One of the oddest books I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, is Roz Chast’s “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?”She’s a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine and her book, illustrated with cartoons, handwritten text and a few photos, zigzags with hilarity and grimness through a reality no one wants to talk about: The …
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Tuning in to Mexican politics
Just before leaving for lunch a few minutes ago, Félix received a phone call from his wife Isela who had some big news: A truck had dropped off a brand-new 23-inch flat-screen television set at their house, with no other explanation except it came courtesy of Mexico's photogenic president Enrique Peña Nieto. This cornucopia apparently …
Waking up to a world full of cobwebs
This morning Mexico went off Daylight Savings Time so we turned our clocks back last night. I'm never sure if we gain or lose an hour in the process, maybe neither.Stew woke up grousing about the soupy morning fog that lapped at our windows, coming after several days of iffy, partly cloudy weather. You get …
Last night Negro put himself to sleep
It's sad when a pet dies, really sad, but not quite as much so when it dies by itself, sparing you the awful task of putting it to sleep, putting it down, putting it out of its misery. Pick your own euphemism. Any hackneyed turn of phrase will do except admitting you decided to end …
On the road north again
While immigration reform languishes in Washington, Mexicans from around the ranch keep marching on north, illegally, to look for work. The last departures were two of Félix' three brothers. One forty-year-old brother left eight days ago and already called from Dallas to report that he's alive, well and working at a construction site. A twenty-three-year-old …
Loving and loathing Las Vegas
When we arrived in Las Vegas, our second eyeful looked like a Potemkin skyline featuring the Chrysler, Empire State and United Nations buildings, along with Grand Central Station, the main building at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, among other New York City landmarks.Except these were for-real buildings, albeit one-third or so the size …
A small branch of a huge tree
Two weeks ago I visited the local Alcoholics Anonymous outpost, in the town of Sosnavar, pop. 800 or so and a kilometer away from us, and was struck by the awesome superficial differences—and similarities—among the millions of members and tens of thousands of branches of this remarkable organization.In Sosnavar meetings are held in a stone granary dating …
And so Arno bought a baby donkey
Summers in the country bring countless newborns, from long-legged foals to fluffy lambs and tiny frogs perched on window sills seemingly frozen in place. Sadly, many of these babies include puppies and kittens abandoned by their owners, assuming they had owners in the first place.Not beautiful but cute indeed. I find all of these animals cute, …
A near-fatal canine drama
Dramatis canes: (in order of appearance)Lucy: A Labrador-ish fifty- or sixty-pounder found abandoned on the side of a highway when she was a few weeks old and turned over to the local shelter where we adopted her about seven-and-a-half years ago. On the alpha ranking in our pack of five dogs, she's the queen bitch, …
Annie get your gun? Or probably not.
I used to believe, naively, that a "home invasion" was a melodramatic synonym for "burglary" until two weeks ago, when at about ten-thirty at night four punks in their twenties broke into the small ranch of a retired American couple in their late sixties who live a few miles deeper into the countryside than us. …
El Rancho Santa Clara 