Kier stayed over at her friend’s house last night, so we did our usual routine. I met her for breakfast. The younger two girls were happily rewatching the dvd we rented last night for movie night.
K and I went for breakfast and she told me all about her evening. There is always drama. She also gets more and more history on different relationships, past, present, hopes for the future. We sit for a couple of hours at a certain table that she likes, with a little bit of sun. She enjoys these breakfasts, and so do I. She keeps saying we never get the chance to just sit for a few hours for breakfast at home, with no where to go looming over our heads. She is right. Somehow the life we’ve created back home rarely has time to just chill with each other, enjoying leisurely conversation. That’s a shame. Perhaps we’ll try to change that for her last year of high school, before she’s off on her own life.
We did have to get home because Cali’s friend came for a sleepover at 11 a.m. and will stay until late tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. Another cultural difference, there isn’t a sense her of overstaying your welcome. In Canada ther is this whole unwritten set of rules with how long a playdate lasts, sleepovers, whether one stays over mealtime. Took me forever to figure those out. Good thing the two girls have excellent friendship chemistry. Somehow they don’t seem to tire of each other and I haven’t had to referee yet. The only glitch is that they still need to be fed. But they can go to the corner store by themselves for snacks, which happens every couple of hours. We also went out for ice cream, went down to the beach so the girls could collect stones.
For two hours in the afternoon Kier and Madi went to silks and trapeze class. This is part of the play. Madi is so light I think she’s well suited for it. Kier says she is going to get much stronger abs and upper body strength doing this.
When they got back from practice, Kier took a long nap this afternoon, something she hasn’t done in quite sometime.
Madi is busy creating a make-believe world upstairs for the two younger girls. They are excited about sleeping up there. Madi will likely join them.
This evening the little choir I joined on Monday nights, sang in the Red Suitcase performance. The Red Suitcase was a play that someone in town wrote which takes placce in Pana and Antigua. It incorporated phone calls to various real businesses in town, with people we all knew. Througout the play different people performed Cole Porter songs. One has to focus not on the quality of music, but rather…something else entirely. You thought I’d come up with something profound there, but alas, I have not. I don’t mean to be a music snob, but somehow I’m most tolerant of mediocre music coming from small children. I’m trying to be more open minded, but it hurts me. The performances overall were painful. I know the gracious response is to say, it’s great that people want to get on stage and try to act, dance, and sing to enhance their life experience and feel the joy that often comes with showing one’s talent to family, friends, and strangers. Yet, somehow I cannot say those things with any amount of sincerity. There are many places for average people with no talent. They’re called karaoke bars, singing in church, in your shower, talent shows, family gatherings, but really, not on stage where people pay 70Q and have even minimal expectations of quality. But I must remind myself that this production was squarely in keeping with the culture of simply doing your best with what you have, not perfection, not necessarily even a base-line of quality. It’s based more on making an effort or giving it a shot. Although there is something welcoming and open-minded to this mentality, I have to confess I have some difficulty wrapping my mind around that one when it comes to performances.
In keeping with the whole theme of simply doing your best, whatever that may be, our little choir performed its song, only I wasn’t singing. Our director of the choir who was also our accompanist, along with another member of the choir, had a gig they needed to do at a bar around the corner simultaneously. Their gig started at 8pm. We were supposed to sing sometime after intermission, no one seemed to know exactly when, but it was around 8:15. So the guys went to do one set, I was the person designated to go and retrieve them at intermission, from the bar, which I did. Only they decided to do a few more songs. Meanwhile, our little group rehearsed the song without the guitar. It wasn’t good. People not only picked their own key, but felt free to shift from key to key during the course of the run-through. Clearly the group couldn’t sing without the guitar to keep them in key.
Then, on stage, they introduce our group, “Now for a special treat, the PanaChoir!” But there is no director and more importantly, no guitar. There is no WAY I’m going on stage to make a fool of myself with a group that can’t pick a key. There are a lot of things I will swallow my pride and do, that just doesn’t happen to be on my list. I tell the group to stall, tell them we I’m going for the director, and run out the door to get the two guys.
Outside the bars are already in full swing, with guys spilling out on the streets yelling, “Hey baby!” as I run past. I get to the bar where the two guys from our choir are performing, luckily they are at the end of a song, I tell them to hurry and I run back past all the “hey baby” guys once more. When I get back to the performance, the group is just coming off stage having sung the song. My friend, who knows something about music, is madder than mad. She says that was the most humilating thing she has ever done. The guy on the piano tried to accompany, but he chose a different key and didn’t know the arrangement of the song since we had shortened it, taken out a few verses. Meanwhile, some of the members of the group who are more focussed on having a good time, had that post-performance high. Were laughing, all excited about the song. They were more focused on getting up there, dancing, being goofy on stage in front of their friends. My friend and I were more into singing the song not even overly well, but at least in one discernible key, such crazy perfectionists we are. After the performance was over, she just wanted to scoot out before she saw anyone she knew, and get a stiff drink.
