signing off

new home:

the bounce, the brass

and that's it

I spoke at my sixth graders' graduation; here's an excerpt from what I said:

Cada dia por el ano pasado, ustedes abrieron sus hogares y sus corazones para mi y mis companeros. Yo voy a dejar un pocito de mi corazon aqui con ustedes.

Every day for the past year, you opened your homes and your hearts for me and my companions. I will leave a little piece of my heart here with you.


The last few days, and especially today, have been spent running around, saying goodbyes, giving and receiving presents and farewell dinners, and, ready or not, I leave tomorrow morning.

Sometime, when I have better internet access, an air-conditioned workspace, and most importantly some DAMN TIME, I'm going to put up some of the heaps of photos I've taken lately. Next year in Jerusalem.

Also, this is the end of Radio Cofradia. When I left Mississippi, I changed my blog's title and continued to use the same URL address, but that doesn't feel right for my next transition. Look forward to a new blog, a New Orleans blog, tentatively titled "the bounce, the brass." I'll post the URL here once I get it up.

Que le vaya muy bien.

campestre days

I usually use this blog for trivialities: I dig the Estelle album; I am burning through The Autobiography of Malcolm X (“I told Reginald what I had learned, like in order to get something you had to act like you already had something”); when I was in the U.S. last weekend I saw a squirrel for the first time in six months and straight flipped my wig. But not this time. This time I’ll be examining the big question now that the year is ending: what next?

Or the bigger question: why am I not staying in Honduras for a second year? Two great teachers and great friends are re-upping, one returning to our humble school to teach her class for a second year and the other moving on to the greener pastures of the big city. I mean, I love a lot of people here, and some of them seem to love me back. All I’m saying is this: I tend to have a good time.

There’s this family, originally from Cofradia, who now live in Miami. They own a half-finished house in this neighborhood called Campestre. It’s a huge, beautiful house, with an upper story and a community pool. They have some kids in our school, and they are astoundingly hospitable to all of their kids’ teachers. I spent most of Semana Santa out there, and yesterday afternoon, under skies twisted and cooled by Hurricane Alma, we rode out there in the back of a truck. Little Moises, the one who reminds me so much of Max from “Where the Wild Things Are,” played with a laser pointer the whole way. We looked at the dirty water in the pool; I rode, or pretended to ride, a horse for I think the first time in life; I shot a slingshot with a gang of boys; our hosts had bought thirty pounds of meat and three cases of beer and forced it on us all night. A good time was had by all.

And the whole time one thought kept running through my mind: “I’m leaving all this.”

We joke about our misery, the demanding children, the hot sun, the cold bucket showers, the unremarkable food, the stray dogs and the dirt streets. But the fact remains that this whole town has opened up its fucking heart for a bunch of gringos. And they do it every year.

If I stayed, and I think about staying every day, I could start the year with my head on straight, not waste so much time getting a handle on the job, really learn to speak Spanish, gig regularly at Bar Klein Bohemia, teach my kids to the moon, do all sorts of great things. But I’m going back to the States, and I feel like I’ve made the right decision.

Oh, there are the obvious reasons: air conditioning, English, sushi, paychecks. But the clincher is pretty simple. I have some people waiting for me.

The Campestre family is headed up by this guy whose ex-wife and son still live in Cofradia. He lives in Miami, and wants to take his son there, and his wife, who has full custody, must have seemed at least somewhat amenable to the idea. He came back to Cofradia with all the necessary papers to bring the boy stateside, but when the three of them went in to the embassy or consulate or whatever to sign the last forms, the mother refused. She doesn’t want him to go. Everyone seems truly concerned for what’s best for the boy, but in these tangles we make with our laws and our love, sometimes no one knows what the best thing is. Most times.

So that illustrates why I have to go back to the States: family trumps. Keep it close. Things get difficult and sometimes you need some loyalty in your corner, and no one, no one is loyal like family. I’m scared if I stay a second year in Honduras someone will die and I won’t make the funeral, or a kid will be born and I won’t be around to see it, or everyone will go on vacation without me. Sometimes, you just have to be there.

New Orleans is next, though I often second-guess my decision to leave Honduras. To fortify my resolve, I think of walking past the mansions in the Garden District, oysters after midnight, the marching bands, the wrought iron, the spook, the funk, the bounce, the brass, the masks, the black umbrellas, the river, the canals, the graveyards, the ghosts, the shacks, the streets, the streetcars, the streetwalkers, the banjos and accordions and washboards and trombones and tubas that make New Orleans what it is and always will be. I rep for the Crescent, and mark this as my message to the bright red devil who keeps me in this tourist town: you know I really hate to leave you, Carey, but this is not my home.

life is full of decisions

I was in Los Cocos Drive-In the other night, trying decide which TV to watch. On the left, a doc about North Korea. On the right, VH1 classic. Then "November Rain" comes on. Troop demonstrations in Pyongyang or Chinese democracy?

vaya the way

Absurdity is a constant companion through any Honduran sojourn. Consider the El Rey Deliciosos Hot Dog stand one passes by each day on the way to and from school. I’ve never bought anything there, but a friend has, and he described the exchange like this:

“Hi, I’d like a hot dog, please.”

