Tag: Life

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Four Weeks in Bogotá (y Todovía Tengo mi Cabeza).

Bogotá sits on a high plain at 8,660 feet, her more than eight million inhabitants mashed up against the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range and sprawling west to the very limits of the Savannah of Bogotá.  The city is huge – one of the twenty-five biggest in the world and the fastest growing in Latin America – and I can see much of it from my fourth floor studio apartment in the Chapinero Alto neighborhood.  I have come here both to try to learn Spanish and to spend a few months transitioning from twenty-two years of government service into a new life in the civilian world; Bogotá serving as an air lock, keeping the figurative bad air from my past where it belongs and letting me breath something new and untainted.  Unfortunately, the literal air at more than a mile and half high is thin and, along Septima (7th Avenue), one of Bogotá’s main north-south arteries, throat-achingly dirty.  The city has a small army of exhaust-spewing buses and a huge one of tiny yellow Hyundai taxis that yield to no one, and they seem to be on the road twenty-four hours a day.

Every American guide book and website profess to Bogotá’s decreased crime rate since the 1990’s, but also warn of a continued reputation for violence. As such I’ve restricted my travel to the neighborhoods between la Candelaria – Bogotá’s original pueblo and city center – and the tower-apartmented neighborhoods of the north side of town, where the young and upwardly mobile reside.  Regardless, I came to Colombia prepared for the worst, and my threat mitigation involves carrying small amounts of cash; making little eye contact; growing an intimidating beard complete with a Louisiana-shaped bald spot; and adopting a feigned accent where I speak Spanish quickly, hoping to thwart would-be muggers by leading them to believe I am not a gringo but rather an immigrant from some far off land where the Spanish is so pure and golden it is spoken at a pace unintelligible to mere Colombianos.  I mentally prepare for my attackers both with imaginary action (where I swiftly disarm them, knocking them out with an elbow to the face and then gently lowering them to the ground, teaching them a lesson in both the power of violence and kindness) and imaginary words (“You want my wallet?  Well guess what.  I don’t carry a wallet.  I carry a money clip. So go fuck off”).  But the truth is that I have never felt threatened or uncomfortable, and Rollos (a native of Bogotá [i]) are disarmingly kind and patient.

I spend my first days in the Hotel B3 in the Virrey neighborhood, and over the weekend the neighboring eponymous park fills with runners, leashless dogs of all sizes, a small troupe of teenage acrobats treating a slack line like it’s a trampoline, athletes using the two or three open-air gyms, and the thick, sweet tinge of marijuana.  I have never smoked it, but even I can tell what the good stuff smells like.  I try to run the footpath, but the altitude sears my lungs, so I instead spend the mornings drinking coffee with the crowd and listening to a gypsy band compete for our attention with an impressively muscular and immaculately dressed transvestite playing a wicked Spanish guitar.

My home for the rest of the month is in the hilly, middle-class, bohemian and gay (both in emotion and sexual orientation) neighborhood of Chapinero Alto, a collection of older two-storey row houses and newer apartment buildings.  This city is crowded but peppered with parks, and every inch of space is used.  Two blocks from my apartment is Parque Portugal (which I quickly label “Parque Marijuana,” or, after my Spanish improves, “Parque Lleno de Mierda de Perro”) and it is never empty.  The benches along the solo winding path host musicians, beer-drinkers, and the ubiquitous necking college students intertwined so tightly they look like a Picasso.  A concrete court seems to be used for basketball only early on Sunday mornings; the remainder of the time it is used for fútbol sala by kids and dads; by grimy construction workers on lunch break, uniformly attired in boots, denim jeans and t-shirts, orange safety-helmets lined up neatly on a slope; or by a four-on-four night league where the shoe of choice is a dirty Chuck Taylor and the athletes are so skilled it seems to me that the small, deflated ball might be glued to their feet.  Colombianos might be Catholic but their religion is fútbol, and a Colombia national team jersey is the single most popular article of clothing, particularly on game days, when the city is riotous with the yellow uniform (and if fútbol is their religion, tejo is their vice, a Colobmian cultural version of bowling.  Except with gunpowder and far more beer and other drunk people standing near your target.  Did I mention gunpowder?).

Tejo Hall, Villa de Leyva
Tejo Hall, Villa de Leyva

 

On Sundays the main roads of Bogotá shut down to vehicle traffic for ciclovia, and hundreds of thousands of residents walk, run, and ride (relatively) smog-free.  It has been going on since 1974, started as a way to open more roads for pedestrians and bicyclists, and if you take Septima from north to south, you can end up downtown in a modern-day bazaar replete with carnival games, junk vendors, food stands, chalk artists, llama rides, jugglers, cuy races, and street performers with skill levels from drunk to painful to huckster to needs work to spectacularly talented.  Keep walking and end up in la Candelaria, home to the federal government, countless hostels, world-class graffiti, and the labyrinthine Botero Museum, a world so fat and joyous that even the graphic shooting of Pablo Escobar looks like it might have been kind of fun.

boteroEscobar-768x1024

Four weeks is not enough for Bogotá; I want to know the city.  After a lifetime of being a mere intruder into foreign territories, I want to feel like a local.  I want a bartender to know me by name, I want to give secret directions to cab drivers that show my local knowledge, I want to sing with the nonstop chants and pounding drumbeats at a Milenarios game; to know the feeling of joy when the streets erupt after Colombia scores against Peru.  I want to know the hangover cure for aguardiente, or where to find the best arepas for breakfast.  Nor is four weeks enough to learn Spanish, and I think the rotating Andres-Manuel-Rafael trio of security guards in my apartment building has learned more of my language than I of theirs.  I want to tell them how lovely are the days in Bogota, with their counterintuitive morning heat and afternoon chill.  I want to tell the taxi drivers that the music is actually Aerosmith, not Guns and Roses, and that regardless, neither are my compañeros.  I want to flesh out, in Spanish, this “American” thing, where apparently every Colombian calls themselves – nee, every resident of every country in North, Central and South America – an “American.”  Though I may be a North American, and “gringo”, when non-epithetical, is fine by me, I am certainly not a United Statesian, and after four weeks of struggling to read signs, patiently waiting for a turn at the gym, asking for directions and generally feeling like an immigrant where you don’t speak the language but learn enough to know that you sound like a child, which frustratingly compels you to speak even less; after all of this I feel confident that I can adequately express what it means to be American.

