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Showing posts with label Salt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Salt. Show all posts

Monday, May 5, 2025

Which Comes First the Margareta or the Flowers?


 

One year, when I was younger than six, either Mom or Grandma and I made a May Basket, I took it to the neighbors and hung it on their doorknob.

Our May Basket was a little holder made of colored paper and filled with flowers. The idea is to sneak over to your neighbor's and anonymously hang it on their doorknob.

That reminds me of Aloha and the lady on the beach in Hawaii who told me that Aloha is a way of life. It means to do good without expecting anything in return. (Aloha also means Hello, Goodbye, and I love you.)

I don't know where the May Basket tradition in my family came from, and I don't remember who instigated it, but I thought of it this morning when I realized it is May 5 and thought it was May Day.  However, I got my holidays confused, for May Day is May 1, while today is May 5, the Cinco De Mayo—Mexico's Independence Day, and for us Margareta Day. Hey, happy to celebrate a country's independence. We used to celebrate it in San Diego, and I would rather miss hearing a Mariachi band play Cielito Lindo, Mexico's folk waltz song. (See below for the translation and to listen to it played.)

This morning, I wondered what and if I should write. I usually post a blog on Tuesday and I will be busy tomorrow.

My uppermost thought this morning was what happened to us as people. Has entropy settled in?  Is it me? Is it prevalent that many people seem not to care?  Do you?

I felt that all our hard-fought-for rights are being stripped away, and somehow we are allowing it to happen. And why are people so concerned with how people are—black or white or yellow or red, gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, Christian, Buddhist, Agnostic, Atheist, and want to legislate it somehow?  Do we really want everyone to be the same? So, see, I wasn't on the best end of the happiness scale.

 

 Then I thought of the May flowers and called my daughter to ask about the day of their wedding anniversary. I knew it was in May when the wild Iris' are in bloom. I looked out into the gorgeous spring day, and I thought of the fun and the Margaritas my best friend and I would order at the exquisite Bizarre De Mundo in San Diego, and remembering those salt-rimmed glasses makes my mouth water even now. 

 

 

My friend would order a fishbowl-sized Margareta as I was the designated driver. Her little boy and my two girls would run around within the confines of the courtyard, and we would send them to the toy store with enough money to purchase a tiny figurine they could add to their collections. My friend and I would talk for so long we would be clear-headed by the time we left, and on the Cinco De Mayo there would be a celebration with a spread of hors d' oeuvres in the court yard, and a mariachi band would play, among other songs, Cielito Lindo.

The rousing refrain is:  

Ay, ay, ay, ay,

Canta y no llores,

Porque cantando se alegran,

Cielito lindo, los corazones.

"Woe, woe, woe, woe,

Sing and don't cry,

Because singing, darling,

Lifts our hearts."

To Listen:

 

https://youtu.be/ojghyoSxsys

Cielito Lindo   (Sweet Belle, Oh Heavenly One, Pretty Darling, Lovely Sweet One)

One person described the song as a celebration of love, life, and the human spirit.

(The translation is more like from a lover to a loved one.—but then romance lifts our hearts.)

 

 

Through dark tresses, heavenly one,

a pair of deep brown eyes,

lower as they approach,

a stolen glance.

Ay, ay, ay, ay,

sing and don't cry,

heavenly one, for singing

gladdens he...

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/cielito-lindo-heavenly-one.html


Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Moon Over India

 


Once I took a train across a portion of India. The railroad car consisted of a plain wooden box with two platforms attached to the forward and backward wall, with a window between the two. The platforms were hinged and could be folded against the wall or pulled down for seats. With my head and shoulders on one platform and feet on the other across from me, I draped myself beneath the window. My two traveling companions didn’t seem to care that I had commandeered the window. I guess my position didn’t look too comfortable to them. But I loved that train ride, for I had a panoramic view of the Indian countryside played out like a technicolor movie.

 

At one stop, I watched little boys playing in the railroad’s water supply that was open and spraying like a fire hydrant. On the deck beside the depot, I watched a couple change their toddler’s diaper and use water from a thermos to wash his fanny. Toilet paper is scarce to non-existent in India. Instead, water faucets are installed beside most toilets, even ones that are a simple hole in the ground. You can bet most of our suitcases were filled with toilet paper, as we were forewarned.

 

As the train rolled along, I occasionally saw a dog with a stained ring around his belly and hind legs. In fact, every dog I saw in that area had the same stained rump. Curious. And then I saw the cause. In the middle of a ginormous mud puddle—more like a shallow pond, sat a dog.

 

Two friends and I went to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal. Hey, we were in India. It was a must, right? I was so naïve. I didn’t know it was a mausoleum. In the 1600s, the emperor built the Taj Mahal for his favorite wife, to the tune of, in those days, 32 million dollars. (In 2020, that would be one billion.) The love story between the emperor and his wife is heart rendering. She was so beautiful that he instantly fell in love with her, and although she was not his only wife, she was the “Jewell of the Palace.”  When she died of complications in giving birth to her 14th child, he was so heartbroken he grieved for two years. And then he watched over the building of her mausoleum for another 10.

 

Upon walking through an archway, we were struck by a shimmering image of the Taj Mahal so brilliant that it appeared to be vibrating. Not only was it made of white marble, but semi-precious stones were precisely inlaid into the marble. The effect was not only exquisite, but gave the structure an ethereal quality. The two towers beside the building are structurally engineered to tilt. Upon viewing the building from a distance, the towers looked straight.

 

We were required to wear footies over our shoes when we entered the building, which was surprisingly small, a simple marble room with a tomb in the center. And beneath it, another room with another tomb exactly beneath the first. I learned later on the emperor was also buried there. The reflecting pool in front of the Taj Mahal contained no water. They told us it was only filled for special occasions, and since it was about 120 degrees that day, we understood why it was empty. I am not exaggerating about the temperature. However, we weren’t unduly uncomfortable and only learned the following day that we had endured 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So, you can understand why the dogs cooled their heels.

 

Six of us, led by a couple who regularly made the trek, journeyed to India to see an Indian guru named Sai Baba. We had viewed a film where he supposedly created verbudi, a sacred ash, from his hands. So, it was a bit troubling when we were there to see trinkets sold outside the ashram that looked exactly like the ones he supposedly explicitly created for a devotee in his audience.

 

What did I learn? That no person is my master. 

 

I once wrote about a phenomenon I witnessed in India and again in Hawaii. That was the grapevine. This surprised me that people just appeared and offered information when you needed it. One morning as the six of us were having breakfast in the courtyard of the house where we were staying, someone yelled over the board fence—we couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see us—but the voice told us that Sai Baba had moved from the little town where we were staying to his ashram in Puttaparthi. So, what did we do? We threw our simple mattresses, that we had purchased, onto the roof of a taxi, climbed aboard, and traveled to Puttaparthi. We did have one meal there, but basically, because we were afraid to drink the water and eat the food, instead, we ate toasted cashews sprinkled with cayenne pepper and drank lime soda from a bottle. (And we left the mattresses for the next visitors.)

 

From the ashram, Florencia, Sherri, and I went to the Taj Mahal. After Sherri got homesick and went home, Florencia and I traveled a bit more—like Copenhagen, “A wonderful gem of a town,” where it was so cold we donned wool sweaters. Florencia had been married to a military sailor who said you could only drink alcohol when the sun was under the yard arm, so at the end of the day, before we had our customary glass of white wine, one of us would ask the other if the sun was under the yardarm. Florencia would say, “Somewhere in the world, it is.” And that would give us permission. Florencia was a perfect traveling companion. She is gone now, but maybe where she is they serve white wine and don’t care where the yardarm is.

 

What sent me off on this trail? My honey and I watched a documentary the other night titled “I am Salt,” about an extended family that spends 8 mounts every year on a desolate mudflat in India, farming salt. Fascinating. I did not know salt required such hard work. Everybody worked on sitting up camp, digging the pump and hoses out of the mud where they had buried them last year, made ponds, and ran a pump constantly to bring the saltwater buried in the ground to the surface to fill ponds. As the water evaporated, leaving behind the purest white salt, they had to tend their crop, building berms to hold the water, ditches to move it, tamping down the soil, adding grass, so the crystallizing salt had something to grab hold of. It was laborious work. As I watched the momma’s making flatbread, I wondered what they ate besides bread, and I thought of the babies in India. The babies didn’t fuss or squirm as one would expect of an infant. I had observed that fact until our ride back from the Taj Mahal in a First-Class railroad car. Onboard, a young couple had a young child, less than a year old. They looked affluent, immaculately dressed, and the baby acted as one might expect of an infant that age, jumping on their lap, active, squirming, taking in its surroundings.

 

I concluded that nutrition had a hand in this.

 

Why did I call this "Moon Over India?" Well, our travel agent said that a visit to the Taj Mahal during a full moon was exquisite, and that we would be there during a full moon. We don't know what it looked like that night for we were wiped out from the day, and languished in a hotel room that night.

That vibrating image was the picture I have carried away. It was enough.

 

Don't forget that review you've been meaning to write--you can be honest, and remember, adults like children's books too. They are fun, and who doesn't want to know what they would find if Inner Earth really did exist. Please go to Amazon, click on book, scroll WAY DOWN of left side of page, and viola' there is a place to write a review. A click on the book cover will take you there.

  Two in a series, however, each stands alone.