Hi,
If the Italians living in my neighborhood when I was growing up ever played Bocci they played somewhere else. But there were enough Italians talking about Bocce that all of us kids knew that the Italian game of bowls existed. We picked up lots of arcane cultural knowledge from the Italians, the Poles and Lithuanians, the Slovaks and Germans in addition to all of the regular culture that is the Irish.
But, really, who ever heard of Petanque? N’est moi, certainment.
The French version is a fairly recent improvement on a much older game of boules. The original apparently involved running to a mark and hurling big heavy balls at a smaller jack. I suppose that over time the aficionados of the sport developed the sort of physical problems that you might imagine. Certainly Jules Lenoir, the guy who developed the rules of modern Petanque wasn’t disposed to sprint or to heave heavy balls of any size a great distance.
So, Petanque is played with steel balls a little larger than an American baseball. The boules, as they are called, must be sized within a specific range of sizes and weights and can be made of a variety of metals in various densities and shades. Proper boules have their size, weight, and manufacture stamped on them and may, or may not have a number of striations used to distinguish them from other boules in play and to affect traction on the ground.
The object of the game is for a player or team to toss or roll their balls closest to a small target ball, while knocking away or blocking the opponent’s balls. When all balls are rolled points are tallied according to those of the team closest to the target “cochonette” before the first proximate ball of the enemy.
Here in Las Galeras a lemon or, better, an almond often serves as the “piggie,” although that seems to change when a certain revolving coterie of French arrive for the period of January through April, more or less. The French. It seems, travel with their steel boules and their wooden cochonettes. In truth, a real cochonette is better than fruits or nuts, having no capacity to turn into a puddle of lemonade, and rolling truer than an oblong almond when cast. For me, it’s one more reason to love the French.
This October I began to pretty regularly join a group of Dominicans who meet in the late afternoon on the beach to play Petanque with a couple of year-round French residents. This is the nucleus of the Las Galeras Petanque Association. “Membership” in the association fluctuates depending on who is in or out of town and participation on any given day varies according to who is occupied with what sort of time-consuming project around the house. A German resident is a pretty regular player and a Belgian couple and the odd Italian or two drop in occasionally, along with a few other Dominicans and Germans and French. It’s an ethnic and linguistic polyglot. Understandably, most of the terms employed during the game are French. “Merde!” is the appropriate comment for an errant bowl, although one can occasionally hear a Frenchman, in deference to the lone American player offer up an Arkansan “Sheeeitt!” in a Toulousian accent. Much hilarity follows.
A couple of the Dominican guys are among the best players and the regular French residents are excellent also. A couple of the regular returnees (those who travel with their own boules) are dangerous players too. The rest of us can vary unpredictably from day to day, but the new German guy and I are consistently improving. The Italian fellow adjusted to the French boules very quickly and held his own quite nicely.
You wouldn’t imagine that it would be fascinating to watch a bunch of people toss steel balls around on the beach road but I’m told that our antics can be quite entertaining. There’s lots of lying and cheating accompanied by grand gestures and loud protestations in several languages. Disputes are often settled with the more or less precise comparison of distances between competing balls and the target jack using a single strand from a palm frond or some other handy piece of detritus from the beach. The German guy carries a tape measure. Go figure.
The fellow who is the most regular of the players decided that what was needed was an organized competition–sort of a round-robin tournament over three evenings of a weekend in January. A sign was produced by the local Dominican sign painter–who is also a killer Petanque player–and posted on the beach for 10 days in advance of the scheduled event. Here’s a look.
Pretty nice sign, eh?
We wound up with 6 teams of three persons each, with the idea that everyone would play one or two of the opposition teams on each of the three evenings with no more formal plan. The team with the highest total score on Sunday evening would be crowned champions for 2009. A simple scheme, but fraught with opportunity and, as it turned out, the necessity for revision.
