The Secret of Christmas

I just came across this wonderful site.  We have two horses and love animals. This is a terrific way to help others that really speaks to us...you too, maybe.

https://secure1.heifer.org/gift-catalog/?msource=kw2792&gclid=CKOThrvuk60CFQcQNAod6GZQoA

Christmas morning and the teenagers are still asleep.  Different times.  It's all good, the growing up, the growing pains (conflicts with friends, conflicts resolved).  I told them Santa was traveling light this year and they are completely cool with that. I think they also see the abundance we enjoy that doesn't come under the tree - lovely get-togethers in friends' homes, cakes and dinners made by friends for their December birthdays, cookie-making hosted by friends, phone calls from faraway family, Christmas afternoon planned in one friend's house then dinner in the home of other long time San Miguel friends. 

Merry Christmas to all!

How To Keep San Miguel de Allende Crime Free - An Insider's Look

So Sunday on the homestead found us sharing a couple of caguamas with Carlos' brother, Hector, our sister-in-law Mari and a friend from the parque (that means he plays basketball) known as Toluco.  The evening mellowed, I made tacos de pollo, and then at 9:30, Toluco jumped up and raced out of the house.  His job is to ring the bells of La Parroquia in the center of San Miguel.  Sunday night was one of them most important nights of the year, the eve of the Fiesta de la Virgen de Guadalupe.  Go, Toluco!  Get there by ten and ring those bells.  Tell people (bong, bong!) to get to bed because the fireworks (bong!) begin at dawn and don't stop all December 12th! At 10 pm, I heard the bells, or conjured I did, imagining Toluco hanging on the end of the thick rope.

Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe is a national holiday in Mexico. Banks and schools were closed.  We ate breakfast at Cafe Contento with Hector, Mari and our girls' cousin, Anibal. Mascando (chewing on a topic), Hector and Carlos decide it must be safe to go to the United States.
           "Mira, in Miami, you have Horacio."
           "Horacio is one smart guey.  He always has the answers."
           "Plus he has some boss sunglasses."
           "In New York, you've got that other dude.  What's his name?"
           "Nobody knows."
           "Wait.  They call him, Mac.  Sue, has anyone ever called you Mac?"
           "No, but they used to call me Skinny McKinney."
           "Then, they've got that whole team in Las Vegas.
           "Right!  Now they've got that dude who used to run that bar."
           "There's a guy you can trust right there."
           "What about those Criminal Minds guys? What are they covering?"
           "Hijole, they're everywhere.  What's an unsub anyway?"
           "We should do a CSI San Miguel."
           "El Dandy, El Waca and El Toluco are not the lottery ticket seller, the drunk with the roses in his lapel and the bell-ringer that everyone thinks.  They're investigators!"        
            "Out to uncover why gringos think they can take their dogs everywhere with them, and how the cops are always asleep in their patrullas at the end of my street!"
             "We'd be safer, you know, with a CSI show of our own."
             "Yeah, I'm going to contact Telerisa. Manana."

Close Encounters of the Mexican Kind: Was Mary Visiting Me or Another Spirit?

Carlos talks about synchronicity.  That if we are aware, we'll notice it happens all the time.  Friday morning last week, somebody pinched my ankle three times and woke me from a deep sleep.  But nobody was in the bedroom with me.  (See my previous post.)  By 11 that day, I was guesting in Michelle Garrison's Spanish grammar class where the topic of the day was brujeria and santeria and Catholicism in Mexico. I told the students at Cafe Contento, in Spanish, about my experience and that I was still trying to figure out what I had to wake up to. Mouths dropped open; their attention was complete.  "Were you scared?" one woman asked.
         "No."
         "Were you able to sleep after that?" wondered another.
         "Actually, I told the spirit I was going back to sleep and to please wake me up at 6:15.  When I woke and looked at the clock, it was 6:13."

          Mexicans had a whole different take on a spirit visitation.  By the end of the day, we were in my brother-in-law Hector's car on our way to a teacher party with him. "So, somebody tugged on my ankle early this morning," I told him. "Carlos was in the living room - it wasn't him."
          "Ha, you got off easy," Hector said. "Once the lady who hangs around my mother's house gave me a cachetada!"
          I brought it up again at the party.  Everybody at the table had a story.  The spirit in fulano's house.  The shaman who worked in the pueblo near Celaya who died but is kept by the villagers, embalmed and hidden in someone's house. Those pueblos around Celaya, si, hombre.  Todos tienen sus brujos.

