Guatemala, Part Eleven: My Hat -- Really

(continued from Part Ten)

As I said, I have more to say about the hat.

Getting back to the beginning of that outing:  I was definitely on the lookout for some kind of hat when we went into town.  The tropical sun was merciless, and I don't have nearly as much hair on top as I used to.  We hadn't gone far from the car when my eye was caught by piles and piles of hats at the entrance of a shop -- neatly nested stacks of cheap-looking local-style straw hats for tourists -- straw hats with colored bands.  They pulled me like a magnet.  I didn't even pause to make sure that somebody in the family knew where I was going.

I had to pick a good one.  My vacation hat was not going to have a black band, for example.  I needed something bright, ideally multicolored.  The hats with rainbow bands all seemed to be too small.  I began shifting hats from stack to stack, peering inside them one after another.  Just as I was beginning to get discouraged, a sales lady came and helped me.  In no time I had what I needed -- a big enough hat with a mostly red band -- and I happily hurried away to find the family.

I don't want to make too much of this hat.  It's just a hat.  For the rest of the trip I wore it a lot, because, well, I needed protection from the sun.  Also because it was my hat.  I started calling it "my silly tourist hat."

During our first visit with Amadi's birthmother and her kids, I omitted the hat even when we went out for a walk on the sunny streets.  I was self-conscious about looking like a foreigner who foolishly tries to dress up like a local.  Also, I wore shiny black dress shoes that day.  We had the idea that, although we are in the habit of going barefoot indoors at home, it might be offensive to do so when receiving guests in a strange country; and I took this principle one step further and put on my good shiny shoes instead of my shabby tattered sneakers that day.

When packing for the trip, I had stuck those "grownup Daddy shoes" in the suitcase.  At the time, that choice on my part had struck me as odd.  I had tentatively classified it as one of those irrational things that people do when preparing for a trip, as they try to fend off the anxiety that goes with heading into the unknown.  On the other hand, I also thought that it might have been a perfectly sensible choice, in which case maybe my having doubts about it could be classified as one of those irrational things people do when preparing for a trip ...   When Tesi saw me unpacking the shoes in Antigua, it became clear that she also found it an odd choice.  But I think my reasoning was sound:  (a) even a person like me who always packs light for a trip should probably take more than one pair of shoes along, (b) it's true that I don't wear these shoes much at home, but it's also true that they are very comfortable, (c) if I want to dress up just a little better than usual at any point (for example when meeting the birth family), these shoes will help, and (d) while the sight of me in shoes like these might startle those who know me well, it is a completely unremarkable sight for the rest of the world.

(I call them "grownup Daddy shoes" because that's what they feel like.  I suppose the right term is "dress shoes."  They are extremely plain, but shiny.  When I put them on, or when I put any dress shoes on, it almost feels as if I'm putting on a coat and tie.  And putting on a coat and tie feels like putting on a costume, like I'm trying to disguise myself as a grownup.  For many men these would be everyday shoes.  Certainly in my father's day they would have been. )

I was glad that I wore them that day in the house in Antigua; it did not feel odd at all.  On the other hand, when the same visitors came back the next day I felt relaxed enough to revert to my everyday scruffy black sneakers, and also to wear the silly tourist hat when we went out in the sun for another walk around the neighborhood.

I don't know the language of hats any better than I know the language of ties or dress shoes or sports jackets.  Sport jackets?  (Sport jackets!  Those casual things that you wear -- with a tie! -- when you're not dressing up in a suit or something!  Is a tweed jacket a sport jacket?)  Since our trip I've been trying to learn a little bit about hats, not so much because of my straw hat, but more because a Facebook friend, Polly's husband Andrew, started reporting on the comments he gets from strangers when he goes out on the streets of New York in 2014 in a fedora.  After some internet research, now I at least know roughly what a fedora looks like.  I think maybe I could distinguish a fedora from a stodgy old homburg, for example, but the finer distinctions are beyond my reach.  I think of Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers's Have His Carcase, looking at the murder victim's hat:

"Last year's hat, reblocked, with new ribbon.  Shape, a little more emphatic than is quite necessary.  Deduction:  not wealthy, but keen on his personal appearance."

I'm pretty sure that back in, say, the early 60's, my father wore a hat when he went to work. I see him in a dark suit (or maybe just dark pants and a dark sports jacket), with a white shirt and a tie and grownup Daddy shoes and a hat.  A fedora, I suppose?  At the end of the day he would walk into the house and hang up his hat.  Also he would whistle a happy little tune that signaled "I'm home!" Six rapid notes that ran together, hi-lo-hi-lo-hi-loooo.  Sol-mi-sol-mi-sol-mi.  Such a familiar and welcome sound!

By the late 60's the world was changing.  I think he started dressing a little more casually for the office.  When I try to picture him coming home from work in those days, the scene is in color rather than black and white.  I have to ask my sisters what they remember about his hats and shoes and jackets.

I believe that my silly tourist hat is of the type that is called a "Panama hat".  I understand that Panama hats originated in Ecuador, and that the very best ones are so fine that they are waterproof and can be rolled up small for packing without doing them any harm.  Mine is the other extreme:  probably such a bad cheap imitation of a Panama hat that as far as a real hat person is concerned it doesn't deserve the name.  Anyway, I wasn't about to pack it in a bag when we left Guatemala.  It was either wear it or leave it behind.

I could have left it in the house in Antigua.  Come to think of it, there were some straw hats already there.  Quite likely they were meant for our use, left there by the landlord or by previous visitors.  Why did I even buy a hat?  It's true that there was one hat in the house that we didn't think we should touch.  It graced the head of a piece of found art in the living room: a big piece of a tree with raised arms.  But I think I could have borrowed one of the others.  Still, I wanted my very own vacation hat.  And, although I didn't know if I would ever wear it again, I wanted to take it with me when we left for home.

On airplanes there was no problem tucking the hat into an overhead compartment, but in airports I wore it on my head.  It was just one more thing to juggle when going through security.

We flew from Guatemala City to Boston by way of Miami, just like that other time when we were bringing baby Amadi home.  Somehow we had forgotten about the tedious part where you have to recover your checked bags, lug them through immigration and customs, and check them again for the next flight.

Back in the year 2000 our experience in Miami was nightmarish:  we had a narrow window of time between flights, we were slowed down at immigration by having to show adoption papers, and after customs we had to get ourselves, our two-month-old baby, and all of our luggage to the other end of the huge airport in a big hurry using muscle power alone.

This time it was much better:  we had more time, there was now a shuttle train from one end of the terminal to the other, and our baby had become a big thirteen-year-old who could walk on her feet.  Also, we got some streamlined service because 86-year-old Gerry cleverly requested a wheelchair.  But it's still a pretty horrible airport.

(At the baggage carousel:  Asa and I are waiting, waiting, waiting for the bags.  A chatty man next to us:  "Where are you guys from?"  "Boston"  "Oh.  Well, at least you have good sports teams there.  Hey, you have a game this weekend."  [Think.  What is he talking about?  Let's see, what time of year is it?  It's January.  Oh, I bet he's talking about football playoffs.  Wow, I didn't even know the Patriots were in the playoffs this year. ]  "I don't really pay much attention to any sport except baseball. Sometimes not even that.  Where are you from?"  "Chicago.  Miami airport is the worst airport in the world.  I've been coming through here every six months for years.  Once they stole all my Christmas presents.  Oh, they weren't worth much, but still, they were Christmas presents ..." )

Besides the shuttle train, the other nice surprise was the fancy machine for processing your passport.  I think these are very new.  I don't know if all the US points of entry have them yet.  You stand in front of one of a number of big kiosk thingies, and you hold your passport face down on a screen so it can be scanned.  Then the machine tells you to look it in the eye, and it amazingly adjusts itself to your height (even if you are in a wheelchair!), and it takes your picture and prints it out with other data on a slip of paper, which you take to the human agent at the booth on your way out of the hall.  I was the first of the five of us to undergo this process, so I was not exactly ready when the shutter clicked.  I didn't think to take off my reading glasses, which I had put on to study the fascinating gadget and to read the directions it was giving me.  I didn't think to take the hat off, either.  But I did manage to look right into the lens, and to keep my eyes open.  I came off looking like some kind of inept but cheerful spy.  I was really really hoping that we would end up with a copy of the picture to take home, but no:  it stayed with the human agent at the booth.  I would have liked to use it as my new Facebook profile. 

It wasn't until after the trip that it dawned on me how much my hat had to do with my father. In my youth the annual family vacation was a high point of the year for my parents, my sisters, and me.  Every August we would head for the woods and go camping:  either at drive-in campgrounds, or on islands, or in later years on a sort of houseboat.  (We sometimes kept a journal, writing down some memories together each day as we went along.  One of my sisters recently came across the home-made Ship's Log that I made for my father one year.  It was made of an actual log, cut in half, hinged, and filled with blank pages. )  And, now that I think of it, he always had a vacation hat.  He might use the same one two years in a row, but it seems to me that he would often just pick one up on our travels when the mood struck, or when the right hat appeared.  It served to keep the sun off his bald spot, and it was also an emblem of family fun and Daddy in vacation mode.  The one I remember best was the type of striped cloth cap that is associated with locomotive engineers.

Guatemala, Part Ten: My Hat

This post is out of chronological order, as usual. It begins on our third full day in Guatemala, when I bought myself a hat.

On New Years Day we five went into the center of Antigua to see things and do things. Up to that point some of us had been out on an errand or two, while others had not strayed far from the house. The affair of the empty cistern and the overheated pump had run its course. It seemed like time to start behaving like tourists.

It was almost noon. We piled into the Jeep. (I don't think we had yet figured out how to get into the back seat without contortions. That would come later.) Tesi drove. We parked near a pedestrians-only street that looked like a good place to start. The mid-day sun was beating down, and I bought a hat. We entered an old church, with its shrines and chapels and elaborate Nativity scene, trying not to intrude on the believers. (I took my hat off.) We bought two wooden flutes (one for Gerry, one for Asa) from a man who showed them off by playing old Simon and Garfunkel hits, including "El Condor Pasa" of course but also "Sounds of Silence" and I forget what else. We wandered through a big store full of lovely woven fabrics, oddities, and tacky tourist things, but we were not yet ready to buy much more than postcards.

Then it was time to make our way, hot and tired and hungry, on cobblestoned streets (Ha! Now I'm thinking of another S+G song, "For Emily Whenever I May Find Her", because it has cobblestones in it. Except that it doesn't have any explicit cobblestones in it -- I just looked up the lyrics -- isn't that funny?-- in my mind that song is set in cobblestoned streets) toward the square, the Parque, in the center of town, beyond which was the place we had chosen to have lunch. Actually, the heat and the cobbled bumpiness were such that, on second thought, we decided to travel those few blocks by car rather than on foot.

Let's look at the restaurant's website: "Cafe Flor is a beautiful Thai restaurant and piano bar located only 1/2 block from Antigua's Central Park. Our delicious menu, friendly service, and our unmistakably warm and intimate atmosphere are what makes us famous." That was all true, except no piano at lunch. I half-expected to see our faces at the site when I went there just now, because the owner snapped a few publicity pictures with our permission, but we don't seem to be in their current slideshow. I wonder if we ever were. Oh! Asa has found us on the restaurant's Facebook page!

After a brief encounter with an ATM, we split up, Tesi and Asa walking to La Bodegona while Gerry, Amadi, and I waited at the Park. We watched people and stray dogs, and I got at least five shoe-shine offers in 15 minutes. I wasn't even wearing the kind of shoes that you're supposed to use shoe polish on. They're sort of sneakers. They're really old and beat up. They used to be shiny. Hey, what do I know about shoes, maybe I should have been shining them all those years.

Then the food shoppers returned and we piled into the Jeep and went home, to nap or do crossword puzzles or walk around the neighborhood as the spirit moved us.

I have a lot more to say about the hat.

Guatemala, Part Nine: Singer-songwriter

(continued from Part Eight)

In a corner was some equipment -- stools, microphones, and so forth -- and it was clear that there was going be some kind of performance. Eventually a scruffy lanky man of the Anglo type, neither young nor old, started tuning his guitar and making other adjustments. Then it began.

I'm not sure of the sequence. I think he started right in with a song, and the stage patter didn't come in until later. The first song was an unfamiliar one. It might have been the one about Minnesota girls, or women. There may have been trains in it, too. I think the song expressed admiration for the tough people of that cold northern region. I'm afraid I wasn't listening closely to the words. I didn't have a high opinion of his guitar playing, or of his singing either, but I remember thinking that strictly speaking, by some standards, his singing wasn't really worse than Bob Dylan's. I later learned that Asa (who, unlike me, has a very low tolerance for Dylan's singing) also thought of Dylan right away.

My best guess is that this song was one of his own, because fairly soon he did tell us that he is a songwriter. He told us a number of things about himself. He said that he was from Texas. He explained that he is a "I'm a, um, I'm a [pause], um, I'm a [longer pause], what do you call it? a songwriter." It's not clear whether he was pretending that he had never described himself that way before, or pretending that he'd been living in Guatemala so long that he was starting to forget his English, or really losing his word-finding ability through some natural or unnatural process, or what.

The second or third song that he sang was an actual Dylan song: "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues".

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez, and it's Easter time, too ...

I thought it was an interesting choice of song for a US expatriate to sing to tourists in Latin America.

Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of doom ...

He sang "doom". I think some people sing "gloom". I think maybe Judy Collins sang "gloom" in the version we had at home when I was growing up.

I'm goin' back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough!

His stage patter also included some almost completely incomprehensible (to me) remarks about Texas statewide politics. And he let us know that he runs a music school for children. I couldn't help thinking of the scene at the end of "School of Rock" when Ned Schneebly is teaching the beginning guitar class ("all right, your fingers are almost in the right place ...")

His wife was there with him: mostly for moral support, but she did join him for one number. She stood in front of a mike (do I have to spell it "mic"? I mean, a bicycle isn't a bic), and while he sang a song about a train she made train sounds. Not whistle sounds, but "choo choo" sounds, or I should say "ch ch" -- and in a rhythm that neither Asa nor I could really get a handle on.

I looked up the Dylan song later, on Wikipedia, because I couldn't remember the name of it or some of the lyrics and it was running through my head. I learned that "Tom Thumb" is a reference to something by Rimbeau, and also that some critic called the song a comic tour de force. I always thought of it as more sad and dreary than funny, but maybe that's because Judy Collins sang it that way. Now it's running through my head again.

Guatemala, Part Eight: Out on the Town in Pana

After the long drive to Panajachel on Friday the five of us checked into our hotel, had lunch outdoors overlooking the lake, and spent the rest of the afternoon in various combinations napping, trying out the hotel pool, or exploring the neighborhood a little.

Amadi and I began with the pool. It had a water slide -- not a very long one, but you did have to climb quite a few stairs to get to the launch point. When I first went up there, I was disappointed to find that the water was not flowing. (I don't think we can count this as one more example of our family's bad plumbing karma.) It seemed like an admission of defeat to climb back down the stairs, so I took the slide down -- not so much sliding as inching. This got the attention of a hotel employee, who rushed outside, leaped over a narrow strait in the pool, disappeared into an underground chamber, and turned on the works. (If the works had then exploded, that would have counted as an example of our bad plumbing karma.) Later on, Tesi and Gerry both joined us at the pool. There were also a few other families around, including a youngish couple from California with a lively and loud baby. He stared at me, as babies often do, and he was definitely amused when I made weird sputtering and trumpeting noises for him by exhaling through puckered lips at the surface of the pool.

At some point Tesi and Asa began to explore the central touristy street of the town, the Calle Santander. Their main goal was to identify a place to have dinner later: a restaurant serving decent food in pleasant surroundings, with some good vegan options for Asa, preferably cheaper than the hotel restaurant.

The place that they chose, Las Chinitas, offered mixed Asian cuisine. It had an indoor-outdoor feel, with big hanging plants and tasteful strings of lights. One booth had a stuffed-animal-strewn bed around it instead of benches, but we passed on that and took a table in the corner.

The food was just fine, and I'm not saying we didn't have a good time, but there were a few things about the ambiance that could not have been predicted.

One, the steady stream of vendors. Women selling woven bracelets and such would come right up to the table, and their response to a polite refusal would be either to try again with a different member of the party, or to tell us that they hadn't sold anything all day, or just to stand silent in hopes of being paid to go away. Sad and disturbing.

Two, that loud baby again. The California couple showed up, and their kid yelled a lot during dinner. (We would have a third chance to hear him again later on, in the middle of the night, since their hotel room was right next to ours.) Tesi actually took a turn quieting him at dinner, carrying him around the room and pointing things out to him. She is a keen observer of human beings, and especially babies, both by nature and by training, and she was pretty sure that the parents needed a break and that the baby would tolerate being entertained by a stranger for a few minutes.

Three, there was the live music. This gets a post of its own.

Guatemala, Part Five: Tom and Asa Decide To Go Shopping

Our departure for Pana was supposed to mark the beginning of the "true vacation" part of the trip. Up till then we had been renting a house and fending for ourselves: buying groceries, cooking meals, washing dishes, doing laundry -- and when I say "we" I mean above all Tesi. Add to that the water/plumbing fiasco and a somewhat busy social schedule, including emotionally laden meetings with Amadi's birth family, and you have a week that was long on satisfaction but short on relaxation.