To begin with, some of the players didn’t want to divvy up the entry fees among the “Win, Place, and Show” teams, preferring to have a party instead. These were mostly the European guys, for whom the 200 peso entry fee didn’t represent 1/3 of a day’s wages. And then there was the matter of actually showing up to compete. One of my teammates–and the organizer of the Concurso–didn’t show up the first day (pressing business on la loma.) The sign painter was crazy brilliant on Friday but a no-show for both Saturday and Sunday–reportedly on a bender. The entire French Women’s team failed to materialize for the Sunday evening competition. I imagined them sharing a glass of wine and tasty hors d’oeuvres while congratulating themselves on the decision to forgo the final day of play. Mostly, this group had not been regular players, although among the best “pointers” on the beach two are women, one Dominican and the other French.
The section of the beach where this takes place is also a road along the beach. As such, it is traveled by tourists on foot, tourists or farmers on horseback, trucks and automobiles, tourists on all-terrain vehicles and the ever-present “moto-conchos,” or motorcycle taxis. Mostly, the vehicles look out for the play and generally the players consider the speed and direction of passer-by before lobbing their steel balls down court. Often activity on the road comes to a halt while passer-by takes in a particularly challenging series of boules. You can safely bet that any group interested enough to stop is French, although one Japanese family was pretty taken by the sport. The rare group of American tourists will as often as not plow ahead with one of their number loudly declaiming about “Bocci Ball, that Italian game.”
Like I said: who knew?
Once our missing partner materialized on Saturday, he, Pedro, and I rolled unerringly to the championship, compressing three days of play into two and combining several big wins and a couple of narrow losses to amass enough points to prevail over teams comprised of better players.
Who would have guessed?
Here are some photos of the concourso.
Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
You may or may not remember the joy that came with our purchase of a General Master semi-automatic clothes washing machine a couple of years ago. Suffice it to say that the General Master has been a continuing, if not enduring, source of pleasure in our simplified lives. It provides just the right amount of connectedness with the mundane task of doing laundry and its’ semi-automatic convenience is a full-on luxury when contrasted with the washboard and tub, which implements are much better suited to forming a jug band than washing clothes, in my opinion.
Anyway, a few days prior to the arrival of our recent and now departed guests, the General Master pulled up lame on the centrifugal spinner side. This effectively made it a semi-semi-automatic washer, rendering it incapable of generating quite as much joy as before. Of course, continuing to use the washing side of the machine was sill preferable to stripping the band of its musical instruments and resorting to raw-knuckle laundry scrubbing, but the General Master was no longer a source of abiding satisfaction here on our little hill.
A cursory examination of its bowels revealed a bunch of powdery carbon-like material dusted across the bottom of the machine. Maybe the powder was residue from disintegrating brushes in the centrifuge-side motor, or perhaps the by-product of a failed capacitor? It was tough to tell without getting the parts to a bench.
I began to dismantle the machine, quickly appreciating that there was apparently only one way to disassemble (and presumably re-assemble) the thing. In this regard the General Master exhibited a notably Chinese elegance and economy of construction that was increasingly compelling the deeper I looked into it. Of course I’m capable of the mechanical deconstruction and could probably manage an electrical diagnosis. I was even pretty sure I could track down replacement parts somehow. But–and this was a Satori-like revelation for me: I just didn’t feel like it.
And so began our search for the Dominican equivalent of the Maytag repairman.
In the interim our laundry took on a cadence of “Wash–Wring–Rinse–Wring-Hang,” and Repeat. The rhythm of the GM had been much nicer: “Wash–SPIN–Rinse–SPIN–Hang,” and Repeat. I could see right away that the “Wring” business was going to get pretty old, pretty quickly and began to imagine a solution.
It was purely a matter of circumstantial coincidence that we recently took a 2 hour drive to Nagua to visit the Dominican equivalent of the Midas Muffler shop. This journey was necessitated by the need for a little muffler repair on exhaust system of the Jeepeta, where a weld had broken in the muffler resulting in a clattering idle that threatened to mutate into a full-throated roar more appropriate to a vehiculo de bomberos. I knew right where to find the muffler man and 20 minutes and 200 pesos later we idled out of the yard and were on our way. This guy was the best, even if his equipment was a little primitive. If you’re reading this on the El Otro WA website, here’s a snapshot of his arc welder, which actually works quite well.
I didn’t ask permission to take a photo of him sporting his version of welding goggles, but you can be assured that he looked both competent and suave behind his Ray-Bans.
