A Story of Friendship, Marriage, and Tails

My former MBA student and nevertheless good friend feels benevolent kinship toward me because he is a wonderful free diver and I used to be a quite good diver. He and I only dived together on the California coast once. That one time was enough for me to realize that he was better than I was although I was pretty damned good (if you ask me). You might say that, figuratively and existentially, on a lifetime basis, I was leaving the water when he was already well in. In spite of this limited overlap, that there is kinship there is beyond the shadow of a doubt. It’s not surprising: People who immerse themselves voluntarily in the cold Pacific Ocean in January,perhaps to catch a couple of big shellfish (abalone), are pretty likely to form mutual admiration societies founded on a shared silent contempt of everyone else on Earth. But I digress, as usual.

In late October or early November, my friend who lives in Central California (as I do) goes on a diving expedition south where the spiny lobster lives. He is successful, of course. Back in our area, my friend has the incredibly kind, charming courtesy to call on me in my own town with two frozen lobster tails in a non-descript white plastic bag. I try to kiss him but he repels me so I buy him lunch instead. Then he goes home across the hill where he lives and I take my present to my home.

Now, I have to become a little personal here and explain that I have a very long and troubled relationship with spiny lobsters. It began with a couple of the spiny lobsters’ cousins, the Atlantic lobster, the one with the big pincers they catch off Maine, for example. Well, I caught a couple of them free-diving in France when I was very young. Immediately, I was hooked. After I moved to America, in graduate school, I sometimes traveled to San Diego to dive for the spiny variety (“langosta” in Spanish). As I may already have mentioned, I was a good diver so, my expeditions were fruitful.

Spiny lobster was an extraordinary addition to the diet of a poor graduate student, of course. So, I became even more hooked. Then I spent a long summer on a Mexican Caribbean island eating not much more than spiny lobster plus bread and local oranges. (The wonder is that I never tired of eating lobster.) Later, I spent half a year in Hawaii. The Big Island turned out to offer challenging and even dangerous diving rewarded by big spiny lobsters (of a surprising green color). During my Hawaiian tenure, spiny lobster was plentiful enough to play a significant role in my seduction endeavors. (I realized later that in most cases, the lobster was superfluous to the achievement of my vulgar aims but I quickly suppressed that ugly, ungenerous thought.)

Then, life changed. Perhaps it was marriage, perhaps it was children. I continued to dive for twenty-five years but not in the right places. The rest of my life became pretty much a spinylobsterless desert relieved only by a couple of oases I am not at liberty to describe here. (And this, for reasons I can’t go into here.)

All this to explain – in an existential vein – that my friend’s gift of a pair of frozen tails of lobsters he had risked his life catching by hand had gone straight to my heart. Or, the gift had gone straight to what’s left of my heart. As a matter of fact, there is hardly any other gift I can imagine that would be more likely to reach my heart. Well, I can think of one such gift but my friend is not the of the right persuasion to have given it, or even to have thought of giving it, at least, I hope so.

Back home, careful not to interrupt the chain of cold, I placed the package of lobster tails in my refrigerator freezer compartment. I wanted to wait for an occasion important enough to justify this rare treat, of course. But one day follows the other and pretty soon, I was facing New Years’ Eve, a time of year that is always a little problematic for me (as it is for millions). My wife had given me a good dry muscat white and I had some now-illegal foie gras stashed away. I thought a couple of grilled lobsters tails would help introduce the New Year in splendor. Why, I even purchased a head of garlic – which I cannot digest – because my wife thought she remembered that she liked “langosta al ajo,” from a long-away stay in Los Cabos.

In late afternoon, I go into the freezer compartment. It’s cluttered, of course, in part because once that I wanted to score some sweetbread, I was blackmailed into buying fifteen pounds. Yet, I have no trouble locating what I am looking for: It’s a somewhat irregular package in a bag that does not look like it would originate in my household. Unlike the remainder of the contents of the freezer, it looks like a package a man, an untrained man specifically, would wrap up. As I chat in the kitchen, I feel in my hand the irregular hard angles characteristic of a lobster carapace. (The angles on the tail account in part for why it’s called “spiny” lobster.) I put the package to thaw in the sink.

A couple of hours later, I am in the kitchen again chatting, with my wife, this time, Suddenly, I observe from the corner of my eye that a red thin fluid is leaking from the plastic bag in the sink. Now, as I have conveyed, I think, I know quite a bit about spiny lobsters. One of the things I know for a fact is that they don’t bleed, and if they did bleed, it would not be red blood. My heart sinks!

I grab the bag, I tear it open. Inside the outer white garbage-type plastic bad, there is a second bag, a slightly decorated blue-on-white freezer bag, it seems. Inside the freezer bag I find two big handfuls of half-thawed strawberries. My heart skips two beats. With my wife’s help, I dive with both hands into the freezer compartment and I take everything out. That is, besides pound after pound of sweetbread, my fish soup from last summer, some sour ratatouille, and even two-year old abalone that had pretty well skipped my mind. The whole action takes only three minutes. At the end the obvious has become obvious: There are not lobster tails in my freezer; there isn’t even one, there isn’t even a half of one. Yet, given my dedication to lobster, there is zero chance that I have eaten my friend’s gift and forgotten about it. So, I am suddenly very unhappy. Men who are reading me, what would you have thought? Frankly, now?

Some relevant facts about sex (not the fun activity, the category). First, all American women believe that home refrigerators belong to them exclusively. When they allow the man in their life to cool a bottle or two herein, it makes them feel generous and open-minded. Second, women are acquisitive but that’s not the whole story. They are almost all fanatical neatnicks. Consequently, they also love throwing stuff away. The radical disposing of the superfluous helps them forgive themselves for the mindless acquisition of the superfluous. The more energetic the act of throwing away, the more virtuous they feel. Third, all women without exception think that all men are slobs. No amount of evidence, such as the rigorous order reigning aboard sports fishing boats, will convince them otherwise. The fact that they usually understand little about the things that men want to retain keeps them secure in their belief. So, it’s common for middle-class women to make themselves feel double-virtuous by throwing away men’s possessions in addition to their own. And any time a woman feels a little down she also feels free to go into the fridge (that belongs to her, remember) and to evacuate anything from it that was put there by a male human being. In my household, for example, bait is such a common target of diffuse anxiety relief that I ended up buying a small fridge just for it.

But, back to my story. After considerable expectation, I face a traumatic New Year’s Eve free of grilled lobster tail. I let my wife have it, of course. I don’t suspect her of deliberate evil. I tell her that she is so insanely eager to throw things away that she does not even look before she acts. My wife is not sweet or submissive but she is of an age where she knows herself pretty well. She protests but feebly because she is aware of the fact that she is quite capable of having committed the heinous act and of having immediately forgotten about it. I contain myself as much as I can but we end the year 2012 in coolness. (I remain a Frenchman at heart; if I discover that my wife has a lover, I may become irritated but some offenses are hard to forgive. It was lobster, after all.) And I eat thawed spaghetti sauce I had stumbled upon when emptying the freezer for what the French normally treat as a gala dinner. I am not a happy camper in late, late, late 2012.

Notwithstanding the bad impression they often make, the French have many virtues. One of these virtues is that their language contains plenty of wise locutions. One of those is: “La nuit porte conseil”, “Night is a good adviser.” Uncommonly, unusually perturbed by what she takes to be an extreme manifestation of one of the worst aspects of her personality, my wife takes advantage of her habitual insomnia to put two and two and two together. And it seems – it only seems- that she gets six. Here is how she explains it to me on the morning of the first day of 2013:

She has not cleaned the freezer compartment since the period I said my friend had given me the lobster tails. The white outer plastic bag is of a model that she has never bought. The white and blue inner plastic freezer bag has a decorative motive. She would never buy anything decorative to put in the freezer. (She is a artist and of the severe variety.) The strawberries are cut as with a knife. She would never cut strawberries except to serve them immediately. She has never frozen strawberries in her life. That’s the practice of an American woman. She is an immigrant like me. She came over as an adult woman. She was born in a country where strawberries were rare, unlikely to be dealt with in any way but immediate consumption. And, finally, the jewel in the crown: If one man (me) was dumb enough to select a frozen item by feel alone, another man was probably dumb enough to select a package out of his freezer by feel alone. (If you remember, I did say that the angles on the frozen strawberries felt pretty much like the angles on a frozen lobster tail.)

