Tag Archives: Retirement

One of the reasons my rent is so reasonable here at my house in Boguerón is that I have been maintaining the yard for the past two years. Doing it myself rather than paying someone else to do it.

Now, that might not sound like a big deal, but you have to understand how things grow down here. People have joked that you could stick a two by four in the ground and it would sprout roots and grow. Well that’s really not that much of a joke. Just take a look at this:

Recently it’s been harder for me to keep things up the way I’d like. It’s not that things are wild and overgrown so much as it just isn’t what I’d like it to be and as I’ve said, it’s a two hour lawn and I’ve got a one hour back so I’ve been less than enthusiastic about strapping on the weed whacker and going out to do battle with the grass. The last time I did it it took three days altogether. Half of the front lawn one day, half a couple of days later and the back yard a couple of days after that. I just couldn’t, or wouldn’t work through the pain, and there was still some that I just didn’t get to. My lease is up at the end of October and the house is on the market. I’ll probably stay here until it sells, and who knows how long that will be? And I want the house and grounds to look as best as possible.

Yesterday at my neighbor’s they had a man with a weed whacker doing their lawn. I went up there and asked the man, who is a Charles Bronson look-alike, to come see me when he was through up there. A half an hour later he and my neighbor came down to see me. I asked him how much he would charge to come cut the grass twice a month. The odd thing was, that everything I said to Charles Bronson in Spanish, was repeated to him by my neighbor as if he was translating somehow. Anyway, we agreed to a price of $25 ($12.50 a visit) and shook hands on the deal.

I asked him to come next week. He said he’d be here on Wednesday. We’ll see. It’s Panama, after all.

The day’s rain started late in the afternoon with vivid flashes of lightning and thunder claps you could feel. They drowned out the laughter and chatter coming from the children and adults gathered at my neighbor Maide’s back porch. The two street dogs that have adopted me because I feed them lay huddled together for comfort against the storm. The rain pounded down so hard and fierce that it drowned out the sound of the rising river a few yards away from the house.

Night fell and I dined on a couple of bowls of freshly-made chili. After putting the remains of the chili into Ziplock bags and storing them in the freezer for another day, I lay out on the sofa to read the latest detective novel I’d downloaded earlier. The fierce storm had abated and the rain had slacked off when I heard “Reechar. Reechar” outside.

I went to the door, turned on the overhead porch light to find my neighbor, Maide standing outside with a towel over her head to ward off the rain. She flashed her award-winning, brilliant smile and handed me a plastic bag containing two, still hot, home made tamales wrapped in banana leaves. That’s what the group had been doing through the storm. Making tamales and she wanted me to have some despite the rain.

Yesterday I had to go to Hospital Chiriquí to pay my insurance premium for the next quarter. There are three people that work in the office, a receptionist, some guy whose job I’m not sure of and the administrator who is a woman who speaks excellent English.

The receptionist speaks some English though we always speak to each other in Spanish. She’s the one who takes the payments and prints out the receipts. She asked me, “¿Qué está pagando hoy?” (What are you paying, today?)

“Más que quiero.” (More than I want to) I said.

There was a chuckle from the administrator’s office. “Your Spanish is getting quite good,” she said in English.

“Gracias,” I replied, “y su Inglés es también.” (Thank you, and your English is, too.”

Big laugh from everyone. Those who don’t learn the language of their adopted country miss out on so much, and I think that, because I’m getting better at talking to my adopted countrymen in their language, I’m leaving a better impression of the gringos who have come here to live.

Sometimes life in Panama is like being a part of The Nature Channel. Like when you catch sight of a stunningly colorful bird flitting through the foliage in your yard, or when you see something like this:

There are several destructive insects we have to deal with here. One is a very large, black and yellow grasshopper that eats about any kind of leaf around and I often find a bunch of them happily feasting away on the foliage in the yard. I’ve found an insecticide called Dos Tigres (Two Tigers) that knocks them out almost instantly. The leaf cutter ants are exceptionally destructive, especially to citrus trees and can strip them bare in a matter of days. This is a problem for me since there are three citrus trees in my yard including a very productive lime tree. I harvest the limes nearly daily and they make a wonderfully refreshing drink.

Recently these ants have been attacking two of my trees. I sprayed their paths and nests with the Dos Tigres and within a couple of hours all activity had ceased, and there’s been no indication of their return. Parts of the trees that had been stripped of leaves are now showing new shoots. But I’m not so naïve as to believe new colonies won’t take hold. Eternal vigilance is the key.

My regular readers know I’m a big fan of Audible.com. Over the years I’ve downloaded dozens of great books to my iPod. Recently I bought several books written by my old friend, Paul Kemprecos. Paul and I worked together at the Cape Cod Standard-Times (now simply the Standard Times) back in 1964. Paul kept on as a journalist long after I returned to college and pursued other dead-end avenues of employment.

Paul created a detective series featuring a character named Aristotle “Soc” Socarides, a Cape Cod character. I read a couple of those early “Soc” books, in one of which he drops in on my family’s restaurant, Philbrick’s Snack Shack, for our famous onion rings and fried clams. Paul also co-authored several books with Clive Cussler known as the NUMA Files.

The problem I had with these books is that while I was able to download them to my iTunes folder on my computer they would not download onto my iPod. I called Audible’s help line and talked to three different reps with suspiciously foreign accents who each gave conflicting ways to correct the problem. None of them worked which is why I made three calls. My iPod is nearly 10 years old, and while it works fine with what has already been loaded on to it I really wanted to hear Paul’s books on my bus trips into David and over to Bugaba.

Fiddling around trying to get my new purchases onto the iPod I noticed when I went to the audible book section there were several lines across the screen that I’d never seen before. A fourth call to Audible was no help, so yesterday I bit the bullet and bought an iPod Nano. I’m calling it my belated birthday present since I didn’t buy anything special for myself this year. Last year I shelled out over $2,500 for a motorcycle and kit which should have been enough to serve for a couple of years. The Nano is a fraction of the size of the original iPod.

Of course it only has about half the capacity of the original and it costs less than half of what a new, large iPod does, but it also does a couple of things the original doesn’t. For instance it has an FM receiver so you can listen to live radio broadcasts. I plugged it into my computer when I got home and the new books downloaded seamlessly into the Nano.

Large or small, these things are a monument to cyber technology. I mean you can download operas and fantastic orchestral programs onto one of these things and then, using just zeros and ones they will send them directly to your brain in high-quality sound. How? Who knows? It’s sort of like flipping a light switch in your house and having the bulb brighten a room. You don’t need to know HOW it happens, just be happy that it does.

When Christopher Columbus was on his fourth voyage to the “New World” his small fleet was anchored in a river in Panama when near disaster struck. I wrote about it in my book: http://www.amazon.com/Adversitys-Wake-Calamitous-Christopher-ebook/dp/B007XTYMXW/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1371742365&sr=1-1&keywords=richard+philbrick

“One morning after a night of heavier than usual drenching rains we heard, far up the river, the low, rumbling sound of huge rocks crashing and grinding against each other and of giant trees falling into the water. The noise rapidly rose to a crescendo and everyone stood frozen in terror as a solid wall of water  in the form of a  wave about six feet high swept around the bend in the river and came barreling down upon our hapless fleet. It hit so fast there was no time to prepare for the impact by running a hawser ashore.

“Almost instantly one of our two anchor cables parted with a sound like a cannon shot and our remaining anchor began dragging through the muddy river bottom like a plow tilling a field. In no time at all our ship slammed into the Gallega which lay behind is with such force that her bowsprit ran through the rigging of our Bonaventure mizzen and it came crashing down over the side in a roar of splintering wood. The stout ropes of the rigging snapped as if made of nothing more substantial than darning thread.”

As my regular readers know, I live beside a small river here in Panama. Normally it looks like this:

That big rock is about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

I don’t have to see the river to know its state. I can generally tell that simply by the way it sounds. Naturally, when there’s been a heavy rain the river rises and even sitting inside the house playing around on the computer I can tell the water level is higher because the noise is louder. And I can also tell when it has been raining harder in the mountains to the north while the rain down here has been relatively light by the noise the river makes. Sometimes the river gets extremely high in a short time but I only know about it after it has happened, alerted by the sound. We’re in the rainy season, now, so the volume of river noise rises and falls daily, sometimes hourly.

Yesterday afternoon (6/19) I was sitting out in the shade of the back porch reading a book on my tablet. Looking up from my chair I have a clear view of the river. It was pretty much like you see in the video above. We’d had some rain, but not a lot here at the house. Thunder, though, rolled down from the mountains for over an hour. Then, like in the book excerpt, I heard a roaring sound approaching, getting louder by the second. When I looked up I saw a wall of water easily six feet high or more coming down the river like a freight train. It didn’t just sound angry, it looked angry. Trees that had been swept off the banks from somewhere way up in the hills rode the crest like lunatic surfers. Roots and branches clawed at the sky as if trying to escape their rush towards the Pacific Ocean below. In seconds that car-sized boulder disappeared. Huge spumes of spray shot skyward as the river swept over the rocks. The water rose so high, so fast, that it overflowed the banks up stream and cut a new path across the field on the other side. The noise was so loud as the river crested that neighbors two blocks away were drawn down to watch.

This is a video from two years ago that gives a pretty good idea of what it was like yesterday:

Here you can see how some of it has overflowed to the field on the other side: