MissMeliss: Escribition

…with living in a foreign country is that things that should be easy, like getting term life insurance quotes, become more difficult.

On Wednesday, my parents’ home insurance agent called to ask them to renew, and told them their policy had lapsed ten days before, even though he’d promised not to let that happen. I got to experience my parents’ side of the issue, hearing them complain about how the binder was wrong, and having another, more reputable agent agree with my mother, “You may have payed a premium…but you weren’t covered.”

And yet, despite this…their life seems so relaxed and peaceful.

Problems seem to lend flavor.

We had an intimate but boisterous Christmas Eve, the latest in a week of small Christmas gatherings.

Saturday, we went to town for tourist stuff, rather than shopping: a trip through the serpenario (reptile museum) where we watched a monitor lizard stalking dinner, a visit to the artisania, which is like a co-op of crafters, everything from sculptures carved from cardon cactus, to earrings made of local stone (I bought a pair), to dresses and such, and then lunch at the Hotel Los Arcos: tortilla soup all around. That evening, my parents’ friends Yvonne (African-American single mother from LA) and her husband Paul (incredibly tall white granola guy from the Pacific Northwest), and Jaya and Murrigan (from India) with their daughters Swastika (yes, you read that right, no, it has nothing to do with Nazis) and Pritivi. Jaya is my age, and delightful, and Murrigan is quietly geeky. Swastika is ten and looks fourteen, speaks three languages (English, Spanish, and the not-Hindu language spoken in their region of India that I don’t remember the name of because I’m horrible), and Pritivi, who is four, speaks Spanish fluently and refuses to speak English, even though her parents want her to.

Yesterday we met friends from New Jersey, Helen and Robert, who have known me since before I was born, for breakfast at a place called Goula (or Gula? - it means “gluttony”) where the food is Mexican with a Middle-Eastern twist. I had green chile chilaquiles, and Helen had pancakes and my mother had something called Joquoco, which was an egg casserole (think fritata) with mint sauce, then toured the shell museum before the beach trip mentioned in my last post, then came home and had drinks with my mother’s dear friend and shopping buddy Maria, who is elegant and stylish, and has this rich, cultured Mexican accent that makes you feel compelled to hang on every word.

Today, I was up at five, but thhen went back to bed after blogging, only to be awakened again around eight with the call “Coffee’s ready!” from my mother. We lounged around, then she and Ira went shopping, and I spent a couple hours on the beach here, wandering through the mangrove a bit, but turning back when a hawk made it very clear I was too close to her kill, and exiting a bit faster when I noticed a rattlesnake basking in the noon-time sun. I wandered the OTHER way on the beach, and let the waves flirt with my toes, played an improvised game of tag with a blue heron and some sand pipers (the heron won) and then sat in the sunshine to watch ducks floating on the surf. After a late lunch I crashed hard for three hours, and woke to hear laughter. Marina, who is Italian but learned English while on her foreign exchange year in the Caribbean and is on her post-doc here in Mexico (she’s a veterinarian, but is studying conservation, and wildlife rescue), is our guest this evening and tomorrow, because my mother cannot allow anyone to be alone at Christmas.

She brought her guitar and we sang carols in the living room, then I found an NPR feed from Alabama, of all places, that was broadcasting an hour of Christmas essays from old editions of All Things Considered, which we listened to while Marina and I decorated the stockings with glitter paint, for tomorrow morning (we only had silver, copper, gold, and turquoise, but it worked out well), and then the replay of Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, which became our dinner music, while we ate my mother’s homemade broccoli beef, and then snacked on coffee (decaf) and cookies.

I love that the circle of friends we have comes from so many places, and yet all in it share a common respect for the world, and for each other. I love that we can sit in a beach front home in rural Mexico and listen to one of the most famous Christmas services in the English speaking world over the Internet, with better clarity (probably) than those actually in the chapel, and I love that amidst all the hustle and bustle of Christmas we all took a few moments tonight to stand on the deck, and watch the moon rise above the water, it’s burnt-orange glow wishing all of us a holiday full of warmth, light, and love.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or some other Decemberish holiday, or none at all, I wish you the same: warmth, light, love…and peace.

You have to seriously earn the ability to visit my parents.

Oh, the flight into LAX was fine. Our bags were moved for us, we learned that there’s a shuttle that stays inside the secure zone so you don’t have to go through security again even if you’re changing airlines and terminals, and boarding of our plane to La Paz from LA took place on schedule.

If you can call it a plane. It was one of those Embraer things that are essentially a school bus with wings. We’re talking “makes an MD-80 look spacious” here. And there was rain and suchlike in SoCal so the flight was fairly choppy. I already was over tired (we got up at 2:48 to make our morning flight from DFW) and a little nauseous, and this sent me over the edge.

Still it was only a two hour flight. And they gave me free Sun Chips. I love the Sun Chips.

We arrived on time, and please understand. I was expecting stairs. I mean, I used to live in San Jose, CA, where stairs are usual. I was not expecting a quarter mile walk from the airplane to the airport, where our flight of folks mingled with the folks from the American and Alaska flights that all arrived at precisely the same moment (we’d all left LAX together as well.)

I was expecting customs to be chaotic. I was not expecting, stressed out service dogs who also had to walk the quarter-mile from the plane, and I was not expecting ONE luggage carousel (at least our plane was first, if the farthest away), and I was not expecting customs to involve, not just trekking toward the light that determines if they glance through your bag, but first a conveyor belt/scanner thing of the type generally used when CHECKING bags.

Oh, and, we got the red light.
Thankfully our customs agent looked through two bags (barely) and didn’t open the big one full of presents.
“You can go,” she said. “Feliz Navidad.”

We thanked her, and wished her a Merry Christmas, too.

My parents were waiting. It took fifteen minutes to get out of the parking lot, and another fifteen to get to their house. We were given homemade stew and a tour, and we handed off the non-Christmas present portion of our shopping extravaganza. Then my parents went out to bribe an official, but that’s another story.

At present, I’m sitting on the deck, watching the lights of the La Paz malacon on the other side of the bay, and listening to the ocean lap at the sand. The pool lights are slowly cycling through their rainbow of colors, between me and the ocean, and the glow is giving me enough lights to type by.

Paz means “peace” in Spanish.

One of my favorite Christmas songs begins, in the local vernacular:

Noche de paz
Noche de amor

English speaking types know it better as “Silent Night.”

But in whichever language you choose, I will, tonight, sleep in heavenly peace.

My parents very generously gifted us with tickets to visit them in Mexico for Christmas. We’d been scrimping and saving but wouldn’t have been able to make reservations til the last second, and while that would have allowed us to fly from DFW to San Jose del Cabo (SJD) in relative ease, even so, SJD is a good 90-minute drive from their town, La Paz, which is on the gulf side of the Baja peninsula. It’s also the capital of Baja California Sur.

But they wanted to be able to plan, and they wanted us to fly into La Paz, and so instead of a nonstop flight from DFW, we’re leaving at the crack of dawn on 12/19, flying to LAX, and then from LAX to La Paz (LAP) all on Delta-coded partner flights. It doubles the flight time, but at least it’s not requiring us to do the ‘tour of Mexico’ version of the trip, which makes you stop in Hermosillo and Guadalajara.

I mention this because, Christmas or not, whenever we (or anyone) visits them, they ask for things they can’t get in La Paz. My step-father asked for lotion. “Lotion?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Lotion.”

I lost the email with the name of it, and called my mother last night, asking her to just go read the bottle. I was expecting it to be one of those uber-fancy skinceuticals that (I’ll admit) I have in cute bottles and jars in my own bathroom. But no. It turns out that what he’s been using as skin lotion is BioSilk hair conditioner.

The translation of hair conditioner into French or Spanish on the bottle is “conditioning lotion.”

But, I assured my mother, “tell him it’s okay. I use Aveda’s rosemary mint conditioner to shave my legs. It’s better than any shave cream.”

And so, as well as Christmas shopping, I need to track down BioSilk conditioner so my step-father can pat it on his face.

I meant to post this earlier, but, now’s as good a time as any. Despite the sadness of my cousin dying a few weeks ago, there is a bright spot, which is that I got to reconnect with another cousin, Cathy.

Cathy is actually more like my older sister than any mere cousin. She was my best friend, babysitter, playmate. She inspired me, let me babble, answered all my questions, taught me how to use a Super8 camera, and gave me my first bra. We used to sing together, we used to catch lightning bugs together, and I haven’t seen her since my grandmother’s funeral in 2001.

I miss her.

Her kids were all toddlers the last time I saw *them*, and she was still in college. Now, the youngest is fourteen, and Cathy’s a real estate agent, and as many in that industry are right now, struggling a little.

But she’s fierce.
And I know she’ll survive.

I’ve made a personal resolution to call her once a week.

Just to keep in touch.

* * *

In other news, Aunt Peg is improving.

Cleaning the upstairs bathroom today, the one we really don’t use that much because the master suite is downstairs, I found a bunch of Clinique make-up in the medicine cabinet. I don’t wear Clinique any more, having switched to Aveda, but I opened the jar of base anyway, and caught a whiff of a familiar scent, and suddenly:

I was five years old and dressed as Pocahontas and my mother was dabbing base on my pale skin to make me look darker.

I was seven, and watching her do her morning make-up, staring into one of those pink plastic makeup mirrors that was normal on one side and flipped (pivoted really) to a magnifying mirror on the other.

I was ten, and had that mirror in my room, and I would stare into it and try to decide if I liked my eyes or not.

I was eleven, and calling my grandparents to tell them I had “become a woman.”

I was fifteen, and had dyed my hair for the first time, and the dye spattered the mirror when I rinsed it out.

I was twenty-one, sharing a mirror with my mother, as we got dressed for my grandfather’s funeral.

I was twenty-four, and doing make-up for my own wedding.

I was five and fifteen and twenty-five and thirty, and all ages in between and yet to come, and I was struck with a sense of home.

And I called my mother, and told her I loved her.

Dear Aunt Peg,

I realize that you are ninety years old, that you’ve had a good life, and that one of the reasons we had your birthday in June instead of August was that you said you felt you didn’t have much time left. (The other reason, of course, was that August weather in SoDak is brutal.)

You’ve been a great auntie. Everyone should have a great-aunt as funny, spry, and sweet as you are, so I know you won’t find it offensive when I ask you that, if this intestinal blockage that has you in the hospital tonight is going to kill you, you could manage to die by Halloween, or hold on til December. Not that I want you to die. Of course I don’t. We aren’t ready to let you go yet, though I know you’ve said you’re getting kind of tired.

But you see, November is a suckful month in our family. My grandfather (your brother), my uncle Merrell, my cousin Eddie, Ginny who thought I was her birthday cousin because we share the same birthdate….all these people died in November, and frankly, if one more person in our family dies in November I’ll have to strike that page from the calendar. Not just MY calendar. THE Calendar. The one that determines when we observe things like Labor Day and Daylight Savings. You know. The big one. The official One.

And removing November would be pretty horrible for the people who have birthdays then, for all the folks who participate in NaNoWriMo, for the people who like to vote (we’d have to make sure November 2008 was put back in, at least), and for all the people who’ve never seen the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and should, as well as all the people who have, and want to again, and never miss it on TV.

I’ve lost enough family this year, Aunt Peg: Uncle Stan, Cousin Pat, Aunt Gwen…and I’m sad about all of them, of course, but you and I are actually kind of close, in the way that great-aunts and grand-nieces can be. We’ve shared Christmases, hotel rooms, and illicit cups of coffee together.

So here’s the deal. No dying. Because frankly, with Pat having died just last week, and my grandmother’s death in 2000 pretty much destroying Christmas, October and December are hanging by mere threads, and if we excised a whole quarter of a year, people might get a bit tetchy.

So, use all that Klindienst stubbornness and Chapman stamina, and the sweetness from the frosting of every cake you ever decorated, and bundle it up and get better.

Because if you don’t?

I’ll make my mother sing at you.

Love always,

Melissa