About a third of the way through Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," Atticus Finch, who we're told didn't play poker, fish, drink or smoke, counseled his son Jem about the proper use of the air rifles he and his sister Scout had been given for Christmas:"I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back …
Author: Alfredo Lanier
My husband and I live on an off-the-grid ranch outside San Miguel, along with the challenging but dear company of four off-the-street dogs and three cats. My interests lie in politics, writing, photography and sundry forms of spirituality.
Keeping sober in an unsober world
When alcoholics sober up one of many quandaries they face is how to reconfigure their social world, beyond their previous circle of friends—many of them unreconstructed alcoholics—and also beyond the initially supportive, but ultimately confining, cocoon of Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and other recovering alcoholics.Sooner or later Stew and I felt as if we should graduate …
Show me your dinero!
Folks sometimes complain about real estate agents and their advertising being more than a little bit misleading, unnecessarily convoluted or maybe a lot misleading.I found this big sign on one of San Miguel's main boulevards, leading to the center of town. It's a banner about six by ten feet, professionally done. The seller doesn't mince …
The Mockingbird flies again
I've been reading about the upcoming release of Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman," the manuscript for which somehow had disappeared, or been hidden or misplaced, sixty years ago. The story in "Watchman" is set twenty years after Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" and both books share some of the locales, and characters, such as …
And can you do Hava Nagila in Spanish?
Undocumented Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are nothing if not versatile. They can mow the grass in Long Island, pick apples in Michigan, work in slaughterhouses in Iowa and Minnesota, clean houses in California, and perform a myriad other job Americans don't want to do.They do all that and more, while earning less than Americans …
Belting oldies in English and Spanish, Gloria Gaynor shows she has survived
San Miguel de Allende is not even close to the road between Hollywood and Broadway, so when a recognizable headliner, even an oldie, shows up in town, it's reason for some buzz.An oldie but still definitely a star.So it was with Gloria Gaynor, a disco queen from the seventies, who put on an awesome show …
Continue reading Belting oldies in English and Spanish, Gloria Gaynor shows she has survived
How the F-bomb in films went from offensive to really annoying
When "Gone With the Wind" was released in 1939, Clark Gable's use of the D-word, as in "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," caused a minor stir, for even such gentle cuss word was considered risqué. Today, "damn" wouldn't even be noticed in the torrent of profanities that routinely course through movie dialogues.In …
Continue reading How the F-bomb in films went from offensive to really annoying
The GOP, shocked and maybe awed
While it worked, for more than thirty years in fact, the Republican political strategy of divisiveness—the use of "wedge issues," to pit social, racial, religious and political groups against each other in order to gain political advantage—worked quite well.Southern white voters abandoned the Democrats in favor of the Republicans, even if they brought brought with …
Where the Caribbean invades Mexico
The first thing to know about Tlacotalpan is its summer heat. It's a soppy heat that wraps itself around you and won't let go. Even an hour before arrival, our car's dashboard thermometer fibrillated between ninety and one-hundred degrees, before it finally stabilized at ninety-seven degrees, with humidity to match.I complained about the heat and …
On the first day of full dignity for gays
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision today, legalizing same-sex marriages throughout the United States, comes six days after Stew and I celebrated our forty-third anniversary together, on June 20.The date is somewhat imprecise, as we didn't have—indeed, we were denied—the benefit of even the most modest civil ceremony or other recognition of the beginning of our …
El Rancho Santa Clara 