How to Break Your GPS and Other Stories from Panama

One Day.  One rental car.  One GPS. 

Yes, driving in hectic over-populated Panama City can be daunting but how bad could it be?

We had done this once before, when we visited last time in 2009, but then we were following our friends - one of whom is a native Panamanian and therefore knew the city well.

This time, on our own, we asked for directions on the best way to get out of the city and onto the Inter-American Highway (also known as the Pan-American, see link below), for our little day-trip to El Valle about 2 hours west and north of the city, from not one but several people. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-American_Highway

But, given their poor English and our (sadly, still) poor Spanish, we remained a bit foggy on the exact route.  Or at least I, the navigator did; David just trusted that with my uncanny sense of direction I had it well in hand.  Then the car-rental guy recommended we take the GPS for an extra $11 and when we accepted he even programmed it for us, starting point and destination, so it all seemed perfectly reasonable and off we went.

Even between our maps and the GPS we ended up going quite astray before we figured it out.  The GPS kept saying randomly, and unhelpfully "stay on this route" - even when we were clearly NOT on any prescribed route as we meandered through one of the (has to be) poorest neighborhoods of Panama City.

Near historic Casco Viejo (Spanish for "Old Town" - see link below), which we had toured on foot the day before, but instead of crumbling buildings next to pristinely restored mansions, it was just crumbling building after crumbling building.  And nothing historic about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casco_Viejo,_Panama

But still A LOT of people around so we never felt too unsafe, plus we just kept moving through the labyrinth with car doors locked.  By the time I realized where we could get the viaduct to take us to the Inter-American Highway, there were suddenly signs for a detour.

I swear we followed them, but before we knew it we ended up on what looked like a pedestrian-only walkway.

Picture a pleasant little Sunday market (Panamanian-style, that is), we just plowed through, before we finally got to the right turn I wanted.  The policeman we passed on our right, as we were almost to the end of it, just looked at our faces and shook his head - probably thinking "Is it just me or are the gringo tourists getting even MORE stupid?" :)

Once on the Pan-American highway and after another short wrong-turn side-trip we soon saw the limits of technology in our world today:  the GPS had gotten so confused by our road-less-taken route that it was telling us we had arrived at our destination (the mountain town of El Valle), about 100 miles before we actually got there in reality. 

Or I just never understood how to use it, user error?  Either way, at the end of the day, when we finally arrived back at the Hertz office across the street from our hotel in Panama City, and told our story to the car-rental guy, he ended up not charging us for the GPS.  Which was really nice of him.

That is probably my best memory of this Panama trip - how wonderful the people are there.  How they put up with our questions in bumbling Spanish and how they had to finally talk in their best broken English before we could understand.

As David says - Panama rocks!  More stories to come....

Put Your Pretty Dress On

Rosie Thomas - Pretty Dress
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XMxwyBBywc
Put your pretty dress on
it's time for you to go to the dance
tie your hair in ribbons and lace
and wear pearls round your neck
And all the pretty princes will see you
All the pretty princes will see you
Some day
Some day

Put your red boots on
it's time for you to walk home from school
every one will laugh
they'll point fingers at you
they'll be cruel
but cover up your ears and don't listen
because you'll know much better than them
some day
some day

and they'll wave to you
and they'll wave to you

put your red coat on
and walk with a light in the woods
if it gets dark dont get scared
there's so much waiting for you
cover up your tears and dont show them
cause you'll know much better than them
some day
some day

and they'll wave to you
and they'll wave to you
and they'll wave to you
and they'll wave to you

cause they don't see you like i see you
if they did, they'd see
the nice litte girl whose
grown up to become homecoming queen

put your pretty dress on
put your red boots on

and they'll wave to you
and they'll wave to you
and we'll wave to you
and we'll wave to you

put your pretty dress on
put your red boots on
put your red coat on
put your pretty dress on
put your pretty dress on
put your red coat on
put your red boots on
put you pretty dress on

2 Wonderful "West Side Story" Stories

In talking with my husband recently I discovered that we both have our own deeply meaningful childhood stories that have to do with the movie "West Side Story" - total accidental memory recovery, a little bit like what led to me posting our twin experiences in "Everybody Has a Swimming-Pool Story" ~ http://www.yousurecantalkbaby.blogspot.com/2011/06/everybody-has-swimming-pool-story.html).

I was at the house of my parents' friends and I guess I was bored while the adults had what I now know of as a "dinner party."  I have no idea where my many siblings were, but what I do know is I watched TV (probably resentfully, because no one was paying attention to me!) and all was regular joe-status quo but then - I switched the channel from an episode of Star Trek that I think I found somewhat creepy, tuning in magically mid-way through the movie "West Side Story" and - everything changed for me.

I was immediately & completely captivated.  "It all began tonight, I saw you and the world went away" - "But here you are and what was just a world is star, Tonight!"  OMG was ever an impressionable, dramatic, headstrong 7 or 8? year old more in love with love, after seeing that?! 

I think this movie (for better or for worse, probably worse), informed a lot of my ideas of what romantic love would be like.  You see the handsome stranger across the crowded room (yah, like the song, I know), and everything narrows down to just the two of you.  And you're instantly in perfect love forever and ever, amen. 

I watched as much of West Side Story (WSS) as I could, but at some point the adult party was over and it was time to go home.  I probably kicked and screamed to be parted from my movie, but the worst part?  They didn't let me stay up to watch it when we got home, they enforced bedtime, as if it were just any other night.  An injustice I will never forget. 

This of course was before the age of VCRs (remember them?), so we couldn't just run out the next weekend and "rent it" - and therefore my care-worn exasperated parents probably insisted it would be on T.V. again, I could see how the movie ended some other time, it was late, it was a school night, whatever.  But my undaunted & anguished cry most surely was "WHEN?!?"  I eventually did see WSS in full but I don't remember exactly when...it may have actually been years later, and it had probably lost a bit of its original "charge" by then. :)

My husband has another WSS story...and just as my story paints this tiny portrait of me, so his does of him.  He was at the house of his parents' friends also, but he was older - maybe ten - and he had already seen the movie (in full, no doubt).  Being similarly ignored by the adults doing their own thing, he found something to occupy himself, which was to hang out with the family dog. 

Of course, that is the saddest part of the story - how his parents always had better things to do than pay attention to him, how they treated him a bit like "luggage" they carted around, without ever asking him what he felt or wanted to do.  As a very kind Aunt of David's once noticed, and actually said to him.  It was true, we will both never forget it, and David did his best never to treat his own son that way.  (In fact, David's own parenting style evolved mainly out of remembering how he himself was parented - and then always at least trying to do the exact opposite.)

Even just being baggage, young David loved going over to this particular neighbor's house mostly because they had a beautiful golden retriever.  He was always drawn to animals, especially dogs.  He once told me in a letter (early in our relationship, when we were briefly living in different states), that he loved their "know-all and tell-nothing eyes" which was kind of my "you had me at hello" moment, but that's maybe another blog post. :)

This sweet gentle dog sat there and probably panted and drooled and loved all over David as he recounted the entire plot of the movie.  I can just picture it:  "Riff went to Tony and said 'ya gotta come to the dance' and so Tony went to the dance and there he met Maria....and afterwards Tony wandered the street yelling her name and then he found her!  on the fire-escape and they talked and sang...and then later there was a fight and Bernado killed Riff!  And then Tony killed Bernado, but he didn't mean to..."

For David it wasn't the romance, or it wasn't the obvious romance that we all think of as the heart of the story, the one between Maria and Tony - the one that got me yearning for love at such a young age, long before I read the original Romeo and Juliet story.  For David it was the romance of being free on the streets of a big city, able to come and go as you please, having a life that's your own. 

Basically the idea of being a real person, instead of a piece of luggage. 

After seeing WSS, David fantasized about running away to New York and joining a gang because it looked like a real family to him - and definitely had something going on that was missing at home.  When he innocently asked his mother "do they have gangs in Milwaukee?" she actually had a moment of pretty good parenting (PGP) when she responded succinctly: "Yes, but not like New York." 

So, we had very different experiences of the movie WSS and different things we took away.  But he, like me, discovered the soundtrack in his parents' collection of records and listened to it over and over, memorizing the words to all the songs:

When You're a Jet, You're a Jet all The Way ~  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9z33lasnkU

I LOVED the dance scene at the gym - the music and that girl in the ice-blue dress (how she moved!) were the epitome of cool to me - not to mention totally hot Rita Moreno in purple ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aenJ5V43Xvk

I guess what this all means, is that David and I are going to have to get the DVD and watch it together.  Me in charge of my own bedtime at last - he with someone who can share the joy & anguish of this amazing film, and actually answer back in more than woofs.  It's about time he and I both get what we need and wanted around WSS!

