Category Archives: Mexico

The sun always shines in Algeria

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It’s a mistake not to leave Oregon at least for a little while in the winter, and so we’re thinking about a trip.

I’m reading A Moveable Feast. I want to go to Paris in the 20s but clearly that will not work out. When I went to Paris I met a woman named Beatrice whose apartment was full of books. She had a painting of flowers on the wall that matched the flowers I brought. Beatrice took me to a structure built by the Romans and gave me creme de cassis to drink.

I want to be in my town the way Beatrice is in hers, even though I have less to work with.

Obviously Hemingway should have stayed with his first wife, Hadley, but it’s common to imagine something we don’t have is better than what’s right in front of us.

Last night I went to The Dark Side see Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene with Mya –how’s that for alliteration– and then to Les Caves to drink Belgium beer. I’m willing to experience anxiety during a film, to be afraid, worried, sad, frustrated, and angry, if the film makes it worth it. I’m not sure Martha was worth it, although I admired its portrayal of the way young females can sometimes agree to give up our autonomy, our safety, pleasure, self- respect, our humanity. I did that when I was nineteen, but I don’t want to talk about it today.

Maybe we’ll go to Hawaii or maybe we’ll go to Savannah or Mexico. I want to sit on a beach, drinking cold beers and reading novels. I want the sun beating down on me. Camus said that even the poorest Algerian has it better than a European because in Algiers the sun always shines.

Oregon in the winter

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My mother is in Hawaii and my kids are packing for Mexico. Here the winter sky is gray almost every day. It’s gray and bleak and we live like people buried beneath plastic, like someone has stretched a plastic tarp over our heads and all we can do is wait for it to stop. My kids don’t mind the weather, but they are packing for Mexico. They are buying shorts and swim suits.

>internalizing repression

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Today I posted the first page of my new manuscript, Watching Rhonda Honey, on my website. The first page is about being raised Catholic. I’m glad I was raised Catholic, let me say that right now. It did three things that I like. It made me psychologically complicated, which is useful for a writer. It gave me a sense of shame, which is not a bad thing, I realize now as I’ve gotten older. And, best of all, the Catholic church taught me that, when you strip everything else away, at heart it’s all a big mystery.
Along with the first page of the novel, I posted a photograph I took in a Catholic Church in Mexico. It’s a picture of Jesus’ bloody, nailed feet. I think it’s a sign of the repressive times we live in, and the way in which we’ve internalized that repression, that I hesitated: would someone be offended? Was it in bad taste? Was I being disrespectful? —I hesitated, even though I knew that it it was right image, that if I could take a picture of what it felt like to be a little Catholic girl, it would be that picture.

>who would have guessed

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I thought I couldn’t write here. I thought maybe my writing required a cynical state of mind and I can’t feel cynical here, on the Jalisco Coast of Mexico, but today I wrote three pages of my novel, Finding Rhonda Honey.
Last night we went to a drag show here in this little town. The guy from the taco stand was a beautiful woman. Who would have guessed. People brought their children and the kids danced, too.