The muffler project was so quick and painless–and the drive was so long that, after a brief visit to a relatively well-stocked grocery, we wandered systematically up and down the streets of Nagua in search of the lair of the Maytag Man. And damned if we didn’t find Sr. Ventura and his two associates, and damned if they weren’t relaxing just like that Maytag guy used to do in the US advertisements.
The five of us had a pretty fulsome if somewhat abstract conversation about motors, capacitors, and sundry components of the General Master and, amid a fair amount of hilarity, we concluded that it would be best for us to deliver the machine to their shop in Nagua, even though the proprietor did volunteer one of his associates to journey to Las Galeras and make a repair en situ.
***I’m compelled to step aside for a moment and observe that a high commitment to customer service is common in the RD and that fact is nevertheless frequently astonishing to me. I mean, everything takes an entire day for this guy, just as it does for us–and he’s offering to make the journey to Las Galeras for the price of motorcycle gasoline to tend a washing machine? Or how about the computer guy in Las Terrenas who spent 3 hours with me in his shop hacking a router that he could easily order new and sell to me otherwise; or the policeman who often stops by the house and chats while making sure that everything is quiet on la loma, and that we are properly introduced to the new guy on the beat. This is sort of reminiscent of one neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I lived between the ages of 5 and 7, and maybe nowhere in my experience between then and now. As remarkable as this interest in the well-being of others is to me, it seems entirely normal to most Dominicans.***
And so with an exchange of names and clutching Sr. Ventura’s cellular telephone number, we bid a fond farewell, mounted our now-quieted carro and returned to Las Galeras comforted by the knowledge that our General Master was only a single day-long trip away from being restored to wholeness.
When we got back to our barrio I shared with our immediate neighbors our discovery of and confidence in the Nagua-based repairman, and our consequent happiness. I’ll admit it: life can be pretty slow here at the end of the Samana peninsula and some days this sort of thing passes for big news. That was the case this time and there was a lively discussion of alternatives to Sr. Ventura and his well-stocked repair shop in Nagua. This conversation led, eventually, to Pegaro.
Our friend Christian was the first to identify Pegaro as a guy who lives 20 minutes away on the road to St. Barbara de Samana and who could certainly repair the General Master and provide an enduring guarantee of his work. Supposing that it is generally better to patronize local craftsmen and not much relishing the prospect of a 4-hour round trip to Nagua, I arranged to follow Christian towards Samana the following day and discuss the repair with Pegaro.
That’s how Denise found herself seated in a quiet Jeepeta by the side of the road, alone with a crippled General Master while I scrambled uphill on a narrow track and disappeared into the jungle. I imagine that she wished me luck as I vanished from sight.
The path was pretty narrow; not entirely overgrown, but needing the attention of a machete. There were sporadic clearings on the narrowing path, each containing one or two houses in various states of construction and/or disintegration. As we advanced we periodically called out: Pegaro! Pegaro! I distinctly heard Christian mutter to himself that he was sure Pegaro should be living somewhere nearby. We encountered a few people who offered us quizzical looks, to which we responded with the one-word question: “Pegaro?” To a person they nodded in the uphill direction and so we plodded along.
It felt odd, wandering in the woods looking for a washing machine repairman. I mean, there’s no sign of a bench, no evidence of a tool, and nothing remotely like the reassuring rows of replacement parts stocked by Sr. Ventura in Nagua. We were actually beating the bushes looking for the Maytag Man when, from behind a tree stepped one of the largest Dominicans I’ve ever seen. This guy had to be 6′ 5″ and must have weighed a solid 240. He was drenched in sweat and not smiling, his eyes inscrutable behind a pair of wrap-around shades. He wore saggy baggies over an improbable pair of plaid boxers and had, not one, but two artificial diamond stud earrings each the size of my thumbnail.
He was right at home, but I suppose that I must have looked pretty strange to him.
We studied each other for a moment before I asked hopefully “Pegaro?” whereupon he broke into a face-filling smile before responding “Ah, si, Pegaro!” and disappeared up an even smaller path to where Pegaro was working with the bananas in the hills. After ten minutes or so (during which another guy gave me three small plants when he noticed me admiring a particularly nice flowering bush) the big guy returned followed by a much smaller man who identified himself as Pegaro. He was compact, strong, and old. I had the sense that he had slipped into his worn high-topped and laceless leather shoes just for the trip down the hill to conduct this bit of repair business.