“Sorry, we have no hot dogs. Only oranges.”

“But the sign says ‘hot dogs.’”

“Only oranges.”

Or consider the year-long struggle to bring wireless internet to this dusty house: after many false starts and stops, our tireless internet technician Ronny finally got the wireless to work by climbing onto our neighbor’s roof and installing a ten-foot antennae on top. Everything worked wonderfully for a day or so and then went wrong: a little here, a little there, PCs yes, Macs no, wireless no, “con cable,” si, with multiple permutations every day. Every time the internet went out, we’d call Ronny over.

“There is a problem in the mountains,” he told us, and then climb onto the roof to adjust the antennae. Had the mountain moved, we wondered. What kind of problem in the mountain could interfere with our internet?

Or consider the case of trash removal: we began the year putting all our trash in a rusted, bottomless oil drum outside our compound. Each morning, we’d find that stray dogs had knocked the can over, and were rooting hungrily through whatever we were extravagant enough to throw away (including bathroom waste; toilet paper overloads the Cofradian plumbing system, so everyone keeps a little wastebasket with a scented garbage bag next to his or her crapper). Needless to say, there’s nothing better to see first thing on a Monday morning than a few mange-stricken dogs rummaging through a bag of used toilet paper.

One day, someone went outside to take out the trash, and the can was gone. After a while, we discovered that our landlord had taken the can away.

“The dogs knock it over at night,” she explained, “because there’s no bottom on the can.”

When will we get a new can, one with a bottom, we inquired?

“You can keep your trash bags inside the compound,” she answered. To leave them to rot in the hot sun, the reader is no doubt thinking; yes, indeed, to leave them to rot in the hot sun, as well as to attract flies, rats, maggots, etc. We still leave our trash right inside the compound wall. Talk of getting a new trash can dropped off long ago.

Or consider what may be the greatest absurdity all year: this afternoon, when I put my key into the lock outside our gate, I turned it around once, twice, three times in the correct direction, then three times in the other, all without unlocking the only door to our compound. I yelled inside to see what was going on.

Paul came outside and spoke to me through the gate:

“The lock’s broken. We can’t get in or out through this door,” he told me.

How did you get inside, I asked him.

“If you go in the neighbor’s, you can climb up a ladder and climb over the fence,” he told me.

So that’s what I’ve done, twice now to get into the compound and twice to get out: climb up or down a fifteen-foot ladder, Ronny’s internet ladder actually, into the neighbor’s back yard (their house sits considerably below us on the hill). I doubt the lock will be fixed before the end of the week. In the meantime, we will continue to make Swiss Family Robinson/castle-under-siege jokes and contemplate the irony that in a sense we break and enter every time we come home.

get ur snork on/mas que palabras

“There are just two things left, man,” a bum in New Orleans told me. “There’s music…” he stopped to consider “…and the ocean.” What of the former we heard on Roatan Island was aptly described by my father as “Epcot music”: drum machine, clean bouncy guitar, well-mannered basslines, and a cheerful, middle-aged-white-guy singing lines like “In Roatan, de weather is so nice/eat banana wit me bean and rice.” Roatan’s Cool Tuna band makes Tiny Tim look like Iggy Pop, or Jimmy Buffet like Glenn Danzig.

If the music was underwhelming, the ocean was the opposite: putting my face underwater and seeing the corals and the fish was spectacular and awesome in the truest sense of the word, to think that of all that beauty living and dying completely oblivious to the noise and the worry just on the other side of the shoreline. The ocean is one thing left.

On to the second thing left: in college I complained once to a friend (a gifted drummer and French speaker, full disclosure) that I didn’t have an innate ear for languages. I remember feeling doubly disheartened by his answer: “That’s funny, since you’re musical, and I feel like people who are good at one are usually good at the other.” I was the one to admit my difficulty with language, but if my friend was right, and second-language acquisition and musicality are linked, am I a hack at something I thought I was good at? I’m sure he’s forgotten that conversation, but it still troubles me.

My Spanish has improved markedly, but is still abysmal; I can live with that. In my essay to apply for this job, I wrote: “I want to learn something. I want to speak, read, and write Spanish fluently.” That hasn’t happened, and it won’t in the next two months. I can usually hold up my end of a simple conversation, but when I listen to myself speaking in Spanish, and mentally translate what I’m saying into English, the results can be discouraging. The other day, I caught myself saying, “Ah yes, bread, yes, I understand, bread.” Though even that is a far cry better than simply smiling and nodding, my more customary responses.

