GUATEMALA - MAY 7, 2021-JUNE 12, 2021

GUATEMALA May 7-June 12, 2021   2021-05-07- FRIDAY - NOKOMIS-GUATEMALA CITY-SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA “Yo tambien" We are riding a yo-yo. COPA Airlines drops us south from Miami all the way down to Panama City, then, SPROING, we bounce back north across the silver slickness of the Panama Canal, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and maybe even a sliver of Belize and hit land in Guatemala City. It is 16 hours since we woke up, drove 3 hours to Miami and hopped on the yo-yo at 5 am. The next bed is a “four-hour drive” west across Guatemala. Collectivo Language School has sent Clemente to pick us up. It has promised us an “immersion experience and it starts now. Clemente greets us in Spanish. There's not much sproing left in us, and little of that is---or ever was--- in Spanish. We manage semi-perky “Ola", and “Mucho gusto” (happy to meet you) and get by on smiles all around. Elfin Clemente leads us to his car. It's an experienced Toyota hunched in a corner of the ‘parqueo'. Godzilla has beaten us to it. The right rear panel and a morsel of the fender are ripped off. Wires dangle. Checking for teeth marks would spoil the mood. Clemente gets that we have dollars, ATM cards, but no ‘Queztales’. We get he is running short on ‘gasolina'. ‘Mucho trafico' is between us and both. I have a documented unfortunate history with ravenous ATMs, but the 'cajero’ behaves, dispenses cash without protest, and regurgitates my ‘carta'. There are no teeth marks. So far so good. The message has not reached Guatemala from the ‘cardniverous’ cajeros in Argentina and Bangladesh. Wallets and gas tanks may be satisfied, but Stomach is not. Half a gummy sandwich aloft has worn out its welcome. We are hungry. I almost get it right, but Clemente, catches my ‘hambre', flips it to ‘hambriento', flashes a BIG grin. “Yo tambien", “Me, too". Connection made, details follow: “Ciudad Guatemala mucho trafico. Una hora… muy silenzio", and we're off. An hour later, the city's ‘trafico' lost in in the deep curves behind us, we're eating local specialities overlooking a mammoth view softened by the gathering mists of the rainy season. The chicken leg defeats fork and knife, the ‘chicken soup’ would cause rebellion among Jewish grandmothers, but the ‘verduras', mix of carrots, potatoes, squash, and avocado, is spot on. The staff is all charm. We forgive the Nescafe masquerading as ‘cafe'. I point to the gaping wound on his car, make gnashing sounds. He laughs. “Si, monstro”. Then, apologizes for the slight hesitation in his gait. I point to my aggravated knees, trot out my new Spanish. “Yo tambien”. “Me, too". How many more possibilities for us than “me, only". There are 30 volcanoes in Guatemala. Born of fire, the landscape is precipitous, but softened by time and an explosion of the possibilities of green, rooted in the fertility of volcanic ash. Clemente’s arms and shoulders swirl arabesques as the road cuts west, rises, falls, curves back on itself wildly through and over the eruptive landscape. We hang in the sky, then rise into the fog, lose distance to the mist, then drop down again into late afternoon light. Clemente picks his moment. “Cuarenta minutos” gets our attention. We round a curve. The landscape explodes outwards and down. Lake Atitlan and its attendant volcanoes fill the world. The view defeats our Spanish, any language. Clemente knows. He grins. I don’t remember his exact words, just the gist. “I have lived here all my life. That's not a bad thing.” He calls our host family. Maria is waiting on the road. She is wearing the colorful blouse and skirt of her Mayan people. And a big smile. Her son has even bigger wattage “Mio nombre es Jonathan". Then “Mucho gusto.” Yo tambien. Times two. 2021-05-07 FRIDAY – PART TWO - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA Maria and Jonathan are waiting for us by the pink store, radiant with welcome, grab our backpacks from the boot of Clemente's car, just above Monstro's chomp site, turn, and slip into a slit in the wall. The packs (fifteen pounds, a new low record) bump both sides. They lead us down the long, deep canyon, turn right at the end, left at the first turn, down three steps, through a heavy metal door, upstairs, and around onto the second floor, and into our two big rooms. Bags delivered, details sorted out, it’s time to eat, upstairs, in “la cocina”. The rest of “la familia", hubby Isa, and older son, Jose, wrap us in welcome. This is home for the next two weeks and already were hooked on our ‘housemates’. My Spanish is mostly gleaned from signs I read riding the subway in New York City eons ago. I remember ‘formicas’ (ants), ‘hemmoroides’ (yep, those), and ‘peligroso’ (dangerous), none obviously helpful in introductory conversations. Dennis' two years of Spanish are ancient history. So, foetal Spanish it is. Midwifed by my wildly over-inventive retrieval of real, and imagined, cognates ripped from operatic Italian, and French (some potently spot on---almost), the family's genius in getting the gist anyway, lots of miming, and all around goodwill, stories flow. Fifteen year old Jonathan wants long hair. “Las chicas" , sighs Maria, with a headshake. She mimes Jonathan falling asleep if he opens a book. Jose is the student, studying now for exams. Like their father, both boys are truly handsome. Las chicas will be lining up. We have a rip-roaring time. And eat. Our plates are rich red with eggs in a tomato sauce, and thick, fresh, corn tortillas, and sweet fried plantains. More Spanish enters one ear, rattles around looking for a resting place, exits the other ear. That must be fatigue. Food words usually stick. Like calories. (Then why ‘formicas’ , ‘hemmoroides’ and ‘peligroso’?) It's pushing 24 hours since our last bed. We get to the new ones downstairs not a moment too soon. 2021-05-07- SATURDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA “Con tequila" ‘Desayuno' is at nine. It's a huge bowl of fresh ‘fruta', ‘café’ harvested from the family ‘finca', yoghurt, ‘pan' (not tortillas), and granola, for which the Spanish is…’granola’. That we can manage. Maria knows her stuff. I translate freely. “It's 9 today, but when you start school on Monday, it's 7”. This comes with a look all mothers know. (Tomorrow, we're on our own. Maria gets Sundays off.) Maria waves down a tuk-tuk at the end of her alley and piles us in. Fifteen minutes on a corkscrew ride up the “montana" and we are way above the lake. We shoehorn out (none of us is ideal tuk-tuk size) and walk to the family “finca". Maria tests the ‘limone'.(They are still too green.) Ditto, the ‘aguacate’, way short of apotheosis as guacamole. The ‘milpa’ is just stalks, with no sign of the ‘maiz', for the corn flour, she—or the tortilla lady down the street--- will pat into those thick tortillas. Most of the café berries are ‘secco', far from ripe, but we see some red ones. “Nuestro café es dolce.” And it is, mild as the air here above San Pedro, away from the smoke of wood fires in so many ‘cocinas'. The work of the finca is not. Café harvest is in the winter. Jose will be in school. Jonathan hates the boredom of picking the beans, but pushes to heft and carry the heavy sacks. They dry the beans on the roof, but take them to be roasted. There are some drying there now. They speckle the concrete in the sun as I write this in the shade, Lago Atitlan behind me, and la montana filling the sky to the west. “El almuerzo est al la una"and at 1pm we push through the curtain into the cocina. Almuerzo is the main meal of the day. The chicken, veggie, and pineapple stir-fry is delicious. Even more delicious is Cecilia, Maria's mother. Weak in the legs she may be, but those eyes miss nothing. She has grafted a spattering of Spanish onto her mother tongue, Tz'utujil Mayan, but wades into our jumbled conversations with the fearless authority of old ladies everywhere. Bang! We’re in love. There's music outside---as there always is—and Maria whips out her ‘móvil' to show us the traditional dance of San Pedro. ‘Los hombres' move stiffly with their hands clasped behind their backs. ‘Las mujeres'? Not so much! They grab their skirts and sway and sashay, sassy and inviting. We have to ask: “Does Cecilia do it?”. She grins, sassy and inviting. “Con tequila". My hair, last managed by a desultory hacking back in Florida at the magnificent ‘do’ expertly choreographed months before in an Istanbul alley (with Gypsy band accompaniment) has needed taming for weeks. I've promised Jonathan the clippings of my ‘cabello' to attach to his, “por las chicas". The ‘barberia' is just up the street, but is it open? Maria hesitates. “Es posible". This is a very useful phrase to understand everywhere we have ever traveled. It covers the linguistic landscape from ‘whaaat?’ and ‘are you kidding’ through ‘who knows', ‘maybe', ‘it happened once', but rarely ‘yes'. The ‘barberia' does post hours: 3-7. At 5, the door is open. Barbers are usually great fun, friendly, chatty, affable. And our ‘barbero' is all of that. Ilias is a shoe-in for the live action version of the Geico gekko. With dramatic and targeted flourishes of scissor and blade he sculpts a thick ebony mop into the bare-sided pompadour that the still-too-young would be stud muffin in the chair has ordered as an entry into the world of ‘las chicas'. He looks good, but Jonathan needn't worry. By the time those flashing tools get to my ‘cabello' Ilias has figured the stud-muffin look is a no go, that my ‘nombre' is Bob, we are from ‘Estados Unidos', and with simple español, a few words in inglés, mimicry, his expressive face and hands, and lots of laughs, figures we can have a good time, barbero and gringo wise. And we do. The ‘corte de cabello’ is tweaked, shaped, agreed to be a success all the way around, a bargain at 20 Quetzales, $2.50. Good times are ‘posible' everywhere. Jonathan laughs when I deliver wispy silver curls to append to the licorice thickness of his mop. ‘Es posible' does have its limits. 