          My 16-year old sees spirits all over the place. Once we went into a downtown store in San Miguel that sells householdy things like hand-blown glass pitchers and glasses, tablecloths, antique tables.  "There's a dead person here," she said, as we ascended to the second floor.
          "What's he doing?" I asked.
          "Watching us," she said, picking up a silver plated spoon.
          Carla had promised early in the day to check our bedroom and see if it was our recently deceased friend Mary hanging around.  When we got home from the teacher party, I called her in.
           "Oh, yeah, there's someone here," she said.
           "It is Mary?"
           "No, it's one of your maestros, here to give you some conocimiento."
           "What's the knowledge I need?  What am I supposed to know?!"
           Carla shrugged, and ran out of the room.  There was a song on YouTube her sister wanted her to hear.
           So now I have more questions than answers.  Coine on, Gringo Nation, help me out!  This is my moment and I don't know how to grab it! Who was in my room and what am I supposed to be learning?

Ghost in the Machine

THE FOLLOWING IS FACTUAL AND NOT EXAGGERATED.  This morning, I was woken by someone pressing on my ankle three times. I looked at the clock - 5:15 - and looked around for my husband. Usually he wakes me at 6:15, sometimes by turning on the light, sometimes by passing the cup of coffee he's made me near my nose, sometimes by pressing on my ankle.  But this morning at 5:15, he was not in the room.

Carlos routinely wakes at 5 AM and goes into the living room to meditate, so I was not surprised when I called his name twice and he didn't answer.  But someone had clearly pressed on my ankle and woken me from a deep sleep.

My friend Mary died two months ago, on October 1, of cancer that attacked various organs including her lungs, and finally moved to her brain. She was a non-smoking vegan. She ran the independent book store Libros El Tecolote in San Miguel for 17 years.  I worked there when my Sean, now 14, was born.  Mary was my first friend in San Miguel.  We were artists' models, sometimes working together, like I detail in my memoir, Flirting in Spanish (http://tinyurl.com/865e85z).  She was older than me by 5 weeks.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  Did Mary try to wake me up to say Happy Birthday?  Did Mary try to WAKE ME UP?

And what am I supposed to be woken up TO?  I'm thinking it was Mary in my bedroom this morning because I think she has visited before. A couple of weeks ago I woke at around 1 am to voices, the kind you might hear on speeded up recording - human but unintelligible. I went into the living room to tell Carla to quit Skyping her friend Weasel in Texas and go to bed.  But the living room was dark.  I walked upstairs to tell my two daughters to quiet down.  But they were asleep.

Days later, I lay on the couch moaning from intestinal pain. My husband put his hands over me to see if he could move the energy around to give me relief.  "Huh," he said after a few minutes.
          "Huh, what?" I demanded.
          "You have a great deal of cold around you."
          "And that's making me sick?"
          "No, there's a dead person here."
          "Doing what?"
          "Visiting."
          "Who could it be?" I asked.  Mary hadn't occurred to me just yet.
          "Who is it who just passed and might want to visit?"
          Now he was annoying me with his riddles.
          "Well, what does she want?"
          "Ask her."
          Aaargh! I wanted to yell.  You're the one with the extra perceptions!  Can't you just give me the message?

           My psychic 16-year old is going to check the house for Mary when we get home.  Meantime, WAKE UP is still rocking through my head.  Maybe if I say Pretty Please, Mary will crash my bedroom again soon and tell me what I have to wake up to, or from.

Been Scrapbooked!

Since my travel and romance memoir is, in fact, a love story, I´ve been snooping around on some romance sites and blogs.  That's how I ended up being the guest author SCRAPBOOKED by romance reader and blogger Nat at Reading Romances - http://readingromances.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/an-authors-scrapbook-susan-mckinney/
It was way fun to put together!  Go over to the Reading Romances blog and see what my favorite hobby is, what my secret wish is and who my favorite authors are.  It's such a cool presentation! Thanks, Nat! 

Vendors in my Life

I guess I better clear things up.  I´m speaking of the taco ladies.  The Hands of Steel lady flips tortillas and gorditas with her bare hands.  She uses cheap stainless steel spoons to serve the guisados (fillings like shredded chicken, mushrooms in cream, chicharón and nopales) into the tortillas to make tacos. Me...I´d be burning my fingers and yelling, Ouch!  Not this lady though.  Her outdoor stand is on Calle Nueva.  She has a nice smile accentuated by some tall white teeth that probably cost her some.

The Gates of Hell taco lady has a little fonda (traditional Mexican food sold out of a small kitchen or stand) at the back of a corner store jam-packed with every snack beverage ever invented by Coke, Pepsi or Lipton.  It´s hard to tell how she cooks because her back is to you when she is at the stove and, like the name implies, she cooks in the dark, as the lights went off in the back of the store about two months ago and have not been repaired.  This gal is probably not even 30.  She rarely smiles.  She does, however, serve her tacos with lovely, crinkled slightly blackened grilled and salted jalapeños.  In both places, you can get a fill-you-up plate of tacos for about one dollar.

Josefina is the owner of La Ventana, where I get my yummy organic Chiapas coffee.  Being in the coffee business, a cold day makes her do a happy dance.  She and I trade service for product.  The other day her two daughters, who've been in school with my girls, came in to my business, Jasmine Spa with a friend for massages and facials.  All on credit.  This means I can think, a latte would be great right now, or Frappucino! and just cruise on over and pick one up.  Sometimes when I don´t have small change the Hands of Steel taco lady will tell me to pay tomorrow.  It´s one of the nice things about living in San Miguel de Allende, which even though it´s a World Heritage Site, is still a small town.

Flor de calabaza and a roof

It´s almost September, the time when rancho folks come into town with buckets of flor de calabaza for sale.  That´s the yellow zuchini flower that many Mexicans sautee and tuck into quesadillas.  The taco lady with hands of steel declined to buy the offered flor de calabaza this morning, but gave the boy selling them a couple of tacos.  After, he insisted she accept a bunch of the edible flowers anyway.

End of the summer also, in our case, means that my brother-in-law, a labor lawyer in León, just won a big case he´d been working on. What that means is that he came to visit his mom in San Miguel yesterday with an overloaded wallet. 

There is a chapter in my memoir, Flirting in Spanish, entitled The Lamina Roofed House.  It told how Carlos took me to his parents´ house for the first time.  Approaching his house, I could see that part of the roof was lamina - corrugated plastic.  There was another chapter that I decided not to include.  It detailed how some drunk soccer boys, sitting on a hill above my mother-in-law´s house began to throw bottles at the house while I sat outside nursing infant Carla one Sunday.  When they ran out of beer bottles, they threw rocks.  My five foot tall mother-in-law ran outside with a machete raised over her head.  The nonsensical attack was over as soon as it started, and the boys came to the house the next day to apologize, and promise to buy another piece of lamina, as they´d torn a hole in the roof.  That was nineteen years ago.  For 19 years - more actually - the family sweated under that roof during hot months and shivered in the cold.  Now, with big brother´s success, the family will get a proper poured-cement roof.  And the lamina roof that my chapter details will be a thing of the past.

Never a Normal Day in San Miguel

First, a couple of days ago, I asked for the usual - two egg and frijol quesadillas (with salsa, got all the food groups covered) from the friendly lady with hands of iron - she turns tortillas, lifts metal spoons from bubbling pots of guisados, shuffles gorditas with her bare, unblistered hands - on Calle Nueva.  On my side of the food cart, I spooned on salsa.  I oversalted (in Mexico nobody glares at you if you do.)  I bit my torta staring at the taco stuffings I could have ordered...liver, chicken in tomato, papas in chile pasilla, mushrooms in cream, when a paper was thrust in front of my face.

"Dibujo del dragon," offered a man who looked like he hadn´t slept much in past hours.  He wore a shirt over a shirt, warmup pants over jeans, had a rather trim moustache.  The drawing was done in black and purple crayon. "Me lo compras?"

"No, gracias."  I didn´t want to buy a dragon drawing.  The man moved on to the next taco stand, and then the next offering his drawing to those breakfasting on tacos.  At the final stand, the guy gave him a taco de cabeza.  The artist tucked his drawing under his arm, and ate.

Then, yesterday, I finished my Mega shopping, and found, when I tried to pull out, the parking lot exit blocked by thousands of frenzied teens.  A huge line of them walking toward the center of town.  First came the green team.  Green t-shirts, sweatshirts and shoelaces, chanting something.  Fist pumping.  What could have them so stirred?  Then came a white-faced clown, riling them up even further.  By now, the blue group was passing.  Then purple, then yellow.  Thousands of teens, hollering and cheering.  There was a banner.  A God banner!  Along came some kids with the head of Jesus on their bags.  Someone yelled something.  The crowd answered, "Si, Cristo vive!"  They were deliriously happy about it.  I thought of those Baptists who sing and whoop and swoon.  I've never seen Catholicism expressed in such a whoop-de-do way before.
Today, officials say the teens numbered 7,000 and came from towns outside San Miguel.  I´m still trying to figure out what their final destination was.
I got out of the Mega parking lot after 25 minutes.  

Shy Barbara Kingsolver

At a Q and A session at the San Miguel Writers Conference yesterday, Barbara Kingsolver said she is the last person in the world who wanted to be famous.  About fame, she said, "I´m sort of afraid of it.  I´m a shy person.  I do not like being on television." 

Kingsolver said that she grew up in Eastern Kentucky where people told stories but frowned upon talking about oneself.   "She´s parading herself around," Kentuckians would comment about anyone who anyone who wished to call attention to herself.  "Imagine how being in front of a public feels to me," Kingsolver noted.  "When I go on book tour," Kingsolver said, "I think, I´m evangelizing for literature."

In the photo is Jody Feagan, founder of the San Miguel Writers Conference, author Barbara Kingsolver and me at a Welcome to San Miguel cocktail party on Friday. 

Barbara Kingsolver Talk

"Novels being in a million different places," said Barbara Kingsolver tonight in a keynote address to some 800 people at the San Miguel Writers Conference. Moi, being one of them. Here are some more of the things she said after declaring that Mexico was her favorite country on earth.

- "The novel beings the way a forest begins. One acorn drops in the mud and begins to grow. Then one falls in a stream. Then a mesquite seed drops."
- "All I can do is pay atteniton to what is growing,"

- After talking about all the growth sprouting from the seeds that fall, Kingsolver said, "I will manage this forest. I will make it what I want."

- About literature, she said, "I believe we should expect from literature an immense complexity."

- "It should be a timeless place where we should experience magnifigance."

- "The Lacuna is the most difficult book I have ever written."
- "The Lacuna. I attempted to explore every meaning of that beautiful word. The Lacuna. It can be a tunnel through rock or bone or time."

Then, I must admit , I had to leave to pick up my kids from the equestrian center where they ride. Otherwise I´d be reporting more. But what I heard was great!

San Miguel Writers Conference

OK, here I am back to writing about writing, although the 2010 San Miguel Writers Conference is big news in town. The word I´ve heard is that more than 600 people have bought tickets to hear Barbara Kingsolver´s address on Friday night. That´s conference-goers and community members.

I myself will be attending all the lectures and workshops that my schedule teaching school and working in our business, Jasmine Day Spa, allow. Next week, I assistant-teach the Teen Writers Workshop with Betsy James. We´ve got 20 teens signed up and will be focusing on science fiction and fantasy this year.

I will be sure NOT to miss my appointments with two, yes, praise be, two agents. One will look at my memoir, to which I still hold the rights even though it´s up on Amazon. The other, an agent for children´s and young adult books, will critique my fledgling Young Adult manuscript. I get 10 minutes with each!

How To Enjoy the San Miguel Fair

Round up your 14-year old and a friend. Grab a snack by the big stage.

Find your sister in the crowd.

And your sister- and brother-in-law. And watch all their kids jump on the brincolín.

Round up the teenagers. (Jen, my Carla, my Sean, Kayla, Sara)

Wait until the stars come out, so you can jump

up to them.

And say Adios, Feria, until next year.

Teen Drama

So last Saturday, as most of my friends trundled off, post-barbecue, to a party in one more gorgeous San Miguel house, I decamped with Carlos and our two girls plus my friend, Alex´s three kids to a fiesta de quinceaños at El Ring disco, the site, by the way, of one of my first dates with Carlos, as told in my memoir, Fast Break South.

The honoree was the daughter of a teacher friend of Hector, Carlos´ brother. So Hector and his wife, Mari and their 9-year old made up the rest of our gang, occupying a long table on the second level, the perfect perch from which to spy on the teenagers, once, after the father-daughter dance, and the escort-quinceñera dance, the discoing began. Research, let´s call it, into the world of teens, if I´m going to be writing about and for them.

Alex´s kids are two tall good-looking blondes - Brad, 19 and Chris, 15. After several summers of swimming and outings with them, our girls are a bit immune to their charms. But not all the girls were. One particular 14-year old asked Brad to dance every single dance, and made him pinky-promise to come back each time he went to the bathroom. Another Mexican gal asked Chris, who was stuffing his face with cake, to dance. Chris said, "I´m eating cake."

"Chris," I growled at him.
"What?" he said, through crumbs.
I frowned.
"O.K." he said, and went down to find the girl who had found the courage to invite him to dance.

My Carla, who at age 14, is more interested in horses than boys, was asked to dance by a guy she´s known for awhile, who happens to be a senior in high school. When he asked for the following dance, she begged off, and ran up to me. "My God, Mom," she said. "Once was enough!"

No mean girls or fast boys. A less hurried, less frenetic life for adolescents? I´ve never tried to raise my kids in the United States of America, but I tend to think so.