White Oprah

She picked up her nickname from neighborhood children. They had grown up playing with our children periodically, but mostly, they watched her befriend their mom. Sure, we spent Thanksgivings and Christmas dinners with the Markers, and they learned that no matter how little they had seen of her, she would do her White Oprah act. The next thing they knew they had let her into their world sentence by sentence, answer by answer to her seemingly benign queries. Before she was done, she had all of the answers and had by not passing judgment had made them feel good about where they were in life. So one day when Marilyn informed her family that Bruce and Sharon were coming for dinner, one of the Marker boys said, “Here comes White Oprah.”

Now that I am retired from teaching and coaching, the most enjoyable part of my life is not the exercising, which I am addicted to, not the taking of Espanol lessons, which I do enjoy, and not the lounging with a good book by the pool with the ocean waves breaking in the background, which only an idiot couldn’t enjoy, but watching and listening to my White Oprah as she meets one more new traveler at the palapa during happy hour. This is where Jaime holds court, but where Nunez weaves her web.
Jaime’s court is a five foot cement bar with a back bar that has one bottle for each type of liquor. You won’t find 70 bottles of vodka. You will find one. Surely, you could find 3 or 4 types of tequila. No, you will find one. The ornamentation behind the bar is one cactus with a red flower bursting from its zenith. A more deceptively discomforting phallic symbol may not exist.

The view that Jaime has beyond the patrons is of the palm trees, thatched palapas, cool pool, and the island studded Pacific Ocean. Now the price of drinks at Paraiso’s palapa is what the liquor would cost at a store. You see part of the homeowners’ association fees is to keep the price of food and drink to a minimum and since the Mexican government would tax the palapa if it was attempting to turn a profit, a beer costs less than eighty cents, a mixed drink around a dollar. I don’t care if the surliest bartender in Mexico was working here, it would do a helluva business. But we have Jaime.

Jaime is the most beloved person to grace any part of the eighty-four condominium complex as an owner or an employee. When the airport taxis arrive, while one person is collecting the bags, one or more members of the arriving party, sprints to the palapa to screech, “Jaime!!!!”. Now with 84 condos and residents coming and going to high and low seasons, a slippage of Jaime’s memory about some of these people would seem reasonable. I mean some of them only come for two weeks a year and rent it out for the rest of the time. But no, he remembers everyone, what their unit is, what they drink, what they do for a living, where they are from in the States or Canada, what the name of each child is whether they have ever been there or not, and their favorite saying or joke that will get them to laugh. Not to love Jaime is a justifiable reason to be sent to a psychiatrist to seek treatment for depression.
So as Jaime settles in one new vacationer after another, I get to watch my wife do her Oprah act. Jaime butters them up, and Nunez grills them. They don’t know that they are being grilled because she asks benign questions with such sincerity and earnestness that answers just roll off their tongues. It is not just her questions, but she lets them in on her life. Since she was an elementary school teacher, and everyone has at least gone that far in school, she is harmless. There is no way that they haven’t done more, made more, seen more, and known more than a second grade teacher. So when she asks, they want to tell her; some need to tell her. It is her eyes that encourage them to go beyond the normal introductory informational spiel that everyone has. She oozes interest, and she is interested. You just can’t fake this act of her. It is who she is. People will, before long, want to go out with us to their favorite restaurants. They will want to have us show them around the city if they are new to Mazatlan. It really makes for interesting bedroom conversations in the morning. She’s too exhausted to talk at night. She’s talked out. It’s a tough job being White Oprah.

So we meet interesting people except when we arrived in late August, the gringos who live here take the hottest, muggiest time in Mazatlan to visit family and friends North of the border. The Mexicans, who dominate the palapa and pool during August, return home because school reconvenes. Given the absence of the palapa, but more importantly the severity of the heat and humidity, we took off for Guadalajara for a week.

At our hotel we met a couple of women at the pool from Seattle who were on vacation for a couple of weeks to tour Guadalajara, Guanajuato, and San Miguel de Allende. One, Maureen is a laid back sixty year old community college teacher while Julie is a forty year old Microsoft type A personality employee. To know Nunez is to know that she would naturally find the teacher more interesting to spend time with. Fortunately, for all of us, Julie mellowed out being around three wing it as we go folks.