I briefly described the problem with the General Master. Pegaro was nonplussed and non-committal although very interested in the work. Together we continued on down the hill to the waiting Jeepeta where we proceeded to contemplate the General Master by the side of the road. I noted with some interest that Denise didn’t appear to find anything unusual about any of this. In fact it seemed quite normal to me, too.
After the requisite number of minutes of dirt-kicking, chin-scratching, and vague speculation we agreed that Pegaro would fix the machine at a reasonable price. He informed us that we could pick the GM up any day between 1:00 PM and 2:00 PM, which was the time when they generally had electricity. As I climbed into the car I watched Pegaro walk confidently up the hill into the jungle carrying our General Master on his head, shoes flapping loosely around his ankles.
Pegaro is eighty-five years old.
Two days later, we returned at 1:30 PM. Pegaro was waiting for us in a shell of a house next to the road. As I approached, he presented me with an obviously blown capacitor and the remains of some sort of hub/pivot that I was given to understand was the very heart and soul of the centrifugal spinner. With lots of animated gestures and some pretty interesting sound effects, he demonstrated the proper functioning of the parts and some of the possible ways in which they might malfunction. I repeated most of the effects, just to demonstrate that I understood. Again, Denise didn’t appear to see anything out of the ordinary in this behavior. I choose to believe this speaks well of her.
Together, Pegaro and I peered at the innards of the machine and I could see where he’d spliced a second-hand capacitor into the wiring harness. At a glance, it appeared that the original capacitor was still in place, but I decided not to look too closely because I wasn’t inclined to discuss the actual origins of the blown capacitor in my hand. It was sufficient that the General Master had been returned to its full semi-automatic functionality, albeit in some ineluctable and Dominicanized way.
Pegaro and I negotiated and agreed on a fair price, taking into account a modest gringo tax and the necessity of his traveling by gua-gua to Samana twice, first to find the parts and then back once more to pay for them once we concluded our end of the deal.
So the machine is restored and, if anything, delivers even more pleasure than before. Wash–SPIN–Rinse–SPIN–Hang, Smile and repeat.
I don’t know exactly how many hands were involved in conducting this transaction and effecting this repair but suspect it may really be upwards of a dozen, counting Christian, Denise, Pegaro and me. I’m also pretty sure that Pegaro’s fee was disbursed fairly broadly into the local economy and quickly.
I’m also pretty sure that if we encounter a problem with the General Master in the short-to-mid-term that Pegaro will stand behind his repair.
The US economy should function so well and the Maytag Men should but do likewise.
Hope all’s well with you. Thank God we in the US finally have a national leader worth following.
Bill
Tags: Denise Hanna, Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
The end of the year and approaching dry season find us both healthy and happy here in Las Galeras, this year more relaxed than last. This is most certainly because of the number of projects completed around the immediate vicinity of the house last year.
It’s not like there’s a shortage of worthy work around here, it’s just that I have to make some small effort to see it. Accordingly, I’ve actually read several novels, in addition to a 6-month backlog of scores of periodicals and yet another slew of Dominican histories.
Based on my recent reading, it looks like the presidential election is Barack Obama’s to lose. Best wishes to him, and here’s hoping that the apparatchiks don’t manage to fritter away the substantial and terrible advantages gifted him by the Bush Administration. Or co-opt his administration in any of a thousand little attractive and detrimental ways…
Actually, we do keep pretty current with events in the world. Our friends and neighbors have shared their wireless network with us and in consequence we’re able to access the Internet from one corner of the house this year. That’s hugely more convenient than traveling to the Internet Cafe in the village or writing lengthy missives with the thumbs on the BlackBerry. Actually, the BBerry connection itself is a pretty recent development in town and represented a significant improvement over the hike to the dial-up Cafe. Technological progress here by leaps and bounds!
Those of you who may recognize the more compulsive aspect in my character will understand the single-mindedness that I’ve brought to trying to develop and extend the wireless signal throughout this part of the neighborhood. So far with some progress, but without the success that ultimately either is, or is not achieved.
Anyway, I open up the laptop and feel the lure of Linux hacking and Router and Access Point configuration drawing me into a technical vortex in which I do find a measure of poesy but, alas, no missives. In any event, that’s my excuse for not writing, and I’m stickin’ to it.
Our first visitors of the year will join us for a week or so in a few days and they will no doubt appreciate it if I wander through the guest bungalow and tighten up a few loose ends before they arrive. You will appreciate the plumbing parts they are delivering and which I will surely install sometime before your visit. That the “walk-through” remains to be done is part of the seduction of that “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” mentality I mentioned a moment ago. I’m sure that the bungalow is lovely, but if you’d asked me 2 months ago, I’d have said that it would have fresh paint by now. “C’est la vie,” as we French say here in Las Galeras.
The garden still requires an inordinate amount of “work” but at the same time it’s a lot more manageable than in previous years. I’m continuing the process begun last year of removing some of the less-attractive trees and shrubs, those that crowd other seemingly more attractive plants. I imagine that this simplification will eventually make it pretty painless to keep up the garden. “Vamos a ver,” as we Dominicans say. As far as that goes, the gardening isn’t difficult; and there’s always ibuprofen and the hammock overlooking the sea and bay with the gentle lulling sounds of the reef and the beach in the background. That’s me talking, too.
The fauna are ceaselessly amusing around here. There’s a pretty large and quite graceful cuckoo bird that is swift, silent and quite deadly as it slips through the trees and shrubs looking for big bugs, small geckos and, I presume, love. A pair of yellow-winged blackbirds has spent weeks in determined and endless battle with the rear-view mirrors on the car; and the dragon has decamped from the kitchen and taken up temporary residence in the wall-mounted gas hot water heater in the bathroom. Bees, livestock and other domesticated animals all provide anecdotes worthy of mention in detail, if not in this missive. Our neighbors’ old dog, Vanille, could fill a couple of good-sized and interesting chapters all by herself, I suppose.
Some of you (Heather, Oscar) will be particularly pleased to know that the vagabond dog has surfaced a survivor and nearly completely mended to join the ranks of the homeless-but-cared-for pack downtown. He’s still a bit aloof from his canine fellows and appears to have forgiven humankind for what agonies we inflicted on him. There was no flicker of recognition that I could detect when we met on the beach a few days before Christmas. However, he did pull up in the lee of a piece of driftwood, curl up, turn his back and hang with us for a game or two of Petanque that took maybe a half-hour or so. I’m predicting that I’ll see him frolic with another of the younger dogs before too long.
Others of you (some, no doubt, for obscure and perverse reasons) will be interested to know that the advent of the dry season has brought the youthful offspring of the frog to visit in the damp shower during the night. I’m pleased to report that lifting the toilet lid does not seem to be a hereditary skill in the amphibian class.
We’re fitting into the community in Las Galeras, which is multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-class, composed of Europeans and Americans who share the common attraction presented by the fishing village cum new town on the beach at the end of the road. It’s an interesting mix, and I think that the Dominicans who hold the whole thing together in a host of ways are sometimes quietly amused. At least I hope they are.
There’s one guy here, a friend and neighbor, who is a retired Boston cop and full-time character. A cursory Google search of the term “Las Galeras” will reveal a few references to him and his activities, including his self-assumed role as Santa Clause to the children in Las Galeras and surrounding environs.
Beginning in June, Paul starts to grow what becomes a formidable head of white hair and a flowing white beard. As the holiday approaches he dons his “less-formal” Santa attire and it’s not unusual to see a bronze-colored round and impish guy zipping along the roads astride his red 4-wheeled ATV which is all polished for the season.
A few years ago, at his instigation, some of the foreign ex-pats began to contribute a little time and money to put together a hundred or so bags of commodities and several hundred small bags of candy for distribution to families in the more remote campo and in a church and school in Las Galeras. We enjoy the camaraderie of assembling the packages, but avoid the distribution which was administered this year by Paul in his formal Santa Suit and a German neighbor with transportation assistance from an Italian foundation operating in Las Galeras.
A good time was reportedly had by all, and Santa shaved on the 25th. I’ve got a pre-shave picture of him and his wife on the quad when they stopped by to deliver a birthday visit.
Now you’ve got something to look for at www.elotrowa.com
Happy New Year.
Bill
Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
It’s a Sunday afternoon in Las Galeras, just as it is where you are; but the similarities may stop right there. For one thing, we’re an hour ahead of the East Coast; four ahead of the West and–well, you get that drift.
But it’s remarkably different here from where you are today.
For one thing, it’s astonishingly quiet, even by the 3rd-world village suburban standard that is the aural benchmark around our house. The ocean tides aren’t particularly strong at this time this month and there are no wind-driven waves to speak of, so the surf sound is an occasional soft and rolling murmur. Being Sunday, there are not many motors going up and down the hill on the way to or from work, or going to or returning from lunch. (True, the Dorado salesman did motor up to peddle fish this morning, but he’s got a pretty good little muffler on that bike.)
A sometime and small breeze rustles the palm thatch in the roof and the leaves in the trees and that is pretty much it.
Other than the occasional cock-crow and a near constant mockingbird song, it’s really quite still today. That pretty much describes my day, too.
You subscribers will know how it’s impossible to keep up with the pace of a subscription to the New Yorker magazine. You understand how the issues come relentlessly week after week with no regard or consideration for the activities that comprise the rest of your life. You’ll understand when I say that I’ve about caught up with those copies that accumulated when we were here for five months last year. Today I spent the morning in the hammock, catching up on the month of March, 2008. A few more issues and I’ll be current to mid-October, when I arrived in the Dominican.
It looks as though the momentum in the US election is swinging Obama’s way. Good on him.
Here, it appears as though we’re entering the dry season a little early. The flowers are starting to get serious about producing seeds, and we’re once again conscious of the water level in the cistern after holding steady at “full” for a couple of months.
Another reliable sign of the changing season is the presence of more tourists in town. The arrival of tourists here is as noticeable as the change that happens on the Easter weekend in Washington, DC. The numbers are profound, although on an obviously different scale. Twenty people can seem to fill up an empty street here like two hundred can there.
A few days from now these visitors will cast a ruddy pink penumbra over the town that will be reminiscent of sunrise. This sort of rosy glow will be generated by the collective reflection from their seriously sunburned touristic hides. And they will spend Dollars and Euros, and life will be better in Las Galeras for a while, or busier anyway.
Most of the tourists in Las Galeras are European and most of those stay in the “Grand Paradise,” formerly the “Casa Marina.” Despite a new and upscale name this is a pretty unpretentious “all-inclusive” resort. It’s the only one of its kind around here and I’m told it is the only Dominican-owned all-inclusive resort on the island of Hispaniola. (Other all-inclusives are almost all owned by one big Spanish hotel chain.)
This year I recognize some of the tourists as regular returnees and nod as we walk through their resort on the way to town. It’s a pretty laid-back sort of place, heavy on beach-sleeping, book-reading, and sun-burning, although they do occasionally mount an expedition of a dozen or more dusty All-Terrain-Vehicles and head up through our neighborhood on the way to one beach or another. No sound of them today, though.
Which brings me abruptly to the real reason for writing today. I promised to let you all know when I took the wraps off the “El Otro WA” weblog and now suppose there’s no reason to delay that any further.
The website contains (I think) every e-mail that I’ve sent to this collective group and a number of other musings and photos as well.
The El Otro WA website has an every-fifteen-minute weather report from the station in Samana which is only 35 kilometers away even though they do get considerably more rain than we do here at the end of the peninsula.
The page also has a convenient little orange button near to the address field of your browser that you can use to do an RSS subscription to the page. It’s painless and easy enough to disappear if these missives become tedious.
Most interestingly, you can begin to publicly comment on these e-mails. Many of you have done so privately and your observations have been thoughtful and hilarious. From your comments I’ve learned some things about your lives and, by extension, my own. I now know something about growing up in rural Florida, about how living and working in the labor movement has been for you; my Mom shared a pretty good description of her first clothes washing machine and a friend in Seattle even sent pretty regular weather updates describing the conditions for the poor bastards living in Ulaanbaatar.
Anyway, I hope you’ll feel motivated to share your comments on the site, that others may enjoy your pearls as I have. You’ve got nothing to lose but your dignity and we’re none of us as dignified as we’d like to imagine, I suppose.
Keep those cards and letters coming in any event.
Best regards,
Bill
www.elotrowa.com
Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
…and he seems to be living there, or maybe in the broiler, I’m not sure.
Unlike his amphibian colleague from last year, this fellow is relatively innocuous although, like the frog, he is of a substantial size. He comes out in the dark to hunt moths and other dainties but otherwise keeps mostly to himself within the confines of our (General Electric) gas stove.
Denise hasn’t baked often, and I never–but when she does he seems unconcerned.
I do not exaggerate in choosing to use the word “dragon.” This is no mere out-sized gecko, but a full-fledged member of some other race. I’d venture to say that he outweighs the big frog, formerly of the toilet, and may approach a pound in weight. To the tip of his long narrow tail, he’s over eleven inches long. He’s pretty thick, too, with a chest like a Rottweiler and a stance like a bulldog. I don’t know if he can unhinge his jaw or not, but he can wolf down a substantial-sized moth with no difficulties.
Recently he was cavorting about the kitchen with an eight or nine-inch long lizard. My guess is that it was all about territory or maybe sex, perhaps both. Anyway, it’s nice to know that he’s not living a solitary life in the kitchen, no matter how rewarding that might be.
It hasn’t occurred to us to name him; he’s nothing like a pet but more of an independent actor with whom we share only space and not really a relationship, as such. It’s fair to say that he has no discernable personality. In that respect he’s like the papaya tree in the garden or certain people I have known, but more interesting.
We won’t disturb him by using either the oven or the broiler to prepare food tomorrow.
It’s been awhile since we’ve been at home in the US for the Thanksgiving holiday. For several years past, Denise and I have either traveled on Thanksgiving Day, or we’ve already been here in the Dominican Republic, away from friends and family in the United States. For us it was a practical way to stretch my 10 days annual vacation by folding a chunk of that time over the four-day holiday weekend.
As a consequence it’s been a few years since we’ve actually celebrated Thanksgiving, which nevertheless remains my favorite holiday.
In fact, Thanksgiving is the only American holiday we ever really celebrate, even if we do regularly participate in Labor Day festivities and take note of both Independence Day and Veterans Day. (Disclosure: I often sing to Heather on her birthday, but she has the grace to not complain.)
Anyway, this year we’ll join a few American ex-patriots here in Las Galeras for a traditional Thanksgiving Turkey dinner. I’m told that the bird will be complete with the little pop-up plastic indicator that lets the cook know that the bird is sufficiently dry and ready to serve. I’m looking forward to it and to the canned cranberry sauce that Paul’s eighty-two year old mother reportedly brought in her luggage, even though the luggage is apparently still circling somewhere between Boston and Santo Domingo. Vamos a ver…
Even if her luggage materializes in time I won’t expect blueberry pie for breakfast on the Friday following the holiday this year, as is our custom in the US. Maybe that’s a tradition in your home, too. If not it should be.
Here in Las Galeras, the frog has yet to put in an appearance although I can hear him in the night, romping in the marsh that is theoretically my neighbor’s swimming pool. Perhaps he’ll make a rush for our bathroom once the dry season is upon us. We’ll see about that, too.
Further rummaging in the update department, I can report that the vagabond dog was sighted in town a couple of weeks ago, trotting along and trailing eight or ten feel of blue plastic string. I’ve no word of him since and both presume and wish him the best.
The mockingbird has returned. He was conspicuous for his absence the first few weeks that I was alone here before Denise arrived and I was envious of neighbors who had nests close to their homes. Now he has discovered the mast and borrowed Wi-Fi antenna that we installed on the roof. The antenna is not working so well for Internet access as yet, but is serving the mockingbird very well as a perch from which to survey the neighborhood and sing its praise.
As in years past, we’ve lots to be grateful for this year: satisfying careers, deepening relationships that the passage of time has brought with family and friends, our health and the prospect of a full and happy future. We’re also gratified by our new government, seemingly interested in developing rather than merely draining our nation.
If only you will think of us when having that second piece of pumpkin pie on Thursday I’m quite sure that our lives will be nearly complete.
Bill
Tags: Denise Hanna, Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana