Unexpected Coherence

Another late night before I sit down to update you on the day. So again, I will limit myself to short bursts of description / news. Not as short as before, but still: Devoid of much narrative thread. Here we go:

Rained much of the day today - at least, the morning. Hence, the morning was spent inside, doing admin stuff (calls to Williamstown Med Associates, who had messed up T's health certificate and had to fax another copy to us; setting up Janneke's phone, which we already used, like, four times today...Stuff like that). Kids played video games and squabbled. Average.

I did spend a bit of time this morning at the Santurce Plaza del Mercado, which is a very nifty old market a ten minutes' walk from here that I'm considering doing a project on. Took this picture:



Also shot a lot of neat footage in the rain there. It's in Santurce, as I said, which is a borough you get into via crossing under a highway from Condado, where we live. As I walked there, I thought, "This tunnel is really a demarcation point between the touristy Condado and the purely Boricua Santurce." And there's wall art (hate to call it graffiti) inside that underpass that, as it turns out, reflects just this difference:



The Frankenstein figure to our left is probably Condado, bending over backwards and changing its identity and becoming something it's not under pressure from the tourists. And the guy on the right is an actual, legitimate Puerto Rican. The sign he's holding says "Santurce's not for sale" or "Santurce doesn't sell out" or "Santurce doesn't prostitute itself" - any of those interpretations might be valid.

We'll see what it all turns into.

Lunch at home, though I ate little, having had one of the greatest empanadas ever made back at the Plaza. Then a nap, and Janneke went off to do some more admin stuff (copies, faxing) at a local Business Center, a tiny establishment (so she tells me) that's buzzing with all the tourists who don't have printers and need them, or need to send or receive a fax, or make keys (?!), etc. And the kids, the dog, and I to the beach.

I did some reading of Betsy's manuscript while the kids and the dog cavorted - didn't even wear a suit, had no illusions of going in at all. And I got a lot read, and the kids entertained each other. Q and I tried to get his daily 300 soccer ball touches in, and boy, that kid gets better all the time. I was admiring some of his latest moves, which I'd yet to see until today, and man. This kid is going to make some noise come high school. Hell, come Monday.

Coordinated via Cellular Telephone technology our arrival back at the spread with Mami, who then went for a power walk while the kids and I read. Supper, dessert, Skype with Auntie Jayne, Mr Bean, and to bed. I also reconnoitered on my dog walk this fine night looking for options for Pizza and a Movie Night tomorrow, and found only Domino's. Which I like, but which Janneke abhors, so I guess we'll keep looking. Fine by me, actually, because either way, I'm getting takeout from a criollo place. Pizza gives me heartburn.

El Yunque tomorrow afternoon, beach in the morning in all likelihood.

Some observations:

There is a well-established culture here of late-night (now, 10:30 or so) exercise bikers zooming up and down Ashford / McLeary, with hybrid bikes and helmets and lights. I must have seen twenty of them. And the other night there were a good fifty, less exercise-minded, bikers, mostly in their 20s, accumulated in the Parque del Indio up the street about the same time. As Clarabelle and I walked past, somebody shouted out, "Cuando quieran, arránquense pa' donde sea" (Whenever you guys want, take off, going anywhere), and the whole mad pack zoomed out - well-maintained, nice bikes, by the way - in a frenzied dash eastward. Strange. Not sure what to make of it.

Saw a cop here with a nightstick of the length and style of a katana, but made completely of the same leather-like plastic that regular cop nightsticks are made of. Dude was jacked. Never seen one of those before.

Puerto Ricans rarely signal their intention to turn in a vehicle. And if it's a right turn? Never.

Coconut flesh, scooped directly out of a coconut that you yourself saw fall and then pried open with your own hands is moist, and soft, and tastes just like you would expect it to.

Man, this wound up a lot more narrative than I thought. Let's hope other things in my future turn out similarly.

Tally-ho!

Soccer and Dogs: Match Made in Condado

Up at the crack of dawn again today. That's right, dawn is at 7:30 here. It's a San Juan thing. You don't know any different.