I have to say about the grocery shopping that, although it was different from home in some respects (bumpy roads, hard to park, hard to find things in the store), it was just like home in one way: in spite of our best efforts to plan ahead there was always at least one more thing we needed, and I don't think a day ever went by without a trip to La Bodegona, the supermarket.

The next 48+ hours were to be different. On Saturday we were to be driven to Pana, where we had rooms reserved at a very good hotel. On Sunday we were to have a private tour of Lake Atitlan by motorboat (lancha). On Monday we would be driven back to Antigua. In between, we would be free to choose between swimming in the hotel pool, napping in a hammock or in the room, doing a little gift shopping -- whatever. We would have meals in the hotel or in some nearby restaurant. In short, it was time to take it easy. Furthermore, Tesi had arranged for someone else to prepare dinner for us when we got back to the house Antigua on Monday: Nancy, who cleans the house twice a week. Tesi even had a plan for Tuesday dinner, which was to save us from another trip to La Bodegona before leaving for home on Wednesday.

And that's basically how the weekend went, except for a couple of us getting a pretty severe case of the kind of gastro-intestinal trouble that sometimes affects visitors to that part of the world.

When we got back to Antigua on Monday, Gerry mentioned that she was at a stage where she would very much like to have some fruit to eat -- the one thing we didn't have! Asa and I volunteered to go to the store, and in no time there was a shopping list: as long as you're going there, how about a couple of big red onions? And some yogurt. And a thing of whole milk, but not too big. Sugar. Paper napkins. And we could probably use another loaf of bread. You could even, instead of supermarket bread, get something good from one of those other places: Organico or Sabe Rico. And we might as well see if they have an ice pack for Gerry's back. Oh, and just see if they have any brightly colored kitchen towels to take home, with pictures of something Guatemalan on them.

It was Asa's idea to make this expedition on foot rather than by Jeep. I thought it was a great idea: a little exercise, a little adventure, a little special time together. I did stop and raise the question of timing -- I didn't want to delay dinner, especially if Nancy was sticking around to serve it to us -- but after a brief discussion it was agreed that dinner would not be until 5:30 anyway, and off we went.

Guatemala, Part Four: Outline

It's been over a week since the last installment, and we're home now -- out of the delightfully mild "tropics" and back in the bitter cold of the "temperate" zone.

This travelogue was never meant to be a complete or balanced thing, but I would like to write down a few more stories. Before doing so, here is a bare outline, to assist the memory of those who were there and the understanding of those who were not.

12/29  Travel day.

12/30  Settling in in Antigua, getting to know the house, the neighborhood, the Jeep, the roads, and La Bodegona supermarket. Visit from Luvia's family. The convite.  

12/31  Meeting with Susi. Lunch by Nancy. Tom and Amadi walk halfway to town. Water/plumbing crisis. Fireworks.

1/1      Resolution of plumbing crisis. All go downtown together (hat, church, flutes, postcards, Thai lunch).

1/2      First meeting with Jacky and kids. 

1/3      Second meeting with Jacky and kids. Lunch at Luvia's house.

1/4      Water crisis continues. Long ride to Panajachel by shuttle van. Dinner at Las Chinitas.

1/5      Lake Atitlan by boat. Dinner with friends.

1/6      Breakfast at the Deli. Long ride back to Antigua by shuttle van. Tom and Asa walk to La Bodegona. Dinner by Nancy.

1/7      A fairly quiet last day, with just a touch of water crisis. Tom, Asa, and Amadi walk to the post office.

1/8      Home.

Some stories that should be told, and maybe will be:

Tesi and Tom's first somewhat dazed trip into town in the Jeep.

The convite in San Miguel Duenas: parade floats and dance troupes.

Tesi and Asa's alarming ride with the plumber on New Years Eve.

Lost in the rain in Juarez in a Chinese restaurant in Panajachel. [done]

Lake Atitlan: geology, the grandfather statue, the Romeo and Juliet of the lake, an herb garden, and natural dyes.

Asa and Tom walk the long dusty road in quest of fruit and other things and largely fail with regard to fruit. [done]

Asa, Amadi, and Tom walk the long dusty road just to mail a few postcards.