Why we love baseball

Posted on July 10, 2016 by juanzqui7

THERE’S TOO MUCH going on in our world that makes us sad, angry, upset, so I thought you might appreciate a bit of levity: 

I AM NOT a fan of writers comparing baseball to life or anything else. I think strikes, balls, home runs and balks are enough; we don’t need to add metaphors to the game. However, several years ago, after listening to my haughty French teacher in DC put down baseball in favor of “football” (soccer), and after getting tired of her questioning why anyone would love baseball, I sat down to write this essay, then translated it into very bad French. I did not change her mind, of course, but she did appreciate my effort and my attempt at humor.

I had forgotten about that essay until I came upon it a few days ago. I’ve fixed the bad French and I may have the courage to show it to my current French teacher, who couldn’t understand why I would rather go to the Astros game when I could have joined her at a bar to watch the European Cup final.

(To my soccer-loving, basketball-loving, American-football-loving friends: this is not an attack on your sport. This is just a light-hearted writing assignment in which I express my love for the sport I love.)

AMERICANS LOVE BASEBALL because it is complicated, like a good chess match. It requires intelligence, strategy and perception.

We love it because it is as subtle as a fine bottle of wine: it needs time to mature, and you cannot properly enjoy it unless you take it in at a leisurely pace. You need time to savor every move, and even more time to appreciate it and share your experience with friends and family. Baseball is generous: it gives you that time.

We love it because it has a beauty that is as deep and challenging and rewarding as those of well-crafted verse. We treat it with the same respect we afford a time-tested poem: we do not hurry it, we pause when it wants to pause and hurry when it chooses to quicken the pace, and we do not scream it out.

We love baseball because it is like a good Almodóvar film. It entertains you, yes, but it also requires that you too do some work to fully appreciate its message. There are no cheap thrills in baseball.

We love baseball because it is like a romantic ballet. It requires poise and balance, artistic expression and unceasing emotion, and an unparalleled physical dexterity.

We love this game because it is like good sex. It is not all furious and mindless automatic pleasure, but rather a series of deliberate hills and valleys, serene lulls and earth-shattering earthquakes and a sense of fulfillment, of having given of ourselves as much as we received from the interaction.

AND, FINALLY, WE love baseball because it is like life itself. It appreciates and makes use of the contributions of players with different talents and capabilities. And, as with life, the game ends when it ends, not when a clock says it must.

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‘The Talk’

Posted on July 9, 2016 by juanzqui7

I HAVE A nephew who is a deputy sheriff in South Texas and a grandnephew who is a state parks police officer. They wear a badge. They carry a gun. They stop people on lonely back roads at all hours of the day and night, never knowing what awaits them as they approach the drivers.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about them, that I don’t worry about them.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my sister and my niece, about how much they must stay awake thinking of their sons.

The horrible and cowardly Dallas shooting that resulted in the death of five officers only makes it more difficult.Jay&EJ

At the same time, that tragedy strengthens my respect for these two men in my family and forces me to ponder about the great mystery: what is that drives them – like hundreds of thousands of other good law-abiding, law-enforcing peace officers – to do what they do?

To see either of them stride proudly into a room in his crisp uniform with a badge on his chest fills me with awe and admiration.

I know that these two men, these two officers of the peace, are good-hearted people with a love for their jobs and a respect for those they serve and protect. I know this because I know them and because I know their parents and I know that their parents have instilled in them a deep understanding that all humans deserve to be treated with respect and decency, regardless of their status in life – and regardless of what side of the law they are on.

That much I know.

WHAT I DON’T know, and what concerns me, is whether their bosses have made it their mission to instill in their men and women the same respect for all humans, and a respect for the law as it is applies to all people.

I hope they have, but I don’t know.

We hear a lot these days about “the talk” that African American parents need to have with their young sons about how best to keep themselves from becoming the latest young black soul to have his life erased by a crazed cop.

What we don’t hear about ­– and what we desperately need – is the talk that someone – a police chief, a sheriff, a constable, a city manager, a mayor – should have with every police officer in every governmental entity in this country, on a regular basis.

Yes, the talk.

About human rights and civil rights and the Constitution, and about how every person deserves to be treated with dignity and decency.

About how respect is a two-way thing.

About the fact that a badge does not bestow upon them unbridled authority but, rather, represents the responsibility that the people, through their government, have placed on them to enforce the law – not become the law.

JUDGING BY THE almost daily dose of videos showing unspeakable acts of violence at the hands of officers, it is obvious that this talk is not taking place in enough jurisdictions. And because it isn’t, the deaths and the insane retaliatory actions continue. We owe it to ourselves – and to these men and women in uniform – to demand that this talk takes place, every day and in every jurisdiction across the country.

 

 

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Damn It, Black Lives Matter

Posted on July 7, 2016 by juanzqui7

Because you can never say it enough: Black Lives Matter! (originally posted in February)

juanzqui7's avatarjuanzqui

THE BEYONCE VIDEO and Super Bowl appearance has brought the “Black Lives Matter” concept back into the headlines. And sadly, most Americans still don’t get it. They don’t get what it’s all about.

I’m embarrassed to admit that even though I have been, from the start, in total support of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was not until recently that I was able to fully understand it and to be able to explain it – to myself, at least.

What made it difficult for me was that, like most Americans, I viewed “Black lives matter” as a declarative statement. When you see it as such, it is easy to understand why the typical response of Bernie Sanders and others was, “Well, all lives matter.”

That’s a natural response for any human being who doesn’t understand that Black Lives Matter is not a declaration, it is a response – a…

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Moving forward: 14 random thoughts on turning 70

Posted on July 7, 2016 by juanzqui7

FIVE YEARS AGO, as I was about to turn 65, I posted an item on this blog called “54 Random Thoughts on the Eve of My Entering Geezerhood.” Here’s an additional 14 thoughts as I turn 70.

1. If one more person utters the words, “the Big One,” or “The Big Seven-Oh,” I swear to the gods that I’ll vote for Donald Trump in November.
2. The French have it right. Instead of saying 70, they say sixty-ten (soixante-dix). Seventy-one is sixty-eleven, and so on, until you get to 80, and then it’s four twenties (quatre-vingts). Ninety is four-twenties-ten. But they’re fooling themselves, I guess, because eventually they reach 100 and 100 is … well, 100, plain and stark. And old. Ancient.
3. I still think of myself as a young man. Maybe when I turn 80 I’ll feel like an old man. The trouble is I don’t really have any concept as to how I’m supposed to feel. There are no books, no manuals to tell me how a man who has been on this earth this long is supposed to feel. If there were, I doubt I’d read them.
4. I know I’m old and I don’t pretend to be otherwise, regardless of how young I may feel. I’m reminded of my age every day, whenever I nod to my reflection in the mirror. I’ve been living with a bad shoulder for almost a year and with a bad back for two decades, so every time I move a muscle I am reminded of how long this body has been toiling away at life.
5. When my body doesn’t rudely remind me of my age, other people do. The doctor I saw for my shoulder, for instance, prefaced every other sentence with the refrain, “Well,

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Portrait of the artist as a 70-year-old

you’re 69 years old,” as if I needed to be reminded of that vital statistic. And recently I became friends with a young Colombian couple. She is my classmate at the Alliance Française and he is a composer/pianist who teaches at Houston Community College. I love being around them because they are so full of life, of enthusiasm, but every time I see them I am reminded of the age difference when he calls me, “Don Juan.” I welcome that, though. I believe that the bowing in respect to a life lived long through the use of usted instead of tu – and the use of Don or Doña before first names – is a noble and useful tradition. In fact, for some time now, I’ve demanded of Siri that it address me as “Don Juan.” And he dutifully complies. (That’s right, my Siri is a guy, and he talks like a Brit; makes me feel as if I have a butler.)
6. I am in relatively good health. I still do my gym ritual three to five times a week, despite my bad shoulder (just yesterday I nudged up the weight on the leg press one more notch, to 405 pounds). I still ride my bike to the gym, and on days I don’t go to the gym, I ride along the bayou paths, a good 10 to 13 miles. Despite all that exercise, I still eat too much and I drink too much, and so I continue to be fat.
7. I find myself thinking about death more often, even though I’m probably doomed to live quite a few more years, given my family’s nasty habit of living long lives (both of my grandfathers, one grandmother and both parents died in their 80s. One aunt lived to be 103. My oldest sister just turned 87). I’m not saying I’m looking forward to dying, but I think I’m beginning to approach an understanding of how really old people who have outlived their siblings, spouses and friends can decide that enough is enough, it’s time to go. Mi Tía Pancha (Francisca Morín), who also died in her 80s, outliving most of her siblings, once told my sisters that she was embarrassed at having lived so long. “¡Que vergüenza!” she said. I think that’ll be my attitude should I get really old. Life is good. It’s fun, mostly. It’s worth living. But I’m convinced that there comes a time when we all realize that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
8. Little by little, things that I had seen as irreplaceable – those constants of my life that have been sources of pleasure and/or inspiration – are going away, saying good-bye. Last year it was Jon Stewart and Dave Letterman saying good-by. Now it’s Garrison Keillor. They’re gone. They’ll never be back. Yes, I can download and listen to podcasts of Prairie Home Companion, but it’s not the same thing. Saturday evenings from 5 to 7 will no longer be a special, magical two hours. Thank heaven the Car Talk guys will be around forever. They will, won’t they? I think that perhaps the rule for when you should be allowed to call it quits should be: if you’ve reached a point in your life when you no longer feel that you’re going to be missing out on meaningful and exciting things, then it’s a good time to die if you want.
9. Speaking of dying, when did that verb become a dirty word, and why? People, like all living things, die. They don’t pass. They don’t pass away or on. They don’t go home. We don’t lose them. They die, period.
10. I miss my old boss, mentor and good friend, Bob Barton Jr., a man who went to his grave failing to grasp the power of his sonorous voice and the powerful effect of his principles and courage. I would love to hear his take on the current political situation. A yellow-dog Democrat and civil rights champion his entire life, he would no doubt have plenty to say about the fool named Donald Trump. Bob was a populist, though, so he might have been a Bernie supporter were he alive. But even if he hadn’t, he would have been a lot more tolerant of Bernie’s and his army than I have been. Bob was an optimist, a man of hope, something I am not, and perhaps that’s what I miss the most about him.
11. I’m extraordinarily grateful for the many friends I have. These may not be among the most astute people in the world (they can’t be if they think I’m a good guy!), but they’re my friends and I love them.
12. Ditto for family. In a few days I’ll be heading to California for our first-ever family reunion (descendants of my parents). I had been disappointed that a number of young family members opted against attending, until I thought back to my attitude when I was their age. Family wasn’t that important then. It was something you escaped from, not flocked to. As I aged, though, family (and friends) became more important. That’s something you learn on your own, though, over time. It can’t be taught, and it can’t be forced on you.
13. My oldest sister, María Luisa, called to ask for my address. She didn’t say why but I’m sure she is sending me a birthday card. This is how she wished me happy birthday last year, in a handwritten note (in Spanish): “July 7 is a special day because on that date you first saw the light of the world … Life is meant to be lived in the moment. Squeeze the juice out of life and savor it. Move forward, always. Backwards? Never.”
14. And with that, I move forward. Thanks for reading.

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15 things to keep in mind about the Clinton email non-scandal

Posted on July 6, 2016 by juanzqui7

CRAZY TIMES CALL for keeping things in perspective. Here are 15 things that we should keep in mind in evaluating the brouhaha over FBI Director James Comey’s non-indictment indictment of Hillary Clinton:

  1. Donald Trump.
  2. Clinton may have been careless. She may have been arrogant, and she may have been stupid. What she wasn’t – and isn’t – is a criminal or a traitor.
  3. Donald Trump.
  4. Comey is first and foremost the director and defender of a vast law-enforcement bureaucracy that, from its inception, has been as concerned about its reputation as it has about protecting Americans. Investigators could not find anything illegal in the email non-scandal and Comey figured, rightly, that his FBI would be accused by right-wingers of being a tool of the White House, so he set out to cause as much damage to Clinton as possible, to prove his independence. It didn’t work, of course. Right-wingers, who would have only been happy if he had recommended a public flogging and hanging for HRC, are predictably in full-outrage mode.
  5. Donald Trump.
  6. This is the same James Comey who has foolishly, petulantly and without a shred of evidence claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement is to blame for rising crime rates.
  7. Donald Trump.
  8. As pointed out in a NYTimes piece today, there is a tendency in Washington to classify every document as secret or top secret. I would venture to guess that the overwhelming majority of the documents in question should have never been classified.
  9. Donald Trump.
  10. For almost her entire adult life, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a good, competent, intelligent and well-intentioned public servant.
  11. Donald Trump.
  12. Bill Clinton was stupid in meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and she was stupid for chatting with him, but I have no doubt that not a word was uttered about the investigation during that meeting.
  13. Donald Trump.
  14. The vast rightwing anti-Clinton conspiracy is no myth. It exists and it is very well funded and it is as determined as ever to bring about Hillary’s downfall. It has never succeeded and it will not succeed now.
  15. Donald Trump.
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On morality, God and Donald Trump

Posted on July 3, 2016 by juanzqui7

TWENTY YEARS AGO syndicated columnist Norman Solomon asked some “independent-minded journalists” across the country to propose questions they felt should be posed to the presidential candidates in the debates between then-President Bill Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas.

I was one of those he asked (at that time I was covering religion for the Austin American-Statesman). Others included Morton Mintz, former Washington Post reporter, John Hess, ex-reporter for The New York Times and Jell Nelson, also a former Washington Post reporter.

It’s interesting how the issues highlighted in the questions remain just as urgent today as they were two decades ago:

The “tremendous rage, alienation and violence prevalent among young people;” rising college costs in the face of stagnant income growth; jobless people who are losing access to food stamps and welfare benefits; immigrant scapegoating; the responsibility of U.S. corporations to employees and their families; and equal opportunity in the face of increasing attacks on affirmative action.

This was my suggested question:

“Both of you have made much of your Christian religion as a foundation of your moral values. Given that, could you tell the American people: At the end of the day, when it’s just you and your God – no political consultants, no aides, no adoring supporters – how do you explain to that God those actions resulting from your putting political gain over principle, especially when you know those actions will hurt, in one way or another, those whom Jesus referred to as ‘the least of your brothers’?”

I was going to suggest that the question would be a valid one to pose to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, except that I don’t think that it is really a valid, meaningful question in this election.

In order for it to be that, we’d have to assume that Trump has a set of moral values. We’d have to assume that Trump believes there is a power higher, stronger and mightier than himself to whom he must answer.

Sadly, we cannot make that assumption.

SOLOMON ENDED HIS column with this paragraph:

“A barrage of these probing questions would be a nightmare for Clinton and Dole. But it’s not on their worry list. In the narrow world of big-name journalism, such questions are out of bounds.”

That criticism remains valid today, for political reporters and commentators would rather ask about polls and campaign tactics and gaffes and “scandals” long ago debunked.

 

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Don’t be afraid to be an American

Posted on June 28, 2016 by juanzqui7

ONE OF THE pleasures of working as a columnist for The Houston Post was the letters (and phone calls)I’d get from readers. This was before most people had access to email, so readers actually had to go through the trouble of finding some paper and pen (or a typewriter/word processor), writing out their thoughts, and then finding an envelope and a stamp to mail their correspondence.

From the very beginning, I made it a point to respond to all letters and phone calls, even most of the nasty ones. Some (like Gary Cartwright’s, which I posted on Facebook yesterday) didn’t merit a response. I tried to be friendly in my response and to be as rational as possible – and to invite future conversations.I found that many of the readers appreciated that and some even took me up on invitations to sit together over a cup of coffee, a beer or a meal to talk about things. Some of those people are still my friends today, I am happy to say.

BUT THERE WERE some letter writers who had no desire for dialogue. They just wanted to reach out and insult. Some of them no doubt would have preferred to reach out to strangle me, if that had been a legal option. Below is an example of one such letter, written in response to my writing about Latinos, Latino culture and Latino issues:

If our nation’s culture isn’t the best, why don’t you go find the one that is? And stay there. Why is it we can’t stop immigrants from swarming to the United States? If I lived in Mexico, I would crawl to the United States (unless I was one of the fortunate, wealthy upper class). What stuns me is that anyone would struggle to get here and then want to hang on to the culture they ran away from. The one that left them hungry, poor, and hopeless.

Of course, there is comfort in the familiar when someone is in a strange place, so the immigrants want to stay together. This is becoming the undoing of the greatest experiment in the world.

Increasing divisions are being exploited by powerbrokers and wedges are being driven into the fabric of the nation. Encouraging these people to continue their former culture and language keeps them separated from the main body of this nation and jobs and opportunity.

For every one of these LULAC, Irish-American, German-American, Italian-American, African-American etc. groups, there are politicians taking advantage of this fragmentation. Columns like yours don’t help.

Remember what this nation was and how it was built – the light that the rest of the world wanted to join. Many still risk death in attempts to get here. Your multicultural garbage is doing nothing to enhance that—only to divide. Is it divide and conquer?

My reply:

THANK YOU FOR your letter regarding my column on diversity. Judging from your comments, I doubt I’ll ever be able to convince you that anything I say has merit, but I feel compelled to try.

Why don’t I find a culture that’s the best? Well, how do you know I haven’t? What makes you think I have to go to another country to find a better culture?

Why can’t we stop immigrants from swarming to the United States? For the same reason we couldn’t stop your ancestors from swarming here from wherever they came from. When my parents came here from Mexico, they did not run away from their culture. My father’s family ran away from a bloody revolution and my mother’s from a messy family situation.

Likewise, I doubt your ancestors ran away from their culture. It wasn’t the culture of the country’s immigrants that left them hungry, poor and hopeless. In most cases it was the same oppressive, selfish capitalistic forces that have kept America’s poor hungry and hopeless.

The undoing of the greatest experience in the world is not multiculturalism. It is the rampant greed that makes a mockery of the Christianity this nation claims to embrace.

Immigrants do not need encouragement by power brokers to continue using their language and maintaining their culture. They do it out of necessity until they can adapt to their new country’s ways and language.

And believe me, they do. It’s a continuing process. People are assimilated all the time without losing their culture. Assimilation does not stop because people read columns like mine (besides, if they don’t read or write English, how can they read my column?)

This nation was created by a bunch of white men for themselves. They had no idea it would become “the light that the rest of the world wanted to join.” But they were smart enough to design it as a country which all its residents, regardless of where they came from or what language they spoke, or what god they worshipped, could have the same freedoms and opportunities (except for the slaves, of course!).

They were intelligent enough to leave any mention of an official language out of the Constitution. They had enough faith in the America they created to not worry about the possibility that other languages and other cultures might seek to make this continent their home. If only people like you shared that faith.

AGAIN, THANKS FOR your comments and I hope you continue to enjoy our freedom of the press by reading columns like mine that may drive you crazy. Don’t be afraid to be an American.

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On barking dogs. And dead horses

Posted on June 28, 2016 by juanzqui7

GOING THROUGH old files today, I came across a printout of a column I wrote for The Houston Post in April 1993, a  couple of years before that paper died.

That column was never published. It was killed by my editor (without even the courtesy of notifying me he was going to do it), who threatened to “yank” my column and my job if I didn’t behave, by which, I’m sure he meant if I didn’t begin to write bland columns like his.

The column was about complaints by a woman named Anita Hause – a white conservative reader whose letters were always getting published in the paper – that The Post’s two minority writers, Bob Newberry and I, “seem to always champion the rights of blacks and Hispanics.”

Hause wondered if The Post had any columnists who did the same thing for other races.

I’m not going to include the entire column, but I thought you might be interesting the last few paragraphs:

“WHILE I LONG ago gave up hope that my columns would at least cause these critics to rethink some of their narrow views, I am not going to lose any sleep or change how I write and what I write about to keep them from getting indigestion two mornings a week.

“It’s about time these folks understood and accepted the reality that this city and this world are changing. It’s about time they understood that for every one of them, there are two, three – or hundreds – more who do appreciate what we write, and who do understand the need to have voices that are not content to follow the official establishment line.

“You may not hear from them as much as you do from the conservative crowd, but that’s because they’ve got more important things to do – like earning a living – than sitting around and writing letters after letter to newspapers.

“Bob and I are not here to make the Anita Hauses of the world comfortable in their xenophobia. There are too many other columnists in this country doing that already. We are here to make the establishment as uncomfortable as possible in the hopes that they will do something about the world’s injustices and the misery those injustices cause.

“Yes, there’ll be lots of yapping, but as Don Quixote told Mr. Panza, ‘If the dogs are barking, it means we are riding.’

“I don’t know about Bob, but I still have a lot of riding to do.”

OF COURSE, AS we all know, my riding days ended a little more than two years after I wrote those words when Dean Singleton sold my horse to the Hearst Corporation and Hearst put it to sleep.

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Orlando: Send in the clowns (don’t bother, they’re here)

Posted on June 13, 2016 by juanzqui7

A WELL-MEANING news anchor described the Orlando gay bar as “a place where people go to have fun.”

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a bar and I never was much into that scene, but here’s what I remember about it:

Yes. I went to bars to have fun and, yes, I went there to meet others, but more than anything else, I went to a bar because it was one of the few places where I could be myself and feel safe.

It was a sanctuary.

It was a place where I didn’t have to be constantly looking over my shoulder.

Writer Jeramey Kraatz (The Cloak Society), put it best on an Instagram post:

“If you can’t wrap your head around a bar or club as a sanctuary,” he wrote, “you’ve probably never been afraid to hold someone’s hand in public.”

Given the advances in the LGBT movement, I’m sure that many of today’s young people don’t feel that need to seek refuge in a gay bar. But too many still do because we still have ignorance, bigotry and hatred.

We still have clowns masquerading as politicians such as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who posted on Twitter a biblical verse saying that “man reaps what he sows” shortly after the Orlando shooting. And we still have other public officials, civic leaders and members of the clergy across the country whose silence speaks loudly, and it tells us that they think Patrick’s post is OK.

What happened in Orlando means that the sense of security many felt in gay bars around the world – that refuge, that sanctuary — has been snatched away.

That is what hurts. It is not for myself that I mourn that loss, but for the young men and women of all races who – because of the Dan Patricks of the world – still need a place to go to where they can feel safe and who are no longer sure such a place exists anymore.

I THINK MOST Americans want to believe that there really is an Islamic State connection to the shooting in Orlando.

Such a connection would make it easier for us to deal with it. We would have somebody else to blame.

But my gut feeling tells me (and early reports from investigators appear to confirm that feeling) that when all the facts are in, we will learn that there was no connection at all.

We will understand that this was the work of one very sick man who happened to be Muslim and who had a thing about gay people — and who was allowed to buy an assault gun despite the fact authorities knew there was something wrong with him.

SO, YES, IT is about terrorism, but it’s the terrorism we are inflicting on ourselves by our unwillingness to deal with the gun issue, and our willingness to look the other way when gay people are marginalized or demonized.

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Mexico City: the best-of list

Posted on May 13, 2016 by juanzqui7

Friday, May 13, 2016 | Mexico City

I’VE DONE MY  last bit of extended walking in this great city. I’ve bought what I needed to buy, plus a bit more. I’ve seen most of what I wanted to see and, even though I’ve eaten nowhere near what I had hoped to eat, this trip is essentially over. I’ve already arranged for a cab to pick me up for my early-morning flight back to Houston and all I need to do now is pack and get myself down to the hotel lobby in the morning.

It’s a perfect time to my first-ever “Best of” list. Here goes:

BEST MEAL: two ham-and-cheese sandwiches in bolillos (like a baguette but shorter in length) bought from Pastelería Madrid, across the street from my hotel. I had spent my day mostly in Coyoacán, the neighborhood where the Frida Kahlo museum is, and had had nothing to eat except breakfast at the hotel and a flan at the museum restaurant. I really wasn’t hungry most of the day but as I neared my hotel, I realized I was famished, so I decided to stop at the Pastelería to pick up something. I was hamthinking a Mexican pastry, something to hold me over until I went out for dinner later in the evening, but as I got to the store, it started raining and it look as if it would keep on raining for a while. So I quickly changed plans and opted for a couple of the sandwiches on display near the front of the story. The moment I bit into the first sandwich I knew I was in gustatory heaven. I’ve been in Rome and I’ve been in Paris and I’ve been in Spain, and I’ve had great ham and cheese sandwiches in all those places, but not a single one came close to the utter deliciousness of these 9-peso (about 50 cents) sandwiches.

BEST PASTRIES: Pastelería Madrid (see above) on Calle 5 de Febrero, a couple of blocks south of the Zocalo. The molletes (conchas, pan de huevo, whatever you call them), at the lightest and fluffiest and best tasting I’ve ever had.

BEST ENTERTAINMENT: I came close to selecting the conjunto playing, soulful norteño music in the Zocalo as part of the Día de la Madre festivities. But in in the end, it couldn’t compare to the sound of a sidewalk duo between the Zocalo and my hotel, a father and son. The father looked to be in his late 30s, maybe early 40s, and the kid was no more than 6. The father played the accordion softly as his son held out a little blue plastic pan into which passers-by could drop some coins (not many did). The son looked bored and the father looked as if his mind was somewhere else. Periodically, he would break out into song, a ranchera usually, and within a split second, the son would wake up from whatever dream he was inhabiting and join him, offering a sweet, sweet harmony to his father’s voice. Despite the boy’s bored demeanor, he sang with force and enthusiasm, to the point that at times his voice ventured into a non-harmonic plane, which only served to make it all more endearing.

BEST INTERNSHIP: At the Salto de Agua station on the pink subway line, a man and his son jumped onto my train car seconds before the door shuts. The father was holding a small box in his hands and in that box were small packages of facial tissue, mints and other items. As soon as the train began to roll, the father broke out into a litany of what he had to offer, and for how much, and just how much his fellow passengers needed what he has to offer. Standing next to him, and holding on to his father’s leg, the son joined the litany, uttering word-for-word his father’s spiel. The first-ever two-part harmony sales pitch I’d ever heard.

BEST MERCADO: Mercado Insurgentes, in the Zona Rosa. I came upon this market by accident today on my way back to the hotel after visiting the museums in Chapultepec Park. While it offers many of the same tacky tourist tchotchkes as the other markets, most of the merchants seemed to have gone out of their way to stock items that are different – better quality, more creative – enough from the other stuff sole throughout Mexico.

BEST ENTREPRENEURSHIP: Two young women, each with a child in tow, stationed themselves in the middle of a pedestrian-only street in front of a busy bar, across the street from where I was having dinner. They had something to sell but I couldn’t figure out what it was and I couldn’t imagine how they’d earn any money at that site; the crowd in the bar – youngish, stylish – didn’t appear to be the type that would patronize street salespeople. But soon I started noticing that some of those patrons would exit the bar, alone or in pairs or small groups, and go to the women who would hand them each a cigarette in exchange for a coin or two. A classic supply-and-demand story. Somehow, these women figured out that young people in bars would sooner or later feeling the urge to put a stick of tobacco in their mouths, and that they’d be willing to pay for that.

BEST MUSEUM SHOP: At the Rufino Tamayo Museum. Beautiful, stylish stuff, some of it handcrafted, from Mexico and elsewhere. I could not resist a zippered portfolio (not that I need one), suitable as a sleeve for an 11-inch Macbook, made from recycled cement paper sacks, by a Mexican company called Paper and Grass. I also had to have – had to, I tell you – an Alessi espresso coffee maker I’d never seen before. I’m sure I have at least 15 coffee makers of all kinds, but I had to have this one.

BEST MUSEUM: La Casa Azul, the Frida Kahlo museum. A beautiful home in the Coyoacán district where Frida and Diego lived. Painted a deep, bright blue, it is an enchanting place.

BEST TIME NOT TO VISIT: May. Way too hot.

BEST WAY TO GET AROUND: Walking. Its the best way to get a flavor of the city. Second-best: the subway. Clean and efficient – and cheap (about 30 cents),  it’ll get you most everywhere you need to go, or close enough. It is crowded as hell in rush hour and it’s not air-conditioned, but it works. Third-best: tour buses. Sounds hokey, but they offer a good way to get a feel of the city, not just the areas where you’re staying. I took it because I wanted to get a glimpse of the can-you-beat-this? skyscraper architecture that has got to be among the most exciting, daring and innovative in the world. Not quite as daring as what you might find in Beijing, but definitely better than anything the United States has to offer.

BEST BEER: An ice-cold Indio served on a hot afternoon as you sit in the shade outside a restaurant listening to and watching this great city go about its business.

 

 

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