[i] As opposed to “Costeños” from Cartagena, or “Paisas” from Medellin.

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The Ninth Life

My grandfather spent the first months of his life as a widower sleeping above the covers of his decades-old queen size bed. Changing the sheets required the initiative of his daughters; my grandfather felt that if he washed anything he would lose, forever, the pillow-case smell of his wife. He and my grandmother had been married some fifty years when she died over twelve years ago, and in some sense, I think, he has simply been waiting around to die.

Over the last few days, it seemed increasingly likely that day had come.  My grandfather isn’t supposed to have aspirin, but had unknowingly been swallowing 325 mg of the stuff each time he followed up his vanilla ice cream with an Alka Seltzer tablet.  The aspirin ate a hole in something, he started leaking blood internally, then throwing it up.

We have been down this road before.  Several times in the last few years, and a few isolated events over his lifetime, have prompted his five children to make the one- to seven-hour trek from the nether regions of Nevada to his hospital bedside, muscling past the hovering priest and fawning nurses (even in the throes of death, he’s a bit of a charming fellow).

But again my grandfather has defied the cumulative effects of age, odds, loneliness and preservatives; again his children have packed up and went back home, heads shaking in equal parts admiration and disbelief.  To be fair, for a man who subsists almost entirely on bear claws and Hot Pockets, every day he gets up is a spit in the face of the devil himself.

A funeral is an ablution for the life of man.  Tragic and cheerless for those who die young; a maudlin celebration for those whose lives have been full and satisfying, but an ablution regardless.  It is also, unfortunately, a chit you can use just once.  But why?  Why are there no eulogies for the living?

My grandfather has always been, with the exception of his brief hospital stays, in full control of his faculties.  He continues to hunt and ride horses even in his 87th year, walks daily, and possesses a wit that seems to only get more lascivious as he ages (he recently told his nurses he didn’t want an X-Ray because he was worried it would make him sterile).  He takes my grandmother with him just about everywhere he goes, she the permanent resident of the left side of a small oak box, he the would-be tenant of the right. He buys her flowers regularly. When he comes into town on cold-day errands he leaves grandma at his youngest child’s house so she won’t get cold, and if he wants to stay only briefly grandma provides a ready-made excuse: can’t stay long, I’ve got your grandmother in the car.

My grandfather is simple.  My gut tells me that definition means something different to you than it does to me, but I don’t know a better single word to convey my admiration for the man.  Dictionary-dot-com lists twenty-nine different uses, and of those I think the one coming closest is free of deceit or guile; sincere; unconditional.

A high-school graduate, in his lifetime he has been a first-generation American, a hair-tonic hocker, a newspaper boy, a retriever of moonshine for the drunks under Bayonne’s bridges, a sailor, a World War II veteran, a pipe-fitter, a miner, construction worker, heavy-machine operator and a member of the Greatest Generation.  He is a pioneer, part of the post-World War II westward migration; a cowboy, a hunter, an amateur rancher, artist, and leather-worker; a husband, father of five, grandfather to eighteen and great grandfather to sixteen (with number seventeen on the way).

He is also, for me, an unfalteringly good example of what it means to be a man.  He wishes ill-will to no one, and is the least judgmental person I know.  I have never heard him raise his voice and never heard him swear in anger.  He deflects praise, takes responsibility for his actions and expects others to do the same. His most prized possession – he told me once – is his family.  No contest.  I know every man sins, but I wager we could use both hands, less thumbs, to accurately account for the times in his life he has lied, cheated, or stolen (and make fists if you want to count the times he failed to correct it). He used to drink, daily, but when he realized he was an alcoholic he just quit.  No twelve-step program, no intervention, no relapse – he just quit.  Simple.

He uses words sparingly.  I once read Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing a story with just six words (For sale: baby shoes.  Never worn); I think grandpa could give him a run for his money.   If something doesn’t sit well with him, he might say “that’s not right.”  Only later, after I began to develop my own moral compass, did I realize he didn’t mean “that’s incorrect,” but something much, much closer to

life is but a series of decisions, of interwoven threads not only keeping you tethered to the ground but keeping your friends and families close, close where they can pull you back down, if need be, or even give you yards of slack to make your own way.  If you are lucky, you can pull them right along with you, or let them lead you back on course.  But if you make that choice, or tolerate those who choose to make such decisions, even in passing, you might take those first steps down a path that ends someplace you just don’t want to be.

He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, one of the most densely populated cities in America, but home is, and has been, a double-wide trailer at the end of a quarter-mile long dusty road in the high deserts of Nevada.  And though his blood is Irish, and his heart belongs to a dead German, his soul is unmistakably and firmly set in the salty dirt of the sagebrushed American West.  Here was – is – his dream: to own a horse, to be a cowboy, to raise a family and work the dirt and hunt and fish and never take more than you need and respect others and have your own space.  And he did it, he has it all – maybe not much to you and I, but it is everything he ever wanted.  Simple.

Josey Wales is one of my favorite fictional characters, and I have only recently put a fine point on the reasons why: but for the six-shooters and the inclination towards serial killing, he is a man who reminds me of my grandfather.  I think he and Josey would get along right well.  Neither say much, but say what they’re going to do and do what they say.  Both kind to animals and lovers of the earth, they have understated senses of humor, respect other people and above all else love their families.

Appropriate, then, to borrow Josey’s simple words for a fallen companion and put them to my living grandfather: I rode with him, and I got no complaints.

 

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Curtains for the Zen Dog

I killed my dog on Monday.  To be more precise, I suppose, I told a vet to kill him.  I wasn’t the trigger puller, or in this case the plunger-pusher, but it felt like it.

Late Sunday night Mojo pissed himself, on his bed, and then couldn’t stand up to move out of the mess.  For almost 18 hours his pulse rate was at a drug-influenced 170-200 beats per minute, but uninhibited it raced to 300.  It should have been a steady 110.  On the way back to the clinic Monday evening, the cardiologist told me he had collapsed once again, and though when his heart was pulsating in the lower range of that 170-300 frame he was literally pulling the vet techs around the hospital floor, they had to give him drugs more and more frequently and his lows were causing him more and more distress.  Three of the four valves of his heart were paper thin.  “It is not a bad thing,” she said, “to put down an 11 ½ year old Great Dane.”