Doing the D.R.

In less than a week we are due to arrive in the Dominican Republic (the D.R. as we like to call it), for our now-annual Caribbean get-away-from-it-all vacation. That is, of course, a very happy thing. But, sadly in the meantime I am "doing the D.R." in another much less pleasant way which is to say I am doing the Diet-Reprise, hence this potentially snooze-inducing and uninspired blog post.

re·prise

noun

1. Usually, reprises. Law . an annual deduction, duty, or payment out of a manor or estate, as an annuity or the like.

2. Music .

a. a repetition.

b. a return to the first theme or subject.

verb (used with object)

3. to execute a repetition of; repeat: They reprised the elaborate dance number in the third act.

I do realize that women and their weight is possibly one of the all-time most boring topics, maybe mostly to men but even to other women also, I imagine. But what is interesting, I think, is how uncanny: here it is about a year later and I'm doing the same damn thing for the same damn reason. (See blog post from March, 2011 - http://www.yousurecantalkbaby.blogspot.com/2011/03/battle-of-body.html)

Practically killing myself to get my body back into some kind of acceptable (to me) shape before we go spend 6 days lazing on a beach. Different beach, same damn repetition. As "they" say and this is me paraphrasing to some degree: in life we will be presented with lessons & we'll repeat those same (damn) lessons over and over until we actually learn (damnit!) what we are supposed to learn. Then we can move on - to the next damn lesson.

So what are the lessons here exactly?
1) Don't procrastinate, like I did - leaving yourself only a couple weeks in which to do the dutiful diet-dance.
2) Slow and steady wins the race - Weight Watchers (program with which I initially lost all my excess weight years ago), has the exact right model IMHO; it's about changing the way you eat for life, versus a three or four week crash diet that takes it off fast.
3) Don't stop going to the gym FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER!!!!! Especially if the monthly fee is being sucked out of your bank account anyway, so you are paying for it whether you go or not - I mean that's just stupid right?!
4) Don't go from extreme diet to eating whatever you want, for you WILL gain the weight back. And sometimes, amazingly, alarmingly quickly.

For full disclosure I should admit that I am in the midst of violating #2 (I did a juice fast/cleanse last weekend - just 2 days - and am back on HCG Diet since then), and plan to willfully violate #4 as soon as I step off that plane into the tropical island afternoon next Tuesday.

But just this one last time, I swear!

After coming home from this next vacation I do plan to do the moderate and sensible thing and then hopefully not be in this same place a year from now or even 6 months...here's hoping I can follow my own damn advice and learn the lessons finally!

But...as my older brother reminds me, with one of his many witty FaceBook posts ("Next time you want to whine that your coffee is too hot and you slightly burned the roof of your mouth, remember... THAT'S A FIRST-WORLD PROBLEM. Get over it."), like too-hot coffee, too-abundant food & cushy desk jobs that keep us sedentary are first-world problems. Maybe I should just "get over it" and myself. But still get my first-world ass to the gym - from now on that's mandatory! :)

You All Know the Story of the Other Woman

He puts his bones back on,

Turning the clock back an hour.

She knows flesh, that skin balloon,

the unbound limbs, the boards,

the roof, the removable roof.

She is his selection, part time.

You know the story too! Look,

when it is over he places her,

like a phone, back on the hook.

◦ "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman"
by Anne Sexton

She thinks she can warm the stars

A woman who writes feels too much,

those trances and portents!

As if cycles and children and islands

weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips

and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warm the stars.

A writer is essentially a spy.

Dear love, I am that girl.


"The Black Art"


By Anne Sexton

autonomy

by Wislawa Szymborska In memoriam Halina Poświatowska 

In danger, the holothurian (sea-cucumber) cuts itself in two.
 

It abandons one self to a hungry world 
and with the other self it flees. 

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
 retribution and reward, 

what has been and what will be. 

An abyss appears in the middle of its body 
between what instantly become two foreign shores. 

Life on one shore, death on the other.
 

Here hope and there despair. If there are scales, the pans don’t move. 
If there is justice, this is it. 

To die just as required, without excess. 
To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left. 

We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
 

But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
 

Into flesh and poetry. The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
 quiet, quickly dying out.

Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar* - 
just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers. 

The abyss doesn’t divide us.
 The abyss surrounds us. *I shall not wholly die

https://www.npr.org/2012/02/02/146281183/wislawa-szymborska-poet-of-gentle-irony-dies-at-88

The Problem

Another Graduate school-era poem, written somewhere in years 1995-1996

the problem is not 

in the time 

for there is plenty 

of that 

no lack of days 

spent 

with books and pens

notebooks to be filled 

the mind eager 

bent to the task 

it loves the long sweet still 

consumption of 

lingering texts 

and lives at wide desks 

in library-silence 

no lack of nights 

lying there like paper 

with eyes wide-awake and lined 

to precision, the body 

folded, unquiet, largely alone 

and inelegant: stealing words from 

pillowed space, it hogs clichéd 

covers from the tossing-turning 

other shoulder, when I really should 

just shut my mind and 

maybe "take a lover" 

this abundant time 

is wrecklessly spent 

when body/mind becomes 

wildly aroused under 

heavy blankets, and 

there's no lack 

of inspiration but - 

I find my energy all used up 

with no thing created 

out of that all that crazy 

literary heat and friction 

the problem is the laziness 

and it all ends up being wasted 

the images lost to dreaming 

the ideas yield no precise 

paper production 

the problem is the giving-in 

to words that are eventually 

recorded,  my too-easy personal 

story, the whining 

and trite, cloying 

emotion 

the problem is the undisciplined 

days and nights of 

hedonism, the desire for it to be quick 

and easy like masturbation, how the 

mind & body love immediate gratification 

and in my covetous hurry the paper sinks 

into profligate time when I'm so tired and 

heavy (like Hemingway) I can barely lift the pen 

to describe things that should not be recorded 

the problem is that the greedy soul 

goes seeking poems in these excesses 

as if it can obscure an almost willful 

ignorance: as if I don't quite know how 

I got here, or even how I got 

an English Degree (from a really good college!) 

without reading Moby Dick? 

the problem is in the soul 

which tries to hide my lack 

with smoke-screen of so many 

cigarettes at the bar, as if my words 

will be more beautiful for the bottles 

the varied colors, shapes and sizes of glass 

as if I could somehow reflect myself ten times 

the size I usually am (since no one else will do it) 

as if in harsh morning light there isn't always 

glinting, grinning shards to rub against a tired 

paper body, saying: you drunk fool, 

to think that you could ever write!

How We "Hurt"

"Hurt" - by Johnny Cash
(originally by Nine Inch Nails)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Before the Holidays, 1995

Before the Holidays, 1995
I am stapled to this paper
that won't let me
say what I am reaching towards:
a generous room with soft
rose-colored carpet
and no more words needing
to be written.

I can't go home
yet, am stuck
in this cold
New England woman's mind,
stranded in her one stingy room
of a Puritan house,
laboring in this chilled
forbidding, midwestern town
for the 25 (below, wind-chill factor)
more pages of Emily Dickinson.

It's torturous
listening to my written voice
posing as authoritive
watching the pen
move in and out of darkness
wondering if I will dream
her words and mine tonight
knowing that tomorrow
I will eat them for breakfast,
with a little butter to take the edge
off her awe and a pinch of sugar
to sweeten her black-coffee bitterness.

If I only owned a computer
I could wrap modern
technology around me
like a rose-colored baby blanket.
And forgo those
freezing eight blocks
of heat loss and skin buckling
at the unforgiving elements.

I fold up in the face
of my self-sabotage anyway,
voice in my head that says:
you can't do it!
It overpowers me like the weather
the "Burglar! Banker - Father!"*
the poverty of loans and anxiety
of deadlines and doubts about my talent.

Whenever I venture out
I always come back again to this
one room with books that don't help
and my Imperial Ego that always
says I am better than anything
I've written and this scarred dark
Salvation Army desk
where I am trapped.

I am tethered to this paper,
stuck
out in the cold
like some poor dull
brown animal who plods
through the drifts
dying of the temperature
and not noticing it, for she
grows numb with uncertainty,
loses all sense
of direction, no answers
available and she'll never
get safely home again.
*The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson #49