Drugs, Rapists, and Some Good People Too: Part 3
Taking a breather on the road to Monterrey, Mexico.
“As I make the final turn, I see this gracefully aging “Grande-Dame” in the middle of the street. She is up on her tippy toes pressing the phone against her ear with one hand, waving the other above her head enthusiastically. She's wearing classy, but sensible shoes for day-to-day home life. There is a bit of gold lining in her blouse that indicates a certain elegance.”
BLOG POST #014 - The Border and Some Good People Too: Part 3
How I learned to ride a motorcycle, speak Spanish and not die. Riding solo in search of adventure from Detroit to Argentina.
Riding was intense because there was too much coming at me all at once. Highway exits split into three branches, so I couldn't tell which one my GPS wanted me to take. Smaller streets were all one-way, with no apparent indication of which-damn-way. Google maps took me to the wrong place, but I could tell I was close by to the hotel.
I called Antonia to see if she could walk me in.
As I make the final turn, I see this gracefully aging “Grande-Dame” in the middle of the street. She is up on her tippy toes pressing the phone against her ear with one hand, waving the other above her head enthusiastically. She's wearing classy, but sensible shoes for day-to-day home life. There is a bit of gold lining in her blouse that indicates a certain elegance.
Meeting Antonia was like the crack of a whip. In an instant, we were best friends. Warmth and laughter flowed easily between us, and we were connected by a common sense of kindness and open emotion. She loved my story of adventure, but she could tell I was sad about something. I told her about my ex-girlfriend, which just made us all the closer. She told me that she was a spiritual healer and that I would be safe there.
Antonia showing off her glowing personality.
She's not my mother. She's not my lover. The title of sister doesn't even quite fit. All I know is, I love this woman like someone I have known all my life. Maybe we have shared reincarnations with each other throughout the ages. Perhaps she was my niece in the year 1720’ and three hundred years before that, I was her loyal dog.
The "hotel" is her home and a guesthouse. It has been built upwards with six or seven rooms that she rents out on travel websites. She has a sweet little dog and three or four shaved cats running around. They look ridiculous, but apparently it helps manage the fur. My room is well-appointed and comfy with a big bed and private bathroom. There is a high shelf lining all along the ceiling, full of cooking and travel books. The space has the homey feel of a son's bedroom six years after he first went off to college where mom had turned it into a sort of library.
I am delighted to talk with her, but very tired from the long ride and the bike repairs. She agrees to let me take her out for breakfast in the morning. I break down all of my gear, have a shower, check in with my family back home, send Rusty a proof-of-life message, and text back and forth with Maria a few times.
I feel accomplished. I feel safe. I feel happy. I feel tired-the-hell-out, and I fade off to sleep quite early.
The next morning we head out to a little cafe for some local Monterrey cuisine. I like buying people food. It is something that everyone needs, it is good for getting to know a person, and it is a good opportunity to ask a lot of questions about the city.
Puente de La Unindad. The Bridge that served as my landmark during my first stay in Monterrey, Mexico.
I am fully masculine, yet part of me is all "Real Housewives of the Huasteca."
I have lots of female friends and I'm very sensitive about what people are thinking and feeling. So, by the time the coffee arrives it only takes a minute for the "hot goss" to flow.
I can see the confusing mix of emotions swirling around Antonia as we jump topics from that cheating floozy “Larry” who broke mi corazÛn back home, to Maria who I'm meeting in the city tonight.
I confess to Antonia that I do not trust my own romantic compass right now, so I'm trying to go easy. However, some of the familiarity of having a girlfriend for the past eleven months has spilled over and latched on to Maria. I still don't know some of her basic vitals, but we have gotten quite close in the past week.
"Plan A" is still a go, and Maria will be my wildlife guide this weekend. But somewhere along the way, I also invited her out before then, just as an “intro-dinner.”
After so much talk, it would be nice to meet in person.
I suddenly thought, "Wait. Is it going to be a date?"
I honestly didn't know. I had never asked about Maria's romantic status, but I could tell she's single. Nobody texts a new strange foreign man forty-one times a day, with her hubby happily standing by.
Antonia gives me a good briefing on the city. One of my ways of politely asking about touchy subjects is with a sort of self-blame. I tell her, "I am from Detroit, where things can be very dangerous. What is it like here? Where are the places to avoid?"
This is much more gentle than possibly saying, "Is this place a sh**hole where I'm going to get kidnapped or carjacked?"
Antonia says that if there are bad parts of Monterrey, she doesn't know where they are. She doesn't worry about her safety and she has never been robbed. What she says and how she says it are good intel, and they helped inform how I move around in the next few days.
As our morning chat turned toward Antonia's life story, there was a strong theme of love and bravery. Decades ago, she was the young pregnant wife of a successful doctor with a harmonious life and secure future. Then, two months before the baby's due date, her husband was killed in a car crash. Being a woman of style and beauty, maybe she had been a little temperamental before all of that. I can only imagine how such trauma spiritually grounds a person all at once.
Every bit of the woman before me still conveyed elegance and beauty. But strangely, there was no trace of vanity. Her spirit and manner had an intense focus on health and healing. This included anything from meditative prayer cards, to eating well, to regular sweat lodge "Temezcal" visits on weekends.
Her house is full of crystals, one as big as a coffee table. Some of this theme went as far as "kooky," like strapping magnets to her forehead as a preventative measure when she sensed a headache coming on. This only made her all the more endearing. Her heart and mind are open to all of the vast mysteries that we do not yet understand.
Antonia’s spirituality takes her to conferences all over the world.
Antonia is full of phrases like, "Everything is perfect - whether you like it or not."
The grief in her life has given her X-ray vision for human sadness. From the first minute we met, she could see past my smile, to the heartbreak only hinted in the black void at the back of my eyes. She is kind and non-judgmental. Her story is a good reminder to me that there are worse things than my tale of woe and heartbreak.
Not knowing how much I love to fix things, she made the mistake of complaining about the broken keypad locks on some of her guest room doors. It seems like this has been a problem for a long time. There is also a noise coming from one of the air conditioners, and her entry gate doesn't shut properly.
I am making a list. I tell her, "The minute we get back, I'm on it!"
She called out, "Cuero!"
I didn't know the definition of this word, yet I understood the sentiment from how she sang it out. She tried to talk through the precise translation. But after three or four paragraphs, she never really hit the nail on the head. No matter, because it was the warmth in her voice that explained it perfectly. It is something regional I couldn't google, or maybe just specific to her family. The word is some version of "darling" not for a child, not for a lover, shared between any two humans connected by a grand affection.
I'm betting that, back in the year 1518 when she hit her head on a tree and passed out, as she woke up to find me standing guard over her with my fur all wet and a stick in my mouth, she patted my head and said, "Awww. Cuero."
One of Antonia’s delightful pets.
After breakfast, back at the guesthouse the facade of "host and client" falls away, as she gives me a code to her private residence kitchen, living room and patio. She invites me to make myself at home. She tells me to eat anything I want and ask the staff for whatever I might need.
I thought, "Works for me."
I jump to action on fixing the locks. I like being useful. I like making friends. I like a good mission in any form, including finding a hardware store for some damn nut or bolt, in a new country where I am a fish out of water.
Tourism is the act of going out, when you have plans to see certain things.
Adventuring is the act of going out, when you have no idea what things you'll see. The repair job is sure to put me into an interesting situation. It also provides a good excuse to explore the immediate area. A task like this lets me walk among normal people doing normal things, like I'm not a foreigner at all. These mini-adventures can be just as much fun as the big ones.
I'm still in sponge mode, soaking up any info I can. I make several outings for parts and supplies as I dial in my riding skills amongst this new environment of busy Monterrey traffic. I'm pretty good at operating the motorcycle gears, throttle, brakes and balance. But then there is the matter of safety. My melon is on a swivel looking in all directions.
"Far, near, side to side," just like they taught me in my four days of motorcycle licensing school.
The one-way roads are maddening, but at least the streets are designed in a square grid where it is hard to get lost. The traffic laws and Spanish language street signs are a mystery I'm still working on.
To some degree I don't care what the rules of the road are anyway. Whatever might go wrong, I'm going to be the one who gets hurt. The burden of caution is all on me. When mishaps happen, the biker always loses. I trust no one, and I make no assumptions about the good behavior of the drivers around me. I do not intend to get tossed because someone else didn't yield. There are lots of opportunities here to be what I would call, "Dead right."
This style of defensive driving is a wise strategy, considering the stop signs seem optional and people largely don't follow the rules anyway.
I kept myself occupied throughout the day, running in and out of the house for more supplies, and taking stuff apart. I get one lock fixed and have a bunch of other things lined up. On one of my passes through the house, I catch Antonia looking odd. I stop to ask if she's ok. She was trying to hide it, but had obviously been crying.
I ask her what I can do to help. "Do you want me to sit with you, or do you want to be alone?"
She is not an "alone" kind of person. A minute later I am giving her a big hug and consoling her, without even really knowing why.
Her dad had passed away a few years earlier. They had a raucous relationship. At one point while he was ill, she was fed up with him lashing out at her. He said she was getting fat and needed to find a man, and so forth.
So, one day she stormed out of the hospital, intending that her last words to him would be, "Fine! You can die here alone!"
I was laughing at how terrible this story was when she told it. But she was not offended because some people are just intensely passionate like that. It took her a few days to cool off and go back to see him in the hospital. His attitude was duly adjusted, and they were able to have a better relationship for the last few weeks of his life.
After she laid him to rest, she set some life goals for herself. One of them was to build this guest house with the inheritance money in his honor, and make a new future of her own. The other was to use her family rights of heritage, applying to become a citizen of Spain.
The reason she was so upset that day I hugged her was that she got her Spanish passport in the mail. This brought back a flood of memories about her father. He would have been so proud. It was some kind of full circle that I didn't quite understand. She missed him and wanted to share this moment with him.
I told her, "He is very proud of you, Cuera."
As the afternoon started to fade, I took a shower and cleaned myself up. I'm super excited to meet my new friend? Lover? fiancee? soul mate?
Or perhaps, simply a paid tour guide who just needs the money.
Maria and I meeting for dinner in Monterrey, Mexico.
I got to the restaurant where we agreed to meet. From her profile and the few photos we sent, we have no trouble recognizing each other.
Many people don't like certain emotions such as; nervous anticipation, an awkward moment, or not knowing where they stand exactly. Well, I tend to find all of these feelings humorous and exciting. No one is going to get physically hurt and we're all just humans after all. Why not enjoy the ride, even when it is not conventionally pleasing?
Oh boy. Here we go. Meeting Maria is all of those feelings, and then some.
I do not know her exact age, but she is at least twenty years younger than me. I thought I might ask the waiter for a bread knife even though we had not ordered any food yet. This was because I could cut the "awkward" hanging in the air, with a plastic spork at this point.
Then, after about eight minutes, a really odd thing happened. She made a joke, and everything snapped back to normal. Suddenly we were talking about every intimate thing, just as we had been for the prior eight or ten days.
In all of our time talking so far, I was very clear about my recent break-up and general disinterest in romance of any kind. Nothing was off limits, and we talked about “Larry” in detail. I needed to vent, but that also created a safe zone of honesty and intention. Not only was I saying it in words that I didn't want romance in my life right now, but I was also making it clear that it would be a bad idea for her to have any inkling of that, herself. I was not a guy you wanted to get involved with, no matter what happens after we meet.
With no “romantic elephant” in the room anymore, we could get down to the business of having a great time. It was chicken soup for my heavy heart. It was time off the clock from feeling sorrow and loss. It was fun.
After making plans for the weekend and big hugs goodbye, I rode home buzzing with hope and happiness.
I settled into a routine and after a week, Monterrey felt like I had lived there for the past ten years. I knew my way around the city. I had a great home base. I had my bestie Antonia to share the daytimes with, and my fake girlfriend Maria to have dinner with every night. I could do my day-job work remotely. There were lots of amazing places to hike and explore.
At one point I stopped dead in my tracks, wondering, "Wait. Am I looking for a new home?"
I questioned whether this whole "year-long ride" was just a ruse for me to go find somewhere new to live. I have met a thousand people all over the world who went on vacation and then accidentally stayed. Janine visited Sumatra, but then met her husband and never left. Michael left Scotland for Borneo, then ended up buying a house and started a career filming clouded leopards. He made it clear it didn’t like people much, so that seemed to work for him. To be honest, it was probably the best thing for Scotland as well.
I don't think this is what I want. I don't think this is my subconscious intention. But I could easily see myself staying here forever. I guess we'll see.
Maria and I make regular visits to the mountain parks nearby, but my favorite place is out in the desert in the neighboring state of Coahuila. (This is one of my new favorite words to say, pronounced "kwaa-WHEE-lah".)
My first Saturday after arriving in Mexico, we jumped in her car, picked up a biologist friend of hers and headed that way for the ninety-minute drive.
Now we're getting into “real Mexico.”
NEXT POST COMING SOON: December 4, 2024