I know this, I told her.  Most Great Danes live 8-10 years, frequently have hip and heart problems, and lug around significantly less than 180 pounds.  But this was my friend, a dog who has been, with the exception of his several brief stays with the Jenks’ and two long ones with my mom, my roommate and companion for the last eleven years.  That’s almost 30% of my life.  It’s 73% of the time I have been in the army.  It would be 15% of my entire time on earth should I live to my 74th birthday, the average age of an American male.  Euthanizing an 11 1/2 year old Great Dane might not be a bad thing, but it is certainly not a good one.

In his younger years Mojo was, in the most emphatic sense of the word, a beast.  He would pull me on my mountain bike, on a dead-on sprint, for almost two miles.  More than once he pulled me off of it.  He inadvertently broke my mother’s forearm in a game of tag.  He could play touch rugby for hours, was a decent hiker but a terrible swimmer (distances were limited to however far he had to go to drape himself over me floating on my pool chair).  He was in a few fist-fights and liked being around fringe characters.  He possessed a pair of the biggest testicles you ever saw, and didn’t mind me showing them off.  He was a great roommate. Though he didn’t bark much, and would never bite anyone, if he was home I never needed to close (let alone lock) a back door when I was at work for the day.  He was house-trained so quickly and so well that I once mistakenly blamed one of my friends for drunkenly wetting my bed when I was out of town for a weekend.  And if he did make a mistake, he always told me so, usually as soon as I walked in the door. He could be rough around the edges, I will grant you.  His breath was atrocious. He sometimes picked on smaller dogs, leaving me feeling like the guy who shows up at parties with the belligerent frat boy no one really likes but pretends to.  He was never accused of being brilliant; his sheer dumbness, in fact, may have been his most endearing quality.  But his drawbacks became nothing but background noise when he leaned against you or dropped his enormous head into your lap and stared at you with his slightly crossed eyes.

Mojo had taken well to our Capital Hill neighborhood, and no one had perfected pretentiousness better than he.  I would leave him in the front yard while I sat on the porch, reading and smoking a cigar, my view of Mojo obstructed by a hedge row but knowing exactly how he was sitting: front legs stretched out, head up and nose elevated slightly above parallel, hind quarters off to his left.  Sphinx-like, were the Sphinx dressed in business casual.  One could not walk by without noticing Mojo, sitting in the sun, a Zen dog in an ambitious city.  People would, more often than not, talk to him.

“You are huge.”

“You are a horse.”

“Oh. My. God.  You are beautiful.”

 Not once in two years did Mojo rise from his position to meet a dog-less person (and those with dogs usually moved along quickly).  He rarely bothered to even make eye contact, and would frequently shift his gaze further away from whomever was standing in front of him, his answer to all compliments uniform: “I know this.  Now please move along so I can ignore someone else.”

But now here we sit, facing one another, him on a lowered stainless steel cart, me on the floor with my legs under him, one arm around his neck and the other scratching his belly.  He looks sad, but I don’t know if it’s because he is, in fact, sad, or if it’s a product of me bawling childishly.  I know we can’t sit here all night long, but I’m not sure what else to do. I impulsively take a picture of him with my cell phone and immediately regret it. The picture is stygian, his face long and skinny and cartoonish like a Pat Oliphant sculpture.  A few friends are here with me, and I ask them to step outside so I can I tell my dog, in private, how much I love him and how thankful I am to have had him as a friend for so long.  I hug him once for my mom and once for me.  He barely raises his head.  And then death knocks on the door.

Death, oddly, looks an awful lot like a thirty-something Connie Chung. She carries in her hand three syringes: one large filled with a milky fluid, one large filled with something appearing to be watered-down Pepto Bismol, and one small.  The first shot, death/Connie Chung tells me, is anesthesia, which will put Mojo to sleep so he feels no pain or discomfort.  The second, and I think the third – I’m not really listening at this point and so I don’t know what she said – induce cardiac arrest.  What I do know is that there is asleep and there is dead.  Asleep feels like Mojo asleep.  I can see his chest heaving, still feel his heart racing.  My own heart races; I want to stop this.

“Hey!  Ha Ha!  Just kidding!  Sometimes Mojo and I like to play jokes on each other!  He licks my face when I’m asleep, I pretend I’m going to euthanize him!”

But Connie Chung is quick, and the second syringe is emptied and then the third.  And though I am familiar with my dog asleep, dead is another matter.  I feel the full weight of his anvil-sized head, see and hear his last breath, feel the cart move as his 180 pound body, for the first and only time muscleless, fully relents to gravity.  A forearm slips off the table.

I am, probably, Godless.  But I love life, and karma, and symmetry, and existentialism is a pretty cool concept and maybe just maybe Elysium is a real place.  I like to think so.  And sometimes life gives us those little reminders that we all come and go, and good often replaces bad, and trees grow in dirt, and being with is usually a better thing than being without.  If you’re lucky, the timing of these reminders is such that it’s harder to write it off as mere happenstance when it is so obviously and joyously karma or symmetry or, if you prefer, God.  Such is my Mojo-less ride home, when I call my good friend Patrick, waking him because he’s been up all night with his wife Andrea helping her to deliver their new daughter.  I had previously suggested they name her Patandrea, but they’ve gone instead with Fiona.  I jokingly tell Pat that Fiona’s and Mojo’s spirits have passed one another in the other-world, and we should hope Mojo’s spirit hasn’t inserted itself into Fiona’s body.

Pat says she could do a lot worse.

 

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Albert Pujols, the Poverty Line, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Being excited about Major League Baseball in the first week of May is equivalent to being excited about your one boring friend’s New Year’s resolution to “really spice things up this year.”  But what if he really meant it?  What if he did something to prove it?  What if he jumped out of an airplane, or decided to walk across Utah, or invented heelies for adults and then cruised around the mall?  Forget the creepy factor – would you stay and watch?  Would you congratulate him for his bravery?

You would if you were Kansas City and your boring friend was the Royals.  For game one – a Monday night in KC (a school night!) – 22,000 fans not only stayed the duration to watch Zach Grienke pitch a 6 hit, 10 strikeout, complete-game shutout against the White Sox, but gave him a standing ovation both after the 8th inning and before the ninth and didn’t sit down until he finished getting hugs and high-fives from his teammates after the game.  Grienke threw his second-to-last pitch 95 miles an hour, prompting the crowd to erupt once again and putting a smile on my face that didn’t leave until I headed for my car.

This is baseball.  I can admit that it might not be a sport (if you can smoke and play it, it’s probably a recreation.  Plus it’s a haven for professional athletes possessing that rare combination of fat and weak – google Bartolo Colon, Matt Stairs, Sidney Ponson, David Wells, Antonio Alfonseca, John Kruk), but watching the game being played correctly – seeing a diving grab up the middle, a back handed flip for a double play, a hitter absolutely baffled by a change up, a ball hit so hard you know, you just know, it’s gone as soon as it comes off the bat, well that’s a beautiful thing.  A thing so beautiful it brings me together with Emo teens sporting awful forward swept hair dos and wearing spandex-laced denim jeans and converse All Stars; young couples wearing matching Royals jerseys, “Soria” scrawled across the back; old women using walkers with punctured tennis balls cushioning the supports; that girl wearing the “shuck me, suck me, eat me raw” t-shirt; and kids, kids everywhere – that is a beautiful thing.  A necessary thing.

On the way out of town, driving I-70 East on a straight shot towards St. Louis I listened to a man call in to the Kansas City am radio sports station and share how he listened to the game with his son, them sitting in his truck outside his house because his “line of work keeps us right above the poverty line” and am radio was the only way he could experience a game; sharing that moment with his son and explaining to him what it meant for Zach Grienke to pitch a complete game shut-out, what it meant for 22,000 fans to not leave their seats on a Monday night – a school night! – in the first week of May, what it meant to him to have that moment of serendipity, bliss, and nostalgia because that’s what he did with his own dad, sit on the tool box in the back of his dad’s truck on his boyhood farm and listen to George Brett or Hal McRae hit bombs, listen to a crowd roar when Dan Quisenberry came in to finish the game.  This is baseball.

There is a man in St. Louis named Albert Pujols, and aside from the unfortunate pronunciation of his last name, he is revered by Cardinals fans as, perhaps, the second coming.  There are not many like him in the sport – Derek Jeter in New York probably; Barry Bonds a few years ago in San Francisco maybe – who command the respect and adoration of an entire city.  Albert Pujols, because of what he can do to a baseball, because he can spot the rotation of the threads on a ball less than three inches in diameter coming at him from 60 feet away at 90 miles an hour and can not only tell exactly where that ball is going to cross the plate but can hit it, absolutely murder it, sending it over the outfield fence and causing thousands upon thousands of people to leap from their seats in synonymous joy.  What is this?  What void does Albert Pujols fill in those lives, what is this thing he possesses that brings together people, old and young, bad clothes and good?  What is this thing that causes Bob from St. Louis to give me, unsolicited, $90 tickets along the third base line so I too can hang around for three and a half hours in order to share in this thing, watching Albert Pujols crush a baseball 370 feet in the bottom of the ninth inning, game out of reach but no one leaving just so they – we – can talk about him on the way back to our cars or busses or trains?

In the early 1940’s Abraham Maslow posed a theory that human beings have stratified needs, psychological needs causing you to first meet the necessities of life, air and food and water and sex and sleep, and not until these were met could you move onward and upward to things like security and health and friendship and intimacy, confidence and self-esteem, and not until you met these needs could you move to the top, to spiritualization and religion and morality.  But I disagree.  I don’t think it’s a pyramid, I don’t think it’s a scale.  There is something to Albert Pujols, to baseball, to watching Zach Grienke pitch a complete game shutout the first week of May, to sharing the roar of a crowd and the success of your home team as you sit in your old truck on your dirt farm with your son at your side, school night be damned, there is something fundamental to this feeling, this necessity, on par with the very necessities of life.  This is baseball.

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The High Life

The Gateway Arch rises from the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, implausible and angled and silver and alien, instantly evoking in me memories of The White Mountains, a favorite childhood book about extraterrestrials come to subjugate Earth’s youth.  Designed in 1947 by Eero Saarinen (he of the TWA terminal at JFK; Washington Dulles Airport; and the “Tulip Chair.” Like on Star Trek.  You know the one) and built from 1963 to 1965, it is as wide at the base as it is tall, and it’s the tallest monument in America – at 630 feet about 80 feet taller than the Washington Monument and almost twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.  Here I met a days-old college grad, on his way from Pennsylvania to California to be a back country guide at Yosemite; spied a cigarette smoking and Diet Coke drinking Amish couple; and chatted (listened, mostly) to a uniformly khaki and polo-dressed couple from St. George, Utah, returning to the Arch twenty years after their honeymoon (“the trees have grown so big!”).

You can stand on the ground, immediately under the Arch and staring upwards with your head rocked back so far it’s impossible to keep your mouth closed, or you can ride to the top in surreal, miniature and plastic sterile pods, folded up in a windowless egg with a man about my age wearing a flannel shirt, too-tight jeans and a Donald Duck wristwatch.  It truly is a marvel, and standing in the 17’ wide top of the Arch, looking down on the flooded river and surprisingly sleepy downtown, provides the proper motivation to think bigger than you really are, or should be.

So on my way east, in the beginnings of an off-and-on three day rainstorm and mulling over my doctor friend’s posit that “veterans and heroin addicts are impossible to kill,” I called the Cincinnati Reds office and asked them for a press pass for that night’s game.  I am a writer, no?  No, no, not a “blogger.”  A writer.  A reporter on life, just taking a little baseball and hotdogs and apple pie (and Guantanamo, and bailouts, and the False Reports of the Secularization of America! and right-to-life and Iowa Negotiated Hog Report and the Fairness Doctrine – the Midwest has a lot of a.m. radio) middle-of-America trip and thought I’d stop by your nice little stadium and then write a story about it. I have, like, 60 readers. Or so.

An optimist would assume the worst one could say is “no,” but Josh from the Reds, he no optimist, offered a much, much more thorough response.  “We don’t credential bloggers.  And you’re coming tonight?  You wouldn’t just show up at someone’s house and expect to be let in, would you.”  Not a “would you?” less Josh indicate an interrogative and an opportunity to respond, but would you as in who do you think you are and who do you think you’re talking to? And we don’t credential BLOGGERS.

Not credentialing bloggers is good policy, no doubt, but advance warning is necessary?  Seriously?  Are there no Mormons in Cincinnati?  No Jehovah’s?  No Girl Scouts, no Little League, no Amway?  I would – do – expect to be let in if I just showed up at someone’s house, and most people I know would probably let you in.  But lesson learned: prior to watching Bronson Arroyo give up 9 runs in three outs (that’s called karma, Josh from the Reds), I emailed the White Sox and changed my approach.  Not a blogger, but a writer for a website, and here’s my link, and I’m seeing five games in five nights, the last night in Des Moines (Des Moines!), and I don’t want access to players but maybe hang out with real writers and see what they do and how they do it and it would make a good story and there’s a war on, don’t you know?

