My master is at quite a crossroads. He just returned from walking little Baby DeVille, the obedient Chihuahua-Terrier, exasperated beyond belief. Not the Chihuahua, but my master from whom I withhold the last iota of responsiveness. The weekly pressure of turning out another felicitous episode of ‘I Love Lupe’ is hard upon him. This mental tension, added to the roulette of passwords, is quite enough to unhinge the poor fellow. True, I am a canine creature bursting, nay bloated, with unconditional love. Yet that does not preclude me from some more sophisticated emotions, such as schadenfreude. Heaven knows why they say it’s a dog-eat-dog world: from my perch, on the blue-velour couch, it seems to be a human-eat-human sort of world.

My master, for example, got inside the gate of the house, open and shut in nanoseconds. Deep satisfaction derives from having successfully rewired his reflexes. Then once inside the front door, he slid his back down, exhaling deeply, already unhinged by the indulgences of the little Chihuahua-terrier who’s always game for a walk. My sidekick. Of course, what human wouldn’t be fazed by the dog sniffing at every nugget of carnitas left on the sidewalk by the taco stand. Sussing out every last morsel of carne asada, and the spicy fried chicken, laden with golden garlic and red pepper infused batter that could wreak all kinds of havoc with a dog’s digestion.

I won’t budge from the couch. But then his daughter brought me, paws first, a connoisseur of anarchy, the supreme sower of chaos, into their lives. Even now, as this self-styled scribe seeks to scale the hillock of yet another episode of ‘I Love Lupe,’ all kinds of mayhem is brewing outside. The demonic rescue dog was assaulting a visitor to our humble abode. Had she bitten the hand of our guest. Like pruning bougainvillea without gloves, each Lupecentric encounter extracted its drop of blood. Moments earlier, she was up to her shenanigans, slipping out the gate when her chief dominatrix, guard down ever so briefly, let the gate swing wide open. Off Lupe ran.

She zipped in the direction of a fabled Hollywood boulevard that turns into a freeway when it’s the hour to drive home. The master relaxed, he sought to relinquish the fear that there’s be tragedy if the erratic Lupe got loose the roadway. The task of the day had been to parse the snowballing of fear. And how folks with an inordinate weakness for lager beer are wont to build snowflakes of distress into avalanches.

My master, in the course of Thanksgiving had had a misadventure of sorts. One that had suddenly exiled him from life’s most reliable pleasures.

To be continued…

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This repeatedly has been underscored this week. Lupe I’ve been babysitting off and on ever since she got the alley-oop from domestic flight in Burbank. She did finally make it to New York for a couple years, after being certified as a service dog. Since then, it’s been a long, surreal sojourn in Los Angeles. She’s a fiercely loyal, irascible pit bull lab. Not once has she awarded me the deference of leashing her up. Then taking her outside for a normal session of evacuating the bladder would be an option. That privilege belongs to her master, my daughter.

The best I. can do with Lupe is grab her chain, and prevent her from mauling, or frightening the heck out of bystanders.

As a result, this has conditioned in Lupe a habit of leaving a yellow liquid pool on the white tiles off the kitchen floor. This is an unpleasant discovery when I get back from a good day’s work and a spring in my stride. Just last week I was still cursing about it. This week I got back from exotic suburbia of Santa Clarita, a dizzying potpourri of drive-in franchises and their carnival-colored signs KFC, Wall-Mart, Red-Hot Buffalo Wings, Golden Arches, Auto Zones, Walmarts, 7-Eleven, you name it.

From that American phantasmagoria, juxtaposed against the breathtaking desert vistas the pioneers had to cross before getting to Encino. Once in the kitchen, the sole of my shoe skidded and some oleaginous substance in the white tile. Oh yes, it was the partially dried shore of Lupe’s puddle made hours earlier.

I did manage to curb a cry of “good grief” and seized on the important action. Grabbing a gnarly washcloth, soaking up all the canine micturation. Then go over it with the washcloth, now rinsed. Dried everything with old newspapers. Then a final wipe over with vinegar. One of the formalities. Who’s to say if it repels dogs, but it least it imparts a stark new scent where Lupe had to go… yet again.

Thanks be given for being able to roll with the expected unexpecteds that come with life on this planet. Thank you, Lupe.

To be continued…

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And now, “It’s, where’s my charger?” Where’s my expletive charger…

Meanwhile, I’m back at the back at the library, having trudged here under the rain. To one side there’s a brochure for free showers. All the showers available at shelters and public facilities. Just look gaze out the window today—there is where the free showers are. From the sky.

This all brings me to Lupe’s latest adventure. Lupe in the rain. The still puppyish pit bull lab did it again. There rain was pouring down, it was pooling on the porch, it was ankle high in parts of the old cracked concrete walking that dips and dives in certain spots. Water, water, what a gift. And here was Lupe, barking ferociously from the inside of the front door. About that time an Amazon delivery came—these strangers with the blue swoosh on their shirt incite Mama Lupe to barking paroxysms. She continued to bark and pound on the front door. Lupe howled and with pummeled the door with all the might and power of her front legs, which she uses with great dexterity. (Sometimes I catch her practicing on opening the knob on the kitchen door. She’s going to do it someday.)

Now the odd thing is Lupe kept barking and howling, long after the deliveryman with the blue swoosh escaped from the rain back into his delivery van. Now I lay there on the couch. What else do you do on a rainy morning, lullabied by the quiet sizzle of raindrops, but stay under the blankets, comfy on the couch? Usually when Lupe goes into crazy barking mode, I will open the door and bid she go outside.

During the first days of the recent deluge, I did so. However, I soon learned that Lupe did not venture into a cold and rainy morning. Her companion, Baby DeVille, Lupe’s Chihuahua terrier companion, ever eager to venture out at the mere dangle of his red leash, stubbornly clung to his place on on the couch under the thick San Marcos blanket. The morning of which I speak, I clung to my place there too. Resisted standing up and connecting feet to floor.

There was a price to pay. When I finally put myself in a vertical position , I peeked out the front door. Fat drops were pouring down still. To my consternation I went into the kitchen, dirty dishes called, a floor that needed to be swept. And there in the middle of the white tile floor—it caught my eye last in this messy, rainy-day tableau: a very generous gift from Lupe’s digestive system. Large ginger-bread colored pellets.

Surely, another expletive escaped my lips before I could censor them:

%$#(*

No rancor did I harbor, at least no longer then a few seconds. I wiped the mess up. I was the nincompoop. Lupe was sending a message: I need to go baaaad!

