Sundays Stew and I attend a free-form church service that compared to a traditional religious to-do looks more like an informal gathering around a coffee table decorated with a dozen votive candles and a sprinkling of bougainvillea petals plucked from bushes outside the door. The program is a one-pager whose order and content can vary from …
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Senior Alert: The Metamucil Threat
It's not as far-reaching or sinister a crisis as say, the Benghazi cover-up, but folks over sixty-five, particularly those with not much else to do, might consider our latest domestic conundrum: Can Metamucil or its chief ingredient, an herb named Plantago Psyllium, harm your dishwasher?This crisis started a couple of months ago when we visited …
Why do we keep on traveling?
For all the breakthroughs in communications—how did people ever buy plane tickets or make hotel reservations before the Internet?—travel is still a bone-wearying affair especially for people like Stew and me who are well past the age of pretending to enjoy spending the evening at a hostel with erratic hot water and deodorant-challenged guests.Two days …
Latest from Rafael Loreno
Even though the highs remain in the mid-80s, the sun is getting higher in the sky and beating more fiercely. Remember, the altitude at the ranch is about 7,000 feet and San Miguel is quite a bit closer to the equator than most of the U.S.So Félix's hats have been getting gradually larger and wider …
The weight of things and people past
Contrary to all the advice to leave most of our belongings behind when we moved to Mexico, a semi-trailer nearly full of furniture, books, kitchen utensils and china, garden tools, pictures and unidentified "stuff" followed us down here. It wasn't even an act of conscious hoarding: Stew and I became so frustrated and enraged trying …
Roaring good news from Mother Nature
Although the beginning of the rainy season is still a good six weeks away, late last night we had an auspicious preview: A roaring wham-boom-bang of a thunder and lightning storm like I hadn't seen or heard for a long time, followed by about forty minutes of very heavy rain. Thunderstorms in the countryside are …
Up my very tangled family tree
When I visited Cuba in 1998 to cover the visit of Pope John Paul II for the Chicago Tribune I stumbled onto a few surprising branches of my family tree, including relatives I'd heard about but had never met and who appeared to be loyal and highly placed apparatchiks. They lived quite comfortably in an …
Tale of a nervous Good Samaritan
How are your abuelitos doing I asked Félix last week. His grandparents have been on my mind ever since Stew and I brought them a Christmas despensa, a holiday shopping bag of groceries containing flour for tortillas, corn husks for tamales, cooking oil, sugar and other Mexican staples that we supplemented with a couple of packages of …
A lousy spring for impatient pessimists
If my first and middle names reflected my gardening instincts they would be Impatient—how long do these damn seeds take to pop out of the dirt?—and Pessimist—alright, so they germinated but probably a late frost, worms, rabbits or the Hand of an Angry God is going to take care of the tender shoots, so let's …
A loud hurrah for a sober Stew
Of all the suffering connected with alcoholism, the secrecy and the loneliness have to be the most painful. There are many people, I'm sure, for whom drinking is a harmless way to celebrate friendship and family, to mark life's landmarks, to share a joy. Not for an alcoholic, whose life becomes ever more circumscribed and …
El Rancho Santa Clara 