One More Good Adventure

The followers of my series of barely spell checked first drafts know that I’ve mentioned that it seems as though summer is nearly over and the rainy season is starting to kick in. I’ve shown the state of the river recently…

There was nothing special about the afternoon. It was a bit overcast but the sky gave but a slim hope of rain though thunder continuously rolled down from the mountains to the north, west and east. It was around 5:30. I was sitting out on the front porch reading when I heard a strange noise coming from the area of the river some 30 yards or so to my right. I looked up and saw some cows moving across the dry, rocky bottom from one pasture to another. Two young Indian lads stood on the near bank.

The noise rose in volume and intensity and then a solid wall of water about four feet high came crashing and rolling around the bend. My neighbors from up the road came running down as I went inside to grab my camera. In the few seconds it took me to get the camera and return outside nearly everyone in the neighborhood had gathered to watch the muddy, debris-strewn water rise.

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It’s pitch dark now. Everyone has long gone home, but the sound of the river, so long silent is background music once more.

It’s only natural for people to wonder what it is that makes me like Panama so much. Of course the natural beauty of the place is one, as long as you don’t look at the ground. It’s often said that Panama, at least in the countryside, is like it was in the States fifty years ago. And for you youngsters who might be reading this, fifty years ago people in the States thought nothing of throwing their trash out of the windows of their cars and littering the landscape. Unfortunately that’s how it seems to be in Panama. In that respect they’ve got a lot of catching up to do with the gringos, but remember, it took the United States a whole generation to get most of its citizens to stop trashing the place.

But it’s the people of Panama that makes the country special. Now, there are some very annoying differences between Panama and the States that may truly try a gringo’s patience. For instance, in many commercial dealings customer service is a completely foreign concept. That’s not to say it’s perfect in the States, it’s just that here, in a lot of instances, the customer is the enemy and is treated that way. But it’s not just gringos who are treated as the enemy, it’s Panamanians as well, so the pain is spread evenly.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve had trouble finding the blood pressure medicine I require. The large Arrocha Pharmacy didn’t have it at all and said it would be a month before they’d get another order. The El Rey supermarket pharmacy didn’t have any, either, nor did the small pharmacy where I buy my generic Plavix. The cute little pharmacy clerk there tried to order it for me but her supplier didn’t have any of it, either.

So, today I decided to go to the pharmacy at Hospital Chiriqui, a modern facility in David and one of the two private hospitals in the city on which most expats depend.

As you know, I don’t have a car. Like almost all of my neighbors I depend on the bus system which, in almost every instance, puts the public transportation services in the States to shame. And with only one or two exceptions, we don’t depend on “chicken” buses here, either. Almost the entire fleet in the provinces consist of 30-seat, air conditioned Toyota “Coasters.”

Here in Boquerón a bus passes the end of my street about every 20 minutes from very early in the morning until the last one departs the David terminal at 7:30 pm. The fare from here to the terminal downtown is 60¢ each way after the “jubilado” (old farts) discount. A bargain at twice the price because you certainly couldn’t drive into town on 60¢ of gas with the price hovering around $4.50/gallon.

I was a good 50 or 60 yards from the corner of where my street joins the main drag that goes down to the InterAmerican Highway and on into David when the city-bound bus flashed by. Oh, well, big deal. I’ve only got to wait about 20 minutes for the next one and I have my Kindle with me to read in the meantime. If I was really in a hurry, and since I’m retired and have nothing but time on my hands 20 minutes doesn’t matter, I could pay half a buck for a cab to take me the mile and a half or so down to El Cruce (the cross roads) where I could pick up any of the buses from seven or eight different routes that service communities farther to the west heading back into the city.

But then I heard a high-pitched sound and low and behold there was the bus that just passed backing up so that I could get on board. That, my friends, is what customer service is all about. And all for a 60¢ fare. I’d seen drivers do that on the Potrerillos buses when I was living up there but it’s the first time it’s ever happened for me. Things ARE different here in Panama. It’s one of the things I love about this country.

p.s. I usually try and buy a month’s supply of my medication but even at the hospital they only had a one-week supply for me. I opted to buy double the dosage pills and will just cut them in half.

I don’t know if you know this or not, but if you have an iPod and you change from one computer to another the only songs that synch into the new computer are the ones you bought from the iTunes store. Anything else that you’ve put on the iPad from CDs get lost. I know this because it happened to me twice.

