Soaked morning in mourning

Our barrio church.

IT RAINED LIKE a motheroo last night. I awoke at 2:30 to the pounding of horizontal water, thunder and my child bride closing the bedroom window.

The rainy season got off to a spotty start about 10 days ago. It blew in big-time one evening, then rained two or three times more. Then nothing for six or so days. Till last night.

I went back to sleep, but awoke about an hour later to the near silence of a calm sprinkle. I got up to open the bedroom window again. Then back to dreamland. It was easy. The air was cool.

Just before 7, I opened my eyes to a gray dawn through the window and the gonging church bell on the plaza 1.5 blocks away.

Someone had died. Death is marked here in the barrio by a slow, dismal gong that continues for hours, often all night long, and it’s done manually. A guy is up there in the bell tower pulling the rope about once every 10 seconds.

Not an enviable task.

Sitting down at the dining room table for bagels and cream cheese at 8, I saw the downstairs veranda under a lake, water that had blown in from the storm. The upstairs terraza had a lake too, but a far more modest one, so I decided right then to install at least one more canvas curtain up there, closing four of the five sides.

The sort of storm we got last night, blowing so much water into the two terrazas, is rare. Last summer it only happened two or three times during the daily, five-month monsoon.

Less rare is a neighbor’s death and the slow gonging of the announcement.

Not being a Catholic, nor even much of a barrio participant, I will not get a gong when I die. That’s too bad. I would like that sort of sendoff, especially if accompanied by lightning, thunder and flooding tears from heaven.

Drama and death suit one another.

I wonder if it will rain again today.

Behold the storm

HERE’S A GREAT documentary about Mexico in the early 20th century, particularly the Revolution and its aftermath down into the 1960s.

It’s almost two hours long. I watched it over a span of days, 15 minutes to half an hour at a time. It’s worth the effort.

I bring this to you as a public service. Free of charge.

Sixteen years of Mexican matrimony

TODAY IS MY ANNIVERSARY, 16 years of wedded bliss.

I’ve been married three times, which has been interesting. The first lasted just five years but resulted in my only children. There were two. A girl who’s now almost 52, and a boy who died in the hospital after three days.

I then got a vasectomy. I was just 24.

My daughter is named Celeste, and my son was named Ian Lee.

The first was a self-imposed shotgun marriage. The second, which lasted 10 years though we lived together 19 years, was done for practical matters, health insurance mostly. The moral of this is don’t point a shotgun at yourself, and don’t marry for practical matters. Do it for the traditional reasons.

Do it for love and romance.

This last marriage, the ceremony, took place in the interior patio of my sister-in-law’s coffee shop on the main plaza. A judge presided. I had no idea how civil marriages were done in Mexico, so it was all a surprise to me.

You stand there with your witnesses, and the judge goes through the words. You don’t say, I do. You say, I accept, but in Spanish, of course.

Here we are waiting for the judge to show up. She was late. That’s me on the left, of course, my child bride, her sister who seethed with envy the entire evening (note face) and her husband, a man who later shot himself to death by mishap in a “cry for help” after his wife tossed him out in the street.

Mexico is full of endless drama.

We had a great time. About 30 people showed up, and we danced in the patio after the rather dry ceremony with the judge. This fellow provided the music.

This video was not shot during the wedding, but that’s the guy.

Having been married three times, twice to Gringas and once to a Mexicana, I cannot avoid making comparisons. Since the nations’ cultures are drastically different, so are the women. I recommend the latter over the former.

There is no comparison.

While I rather fell into the first two marriages, I was quite deliberate with this one. I even got down on my knee to propose, and I did it between two pyramids built centuries ago by the indigenous folks of our area.

These are the actual pyramids. Women like it when you make a splash.

Whether it was the pyramids, the singer known as El Potro, the magic of the judge or some other unknown factor, this marriage has been a keeper.

Best move of my life.