Janneke wanted to come along this morning to go see Q's potential soccer camps in action and to check out T's dog-training camp. I had thought I'd leave her to work this morning, but she didn't want to miss it. So all four of us hit the road somewhere around 9:30, I believe. Easily found our way back to Q's two potential camps, and they were both delightful-looking places for him. The one had larger and better facilities, so we opted for that one. It's called SPADI. It's housed on the colegio, as i told you before, and we stood in the light rain and watched all three age groups practice. The kids who were clearly Q's age were, mostly, not very skilled, so we began to wonder if Q would wind up being bumped up to the older group. But it won't matter - he's there for the Spanish, more than anything. And we never heard a word of English out there on the field.

We walked into their temporary office (somewhat mini-Explo-like), and got the forms filled out and left them a check. Q's got a new soccer ball now with SPADI printed on it, and a T-shirt, though he'll eventually have 2. He left loosey-goosey and smiling, so I don't think he's really very nervous about it at all.

From there, we went to find T's dog training camp. But just as we pulled out of the Colegio, what should we see swooping across the road and back into the treetops, but one of THESE babies:



That's right: A blue and gold macaw. No, they're not native to Puerto Rico. But there have been enough escapees over the years, it seems, that there is now a wild population, consisting of at least four individuals, which we know because it swooped back to the top of a very tall palm tree, and began to cavort there with three others of its enormous, gorgeous kind. Really, it was a treat for us, right up there with the little parrots we saw in the tree as we ate our snacks pre-supper in Old San Juan the other day. (I think that was the truncated-entry day, so this may be the first you hear of it. Little guys, 11" long, green, with yellow wings, eating the fruit out of an ornamental tree right in the heart of the old city.) And on we drove.

Massive errors in reading the map (never mind whose errors, you mean-spirited blame-monger) led us deep into the hills on a windy road that ends up at a massive water purification facility, where the grim-faced woman at the security desk knew nothing of the place we were looking for. (She also seemed shocked that we were coming to her station from inside the plant, having driven past the main entrance and around some service roads to come straight up her backside, so to speak. A flanking maneuver. Learned it from "Braveheart". Unfortunately, I learned that scene a little too well, since I wound up charging out of the car at her, painted blue and lifting my kilt. As far as you know.) Back down the hill to the main road we'd left to wind up at the filtration plant, where we pulled over and called the facility - on our Cellular Telephone, which, I stress again, is an item that we now possess - from a strip mall. Janneke stayed on the phone with someone there who talked us through all the landmarks until we arrived, safe and sound, at De Varona. It's the tidiest, coziest, most hygienic and charming little new-age pet-lover's haven you can possibly imagine, complete with tinkly bamboo-flute background muzak. We saw the current crop of camp attendees scampering and playing in the grass under the watchful eye of their counselors, all of them young women in their 20's (this seems to be a precondition for employment), happy like clams, cavorting with delight. It really was incredibly sweet, and now T left grinning hopefully about her upcoming camp experience.

Got turned around again going home (Janneke's fault. Totally.) and had to improvise, with me guiding myself by feel and, to a lesser extent, by the geography of the surrounding high-rises, zig-zagging this way and that until I felt we should come out right about where we live and look at THAT! That's the church up the street from our apartment, and look at THAT! We're on our street! Not bad for someone who'd never taken that route before and couldn't consult the map because someone couldn't find any of the street names we were on or passed quick enough to be useful. (Janneke again.)

Got home, walked the dog, had a lovely lunch that Janneke lovingly prepared, and then certain of our party required rest, and so napped for a reasonable amount of time. (20 minutes or so. Never mind who. Jeez! Enough with the Spanish Inquisition number...!) Q decided to stay back and watch the US-Sweden women's world cup game, and Clarabelle, T and I hit the beach around 3:00.

T had fun in the waves, but the most exciting thing, potentially, was that Clarabelle met a little white dog whose name I forget, but whose OWNER was named Xavier. He's 37, grew up in Canada, Spain, and Puerto Rico, the son of a catalán chef and his catalán wife. He is a soccer coach and, I think, former pro player; he has a son Q's age, and he and his son had been prowling the beach with a soccer ball, looking for someone to play soccer with. They live nearby and are out on the beach every day about that time, he said, trying to scare up a game. I told them about Q and the awful irony that he loved soccer so much he'd skipped THIS PARTICULAR afternoon at the beach to watch the game. (His friends Ada and Karen are at that game, so that might also have kept him home.) We chatted for a long time (T thought it far too long), and parted determined to meet up again on the beach. I have very high hopes. Oh - He also highly recommends SPADI, says that if he hadn't been scheduled to spend July with his son (he and the boy's mother have split), he'd have been contracted to coach there. A great chance meeting, and now we'll be on the lookout for each other on the beach. Could be good, fertile stuff, socially speaking.

Clarabelle met a new friend, then, and many others, including a gorgeous formerly-feral dog named Selva, owned by a crunchy-granola Spanish couple who appear to have come here a few years ago as partiers and never left. Such a gorgeous animal - color and ears of a dingo, with a pleasant amount of chub covering the ribs in revenge for the first four months of her life before Iker (that's the man's name) found her, living on a remote beach (called "Playa la Selva"), surviving on lizards. Never barked, hardly left her owners' side except to run with Clarabelle. Great, great dog. So, wave-leaping and friend-making until 5:00, then back home, where Janneke and I took turns hitting the street for exercise.

I ran to the end of the new Dos Hermanos Bridge, then back again, all along Ashford Avenue. I've been going barefoot all I can around San Juan, and running barefoot on the beach and on the street on alternate days, and I tell you, my feet are getting to be downright tough. I picked up some pretty good speed today, nearly heedless of the terrain or the surface, though always prudent, and while it was a shortish run, it gave me a lot of confidence. We'll see how the tootsies feel tomorrow, as to whether I do the beach or the street, but progress is steady and is beginning to be steep. Big fun it is, to run again, after so many years of non-running and then injury-plagued minimalist-shoe running. I feel right now like I'm never going back to shod runnin'.

Evening of leftovers and early to bed - kids have been yawning a lot lately. Perhaps tonight I can make some headway on some personal projects - it isn't even 9:00, kids are about to be in bed, and I've done this. Lookin' good.

Hasta la pasta!

San Juan: Even Tuesdays Are Memorable

Tuesday dawned ominously in Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico. The laws of nature and physics, it appears, have been suspended; everything is topsy-turvey, nothing makes sense. For I, Joe Johnson, husband of Janneke van de Stadt, was the first to get out of bed.

Took the dog for a walk, received confirmation from the renter that all internet issues have been resolved, and set out to do some morning chores, sans kids, on my own. Namely:

Find a bookstore called "La librería mágica", where I would purchase a copy of our old graduate school friend DiNora's novel, which I had learned about when I bumped into her in Cincinnati. Both of us do the ETS correcting gig, it turns out. I had the address - 013 Ponce De León, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. I know Ponce de León well, you may recall from the last time we were here - this would be a cinch.

Then: On to Best Buy, across the street from Plaza Las Américas, to get some electronic gear.

Piece of cake. An hour and a half, tops.

Drove the rental car with zest and vigor over to Ponce de León, in Santurce, just a few hundred meters from Condado, and looked for "013" - an odd address, but whatcha gonna do. Joined Ponce in the 1500 block, and whistled at how far down "013" would be. Drove and drove and drove, and the street ended long before getting sub-600's. Huh. Circled around to where I started (can't go east on Ponce; buses only), parked, and squinted at the address.

DiNora had written "#1013" - and the "1" looked like part of the "". Aaaaah. Off to find 1013.

Drove to the appropriate block, parked, walked. Found 1001; found 1051; found the vacant lot between them. Huh! What the hey?

Walked into a head shop where the smell of marijuana fouled up any drug test I'll be taking in the next few weeks. No idea, they said; she must have written it wrong. Could it be "1310"?

Good idea, I said. Not that far. Let's check it out.

Back in the car, circle arond, park, get out, look. No such address. Enter a little store; buy diet Pepsi and yucca chips; ask the woman at the counter. "No clue," she says. Huh. The guy behind me doesn't know, either, and they don't have a phone book. "Gracias," I say to both as I leave. "Que tengan un buen día." And the man says to me, "Que esté bien y seguro." Nice, that; poetic. Never heard that one before. "May you be well and safe."

Walked into a cosmetology institute, largely because it was so gorgeously air-conditioned, and managed to make eye contact with the two men who met me at the door despite their intimidating hairstyles. Asked them; one went to look for a phone book, the other began to fiddle with his iPhone. "Se llama 'Librería Mágica'," I said. He looked up at me. "Eso está en Río Piedras," he said.