Maureen’s most immediate rewarding quality is her bilingual skills. She has traveled extensively throughout Mexico over the years and helped us immeasurably in navigating the confusing layout of the streets of Guadalajara. At every stop light she would convince the car next to us, and in the second largest city in Mexico there was always a car at the stop light next to us, to roll down their window and give us directions that were exactly the same with the last stop light information we had received. No one denied her of this information. God, I love Mexicans.
Sharon and I also loved traveling with Maureen and Julie. We eventually hit as many of the tourist activities that we could find in our collection of guidebooks with the two of them. We visited museums of Orozco’s powerful political paintings that graced one building as if it was the Sistine Chapel. We loved the Huchiole museum of an indigenous tribe that has rejected all attempts to Mexicanize them. We cherish a symbolic painting that we purchased there that has a written explanation of all of its symbolism. All I remember were the shaman’s extensive use of peyote to achieve oneness with God. I think I learned all about that when I returned from Vietnam trying to figure out why God would permit people to do what I had witnessed for the previous 13 months. Passing peyote to our congressmen might have improved our foreign policy. It might have some merit now as well come to think about it.
Another gift that Maureen provided us with her language skills was to hear the stories of proud artisans. We drove to Tonalo, on the outskirts of Guadalajara, where their pottery is legendary. In fact, the national pottery museum is there. Maureen asked so many questions of an armless curator that he walked us throughout and shared story after story of all the great pottery makers in Mexican history. His inability to speak English and to use his arms to gesture hampered nothing of my ability to appreciate his fervent love of great art done in clay. My favorite part of the museum was the selection of yearly winners. I can only compare them to going to a quilting show where stories are woven into the fabric. The pottery displays all told stories and we snapped picture after picture.

The best story we heard was at a two hundred year old shop that has been marginally modernized. We were given a tour by one of the sons (a 55 year old who was one of six sons who worked there). He showed us the process from beginning to end. While he showed us his shop, his father arrived. His pride in his product was palpable. This eighty year old man’s eyes lit up. The son then took us to show the numerous articles that had described the quality of this family’s pottery. These articles he showed were only the English written ones from the likes of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

He then showed us the Hall of Fame pictures on the wall of Presidents and significant politicians who had pictures taken with the family at major social gatherings. He then showed us one last article about a dinner the Mexican President Calderon hosted with President Obama in attendance. President Obama commented on the lovely table settings. President Calderon then gave Obama a setting of? I mean how many settings do you give a President? Six? Ten? Twenty? I confess I don’t know how many, but I’m betting you can guess who had made this pottery.
The family took pictures of us and we did as well of them and asked them if we would make it to their wall. They laughed. Julie bought an expensive plate, and we moved onto a wild display of wares throughout the village that are allowed to clog up the streets each Thursday and Saturday. We wandered around until hunger overtook us, and we were herded into this alley by a restaurant crier who promised us the best Mexican meal ever. Admit it, only a dumbass would allow himself to be cajoled into an alley in Mexico to eat a meal. But we were weak and miserably hot, and ravenous.

I know that if you are in deed ravenous enough, a mediocre meal may achieve unfrickenbelievable status. Julie spotted an item on the menu that she had previously eaten and loved to such a degree that she learned to make it in Seattle. Chiles en Nogata is a couple of large chiles stuffed with meat, a smattering of dried fruit, and cheese. It has a white walnut sauce poured over it. Persimmon seeds are sprinkled on top. It looks like the Mexican flag with red, white and green colors. It should be the national meal. Persimmons are only ripe in September, so it is rarely seen on menus eleven other months of the year. Chiles en Nogata doesn’t appear in every restaurant, but when it did, I ordered it. The worst one I ever had was an 8.9 on a 10 scale. The one in Tonalo was an 10.
After a week in Guadalajara Maureen and Julie who had reservations to stay in Guanajuato, boarded a bus. The guide books all raved about this city, so we took a circuitous route that wound into this spectacular city nestled into the mountains that hosted enough gold and silver to make it one of Mexico’s wealthiest colonial cities. Guanajuato looks like an Italian city with one colorful casa after another sitting on top of each other as they work their way down from the mines to the plazas and 90 tunnels that make up the safest and quickest way to navigate the city. This city of 150,000 is loaded with entertainment either in clubs and restaurants to the streets and plazas. Street entertainers and excuses to hold a fiesta abound. The most famous festival is the Cervantes festival during the last two weeks of October. International stars play in three or four venues that are also shown on large screens around the largest plazas and people dance in the streets into the wee hours of the morning.

