Guanajuato Day 12

8.1.06


I break my 25” record walking the mile and ½ uphill to school by 3” and realize how much I miss walking back in LA. You miss so much inside your car or public transportation: the smells, shoulders brushing on narrow streets, the careful navigation of dog poop and potholes, attentions to details on a house door, eye contact. Pedestrian cities have an entirely different feel from vehicular ones and I think of New York’s energy and San Fransisco’s compactness and Paris’ street life and so many metropolitan areas in which I have lived, where I have felt more alive than in LA. I don’t need much in the way of commercial venues, but I do enjoy cultural events, educational opportunities, a good coffee shop, dependable electricity and fresh produce; which nowadays leaves many options in the world open. What I am reminded most of here in Guanajuato and my brief visit to San Miguel is the importance of the central plaza, the meeting place where people parade and discourse. You just don’t pull over to the side of the road in LA to chat with a friend you meet at an intersection.

In saying hello to a worker at the school, I think of how Spanish uses Buenos Dias, the plural to wish one a good day. In French, it’s bonjour; Italian, buon giorno, German, Guten Tag and English, Good day or Hello, all singular formats. Am not familiar with enough other languages to know how others greet, but this idea of wishing someone a series of good days, rather than just one at a time is interesting. More reason to romanticize this language I am so greatly enjoying right now.

Michael and the kids take the funicular up to the base of the great statue of Pipila as I hike up the steep steps, which are virtual rain gutters after the afternoon thunderstorm. It’s a typical tourist sight with vendors and food stands and Noah buys these weird things called Snake Eggs. Ovoid magnetic metal things which, when tossed into the air, snap to each other and click wildly. For some reason I find them fascinating, this tizzy of activity between two opposing poles, that brings them together, like long lost lovers. He stands at one end of the plaza tossing and buzzing his, while a man on the other end, seems to respond in kind, tossing his own. I buy a set for myself, finding the smooth shapes soothing and think I’ll use them in a sort of meditative way, like the Chinese use those musical cloissone balls, the name of which I can’t remember. They remind me of conjuctio, that attraction of opposites which seems to drive so many relationships, biological functions, psychological battles and outright insanity. What makes two opposing forces, such as the magnetic poles, seek each other out? Did Mother Nature design everything with a missing part so that it would seek it’s tally-half? This seems to drive so many great love stories, such art as I understand colors to be complimentary, symetry a desired goal, those musical phrases which cry out for the resolution of chords and arpeggios.

Here´s to those wonders in life, which ask us to look beyond, within, without for questions and answers and those odd media, such as a child´s toy which prompt them.