A continuación

It has been a strange week or so. On top of being home in Glastonbury for about 10 days, which would take another blog—not just another post, but an entirely different Blogger site—to explain, we also were staying in Harlem, partying in Tribeca, paying $10 for two orders of fries, a Presidente and a Fanta at the Santo Domingo airport, waiting for new passengers on an airstrip in Curaçao (it really exists!), killing cockroaches and watching “Master and Commander” in Caracas, and sleeping, kind of, on a double-decker bus for 13 hours to get back to Mérida. So forgive me. I’m a bit out of rhythm.

My Spanish is flooding, er, trickling back, and the city is unsurprisingly unchanged from the last time we were here about three weeks ago. Our friends are still here, the noise still noisy, the machos still macho, and the buses still everywhere, clogging traffic all day long. I don’t know what I expected, but nothing fundamental has changed about Mérida—or more importantly, about the way I view Mérida—since returning from the States. Maybe after being here for eight straight months I’ll look back and say, “What? I thought that?” Maybe not.

But our time at home, and at the beaches of Choroní before that, has refreshed us. It’s put our first 10 weeks here in question, and now we’re ready to interact with our space, to work hard but not forget the incredible cultural and educational opportunities around us, or, best said, to live a new and better life here. And it let us do things that we can’t do here, like seeing our families. Aside from the few who might make it down to Venezuela by August, we won’t see them until nearly Thanksgiving, so it was particularly nice to spend time up in New Hampshire with both Brooke’s family and mine on Christmas day. Add in all the gallivanting with my mom, watching the Red Sox DVD with my dad, hitting a bar with my brother, drinking home brew with Gary, joking and s’moring with Judith, Paul and Pat, venturing to Hartford reunion bars with Cort and Caroline and snow angelling with Duncan, and it was a pretty good stay.

But we did more than just hang out with the fam while at home. I mean, come on: in New York, alone, I got to: hang at The Mag and not get paid to do exactly what I did every couple of days there (you can guess); eat 50%-off sushi at a place that makes you spend $14 before you get the rebate (which is always in effect) instead of just cutting all of its prices in half; go to a pub next to a Houston Street gas station and explain that my friend Lee’s name wasn’t, in fact, Wade; wake up the next morning and walk around all of Fulton Street Mall and the Atlantic Center (and why is there a huge indoor mall in the middle of Brooklyn? And why isn’t the FSM called the Fulton Bazaar, and the Atlantic Center the Great Suburban Paradise?), entering every Jimmy Jamz and Foot Locker in search of a black T-shirt with a yellow Wu-Tang symbol and a red or green Red Sox New Era fitted hat (7 3/8 or 58.9 cm) with the two socks, not the B, and finding neither; have terrible stomach pains after eating at an East Village Middle Eastern place oddly named Moustache (and apparently pronounced chez français: Moos-tash); watch Hitchcock’s “The Birds”, in all its eye-pecking glory, at a gay bar blocks away; head to a salsa bar in Tribeca (or TriBeCa? Argh.) that was filled with non-Latino banker types who didn’t salsa and that had no clocks or televisions to announce the New Year and that had bartenders who didn’t know how to make drinks—not even a Shirley Temple—and that had a DJ who, on top of ignoring the advent of 2005 entirely, said, when asked about the absence of salsa music at a salsa bar: “Oh, that’d be cool. But I brought reggae.”; buy Pepto-Bismol at a bodega later in the night for instant relief; wait underground for the A train at West 4th Street for 45 minutes, all the while listening to some woman talk about needing to get back to her man uptown to change his world; and, finally, a day later, wait for a bus to Newark that never came to 135th and 7th before negotiating with a gypsy cab driver and getting there plenty early, anyway.

That doesn’t happen here in Mérida. Well, maybe the stomach pains do, but not the rest of it. But I think now, finally, I can deal with that. As Bob Dylan told Ed Bradley when asked if were disappointed that he could no longer conjure up the great songs of his mid-sixties life, I can do different things now.