Dogs: Ambassadors of Love

In the late 90s, I bought a sweet little 1920s canyon bungalow in Mt. Washington, an old Los Angeles suburb. Shortly after moving into it, I realized that I was living in an entirely family neighborhood and was likely the only single person for blocks. It was a nice, but I felt a bit out of place. I didn’t immediately connect with the community and I somewhat morbidly used to wonder if I fell down a ravine while on one of my daily walks with my dog, Andy, how long it would be before anyone noticed I was missing.

We lived on Glenalbyn and hiked up to the top of Mt. Washington every day

Andy, like most of my dogs, was a foundling. Before buying the house, I had lived for three years in the mountain community of Big Bear, California. Early one Monday morning, when I was walking around the lake, this long-legged puppy joined me and wouldn’t leave. I believe he’d been left behind at a nearby camp site that had been packed with people over the weekend: either intentionally or because he’d wandered off and got lost. I spent two weeks trying to find his owner; then happily called him my own.

He grew to be 100 pounds of sweet-natured goofiness. I’m not sure what he was, but he likely had some Labrador or even Newfoundland in him. His fur was long and silky and shed water like the proverbial duck’s back, and had a thick undercoat. He loved swimming in the lake and the rolling around in the snow.

Andy was swimmer and was known to come out of Big Bear Lake with a fish!

We went through some tough times in that cabin. One day when playing in the snow, his leg went down a gopher hole and sustained a terrible injury. He had to have two operations to repair the ligaments in his knee and was in a cast for months. I know he was in pain a lot of the time so I took the mattress off my bed and slept cuddled up with him on the floor. 

Later, when his leg was mended but my heart was broken, he’d jump on the bed, circle a couple of times, and then curl up next to me. I wasn’t sleeping very well back then and whenever I opened my eyes, he’d be gazing at me with his big, soulful eyes.

When we moved back to town, I knew Andy missed being out in the wilds so I took him for very long walks every day all over the neighborhood. One day, a little boy playing behind a fence struck up a conversation with me. I heard is mother call out through a window to ask who he was talking to. “It’s that lady with the nice black dog,” he said. I realized then that I actually was not as invisible in the neighborhood as I thought. People were aware of me, but probably more so of Andy. Things got rapidly better after that and I became close with my neighbors and made many friends in the area. A lot of it had to do with Andy. He was so pretty and so sociable that people would stop to pet him and talk to me.

Then after I’d lived in that house for about nine years and Andy was around thirteen, he got cancer. By the time it was diagnosed, the tumor on his pericardium was big and growing rapidly. The vet told me he only had weeks before it grew so large that it would stop his heart from beating. About six weeks later, he keeled over panting and couldn’t get up. My neighbors on either side came over and made a stretcher from a blanket and carried him to my car. Another came with me to the vet and stayed with me until Andy gave one last big gasp; his heart, big as it was, was no match for the cancer.  

Andy had so many friends that I couldn’t stand the idea of having to tell the story over and over. So I pasted a picture of him on some card and put a little note on saying he was gone. Then I tied it to my front gate. By the next day, I had a “Princess Di” situation going on! Kids brought handmade cards with sweet messages in crayon and stuck them on the gate. People left flowers and notes for me. Someone even stuck a bottle of wine through the fence, another a tin of homemade cookies. Andy truly had been an emissary of love.

Now, years later, I moved to my current home in Mineral de Pozos, with Andy’s successor, my little dog Henry. 

Henry at home in Mexico

Things were different here. I felt immediately at home and assimilated into the community very quickly. But there are the odd occasions when I still feel like the new girl. Then one day last week I met some friends for a drink at Pozos’ new swanky hotel, Casa Diamante. Since I hadn’t been there before, the assistant manger offered to show me around. As we were touring the impressive rooms and gardens, I started to tell him that I lived in Pozos. “Oh, I know,” he said. “I see you walking your little dog when I’m driving to work every day.”

Welcome to the hood.

My Quest for a Second Soul

To have another language is to possess a second soul

-- Charlamagne

I’m trying to learn Spanish. Let me rephrase that: I’m learning Spanish. I’m banishing negative self talk about it like, “I’m way too old to learn a whole new language,” and (imagine a whiny voice) “This is hard.”

I do at least have a bit of leg up on people from some other parts of the States and Canada who come to Mexico since I lived for over 30 years in Southern California. It was, of course, part of Mexico up until 1849 and still remains a largely Hispanic city. You pick up a certain amount of Spanish by osmosis. I already knew, for example, that Hermosa Beach translated to beautiful beach; that Puente was bridge; and that you didn't need to say La Brea tar pit because La Brea meant tar pit. I could correctly pronounce Sepulveda, La Cienaga, and Cahuenga boulevards. And in general I developed an ear for what Mexican Spanish should sound like.

Olvera Street in down town LA: really

When I made the decision to move to Mexico I frantically started listening to Spanish language tapes in my car. On arriving here, I noticed people looking at me funny when I attempted to speak and discovered that I had been studying Spanish Spanish and not Latin American Spanish. They’re the same language of course, but with subtle differences in usage. My Pimsleur tape instructed me to say, “Encantada” on meeting someone. Mexicans are much too polite to snicker but I’m sure they were amused inside when I said the flowery, “enchanted.” I learned quickly that here people say, “Mucho Gusto.”

The year I lived in San Miguel de Allende it was all too easy to be lazy about it because there is such a huge ex-pat population and so many of the Mexicans that work in the largely tourist industries speak English. You could go days without hearing anything but English spoken. Still, I bought and started plowing through Rosetta Stone Spanish, which many people swear by. I find it a bit tedious, but perhaps because I already spend so much time at my computer that another hour a day is a chore. I do, though, like a podcast from, of all places, Scotland called “Coffee Break Spanish.” They’re 15-minute conversation sessions on specific topics and I’ve learned a lot by listening while making my dinner or doing other chores.

When I moved to Mineral de Pozos, the situation became more urgent. The foreign population is much smaller and far fewer of the locals speak any English.

Pozos: not a lot of English spoken here

I’ve discovered that learning functionally is a good method for me. If I need to say something, I use a translation program that lets me see and hear what to say. Then once I’ve used it, it tends to stick. The flaw with this method is that then people respond and I have no idea what they are saying! My Mexican friend Rosa wants to learn English so we spend an hour every week helping each other. I also watch movies with Spanish sub-titles and usually pick up a word or two each time.

Rosa and I: able to communicate against the odds

In the last year and half, I think my Spanish has improved exponentially but I have problems conversing because I’m still translating everything in my head. By the time I’ve figured out what to say, everyone else has moved on. I also understand a lot more than I can speak.

This year my resolution was to get fluent. In talking to friends, I discovered that several others in our little town had made the same determination. So we got together and hired a Spanish teacher from San Luis de la Paz to come to Pozos twice a week. The lovely and patient Lourdes is taking us rapidly to the next step. But, it seems, there’s no getting around the issue of learning some things by rote: like verb endings. It brings up memories of sitting in a hot African classroom chanting French and Latin conjugations.

I was struggling yesterday to memorize the Spanish verb ser “to be” (not to be confused with estar, the other Spanish verb “to be”), when out of a brain cell lingering from around 1965, up bubbled the Latin conjugation for “to be” in all its tenses! Spanish is not identical to Latin, but close enough that it was like a light shining on it and I suddenly got it. Right after that, I also called up the Latin conjugation of “to love.” Again, the verb endings were so close that it became a tremendous shortcut for me. There was also something about the memory of the rhythm of chanting them that helped me chant the Spanish verbs.

And hey, I am living in Latin America.

So here’s a shout out to Miss Linder, who as a young women in the 1960s valiantly drilled Latin verbs into the heads of a bunch of fidgety teenagers at Umtali Girls High, most of whom couldn’t really figure why we needed to learn a has-been language. Miss Linder is advanced in age and still living in Umtali (now renamed Mutare) so she might like to know:  it came in handy after all! 

Somebody posted this picture to my old high school facebook page, 

showing Miss Linder back row left: still teaching long after I had gone.

Of Elevens and Pennies

When I was a kid, I commandeered the number 11. I declared it my favorite number, and for some reason, felt warmly attached to it. Perhaps it was the pleasing three-syllable word, sounding a little like elfin, or maybe it was the look of the figure, the symmetry of the two ones. In any event, whenever I was asked to “pick a number” or ascribe a number to anything, it was always 11. Eleven was “my” number.

Jump forwards a few decades. From editing a book for a numerologist, I learned that 11 is regarded by many as a master, even magical, number.  For the purposes of their trade, most numerologists reduce numbers down to a single digit. For example, 176 would be reduced to 14 and then again to 5. Except for 11; it stays as is.  In some interpretations, 11 represent balance; in others a gateway. By all accounts, it’s a good thing to have in your life.

My birthday falls on the 29^th of the month, so based on all of this, it turns out 11 actually is significant for me. At the time I was working on the book, I lived in a house in the Mt. Washington area of Los Angeles. The last two digits of my house number were 65; the last two digits of my zip code were 65; and the last two digits of the phone number randomly assigned to me by the phone company were 65. I just thought it was an amusing co-incidence. I started to incorporate the numbers 11, 29, and 65 into all my pin numbers and pass codes.

I also was vaguely aware that there was something called the 11:11 phenomenon. People all over the world claimed that they saw this number with unusual frequency. I thought it sounded a bit silly, but truth be known, since I regarded 11 as my personal number I was mildly miffed that I was not privy to this.

That is until a couple of months ago.

Then it started. Suddenly I began to see 11, 11:11 or even bigger multiples of the number everywhere I looked. I’m not kidding; everywhere.  Yes, it seemed to be 11 minutes passed the hour whenever I looked at the clock, but it was way more than that. Here’s just one example I caught with my camera. I was sitting in a coffee shop and glanced at the building across the street. There were two number 11s on the one wall.

You could put this down to what some people call “red car syndrome” where you see a red car of a certain make and then notice it everywhere. I believe in the psychological world it’s called perceptual vigilance, where your attention is drawn to things you are interested in. That could well be the case some of the time, but there have been too many weird occurrences that seem to fall outside of that explanation.

For example; before I went out for the night on New Year’s Eve, I checked my blogger dashboard to see how many hits my blog had had. The tally for the year was 111111 and the post with the most hits for that day had 111. Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast of NPR’s Morning Edition while I did some chores. It stopped broadcasting as occasionally happens if the internet goes woozy. But instead of coming back on in a few seconds, it stayed off. I went to look to see if I could click it back into action. The little slider thing that tells you how much time has elapsed was stuck at 11:11. When I glanced at the time in the corner of my screen it was 11:11. And oh yes, the date was 1:11. It is kind of strange; no?

It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me. There was the case I refer to as pennypalooza. For a few months before I left my California home and moved to Mexico, I found a one-cent coin almost every time I left the house. I would be walking Henry and glance down and see a penny at my feet. Or I’d take the trash out and find one in front of the dumpster. They would be next to where my car was parked. Once, I found one as I walked across a grocery store parking lot. I dropped it into the little plate on the checkout counter that had a sign saying “Leave a penny; take a penny” and promptly found another while walking back to my car.

The incident that really made my hair stand on end was when I'd been out for a short while and came home to find a penny that hadn’t been there when I left, on my doorstep. I had not told a soul about what was happening with the pennies so no one had put it there just to mess with me. And I lived in a gated complex of just three units. The people in other two homes were at work all day so only I was around. Even the mailman and delivery people couldn’t get in without someone to open the gate. I could think of no rational way that penny could have got there. I actually started to wonder if I was having some kind of psychotic breakdown and was dropping the pennies for myself to find!

I saved the coins in a jar. When I was packing up to move to Mexico I decided to cash them in at one of those Coinstar machines that they have in supermarkets. Just for fun, I thought I’d buy lottery tickets with the money. I went to two stores and the machines were both out of order. So I put the bag of pennies in my glove compartment and gave them no more thought once I got caught up in the frenzy of moving. Until I started writing this, I had forgotten they were there. I just found the bag under all the papers and other stuff that accumulates in the glove compartment. Here they are.

There’s a tendency to want to find some meaning or message to things like this. Is the Universe trying to tell me something?  If so, what the heck is it? There’s no point in the 11s and the pennies having significance if I don’t know what it is. That’s just plain frustrating. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s just odd co-incidence; maybe synchronicity.

Oh, wait a minute. Eleven’s made up of two ones and a penny is a one-cent coin. Perhaps it’s number one  that’s haunting me ... ? 

Okay: After typing that last sentence, I looked to see what the word count was for this blog and this is what I saw. Hand on my heart, I did not arrange this. Now I'm all creeped out again.

The Meanest Kitty in Mexico?

When I bought my house in Mineral de Pozos six months ago, the previous owner warned me about the feral cat issue. (She also said there were ghost cats in the house; but that´s another story!)

Sure enough, when I moved in it became apparent that cats had been running rampant in the empty house. There was a hole in the very old, small door leading from the bathroom to the courtyard that gave them ingress; cat pee in the corner of a bookshelf; and little dusty paw prints all over the house. My first line of attack was to block the hole in the door from the inside but proved ineffectual as I´d come home and find my barrier pushed aside. Then I piled bricks in front of it on the outside. But these were super cats. The bricks would be tossed aside like Legos. Finally, I dragged a big pot with a particularly vicious cactus plant in it up to the hole and finally had an effective blockade. Eventually, I had a new door made and the picturesque old one is now an art installation on my porch. La puertacita a ninguna parte. (¨The little door to nowhere.¨)

The Little Door to Nowhere with the ¨cat hole¨in the bottom

But that didn´t stop the cats entirely. All the rooms in my house open to the courtyard so I have to make sure every door and window is closed and latched when I go out. I even have to close the doors on one side of the house if I am on the other side. I learned this the hard way when I went into my kitchen one night after watching a movie in the living room, and it was wrecked. The trash can was up-ended and the contents strewn all over the floor. The dog food dragged off its shelf and scattered everywhere. And there were broken dishes in the sink.

The mayhem in the house was not the only problem. The cats would party on my bedroom roof at night. They were a rowdy bunch: wailing and yowling and running around, making far more noise than you´d think possible. I´d see their shadows spookily passing over my skylight. They regularly overturned the recycling can with a clatter and used the fern bed under my bedroom window as a litter box.

Of course, I do have a secret weapon against them: Henry. My little dog Henry actually has no problem with cats. When we visit a friend who has one he will politely sniff them and yield the territory and if we meet one on a walk, he will just stroll on by. But these cats were a different breed. If he encountered one skulking under the lavender bush, it would go all saber toothed tiger on him. Just because he´s polite doesn´t mean he´s a wuss: When the cat arched its back, bared its teeth, and hissed at him, he´d fight back. Next thing, I had Wild Kingdom going on in my garden. Cats streaking and emitting blood curdling howls and Henry right on their tails, silent, focused, and looking for a take down. Further, at night, when he heard them on the roof, he´d hurl himself at the door barking loudly. Did I mention this was the middle of the night?

I decided it was time to know the enemy. I identified three: a pretty white female, a ginger tom, and a gray one of indeterminate gender. I realized pretty soon that the latter was the alpha whatever. Before long it had banished the other two to the perimeter of the property. I still see them sunning themselves on top of my water tank or prowling along the wall topped by broken glass (putting paid to the idea that it would deter a cat burglar) but they rarely come any closer.

Ginger cat is now exiled to the ruins next door

And now I think gray cat is trying to get rid of me. He has no fear at all. I see him watching me everywhere I go.

He´s always there; just watching and waiting

Several times he´s walked right into the kitchen when I´ve been in there. If I try to shoo him away, he makes noises like something out of The Exorcist. He brazenly tries to sneak passed me and into the house, crawling low to stay out my line of sight. He sleeps on my outdoor furniture at night and should I venture out to the courtyard after dark he acts like I´m the one who shouldn´t be there.

(OMG, even as I´m writing this, he just jumped on my firewood and knocked the whole pile down!)

Quite frankly, I´m scared of gray cat.

Don´t let his benign apperance fool you. One step closer and he would have had my eyes.

I really do like cats, so why not just make peace with him and since he already lives here, adopt him and fix him? Well, for one thing, he´s probably too feral to tame. He´s in pretty good shape and probably feeds off rodents and scraps so I don´t feel too badly about not trying to save him. And I know he drinks from Henry´s water bowl.

And secondly, I´m allergic to cats. At age five, I developed severe asthma. I´d have attacks of the kind that these days would have you rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. But in 1950s Africa, I just had to gut it out because there was no help on offer. Additionally, no one apparently made the connection between the onset of this condition and the new cat I got that slept on my pillow; both of us tucked snuggly under a mosquito net. His name was Smokey and he was followed over the years by Misty and then Mr. Jinx. And throughout my entire childhood I wheezed and huffed so hard my ribs would ache for days. Once I actually broke a rib.

Me at five with Smokey. Oh, if only I´d known ... !

The attacks stopped quite abruptly when I moved to England. I just thought it had been something in the air: maybe the jacarandas? Then after I´d been in London about three years, my roommate brought home a little calico kitten and we both fell in love. We named her Tiffany. (Hey, this was the early 70s and it was all about the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany´s. We were way ahead of the trend.) Within a couple of days, my asthma was back and I finally made the link. Now though, I was able to go to the doctor and get pills and later an inhaler that got me though until my roommate moved out and took Tiffy with her.

For the next 20 years, I avoided cats. It´s sad because I love all animals and would love to snuggle with a cat like I did in my childhood.

Who could possibly not adore Chacha and RubyCat, the new kitties at Galeria 6?

After all those years of dodging them, I tentatively tried being a room with one and I learned I´ve built up a tolerance.  My threshold is about two hours before I start to feel that familiar tightness in my chest. Some of my friends will be surprised by this revelation because I rarely talk about it. The thing is; if you say you´re allergic, people want to put their cat out of the room. But it´s the cat dander and hair that is already in the room that causes the problem and banishing the poor cat from its own home doesn´t really help. I had to clean and paint my house from top to bottom when I realized the cats had been hanging there while it was empty.

So, no, gato gris and I are going to have to make some kind of peace. He/she needs to understand that I am the mistress of this house and is going to have to find somewhere else to haunt.

I know: Fat chance.

My Summer Vacation in Mineral de Pozos

Regular readers will notice that I haven´t posted a new blog for many weeks. The official explanation is that I took the summer off. The fact is; I haven´t felt one bit like sitting down and writing, either this blog or actual work. That´s unusual for me as generally I´m more comfortable in front of a keyboard than anywhere else. But since I settled into my new old house in mid-June, all I´ve been moved to do is work on it and in the garden. It brings me tremendous joy although I have to keep reminding myself not to feel guilty about not writing.

Now it´s September and somehow just the turn of the month has put me in a better frame of mind for sitting at my computer.  So to kick things off again, this is a catch-up with pictures of my Mexican summer.