We went to PanaRock and listened to the band there for a while. She knows all the musicians in town since her husband plays in a band. It was a lot of fun to be out. Kier joined us after a little while. After she sat with us for a bit she went to join her friends. On the way there she showed us all the different places where they hang out on the weekends. My friend’s son also hangs out in this group and found this information equally interesting.
The main street is a different world in the evenings. All the little souvenir stalls are closed. There are many little tables set up on the street serving food. Lots and lots of people standing on the street talking and drinking. Kind of like a huge street party. I asked Kier if this was unusual and she said that’s how it is every Friday and Saturday night. Didn’t take her long to track down some friends and she happily bounded into a little cubby of a restaurant/bar.
My friend and I weren’t ready to call it a night, so we went to Atlantis and I had the absolute best hot chocolate I’ve ever had in my life. I could be because I was cold, my throat is still very scratchy from my cold, but it was still the most marvelous decadent liquid I’ve had in a long time. We were having a great talk, not a small talk convo, one about things that really matter, how they ended up here, spiritual stuff, parenting stuff, when a young guy showed up at our table.
He was not a random stranger. He is one of the volunteers that my friend’s husband gave work to for the week to help build a house for a family up in Concepcion. I visited that house-build, there are pictures posted. Like every person who passes through this town, this guy had some kind of crazy story.
He is from Maine, but his house burned down in October. Since it was cold, he kept hitch-hiking south and working while he went. Then we went to Mexico and got robbed at the Guatemalan border at gunpoint in an alley. Managed to keep his passport, that part of the story was kinda fuzzy. He shaved some crazy designs into the side of his head (next to his mohawk) in order to win a bet and a get a date with some girl. He is on his way to Brazil because he met some guy in Mexico that owns some kind of gem mine (??) said if he can make it to Brazil alive by hitch-hiking, he will give me a job when he arrives. So he’s on his way to take that guy up on his scary job offer. He kept kneeling by our table for two, simply would not leave. My friend’s husband had given this guy work for the past week since he had been robbed and had no money or passport, so she seemed comfortable talking with him. I think my friend is just a nicer person that I am, and didn’t feel the need to politely get him to move on. He was probably in his early 20s, huge fellow who filled a doorway, crazy hair, kept talking about how good he is with his hands (who says that?), wanted to buy us drinks even though either of us could be his mother. I was ready to make him move on, but my friend has a soft spot for lonely people. The only way to shake him was to leave, so that’s what we did.
Once we were outside, we met all sorts of people we knew and ended up talking in the street for a while. We talked with different people, hilarious conversations. We talked about the play, the song, with friends of ours who were in the audience. They were ribbing my for chickening out of singing, I told them I only sing with groups who can decide on a key.
Then we met up with a friend we were trying to call all evening. She is a contact from the church, has been going through a crazy break-up with a boyfriend. He turned out to be a crack addict, stole the jewelry she makes and lives off of. He has been going around town trying to sell her jewelry for money. When I see it in writing it all sounds a bit crazy. We walked over to Circus Bar to help her track down someone who had information about some of her stolen earrings. We decided not to stay at Circus Bar, although there was a great little band playing, 2 classical guitars, drums.
We walked through the crowded streets, saw another mom we knew who was tracking down her son to tell him it was time to come home (he doesn’t have a cell). She works for my friend, very sweet woman. After that the three of us went back to the place we had just come from and had another hot chocolate. Scary hair guy had found a buddy to talk to at the bar, so only came over to our table a couple of times. The three of us talked for another hour. The sons of both of these women are best friends and they live next door to each other. I enjoy the company of these two. There is an ease to our conversation as if the three of us have known each other for a long time. The one woman had to get a restraining order on her ex, she was showing us crazy texts he was sending her. She was telling us how hard it has been lately to make ends meet and that on Thursday they were down to a couple of squash and her friend made a soup for her out of that. As I’ve said before, people are more open about their situations here. They just tell you if they are struggling, put it out there without hesitation. They don’t fear being judged here in the same way we do in North America, even though people are much more likely to give their honest opinion about the situation once it’s on the table. Just more openness to sharing the entire human condition, not just the nice stuff.
It was getting late and we were all getting tired. The younger people outside where still going strong. There were more people on the streets than before. We decided not to look for our kids, we each have one kid in that group, who were all together somewhere closeby, hanging out. We know they look out after each other and it may have cramped their style to see their three moms checking up on them. We opted to leave them undisturbed.
I had a great evening. I now understand why Kier likes to hang out with her friends in this setting. It really is like a street party. You hang out talking with your friends, meet up with other people you know, have numerous interesting and unexpected conversations, you can go from place to place depending on what kind of live music you want to hear at any given moment. Great inexpensive food available anywhere you go. What’s not to like. No wonder people drive her from the city to hang out at Pana on the weekends.
Madi was an awesome sitter. They watched a movie, had popcorn, did lots of other girly sleepover things. They didn’t end up sleeping upstairs, but rather in the living room. I knew I had to get to sleep since they would want food at around 7. I was right.