To be continued…

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“I was with my partner,” said Mr. Llamas. “He was ready to open the gate. I stopped him just in time.”

Yes, it was a terrible scenario to contemplate. My heart skipped a couple beats: an open gate would’ve spelled a Lupe on the loose. And as destructive as the pit bull lab Lupe was –she destroyed hats, the chomped-on first-edition books, and just the sight of that Stetson with its devoured ribbon, and worse still, devoured the sweat soaked, embossed gold-lettered band, identifying its origin from a dry goods store in Sweetwater, Texas, made of Nutria fur. It brings me to despair.

It was left by Grandpa’s brother Dude breezed through Idaho in, say, the late 20’s. To wear it would require a complete ribbon-ectomy. Further, without the soft inner band (let me try it on now) just to be sure. No, in fact it does not truly feel like a crown of thorns—it IS wearable. Hooray!

In this case, of routine gas company maintenance, in point of fact a ferocious cat got so out of the bag, I am only grateful that the gas company rep restrained his eager, less experienced partner, and prevented him from opening the gate wide, thus releasing Lupe to freedom. (“Dog prevented entry” was the reason checked off on the Sorry We Missed You notice.) There but for the grace of dog, Lupe would’ve bounded down the walkway and and out onto the busy street.

And one can only picture the worst: that lovely exuberant creature, with the soulful eyes and white-tipped paws, and white belly triangle contrasting with her reddish-brown fir, taken from this world to the next by some motorist, logic would deem conscientious, much as Lupe has been adjudged Leapin’ Loca Lupe. And she takes us all by surprise—an escape artist for whom walls and wrought-iron bars are no obstacle.

That would’ve been monstrous all around. A downright tragedy. It would’ve been cathartic, of course, and it is to be avoided like a carcinogen. But a dead Lupe is not to be welcomed. Lupe, trying and unpredictable and rambunctious as she is, in equal measure vexes us and endears us. And there we would have been, planning her funeral and composing her eulogy. How can this be, and yet I wonder, I stumble. On the other hand, being a pit bull lab, she might have leapt up and been feasting on the Gas Co. rookie’s brains.

As it was, the whole blooming episode served to clear the way to the hatch where the decrepit gas meter lurks. It provided the impetus to leave the incapacitated Super ’73 electrified bike for bulky item pick up. Strict instructions to get it to the curb before 6 a.m. Friday. It was already swiped by someone before midnight Thursday.

May the Super ’73 have a whole new life bestowed by its rescuer. The house side path is clear now. We’re ready for Mr. Llamas…

To be continued…

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“I was in the Golden Hind this week.”

“That is quite amazing,” I blurted to the pit bull lab, leapin’ loca’ Lupe. “You mean you were with Sir Francis Drake.”

“Heavens no,” said Lupe. “The Golden Hind is a lounge on the West Side.”

“You don’t say. The West Side of what?”

‘Civilization, of course,” barked Lupe, being a Hollywood dog. “Well you’ve got to be on your toes, over there,” said Lupe, sniffing toward more promising territory. “You’ve really got to be on your claws over there. Did I say claws? Boy, am I getting tired over translating into human terms my meaning.”

“Toes, claws, worry not, Lupe.”

She continued her tale: “There are a bunch of 80-year-olds over at the Golden Hind, and you’ve really got to be on high alert. The all allege that the left home without their wallets,” said Lupe in her doggie way. “Don’t buy it for a minute,” she said. “They’re just weaseling a drink out of you.”

I limited myself to a very expressive WOW, as I suffering a surfeit of critters, human and non-, all twisted in nonsense over some foolery or other.

“It is a cool bar, the Golden Hind is – So is the H.M.S. Bounty, for that matter,” Lupe the pit bull lab prattled on.

I shook gravely my head up and down. It swiveled as a gimble supporting the weight of the bleeding world, like Hercules. Who needs a gym membership when Lupe the pit bull lab lies atop of you?

The geezers would take umbrage at this, but, hey, wait: was I not swiftly nearing that demographic myself?

“And there is one man there,” Lupe averred, “who carries a plastic bag and in that bag he has two… Oh, what’s that animal? It’s like a hamster.”

Nothing funner than a guessing game, as it reaches a correctness seldom matched by actual sanctimonious life.

“A rat,” I offered. “Rats are quite underrated,” I said.

“No, it’s not a rat,” spoke the adjudicator.

“A squirrel?”

“No, not that. They’d chew their way out of a prison in no time.”

“A marmot?”

“No, but you’re getting warm.”

“A nutria?”

“Exotic choice, but you’re still not there.”

“… Ah,” said my interlocutor with a mystic caption in their eyes. “A FERRET !!!”
“Yes, indeed,” I concurred. “I know it as a verb and not a noun.”

“Not one ferret, but two,’ said the adjudicator of the quiz. “Imagine you’re in a dank bar, and somebody opens a bag that contains two live ferrets. You’d be forking over the dough in no time. And that’s the grift of these octogenarians – to catch you off guard.”

Away from the streetlamp I shuffled. Still shaking my head, I was. Had a canine engaged me in this conversation? Godfrey Daniels, I’d better steer myself to the Golden Hind. It was almost closing time.

To be continued…

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The white-bearded one (it used to give the impression of being brown), before my residence here began in late puppyhood) is frantic. Boiling with animosity for heeding “helpful” advice spouted by busybodies, then recriminating himself for harboring the same animosity for those people. How could he stoop as low as they? How indeed. What a cast of rogues they were. The Professor, Ginger and the rest, and now there were strangers, too, who breezed in for a rented stay. It was so easy to ignore them and not greet them as strangers, and the alienation grew like the hole in the ozone. When my handler finally bequeathed the modicum of recognition on one middle-aged woman, enquiring how long she was to stay, the reply was blunt.

“I’m leaving tonight.”

“Well, I guess I caught you in in the nick of time.”

“Au revoir… Bon voyage.“

He stubbed his toe on a boulder placed alongside the walkway to the street. Cursed himself for this unholy war between misanthropy and bonhomie. And why the devil had the catman, the neighbor with a fondness for felines over people, boast of the virtues of staying away from dogs, and to by all means to stay away from the dishwater blond visitor from Colorado, Wisconsin, Dallas, Fort Worth. Who knew? But is made the brief encounter final encounter rebellious and satisfying.

“Dogs, you know shed hair. They pee. They defecate prolifically.“

Yes, it was humiliating to walk into the white tiled kitchen and step into a turd. It made the hours away from the cozy home a mild but uninterrupted torture. What will I find when I come home. What will be there? No, it is not my purpose to drive Mister to insanity, but I’ll say he’s doing a pretty good job of it himself.

Now take Sunday, a wonderful day with blase corners for most folks. He left me to blob around the house, glued to the floor, while parading the little fella DeVille in that place he goes every Sunday. That’s cause I obey no man. The dangle of a leash in front of me will spark no obedient leap like that lapdog DeVille. And last Sunday DeVille vanished into thin air. High and low he looked and nowhere was a trace of the perky Chuihuahua-terrier.

To be continued…

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Leapin’, loca, Lupe has thrust herself with all might against the heavy mahogany-stained door (Home Depot’s idea of “Baronial” with that lousy leaded glass slit that goes against major tenets of Feng Shui, like letting the light from outside in, and permitting an outsider to have a view of what lies within. Since Lupe came to our house, she has repeatedly slammed with all her muscular might. And it has had consequences.

The too-heavy door sags and the floor works as a plane on the hardwood planks. That contravenes the notion that windows, doors–everything in a harmonious house–ought to operate fluidly. And it’s not as if there was no effort put into the effort to making the ornate door glide smoothly open and closed. Its functionality was a quest that took years and years, lots of inquiry and never giving up.

First, I asked neighbors, and they said change the old hinges, clean up the gunk and dust. Hammer any hinge pins into place if they are sticking up. This I did and it was still the same result. Oh yes, I also made sure that the hinges were screwed in tight.

You know, the whole problem with the door is the previous resident, a very theatrical person, who was a female impersonator and had sheds of sequined gowns outside the tight perimeter of the dwelling, had a weakness for grandeur. She got this massive carven door, stained it with mahogany marathon. There was this pedestal sink in the tiny, tiny bathroom. There was a frieze of wallpaper cherubim in the bedroom of which one panel has been preserved. So naturally Ginger, chose the baroque wooden door, much more fit for a suburban house in a wannabe Hancock Park mansion, than a humble cottage.

I found a workman who’d done a fine job on a neighbor’s casement windows. He only spoke English. He did not like questions. His idea of a fix was sinking 12-inch screws into the twoXfour frame that couldn’t support the heave door. At the end he overcharged and walked away before the job was truly done.

Months passed, seasons. Then I met a father and son team who specialize in fixing 1920s houses. They opened up the wall, they put in double reinforced two by fours, and anchored the hinge screws to the new frame. They patched the stucco, matched the shade of banana yellow that only a Van Gogh or a Ginger would choose to live in.

The door was okay for a few years and then came Lupe. When anybody comes to the outer door, she slams herself full body against the door. The months have past, now more than a year, a crack shows where the new frame has come loose from the massive door. The solution is all too obvious. Rather than repeat this home-repair Odyssey: move into Hancock Park.

To be continued…

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It was in the sala today where she bolted from behind the blue-velour couch, and her sinewy body in a split second described an arc. It commenced on the wooden floor, with a zingy spring of her white fur paws, evocative of nothing so much as white booties clad to the ends of her long spindly legs. Briefly, Lupe because airborne, at the top of the arc, after clearing the sofa, Lupe zeroed in on the coffee table. There was a sharp thunk as her paws (badly in need of a manicure) struck the hardwood edge of the coffee table, book supporter and bric-a-brac and art showcase. In a trice the white-tipped, spindly forelegs descended to the floor.

Lupe retreated with aplomb and a sweeping gaze of those so-human eyes the pit bull possesses. What is it? I ask. The warm brown pupils, or it it the very white background provided by the eyeball that gives her gaze a charm than is human and also, a bit startling.

“Thank heaven she didn’t land on the table,” exclaimed a bystander. “She could have been hurt.”

Such is always the case with Lupe. She zips out of the gate. Will she ever come back? Will she get onto that 1923 sidewalk built by a sidewalk mogul named Peck? Or will she get on that cracked survivor of a pedestrian walkway and discover its irresistible charms known by locals and tourists alike, and make her way to Hollywood Boulevard? Truly, it makes the heart stop to imagine all the perils that Leapin’ Local Lupe could face in the big wide mad world outside her comfortable home where she gets three round meals a day.

Yes, no doubt, her energy, spontaneity and sheer sinewy strength coax a human guardian (i.e. dog owner) into craving the delusion how easy life without a Lupe might be. But that is a desire to be summarily dismissed. She has all love, and to get her through the day is submission to duty. A simple case of stepping up. I love Lupe: we all love Lupe.

There’s a neighbor of mine who loves her and has been taking baby steps for months. Stopping outside the gate to call her name. To reach a hand between the metal bars and pat Lupe on the head. Verily, he has gained her trust. On weekends Lupe has been invited inside their yard hang for a while and get to know their spaniel. It has worked out surprisingly well, this experiment in socialization.

Still, in a world gone sideways, it is reassuring to know that when this neighbor walks by the fence with his briefcase, Lupe breaks into a dog-race run from side to side in the narrow strip of yard, stirring up clouds of parched dust. And reigniting my beliefs, “Yes, she is still a contender.”

To be continued…

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The mosquitoes come now and again to share their supersonic buzz to my ear. They are the dengue’s emissaries. A keen shriek in the dark night. Thanks to my sojourns in the semi-tropics of Puerto Vallarta, and other lands of the hammocks, I have developed a lightning-quick reflex hand clap in that, more often than not, silences the high-pitched hum. There is a tinge of sadness, too, in that silence.

Still there is cause for concern. Dengue indeed has caused more than 5000 human lives to be silenced in recent years. If chagas doesn’t get you dengue fever could. Symptoms arise from three to 14 days following the initial infection. In some instances, the disease shows no symptoms. Then again, what you don’t know might hurt less in the end.

When the symptoms do unmask, they can include a fever, headaches, nauseousness and pain in muscles and joints. Also, there is a concomitant itching and rash. The way an infection comes about can be likened to a safecracker lining up all the wheels. That is, you can be bit by one kind, when there are actually four different kinds. Suffering one type of dengue, one develops immunity only to that kind.

Though sufferers usually recover within five to seven days, there’s severe dengue, which poses a threat to life. Severe cases may require a blood transfusion and hospitalization.

Dengue fever can be discouraged by not going to the tropics, though it seems you just can’t get away from them this September. You can also wear long-sleeve shirts. Use insect repellent. There’s Permethrin, an insecticide that is reputed to last through several washings. (Why can’t they invent a laundry detergent that last through several washings.)

The experts recommend no getting exposed by not leaving your house during mosquitoes’ delectable biting hours. They also recommend sleeping under a bed net if your sleeping area is outdoors. And of course these chirpy experts recommend window screens. Which brings us back to the start of the story. And the slashed window screen.

Which causes me to exclaim: Lupe, Lupe, what hast thou wrought?

To be continued…

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Yep, she pulled the wool over my eyes one more time. Over the weekend, as the blast furnace of summer keeps on chugging into the suburbs of autumn, one window was raised. The cool air kept coming in a night, that way. Sometime in the course of last week, Lupe saw fit to do a sign of the cross in the window screen with her claws. The screen is quite useless now, except as another vestige of Lupe’s erratic nature.

It lets a whole lot of banshees out of the bottle.

Let’s start with Chagas disease. It is an exotic and sociopathic disease spread by insects known popularly as “kissing bugs.” They earned the name kissing bug for a reason: people usually get bitten by these bugs mostly around the lips and eyes. Guess what? The anesthetic in the bug’s saliva prevents one from feeling they have been bitten. Here’s to cruel and devious nature, folks. The reactions run the gamut from itching (which can be pleasant in and of itself) to supersensitive welts and choking, not to mention hives.

Indeed, there is a long period of dormancy. You’re lucky there insofar as Chagas, also known as American trypanosomiasis, may not ever catch up to you before something else has. In the beginning phase, the symptoms may be mild, mimicking those of a garden variety illness: a temperature, swollen lymph nodes, or raising flesh where the “kissing bug” left its kiss.

After a couple months, the unfortunate victim graduates to the chronic stage of Chagas. There’s good news and bad news. Like Don Corleone, it is best to get the bad out of the way. The bad is these forty-five out of a hundred infected individuals develop the disease, whose complications include heart disease ten or twenty years down the road from the first infection. Which can lead to a coronary.

So, a clear majority of those infected get off Scott free. Those remaining Chagas infected have nerve damage in one out of ten cases and one of five may have an enlarged colon: after my own time in the semi-tropics of Los Angeles it occurs that this may be no laughing matter.

The four flaps of the once window screen flapping in the breeze give rise to a whole other uninvited visitor. The homely mosquito that torments my ears at night. It is messenger of the dread dengue fever.

Oh, Lupe, Lupe, Lupe—what have you done?

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I had returned home after filming – it was a good day’s work, that’s what I remember – and my list of needs was honed down to the bare minimum: sit down on the couch and take it easy. But easy wasn’t on the menu that night a week ago (it seems an eon ago). My ears were met by the shrill, heartbreaking bark of DeVille, the Chihuahua terrier. As Lupe, the pit bull Labrador was clenching the back of DeVille’s spine between her very strong incisors. It was a journey from comfort to trauma in a matter of seconds. I really was not ready for this. And you, my appreciated reader, will not rebuke me for being thrust somewhat unwillingly into this immediate-response reaction; but that was what was called for.

I jumped from the couch, and my daughter grabbed Lupe’s chain and I swifted baby DeVille out of the danger zone. As I say, internet had quickly taught me a bit too much about the instincts of a pit bull: trained since the early 1800’s to crush another dog’s skull between its jaws. Ah, poor Lupe, I ponder often, cruel, cruel destiny of breeding. Yet it lurks in the wings. It’s ever there. It lurks in the wings that you can come home any old night and dear DeVille will have X’s for eyes and his neck askew. It’s a haunting image that pursues me, and that night when I got home for a little chillaxing, my guard was down, and I was rudely awakened from the presumption that Lupe’s blood sport days were well behind her.

This in the human condition, to be vulnerable at any time, any place, anywhere, to the unexpected, the preposterous, the savagely violent, and being offered the opportunity to step right in and do our heroic part to prevent savagely tortuous end for a beloved household dog, and Lupe is no less beloved than the Chihuahua Terrier with the soulful eyes.  Just she came later, and she requires me to keep on my toes.

What is wrong with Lupe? Remember she was a rescue of a rescuer who found her wandering around Echo Park Lake, and yet the rescuer sought to be free of her puppy voltage. Indeed. There’ve been manby the theory about what makes Lupe tick. One of the best is that she misses you, she doesn’t want to see you leave her home–a bungalow where she’s been much of the last two years. One visitor has theorized that she leaps up with those long, legs white tipped paws and reaches out with those long auburn legs because she doesn’t want to see you go.

That’s all find and dandy, except when the exuberant affected is directed at a person who had been opened up on numerous occasions by surgeons and screwed back together. Then Lupe’s forceful forepaw reaching the thorax can most painful. By proxy even. Excruciatingly so.

To be continued…

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The great discovery was that peanuts could be safely consumed by dogs. The fact is I like to consume peanuts as well. And I’ve come to rue the day when I introduced Lupe to them. The moment she hears me munching on them, she moseys into the kitchen and stares at me with those so-human puppy dog eyes. Then, I am seized by the urge to withdraw to a tiny room and keep the whole bag for myself.

Lupe looks at me and wags her auburn tail. And I feel the wrath of my own selfish, greedy nature. Of course, I share a handful of peanuts, and she gobbles them up. My first experiences with the Chihuahua terrier inspired an improvement in the peanut-feeding technique. This is what it was: when Deville had been fed an unshelled peanut, his dog-walk evacuations told a tale of unassimilated bounty from fertile earth. Whole peanuts that stood out like a missing tooth in a beautiful smile.

So, I have taken to chewing a handful and then letting the resulting peanut mush plop onto the kitchen tile, where the energetic Lupe instantly appears, thanks to canine scent and that pungent peanut smell. It can now be digested. Lupe is the fast one and DeVille now, being the senior dog of this duo will saunter in. May delicate readers not be grossed out by my active participation in the preparation of peanuts to aid the dogs’ absorption of the legume that put George Washington Carver on the map.

There are some good things we do at home that we wouldn’t want everyone to see. Even a dog. I note that in the climactic doggie days of summer, Lupe has taken to lounging on the bathroom floor. Which poses some difficulties when needing to shower or brush my teeth, as she occupies a choice spot between the sink and the bathtub. Then again, Leapin’ Loca Lupe has been such an evolutionary stimulant, keeping me on my toes lest I step on that dear furry stain.

DeVille, on the other hand, today was sheltering under a chair in the living room. There is something about a cool place and a small safe place that where humans and canine all long for.

To be continued…

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That’s kind of a funny story, too, about a child born in the early 21st century and going on a trip to Paris, really adept at texting and digital savoire faire, always guilting me about my clumsiness in cyberia. Nay, it’s nearly been a torment, that is to say a gift, laid upon me by the digital gods. Even today, when reminded that it is the day of the week to come up with 800 words, two hours of the morning were swallowed up by the matter of resetting a password on a blocked account. Passwords are my bête noire. Down that rabbit hole again. Darn, why doesn’t spell check KNOW the right way to typeset bête noire. I must be turning into an android, expecting the computer to do the work for me.

What was I saying? Well, it came time for Alexia to get the flight back to Los Angeles from Paris. And then much to her burning chagrin, not only burning but everlasting, besmirching the digital savvy of a whole generation, she realized that she had booked the return flight, NOT for July 30, but for August 30. A mere slip of the splayed finger. So, I’m not the only splay-fingered fool in the world.

And that’s what gets me; after so many times of entering what I know to be the right password: it turns out I had enlisted some incorrect number or symbol. And in the meantime, I begin to doubt the truth of my conviction that I’m using the right password. This is all gateway to a fine delirium. Anyway, back to Lupe: the pit bull lab mix would be left alone for six hours with the Chihuahua terrier. I left a bucket of water. Two heaping bowls of dogfood.

The fear, stoked by those knowledgeable in doggie ways, was that Lupe could have reverted her nature as she was bred to be, and crush the cranium of Baby DeVille between her jaws. That breed with the oh-so-tender human as was bred by the British to crush its opponent’s skull.

New Orleans was a blast, as it always is. One of the wonderful places that stands out St. Roch Tavern on St. Roch Street. And it turns out that St. Roch is the patron saint of dogs and the sick. It’s a bleeding miracle.

And still in the back of my mind played out; what happened to the dogs in those six hours. I made it to the Louis Armstrong Airport. Waited, walked around for two hours, after getting X-rayed and then was able to find a seat with a nice place with a view of the tarmac and eat an exquisite leftover of English muffin, poached egg, bacon and hollandaise sauce in the too air-conditioned airport. The border collie of a friend in New Orleans got most of the bacon. I got the rest.

The trip home was a lot sadder than that anticipatory one, on which I let the wife of the older couple from LA out to a reunion in Louisiana, I let her keep the window seat. Assigned to me. That was reward enough. They also treated me to a beer. Good medicine for the sultry days that lie ahead for an overheated world.

The final plight was to arrive at LAX and wait for Alexia to come in her car. Gosh, I think I waited over an hour, eyes peeled for that blue-black Prius. Darn, I called her. I lacked faith. Just five more minutes she was there. And I knew that the dogs were alright. Alive and well. One of them had vomited in a corner, and I have yet to discern which corner. It’s probably all dried up by now.

To be continued…

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In the case of Leapin’ Lupe, she has a companion. Little DeVille the Chihuahua terrier who first got invited into our home, and became a member of the family. Today I pulled out some foil-wrapped turkey from the fridge, after being out of town, it was for DeVille, but Lupe’s ultra-sensitive sniffer brought her loping and panting into the kitchen.

Dogs love unconditionally (except when begging) and that’s where dog mastery comes in. Those helpful people, with their tips and their well-meaning advice, often provoke a scorching rage in me. A good example is when the dog takes advantage of  my penchant for daydreaming during dog walks and gets her fangs around a chicken bone, the kind which gets discarded on the streets with irksome regularity. And the danger on the street is you get a well-meaning stranger staring and scolding that the dog should not have that chicken bone. And the dog will come to an ugly and painful end.

And, now I the hapless and shamed dog walker am struggling to pry the dried greasy chicken bone from Lupe’s tenacious jaws and throw it far as I can over the hedged wall of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and into their parking lot. “I am an artist, clocked as an irresponsible dog abuser.” Certainly, when Baby DeVille gets the better of me and already has a burger patty scavenged from Vine Street, run over by a million cars, it behooves me not to wrench it from its jaws, but to defer to the uncanny knowledge and instinct of dogs, than to risk the wrath of baby DeVille.

He has developed a savage piranha hiss baring his teeth, after many spats with Lupe over the long summer she was left to me and I took her to an obedience class. I stayed while she was expelled, and learned a few things. Lupe truly left me with stress syndrome, not being able to simply open the door or let my guard down when entering the gate.

Again, she kept breaking down the triviality of the material world. It was a hot August when I left the bedroom window open and she leapt right through the window screen, indoors, and to this day it remains. A reminder of those funny, disturbing puppy days. All the emblems of her vivacious of destruction are still there: the gaping hole in the window screen, the chomped corner of the Simon-and-Schuster bilingual dictionary, the Brando photo, they’re still there. And where she cut through fifty pages of a book, her saliva acted as a glue that required separating each page from the next.

To be continued…

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He belonged to a generation of humorists (by definition someone who gets the giggles, not belly laughs), occupied by the likes of Mort Sahl and Jack Paar. Unlike them, Sam Levenson dwelled more in daytime TV: think Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. Every comedian has a straight man, and Levenson’s was American society through Watergate, the sexual revolution. A very gentle kind of humor, marinated in nostalgia. He was big enough as a speaker, radio personality, contributor to Readers Digest and game-show panelist to warrant a Modern Library selection of Levenson’s writings.

Born in Brooklyn in 1911, died in Brooklyn August 27, 1980, born to an immigrant Jewish family who left the Soviet Empire for better shores. They were marinated in yiddish, which has a word for everything, including Sam’s brand of humor, heimish, a homespun humor that purveys gentle comfort and Jewish cultural flavor.  

On his Mama and Papa, “When words no longer sufficed to express the depth of their anger they flew into a great silence, during which the children were used as messengers.”

“Tell your father it’s time to eat.”

“Papa, Mama says it’s time to eat.”

“Tell your mother I’m not talking.” 

“Mama, Papa says he’s not talking.”

“So, tell him ‘Thank you’!”

“Tell her she’s welcome.”

Ah, the joys of functionally dysfunctional family. Levenson’s holds a prism to old school film romance versus the graphic trend of the seventies; The classic formula for a three-act play used to be:

Act I: He wants to, she doesn’t.

Act II: She wants to, he doesn’t.

ACT III: They both want to, so they drop the curtain, and the audience politely goes home. “Exit” was the only four-letter word permitted.

Levenson elaborates; Fig leaves were placed over the two most vulnerable parts of his body, the ears and eyes. “Speak no” was added to “Hear no, see no” . . . “My parents had never heard of Freud. In our building was one Fried, one Freund, and two Friedmans, but not one Freud.”

Clearly, the Brooklyn humorist took the side of frugality, a virtue all the more neglected 50 years after we wrote; (Mama) “put everything to work: a little castor oil would make anything go faster—clocks, fans, drills or kids, a few drops of castor oil in a steam iron, and you could press a shirt and cure a cough at the same time; the cotton packing from pill bottles was good for an earache… warm laundry water was good for pouring out the window onto those noisy kids.”

In this volume, fifty years ago, Levenson even forewarned these very AI-mesmerized times; “We have created machines in our own image. They are so human that they behave like human beings—mean, irritable, lazy, stubborn, spiteful, wasteful, even neurotic and psychotic.”

Maybe here the solution will be to look truth in the face, kvetch all you want and remember to season it with some laughter, which makes all the boo boos hurt a little less. Here’s to the memory of this humanist funnyman who always carried a heavy backpack laden with a dimension of morality and ethics and immeasurable love for all life’s used-to-be’s.

And here’s the real punchline; my resolve to retire this book from my bookshelf is in full retreat.

Grady is the Wizard of Fiction

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He was blind to the crass and calculating slither and rustle of his baby plan.

“It was the way business is done on the Isthmus,” they used to say.

Max had heard this sentiment repeated so many times, it amounted to what wu wu New Agers would call a positive affirmation. It had trickled into his ear with frequency, it was a shrug, it was a grim admission and then in one cosmic moment, when waiting for the light to turn to cross Wall Street, on his way back from lunch. He knew what to do, Max had a seizure of insight. He, the famously upstanding man trained to be a rabbi, who found his true calling in business, where he was noticed for being emotional and human, on top of being profitable, where other CEOs were not. César Chavez publicly praised his generous spirit.

“Of course—a bribe!” And Mr. White started humming, “Here comes the bribe, here comes the bribe!” to cheer himself for the task. So here.

The era Max was going through, a time of running hot and cold, tears welling up over matters of life and death, as well as thunderous fears built on the death of a flea. Without going to a therapist (that simply wasn’t done) he profoundly sensed that it was the endless cycling and recycling of unsolved issues that brought many of us to the brink of lunacy. And Max knew, in his heart of hearts, that he wasn’t on the brink, he was well past the surburbs of lunacy and was fast approaching the city center.

It made his skin tingle on the nape of his neck when he thought of the attaché case. The Swiss bank account where the Central Americans could collect their largnappe (they would call it in New Orleans) and Max had so cleverly prepared for this moment—the moment, memento mori. His teeth tingled to think how cleverly he had thought it through. He had already done it once in a way that gave him beginner’s confidence; there was an earthquake in Nicaragua in the 1972. Here’s how Max was going to pull it off, disguised earthquake relief funds that would go right into Somoza family hands and not fall between the fingers.

On May 17 the New York rag of record exposed the bare facts:

The company was not being extorted, by Honduras, as White had alleged, rather it was extorting One of Honduras. Max E. White went to Tegucigalpa with a lowball offer of a few hundred thousand dollars.

One of the Senior Vice Presidents, Darryl Jackson, met in Miami with Foreign Relations Bennaton who demanded five million dollars to solve “the banana problem.” Ridiculous. He went on to take care of business and old Miami hand from the 1972 convention in Miami he attended to throw company support to the Nixon campaign. Honduras came around. The offer of 1.25 million and a 2.5 million payment promised. And a senior Allied Fruit vice president made sure that the first 1.25 was received by a Honduran diplomat. It was pure dollar diplomacy. A year before the tax per banana box was one dollar, which amounted to thirty million a year and that tax was down to thirty cents per box at the time Max White touched the sidewalk outside the World Trade Center.

The Honduras bribe provoked a storm of disapproval and moral disgust. Yet this passionate reaction didn’t come from its fervent enemies—Trotskyist students, polemicists and Latin American poets. Instead, the opprobrium came from Wall Street’s own, the brethren of Max E. White. Wall Street was outraged. The Allied Fruits, excuse me, United Brands took a nosedive. Had Max E. White not already been deceased due to his own dry dive from the 55th floor of the World Trade Centers, he would have killed himself again.

His widow, Rega, felt such turmoil in her skinny body. She wished Max Kaddish all over again. The tragedy of it. He didn’t trust her to tell what was weighing on him. God knows she had tried to coax it out of him.

“Max,” she said to the picture window that looked over Park Ave. “I forgive you.”

And an inappropriate afterthought immediately sounded in her brainpan; “Max, thank heaven you did it in your office in mid-town, and not in our apartment. There would have been hell to pay.”

Quickly followed by Max’s own voice (so clear it might’ve come from the maid’s quarters); “There is no hell in our faith. Gehinnom. A place of intense shame…”

“I don’t want to hear this now,” Rega cupped hands over her ears.

“Ever the rabbi,” Max said from that voicebox in the linen closet. “The gates of tehuva are always open, and not at some vague point in the future. It is available right now, in this present moment. Being out of alignment with G-d’s will is punishment enough.”

“Stop it, stop in,” Rega cried, “why are you torturing me so?”

Then there was silence. Taxi horns from the street below. And Rega was gripped by remorse and suddenly felt the solvent of Max’s words. Tshuva, here and now. She wept copiously over the dry Boston fern the maid had neglected.

The cry went up that Allied Fruit was up to its old shenanigans from quarters willing to look the other way in past times, the chilling effect was to drive AF out of the temple of lucre. It was as if a death squad from Allied’s old Central American region had “disappeared” it. Allied’s tendency to place commerce over freedom had done much to encourage death squad forays. Now events followed a familiar and predictable course when it comes to fallen empire. Quickly everyone stopped talking about the victim in anything but hushed whispers.

“Had the octopus ever been there” the voices asked. Allied Fruit Co. was expunged from human memory, banished from the Earth. The company that had had a fleet of 100 ships, a hundred thousand employees, and had over a million acres in Central America had vanished. More ephemeral than the pyramids, the monuments of their payroll offices and railroad stations remained to be overtaken by the cannibalistic verdance of the jungle to remain a little bit longer with the last stone stand of the Mayan remnants on their journey to erasure from the earth. Dark and bloody had been the journey of the innately humorous and flamboyantly phallic banana to America’s cereal bowls.

THE END

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The masses were slaves to it.

“Here’s a little bit for you,” said the Master. “Jump. Sit. Roll ever. Atta boy! Those were the masses who sold the time of their lives to the Master.”

This seemed to be the unpublicized thing about the metamorphosis from middle age to way past the middle; you were really quite alone, with thoughts and an all-enfolding emptiness as so many of the friends from the days of the banana frontier. Of course you made new friends, that’s what you did He had outlived so many, and when he went to pay his respects to the old rabbi on Yom Kippur, at first the fellow squinted and didn’t know who he was.

“Look yourself in the mirror, Sam. You’re not 28 anymore.” When he got home Rega put a spring with a boxing glove on it.

On earth, after Sam Delaney’s departure, not so much death as the slow, slow closing of an aperture, Allied Fruit was a man without a mission, meandering from here to there. It had suffered a blow to the brain; it didn’t have a brain. The problem that caused so many other problems (Panama disease) which took the bull by the horns in AF’s wandering years of overthrow and consent decree, a settlement approved by the court. The disease was not cured; however it was made moot by the introduction of a banana called the Cavendish, which was one of the breeds be growing wild in Southeast Asia, that began to be cultivated.

The Big Mike was tastier and hardier than Cavendish, and bigger, but the Cavendish was impervious to Panama Disease, and it has a higher yield. A Cavendish rhizome produces twice as many fingers as a Gros Michel, which meant that the banana companies could operate on half as much land.

Union Fruit began to experiment with the Cavendish. The first Cavendish bananas were shipped in 1953. They were a more delicate breed than the Gros Michel, that could be laid on the decks of a ship. The Cavendish had to be shipped in a box. This was a new addition to a trade which customarily stuck to a few bare essentials. The banana label was an innovation, likewise the banana box, with holes, so the bananas could “breathe.” The way bananas were sorted, stacked, shipped and stocked

Allied Fruit still had enough momentum from its glory years to move forward. By another name you could call that inertia. The company had become imitative. You had a board of directors in Boston, who got their dividends and stock options, they were in auto-pilot. Instead of groping for the constant innovations and breakthroughs that marked the company in its first years, it repeated earlier moves and techniques. Bernard Lukasey was semi-retired in Boston, and went to the offices near Beacon Hill and he had this great idea to make an animated series about Banana Bob. It would appeal to the sweetness kids liked, and tie-in with a new product his client General Mills was dreaming up. Nobody cared. Also, although Sam Delaney had long ago passed from this veil of laughter and tears, he persevered in pushing his people to find the elusive chemical; formula for perfect artificial banana flavor drops. As anyone who has ever tasted banana flavor drops from a plastic squeeze bottle knows, banana flavor is something else altogether, a flavor of its own.

As Sam’s world became smaller, and his body shrank, his creative concerns shrank as well. It was the grandkids, the children of Sam II who came back from trick-or-treating, and they discarded the banana-candies. Sam took one nibble and said, “This tastes like shit.”

The company had had lost its edge, it had lost every speck of inventiveness it had, in the area of production, sales and transportation, as in the matter of politics. Allied Fruit was doing business in the same old stand, even their ‘new’ executive office built in the 1950s, had a staleness. The world had changed. Allied fruit struggled under the weight of its own tenebrous history, a heavy one, and its image, forever ambered in 1912, a tinny Victrola playing a record of Irish tenor, John McComack, somewhere in the nether regions of an empty mansion undergoing ludicrous disintegration, the walls freckling, the windows broken, infested by snakes and poisonous spiders. Once Allied Fruit counted among the nation’s most enlightened corporations. It was now seen as archaic, lethargic and racist, not to mention a male enclave of privilege. In 1969 the Allied offices at Pier 3 on the Hudson River were bombed by Neo-Anarchist radicals. They used Allied at the object of their hatred to make a stand on the Vietnam War. Unrest and disgust were reaching a crescendo that summer of 1969. A New York intellectual, Norman Mailer, commented:

“You can attack property rather than people,” Mailer said on a talk show. “I mean you have to snipe at a human object whereas this is a way of symbolically attacking the Establishment without attacking human beings. There is something symbolically satisfying about a pure explosion, the emotional satisfaction and drama attached to it, calling everybody’s attention to the fact that something has been done.” Allied Fruit had been reduced to a symbol of the system. It was one last hurrah for the tarnished brand to be targeted that same summer alongside General Motors and Standard Oil.

In the 1970s Pier 3 was destroyed. Clawed into pieces by giant machinery and dumped into the river to make the landfill the world’s tallest building, was to be built on.

To be continued…

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In the course of a class assignment Mrs. Vigoda invaded that secret and private place, Miller’s own shrine and sanctum, the Carnegie library at the corner of Union Street and Trafton Alley, and the fines built up and built up as it lay in his house on the clothes dryer.

“Moby Dick,” by Herman Melville it wasn’t, more likely it was a book about television with an introduction by Bob Hope. OK. Deal is the fines, the nickels and quarters were piling up into high columns. Miller was going down the circular terra-cotta steps to the library to discover that his lime-green ten-speed bike had been stolen (in his anger at being at the library due to Mrs. Vigoda’s assignment, he hadn’t bothered to lock it up) and Officer Morton came up to him in the night and said, “Grady Miller.”

He looked up and smiled, “why yes.” The words were barely out of his mouth and officer Morton, a rookie himself, “Let’s go for a little walk. I hear you’ve been having some problems. I was once your age, too.” Chet Morton took him down to the old police station, where they had an empty cell handy.

“This is cool,” said Graydon. He remembered a field trip when they were in second grade and how you had a hole to poop in. In front of everybody. Except there was nobody there. It was pretty empty on a weeknight in Watsonville.

“I want you to go in there and think it over. The librarian tells you have a book long overdue. Like six months. It’s up to like fifteen dollars.”

Miller lost his liberty for 15 minutes. It felt like fifteen hours, one minute for each dollar.
Only years later, after his mother had died, did he learn that she (mom) not the librarian Seeley Sumph had cooked the scheme up to get him to return the library books, and now when they asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime, he couldn’t get that 15 minutes out of his head.

That was the legacy of Mom, this dunder-headed belief in hard work and this ultra-honesty. His mother was now ashes rather like iron filings, but Miller could conceive of bringing her back from the dead, just to say, “What were you thinking?”

Years later he wrote a poem about that lime-green bike infused his animosity, at the hard work, the sadness and the anger.

Money is Not the Issue (The Decent Thing)

I wanted a ten-speed
bicycle bad, like lovesick bad.
My parents made me work for it.
I swept, painted, weeded,
Delivered newspapers.
The garden, got my fingernails dirty,
built shelves for Dad, dusted
amber pharmacy jars and vials,
washed windows, reeked of Windex,
three years and more, I was
indentured. I counted the bills
and coins weekly and coveted it,
saved it in my toy gunmetal
gray Fort Knox safe.
I wanted the best bike
with a fine pressed leather seat
from Great Britain
and a chrome molybdenum
frame, Kool Green.
I would’ve gotten a Peugeot
bike if I could have. I was
a born snob.
At long last I got my luxury bike
for my birthday and slept with it
in the bedroom at night,
thrilled by its smell of fresh
gumwall tires and lube.
A sleek continental cross
in a circle on the front, Instead
of a dopey oval with
S-C-H-W-I-N-N
spelled vertically.
Afresh Saturday, after
my first week as a 12-year-old
I raced the lightweight Schwinn Le Tour
around the track at Geiser field,
alone in all the world, and sitting on top
of it, smug as the first lone person awake
in a sleeping house.
Then a red dog ran in front.
An Irish setter. . .
I braked hard and flew
over the handle bars,
over the drop handle bars,
The sky did a somersault.
Then I was flying in an
Ambulance through Freedom,
sick to my stomach.
All I could think about was Evel Knievel
was flying the next day over Snake River Canyon
and I was missing a Presbyterian swim party
and felt hot shame, though no one was to blame
but me for gripping the front brake hard.
The calipers locked and I dove straight into night.
There were a few minutes missing from my reel
after that, like parts of the old print of “True Grit”
by the time it made it to the Fox Theatre.
A young guy with gold wire glasses
and a handlebar stache
came to Mom’s door and said, Your son is on the field.
Every horror a parent can imagine about their
child, Mom must have imagined in that moment.
The guy with the wire glasses had done
the decent thing.
He called an ambulance.
He lived next block down
Beach St. in an olive-green duplex
Anything to help. He’d be there.
He moved away right after that.
We never saw him again.
Or the red dog.

To be continued…

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Allied also established the largest private health care system in the world, for its employees, an educational system whose graduates included the Fidel Castro and a young newspaper reporter from Aracataca, Colombia. Let it be clear that Celal Tasci and Songul Tasci, the British husband and wife team that heads Allied Fruit and Veg Ltd. in Edmonton, London, England are in no way associated with Allied’s historic octopus reach, though the predecessor of Chiquita bananas did have a presence at old Covent Garden as early as 1902, thanks to London-based banana importer Elders & Fyffes.

Then some seventy-three years later, The New York Daily News would have a loud, fat headline, The Power and the Gory, a pretty clever one, if I do say so myself; there besides a picture of you, Max, stricken by severe life-brain, right-brain separation on the ground starting at the top of your forehead and running down the back of your head. I know the score, Max. It’s not pretty and your offspring will be disturbed. And someone stole your Florsheim shoes. . .! That was of course, Max, when they cost a pretty penny and before the product fell victim with “brand dilution,” taking a prestige product and turning it into crap.

I know, I know. (Max thought to himself) I paid off one of the presidents in the isthmus to be sure the banana tax get reduced and undercut the competition. And then I paid one of the presidents $ 800,000.

“I’m amazed that he settled for that low a price,” said G-d.

“Well. . .” Max stammered.

“What well,” said G-d.

“This sounds just like a repeat of the conversation I had with my wife this morning.”

“Stop beating around the bush, Max,” said G-d, the father-mother.

“I’d promised him another 1.5 million in a Swiss bank account. I offered a pay-off, a necessary cost of doing business down there, but the snoops from Security and Exchange Commission call it corruption.”

“Who put you up to it, Max?” asked G-d.

“Nobody. It was me alone. I was behind the eightball. See, I paid for the company with loans borrowed against the company’s assets. Which turned out not to be what they were made out to be. . .”

“Don’t complain. Don’t explain,” said G-d.

“Look, nobody ever chose me to play stickball when I was a kid. I was short-sided, so I’ve gone it alone. Believe me it was lonely and chilly, it changes body and mind like being in love but all inside out, being an agent of something bad like that. It grates on you.”

The brilliant salesman had calculated that, in their country’s calamitous hour, after Hurricane Fifi, one and a half million dollars might persuade Honduras’ leader to pull out of the banana Cartel that had waged war on United Fruit.

“It was the way business was done of the isthmus.”

Max had heard it so many times, it was tattooed in his brain. It made his skin tingle when he thought of the money in the Swiss bank account. It was the way things were done, and he had so cleverly prepared everything and did not say a word. The Wall Street wolf who’d trained to be a rabbi didn’t say a peep to anyone when, perhaps, he needed a rabbi himself to confide in at this dicey juncture in his less than upstanding life. But, it was thrilling, his skin tingled, it felt oddly better than sex. In the midst of this dereliction of morals Max E. White suddenly bore the cross of lust, that returned with redoubled force from the lost lagoons of his teen years.

This fabulously successful company had spawned a black hole, all its mega-money inverted into a vacuum. How they seemed to drop off in uncanny numbers. Che Guevara died in Bolivia, shot by a CIA recruited Cuban-American exile, who later suffered terrible ulcers and nightmares. “Tell Fidel he will see a triumphant revolution in America,” were Che’s last words before telling his wife to remarry and try to be happy.

The Central players in the Guatemalan coup had died with off celerity as if sucked into the uncanny void that overtook Allied Fruit. Roy Renaud, driving his sleek brand-new Thunderbird in Thailand, where he’d taken a posting. The military president Conde Castillo on a street in Guatemala City in 1957. He was walking with his wife into a movie theater. An assassin shot him seven times. The death of Conde Castillo launched a civil war that spun out of control for generations, brutalizing the nation and leaving two hundred thousand dead, all heaped against the salvation of Sam Delaney, not to mention a combine for immigrants, a stream who came looking for better or more or simply peace.

Who, if we believe in karma, must already be among us again, striving toward that more perfect life, freer of brutality and richer in justice. In 1995, as life acquired a sheen at last of normality, the body of deposed president Jacobo Gastón Balverde was exhumed from Mexico City and brought by jet to Guatemala City and reburied beneath a mossy shrine as a huge crowd looked on and many speeches were made.

To be continued…

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