2021-05-09 – SUNDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA & SAN JUAN LA LAGUNA “No problema" Sunday is Maria's day off. We're on our own for meals. She has suggested a place up the street for ‘desayuno’ . The towns around Lago Atitlan are steep staircases and ramps up the slopes of ‘las montañas', so it is up in both senses. It is also closed, or not there or, more likely, we missed a bit in the translation from español to street map. Ilias, el barbero, is open, scissors flying. “Olá, Bob". Eyes fly this way. Scissors fly that way. I worry about ears, so keep it short, which is my only choice, really: “desayuno". So does he, pointing up to the ‘mercado’, then semaphoring a turn to the right. And returns to the head in front of him. It still has two ears. A few steps into the blaze of color of the Sunday market and we forget hunger. Our senses overload, but Stomach eventually wins. Like all of its breed, ‘Comedor Flory' is home to a choice of a few cheap meals, a couple of tables, a resident grandma/cook, and no English. Our choices are ‘panquequis’' (sound it out), or black ‘frijoles’, ‘uevos’, and fried sweet ‘plantanos'. Bring on the beans, eggs, and plantains. Flory mimes her repertoire of egg styles. She corrects my choice of ‘revuoltos', to ‘revueltos', and our eggs come scrambled. It's all delicious. ‘Abuela' disappears through the curtain. We don't hear any grandkids. Maybe they haven’t turned up yet to celebrate ‘Feria de Madre’. Her mother, however, arrives, clickety clack, leaning on her ‘baston'. She gives us the once over, notices my ‘baston', shakes hers, and asks me how old I am. Her 84 trumps me, and she nods, co-conspirator in the war against Rebellion of The Knees. Desayunos for two is 40 Quetzales, a drop over $5. English and ‘touristese’ creep onto the signs towards the bottom of the street that drops down the steep slope to the ‘playa'. The street murals are their own language. “The black one" says the boat jockey. We hop onto and duck into it, climbing through and over the other passengers. They make room, without a grumble, and with several “Olás". Ten minutes later we do it in reverse and creak onto the dock at neighbor pueblo, San Juan La Laguna. Saint Johnny is famous for its street-proud people. The place is spotless. And vertical. Add a few more degrees of tilt and the road up from the dock would be a leaning wall. The lake is 5,180 feet into the clear sky. We live at 13 above the Gulf of Mexico. We feel the difference as we claw up the cobbled street. The views wipe out my arsenal of adjectives. The tuk-tuk back to San Pedro (20 Quetzales, $2.50), saves The Knees from the vertiginous descent from San Juan and from the alpine rise from the lakeshore up to our neighborhood in San Pedro. It drops us uphill from the ‘mercado’ and our ‘casa’ at the ‘parqueo', with its trees, white church, and statue of San Pedro himself, authoritarian, haloed, and luridly Disneyfied. The market has packed up. There are some women pat-patting corn meal into tortillas. There's no eatery obvious in our shuttered neighborhood on Sunday evening, so we head back down towards the lakefront for ‘la cena' . Even here, usually Gringo Central, we see few foreigners. They are young, truly, or hanging on to the last gasps of claims to being ‘young-ish’. ‘Cena' is in a ‘restaurante’, with many tables, a printed menu, and ‘abuela’ replaced by her satistfyingly hunky grandson. We pass on the ‘Big Burgers’. The ‘quesadillas con pollo' and ‘con chorizo’ are thick with flavor, meat, and cheeses. Mango milkshakes wash them down. In the narrow alley in front of our ‘casa’ kids are shooting marbles. We stop to watch. These kids are good. One overshoots. The marble ricochets off the stone wall and disappears down a grate. He turns to us. ‘’No problema'. He lifts the grate, spreads his legs, one on each edge, into a perfect flat split, then bends his torso down through this horizontal impossibility, grabs the rogue marble, reappears, unhooks, replaces the grate. And makes his shot. Tomorrow we start beginner’s classes in Spanish. ‘No problema?’ 2021-05-10 – MONDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAY 1 No problema? Uhhh, it’s a lot easier to study a language when you're 20 than when you're…er, not. Our teachers, blue-jeaned Antonio for me, and traditionally dressed Lesbia for Dennis., are wonderful. The school grounds are paradise, even by the high standards of this beautiful country. Four hours one on one. ‘Nuff said. Brains are fried. 2021-05-11 TUESDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAY 2 “Cuba Libre” My ‘cerebro' is mush, not a synapse available. Its deeply hidden trove of French and operatic Italian makes access to a lot of written and even spoken Spanish easy. But it sure messes up what comes out of my mouth, a kind of murky pseudo Esperanto which grabs onto Italian endings and French verb stems, enthusiastic, but messy. Teacher Antonio is puzzled. I’m not supposed to know any Spanish, but I get what he says, well most of it. Not so much the other way around, though he's catching on. But, it's only Day Two, too soon for the Language Fairy to do her magic. Four hours of this and I can use an ‘adult beverage'. Instead I get Cecilia. With more laughs and no hangover. Maria starts the story. This is an approximate version “I used to work in a restaurant. (This explains the gastronomic wonders that come out of her kitchen.) One day Cecilia comes to visit. The bar tender offers her “something to drink”, pours her what looks like Coca Cola. She has two, maybe three. Then she tries to stand up.” Maria starts laughing. “Cuba libres" yells Cecilia and reproduces her shaky ascent from the bar stool with the genius of a born physical comedian. She rolls her eyes, wobbles, shakes, a septagenarian Mayan Lucille Ball. And laughs her deep throaty laugh. It's ‘adios tequilla, holá Cuba Libre’. There are no Cuba libres at dinner. Maria gives us a traditional drink of ‘pinul’, natural cacao ground with corn. It's not sweet. Natural cacao is bitter, and the ‘chocolate' flavor is mild. It's a remote ancestor of hot cocoa. I raise mine to Cecilia. “Cuba libre". She laughs and does her sway. Life is good. Even if our ‘cerebros' are fried. 2021-05-12 WEDNESDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAY 3 “Estás seguro?” “Si, muy seguro”. I am very sure. There was an earthquake last night “a la medianoche”, or exactly nineteen minutes past at 00:19. The rattling windows woke me up. Then, the room shook. Antonio is skeptical. We compromise on “una temblor" rather than a full-fledged “terremoto". We get back to shaking my tongue loose from the grasp of the helpful, but tyrannical, Italo-Franco voices ruling my head. My midnight ‘tremblor' has nothing on our afternoon shakedown by Lake Atitlan. We left-right-left-right through the narrow streets and alleys from our neighborhood down the steep slope to ‘la playa’. Down here some of the walls are grand canvases of painted scenes of life along the lake or Mayan culture. A boat guy points us to a boat going to Panajachel, the biggest pueblo on the lake. The 50-minute trip out across the lake on the ‘local’ boat is calm. We stop, load and unload passengers at half a dozen pueblos before ending the run at Panajachel. Panajachel doesn’t do much for us. People bustle and smile, but shops stacked with stuff for the tourists who haven't come for a year are dispirited. We don’t stay long. Most of the day el lago is a sheet of polished lapis lazuli, sleek, deep blue, and calm. Today it is grey,with rain clouds hanging onto the volcanos. Most afternoons winds swoosh down the slopes and roil the blue into peaks of white caps. Today they also bring wispy rain. The trip back to San Pedro on the ‘express’ is spine-smashing. ‘La lancha' is small, crowded, low-lying, no match for the afternoon temper tantrum the lake is throwing. We bounce from wave to wave, spines and hips beyond protestation. I’m sure we'll be three inches shorter when we slosh onto the dock back at San Pedro. The roof and roll down sides don’t help much against the torrents the lake hurls at us. We huddle but get soaked. Then, we dock, climb out of ‘la lancha’, pay our 40 Quetzals. We're no shorter, just damp. The trip took 20 minutes. Maybe that's enough to shake loose all those French and Italian gatekeepers in my head and make room for the Language Fairy to sweep her wand. But “no estoy seguro". 2021-05-13 THURSDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAY 4 The Language Fairy has arrived. I'm stumbling through questions and answers we ‘viajeros’ will need as we travel across the Altiplano in a few weeks but I stumble in Spanish. It may be a gringofied version, but it's not corrupted by its Romance cousins. I give the cousins --- and the Latin I chanted in church waaaay back when ---their due. The connections are a puzzle I play with as I file the Spanish away. The nouns are obvious. The verbs are cagey. The plural in this one looks unrelated to the singular, but it’s the same root as the plural in French, both fossilized Latin. The ‘an' ending in third person plural is a clear cousin to the ‘ent' ending in the same place in many French verbs, even if in Spanish they say it out loud and the French, well they just stifle it. This is great fun for me in between stumbles. I can now ask if the bus will be on time, but Antonio updates me. It’s a useless question. They will never be on time. Still, it’s a useful pattern and beats the stuff I had in language class in high school. Trust me. I have never had to ask anyone in French ‘would you be angry if you found an aged purple unicorn in your garden?’ Back home we scramble to help Isa and Jonathan fill baskets with the coffee beans drying on the roof. Rain clouds gird ‘el volcan' and drops fall just as we finish. Not a bean is left out. Each bean has been hand-picked, packed into bags, carried up the ‘volcan' from ‘la finca' to the road, then down to the pueblo, and up to the roof. They spread the beans, watch over them, dry them, store them. There's no magic wand here. 2021-05-13 FRIDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAY 5 “Yo robo tu silla” laughs Maria. We've climbed up the stairs onto ‘el techo' and into the cool afternoon air to review today's lessons. ‘El volcan' eats a chunk of the sky to the west. ‘El lago’ shimmers across the east. Coffee beans dry at our feet. Maria is sitting in the white plastic chair she ‘robbed' from me, sewing glittery lozenges along the edges of a deeply red apron. It spreads over her blue and purple skirt in the making as it will in the wearing. The skirts are untailored rectangles, about 8 feet by four, one size fits all, enough to wrap slender figures as they mature into ‘traditional builds'. The aprons are about 2 feet by 3. All the women in San Pedro, even the young ones, wear the skirts and aprons, ripples of stripes, plaids, and wildly imagined animals and flowers. Equally complex designs run along the belts that tie the lengths of fabric into long skirts. These hand-woven exuberances of color are meaningful achievements of hand, eye, imagination, and confidence. They are different in every village, badges of their Mayan identity. Many women weave their own. So does Maria. We see no men here in traditional clothing. Jeans are ‘in' for all men. Baggy and droopy are not in the sartorial lexicon. Older men wear ‘sombreros', though they are restrained, closer to classic panama hats then to the UFO-esque extravagances of mariachi bands. We carry up chairs from our rooms and join with Maria and her friend in the shade. They sew. We stretch synapses to accommodate Spanish verb endings, stitch sentences silently. There is music and song from ‘las casas' that stack around us lap at the lower slopes of ‘el volcan’. Maria has not ‘robbed' us. 2021-05-15 SATURDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA A movement catches my eye. I see a man climb up stairs on the side of the white church, cross a flat roof, bend down, pick up a rope and pull. The bell rings, tinny and flat. Once, twice, then more. It’s ‘las cinquo', so we expect 5 bells, but he passes five, then rambles on, with no great rhythm. The Prelude flattens to a stop. The loudspeaker croaks alive, then settles into a numbing repetition of a prayer I recognize from my few years attending Mass in Latin