I did not, in fact, invoke the “war clause,” but it was unnecessary, as Ray Garcia and Scott Reifert are not only optimists but are also Major League Baseball’s finest Vice President of Communications/Coordinator of Media Services and Champions of the Little Man and . . . they gave me a ticket.  And a media package, and access to batting practice where I could size up Carlos Quentin (he’s big) and A.J. Pierzynski (bigger) and even stand next to Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of both the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls and the 52nd richest man in America.  And I paid them back by ruining Mark Buehrle’s Perfect Game.

Not “perfect game,” as in the sun is shining but it’s not too hot and it’s not crowded so we can hang our feet over the seat in front of us and the beerman knows us by name and we can see perfectly Ichiro’s laser throw to third holding the runner at second and there’s a beautiful human being at your side and we just can’t stop smiling but perfect game as in Perfect Game.  As in

 

scorecard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and no walks and no errors and not even a sniff of Detroit’s batters figuring out Buehrle’s speed and timing and location.

Athletes in general are a superstitious lot, baseball players particularly so, and a Perfect Game is an untouchable, an unspeakable.  It has happened just 17 times in the 132 years of the sport; they are magical and to see one, to be in the presence of greatness, of such infinitesimal rarity would feel like that first time you were twelve was it? maybe eleven and jumped off a cliff, it seemed so high and you were so scared but you jumped anyway and plunged into the water, kicking like a madman to get to the top but doing your best to appear nonchalant, so nonchalant when you yelled at your buddy still on the cliff it’s easy don’t be a baby – just like that but better and I know I shouldn’t but I had to send a text to a friend anyway to let him know i’m in chic watching a perf game thru 6 and he rightly, rightly responded you just effed it up go get a beer.

But it’s a text! A text is not spoken, a text should not violate the rule, but the very next hitter hit the ball on a rope to the first baseman – he caught it for an out – and the next batter hit a double into the gap and then Buehrle walked two batters and the bases were loaded.  And I ruined Mark Buehrle’s perfect game.

Major League baseball stadiums are cathedrals and Perfect Games are unspeakables and Jerry Reinsdorf is the 52nd richest man in the United States but if it’s Middle America that you seek, you need go no further than the High Life Lounge in Des Moines, Iowa.  There are decent chain restaurants in just about every city in America, chain restaurants with good service, and good food, and a good atmosphere, places like The Rock Bottom Brewery or Old Chicago’s, but chains are, after all, by nature impersonal.

But there are also pseudo-chain, shadow-chain back-alley, dark corner, cracked sidewalk establishments in every town, disconnected commercially but a veritable network emotionally, spiritually, celestially, where it’s not that you don’t want to be seen, but rather don’t want it to seem like you want to be seen yet relish that moment when you can just let it slip out that you’re in the know: let’s meet at _____ and it’s that much richer if the invitee needs directions.  Bob Dobb’s in Tucson and the Cap Lounge in DC and the Beach Tavern in Tacoma and – you know the one in your own town.

The High Life sits on the corner of 2nd and Market in Des Moines and the $2 PBRs taste like holy water after shelling out $8 for keep the change beers at Kauffman, Busch, Great American, and US Cellular stadiums.  There is shag carpet on the floor and dirty brown formica covering the bar and black naugahyde stools pushed up to it.  It has eight taps visible, one each Old Style and Pabst Blue Ribbon, two Lite, three Miller High Life and one Guinness, off by itself at the end of the bar like an accountant at a teamster’s party.  The décor is late 70’s and the clientele not much later, and I wish I could tell you it’s been a Des Moines staple for that long, but it’s been around since . . . 2005.

Yet, it was a good beginning to the Iowa Cubs, because if the Cubby Bear on Addison puts you in the proper mindset for Wrigley, the High Life Lounge puts you in the proper mindset for AAA baseball.  Though just one step down from the bigs, and for many organizations just an hour or two down an interstate, the atmosphere at AAA baseball is closer kin to your kid’s little league game.

This is truly a family affair.  I heard a little girl in line next to me tell her mommy that man is wearing a purse (it’s a man-purse, honey, and don’t point at the man); bought a $12 ticket that let me sit anywhere in the park (even the cheapest $4 tickets are within foul ball souvenir territory); envied old couples bundled up in shared blankets; and watched eleven – eleven – First Pitches: two small children, a local congressman, three people appearing on behalf of the local ALS, a local boy-makes good with the World Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, and four others who threw out their First Pitches so quickly and anemically I failed to either hear their names or write them down.

And all of them, every last one, even the little girl who took a full two minutes and the announcer’s public encouragement to just throw it to the man in blue standing behind the plate, everyone of them was applauded roundly.  Is this baseball?  Or is this Iowa or anywhere else in the Midwest or America for that matter?  Every half inning had a contest, a throw-it-through the tires or musical chairs in the oversized blow-up baseball gloves or a scholarship raffle or little kids racing wearing huge, baggy clothes and both t-shirts and hotdogs shot out of a compressed air gun – hot dogs, and more hot dogs and more hot dogs and this is America.

All American sporting events start with the Anthem, but it is endemic to baseball.  It is usually performed well, sometimes especially so.  But occasionally, I think, it is superlative, and if done correctly it can do to you what that Perfect Game does to you, what that first post-cliff dive gulp of air or that random where did that come from? memory of that first really, really good kiss can do to you.  On this day, a cloudy, windy, slightly cold night in Des Moines, Iowa, a young fellow – challenged, I think; touched, exceptional, mentally retarded – played the American anthem on his Casio keyboard.  And it was beautiful.  And no one, not a soul, not a breeze, not a flap of flag or drop of cup or cough or awkward laugh escaped during this mistake-ridden rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, and I, after five days of baseball, and America, and occasional loneliness,            just             felt             good.

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Going Hemingway

Quito to Baños and Back Again/8-12 April, 2008

Is there a more harrowing opening scene in modern cinema – outside Saving Private Ryan – than the first ten minutes of Alive?  Is there one among us who didn’t experience an empathetic tightening of the glutes, an involuntary clenching of teeth, a collective release of breath once that doomed plane skidded and tumbled to a snowy stop?  The 1972 crash – loaded with an Uruguayan high school alumni rugby team – resulted in 29 dead and 16 survivors spending 72 days high in the brutally cold Andean cordillera before they were finally rescued.  In addition to the 1993 movie, the post-crash events spawned the delightfully macabre bumper sticker Rugby Players Eat Their Dead, which is, in fact, how those 16 survivors lived to tell their grizzly story.