So what; I guess I am doomed to always play the provincial bumpkin wishing to be a silver-tongued diplomat. The simple truth of the matter is that my priorities have changed from when I wrote that essay. The time I should have spent learning Spanish I’ve spent playing gin rummy and fooling around on the guitar. Time I wasted, or didn’t waste; why go in pursuit of lost time.

A few weeks ago, one of the kids’ mothers approached me and asked if I would learn a few songs and accompany her on guitar for the Mothers’ Day performance at school. One song, in Spanish, was called “Comprare,” or “I will buy,” and listed all sorts of confusing things the singer could buy with a smile: the weeping of the children, the hunger of the mendicant, all those things that aren’t sold (“todas esas cosas que no se venden”). I learned it without much trouble. Her other choice was more difficult: Extreme’s “More than Words.” I struggled with the syncopation, the melody, the range everything, and the first few times we sang together it truly looked hopeless.

Singing with someone is always preferable to me to singing alone, one reason being that together it’s harder to run from the stage. I’m certain we both at times wanted to give up on “More than Words” but neither of us wanted to be the timid one. We practiced every day for the week leading up to the event, and I worked on the song on my own until my fingers hurt like they haven’t since back in high school, when I first learned to play in my best friend’s bedroom. For whatever reason I really fixed on this song, so much so that it was always floating through my head, and the more I thought about what the words meant, the more I decided that Irma and I had to sing “More than Words” for the Mothers’ Day program, despite all of our unspoken misgivings, because, after all, in situations like this one that are ripe for miscommunication and so many clumsy, blundering conversations, doesn’t the sentiment behind the words trump all the little useless broken tools we are always flinging from our mouths? Don’t the fragile little things in school uniforms understand their teachers’ smiles more than they understand what they say when they say “Iamfinethankyou” and run away? Isn’t this all about more than words?

We played “More than Words,” probably for the last time, at the Mothers’ Day celebration last night; the song sounded fine, though the guitar was by and large inaudible and our voices shook with fear. After we finished, the audience clapped politely, just like they did for the kids who performed before and after, and we staggered awkwardly from the stage.

Later, for the grand finale, I played the guitar with my students as they sang “Himno de la Madre,” a Honduran folk song whose chorus goes:

En el nombre de madre se encierra
La mas alta expression del amor
Por que no puede haber en la tierra
Una imagen mas clara de Dios

Which as best as I can translate means:

In the name of the mother in enclosed
The highest expression of love
Because you can not have on the earth
A clearer image of God.

And, as we sung the final “una imagen mas clara de Dios,” a thought occurred to me again that had occurred to me the first time we practiced those lines: a clearer image of God could not be had on the earth than in those small voices singing together out of the darkness.

solo hay buena gente aqui; si usted no es buena gente, tiene que salir

Gig numero dos; Bar Klein Bohemia. I was feeling great, really kicking it, remembering most of the words and chords and my voice sounded great (to me), lots of hollers, when after an hour one of my strings breaks during verse two of “Always on My Mind.” Naturally, I don’t have a spare, and so rock-and-roll bassplayer elf Gary stepped in to reveal another facet of his mysterious persona: Gary is a rock-and-roll McGyver (whenever Gary is spoken of, "rock-and-roll" is a necessary modifier). I mean, supercrafty. He used a pair of pliers to tie a knot in the D string, and while I’m thinking “No way this will hold, a guitar string is under hundreds of pounds of pressure,” he’s bringing it up almost, almost, almost, almost to pitch. I swear: like a half-step short. Bang, the string re-breaks, puta puta mierda. Somehow, in this whole process, a second string is broken as well, turning my beautiful guitar into some giant bullshit ukulele. Playing a six-string guitar missing the two middle strings is like playing a piece of driftwood.

The music wasn’t over, though. Some hombre plugged in a bass guitar and Gary seemed to think my four-string guitar was just right. “We have a new group for you,” I told the ten people listening. “Our name is Los Gallos Azules” (Blue Roosters, homie). I settled in on the harp and the words and we struggled our way through “When the Levee Breaks.” Hey bass man, there are twelve bars to the blues, and you just do them over and over. And turn the thing down, while you’re at it, Mister Johnny Funky Bass. Los Gallos Azules dissolved after about five minutes.

But a good night. I am, of course, tres thankful to all the friends who came to see me, and my favorite part of the whole night might have been insisting to everyone that they go see Hazel’s mural inside the women’s bathroom. Now everyone is going to the beach but me.