling girl who instantly produced my article with a flourish, almost as if she had been waiting just for me.

I love this country.

Rock Star

How old is she? What does she weigh?

Polite people don't ask such questions. But people who admire trailers of a certain age can't seem to help themselves.

I knew Pam loved vintage Airstreams because I endured a year of marital torment before finally admitting last year that if she had to have one, the specimen in the photo above was probably a good choice.

We've just returned from our first real trailer excursion, and I now realize that America has a major soft spot for the silver bullet, and the older it is the softer the spot.

"Love your trailer," they shouted at us at almost every stop.

Others gave us thumbs ups or V signs as they drove past. One man who cornered me while I was trying to examine the pictographs carved on Newspaper Rock in Utah grew emotional.

"I don't know what it is, but I just love old vehicles," he confided. "They're such a slice of Americana. I still drive a Corvair."

"Oh," I said. "Well, wear a helmet."

By the way, "she" is 44 years old and weighs well over 3,000 pounds, stuffed as she was with the organic, free-range, grass-fed, sugar and gluten-free groceries with which Pam provisioned her for the trip.

Her prior owners called her "Streamie," which I thought was dopey when we took possession but which is now a household word and may eventually be a vanity plate.

She scared me to death when the sellers delivered her to us last year. I am a poor hand with machines, and a trailer is a rolling collection of mechanical puzzles. In an antique like ours, they are also balky and brittle with age. I spent hours in the penalty box last week for bad language in front of Elizabeth, nursing scrapes and nasty spatters.

Nevertheless, with only a few minor exceptions I managed to make everything work for a week on the road. Even for the two nights we spent in remote campsites, we had hot water, cold beer, fresh-cooked meals, and reasonably wholesome sanitary facilities.

The high spot of the trip was Canyonlands National Park in southeast Utah, where we snagged the last of the come-as-you-are campsites, nestled beside rock that took 300 million years to lay down and 300,000 more for wind and water to carve into the dazzling shapes that surrounded us.

That's the spot in the photo, which doesn't do it justice.

Nothing broke, not even on the horrible drive into the Chaco Canyon, cradle of ancient pueblo civilization, a 21-mile ordeal for man and machine, 13 miles of which is unpaved washboard that seemed like it would rattle the rivets right off poor Streamie, but didn't. In one low spot we forded storm runoff after passing signs advising us not to cross if any water was present.

"Those Airstreams can go anywhere," said the ranger who greeted us at the campground. "Say, how old is she and what does she weigh?"

Fair's Fair, Except When It Isn't

We've taken an important step forward in technology adoption at our house. Elizabeth is now willing sometimes to use earphones with her iPad, which means other audio traffic doesn't have to penetrate a backbeat of Dora, Caillou or Peppa Pig.

I was watching the men's U.S. Open final when I took this picture. I recorded the moment because I was so thrilled to be able to hear John McEnroe's commentary at a reasonable decibel level.

But relief from digital toddler background noise comes at a price. It takes more diligence to monitor what she's watching, something that given the nature of YouTube was tricky enough already.

One of the so-called "tropes" of user-generated online video is the taking of familiar clips and altering or replacing the soundtrack to produce something the user imagines is creative.

Even programming originally intended for small children gets fiddled with by amateurs with nothing better to do. The results range from fatuous to vulgar to scatalogical or otherwise obscene.

On YouTube, these moronic contributions to the creative commons show up mingled in the same search results with the real stuff. So Elizabeth occasionally queues one up. Usually we notice right away, but not if we can't hear it, which we can't if she's using the new pinky-pink earphones.

Thinking about this kind of misappropriation of copyright-protected material by juvenile vandals takes me back to my days helping AP with intellectual property issues . . . actually to one day in particular that still rates as one of my worst at the office ever.

It was in the weeks just after a squad of U.S. Marshals in riot gear plucked Elian Gonzalez from the arms of his dead mother's family in a scene recorded in a memorable and celebrated AP photo that was published almost everywhere.

A couple of goofball web designers copied the photo and animated it to produce a crude takeoff on those old Budweiser "Wasssup?" commercials. It was pretty hilarious, but AP's photo department was outraged and insisted that I do something about it.

I sent the pranksters a stiff takedown notice. They did take their video down, but they put my notice up in its place. By then their amusing video had accumulated a huge online audience, courtesy of some radio shock jocks who plugged it on the air.

Within minutes, my email account was clogged with hate messages and death threats, and furious callers almost took down the entire AP headquarters centrex system.

Then the pranksters lawyered up and went to court seeking a judgment declaring that their video was protected parody under the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act which AP had no right to suppress.

The case they relied on was one in which the owners of rights to Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" tried to quash a rapper version by 2 Live Crew that played off the lyrics, rhythms, themes and images of Orbison's original.

The Supreme Court held that the rappers had made fair use of the original song, producing a new work that did appropriate the original copyright-protected song but only to the extent necessary to create commentary on it. The justices concluded such works are entitled to a free pass from breach of copyright lawsuits.

It's been a pet peeve of mine ever since my Elian misadventure that everybody in the copyright community seems to think that case -- Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music -- stands for the principle that any parody making use of somebody else's work is exempt from copyright prosecution. I truly believe they're all wrong.

If you read the case closely, I think you have to conclude that what the court intended to protect as fair use was parody or satire that directly commented on the appropriated original content. Just goofing around with somebody else's stuff for laughs doesn't qualify.

At best, the Elian video was a spoof of the Bud commercials. It certainly made no attempt to comment on the photo, except maybe on its ubiquity. The spoofers admitted as much afterward.

But in those days AP had no appetite for playing anti-free speech troll in a federal copyright case, so we pulled in our horns and slunk away to watch while the video went viral.

Fair use law remains a muddle, different in the eye of every beholder, and even federal judges often seem not to understand it very well.

But Elizabeth is only three years old, and in our house these are golden years in which I get to decide all by myself which content thefts deserve protection and which are mindless trash.  I am using my power for good.

Move Over, Galileo

My friend Larry down the street used to ride bicycles in Midland TX with a buddy who had a recumbent that looked a lot like the one in this photo.

The buddy died, and the bike ended up for sale  in a shop where Larry spotted it and tried to buy it back for old times' sake.

But recumbents are tricky, and the shop owner didn't want to sell it to Larry without letting him try it first. It was raining that day, so Larry said he'd be back.

When he returned a few days later, the bike had already been sold to somebody else. The shop owner offered to order him a new one for delivery in three weeks, but Larry was pissed off and not disposed to do business with the inconsiderate jerk.

Instead, he acquired some aluminum tubing and went home to his workshop. Less than a week later when the drive train components arrived in the mail, Larry rode a working recumbent out of his garage in time to join a local bike club ride.

The bike shop owner stood there slack-jawed as Larry rode up.

"You never said you had a recumbent," he said.

"I didn't have one," Larry replied.

"Well, where'd you get this one?"

"I made it," Larry said, and was off in a smug cloud of righteous indignation.

He was riding the bike pictured above, which he brought up to Ruidoso last weekend to show off its climbing capabilities, not much use in the flat terrain around Midland.

I've never been an admirer of recumbent bicycles, notwithstanding the many practical points in their favor, so I declined Larry's invitation to try this one myself.

I admire Larry enormously, however, and not just because he can make a bicycle. Actually, once he had made this one he couldn't quit. Half a dozen more recumbents in various alternative designs have rolled out of his shop over the past couple of years and into the hands of friends who otherwise would have paid four-figure sums to buy them. That bike shop owner never knew what his fecklessness cost him.

But Larry's fabrication skills go way beyond bicycles. He owns three airplanes. Only one of them is airworthy at the moment. But the new landlord at the strip where Larry keeps them has changed the rules and raised the rent, so Larry intends to fly all three somewhere else after he's patched them back together.

A sailing friend called Larry several years back after a hurricane smashed up his boat on a lake near Del Rio because he couldn't find anybody locally to repair it and the insurance company wanted to declare it a total loss.

Larry drove down with a trailer he'd made for his own sailboat, hauled it back to Midland, billed his friend's insurer, and then decided it was too nice a boat to salvage for parts. Instead he patched it up, recoated the fiberglass hull, and sailed the boat himself.

A couple of months ago, Larry was working on a new deck in back of his house when Cynthia, his wife, announced that their washing machine was busted. Larry told her it was at least 25 years old and they should get a new one.

"Oh, you can fix it," Cynthia said, not looking up from the magazine she was reading.

Larry came across the street sputtering about his princess bride and asked if he could borrow our Internet connection to look for YouTube clips that might help him please her. A few hours later there were clean socks and underwear in his drawer, and Larry was back at work on the deck.

Cynthia clearly knew what I now realize. The way to get Larry motivated is to annoy him. I hope this post makes him mad. The pilot light on my trailer's water heater needs some attention.

Location, Location, Location

These ruins are all that's left of a small city now known as Gran Quivira where more than 2,000 people were living when Spanish missionaries came across it nearly 400 years ago.

It's on high ground overlooking vast surrounding expanses of rolling grassland dotted with piñon shrubs. Driving up to it from Carrizozo to the south last week, Laurel and I could see a few cattle grazing here and there but not much else.

A couple of rattlesnakes basked on the warm pavement ahead of us, clearly confident they wouldn't be disturbed. A bony little kit fox burst suddenly from the brush beside the road with a kangaroo rat in her teeth and seemed so startled to see us that she forgot to get out of the way. I had to swerve to miss her.

Otherwise the country looked silent and empty, and it's hard to imagine why people would even have paused there on the way to someplace more promising, let alone settled and built. What could have sustained them in this austere place?

Even after you read the brochures that sketch the human history of the region, the answers aren't entirely clear.

There's no surface water, yet the people of Gran Quivira managed to catch enough rain in cisterns and basins not only to survive but to cultivate a variety of grains and other crops.

They rounded out their diet with hunting and gathering, and had enough energy left over to create ornamental pottery and to trade goods and even food surpluses with distant communities in every direction.

Century after century, the inhabitants of Gran Quivira seem to have lived on a razor's edge, their society subject to annihilation at any time by drought, famine, attacks from plains Indians to the east, and in its last years by an influx of Spanish-speaking mouths to feed.

Around 1670 it all fell apart and everybody left, decamping so suddenly that the Spanish didn't even finish the grander church they had begun a decade or so earlier to replace the chapel in which they had been converting Indians for a half century.

But forget the Spanish. A civilization that sprouted in one of the continent's least hospitable environments, yet thrived without any help from Spain for a thousand years or more, just evaporated overnight.

We got back in the car with a keener sense of how resilient, adaptable and vulnerable our species is, and got back on the road to Albuquerque. Located right beside the Rio Grande, its lease on life seems more secure than Gran Quevira's ever was.

But as the climate warms and the river's flow dwindles, who knows?

Res Ipsa Loquitor

We had a little tragedy on our block last week. Martini, a black and white Pekinese mix who belonged to a neighbor three houses away, was struck and killed in broad daylight  by a car whose driver didn't even bother to stop and see what he'd hit.

It has to be said that Martini would have been a dog at risk even in a neighborhood where all drivers kept to a reasonable speed, which in ours they don't.

Adventure loving, sociable and fearless, she scampered out the door whenever she could and wandered far and wide, ending up one time at a stranger's barbecue half a mile away because the food smelled so good.

Driving to the grocery store, I once came across her several blocks from home, sauntering along in the middle of the street as if it were her private path to joy.

I stopped, opened my passenger door and said, "Martini, get in here." She hopped up beside me, and I took her home, though she'd have gone cheerfully to Fargo with me if I'd been headed that way.

So Martini wasn't what a personal injury lawyer would call a "reasonably prudent dog". She never looked both ways, and I'm guessing she probably didn't look either way very often. More about the peculiar way lawyers think in a moment.

But Martini's heedlessness is no excuse for the driver who hit her if he wasn't making any effort to slow down and keep an eye out for living creatures.

A couple of rackety old sedans with clapped-out mufflers speed regularly past my house. They're at the top of my list of suspects. If it was either of them who hit Martini, they are contemptible hit-and-run dogslayers in my book.

In the face of the possibility that we have sociopaths like that driving daily past our houses, where many of us also have dogs and some have children, we decided to petition the village for a "Children Playing" sign or at least a posted speed limit.

My neighborhood is Ponderosa Heights on the slopes above Lawrence Brothers. It's full of blind curves and steep hills where you don't know what's ahead until you're over the crest.

I called the Street Department this week to see about what it might take to get some signage up to remind drivers they should slow down. It turned out to be pretty easy. I was told a work order would be prepared for posting of the speed limit in both directions -- 15 mph -- perhaps within a couple of weeks.

But we were told to forget about what we really preferred, the "Children Playing" sign.

A sly litigator supposedly argued with a straight face to somebody in authority that when the village puts up a "Children Playing" sign, it amounts to public notice that the children have village authority to play in traffic and the village assumes liability for anything bad that happens.

I'm a retired lawyer myself, but honestly, that's the kind of knuckle-headed thinking that would give my former profession a bad name if it didn't already have one.