Despite it being the rainy season, we had a hot, dry spell that gave me loads of time to plant and weed and reorganize my courtyard garden. The previous owner told me that she loved the garden to be all tangled and mysterious. I do get the appeal of that, but I felt I was not actually seeing half of it so I tried to sort it all out. I dedicated an area to succulents and cacti (and have the scars to prove it).

A shady spot outside my bedroom window has become the fern garden but there´s also a magnificent ojo santos bush that was thriving there.

I got the funky fish fountain to work, although it´s sort of jerry-rigged at the moment. I wasn´t sure if I should be reassured or made nervous when the dengue fever task force came round and put something in it to deter mosquitos.

Once I uncovered everything, I found I was better able to showcase my magnificent lavender patch; two spectacular hibiscus bushes; and a highly perfumed rose bush. After a shower my garden is heady with scents.

My fruit trees yielded me some delicious tiny peaches, a handful of figs, and more pomegranates than I or the birds could eat. I have a fruit called a lima that I´d never heard of before. It´s a citrus that´s not as tart as a lemon or as sweet as an orange.  I´m experimenting with smoothies and salads.

I also did a little art project in the garden. I inherited a painted arch over my bedroom door and embellished it with some metal birds and old birdcages I found.

 And speaking of birds, I had two batches of baby golondrinas in my entryway nest! The first was a trio that peeped and cheeped all day so I called them Peter, Paul, and Mary. I watched and photographed every stage of their development with total fascination and was sad when they finally got their wings and took off. On the other hand, I was happy not to have to clean up bird poop every day.

Then a couple of weeks later I was amazed to discover I had another four. Like all second children, they didn´t get photographed as much as the first, nor did I name them. They´re at the stage where they fly off during the day but around 7 p.m. come home and, fully grown, cram themselves back into the nest for the night with tails and wings sticking out everywhere. More poop to clean up.

The house got its share of attention. I repainted the kitchen, which was no easy task since the walls were red and now they are white. It took four coats! It´s still a work in progress as I´m planning to tile the floor and put in a colorful tile backsplash. The bathroom, which I thought would be the very first thing I´d do, is still not started. This is because the guy I found to do it is not available as his mother had an accident and he doesn´t want to leave her side.  Get well soon, mama!

I also had the sala painted; too big a project for me but Oscar and Chucho did a great job. And I finally unpacked all my boxes from California. I cranked up the sewing machine that came on the truck and made pillows and drapes. I invested in a couple of pieces of show-stopping furniture: What I call the Marie Antoinette bed and a huge room dividing buffet. So it´s starting to come together.

But the summer wasn´t entirely about work. I went to a number of lovely parties both here in Pozos and in San Miguel de Allende. Some had mariachis!

Happily, my friends Eleanor and Barbara each have places in San Miguel where I can bunk down for the night when I don´t want to make the 40-minute drive back to Pozos after dark.

Pozos also had a number of wonderful events: a blues festival, a mariachi festival, a mine tour, a home and garden tour, and several art openings. During the Toltecidad, Zaragosa Plaza looked like Venice beach on a Sunday afternoon. 

Friends who came to town from San Miguel for these happenings knocked on my door so I had a constant stream of visitors. Plus, I´ve made a whole lot of new friends in the neighborhood. What I´m finding is that weekdays are quiet here but there´s a whole lot going on at the weekend. That set-up pretty much suits me to perfection.

The only fly in the ointment this summer was that my little dog Henry got a nasty eye infection in both eyes. Many vet visits, antibiotics, three kinds of eye drops and mucho dinero later he now seems to be fine.  

Well, the other bummer was that my computer hard drive fried and my new one has a new operating system with the instructions in Spanish so that has been, to say the least, an interesting learning experience. I don´t really know if Windows 7 is good or bad because I don´t really know how to use it properly. But I´m managing well enough to have no more excuses for not writing, so tune back in for regular posts.