As I readied for my two-week trip to Ecuador and Peru, my own desperate thoughts of how I might live should my TACA Air airplane crash-land in the Andes had taken refuge in my traveling companion for the total of my nine flights over a two-week period: Mac would provide me plenty of much needed sustenance, if need be, because he’s a good friend, and because I could – I would – eat him.  I would.  Mac is a big man.  Or at least he was.  It seems Mac is in love – to a vegetarian, to boot – and he’s a good twenty pounds lighter than the last time I saw him.  Fortunately about every third Latino getting on our flight carried a box of fried chicken,[1] so I wouldn’t have to eat Mac after all.

Mac and I had but two goals for our trip to Ecuador and Peru – to see a soccer game and to see Macchu Piccu.  The rest would be unplanned, allowing us the freedom and flexibility to go where we wanted when we wanted, to stay or go, to take the backpacker-highway or the road less traveled, to drink heavily or not at all.  We opted for each.

Ecuador: Land of Little People

Our first stop is Quito, the capital of Ecuador and at 9,200 ft, way too close to the sun.  It takes me less than a day to get a solid base burn that lasts throughout our trip (none of my Latino DNA, apparently, is in my epidermis, and by the end of the trip a cloud of dead skin sloughs off me each time I remove my fleece).  But our first afternoon starts overcast, so we kill time with a bowl of ceviche and the first of our many, many Pisco Sours.  Bitterly and legally disputed over, Pisco is a native drink of both Peru and Chile but served everywhere in the region.  During Spanish colonial rule, imported grapes were the beginnings of what became a hugely successful wine industry.  But in 1641, King Philip banned the import of wine, causing the Peruvians (or was it the Chileans?) to find an alternate, yet still alcoholic, use for their grapes.  Voilà, Pisco.  Add some egg whites, Simple syrup, lime juice and a dash of bitters, and you have the Pisco Sour.  Though it tastes like a more acidic Margarita, it sneaks up on you like jungle juice at a frat party.  I blame it on the altitude, but the three drinks we had as we waited out the rain, sounding all the world like machine-gun fire as it fell on the fiberglass covered courtyard, left us both feeling adequately prepared for our two-weeks in South America.

It did not, however, adequately prepare us for our first South American riot.  There are a lot of cabs in Ecuador – far more cabs and buses, it seems, than private cars – some government owned and operated, some not.  The drivers of the some not, on this Tuesday afternoon, are restless, and express their displeasure by clogging the streets and hurling rocks, bottles, fists and feet at every passing yellow cab.  There are thousands of men chanting and kicking yellow-cab ass as the cars accelerate through the gauntlet of protesters, and Mac and I get close enough to film but far enough away to stay out of the way of the frequent errant projectiles.  We stand safely, we think, next to the sole police officer we see, who is acting on the situation largely by looking the other way and texting messages on his cell phone.  An ice-cream truck drives by, “Jingle Bells” drifting lazily from its loudspeaker.

The average height of a Brazilian male, says www.shortsupport.org,[2] is just about 5′7″.  The vast rain forest and towering Andes Mountains separating Ecuador (and Peru) from Brazil must include a genetic decline, because Ecuadoreans seem to me to be much, much shorter.  Mac and I look like genetic freaks, never more so than when we fold ourselves and our backpacks into public transportation, be it the hilariously miniature Daihatsu cabs – we frequently bottomed out over speed bumps and potholes – or the back seat of the Quito-Ambato-Baños bus we took after our third day in Ecuador.  The four-hour journey began with a Tourettic DVD salesman pacing the aisle of the bus for the entire first half of the trip, talking to no one in particular but repeating the same sales pitch with the dedication and regularity of a time-condensed call to prayer coming from a minaret.  He would start at the back of the bus, dropping cellophane covered DVDs on each passenger’s lap, making his way to the front.  A passenger indicated his interest by picking up the DVD – no matter if you were picking it up simply to give it back.  On the salesman’s return trip, untouched DVDs went back into his canvas bag, touched DVDs invited the hard sell.  He warmed to us after he found we were American, and we learned from him that a) Columbian women were hot; b) he had family in Florida; c) Columbian women were hot; d) Columbia was the third largest country in South America; e) Columbians liked war; and f) Columbian women were hot.

We rolled into Baños around ten at night, and our desire to both get us into a beer and out of the rain prompted us to break routine and follow the first teenage hucksters accosting us.  They took us to the Hostel Freddy, where we were given two rooms – mine smelling like farts and cigar smoke –  for $5 each, a pretty good deal until I was woken by the sounds of the bus station, just a block from my single-pane windowed room.  Mac, no doubt, slept through the night, lulled by the sounds of his own snores.  Five dollars a night might compensate for farts and cigar smoke, it does not make up for unwanted wake-up calls.

Baños, named for the natural mineral baths spread throughout the town, is hemmed in by towering mountains and the Tungurahua volcano, active enough that this city is still clearing eruption residue covering a part of the only paved road leading to town.  Mac and I climbed to the top of one of the ranges, braving muddy trails, no trails, thirty degree inclines with no trails, jungle-thick flora, fifty-cent piece sized spiders, diving vultures, and an overzealous guard dog (after starting down the wrong trail, we asked a local woman how to get to the “antennas.”  Her prophetic answer: “take a cab”).  We walked the road back down, unsuccessful in our attempts to hitch a ride from either of the two cars passing us, pausing only to accept the offer of a local farmer to take one of his granadilla, a fruit looking like an orange on the outside and a pomegranate on the inside, but with the consistency of mucus.[3]

We spend the afternoon as the only customers in a vitriolic Dutch woman’s café, listening to her espouse her theories on American politics and calling George Bush a “fucker.”  Her Ecuadorean husband walks past us hangdog, and I am grateful I am not him.  On our second and last night in Baños, we visit the mineral baths, where we account for all four hundred something pounds of gringo, our board shorts looking like Capris in comparison to the locals’ Speedos and boy shorts.