My heart sank. Of course it is. She wrote it right there on the damn little card she gave me. I'm in Santurce. I read "Río Piedras", and my mind said "Santurce". Because I know Ponce de León as a street in Santurce. But Ponce de León goes for miles, and has a whoooole different set of building numbers in Río Piedras, the neighborhood where the Universidad de Puerto Rico is. Jeepers. I, ladies and gentlemen, am an idiot. He told me generally how to get to Río Piedras, but by that time I was sick of driving and decided to just go to Best Buy.

Bam - Five minutes later I was there, having driven quickly and competently and only three-quarters legally, in the Puerto Rican fashion, through many an exit and treacherous turn. I looked smugly and self-satisfied-ly about for admirers, a la Mr Bean. Found none, also a la Señor Purutu. Wait - I'm in Puerto Rico - Señor Gandul.

Bought a camera. Canon Power Shot SX130 IS. Let the second guessing....Begin!

Also bought some other stuff, including a second AT&T track phone-style pay-as-you-go. Prices pretty much identical as at home.

Asked the woman at the counter how to get to 1013 Ponce de León in Río frickin' Piedras, and she pointed me toward a bike cop who, with his partner, was hanging out in Best Buy, probably because biking around the city, you get really hot. Best just to stay where it's air conditioned. Anyway, this guy gave me the best, most thorough, most infallible directions, complete with landmarks, street names, possible missteps to avoid, and a hand-drawn map. It was as if he'd been waiting years for someone to ask him how to get to just that specific librería. When he sent me off with a handshake, I wanted to hug him. Glad I didn't. Dude was jacked.

The directions led me straight there, where I found DiNora's book in a matter of seconds and then sniffed my way back to Condado. All errands accomplished. Only took me two and a half hours.

Met up with the fam at the beach, swam for half an hour or so, then home for lunch. 'Round 3:00, the kids, Clarabelle and I headed back to the beach so Janneke could work - she's got an article due in the coming days. The beach was nice, but I am limited when I've got Clarabelle - she would probably stay within 100 yards of us, but in the meantime she would lick every person in that radius, tromp over sunbathers, etc., and we had gone to a slightly more populated portion of the beach in the hopes the kids would make friends. Which they did, for a while, with one kid, a Puerto Rican twelve-year-old who had spoken to me in English at first (doesn't happen much here), but whose English apparently peters out not long after "What race is she?" (He was asking about my dog, not my daughter.)

A lot of people ask that. She's a unique-looking dog, so I get it, and I always give the same answer: "Her mother looked mostly like a basset hound." "And the father?", they always ask. I shake my head. "No one knows," I say. One guy laughed and said, "That tends to happen." (It's funnier in Spanish.)

Janneke came and met up with us again 'round 5:30, and then took off down the beach on a power walk. By 6:20 we were headed home; Janneke prepared supper, and I took off on a beach run. I like beach running, thought the slight slope that's always to your right on the way out, and always to the left on the way back, gets tiring. Nothing beats that ocean dip at the end, though. And I like running without a shirt. Don't feel comfortable doing that on the street, but on the beach? Dude. It's the beach. You're lucky I have pants on.

Or perhaps I misunderstand the nature of beaches.

Closed out the evening just now with two episodes of Mr Bean. Man, you put it all together like that, and it feels like we didn't do that much. This needs some dressing up with photographs, I think. Here are a few:



Me in the new guayabera. Taken by T. Long pants are kind of the way to go with those. Always wanted one, not sold on the look now that I own it. Story of my life.



There - Proof that Skittles is still alive. Leave the ransom under the bridge at midnight. If I smell cop, the kitty gets it.



And proof that Q is alive. Well, as alive as one can be while playing video games.



Clarabelle's been getting thinner. It might be that this food we got her here just isn't as nutritious. Upping the dosage. We'll keep you posted.



T at her work station, where she does drawings by request and writes letters and postcards to friends she made in the campground playground the weekend before last. Genius, I know.

Want proof that Janneke's still alive? Get it yourself. That lady scares me.

Not quite haiku

OK – Long day, late night. So I will limit myself to four-word observations or declarations from the day, not necessarily in chronological order:

Barefoot-ran Ashford Avenue.
Condado Beach, two hours.
Clarabelle made many friends.
Clarabelle made one enemy.
Lunch at home again.
Post-lunch birthday cake!
Post-lunch nap. (Me.)
Old San Juan: Parked!
That’s not that easy!
Saw parrots while eating.
Right in the city.
Found a great restaurant.
“Pernil”: Heaven on earth.
Kids think so, too.
San Juan fireworks suck.
Didn’t see them anyway.
Few people = beautiful city.
Driving? Easier and easier.
Tess: A born poet.
I rock the guayabera.
Clarabelle doesn’t dig absence.
Filmed many, many things.
New iMovie truly sucks.
Can’t figure it out.
No movie, therefore – sorry.
I’ll work on it!

Maps, malls, mongooses.

Well, no actual, literal mongooses.

Day 3 dawned late again. Kids stayed up watching “Nacho Libre”, and then Ma and Pa stayed up late doing all sorts of things. Which isn’t as dirty as it might sound. Unfortunately. We were preparing for the day today, writing to people, blogging, etc.; Janneke finished out the day with a couple of episodes of “Friday Night Lights”, with which I have lost patience. Funny story, there: We were counting on mailed Netflix movies last time, which showed up in the box here in the apartment building, and kept us entertained in the evenings, but THIS time, we figured we could make use of the instant view. But we arrived, and Marimer told us that due to some sort of bureaucratic or political snafu, instant view was not available in Puerto Rico. We snarled and shook our fists at the sky, but accepted our fate.

Then Janneke tried it night before last, and it worked.

And I saw on the front page of the paper yesterday morning: “Netlix por Internet Llega a la Isla”.

Our arrival coincided perfectly with the introduction of instant view in PR. Coincidence? I think not.

So, anyway, today. Janneke walked the dog while the rest of us had breakfast, and then around 10:00 AM (other things happened in there somewhere, but they are lost to the mists of time), she went grocery shopping, and the kids and I watched the end of the Australia vs Equatorial Guinea Women’s World Cup game. Upon its conclusion, we bundled ourselves into our suits, slathered each other with sun screen, and headed to the beach.

The kids entertain each other endlessly in the waves there, leaving the adults to participate as they like, or find other means of entertainment. Mine today was Clarabelle, encouraging her to swim out as far as I could, and then watching her as she timed her turnabouts in the face of large waves so perfectly that she wound up body-surfing back to shore. She kept coming back out for more, and has been a very tired pooch since.

I also occasionally broke into a sprint on the beach, encouraging her to follow me, and counted how many steps I could go before she would catch me. My best was 50 or so, but I think she was just toying with me. Pretty good exercise, and I always remained within good earshot of the wee ones.

Only an hour at the beach, though, and thunderheads chased us back. We walked into the lobby moments before the big chaparrón hit, and happily found Janneke back in the apartment to buzz us in. The kids were disappointed with the short beach day, but what can you do.

Lunch, and then the four of us bundled into the car to follow hand-printed Mapquest directions to where the two main candidates for Q’s soccer camp are located. Partly to scout out if one’s farther than the other (not the case at all), and to see if one has better facilities (one seems clearly superior). But also to get to see just how simple it is to get there and find each place. Not so bad, once you get the hang of it; we’ll go back Tuesday, when each camp will be in session, and see how they look with live players and such on hand. But the SPADI Soccer Academy is looking like a clear favorite, on the grounds of the Colegio San Ignacio. The kids were pretty patient with our zooming around town, armed with nothing but our wits (say nothing, please) and a map (which we bought from a zoned-out kid in a gas station for $3.20, who told me he was sure he didn’t have maps to sell, and almost refused to reach back and see if that pile of folded items behind him was maps, which it was. And who refused to accept a $2.00 bill, despite my assurances that it wasn’t counterfeit.). but most impressive was Janneke’s patience with me, and mine with her. No one got mad at anyone as we charged around for a couple of hours, and in the end we kept our sense of humor beautifully. Maybe we’re finally entering middle age. Or senility. Or both.

The reward for all that running around was a trip to the Plaza Las Americas, the biggest, baddest mall in San Juan, where T bought some new books. (She ran out already – the kid reads like John Wayne smokes. (Smoked.) We got some soft-serv ice cream there, too, which took the edge off the kids’ nerves. That place is vast, and it exhausted me all but completely – I can just feel the energy seeping out the bottoms of my feet in a place like that, painfully. But it was a very nice, fun, up-scale shopping experience. There was some Puerto Rican traditional music being played in one of the atriums, and we watched a few minutes of it before slouching off to Radio Shack. (They didn’t have much of a camera selection in the actual mall – I’ll have to go to Best Buy, across the road, one of these days.) Quinn noticed a lot of PR teenage boys with little tails at the back of their hairdos. And once he mentioned it, I realize he was very much right. Odd fashion tidbit on the island here.

Map navigation helped somewhat back to the apartment, but really it felt more like body memory, muscle memory of the drive. Janneke has such an amazing eye for little details from four years ago; she knew which exit to take, but then I saved the day by insisting we go straight across Avenida Ponce de León instead of going left like she wanted. We all arrived safely, and the kids installed themselves to indulge in their own brand of fun – Q with the DS, T with a book of math busywork problems (you got me – no clue why she loves that, but she does, and sings to herself as she does them (“two times six is siiiiiim-plyyyy tweeeeelve”). And Janneke went off to do some power-walking, which, she reports on her return, didn't seem like enough, so she RAN! For the first time since the kids, she can run again! Big, big news. We're just a couple of rejuvenated old forty-somethings, she and I. next thing you know, my hair will grow back. Think of it: New hair! And not on my shoulders!

The evening holds a meal, some guitar-playin’ for me, and then a lengthy period reading Betsy Burris’ manuscript. Got to get to that. I’ll mail it back to her the minute I finish it, which, judging by what I’ve read of hers previously, should not be long or feel like work. A fine day, a necessary day, an unspectacularly spectacular day.

And here’s some video of kids at the beach.

Wet Dogs Morning, Afternoon, and Evening. (Cats stay dry throughout.)

Oof-da! First full day in Puerto Rico. Where to begin?

First, with our first full night, which was restful and long. We all got up late-ish (7:00 for Janneke, 8:00 for those of us with souls), and a breakfast of cereal, bought the night before at Supermax.

Where, if any of you are scouts for modeling agencies, you should start hanging out.

And where Pueblo used to be. Pueblo was the store where we used to get our groceries, but the whole dang chain went under and was subsumed into Supermax. Which may or may not have a connection to Supermaxi, Ecuador’s biggest chain. Hard to say without access to Google and a smidgen of interest. I have one, but not the other.

We let the morning slip past us pleasantly, me resolving an issue with the renter back home and her internet access, and walking the dog around the neighborhood. (We didn’t go onto the beach, because I wanted the kids to be witness to Clarabelle’s first experience in the waves.) Janneke and T spent that period at Supermax while Q and I took Clarabelle up and down the streets, observing the dramatic shifts in property values and building quality from one block to the next. Kind of a nice walk we two had, and we got back home just as the ladies made it back. Nice timing, since there’s only one set of keys.

Lunch, and then to the beach, where Clarabelle’s first dip in the waves did not disappoint. She was a little afraid of it at first, but eventually plowed in easily deep enough to swim, and the kids had a blast calling her farther and farther out, chasing her up and down the beach. I laughed then, and laugh now, at the hotion that we brought our damn dog along. It’s just so cool. Extravagant? I don’t think so – no more so than having a dog is in the first place. If you argue that point, you don’t take your dog to the vet much, do you?

Those kids of ours wore us out. We were at the beach for four hours as a family, though I took a break to go running down the shore to where the beach peters out, which took 12 and a half minutes, and then seeing how fast I could make it back. (9 and a half.) Janneke then took off to do her power walking and scope out some shops for assorted stuff she needs. Not sure what it is. She told me, but who listens?

Late afternoon: Charades before dinner, driving directions transcription for tomorrow’s adventures (the mall, and the two soccer camps Q is thinking about, for reconnoitering purposes), and then dinner, of chicken and tomato sauce, lovingly prepared and gratefully consumed. Followed by Nacho Libre on the ginormous TV that Marimer was considerate enough to purchase for our use, and then to bed.

For the kids. I walked the dog around 10:30 in a gentle, warm rain, and assessed property values again as I went. Marimer says the crime rate’s been awful this year, and you really can see the effects of the economic crisis on much of what surrounds us. Other elements are totally unaffected, or seem to be. Life again, being unfair and inequitable. It keeps on doing that.

