Love is a bitch on a grass mat.

This is Oscar, the Honduran French Professor who was constantly instigating competition over Yan and I's Spanish skills. I didn't used to like him cause he was grumpy but then I had to tolerate him cause he was Yan's best friend, and then I actually grew to enjoy him.
This is a pig in the town airport. It was great for the young and carefree. Personally, I loved the fact that animals wandered around like they owned the whole town.
Yan and I lived near each other right up this street, up on the hill. Behind us was a rainforest/jungle.

This is on the town square, though the Evangelicals probrably dominate Honduras at this time, which always seems to happen in the poorest countries with so many vulnerable people. La Catolica has lost a lot of ground - now it's more for the middle class and rich, with a scattering of devoted campesinas.

This is the kind of thing we'd see at the beach all the time. These boys are Garifuna, or Black Caribs, descended from the French island of San Vicente. They settled in Honduras after the English took over San Vicente and couldn't dominate them....They dumped them on Roatan, where they cultivated yucca and wound up saving the Spanish Colonizers in Trujillo from starvation.
Do you like rusticity? Trujillo has it in spades.

Guns, machetes and other nifty little phallic extenions are commonplace and often combined with alcoholic consumption and broken-hearts inspired by tv novelas, so Trujillo is not for the weak of heart, stomach, or anything.

My Story About Yan's Dog and the Grass Mat.

Once upon a time, I lived in a little town called Trujillo, Honduras. This is what it looked like, though prettier in places and uglier in places.

Trujillo is a blog in and of itself. I'm just going to share a vignette now and then. Here is one.

I had an American friend in Trujillo, whom we'll call Yan, since that's how they pronounced his name. He was and is a 6'2" tall blond gringo. (Otherwise know as Gringote, which means Huge Gringo. He was quite popular there, so they said Gringote with a lot of respect.) He was a Peace Corps volunteer at the time, planting trees with school children, and I was a wanderer living in one town. I had recently graduated from college and living in Honduras was what I did next. I wanted to learn Spanish at first, then I just wanted to live there and experience life in an interesting way.

Trujillo was and is an isolated beach town that's caught in a time warp. It was laid back and friendly yet wild and intense. It was a great place to swim, dance, drink, and generaly socialize and wander, and lets throw in a few aventuras...(cause when you're an American abroad in Latin America and haven't a care in the world (including for your reputation) those aventuras tend to happen. And for me and Yan, they did, though not together.) It was the perfect place for young people who aren't into well-beaten paths, constricting environments and trendiness. It was gorgeous and bizarre.

Yan and I had initially ignored each other, since we were both were into the native culture - spoke good Spanish at that point (we had a little competition going there, instigated by our professorial friend Oscar, one of the 10 Hondurans who speak French, and who tries to be rather snobby in a harmless way.) Then one day a friend introduced as and we became fast friends. In fact, we were buddies in crime. If there was a picardia (bit of devilishness) to be discussed, it weaved its way through our conversations. Neither of us was too wild, but we were wild enough to generate some pretty fun times and great stories. We were always hanging out and taking our boyfriend/girlfriend and the French professor with us to dance and swig back Port Royals and there was quite an air of commeraderie. We'd play truth or dare on the beach with some beers. It was pretty much a highpoint of our youth. Everything was comical, sexy, strange, unpredictable. We will always be attached to eachother because we shared that strange world.

But on to the story. Yan had a dog named "Numada" which meant friend. He trained the dog to attack when he said "whoosh" and fed her only raw meat scraps from the butcher. Personally, I like dogs, however I found Numada to be very aloof (even though her owner was quite warm and jovial, despite his macho dog training thing.)

Anyway Numada and I, we weren't tight. We tolerated eachother. We never "saluted" each other. Yan in retrospect observes that we were rivals, two friends competing for his attention. I felt that she was one of those distant street dogs without an ounce of warmth to her, but Jan will probrably be mad at me for saying that. I think she was only nice to him since he was the meat man. Yan, don't be mad!

As I intimated, I wasn't too tight with Jan's best friend Oscar, though we grew on each other. And one night, my boyfriend was working the nightshift at Standard Fruit, where the Dole boats docked on the port, and I got locked out of our house. I had to sleep in Oscar's room after going to the disco. I was wearing a sexy outfit however Oscar prefers men anyway and in a tipsy daze somehow I agreed to sleep on his floor, on a woven petate. Yan couldn't host me cause he was seducing some helpless Honduran virgin girlfriend next door in his studio apartment, trying to Americanize her and show her a good time as she quaked with fear that her Tio Moncho was going to knock on the door with a pistol, or at least that neighbors would see and her rep would be shot.

The petate mat was not exactly comfortable on the concrete floorand the room was full of mosquitoes however I was too done-in to notice. Anyway, I'm sure Oscar had offered me to share his twin bed but somehow I went with the mat. And since Yan was getting jiggy with it in the next room, he had stuck his dog Numada in Oscar's room, and somehow I woke up in the morning to my boyfriend knocking on the door disgruntled, with me on the petate with Numada in my arms.

The End (of Sorts)

The Impetuous Squirrel

I have this little problem....It's that very strange things tend to happen to me with creatures from the animal kingdom. No, nothing like that. Small, tedious creatures seem to get mixed up with me. It's definitely an erie pattern. I've mulled over contacting a spiritual advisor about this, because it seems almost karmic - it's like I'm covered in sugar to attract exactly what I want to stay away from me. A very kind male once suggested that it's because I have this "life-force" about me that attracts other beings...I thought that was very generous of him. He said that as humans we think that certain beings are "bad" - like rodents or bugs - but that they are just "beings" after you remove our social constructs. Beings that carry diseases and venom.

But on to the impetuous squirrel at the public zoo.

I was unassumingly standing by the seals, outdoors, leaning on the rail, and before I could even feel it a squirrel started climbing up my leg. I screamed of course and shook it off and it quickly ran away. Luckily it was fall and I was wearing heavy clothes. But now, I can't see a squirrel without suspecting it's sizing me up for a potential pounce.

The thing is, I don't know what that squirrel wanted with me. I wasn't holding any peanuts or anything.

Last summer, I was sitting in the park with a very nice man, having a long conversation under a tree. I was very enmeshed in the conversation however I was starting to notice that a squirrel was hanging around a few feet away from us and just kept staring and I started getting very unsettled. Being a peace-lover, this gentleman did not chase the squirrel away, but assured me a few times that it wasn't going to come near me. But that squirrel harshed my mellow. I just wanted it to go away, and it stayed there the whole time fidgeting with unspoken desire to - what? - we didn't have any food on us either.

A few days later, I was on the phone with this man, and a squirrel climbed onto my window ledge, wanting in. Luckily, my window was closed. The strange part is that I live on the third floor, so it had been ambitious enough to climb all the way up here, all for naught.

Pigeon in a Traffic Jam

Once I was on the Pasadena freeway heading toward Glendale. Traffic was slow, and in the middle was a pigeon just standing there, impervious, and the cars were swerving around it.

I had always thought that pigeons were just not bright but terribly persistent, which explained their roaring success at the game of life....As I looked at this pigeon, standing there slowing things down even more, I started wondering if it was a conscious choice on his part to test limits. "He knows he can get away with it," I started thinking. That pigeon had become a fixture in the traffic jam - many cars tolerantly bypassed him.

I wonder if one of the random times that that story comes up at a party over cocktail peanuts, if someone will say, "I was there! I saw that pigeon!" Those are the kind of strange commonalities that make life more livable.