as a child. The petition breaks out of my memory: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death". It draws the faithful up the steps and ramp, women all, colors bright against the white façade. They wash through the door, dim, then disappear. To the right of the steps three kids bounce skyward, fall, and laugh inside the screened walls of a bounce house. The church is one end of ‘el parque', probably the reimagined descendant of the original plaza, center of the pueblo. San Pedro himself looms large in the center, overseer of the faithful, or at least of the guys selling ice cream the women selling ‘empanada’s or ‘chuchitas’, their equally delicious cousins, the old guy trimming a palm, the kids bouncing, running, dripping ice cream. It’s a good place to be in our day off. Passersby smile at us, ‘Ola, buenos tarde', then walk on. That happens everywhere up here in the old heart of the pueblo. Every time it feels good. These are gracious people. It's not market day, so the market street is quiet, so quiet that we hear our favorite sound, the pat-pat-pat of women's hands as they flatten balls of corn meal into tortillas. We head down the slope to home. Elias, ‘el barbero’ is shut tight but I wave anyway. Upstairs, in ‘la cocina’, Maria is making dinner. Pat, pat, pat. 2021-05-16 SUNDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA “Muchas gracias" ‘La abuela' at Comedor Flory remembers us from a week ago as we take seats at one of the 4 tables in her place. The other breakfasters, smile, nod and return to the business at hand. ‘Domingo' is market day and the family's----Maria’s---day off. We're on our own for ‘el desayuno', ‘el almuerzo', and ‘ la cena', all three meals. Comedor Flory offers two choices ‘para el desayuno'. Dennis goes for ‘huevos y frijoles’ again. I try ‘panqueques'. “Con frutas?” “Si, por favor”. ‘Las frutas’ are fresh, ripe chunks, lush with flavor. ‘Los dos cafés' come without asking. They're weak (compared to that scoop-heavy, hefty stuff we brew at home) like all the coffee here, but we're getting used to coffee as hint rather than blast. We're here for the color. I'm looking for a replacement plastic ‘banda’ for my watch, and maybe a new charging cord for my increasingly crotchety old phone, but we are amenable to seduction. The open air market is fruit, veggies, and piles of cloth already seducing our eyes. Inside are shops and stalls, gerry- rigged and tightly packed with more mundane things. It's ‘show time’ for our market ‘español'. Alas, nothing we find is more than a few Quetzales, and way below the threshold for legitimate bargaining. ‘Puedo ser mas burato?’ is stowed away, unused until we need be serious enough to ask ‘can it be cheaper’. Dennis spots a candidate ‘banda' in a pile neatly displayed in a micro, after-thought, shop that specializes in things that link other things, like watchbands, charging cords, and shoelaces. It's 15Q, about $2, installed. Easily seduced I stuff a handful of shoelaces of seriously assertive colors into my backpack. I use them as ties on the fabric bags I make to keep ‘stuff' sorted in my backpack. The purple ones may go elsewhere. They would add that certain ‘no se que’ to my boring boots. That's another 15Q. The teenager in charge tries hard, but none of his charging cords--- not even the dashing pink one---slip in or stay in the port on my old phone. He peers into the port. “Hay una problema dentro.” And shows us. We can barely see the port, let alone its innards, but take his word for it. (Note: back home in ‘la casa', with laser pointer, and deep squints we see there is indeed ‘una problema’. The connection thingy is bent up. A straight pin and a few curses do the trick, a major miracle.) Back out in the light ‘el mercado' whirls. Many people are masked. All are about their business, buying, selling, visiting, chatting. The few people who notice us greet us, strangers, with ‘Buenas dias’. These are gracious people. We pass the veggies and fruits stands on one side of the street. The mangos are plump, sleek, riotous rainbows. Across the street women sit on the cobblestones chatting behind baskets stacked with skirts and aprons, colors achingly luscious in the sunlight. Dennis picks out two small squares of hand woven cloth. They are on every table to keep tortillas warm. The lady is gracious. ‘Buenas dias’ and ‘muchas gracias’ flow both ways as Quetzales change hands. Yup, 15 of them. Chairs and a tent almost fill the end of the street. People skirt around them, as do we. The loud speaker--- very loudly---sings a peppy song. A prayer meeting? The ornate coffin and twice life size photo of a middle-aged man inside the tent put shot to that guess. The chairs are empty. But ready. Señor is being sent off with panache, not hidden away, but smack in the middle of his people going about life on market day. Sometime in the afternoon, the grid snaps and the whole pueblo, all 18,000 of us, lose power. Down by the lake, generators hum in a few restaurants. Ours is run by a silver haired, ex-pat Italian ’. He joins our collection of ‘Italian Surprises’, Massimo now living outside the village of Diembering on the coast of Senegal, and cross-dresser Dario from his wondrous place, ‘Peter Pan', on the coast of Madagascar. Mangos from the market still alive in our eyes, we drink more in thick shakes, preamble to sandwiches of sautéed veggies, cheese, bacon on focaccia Then, we empty his reefer of all 7 of his remaining custard tarts to take back up the slope to the family. “Muchas gracias" says Maria. Muchas gracias, Guatemala say we. 2021-05-17 MONDAY TO WEDNESDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAYS 6,7,8 We are ‘in the groove'. We are surviving conjugations of irregular verbs, wandering lost through the confusion of the three verbs that conspire to divide up the notion of ‘to be’, loving the classes and our teachers. Our days embed us in this lovely place. ‘Desayuno’ at home, walk down the alley to school, 2 hours of class, snacks, different every day and home made (fresh mango jam, empanadas, chuchitos, tamales), ‘almuerzo’ at home, nap, study on the roof under the volcano, ‘cena' with the whole family, the day's español on display with all its warts, study, bed. Maria's meals are fantasies for the tongue. Details on request. We decide to return for a third week after we take a week off to travel. Everyone is happy. Check. 2021-05-20 THURSDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAY 9 “Tengo un secreto” Cecilia is weaving, but not from ‘coca cola'. This is the real thing, cloth in the birthing. Hundreds of threads flow in a river of stripes fifteen feet across the room to her seat. Knotted loops hold them in place. The ends of the threads are tied to Cecilia. The even pressure of Cecilia's back and bottom against a wide belt across her back keeps them taut. I used to weave, though not with this kind of back strap loom. Mine was self-contained and wound the taut and separate threads around a rotating beam that is part of the loom. The whole thing fit on a table, and now on a shelf in our garage. It is easier than Cecilia's loom, efficient, convenient. I could walk away from my threads any time. Cecilia is the loom. She laughs when we take her picture. In the kitchen Maria laughs, too. We're one bite short of a deep moan. Her pasta is that good. “Tengo un secreto". “When I worked in the restaurant, the chef told us we must always cook with happiness, and kindness, and love. I cook with love. That is my secret.” 2021-05-21 FRIDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA: LANGUAGE SCHOOL DAY 10 Spanish verbs are prone to wild orthographic wanderings. How the verb ‘ir' (to go) went to a place where ir becomes yo voy (I go), vos, vo, the famous vamos (the “we go”, “let's go” we all know from bad westerns) vais, and van, leaving not even a hint of ir in the dust I leave to historical linguists. I'm an unscathed survivor of French 101 where the verb to go is aller, but winds up je vais (I go), then continues way off the track to vas, va, gets back on track for allons and allez, then goes astray again to vont (they go), so the perambulations of ‘ir' are a bit familiar and negotiable. That’s inside the head. Between there and the tongue is impenetrable cement. Still, Antonio endures. We'll be back in a week. I'll chip away at the cement. At ‘la cena' Maria, Isa, Jose, and Jonathan work out our itinerary for getting to Chichicastenango and its famous market, where we ‘vamos' tomorrow. A boat and three ‘chicken buses’ should do it. Stay tuned. 2021-05-22 SATURDAY DAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA TO CHICHICASTENANGO “I'll be the toast of Chichicastenango.” So sang Chita Rivera on Broadway in the show ‘Bye, Bye, Birdie', way back in the 60's. She sang directly to me, sitting way back in the audience. I was hooked by the first repeat. Chichicastenango has been on my travel map for over half a century. We had two hours there in 2016, but they don't count. The real ‘Chichi' is Market Day Chichi, two incarnations a week, on Thursday, and explosively on Sunday. Saturday morning Maria hugs us goodbye. Directions in hand (one boat, three buses, three towns) we walk to the ’playa', hop on a ‘lancha’ to cross ‘el lago' to Panajachel. A guy on the boat has a twist on the Guatemala use of color. The volcanos hold the silk of the ‘lago' taut under us. At the dock in Panajachel, guys point us up the steps and up the street to our rides up the mountain to Solala. Touts yell “Solala, Solala”, and wave us up into the open back of a pickup. Other passengers sidle to give us room to stick up through the cross hatch of metal pipes that hold us all erect. We do the same as the pickup fills, then overfills. The road is a snake standing on its tail. The ‘lago' recedes, the horizon opens, the volcano weeps waterfalls. Ten minutes later we drop onto the ridge of Solala. That's two rides, and two towns down. The driver points us up ahead and to the left for the ‘camioneto para Chichi'. It's ‘camioneto’ in Spanish, ‘chicken bus' to gringos. They are retired North American school buses revived under exuberant paint jobs, and famous for carrying three times as many human passengers as there are seats, and twice that number of….yes, chickens. (We've been stuffed into the equivalent version, most memorably in Bangladesh and Ethiopia. I'm not sure, but we may have gotten betrothed to our seat mates in both countries. Propinquity counts.) The tout points us up and into the first peacocky camioneto lined up at the corner. First he checks that we're masked, then takes our temperature, and antiseptsizes our hands. Inside the teenage ticket taker spaces us out, one every other seat. This will not be the classic ‘chicken bus experience’. The chickens don’t notice. Our next stop is 30 minutes across the mountains. We pick up passengers as we go. The assistant sprays their hands and spreads them out. Sort of. The landscape is spectacular, nature showing off, all fecund, soft, and compelling on the eyes. The towns are angular hodge podges of cement, tin, stuff piled on stuff, of people making do with what they have. In Los Encuentros, and three vehicles and three towns down, we scope along the stretched arm of the camioneto kid, and follow the shouts of touts to climb into a minivan going to Chichi. The van guy sprays our hands, and spaces us out. A half hour later our van squeezes through the narrow streets, homes in on its buddies, and drops us. Three hours, a boat, a pickup, a chicken bus, a van, three towns, and about twelve dollars after leaving Maria's hugs we are in Chichicastenango. Untoasted, perhaps, but in Chichicastenango. 