And so ends another day in paradise. I’ve got to go play the guitar a little before Janneke yells at me for bringing the dang thing. But then, it is late, and I’m pretty tired. Maybe I’ll do that instead of blogging tomorrow…

We're baaaaaaack!

That, my friends, was a long-ass day.

Not the one that apparently lasted four years between the last post in this blog, and this one. No no no. The one that we just spent getting here to Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico again.

It went for a couple of weeks, this day. We had to get the house ready for our renter, an actress who was going to be doing the Williamstown Theater Fest during July. We knew this; we’d known it for months, and it was going to help us finance our trip to Puerto Rico. Knowing, then, as we did, that there would be a family of three rummaging about our house (and I mean that in the nicest possible way), we had to make every damned inch of the place presentable, top to friggin’ botton, and also hide away all our personal bits and sensitive documents and troves of evidence. All of which took a hell of a lot of work, which we parsed out over two solid weeks.

Since we were going to be renting anyway, we decided to make some quick cash by renting the place out for the three nights of last weekend, kind of a trial run before the long-term renters arrived. So we essentially got the place spiffy twice, with a short stint of actual occupation in between that managed to filthy the place up considerably.

In addition to all of that, we had to pack and prepare for six weeks away. Arrange for someone to cut the yard, get the mail stopped, get health certificates for the animals, on and on. Thursday was the last day – we’d handed off the key to the renter on Wednesday evening, and had all day Thursday to fret. I mean, prepare. Well, we managed to do both, simultaneously. We finished Thursday evening and had a goodbye dinner at Brad and Betsy’s that lasted until 10:00, came home, put the kids to “bed” on the couch so as not to dirty any linens, and dragged the suitcases into the front room to wait for our ride, which was to arrive at 12:30. At night.

She was early, we piled in, and had three cramped hours in a minivan, with three adults, two kids, a dog in a crate, a cat in a carry-on cage, a guitar, three backpacks, and three large suitcases. It was pretty claustrophobic. We had to get to the airport and have Clarabelle registered with Delta Cargo two hours before our 6:48 flight. We missed the turn to the gates a time or two, and were then attended by the two slowest clerks ever to refuse to break out of a slow-motion saunter between the photocopier, the stapler, and the computer, all located at the remotest possible separate corners of their work space. When one of these tortoise-people finally handed us our paper, he said, “Go, man, go, you’ve got to get to the gate. I don’t know if you’ll have time.”

We managed to miss the gates again (I say “we” – I wasn’t driving. Our expert chauffeur, a paid professional, zoomed past the turnoff for the gates. Twice.), raced to turn in our checked baggage, and hurtled over to security, where we stood in the longest, most slow-moving line you can imagine. Two people – TWO! – at JFK were checking everyone’s ID and boarding pass, and then two more – TWO! – were running X-ray machines for our carry-ons. We weren’t full-body scanned (has that stopped…?), and managed to walk straight down from security to our gate, B-20, the closest one available in a stroke of luck, and straight onto the plane. Moments after we arrived, they announced they had closed the door. We were very nearly the last to board.

They had us spread out all over the plane, but Janneke and I each managed to talk someone into moving so we could have a child near us. And all I really remember of the flight after that was being cramped, having Quinn’s sleeping head on my shoulder, and the strong, serene voice of our captain telling us we were going to fly around a storm and thus lose 30 minutes or so and arrive 20 minutes late. He was very good, this guy, knew just what to include and what not to, pointed out the storm off to our right as we wheeled around it so we could tell why he was doing what he was doing. Still, I was so achy in so many of my joints by the last hour of the flight, due mostly to being over-tired, that his confident and well-spoken voice just seemed cloying and haughty at the end. What can I say, I’m an evil person. Don’t tell the kids.

Who were super troopers throughout, hefting their heavy bags (Tess’ made heavier by her insistence on bringing the actual coins from her piggy banks with her to Puerto Rico, and not the equivalent amount in dollar bills I offered to swap them for) and dragging suitcases behind them over to meet Marimer.

Marimer is a friend of Aurora’s, the woman whose apartment we had been going to rent. When Aurora found out her plans had changed and she couldn’t be out of her apartment for the whole 6 weeks, she contacted Marimer, who lives in the same building one floor up, and who was going to be away. So Marimer not only agreed to rent us her gorgeous, tastefully-decorated, comfortable apartment, but also offered to come get us at the airport. This was the first of my cell phone moments – I bought a $9.99 cell phone at Best Buy to bring along, and used it when we arrived to call Marimer. She then called me at the baggage carousel to see which group we were (we had never met), and we walked about for a minute or so, describing our clothes and our positions until we caught on and recognized each other. Very odd, this whole cell phone business – and ridiculously, frighteningly useful. That little guy starts buzzing in your pocket, and you just know, “Someone’s calling to help me!” Which Marimer was, and which another guy was a little later on.

Marimer is wonderful and warm and insisted on carrying a bunch of stuff for us all the way back to her car. We stuffed all our bags and almost all of our people into it and headed to the Enterprise rental service. (I took the shuttle, and beat them by a few minutes.)

Getting a car out of there turns out to take a good 45 mintues. It’s a holiday weekend, and lots of folks are coming home to Puerto Rico to celebrate. Our flight was chockety-block full, and it made for some really interesting anthropology at the rent-a-car counter.

At least three different families were there, in which the parents are from Puerto Rico, and the children, from toddlers to teenagers, are from the US. And in almost all the cases, the kids just about refused to speak Spanish. They would respond to their parents in English, their parents would sometimes have to repeat things they said in English because their Spanish instructions were met with “Wha…?” – It was interesting to watch. There were probably others there where the kids spoke perfect Spanish, and so I just didn’t notice. But there were definitely a number of these generationally distinct linguistic family groups.

I also began to notice at Enterprise something that continued to strike me throughout the rest of the evening, and which I don’t recall from our last visit: Puerto Rican men are jacked. Big, round shoulders, thick chests, narrow waists. Most seem to be carrying fifteen or twenty pounds extra, but a huge number look like they were serious contenders and bad-asses maybe five years ago. I hadn’t thought of them as “burly” the way I do, say, Russians, or Icelandic folks. But they are a formidable bunch. Wild generalizations: It’s what I do.

From Enterprise to pick up Clarabelle, who at this point had been in her cage since about 3:00 AM. (It was near 1:00 PM.) And buzzzz! My pocket rang! It was the guy at the cargo counter, telling me my dog was safe and sound. “We’re trying to find your building”, I said. “We’re near a Burger King, I can see a post office in the distance –“ “You’re right near by!”, he said. “Go to the post office, and we’re in the building all the way to the left. Go around the left edge of the building and up the stairs to come in.”

Cha, ching. Problem solved. Cell phones, man. I am becoming a believer.

Marimer led us to Condado, which seemed shabbier than I remembered it. But I think that was my tiredness talking, because after she showed us her apartment, and we set up the kids with “The Princess Bride” and Janneke and I hit the hay for a nap of almost exactly the length of the film, and I walked downstairs with Clarabelle to take her for a spin before an early supper, the neighborhood recovered all its magic from four years ago. I was delighted to tool down Ashford Ave with the pooch in tow, to hear Spanish all around me, to be reminded by the passersby, and by the looks I was getting, that Condado is a hotspot in Puerto Rico for gay nightlife…All fun, nice memories and impressions to have reborn again with a quick dog walk.

Barefoot. More on that tomorrow, I suspect.

Early supper at Bebo’s. I’m now more convinced than ever that there is no portion of a pig that, when cut off and heated at length or even burnt, is not stupefyingly delicious. I had the oven-roasted pork with fried bananas and rice & beans; Tess and Janneke split a mofongo con camarones; and Quinn had the milanesa de res that he’s been talking about for four years. A very, very happy reunion with our neighborhood Bebo’s. And a reunion that pretty much guarantees that if and when I step on the electronic scale that I noticed this evening in Marimer’s bedroom, I will no longer be south of 170.

Just before bed, Janneke, in her half-awake stupor, said that if we ever were to come into some money, she would love to buy an apartment in Condado so we could do this more often. Now, she may not be completely in her right mind; after all, she said that after our two-week-long day that led up to our happy landing here, sitting on a couch in her pajamas, having administered herself a shot of some liquer or other to guarantee a good night's sleep. But after all that, she's in agreement with me. I’ve been saying that for a while, but it finally appears she might be coming around. So, if any of you were thinking of sending Quinn a million-dollar birthday card, this would be the year. We’ll put the place in his name, don’t worry. It’ll all be on the up-and-up.

Off to bed, man. I’m too old for this stuff…