We found a bed and breakfast sport next to the loudest church in Mexico. Mexican clergy love to remind their parishioners that they need to get to the church to cleanse their souls after the previous evening’s debauchery. I swear every 15 minutes the most magnificent snooze alarm assaulted our room. Nunez never woke up. She did make it up for breakfast to hear Hugo’s stories each morning. Hugo is this 50ish gay painter who hosts the bed and breakfast for his sister who owns two of the most outlandish B&B’s of all time. The one just outside of town and the number one in all of the guidebooks is outright ghoulish. It is Dia del Muerte on acid. Our camera got a workout. I mean we had a canopied bed with an angel suspended just above our heads. No one needs to wake up to that. We spent one night there and moved in with Hugo.

Hugo, a stout fellow, spent eighteen years in Portland, Oregon and spoke English with a gay lisp and a Mexican accent. He could tell a story though. Breakfast crept into noon each day and only then did we reluctantly leave to tour his city as he thought we should see it. That is to forget the museums and the mines. Go into the plazas and sit and watch the people. Talk to them and hear their stories. Eat at the restaurants that Hugo liked. He certainly didn’t steer us wrong there. But no stories that we heard were as good as Hugo’s.

My favorite one was of his uncle who bought this old restaurant and tried to renovate it into a home of his own. While digging under the urinal, he found a deposit of three hundred year old gold coins. Hugo explained that each neighborhood would mint their own gold coins and if you were discovered to have another neighborhood’s coins, you would be killed. It was a capital offense to do business with another neighborhood. If you did do business, you would hide the gold coins from anyone who might squeal on you. His uncle had come across a cache of gold that made him a very rich man. So the next time you find yourself fantacising at a urinal, remember that there could be gold down there.

After saying goodbye to Hugo, Julie took a bus to the Leon airport to fly back to Seattle. Maureen joined us to drive to San Miguel del Allende. Of course, driving through villages with two women necessitated stopping at every possible pottery store along the way. We had to put some of the luggage in the car to make room for the pottery we purchased. It all lies in a cupboard where it never sees the light of day, but damn, was it fun to buy. Watching two women look for bargains is priceless. Yeah right. It’sexpensiv e. “You don’t want to know what I spent.” No kidding.

I mean they get on this roll, and before long every piece of pottery that was on the wall, is being wrapped up into paper and stacked into a cardboard box. Then they are so excited because the young girl who is working the shop gives them an incense holder or some other piece of pottery that they could never sell, but it’s a gift. Now when you leave, we are the best of friends and the cameras come out and it’s a love fest. I don’t get it. It’s all in a cupboard. There’s nothing else in this cupboard, so it’s not like I will occasionally look in there for a place mat or something and see it.

Can you imagine when this teenage Mexican girl gets picked up by her father and asks her how her day went during the least touristy month of the year on a Monday? “Papa, I sold everything on the wall. I sold out the whole damn store.”
“Wholy friole!!! How did that happen?”
“I don’t know. Some gringa named Nunez. She liked it all.”
“What’s she gonna do; open another store?”
“No Se Papa. She’s a loca gringa, but very happy. She gave me a hug.”
“Oprah del Blanco.”

We did make it to San Miguel del Allende and stayed at another attractive bed and breakfast that was thirty yards to the main plaza and ten yards from the restaurant where Hugo told us we had to dine. Hugo batted a 1.000 on his restaurant recommendations. We watched the El Grito celebrations of the announcement of the 1810 Mexican Independence from Spain and its reenactment by the Mayor of the city and its subsequent fireworks. Mexicans know how to throw a party. Best coordinated city celebrations I have ever seen, and Paris on Bastille Day was spectacular.
After a woman spends ten days traveling with Nunez, they are going to be life long friends. Before Maureen departed, she told us of her most painful yet life changing experience that I will never be able to do justice to in print. Her sister was in Puerta Vallarta on a honeymoon twenty-five years ago. While her betrothed and she were golfing, a man walked up to them while they were on the course and shot them both. Maureen’s sister died and her husband was hospitalized for a lengthy stay.

The Seattle papers raged on and on for weeks about the incident. Maureen’s parents have obviously never forgotten and never forgiven Mexico. Maureen traveled to Puerta Vallarta to learn about what had happened. The police gave little satisfactory information and although they arrested and convicted a drugged individual, Maureen was less than content with the manner any of it was handled.
This incident haunted her for years, but did not persuade her that Mexico was an evil place to be or anything less than a country peopled with pride, compassion, and love. Her parents do not understand her repeated forays into Mexico, but Maureen has decided to live her life how her sister would have wanted her to. She confessed that this is a story that she rarely if ever tells, but she hadn’t met up with White Oprah until now. The night before we departed Sharon and Maureen tearfully embraced to say their goodbyes.