2021-05-23 SUNDAY DAY - CHICHICASTENANGO “Five. Not five dollars. Five Quetzales” Manuel, owner/manager of Hotel Chalet knocks on the door at 8:30. “Desayuno es listo.” Actually he says “Breakfast is ready”, but I am in espanol mode, and hear what I want to hear. Last night he checked my passport, and took our measure with his evaluation of the previous occupant of the US White House. “Just like ours, no heart and grabbing money.” Then we got our keys. This morning we get scrambled eggs, warm bread, butter, jam, and fruit around a table just outside and up a few steps from our ground floor double, in easy reach of the fresh coffee. The hotel rambles up and around three floors of this old house to a roof overlooking low rise Chichi. None of the towns we have been in or through are memorable. All are vivacious jumbles. That was Chichi, too. Yesterday. Chichi in full swing on Sunday market day is radiant, ugly duckling become peacock. And strutting its stuff. Color erupts from the cobblestones, spilling through and around every street. The weavers of Guatemala have fiery rainbows in their fingers. The cloth stalls are incandescent. On the fringes are the mundane--- combs, tools, cellphones, shampoos---spread on the road and on the same cloth, simmering on the cobblestones. We wander, then rest for a while amidst the flower sellers on the steps of the church, semi-invisible. We see one other obvious foreigner, blonde, pinkish, large. No one pays us any attention until we stop to admire, or comment. The sell is soft, embedded in smiles. As we always do, we find a keychain for our friend Nuri’s collection. It will have a history---Chichicastenango, Guatemala to Florida before it hits home on his wall in Istanbul. Here, that one tiny purchase makes us visible, viable, valuable. The stall keepers may wave as we pass, but they can't follow. The ‘trinket tots' can. This one drips trinkets, tiny, poorly carved and slipshod painted versions of the wooden masks justly displayed in museums and antique shops, art shrunk to travesty. He looks about 8, is probably 12. “Five. Not five dollars. Five Quetzales.” The accent is perfect, the consonants crisp, the vowels pure. He deserves better, probably won't get it. The opportunities here are limited. But, way north, across Mexico, maybe… Maybe. All our ancestors knew that one. 2021-05-24 MONDAY - CHICHICASTENANGO TO HUEHUETENANGO Last night the rainy season fell on us. My friend Ron Boccieri used to describe this kind of rain in Taiwan as ‘a cow p#ssing on a flat rock’. A whole herd made it to the skies above Chichi. But not before we swept into the courtyard of a souvenir shop/restaurant, a sort of mini Chichi Market Day With Privileges. While the celestial bovines did their thing, we claimed our privileges down below, cold beers. This morning is brilliant, Chichi scrubbed clean, even of clear directions to onward transportation options. Especially that. Saturday's ‘parqueo', where our bus dropped us off coming from Los Encuentros is today an empty lot. Helpful people point thataway for the bus back to Los Encuentros. Thataway, we learn, does not include turns, or distance. The North Pole is thataway, true, but don’t try walking. We hope the vehicle to Los Encuentros is closer. A helpful policeman sorts it out, caps the hand pointing thataway with words we get. We head for the ‘azul' (blue) thing ‘arriba' (up there). Beneath the blue tarp, the guy says “Los Encuentros! Si!”. And points thataway into a bus. We join the spaced out masked riders. In Los Encuentros we slip directly into the bus for Huehuetenango. We are all spaced and masked. An hour later the ticket guy reminds us that the bus doesn't go ALL the way to HueHue. But HueHue IS thataway. Dropped in a non-descript town, we follow the off-bussing cognoscenti across an intersection, up a hill, then on a dirt road, through a construction site to, yes, a huddle of buses. “Huehuetenango! Si!” and in we get. 50 meters later, the ticket guy hustles us off, points to another bus and with a big smile says something I hear as “direct to Huehue". We squeeze in, the four hundred tenth and four hundred eleventh passengers. I lose sight of Dennis. I share my seat with a skinny guy. My twelve-inch section is over the right rear wheel well. My knees veer upwards, soon to become kissing cousins to my chin. While the enterprising bus driver is off looking for a large shoehorn and some lubricant, two peddlers squeeze on. One goes on about sin and peddles salvation. The other is selling ice cream. They have their Sunday and sundae shticks down pat, slick and rote. Being a ‘bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' kind of guy, I know which I would go for. If I could move. But, at least the bus is going directly to Huehuetenango. Wrong. It is aimed at Huehue, directly at it, but also directly at every place between here and Huehue, even to places that aren't places. And to any place where there is an arm waving for the bus to stop for someone to get on, or any place where someone on the bus wants to get off, frequently 20 meters past where someone else just got off. The ticket guy jumps off once for a coke. He doesn't share. The road swirls in deep curves up and down and around the mountains. Seat mate and I shmush and meld. We don’t actually hook up, but one shmush slides us just past second base. There is music, LOUD music, from seriously compromised speakers wired to the luggage rack, and clearly bad after market choices. They are stuck on BOOM BASS, a level known to induce earthquakes, surely a poor choice in geologically fickle Central America. Seat mate falls asleep. After all we’ve shared! How like a man. Unfolded after a couple of hours, our legs regain sensation enough to descend from our ‘chicken bus experience’. Guatemalans make good travel companions, even in heaps. The entrance to Hotel Mary (mahREE, corrects the cabby) is inside a parking garage, but the room is clean, spacious, and there are torrents of hot water. It’s cheap and in a great location, cheek to jowl with restaurants, and even to a bakery with coffee. We can do cheek to jowl. 2021-05-25 TUESDAY - HUEHUETENANGO TO TODOS SANTOS “Las Cruces" Somewhere skywards of ten thousand feet, we break through the clouds. They are a churning river of white peaks beneath us, hiding the voluptuous slopes they keep green. The tall trees can't climb this high and still stand straight. Shrubs reign, though bent to sere wind and drought. Sheep forage. People? We don’t see many. We don’t stay long here. The road dives and corkscrews down…. The day starts with a breakfast of ‘mosh', oat porridge with banana, and coffee, preamble to a long amble across town looking for a ride from Huehuetenango up to the mountain town of Todos Santos. Men of that town all still wear traditional garb, and the women are famous weavers. Few foreign tourists get there. Travelers try to. We're getting better at oozing out enough Spanish so that people understand what we want and that we have no idea what to do about it. This is Guatemala and even though Huehuetenango is a big city, people are helpful. One guy walks us several blocks to a likely spot for transportation to Todos Santos, waves, and heads back to his shop. Our minibus driver adopts us. “Yes, you can go to Todos Santos, but I go only to ‘Las Cruces’ and makes a big + sign with his fingers, to let that sink in. (Aha 'The Crossroads’. Good name for a town.) “There is another bus there." We pile in, drive awhile, stop in a town and wait on a crowded street for the van to fill, then start skyward. This is La Cuchamatanes region, Guatemala's roof, a very steep and high roof, peaking at 3837 meters (12,662 feet). The roads don’t rule, they cling. Passengers pray. We enter the clouds, breech them, drop down again, level off a bit. The road splits. We stop. Our friendly driver opens the door and points. “Las Cruces". Only it's not La Cruces, all capitalized, as in a town, but “las cruces", lower case, as in well, just a crossroad. Period. There are four signs with arrows and names pointing hither and yon. Todos Tantos is neither hither nor yon. Dennis’ Maps Dot Me finds it. It's just a seven hour walk…thataway. We share las cruces with a woman, two kids, three baskets, and a guy selling peanut brittle so we figure there's some action here, ride-wise. The very dead and bloated dog probably doesn't care. We watch the woman pull pretzels from her baskets, weigh them in a balance scale, stuff and tie them into a plastic bag, then do it all over again. The kids watch us. The peanut brittle guy has a sweet smile and even sweeter, caramel darkened, brittle, which I hope my molars are not. There's some traffic on the road going thataway. None of it stops. We wait. Then a van pulls over. “Todos Santos?”. “Si” and off we go. Thataway. The road leaves las cruces in the dust and on the flats. We climb, swirl, eat our tails, dip, dive, climb again, then swan dive down the main street of Todos Santos. The seven hour walk is a thirty minute drive. Todo Santos holds tight to its valley, at 8100 feet coddled by the cloud-slashing peaks above it. It ripples over deep dips and crests. Our hotel is 100 meters up one. Up. Very up. Young Deborah and Ezequiel greet us through their masks. The place is filled with flowers. Our room is huge. Our balcony hangs over the street and under the mists, now unwrapping the peaks. We may never go back to ‘las cruces'. 2021-05-26 WEDNESDAY - TODOS SANTOS Casa Familiar and Todos Santos seduce us. This is a mountain town, grasping the slopes, hard scrabble, one road in and out, trails everywhere, caught in the mists dribbled down from the cloud eating summits way above . And, yes, all the men--- even the kids and teenagers--- wear traditional garb. We stay three nights. We see no other obvious travelers during our three days here. Signs touting walks on the slopes are all en español. It is a Mayan town, of the Mam Maya people. Their customs, clothing, language are different from those of the Tzu'tuhil Mayans of our family and in San Pedro. The men, from toddlers upwards, wear the red -striped pants, and white shirts with blue stripes and thickly embroidered collars and cuffs, even when working. We only see mature men wearing the chap-like over-pants and narrow brimmed fedoras. Women wear the hats, too. Just about everyone shoulders a brilliant woven and/or embroidered bag. Bags like these are in shop all over the country. I thought they were just invented ‘tourist schlock'. Not here. Our hotel is a family home. People come and go, peel potatoes, hang laundry, cook, stack firewood (more about that later). Two tiny chicks (one dyed bright red) cheep-cheep across the yard into the chick-sized jungle of potted plants, all in bloom. The very pregnant cat seems to ignore the chicks, but she's a cat, so who knows what plans are afoot. ‘Pollo' is a favorite dish all over the country for two-footed Guatematecos. The four-footed ones probably agree, and accept fresh ‘meals on wheels' as their due Bougainevillea climb four stories around the yard, backdrop for Debora's ‘abuela', or maybe she's her ‘tia’ (auntie) who sits on the ground strapped into her loom. Our español is up to revealing we're from Florida., but we’re sure we misunderstand her when she says she has been to Florida, to Stetson University, to teach weaving. Her husband confirms it in pre-Spanish 101 terms. She chats as she picks out balls of yarn from a deep basket to meld into a complex row of squares. ‘Celesto', she says, I make a guess and find the right blue in her basket. She nods. Maybe I'll a better grade in weaving school than in Spanish school. 2021-05-27 THURSDAY - TODOS SANTOS “Quince minutos" The afternoon mists descend, blocking the sun, and dragging the temperature down into ‘mucho frio' range. Only our thin shirts and the thick quilts in our room are between us and a stiff version of us in ‘celesto', never one of my best looks. ‘Rough Guide: Guatemala' offers hope. The Mam Maya have sweat lodges. “Si. En dos horas. Arriba”, says Debora, pointing up to the roof. She needs to haul firewood from the courtyard to the roof, fire up the logs, and heat the stones. Two hours later we follow Debora up the stairs past the walls of bougainevilleas and to our rooftop cookery. Around us the roofs of the neighbors stack up the slopes, concrete boxes harsh against the fuzz of the trees. Above them the view of mists, crags, sky is spectacular. Debora gives us our lesson in Mayan Saunas 101. She points through the low door. There's a single lazy candle for light. “Aqua muy frio aqui. Aqua muy caliente alli". Yes, freezing water here, scalding water there, no exaggeration involved. Mix ‘em or die frozen or boiled. Spanish plus great miming complete the instructions. Pour the comfy result over your head, spray water on the rocks to make steam, don’t touch the rocks, they're hot. She leaves. We strip to our jockeys out there on the roof. Eziquiel comes with final cooking instructions. “Quince minutos.” “No mas, no mas, no mas”. We crawl into the ‘chuj' . Ezequiel leaves with our clothes. Crunched down under the low roof, we sit on the brick bench, close to the logs and the hot stones, mix, pour, shiver, spritz, re mix, re pour, re-spritz, resolve to redo this. 15 minutes in and our bones are heated. We crawl out, unbend and stagger on noodle legs. The view is still memorable. I doubt the neighbors think the same of the view they're getting. I see no glint of binocs from the neighboring rooftops. There must be better shows in town than two semi well done gringos, steamed pink but clearly not in the pink of their lives. Eziquiel returns at Minute 15, leads back down to our room. Above our towel sarongs, we add steam to the mists. We are warm way until bedtime. 2021-05-28 FRIDAY - TODOS SANTOS-HUEHUETENANGO-QUETZALTENANGO-SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA “Like love. Sometimes late, but it arrives.” Debora tells us buses leave every half hour for the trip straight back to Huehue, “sin cambiarse en los cruces”, no change in los cruces. We'll wave at the signs as we pass through, The plan is to catch a bus in Huehuetenango to Quetzaltenango, where there is a direct bus to San Pedro that passes right in front of our alley. As the quetzal bird flies, it's not far all the way back to Maria's. But we're crossing Guatemala's convoluted altiplano, an origami landscape The roads snake, rise, fall, twist, in constricted spirals, folding distance on itself. We figure three legs, guessing about 2 hours each, not counting transfer time. Six hours, maybe 7. Right. We miss Debora, but get to say good-bye to Ezequiel, leave a small tip for everyone, strap on the backpacks and head down the slope to the main road. A man, wrinkled under his fedora, smiles at us, pats a spot on a concrete step. ‘Si, Huehue'. He points down. Below his striped pants, his boots match mine. “Estados Unidos.” Forty minutes later we are out of the valley and in the dust of the high flats. The bus doesn’t stop at the signs at los cruces. We wave. A bit more than an hour after that---including the many stops where someone waves to get on or bangs to get off---our microbus squeezes through a final turn out of narrow streets and the into the visual cacaphony of the bus station in Huehue. Three minutes later a tout yelling “Xela, Xela, Xela” leads us through the crowd and bustles us onto a chicken bus to ‘ Xela’, aka Quetzaltenango, and we're off on leg number two. And right on our imagined schedule. We start out in ‘pandemia' spacing, but people need to travel, and the bus needs to make money. ‘Mascarillas' will have to do. Everyone wears one. Antiseptic hand wash hangs on the door. Our seats are prime, just behind the driver and his assistant, with great views of the roadway ahead, and of the assistant's substantial ‘Joe, the Plumber cleavage’, way too close. My seat is a single right at the door. There's room for my feet and knees to dangle into the door well. Dennis shares his with our backpacks. Nobody crowds, but the ‘cheep, cheep' from a satchel as a woman passes to the back qualifies this leg as ‘chicken bus lite'. About two hours in, we rise up to the outskirts of high Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second biggest city. The traffic congeals. We ooze slowly, then puddle, dead still. The driver and his assistant/tout get out, stretch, reveal matching cleavages, chat, smoke. Peddlers swarm, sprouting ice cream, nuts, drinks, and a tray of puppy dolls with bobbing heads. A sign over the windshield lays it out: ‘This bus is like love. Sometimes late, but it arrives.’ It is. And it does. Eventually. We know we're getting close to the Xela bus station. Joe the Plumber hangs out the door (yes, hangs out is just about right) yelling “Huehue. Huehue. Huehue" to other buses and pedestrians. Impressed by the moxie, I flash him a thumbs up. He flashes me…a big smile, turns, hangs out the door and flashes me again. The streets of Xela are not bus friendly. It's slow going. We lurch to a final stop 6 hours into our 4-hour trip. Transfer to a San Pedro bus takes two minutes. Max. Then we sit, waiting to fill. The bus terminal is a great show. People move and hawk stuff. Chicken buses get a final spit polish. So do the boots of a travelling dandy chatting up his ‘chica' on his ‘móvil'. Two hours later we begin the steep drop to Lake Atitlan, still no altitude slouch at a few feet shy of a mile in the clouds. The road is a vertical Slinky, tightly wound to rock on one side and space on the other. The views of the lake and its parent volcanos draw our eyes out, not down, a good thing. The bus squeezes into and out of the pueblos along the shore. Santa Maria Visitacion, Santa Clara La Laguna, San Pablo La Laguna come and go. It's slow going until we get to San Juan La Laguna, last stop before San Pedro. Then, its no going. Tuk-tuks blooming balloons fill every street. Later, Jose tell us this is the parade of the lovely candidates for ‘La Reina' of next week’s fair/festival/fiesta. We non-royals just have to wait. It's not our show. It's a few minutes shy of 9 hours into our 7 hour trip when we say "Aquí" and the bus drops us in front of my ‘barberia’ and across from our alley. Maria is all smiles. We're home. 2021-05-29 SATURDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA Yes, but… Maria has been weaving. She shows us her work, piled and ready to be sent off to a Dutch former guest and current friend who will take them back to ‘Holanda’ and sell them for her. At ‘la cena' we tell stories while we eat chunks of avocado, creamy green islands in a soup of wonderful flavors coerced out of beef, squash, corn, carrot and cilantro. In our stories, ‘dumped in los cruces’ upstages the ‘around Guatemala by one boat, one pickup, four microbuses, and six chicken buses’ soap opera. Maria asks us how much the fare was from Xela. It's 50 Quetzales ($6.50) . Before ‘la pandemia' it was 25 ($3.25) but they raised it to 50 because they have empty seats. Now it will always be 50. That’s a lot, too much. “Isa has been to Canada. Jose has been to many places with his classmates.” She stops. “I have never been to those places. I would like to see Antigua.”. “Maria, the world comes to you with us, your students”. She laughs. The soft smile that follows says it all. Yes, but…. 2021-05-30 SUNDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA Last night the rainy season washed torrents out of the clouds. This morning the air is so clean the volcanoes are, polished, green edges, sharp against the sky. We walk up past los cruces where Calles 1-A and 2-A cross and climb on our street up to the market and ‘our' Sunday desayuno place. The panqueques are especially good this morning, crisp. Like the air. The market is brilliant, muy colorido, the mangos more orange, the tomates more red. Even the onions, most retiring of the veggies, puff up and flaunt their stuff, a brighter purple, though they are no match for the eggplants, rich in their imperial drag. But, the women rippling columns of pattern and color, are the glory of the morning, Their blouses and skirts talk, telling the story of who they are, and where they are from. I wonder what the migrant/refugee women lose when they absorb other dress, to fit in north of Mexico, in ‘el norte'. Down by el playa we nurse two cappucinos and watch the volcanos catch the mists and birth clouds. More young gringos ply the streets than did two weeks ago. They all look the same, under-dressed for this place, not terribly interesting. They probably think the same about these two fossils, except for the under-dressed part. We are glad we live way up slope, on our calle, near the market, and among the women. Mid-afternoon our neighbor's music stops suddenly, guillotined by another power outage. If there are any places open for a meal, they’ll be down by the playa, amidst the gringos. Hunger drags us off our high horses and down to the shore. Nick's Place has a generator and tables overlooking the lake and one of Mother Earth's most luscious views, now slowly disappearing behind the scrim of approaching rain. We share the porch with a local family, from abuela all the way down to a new puppy. The rain hits, drumming the tin roof, and not gently, spitting cold, wet pellets at us, driving us deeper into Nick's. Our meals are good, the beers much less so, aenemic, verging on Bud Lite Lite Lite, but we nurse them and the coffees that follow. The rains outlast us as the light fades and buenos tardes slips into buenos noches. Wrapped in a tuk-tuk we bounce back up the slope to home. There is no power up here. Small pools of light from our head lanterns get us equipped for the dark, me with this tablet and my Kindle. The dark is silent. We miss our neighbor's music. The dogs have wrapped their quarrels and the cats have nothing to comment about. Then someone sets off fireworks. 2021-05-31 AND 2021-06-01 MONDAY AND TUESDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA LANGUAGE SCHOOL – DAYS 11 AND 12. “Tu español es mejor.” Tums filled by another of Maria's ‘desayunos extraordinarios’, and travel-tested español at the ready after a week on the road in ‘put up or shut up' mode we head down the hill to our paradise overlooking volcanos and the lake. Three new students have joined Debby, John, and their two sons, so there are more teachers, a twenty-something guy in jeans and tee shirt, and two women in traditional dress. One is the wife of Antonio, my guy. He waves me down through Delfino's garden to our niche among the flowers. I jump in cold, with the trip. The words come in more or less the right order. Genders get a bit scrambled, but the verb endings come out mostly well- sorted, even if all in the only tense I know, ‘present enthusiastic’. It’s not great Español , or good Español , but its recognizable Español, OK bad Español, but somewhere in the futbol park . Call it 'gringoañol'. Antonio understands it enough to ask relevant questions. It's my first conversation and I love it. Then he says “Tu español es mejor.” It makes my day. I like this man. He is skilled, patient, and interesting. He wants me to learn his language. We land on some new territory, the messy quicksandy one of negative phrases. It seems easy, the words similar enough to their cousins in francés that they. sink in smoothely. The next day I am stuck in the mire of those peskly double negatives. My mouth is filled with sand, my brain not moving. I learn how to say “estoy frustrado”. We're not likely to hear “Tu español es mejor” again. I need a ‘boost'. Dennis feels the same. We get it at home. We chat with the family, tell stories even, over Maria's great meals. They all have forgiving ears and laugh with us as we twist and warp their language. Maria is a genius at rephrasing our stumbles. Jose provides English words when we miss the Spanish reworking of what we really wanted to say. Jonathan adds his irresistible laugh. Isa nods. And Cecilia? She's just Cecilia. After a morning of linguistic comeuppance, this is tonic, maybe not the kind Cecilia goes for, but it does the job. The father of the husband of one of Maria's cousins--- a close relative in the local scheme of things--- has died, so most of this family goes off to visit that part of the extended family. Here, all day, happy marimba music tinkles across the roofs. A chorus of ‘Happy Birthday' tells us why. Jose fills in the details. It’s the birthday of the ‘abuelo’ of the neighbors a few alleys over. Then he laughs. “The way they sing Happy Birthday is so boring'. When our family sings it, we really sing it.” I believe him. 2021-06-02 WEDNESDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA LANGUAGE SCHOOL – DAY 13 “Loco" The last days are closing in on us. Neither of us is ready to say goodbye just yet. We want to gift the family, especially Maria. We do, with a day off and a meal someone else cooks. She beams. “Manaña, para el almuerzo. Mañana es el cumpleaños de Isa”. She knows a restaurant. So, tomorrow lunch it is. And, it's Isa's birthday. Timing is everything. “La cena es listo “ yells Jose down the stairs about 7. Dennis drops his homework, and I my ‘tarjetas magicas’, , the flashcards that bring class home every day (and keep proof of senility at bay). We head up to ‘la cocina' so ready for another of Maria’s gifts to our eyes and tongues. Maria is laughing. (A free translation will follow.) “Do you know what she did today?” ‘She' is sitting in her chair by the wood fire. ‘She' waves, flips a quick Olá…and waits. “Cecilia went swimming in the lake.” Stop. “In the lake. In the MORNING.” “Everyone else says it’s too cold in the morning. Not Cecilia. She says its too cold in the afternoon. But she shakes when she gets out". Maria grabs herself and shivers. “Loco!” Then she looks at her mother and laughs. Cecilia? She laughs. “Si". And shrugs. “Coca Cola. Doble". Loco? Not a chance. 2021-06-03 THURSDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA LANGUAGE SCHOOL – DAY 14 Happy Birthday. ‘En chino' Dennis points to Isa's shoes. They are red, seriously, majorly, unapologetically red. I have been lusting to buy a pair of red shoes since seeing them tumbled in fiery piles across the shoe markets of sub-Saharan Africa. But, aesthetics always win. As bright parentheses around Isa's futbol-toned, bronze, legs they work. On me, they'd be misplaced exclamation points falling off the bottoms of our floppy travel pants. We're a parade through the alleys down towards ‘gringoville', Maria leading, then Jonathan, Isa, us, then Cecilia, on Jose’s arm. The Clover Restaurant is part restaurant, mostly garden. There's a tattoo place upstairs. Maria knows the chef. “This is Cecilia's favorite place.” (I forget to ask if this is also the place where she had those first “Coca Cola…especials…dobles' , the ones that rocked her world, and bumped tequila off her bar stool.) Outside, an armada of gringos and gringas ride by on horses, clip-clopping on the stones through the narrow alley. Maria orders ‘rollos pollos' (chicken wrapped around bacon, cheese, spinach). We follow her lead--- she knows the chef, after all. Cecilia, Isa, and Jonathan go for chicken wings, Jose goes Asian (his favorite) with Bombay curry. Fresh lemonade goes all the way around. It's all delicious. But too much. “Doggy bags" (roughly translated by yours truly as “bolsas para perros”) gets a laugh and a snort of disbelief from Jonathan, all-consuming Jonathan. Dinner is 7:30, later than usual. Were stuffed from lunch (‘rollo pollo' suggest rolly-polly to anyone?). And the birthday cake is late. Dinner is traditional cumpleaños food, potato tamales wrapped in leaves and steamed, and a warm drink of fruit juice with chunks of fruit. Nephew Benjamin and wife deliver the cake. It's four inches high, a cartwheel of calories. The frosting on top is printed with a picture of Isa. This is a new one for us. We usually snap photos, not snack on them. Isa sails through the usual huff and puff, athlete lungs barely noticing. Then it’s time to sing. I know how this works. Fingers point, and Bob and Dennnis are tagged to sing. This is our family. We want to save their ears. I am prepared. I tap my phone and Isa is serenaded with the universal ‘Happy Birthday Song'….in Chinese. To much applause. Distraction successful, we attack the cake. The cake is still warm, the icing not overly sweet. The slabs Maria hacks off the cartwheel go down easily, the photo of Isa adding just a hint of ‘no se que'. Perhaps cannibalism? Isa springs his news. His name is on the list. He has his visa and will go to Canada next week to pick cherries. It's a true gift. He'll be away three months, but will earn a lot of ‘dinero'. There's a lot to celebrate, and we do, loudly and happily. And ‘con amor'. 2021-06-04 FRIDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA LANGUAGE SCHOOL – DAY 15 My last day with Antonio is a new day with a friend. I am semi-somnolent from too many ‘tamales de papas' and that one godzilla slab of Isa’s ‘pastel de cumpleaños'. Antonio says his head isn't so good. I have my suspicions why. This morning Maria confirmed that Antonio's name was not on the visa list. He won't be going to Canada to pick cherries. That's a big loss of income. No, it's a total loss of income unless some students sign up at la escuela. I am his first estudianto in a year. I don’t mention it. Unspoken, our agreement is this last day will be free form, wandering. It's one long conversation, with a half hour concession at the end to introduce the structure of the most common past tense of the two common ones, and the future tense. “Practice the present tense and the past and future will be easy.” “Proximo año". Next year”. We do it in Spanish, except where stunted vocabulary and misoriented stumblings demand a road map with signposts in English. Antonio pushes both my ears and my tongue gently. We wander from ‘la geografia de taiwan' to his plans “para la tierra" around his house. They include a traditional Mayan sauna, and maybe “un orno" to make wood-fired pizza, and, of course, more chickens. Those gringos down in gringoland (my term)? No, says he, they are not in Guatemala. They are in their “fantasía de Guatemala.” Politics and religion? Let's just say we vote in the same column. He stops. Looks at me. “Roberto maybe I teach you a lot, but what I learn from you is nunca es tarde”. ”It's never too late.” That I understand the Spanish words without effort is his gift. The message moves me deeply. As our last morning ends, I give Antonio my gift, wrapped in a message to him in Spanish, printed all in upper case, with my email and phone number. I ask him to not open it until he is home. We shake hands and he leaves. We thank Nicolas, the manager for the school, the beautiful space, the superb teachers, the delicious snacks halfway through each morning. I thank Delfin, the gardener, for my lessons in flower names, and for the beauty of his garden. And we say goodbye to Debby, John, their two sons, Daniel the surfer/medical student, and Rebecca, the nurse. “Hasta luego”, all. There's no spring in our steps as we walk home. Cecilia sits in the doorway with a pile of bananas on sale, fresh from her tiny garden just above the school. She grins a big “Olá” and “buenas tardes” at us, banishing clouds. About 8pm I get a ping on my phone. It's a WhatsApp from Antonio. The message is long, but the core is this. “Te cuento que empecé el día no muy bien por las de Canadá pero tú me.lo arreglaste, así que otra vez, muchas gracias.” In Googlese: “I tell you that I started the day not very well for the ones in Canada but you fixed it for me, so again, thank you very much”. Some goodbyes are helloes waiting to be acknowledged. We will be back. 2021-06-05 - SATURDAY - SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA TO SANTA CRUZ LA LAGUNA Leaving is hard, but…“No sin ninguno almuerzo" says Maria, “Not without any lunch" So we stay, hooking onto another lesson in those double negatives (triple in this case), and another taste of Lago Atitlan fish à la Maria. Con amor. Always. Jonathan and Isa left for the fields about six, so it's us, Maria, Jose, and Cecilia. Cecilia apologizes “No puedo hablar espanol" (she does just fine, thank you.). We bow “lo sentimos no hablar Tzutuhil". That gets us a Cecilia laugh. Then, hugs all around, and we're gone. “Santa Cruz! En dos minutos!” We slalom down the steep slope to the dock, unhook from our small backpacks, pass them through the windows, climb with supreme lack of grace off the dock, down into ‘la lancha', over a few rows of benches. People make room for us. There are no land routes to Santa Cruz, just this one, a noisy bounce across the shining blue of the lake. It’s the ‘local', stopping, loading, dropping wherever a passenger waves or calls out, lacustrine chicken bus. Matching sets of gringos load on. The young and insensitive seem friendly and affable. One, fuzzy and barely out of puppyhood, ---”My name is Karma, (or Rainbow, or Moonbeam, some such, I don't remember)--- is sweet. He offers his well nibbled mango seed to other passengers. A gringa accepts. They are in their minimalist drag, all doing their thing exactly like everyone else's thing. (NOTE: in the interest of full disclosure, I was probably a card-carrying member of The Young and Oblivious when I backpacked through Southeast Asia in 1965. Back then we wandered because everything was ‘Far Out'. Now we two prefer the ‘Close In'). When I asked Antonio what he thought of the gringos by the playa, he hesitated a bit. Then…”don’t they have any clothes?”. I wonder: if they wear so little, what’s in those huge backpacks they carry around? This month's trust fund dole? Still, most smile. There's a subset without smiles, women ‘of a certain age’, always very thin, marching under their packs, always alone, faces set rigid. These are interesting, but a nod or smile goes unacknowledged. Surely, there must be something ‘buenos' in their ‘dias'. They're in Guatemala,. We creak onto the skimpy dock at Santa Cruz. To the right is ‘La Iguana Perdida', The Lost Iguana,. Its website features raucous gringos dancing and drinking at night, and pinkish one drying out under the volcanos in the daytime We go left, to the other place with rooms, ‘La Arca de Noë'. Noah is nowhere to be seen. His ‘arca' is a string of cabins and rooms anchored in the green of the slope above the lake. Juana checks us in and leads us down the stone steps, then along the shore through the garden. She apologizes”, es un poco lejo", (it’s a bit far). Maybe Eve said the same to Adam on the way to that apple. I bet his answer was ours. “Who cares? This is paradise.” 2021-06-06 SUNDAY - SANTO CRUZ LA LAGUNA – DAY 2 The rain is a loud percussion band, demanding attention at first light. Deep notes drop straight from the clouds. Higher ones drip from the tall trees. Sharp ones ping down from the understory onto the ripples of the translucent roof over the patio. A solitary bird trills a long melody, repeats it, ends the repeat on a high note, then starts again, over and over, even long after the band retires and the sun claims the day. The morning shines. We're already hooked on Noah's Ark. Last night up at Noah's restaurant, our Cuba Libres downed in Cecilia's honor, and well appreciated in their own right, the music shifts to Happy Birthday, and Noah, aka Domingo, delivers a huge birthday cake to the only other people in the Ark. Of course we are invited. Mama is turning 55, could pass for 35. Her ‘date' is her son. They are delicious. As is the cake, tall, creamy, but lacking that certain ‘no se que' of the edible photograph. We breakfast with the volcanos, in air so rain-washed it squeaks. It's settled. Two more nights here. Maybe we will review our Spanish flashcards. We do speak it with Domingo and the women who work with him. We thank Antonio, and Lesbia, Dennis' teacher. Antonio thanks me for a photo I send him of the last morning at the school, ‘Teachers with Pomegranates". Tuk tuks are the only motor vehicles on the one road in Santa Cruz. They do the straight and steep run from the dock to the Mayan village way up the slope. Down here, there is only a path along the lake. We take it. Part mud, part stone, part boardwalk, part whatever was at hand, and wrapped in flowers, it is the only connection between the dock and the lakeside houses of affluent gringos and local people as besotted by the view as we are. In front of them young gringos lounge on chaises and watch their littermates paddleboard. Glistening brown kids of the pueblo play in the water, no toys required. On the way back we follow a short trail up the slope. It ends in a futbol field. I like futbol. Team sports usually bore me beyond, well, just beyond beyond, especially American football with its arcane stop-and-goes and arbitrary (to me) scoring rules, and the snoozefest of baseball, and the unsportspersonlike violence of ice hockey. Basketball I get. I can see the skill and the balletic genius. And the ball is big. I can follow it. Futbol has all that. And…no hands. (Does all that headbutting shake fillings loose?) There is no grandstand. We join some guys on a narrow ledge and lean against a concrete wall. Neck complains when I bend Head back far enough to see the top of the gorge that hangs over the futbol green. We watch until the first goal, then walk back down past Ice Cream Guy and his over the shoulder cooler and flock of milky faced kids. Late in the afternoon, mists play with the horizon, promise rain, renege, then tease us with views of the volcanos wrapped in gauze. Domingo builds a fire. Night falls, hiding the lake, but bringing the sound of the lake licking the shore below us. There are no stars above. Across the lake the lights of the lake towns are our galaxies, closer to home. Yes, two more nights. Minimum. 2021-06-07 MONDAY - SANTO CRUZ LA LAGUNA – DAY 3 The rain is gentle, kitten steps on the roof. I commend the Santa Cruz Weather Genie for her good taste in things wet. Late afternoon she wraps the volcanos ---and the day--- in gauze. At night she washes the air, polishes it to diamantine sharpness, awakens us at dawn with percussion overtures, or today's kitten steps on the roof, to show off her work, today adding ostrich plumes and a bit of goose down to the summits. We applaud. We carry laundry through the garden, turn down the stone steps, then descend a few steps to the shore and the tiny wooden shop selling hand woven cloth…and offering ‘lavanderia' by the pound, by “mañana en la tarde". Tomorrow afternoon is fine. We may never leave anyway. Santa Cruz is two places. Down here are the few hotels, the hidden houses of the affluent, the dock, and the gaggle of tuk-tuks that run up to the real Santa Cruz. For 10 Quetzales each our tuk-tuk swerves and twists up the steep road to the Mayan Santa Cruz. Some cruceños work down at the shore, but otherwise the pueblo is unaffected by travelers. We're the only obvious outsiders we see. There are no hotels, no souvenir shops, no bars. The houses grasp the slope, really more a cliff face, and pile as needed. The streets are steep, corrugated against the pull of gravity. The white church sits at one end of its square, as churches do. Both are shrunken cousins to the ones in San Pedro. But the square is a rare flat space in all this tilt. Kids run and kick a futbol across it. Where the tuk-tuks land and take off for the flight down to the other Santa Cruz there is CEPAC, and Amigos De Santa Cruz, a cooperative for weavers that sells new cloth and recycles fabric from women’s blouses and skirts into small bags, napkins, placemats. CEPAC also has a restaurant with traditional dishes. The pueblo is not a pretty place, but…. the view is staggering. Maybe los cruceños notice. We do, and nurse our drink of hibiscus tea, lime juice, and soda water in the café atop the CEPAC workshop, in flight way above the lake. Later, down at the shore on the narrow strip of flats, we leave Noah's Ark, cross the road, passing the Lost Iguana and the tuk-tuk guys, and follow the rocks, gravel, old boards, mud, and good intentions that make the path along the lake. Like the pueblo way above, the path makes do. There is no fluff. Domingo’s food is spectacular. The black beans and potatoes are earthy, rich from the volcanos' fertile gifts, drawn from deep in Mother Earth. We do try our Spanish, in bits and pieces, more each day. Spanish, like all languages, is another lens through which to see the world. Using it is borrowing a new director and cameraperson to film the same screenplay. Who knows how it will look? This screenplay suits us just fine. We add another day here, making five. 2021-06-08 TUESDAY - SANTO CRUZ LA LAGUNA – DAY 4 Drumbeats first morning, then kitten feet yesterday, now, this morning, the roof is silent. Just the piping tweets of birds awaken the day. Our room is the last one of the three along the veranda deep in the garden. We've never seen anyone else down here way at the end of Noah's Ark. It's quiet. The trees swallow the chatter from the tuk-tuk guys back by the dock. At La Iguana Perdida hangovers keep the morning volume down, but even at full night time volume the noise loses its way amidst the trees and never gets to us. Our habit is to do a late breakfast then ‘el almuerzo‘ in the late afternoon, two meals plenty prep for Cuba Libres at sunset and into the night. Last night there were more people than just us here at sunset for their cena’. I think they are refugees from La Iguana. They're quiet, whispering conversations, español sibilant over the murmurs of the waves licking the shore below us. Still, we feel a smidge invaded. But, Carlos and Maria know us by name and smile with us. Today, the Weather Genie is doing somersaults, flipping the weather around. The wind picks up in the morning, hours early, and corrugates the blue of the lake. The launches bounce from rib to rib. It rains at noon, swallowing the volcanos. Then everything calms in the afternoon and the launches on the lake are silken. The volcanos reclaim the horizon, but haze sips their color, leaving only a wash of greys. We sit amidst flowers. Below us kids dive and swim in the lake, making memories. Ours. 2021-06-09 WEDNESDAY - SANTO CRUZ LA LAGUNA – DAY 5 “No, señor…” Butt, bones, and molars protest. The lancha hydroplanes across el lago bouncing hard down every other wave for the ten minute ride to Panajachel. We're here to sort out transportation back to Guatemala City tomorrow in time for the Covid test that will get us into Panama during our 9-hour layover and back into USA on Saturday night. My español at the dock gets us directed to an “officina arriba". The ‘office up the slope’ is a tight fit for plus-plus-sized Antonio and his forest of billboards touting his mix and match menu of how, when, where, and for how much he can get us to anywhere in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Belize, and just about any place this side of an ocean crossing. (There's surely a cousin who handles the ‘wet menu'. ) We order the combo of microbus, “mañana” at 9, loading from in front of “la officina”, for $26 each, to our digs in Zona 10, Guatemala City. It’s pricey and we'll miss the color of the Panajachel-Solalá-Los Encuentos-Guatemala trip via back of pickup and three chicken buses, but The Guatemala City Special will get us to the city in under four hours, and in time for our Covid test right across the street from our room at Hotel Quetzalroo. “Antonio's OK. I’ve used him for years”. Just-met Debbie is right behind us, figuring out how to go to Chichicastenango, there and back in one day, tomorrow, for the market. Antonio needs two people to launch her trip. If someone else shows up….then, OK, but if not…. They both shrug. She comes to the lake pueblos to bring school and medical supplies for friends who work in schools and another who runs a medical clinic (with two dental chairs). Chichi would be nice, but…how important is it? Go with it. ‘Pana’ once is worth a visit. Pana twice? Eminently missable. Since we're ‘in the neighborhood’ we hop a ‘lancha’ and bounce further around the lake to the pueblo of San Antonio La Palopó. It's more traditional, says my Rough Guide. The men wear the striped pants and shirts, says the Rough Guide. The weaving is traditional, says the Rough Guide. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Women in traditional dress meet the lancha, touting shops up the ramp, in whiney tourist-ese. The men are in jeans and tee- shirts. Empty pizza places clutter the street above the dock and bump against a string of kiddie carnival rides. The free-standing looms strung for weaving traditional cloth are fronts for shops filled with tourist schlock in eye-searing, lurid, combinations, libelous travesties spawned in aesthetically challenged sweatshops in Shanghai. Rough Guide gets one thing right. The setting is spectacular, higher and steeper than the village that hangs over Noah's Ark. We climb the ladder of twisting streets to the inevitable church for a better view, slowly to avoid a case of the bends. No town we've been in so far has been pretty, or even close. San Antonio doesn't surprise us. The jumble gets the job done, with whatever it takes. It’s a bit minimalist, and a bit cubist, but an honest effort. And another reason that fakery in the shops jars. There's no flatness anywhere in San Antonio, so no room for a plaza in front of the church. Market day eats up what little flat there is. The church hikes up its ecclesiastical skirts, and hunkers down atop a dozen narrow steps. I wonder where the soccer field is. Futbol on the slant doesn’t work. Does it? The warmth of the people of San Pedro hasn't made the journey across the lake to San Antonio. People avert their eyes. There are no spontaneous “buenos dias", though ours always gets a response. There's a deadness here. Covid killed the tourist industry, leaving this shell. We free dive back down to the lake. Oops, there won't be any lanchas back to Pana. There are pickups that go there. They leave from….the church. Up there. Waaay up there. Up we go. Again. ‘Up there’ has no pickups. But it does have new friend Debbie and a guide she has hired for the day from Antonio. He suggests a tuk-tuk, finds one, negotiates a price back to Pana for 60 Quetzales EACH, $8 EACH, steep as the slope. The driver is maybe just out of puberty, but experienced. He knows every pothole on the road. We drop in on most of them. The ride is a very long molar rattle, but it's a beautiful trip across the mountains, and through quiet Santa Catarina pueblo before descending into the traffic in Pana. Saint Cathy gets a check mark for our next trip to el lago. At the dock I hand the driver 2 times 60 Quetzales. “No, señor. 60 Quetzales para dos". And hands me back 60 Quetzales. San Antonio is redeemed. We're at the wrong dock to get a lancha back to Santa Cruz, but that's another story. Our last evening back on the Ark is damp and chill, an ill-mannered send off by the Weather Genie in a hissy fit. Domingo warms it up “El desayuno mañana?" At 07:15 ? No problem. And fixes us two mojitos. The delightful British family from last night is gone. They rescued a micro-tiny puppy from some kids were using for target practice. Having Nacho in tow---even fully prodded, tested, injected, and chipped----puts the kaybosh (?) on their plans to visit the USA on their final leg, back across the pond. “We had to take him. It was the only thing to do, really.” We get It. Just before Covid they left the UK with their seven-year old human puppy to travel for a year. Covid arrived in Africa and sealed them inside tiny Malawi for three months. They couldn’t cross the border, but could travel freely inside the country, so found a house, settled in, wandered. They loved it. And laugh. “Grab what comes. Make the best of it.” My mother got that. Today, June 9, 2021 would be her 105th birthday. She died way too young but not before finding an orange backpack (“to match my jeans", she said) and joining me in my village in Taiwan for a month. When our bus was stopped for hours behind a landslide in the mountains she gave English lessons to some high school students stuck with us. 48 years later they may still have an unmistakable ‘New Yawk’ honk to their English. Maybe they remember her. It’s nice to think they might… 2021-06-10 THURSDAY - GUATEMALA CITY “This coffee is $520 a pound.” It takes half an hour to twist up the tight curves to Solalá, two and half more to drop down gently to the outskirts of Guatemala City and almost an hour on the flats through the city to Hostel Quetzalroo. An hour later we’re in-processed in the clinic right next door, 300 Quetzals ($39) lighter, Covid nose swabbed, promised results in 2 to 4 hours, and washing down thick tortas with cold beer. The avocado and cheese don’t hold the stewed pork and onions in the roll, five inches across, and two inches thick. ‘Dessert' is finger lickin' good. Next time we'll go for the tacos. Quetzalroo manager Marcos has made us a deal. “I’ll take you to my favorite place to eat. You get my lunch. Its’ cheap.” Deal. Done. Delicious. Really cheap. Then. “Coffee!” He loads us and Israeli friend, Israeli Ita, into his van. We smell the coffee before he backs into El Injerto . El Injerto is high tech coffee addict heaven. Six hours after our last view of the volcanos we're staring at four glass jars of beans and a row of a dozen glass doohickies for turning them into the celestial brew. Only a few look familiar. None involve boiling coffee. Each affects the coffee differently, says the barista. I pick one that “emphasizes the clarity of the flavors”. Dennis picks another. We sniff the beans, both choose ‘Geisha', beans from Ethiopia (nope, don’t remember how it got that name). I lose the details about water, the heating method, temperature, and the shape of the spout that delivers the water to the doohickie and the waiting coffee. Sugar? Milk? Sacrilege. Our brews, same beans, different doohickie, smell and taste the same. Delicious. More camparison tasting would be dangerous. This is a lot of hyper-caffeinated super-annuated gringo to wipe off the walls. Or off the real coffee tables, tops made of coffee beans. Marcos has been to the two most recent (pre-Covid) great coffee conventions in the ‘happening' epicenters of coffee-dom. Those would be Korea and Taiwan. For drinkers, anyway. Neither produces coffee. The drinkers are serious. “This coffee is $520 a pound” serious. The beans originate in forests on the island of Reunion off the coast of Africa. The packaging is in Korean. Our Ethiopian Geisha is on Marcos. “I bring this energy to everything". Israeli Ita, fluent in English, and also in Spanish after 5 years here, is bouncing off the furniture prepping for a date with a ‘chica’ he met on line, or maybe on the street, maybe through a friend. The details are lost in the rapid fire delivery. Picture Robin Williams on speed. On Fast Forward. And Ita had only one cup of coffee. Another guest, Canadian, is pretty drunk, mostly coherent, potently anti-vaccine, anti-masking and anti-lockdown. And very angry. The conversation does not begin well. “The f**kers can all f**king die. If the f**king f**kers took f**king care of themselves they'd be f**king healthy. And wouldn't be f**king sick. F**k ‘em., the f**kers” There isn't much for us to add, even with a few more nouns and modifiers on hand. By midnight the f***, oops, is calmer and quite articulate about how to treat guests in the hostel he owns in the lowlands, and knowledgeable about diet, and the history of Guatemala. He's actually quite interesting. It’s too bad his last insights about what body parts require bathing, and how often, stick with us. We miss our family, our teachers, the volcanos, el lago, the grace. Priceless 2021-06-11 FRIDAY - GUATEMALA CITY “Don't **** with me boys, this isn't my first rodeo" She stands with a bowl on one hip, legs wide, buttresses for her bulk and for a face that isn't about to concede an inch. Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest facing down a room of patronizing men has nothing on this lady. She's 6 inches tall, brown clay, and all bristle. Whoever made her a thousand years ago probably knew her. I hope she wasn’t her--- or his--- mother-in-law. Until today, the humanity in the art of the Maya has eluded me. The colors are earthy and brilliant, the costumes spectacular eruptions of stylized feathers, the pageantry cinemascopic but the faces , I think, are stiff, stern, abstractly inexpressive. The lady changed that today, daring me to dismiss her, right through the glass at the Museo Popol Vuh. She's not alone. There are many of these small figures, mostly women, all personages, all smitten with life. They make me look more closely at the two-dimensional frescoes., big events with kings, gods, the trappings of self-promotion. The life is there, too. Under a stupefying head dress of quetzal feathers a sly smile tells it like it is for the dude in that outfit: “Man, I look good! Or, maybe he's sending a message to the lady with the bowl watching the parade. “Look at me now, Ma!” The descendants of the lady and the feathered Beau Brummell have charmed us these five weeks. Would their ancestors have done less? Their descendants may not have feathers of the Quetzal, but they've captured the colors of the elusive bird in the cloth they weave and wear. The techniques, designs and color combinations are inevitably harmonious. The ‘plain' white cloth ripples with as much life as its complex loom mates. All this is on display in Museo Ixchel. We carry a bit in my vest from Chichi and the cloth from Todos Santos. Eyes and imaginations over driven, we leave a third museum for next time. Marcos drops us at a warehouse that hides his friends' gallery. Young Enrique walks us through an installation of works by an artist to remember his grandmother. She loved birds, and called them to her by repeating ‘kit, kit, kit, kit'. He uses those words in his art to call us to protect nature. And he makes me remember my grandmother, long gone, but not for me. Back at Quetzalroo, Ita, our Israeli with the boundless ‘sproing' of the love child of Robin Williams and The Energizer Bunny, has struck out on last night’s date. (Well, they did bump elbows one time.) Three seconds later he is posing for Facebook photos . “Show my eyes. My eyes are good. The rest of me, I don't like so much, but the eyes I like.” He grimaces into the lens, flipping arms and expressions. “I want to show my energy.” “And my eyes.” Ten minutes later he is leaving for Antigua, stuffing clothes into a backpack while ‘sproinging' around the room, and deciding he will not stay at the synagogue in Antigua because “those Israelis are so boring.” We're worn out. The air still shimmers. Lunch is a repeat of the torta extravaganza of yesterday, with a taco al pastor appetizer, and a beer chaser. Moderation has no place on the last day of a trip. Best is the time we spend getting to know Marcos. He is kind, smart, funny, expressive, clear about his country's history. Deals are made, sealed, delivered. “Come visit us." “Come back to Guatemala.” Done!! 2021-06-12 SATURDAY - GUATEMALA CITY-PANAMA CITY AIRPORT-MIAMI Up at 3am, airport at 4, yo-yo flight south at 6, Panama City airport for 9 hours, airport food, flight back north for 3 hours, hotel at 11pm. Not sure where we are. There are no volcanos. There is a bed. Enough.