The morning brings us symmetry: As we get into our cab taking us to the two and a half hours to the Quito airport, the radio plays Europe’s The Final Countdown, that traveler’s anthem we’ve heard in Mexico and all over Scandinavia.

la vaquera

[1] KFC is the Starbucks of Ecuador, but every box of chicken on our flight was an unknown brand.  If anyone knows this phenomenon, please let me know.

 

[2] Short Persons Support’s mission is to a) Support and provide reference material to persons of short stature; b) Raise awareness of the social and economic issues facing short people; and c) Provide inspiration to short people to help better their lives and attitudes.  All I want them to do is tell me the average height of an Ecuadorean male.

[3] Later, in Lima, we explained this story to some other travelers in an attempt to recall the fruit’s name.  “It’s not fruit,” stated a sassy Canadian.  “Don’t tell me it’s not fruit,” I answered, “it was sweet, it had a peel, it had seeds on the inside.”  Or something like that.  “No,” she answered back, “it’s snot fruit.”

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Call to Macchiato


Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/March 16, 2007

It’s 5:15 am and I’m woken by the call to prayer being blasted outside my window. Though spoken in Amharic – a language uniquely Ethiopian – it sounds remarkably similar to a Native American chant as I fade in and out of sleep. My Malarone-inspired dreams take me out of Addis Ababa and back to the Nevada desert where I sit and watch a tribal counsel quickly go from group chant to an argument over one guy’s Marine Corps jacket. This dream is only slightly less bizarre than the one I had the night before where Lisa Bonet and I were firmly entrenched in a life of domestic wedded bliss. But that’s for another time – the call to prayer has gotten louder – and so I’m awake for my first full day in Addis Ababa.

This is the poorest country I’ve ever been to. At 6:45 a.m. our part of the city was already awake and moving, and the early sun filtered through the mix of dust and pollution gave a look of a war-torn country. Beggars are everywhere, matched in numbers by the homeless lined in neat rows along the sidewalk, still sleeping. There are piles of garbage scavenged over by mangy dogs, and sewage drains double, apparently, as toilets. But the city is alive and well, and it has all the characteristics of fast-paced city life. There are 7 million people in Addis and its suburbs, and it seems like most of them are out walking. The taxis are mini-busses, and they pull over toward the sidewalk at designated stops, slowing enough to allow the guy hanging out the window to scream the destination to no one in particular. You can hear them coming and going, bus after bus driving down the road with a man standing outside the passenger window like your dog letting his ears flap in the breeze. The streets are lined with stores, shop after shop selling car batteries, then shop after shop selling rebar, then shop after shop selling tires – it continues on and on. My instinct says they need a mini-mall, but then there would be no reason to ever leave your own neighborhood, thusly losing your connection with the rest of the city.

Ethiopia is the home of coffee, and they serve the best macchiatos I’ve ever had. Mark and I had four of them (for less than a dollar) while we stood outside on the street, watching daily life go by. I left my video camera running and almost every child that walked by made a face or smiled. This country has over four million orphans, and many of them seem to be on the street (part of this trip is to help some orphanages, so more on that later). We had dinner at the “expensive” western restaurant, which had average food but was remarkably nice and definitely western, replete with the ubiquitous older white male escorting the younger, really really hot brown girl (I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve been).

One story before I end: At dinner I met a friend of Mark’s, an Ethiopian woman who runs one of the orphanages. She’s actually from the northern part of Ethiopia, an area named Tigray, and left this country when she was eleven years old due to a civil war. She and her cousins (one parent died, and the other stayed behind) walked to Sudan (she doesn’t remember the distance, only that it took a few months) and then lived in Khartoum with an uncle and several other relatives in a single dirt-floored room. In Sudan, she was treated as a second-class citizen until she left, at 17, to go to Boston. She had never been to America, spoke no English, and had experienced neither electricity nor running water – let alone boarded an airplane and flown across the world. She taught herself English, did well enough in school to get a scholarship to a university where she ran track, and came back here to Ethiopia to help the children of this country. It’s an incredible story, but it’s commonplace here (at least up to the fly to America part).

More later – I wanted to send some quick thoughts – but it’s 5:45 here and time for a macchiato.

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Sudanese Refugees Got No Game

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/ March 20, 2007

Can you get AIDS if you rub your eyes after you’ve handled a snot-nosed HIV-positive two year old? And is there irony in orphaned Ethiopian girls wearing t-shirts with the words FEELGIRL emblazoned across the front? Today was powerful, so I have to lead with sarcasm while I absorb it all.

My days overseas usually start with a hangover, but today started with a trip to Mother Theresa’s AIDS orphanage in Addis Ababa, where Sister Maria (she didn’t even know the words to “How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria”, the silly nun) has taken care of thousands of kids over the last ten years. She, her support staff and 400 kids – all HIV positive, with a few having full blown AIDS – live in an incredibly clean compound where the kids receive schooling, lots of attention, and medical care (they now get ARVs, and only four children died last year). Sister Maria runs the place like, well, a Catholic nun, and I witnessed her order three loan officers, there to check her books, to “not leave without making a donation.” We visited two other orphanages of varying quality, and were served macchiatos at each – I think I had seven today, and am clearly subsidizing my beer intake by sucking down as much caffeine as possible. The children are polite and well behaved, and seem much like kids anywhere, with the exception of the very young ones – they practically attacked me and the other males in the group. Orphanage staff is almost exclusively female, and toddlers, it seems, sometimes want to be held by men. I spend most of the day conflicted. Conflicted because I’m white; conflicted because I am, relatively, loaded; conflicted because I’m a foreigner (“forengee“); conflicted because trips like the one I’m on are almost always faith-based (“Jesus lovers,” I call them (me?), though the Ethiopians spell Jesus with a “G.” My name, of course, is Gay); conflicted because I’m not a Jesus-lover. The people with whom I’m traveling are incredibly kind, motivated, and genuinely concerned about these kids, and are clearly moved by a higher power. But I remember what Townes Van Zandt said about being a guitar player: if you truly want to be one, then that’s all you can be. You have to be willing to give up money, security, livelihood, a job – all the cholesterol in your life preventing you from mastering a blues scale.

So if you truly want to live your life for Jesus, then shouldn’t you do nothing else but live it? We roll into the orphanage, hold some kids, drop off some soccer balls, then roll back out for a post hand-sanitized macchiato. Does it really matter? Does it make a difference? Mull it over along with me.

I skipped the last stop of the day, a tour of the “Institute for the Destitute and Dying,” opting instead for a walk with a friend through the alleys of the Kaliti neighborhood. Kids literally run the streets, most in flip-flops, some barefoot, the older ones in better shoes and school uniforms. I saw a Britney Spears poster; an ad for Tupac’s latest (I think, I’ve lost track); tailors sitting outside, running old-school Singers; VW mini-vans and motorcycles flying through the streets (I’ve cursed exactly once on this trip – I swear – and it was when a motorcycle swerved to pretend to hit me. I yelled out “fucker,” which I immediately regretted after realizing the number of little kids constantly following us). We stopped at a gate reading Jesuit Refugee Service Center, and as it opened to let a car enter, I witnessed the most delightful image I’ve seen thus far – Sudanese refugees playing basketball. They were tall, lanky, incredibly dark, and awful at hoops. I mimed my 20% accurate set shot, and a young kid named Ricard waved us in. Matt and I spent the next hour at 7700 feet running up and down a concrete court with bent, net-less hoops; me on a belly full of pizza and macchiato trying to set picks on 6’8″ 130-pound Sudanese teenagers running from who knows what.

Africa is growing on me.

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Thank You for Being a Goofy White Guy

Somewhere between Gulu and Jinja, Uganda/March 29, 2007

 I haven’t shaved in two weeks, I’m wearing my underwear inside-out for the third day in a row, and today is, at last, Africa hot. I’m in Uganda on the road from Gulu to Jinja and feeling totally irrelevant. I wish I could sufficiently describe to you the contrasts I’ve experienced since I wrote you last. This place is a cold-water blast of visual, emotional, and tactile sensations unlike anything I imagined. Bats as big as place mats, some charred and crispy, hanging from electrical wires like tangled kites; dirt-poor people always dressed immaculately; stern faces on Rwandan farmers that light up when you wave to them; kids in strikingly bright colored school uniforms, almost exclusively barefoot (especially in the country); and some of the coolest greetings you’ll ever see. Ethiopians shake hands and then touch their right shoulders together. Rwandans wave with two hands, raised up about shoulder level, smiles as big as their faces. Ugandans shake hands like I will when I meet Charles Barkley: first the standard white guy handshake, hold it briefly, then switch to the overhand so only thumbs are interlocked – again, hold it briefly – then back to the standard white guy shake. Eye contact throughout is mandatory.

I came here expecting to have my life changed, but it didn’t take long to realize that expectation was based on naivety and 30-minute clips from the National Geographic Channel. Africa is everything you imagine it might be and nothing like you think. In Rwanda I visited a church where in 1994 over 5,000 civilians – mostly women and children – were massacred by grenades, rifles, machetes, arrows and stones, all victims of a genocide that killed over 800,000 people in about 90 days. They came to the church seeking shelter, and when threatened refused to leave. Now their skulls are stacked neatly in rows in the rear of the church, while most of the remaining bones are thrown together into a giant pile under a dirty tarp. Just a few miles up the road from the church, in a huge grassy open meadow at the foot of an active volcano, we played soccer with about 100 orphans. They slipped in cow shit and laughed like any child should, calling us “barbaro” (it means “buffalo;” they apparently found our aggressive style of play a bit excessive) and even more hilarious, “freak.” A teenager named Fierce who was anything but scored after executing a sweet juke, to the delight of everyone, causing the other 99 to break into song.

I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere more beautiful than Rwanda, made all the more shocking when you remember this is the environment that produced “short sleeves” – cutting off arms above the elbows – and “long sleeves” – cutting off arms at the wrist. The government is still prosecuting participants in the genocide, using “gacaca” (ga-cha-cha) courts to allow the victims to determine the sentences of those who plead or are found guilty. Remarkably, most are given lengthy community service sentences rather than jail time. Could you look at someone every day, knowing they stole your car? What if instead they hacked off your brother’s limbs? Or killed your parents? Somehow this country seems to be moving on.

In Uganda I visited an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camp where I witnessed first-hand evidence supporting the stat that about 85% of all of Northern Uganda lives in these camps, and that Uganda is the youngest country in the world – they have an average age of 16. Because of a 20-year war between a rebel group (the Lord’s Resistance Army) and the government, hundreds of thousands of farmers have been displaced from their land, living instead in small, circular huts.

Parentless children are the most visible effect of the war. Most of the adults have been either killed or displaced by AIDS and/or the war, and as a result the kids are stacked into schools and orphanages (and the IDP camps) like cordwood. They seem far happier than anything I’ve seen in America. There are many westerners here doing many great things, but if you have time, check out www.invisiblechildren.com – it will sadden, humble, and inspire you. Because the LRA was essentially abducting children from their homes during the night and forcing them to fight and kill in the rebel army, thousands of kids started walking from their homes at dusk to come together to sleep in the city. They arrived at night, thousands of them, some having walked several miles just to avoid being abducted. They slept together, arms and legs intertwined like piles and piles of puppies, and then walked back home the next morning to either work or go to school. Three twenty-somethings from California captured their story on film and started a movement to get the kids back into the regular folds of society. Today they are helping to run a boarding school that houses over 1400 hundred students, about 80% of which are orphans. Until a new dorm is completed, girls live 50 to a room – there are over 400 of them living in two buildings, each about 150’ by 50’. Though they see white people – or “muzungu,” which essentially translates to “running around in circles” – on a daily basis, they rarely see white children, and a six-year old blonde girl on our trip was given minor celebrity status. Goofy white guys, apparently, cause less of a stir. People in Uganda say “thank you” an awful lot – thank you for walking today, thank you for wearing shoes, thank you for cleaning up your part of the sidewalk. I tried a “thank you for doing your homework,” but was met only with giggles and points.

My initial worries about being the sole agnostic amongst a sea of believers were totally unfounded, and I had some amazing conversations about the places we occupy in this world. On top of that, it turns out trying to introduce Jesus to Africa is a lot like trying to introduce soccer to South America – it’s already here, in full form. If anything, it was almost an afterthought. Far more interesting is some of the great t-shirts I’ve seen: “Jesus First, Then Comes Soccer”; “The Man” (arrow pointing upwards), “The Legend” (arrow pointing downwards); “Ann Arbor is a Whore” (couldn’t tell if it was a Michigan State or Ohio State shirt); and my favorite, “Grandma To Be” (on about a 25 year old dude).

So that’s it. No dramatic ending, other than I rafted Class V rapids on the Nile today – no crocs, but lots of spills. Hope to see you sometime soon.