Ever since I got here, we'd planned to go to Nogales on Friday. I wanted to go for mostly sentimental reasons. Years ago, when Johnny was an architectural student, his department went on a field trip to Phoenix predominantly to visit the Paulo Soleri sites of Arcosanti and Cosanti. While in Arizona, they slipped over the border to Nogales. Though Johnny expressed distaste for most of the Mexican part of the trip, he brought me home a wonderful pair of exotic looking leather sandals which I wore for years. Later, when he graduated, we tripped to Disneyland and home through Phoenix and again bought sandals for me in Nogales. It was that experience I was hoping to duplicate.
We got off to an interesting start. Jaren needed to deliver materials to the local public library which we couldn't find. We abandoned that task and started on the next, delivering their rent check to their housing management unit. It was miles across town from where we had been searching for the library. Jaren thought it was at 2720 Prince and Charity said she had been there before and knew it was on Ina. So we went to Ina. (I once knew a woman named Ina. She was the mother of a friend and the wife of a man who would buy our mud pies for 5 cents apiece. He purportedly ate them though he'd never let us watch.) Charity admits that she's not good with numbers so she did not know an address on Ina. What she knew is that the building we were looking for was by "where they build up a wall to hold stuff back." In other words, a retaining wall. Ina is miles and miles long. How long did it take us to drive up and down Ina looking for a retaining wall? Finally Jaren and I got out of the van at a Fry's Food to buy deli sandwiches and chocolate candy bars. Charity continued the search for the retaining wall. We bought the food we needed and Charity found the housing management.
At last we were on our way to Mexico.
If somehow I'd forgotten what the experience is like of being constantly harangued by vendors, I've never had the occasion to experience it with three screaming, hyper children determined not to listen or to obey anything the adults were saying. While we were in Tucson, Jaren showed me a business named "Ugly, but honest." One of the last places we visited in the bizarre bazaar was a booth where a man was calling out "Cheap American junk!" The only honesty we heard. By that time, Claire had held my hand long enough to earn a bobble head. So we bought three of them for two dollars. Charity was disappointed that Jaren and I gave up the battle so easily. She needed some time without children to do the shopping she wanted to do.
We got off to an interesting start. Jaren needed to deliver materials to the local public library which we couldn't find. We abandoned that task and started on the next, delivering their rent check to their housing management unit. It was miles across town from where we had been searching for the library. Jaren thought it was at 2720 Prince and Charity said she had been there before and knew it was on Ina. So we went to Ina. (I once knew a woman named Ina. She was the mother of a friend and the wife of a man who would buy our mud pies for 5 cents apiece. He purportedly ate them though he'd never let us watch.) Charity admits that she's not good with numbers so she did not know an address on Ina. What she knew is that the building we were looking for was by "where they build up a wall to hold stuff back." In other words, a retaining wall. Ina is miles and miles long. How long did it take us to drive up and down Ina looking for a retaining wall? Finally Jaren and I got out of the van at a Fry's Food to buy deli sandwiches and chocolate candy bars. Charity continued the search for the retaining wall. We bought the food we needed and Charity found the housing management.
At last we were on our way to Mexico.
If somehow I'd forgotten what the experience is like of being constantly harangued by vendors, I've never had the occasion to experience it with three screaming, hyper children determined not to listen or to obey anything the adults were saying. While we were in Tucson, Jaren showed me a business named "Ugly, but honest." One of the last places we visited in the bizarre bazaar was a booth where a man was calling out "Cheap American junk!" The only honesty we heard. By that time, Claire had held my hand long enough to earn a bobble head. So we bought three of them for two dollars. Charity was disappointed that Jaren and I gave up the battle so easily. She needed some time without children to do the shopping she wanted to do.
We walked back to the parking lot on the American side where we'd parked the car and drove across the border. Jaren and I were both much more interested in seeing the countryside than in being accosted by thieves and beggars and men trying to pick up Emilia and stroke Claire's golden hair.
Claire thought she'd like to live in the neighborhoods we were driving through and was quite upset that we wouldn't let her play with the children and try out her few Spanish phrases.
Charity did get some private shopping time while the kids slept in the car with Jaren. She also got to shop once again while we spent an hour inching our way through the queue of cars entering the good US of A.
It requires a non-enviable ability to divorce oneself from natural feelings of compassion and empathy to see such extreme poverty and filth and then drive away eating a chocolate bar.
Jaren and I went to see King of California--a delightful movie.
4 comments:
You photo porker. I thought we were going to share. I mean nice potes.
What kind of chocolate?
yeah, my kids have had better days, though lately I can't remember what they were like or when they occurred.
Great pics. I'm so glad to get the ones of Tucson. I've been ill and out of it and MISS THIS FAMILY. They seem to have given up their blogs, but what about you? Keep going? And where's my book? I'm reading The Road, but can't recommend it yet, though many have pushed me into reading it. Where are you and what are you doing?
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