I’m a pirate at heart. As Jimmy Buffet would say, “Yes I am a pirate, 200 years too late. The cannons don’t thunder, there’s nothing to plunder, I’m an over 40 victim of fate.” When I was living in Antibes I used to listen to the wonderful Radio Baie des Anges station and stole probably more than 80 hours or great music from it. That’s where I found out about the Belgium group Vaya con Dios that I’ve featured here, and where I found Saffire, the Uppity Blues Women. When Napster was going strong I downloaded another tone of music from it.

This afternoon as it was pouring down rain on Boquerón, Panama, I dug out my huge pile of CDs and started adding them to my iPod and came across a New Orleans artist I’d forgotten about, Mary Gauthier (that’s pronounced Go-shay for those of you who don’t know Cajun).  I’d forgotten to reload her the first time my songs got dumped so I hadn’t heard her music for a couple of years.

I never saw Mary Gauthier. She wasn’t around when I was living in New Orleans. She was born in the Big Sleazy in 1962 and given up at birth by a mother she never knew. She was adopted by a couple in Thibodaux. At age 15, She ran away from home when she was 15 and spent the next several years in drug rehabilitation, halfway houses, and living with friends; she spent her 18th birthday in a jail cell. Struggling to deal with being adopted and her sexuality (we all know what that euphemism stands for and it certainly doesn’t make her a bad person)she used drugs and alcohol which later in her life provided fodder for her songs.

She enrolled at LSU as a philosophy major but dropped out in her senior year. After attending the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in Cambridge, Mass., she opened a Cajun Restaurant in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood and called it Dixie Kitchen (which also became the title for her first album). Mary ran, and cooked at, the restaurant for eleven years. She was arrested for drunk driving opening night, July 12, 1990, and has been sober ever since. She wrote her first song when she was 35.

The following is the title song for her second album Drag Queens in Limousines…

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As my regular readers know New Orleans is the place where my soul resides though I will never return. The area has never, and will never, recover from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and to go back would simply break my heart. I don’t think anyone can look at Gauthier’s Katrina memorial without getting choked up by what the people of New Orleans suffered through.

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The rainy season seems to have come a few weeks early to Panama. According to the books, the dry season, summer here, isn’t suppose to come for about another month. But we’ve been getting rain nearly every afternoon for the last two weeks and it has brought the dormant plants back to life.

This morning I noticed an area of the yard covered with mushrooms.

One patch of ground that was completely brown and crunched under foot two weeks ago now sports these tiny white gems…

And a tree at the side of the house that seemed to be a hopeless case with only a dozen or so leaves has sprung back to life. Well, it IS Easter morning so renewal is the theme for the day.

I’m afraid the poor, brown tree in the back yard is beyond hope of salvation. There’s been absolutely no change in it at all. Avocados are appearing in the markets now. Perhaps I’ll try and plant one of those seeds.

I miss not having a dog around. Sure, they’re often a pain in the pooper what with having to feed them regularly, take them for walks, bathe and groom them. All that sort of thing. But here at the house in Boquerón my lease says I can’t have pets without the consent of the owner. Well the owner lives in Texas so I just ignore them and have pets anyway. No, not a dog, a cat or a kinkajoo. There was a rabbit out on the lawn a couple of nights ago but I’d rather eat one than have one as a pet.

No, the pets I have came to live me of their own volition. Small, funny, common house geckos. I mean, with the exception of house flies, how can you not love something that’s able to walk as easily on the ceiling as on the floor?

There’s no need to feed them. They feed themselves and with the exception of spiders, you’ve never seen a place for spiders like Panama, they eat all the bugs that find there way inside the house.

Yesterday, though, I had an uninvited intruder who probably wanted to be a pet, too, but since these animals are vegetarians it wouldn’t pay its weight around here.

It took me nearly half an hour chasing after the intruder with a broom before I was finally able to get it outside and it didn’t seem to take rejection well.

According to all the books the “rainy” season isn’t supposed to start for another month or so. There have been some practice sessions the last couple of weeks, though. Heavy cloud cover in the afternoons. Thunder has rattled around bouncing from one mountain to another as I think I mentioned in a post recently. But yesterday afternoon, shortly after returning from my weekly meeting with some other gringos who get together to work on our Spanish and a shopping trip where I bought a cheap still camera, the sky turned dark gray, a cannon shot of thunder shook the windows and Mother Nature let loose.

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It rained like that from about three o’clock in the afternoon until I went to bed around 11:00.

Recently I posted some pictures of the trees in the back yard, one of which looked to have succumbed to the drought in spite of frequent watering. The good news, though, is that one of the lime trees is going to have a lot of fruit this year. The fragrance of the blossoms wafts all the way to the front porch.

Rum here in Panama is excellent and inexpensive. I guess I’ll have to buy a blender for the house so I can make daiquiris when all those flowers turn to fruit.