So, here are a few ethical questions I am now facing:

First, do I owe my wife an apology for my intemperate outburst in the last hours of 2012? Do I owe her one although my suspicions were so credible that she hardly bothered to defend herself at first?

Second, is it fair to think that my friend owes me a pair of frozen spiny lobster tails? How about the fact that we turned the strawberries into a pretty good coulis since they were already thawed anyway? How about I give him a pound of strawberries and he gives me a couple of lobster tails?

In the event he is unable to replace the tails on the spot, am I within my rights in demanding that my friend travel several hundred miles and risk his life  in choppy waters again to replace the two lobster tails he pretty much stole from me though likely, unknowingly?

Third, is it more honorable to return her freezer baggie to my

friend ‘s wife or to leave well enough alone on the ground that the poor bastard does not need this too?

Fourth, is it even fair to ask if it is possible that my wife is totally guilty as I initially suspected and that she is playing me like a fiddle based on what she knows of my love of stories?

PS: Update four days later: My friend made a full confession by phone. He will make up for the loss. However, he is not man enough to tell my wife how very, very sorry he is.

© Jacques Delacroix 2013

A Nice Little Book Event

No reason to despair of the world. Goodness is in people’s hearts all around us.

The other evening, I leave a box out containing about ten hard-cover books. Those are surplus books I purchased from the library for one dollar, or reduced-price books from Bookstore Santa Cruz.  The fact is that I read a lot, including much trash and semi–trash. I am running out of space where to keep books that I have read. Still, like most people, I don’t want to just throw books away in the garbage.

And besides, there are few books I ever read a second time. When it happens, it’s liable to be thirty years later or more. I fact, I re-read Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” last month, forty years or more after I had first read it. I was astounded by what a bad book it is. Hemingway gained cheap fame in that case by abusing the device of deliberate bad translation (from Spanish). The characters in the book keep calling each other” thou” and “thee.”  When they can’t stand someone, they declare that they don’t want to “support “him any more (“soportarle“). What tripe! The movie was much better.

Anyway, I digressed but I feel better for it. So, I leave on the sidewalk outside my house a box with ten hard-cover books and with a note in big characters: “Free books!”  Early the next morning, I step outside barefoot to retrieve my WSJ. Neatly stuck under the doormat at the bottom of the porch steps are three one-dollar bills. The box of books is gone. There is a message scribbled on one of the notes: “For some awsome books.”

I like that. Encourages me to do it again. Recycling sometimes makes sense after all.

Christians Riot Around World.

Catholics in Italy and in Spain, Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria, and many others in Scotland and South America rioted Thursday. They were triggered by the reports  that a fragment of papyrus suggested that Jesus the Christ was married.  Christians in several African countries burned down mosques with worshipers inside after looting the shops of Muslim merchants

The report incensed several varieties of Christians because it is a major article of faith among Christians that the Savior did not partake of the pleasures of the flesh (as marriage sometimes implies).

Elsewhere in the world, two Oslo rioters where shot dead by police trying to protect the embassies of Muslim countries. In Helsinki, ever-fanatical Lutherans tries to set the Egyptian Embassy on fire because the papyrus fragment in question originated in Egypt. One Finnish rioter declared that the new Islamist government of Egypt  concocted the blasphemous story or, at the very least, that it failed to censor it. Other rioters joined in to proclaim that the papyrus should have been suppressed out of respect for the Christian religion..

Profiling! Lance Armstrong

Heard on local radio 8/24/12:

A  sheriff’s deputy stops two guys in a pick-up truck in the back country of Santa Cruz  in the middle of the night. They have rifles, ammunition, and a big high-power light in their possession.

One of the two guys is on probation. His probation conditions specify that he must not be near a firearm. Both men are in their forties. Both have white names. (Don’t ask me how I know, I know and so do you – with a high high probability – if you take the trouble to think about it.)

The deputy’s attention was first drawn to the pick-up because someone had thrown an empty beer can out of its window.

“No profiling.” cry the liberals “It’s unfair!”

N.S.!

Something else ( no connection to profiling):

They can say what they want, Lance Armstrong demonstrated that the American science of biochemistry is superior to the European brand.

And however drugged he was, he did it on one testicle. You try it!

Animal Spaces: New Issues for Environmentalists to Worry About

Many people labor under the impression that conservatives like me are indifferent to the health of the environment. Nothing could be further from the truth. I try to do my share of the heavy lifting.

