Postcard from San Miguel: A victimless crime

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What could a purse mean to a gringa

who can stay in a house on a hill?*

A house with more bedrooms than people,

if maid and gardener count little.

Three-hundred and twenty-five pesos?

Food for the family to the native;

so little to the graying gringa.

The journal with illegible garble?

Trash to the native;

irreplaceable to the writing gringa.

An iPad demanding a code to enter,

rendered impotent in a house with no wi-fi?

Trash to the native;

legions of lost words to the writing gringa.

That plastic card bearing a name

obviously not of an hombre Mexicano?

Trash to the native;

precious lost time to the aging gringa.

Cancelling the card and requisite changes,

all those shopping links and autopayments.

Unimaginable repercussions to the native;

in his eyes, a victimless crime.

And maybe so,

compared to such a hardscrabble life.

Loss of trust means nothing

to someone with no reason to trust life.

And what’s 325 pesos to a gringa

who can stay in a house on a hill?

The hopeful arm stretching out the driver’s side window

failed to snatch the satchel clutched tightly to her chest.

No food for the table of the native;

unrecoupable words saved for the writing gringa.

*Apologies for this format, so awkwardly written by one unaccustomed to verse. Blame it on poet Ellen Bass. Emerging under the spell of her reading during the Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende, prose seemed prosaic. But the awkward prose to which followers are accustomed will resume after sleeping off her influence.

Prescribing a dose of ‘Blue Medicine’

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Without true love we just exist

So here we lay in our comfy coffins….

“Comfy Coffins” by Joe Reyes and Erik Sanden

Rather dark-sounding for Valentine’s season. But, after all, February 14 commemorates the date Saint Valentine was beheaded some 17 centuries or so ago – a detail Hallmark certainly let fall through the cracks.

photo by Ramin Samandari
photo by Ramin Samandari

But, despite blue-sounding lyrics, the harmonizing voices of Demitasse – Joe Reyes and Erik Sanden – leave you feeling uplifted. Their songs represent their therapeutic approach to recovering from losing their fathers following long-term illnesses.

The other night Joe Reyes said singing them made him feel grown-up, but the expressions the duo wear don’t look it. The pair sports these impish Vienna-Choir-Boys-type smiles while singing, clearly enjoying every minute they are playing together. And it’s contagious.

Bedlamb Records describes their vocals:

The sound is somewhere between Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and the Beach Boys on a dark day. Or Elliott Smith on an extremely bright, sunny day. Or John Cale tossing his car keys to Neil Young.

Demitasse’s music went well paired with a hazelnut and arugula salad and a bottle of wine, but form your own opinion by listening here.

Demitasse appears on Tuesday nights this month at the Liberty Bar. The residency comes in advance of the release of Blue Medicine on Bedlamb Records.

There’s no cover, and the music begins at 7 p.m. But don’t wait until 7 if you would like a seat at a table.

Going will cure what ails you.

Photographs from the 1800s place faces on the names found in the registry of Zephaniah Conner’s Bible

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Louisa Ann Godwin Conner in mourning for her husband Zephaniah Turner Conner, who died in 1866 in Macon, Georgia, after serving as a Colonel for the Confederacy

Diligently pursuing “Indian depredations” (by Native Americans who objected to the State of Texas having awarded their land to others) around the Coker Settlement on the north side of San Antonio, I paused to look for the copy of The Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick.

And there it was. Not the memoirs, but the small leather-bound, gilded album with photographs of the Conners. Seriously old photos, primarily taken in Macon, Georgia, between the 1860s and the late 1800s.

These will be of little interest to most people unless you are a Conner descendant, but for those, wherever they are, I wanted to post a few of the photos of family members whose births and departures are recorded in Zephaniah Conner’s Family Bible – the behemoth one dating from 1831 featured in this “Older than Methuselah” blogpost, in which you can find out more about this particular branch of the Mister’s ancestors.

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Now, where was I with those restless natives in Texas?

Maybe it will be less distracting to read Mary Maverick’s memoirs online….

July 7, 2016, Update: John Banks wrote a wonderful piece on his blog addressing the Civil War experiences of William Allis Hopson fighting for the South and his younger brother, Edward, fighting for the Union.