Environmentalists are sounding the alarm every day still about global warming and the attendant destruction in the animal kingdom. Yet, polar bears are multiplying obscenely. The bears go about their monkey business pretending they don’t have to hunt 24/7 the quickly vanishing seals that are their main diet. The seals anxiously wait for the relief a couple of F degrees will provide.

Environmentalists also lament the hundreds of species unknown to anyone that disappear every month.In the recent past, some would even have claimed that humans, with their diabolical stone-tipped arrows, caused the disappearance of the sauropods. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and the ad was never aired.

In the meantime, no one is paying much attention to the high level of dissatisfaction (and rising) in familiar animal species. Lately, this simple idea has been dogging my mind: Many kinds of animals need more comfortable or more appropriate places to do their thing (its thing). I hope my old-fashioned thinking in this connection does not make me sound like a dinosaur.

First of all, birds look forward to venues where they can flip one another without interference.

Cattle want good space outside of ordinary stables where they can bullshit in peace.

And, by the way, the bull walks around muttering that it’s up to the china shop owner to do something, finally.

Speaking of which, elephants demand windowed showrooms where they will be noticed, at last.

The giraffes simply request a little more headroom, as you might expect.

Brown bears and black bears wish to spend more time lifting the elbow in comfortable Wall Street bars and less time chasing bulls out in the open.

Cats need shelter when it rains dogs and dogs when it rains cats. A common shelter for when it rains cats and dogs would be nice. It’s going to be difficult to arrange but it does not mean we shouldn’t try. The precautionary principle demands it.

The ads on TV finally got to the four-hundred pound gorilla. He gave up sodas and he is now at the gym on the elliptical every morning at 7 am sharp.

The porker is going clean; he refuses to live any longer in a pigsty.

The sheep and the goat want to be separated, at last. Each group want its own stable. The housing for the goats has to be a little taller because of the horns.

The snake in the grass is getting tired of being wet most of the time. He has a good claim to dry quarters, it would seem.

The blue-footed booby keeps complaining that men don’t look her in the eye, that they stare at her feet instead. She aspires to the occasional refuge from their degrading stares.

In the end, there are only two animals I can think of that seem fairly satisfied, space-wise.

First, the beaver is content to mind its own business in its lodge as long as it’s not overly stimulated.

Second, the fox adamantly refuses to leave the chicken-coop under any circumstance.

What do you think? I hope this view is going to worm its way into your environmentally conscious minds. I hope so, because this simple animal plan has been like an albatross around my neck for a while now.

I can hear some of you snickering: It’s for the birds, you say.

Rats!

My contribution ends here.

Friends: Add if you wish to this deep philosophical  zoossay. Watch you: if you exceed me in crudeness, I will censor your contribution.

Three Astonishing Women: A Short Short Story

I leave my newspaper on the table outside as I dart inside the coffee shop to get more sugar. When I return, three seconds later, a middle-aged woman is walking briskly across the street, holding my newspaper in her hand.

Hey, I shout fairly amicably, I was not finished with my paper.

She turns around and throws the paper on the table near me.

I don’t want your stupid paper, she says. What would I do with it? I am legally blind.

Fact is that she is wearing unusually thick glasses. Point well taken. What do I know?

I drive into an unevenly paved parking lot behind a woman in a big van. When she makes a right-hand turn, I spot a blue handicapped sticker on her windshield. Just as she is about to place her van in the reserved handicapped space, her engine stops. After several useless attempts to re-start it, she steps out of the vehicle and starts pushing.

I am a real sweetheart and also an old-fashioned nice manly man so, my first reflex is to get out and to give her a hand. I abstain because I soon judge her efforts to be fruitless. She is pushing that heavy van up a significant bump. I think there is no way the two of us can vanquish gravity and place the van in its spot.

Then, the woman braces herself; the back of her dress rises and her big calves become like hard river stones; she harrumphs once and the van ends up perfectly parked in the handicapped spot. I learned another lesson: Don’t judge a book by its cover, or even by its title.

Speaking of parking makes me think of the last time I went to the DMV. I only wanted a copy of a trailer permit for which I had duly paid. As is normal, I am in a bad mood much before I reach there. Less logically, my irritation grows as I advance up the line. The employee to whose window I am directed is a plump young Latina with a fairly pleasant face

I explain my request. She goes tick, tick, tick on her computer and, quickly enough, she hands me the copy I want.

It’s $16.75, she says.

I explode. That’s ridiculous, I say. That fee for a simple copy is an abuse of power. I changed my mind; I don’t want it anymore. Keep it.

Well, I will just have to give it to you, says the DMV employee with a big sweet smile.

I practically fall on my butt in the midst of dozens of pissed-off customers.

I guess I don’t know everything about women, as I often think I do, just most things.

Hermanos*

This story was first published in NotesOnLiberty about 5/ 15^th/ 2012

This is a story about Mexicans but before I get to the topic, I need to make small political commentaries.

Most of the time, I abstain from describing myself as a libertarian for several reasons. One is the current and recent libertarian leadership that I can’t stomach. (There is a series of comments on my blog about Ron Paul’s behavior: factsmatter.wordpress.com . There are also many comments from true-blue libertarians about my anti-Paul rants. ) Another, possibly more durable set of reasons for my reluctance is that I am keenly aware of the contradictions between some of my positions and because some of my positions are incompatible with fundamental libertarianism. Incidentally, I am not the only libertarian (small “l” ) with such contradictions in his heart; I just have the great merit of being aware of the fact. (If I say so myself.)

`One of my un-libertarian positions consists in repeating without hesitation that every national society has a moral right to control its borders. We can’t just have different kinds of people bring unchecked into this society their habitual laziness, for example, or their propensity to disorder, and worse, their concept of order, or again, their ethical idea of the proper relationship between religion and government. (Feel free to put national names and other stickers on each of these four categories.) The fact that I am an immigrant does not make me more mindlessly “tolerant” on such issues. On the contrary, I believe I am better able than most native-born Americans (or than all of them) to judge that those who live in this society, such as it is, are exceptionally lucky. Not that it’s that hard to figure out, at any rate. Poor people from everywhere want to move here but also many prosperous people from prosperous countries. Millions have voted with their feet. Even more millions are trying to, many at great cost to their safety.

Among the latter, of course, are many Mexican nationals. I have argued elsewhere in a scholarly libertarian journal (The Independent Review) that the Mexicans should be given special treatment by American immigration laws. With my co-author, fellow immigrant Sergey Nikiforov, I have argued that the key to an overall solution to the problem posed by Mexican illegal immigration specifically lies in the separation of freedom of movement from citizenship. This, for both Mexicans and Americans. I also argued, in that article that Mexicans, our next door neighbors, should received special treatment, privileged treatment, treatment over and better than that we extend to other foreigners. Incidentally, there is a live link to this article on my blog: factsmatter.wordpress.com. And no, it is not the case that “foreign” is a dirty word. And, as some wit remarked years ago, about the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs, and I wish it had been me: “If they want to have affairs, they can damn well have them at home!”

Not much more than a couple of years after this article was researched and prepared, we learn that net illegal Mexican immigration into this country probably approximates zero. (That’s illegal Mexicans coming in minus illegal Mexicans leaving the US.) The current worldwide and American economic crisis is of course a sufficient explanation for both changes, for the decrease in comings and for the increase in goings of Mexican illegals. Incidentally, the fact that illegals are leaving in large numbers pretty much gives the lie to the idea, lamentably common in conservative circles, that they cross the border mostly to take advantage of our social services. In this country recently, jobs have dried up while social services have expanded but Mexican illegals are still leaving. Ergo, they were not here for social services but for jobs. As Nikiforov and I argued all along, they come to work. Since they are mostly young, while they are in the US, many also commit crimes, as the young tend to do everywhere, and many mate and have children, as young adults do everywhere. All this criminal activity and all this productive mating places a burden, a burden, on social services of course. It’s a normal burden, not the parasitic blood-sucking in some conservatives’ nightmares. If all works well, some of those Mexican illegals, or many, stay here, they pay taxes here for a long time and they support my adult children later with their Social Security contributions.

Notwithstanding the sufficiency of the economic crisis explanation, there is an alternative explanation to the quick reduction in the in- flows of Mexican nationals across our southern border. Or rather, there are two explanations that combine to produce this decrease, aside from, independent of the American economic crisis. First, Mexican fertility rates have declined precipitously to the point that they now approximate American rates. On the average, Mexicans have only slightly more children than do Americans and the trend is downward. Secondly, after many years of severe economic trouble, Mexico is finally achieving the kind of economic growth that is considered normal at its moderate level of development. The latter is of course systematically higher than American economic growth. After a severe contraction in 2009, Mexico achieved a mean GDP growth of 4.2 for the past three years, 2012 included, against 2.2 for the US. (OECD StatExtracts, Economic Outlook No 90, Annual Projections Dec 2011.: “Gross Domestic Product, etc,.”)

Now, I want to evoke a subjective side of Mexican immigration. Namely, I want to assert that Mexicans make very good immigrants to this country (This, even if like most immigrants in the past, they tend to vote Democratic at first.)] And then, I make the specific claim that Mexicans, illegals as well as legal immigrants contribute a high degree of graciousness to American culture, a culture produced largely by the grandchildren of the English, Germans, Irish, Poles, and Slovaks. (See what I mean?)

Here are some reminders about Mexicans in the US:

Mexicans work hard. Everyone agrees on this even those who suffer most from their presence as job competitors. Unlike some European immigrants for example, they don’t ask for directions to the welfare office a couple of days after they arrive. They come from a work-oriented culture, like American culture used to be many years ago.

Very poor Mexicans are more socially acceptable, less socially disruptive than equally poor native-born Americans. There are Mexican “homeless” encampments on my river. You never hear about them. You would have to know they are there. You can’t say the same of Anglo homeless squatters in Santa Cruz. (Some kill people, not many, just some.)

Mexican immigrants arrive here well informed about American institutions, about American culture, about American habits.

Mexicans immigrants come from a country rent and terrorized by the blowback of our war on drugs. Yet, they have the good grace never to mention here that we are nearly entirely responsible for the horrors their country has to suffer on account of our stupid policies. I mean, of course than if the US announced the legalization of all drugs, the massacres, the beheadings, the cutting off of hands and feet would stop in Mexico within weeks or days. I am simply assuming that making the supply of a product in high demand illegal is certain to make the product prodigiously profitable. Hence the bloody turf wars among Mexican suppliers. Legalize or ignore drugs; let the price of marijuana drop to where it belongs, somewhere between the prices of tobacco and of carrots. The massacre in Mexico will stop,

Mexicans are also courteous and endlessly gracious, in my considerable and lengthy experience. Below are three illustrations.

There is an old-style diner I frequent about once a week for breakfast. (I have immortalized it in a story: “Radio Free Santa Cruz“ published in le libertarian periodical Liberty, 24-8 -September 2010.) I go there often, usually thrown out of bed by the insomnia that plagues the aged who feel guilty for old but good reasons they may not want to go into publicly lest they be charged with bragging. The same crew of two Mexicans is always in the kitchen. It’s an open kitchen. You can see them and you can hear everything they say. No matter how early I get there, I find these two guys guffawing and joking loudly. That’s often in the middle of breakfast rush-hour. This is worth commenting on because, the world over, cooks are given a pass for being A.H. at the height of their rush-hour. The rule does not apply to Mexican cooks. If you don’t believe me lend an ear next time you are in a cheap restaurant. In California, that’s an easy study because all cooks in such restaurants are Mexicans, have been for ten years or more. (Some are legal immigrants!)

One slow day, my wife and I enter a small Mexican-owned small shop on the edge of town. My wife is from India. She is looking for tropical fruit that are still uncommon in mainstream grocery stores, in the years right after the signing of NAFTA. Her attention gets drawn to a cinenovela being played on a TV set hanging for the shop ceiling. Observing that she is craning her neck, the young man behind the counter brings a box for her to stand on. His buddy who has been hanging out in the shop with him approaches and offers my wife his hand to help her climb on the box. The guy has dark skin and very short hair. He appears to be somewhat over twenty-five. Intricate tattoos sally forth from the neck opening of his shirt and climb all over his neck in thick masses and then curl into the external faces of both his ears. There is only one place in the world where you can afford the time and the expense of such dense tattoo-art: prison. The thought imposes itself on my inexorably: This young Mexican jailbird is much better bred than all the white middle-class young of the same age we know. Of course, I will be accused by the pedantly naïve of “generalizing.” Not so; as soon as you open your eyes a little, you will observe that, in California, people with Spanish last names and skin a shade darker than average are systematically more polite than the rest of the population. As I write this, I am trying to gather some recollection of one rude Mexican or child of Mexicans I have met. I come up empty.

Now, in connection with the next story I have to say something quick and historical about myself: I was born in Paris, France. When I was two, the soldiers who marched down the Champs-Elysees were not French. How do I know? The French are incapable of orderly goose-stepping.

There is a woman in her late twenties who works as a cashier in a pan dulce bakery I patronize every so often. She has grown on me. The reason is that early in our fleeting relationship, she discovered that I was a special kind of Anglo, one who actually understands Spanish and who actually speaks reasonably well. This is a digression: California is full of people who have taken multiple vacations in Mexico and who brought back fluency in how to say, “ Two more beers, please,” and, “Where is the restroom?” They are gringos who embarrass the local Mexicans who don’t know how to let them know politely that their’s, the Mexicans’ English is much more serviceable than their’s, the gringos’ Spanish and that, therefore they, the Anglos, should keep their primitive Spanish where it belongs, in their back-pockets, for a dire emergency.

So, anyway, soon after discovering my comparative fluency (comparative!) the young cashier began addressing me casually as “tú.” This flatters me, of course, because California Mexicans, as is the won’t of immigrants in many places, mark their belongingness with each other through the use of a familiar form of address. Mexicans who would go on calling each other, “Seňor” and “Seňora” in Vera Cruz or in Guadalajara all their lives, instantly begin using the “tú” when they live in a sea of gringos. The young woman does me honor whenever she returns change addressing me the same way, as if I were one of her affectionate uncles, for instance. And yes, I understand that she may be simply engaging in a commercially valid practice. All the same, she does not call “tú” others who look like me.

And, it’s time to say that my grand-daughter often accompanies me to the pan dulce shop. It’s true that her looks may have facilitated this process of instant assimilation. I don’t want to tell here this long and interesting sub-story but the child, three at the time, is no more related to me by blood than say, a gopher. Instead, she is very pretty (I may brag since we are not genetic kin) in a bronzed sort of way that might well look Mexican to a Mexican eye. At any rate, I often enter the pan dulce shop with the child in tow. She is smart, talkative and loud, like Grandpa, and she wins hearts everywhere she goes (also like…). So, anyway, one day, I show up at the shop without that beautiful child. “And where is the little one” asks the young casher? “Oh, I say, she is with her Mom.” “I see, retorts the casher, she is with her mother one week and with you the other week.” “No, no, I exclaim, she is not my daughter, she is my grand-daughter!” The young woman raises her head, looks at me intently. I swear, disappointment in me is written all over her face.

What’s not to like?

©Jacques Delacroix 2012

* Brothers

Dog-a-roll (Meena’s Bestiary*)

The elephant plays with the ant on the jungle gym. The elephant breaks something and he never finds the ant at all.

The mackerel wants to be friends with the camel and the dragon-fly with the dragon. They just have trouble finding places to meet.

The penguin and the pangolin take long walks together. They both walk funny and one is always too hot, and the other too cold.

The zebra goes jogging with the cobra. But the cobra bites the zebra and the zebra tramples the cobra underfoot  (underhoof ?). Each goes back to his own home limping. They never meet again.

The sea-gull grabs a beagle off the beach but the eagle clasps the beagle off the sea-gull.

The sore boar soars with a roar.

The bat, the cat, and the rat play cards in a cart every Saturday night.

The fox and the ox pull a wagon full of chickens together. The ox claims that the fox does not do his share of the pulling, that he keeps looking over his shoulder, and salivating grossly.

[The two sentences right below to be read aloud only after Meena reaches age fourteen.]

The hedgehog in the fog climbs on top of the clog-brush. He climbs down muttering what sounds like an apology.

Meanwhile, the dog and the frog are best buddies before God.

*Meena is three

© Jacques Delacroix 2012

A Nice Story (for a Change)

My little sister who lives outside Paris had been single for a while. (I did not ask her if she had been celibate; I am a gentleman.) Then a very nice eligible man in her age range entered here life. Then, that good man became her companion. (I have to make a digression here. The word “companion” is one of the nicest words in the English language. It comes from the French and it means literally: “One with whom you share your bread.”)

Anyway, after not so long, the companion was carried off by a massive heart attack. Perhaps to console her heart, my little sister took her grown son for a short trip to New York City. They went to the Ground Zero memorial, of course.

Long after they came out, at the hotel, my sister discovered she did not have her favorite silver bracelet. The bracelet was the last little gift from her companion who had passed away. She figured she may have forgotten it in the box where you place your metal valuables before going through the security gate at the Ground Zero memorial. She does not know English well and she and her son were flying back to Paris the next morning early anyway. So, there wasn’t much she could do.

Back in Paris, she mourned for several days. Then, finally, she did the obvious and she emailed her big brother, the American who lives in California, for help. I agreed of course, but I advised her not to be optimistic. I did not see how a public site that processes thousands of visitors each day could collect and classify what must be hundreds of lost objects daily. To be even more honest, I did not see in my mind’s eye how I could, at a distance, motivate any employee there to even try to look for that particular bracelet. I would have put the odds of finding it at only slightly better than winning the California lottery. (I have a friend, a statistician, who says the odds of winning the California lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not!)

I am a man of my word. If I promise you a punch in the nose the next time you do that, you can be sure I will try. So, late on a Sunday night, without enthusiasm, I supplied the 9/11 Memorial and Museum the abundant details of the description of her bracelet my sister had provided by email. I let her know I had done it and recommend again that she not get her hopes up.

Only a few hours later, I got up and, my first cup of coffee in hand, distractedly, I checked my Gmail. There was the loveliest, kindest note from a Mr Fernandez, the Security Account Manager at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, telling me that he had my sister’s bracelet. Mr Fernandez is a kind, prompt, devoted man to be sure. But I think he was much helped in his search by one special feature of the attractive but ordinary bracelet. My little sister’s companion had used a sharp home tool to engrave himself on the inside of the bracelet, a little heart and my sister’s first name.

The Mysteries of Nature

There is a big stupid redwood tree in the tiny plot in front of my house. It’s stupid because it would be much better off in the forest with its brothers, less than two miles away, rather than littering the sidewalk and threatening my roof. To make matters worse, the utilities company appears to have the right to trim it any way it wants. So, my sequoia looks like an old toilet brush. The city of Santa Cruz won’t let me cut it down and it has the impudence to ask for a special high fee merely to hear my appeal.

Santa Cruz has no manufacturing. It was all run out of town in past years by the left-wing/Green political class. It’s squeezed between the usually breezy Pacific Ocean on one side and wooded mountains on the other. The wind is from the west, from the ocean, four days out of five. My stupid redwood tree right downtown is essential to maintain air purity, I am sure!

Anyway, the redwood tree has one redeeming virtue: It’s home to an abundant and varied fauna. At the apex is a large population of squirrels. They seem to be divided into two tribes, or two ethnic groups. One tribe is red with a tinge of brown, as you would expect in California. The other tribe’s coloring ranges from jet-black to kind of black. The racial strife between the two groups is incessant. At sunrise, they pursue one another across my roof. All day, they set ambushes and they chase the other guys up and down the tree and on the ground.

It’s not always clear what the squirrel warfare is all about. There seems to be plenty of living space for all (“lebensraum,” in German). Or it’s only the old guys fighting over mating rights. Or the old females just being bitchy. Or it’s the young guys that are aggressive because they seldom get any. I know however what they are not fighting about. They are not merely fighting about food as you would expect ordinary forest-dwelling squirrels to do, for example, that must tear each others’ eyes out for every tiny pine cone seed, even every little bitter-tasting acorn.

The squirrels on my redwood tree, or their redwood tree, feed exclusively on peanuts. This is true for both the gray-red and the black tribes. It’s been true for at last four years. It’s a perplexing fact but a fact nonetheless. Not only do I see them eating peanuts. I see them burying them in various parts of my backyard and I see them digging up peanuts in the winter.

At first, I though the squirrels were benefiting from a kid’s lost lunch. Then I suspected that a neighbor fed them peanuts. But, no, in the end, I would have caught him in the act. Then I guessed they had chanced on a commercial cache of peanuts. But this has been going one too long. The only possible valid explanation is hard to accept: They have access to a truck that delivers peanuts to various small stores in my area and they are fairly aware of delivery schedules.

So, there you are. I did not tell you I believed my explanation. It’s just the best I can do at the moment. Or, it’s just one of those mysteries of nature, like teats on bulls.