In which I take the cowhide to the post office and become part of a conspiracy

The cowhide weighed three and a half kilos -- too heavy to carry in my backpack. We took it to the post office and I asked how much it would cost to mail it to the U.S.

“Twenty-five dollars,” the clerk told me.

“That’s rather expensive!” I said. I decided I could carry it for a while.

“It’s the government!” the clerk said. “Did you know they are talking about privatizing the post office?”

Well, no, we didn’t.

“How many post offices in first world countries are privatized?” he asked. He put his index finger under his eye, the Latin sign for “Beware.” “You watch! There’s something strange going on here.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I think Carlos Menem wants to make the post office private so he and his buddies can send drugs through the mail without worrying about postal inspectors!”

In which Doris wants me to sell her old clothes

Primo told me that Doris wants to ship her winter clothes - her more than seven years' old winter clothes - up here for me to sell.

Because there is no market for winter clothes where she lives. And you have to take them to the dry cleaners, first.

Bless her heart, based on my eBay scan, there does not seem to be much of a market, period, for old Oleg Cassini or Valerie Stevens clothes. Especially the kind worn by older ladies.

ADDED

Let me expand on this.

Explain to me why I should schlep someone else's old clothes across town trying to find a consignment shop that will take them when that person does nothing but criticize me (to Primo) while complaining (to Primo) that she has been "reaching out" to me, which does not mean actually contacting me to try to develop a relationship but instead apparently means nothing more than saying to Primo that she is "reaching out."

What is in it for me to try to sell these clothes? Do I get a cut? Do I get gratitude and an apology for the crummy way she's treated me?

I doubt it.

Even if I were to get a cut, I don't think I could be laughing my way to the bank.

Yes, you knew the tackiness was coming.

I have seen how Doris dresses.

It would be one thing if she had a closet full of DVF wrap-around dresses, which go for a few hundred dollars on eBay. Or if she had Chanel suits. Or anyone else super famous.

Nobody comes to mind because haute couture is not within my reach and really, I don't care. Go all Devil Wears Prada on me about how the choices the designers make filter down to my ratty acrylic blue sweater. Blah blah blah. Whatever. I know what looks good on me. I know quality because I used to sew my own clothes. I could never in a million years afford haute couture so I don't care. It's just not my thing. Fine for other people, but I just don't care.

That said, I do know tacky clothing and bad taste when I see it.

If the outfit that Doris wore to our wedding is any indication of her taste in dressy clothes - all I have ever seen her in otherwise is t-shirts, capris, and sandals - then I am positive that there is no secondary market for her clothes.

She moved her winter clothes from the frozen north to Florida over seven years ago.

I don't know why she did that. They had no intention of moving back north.

Now, finally, she is realizing that perhaps she should clear those clothes out of her guest closet, where they reside above the paper bag full of old newspapers that they also paid someone to move to Florida? Now, she is realizing that?

Now, she wants to sell those clothes.

Correction. She wants to ship them to me and for me to sell them for her.

And what do I get out of this?

Nothing. I get nada, bupkus, zippo.

Yes, I am cranky.

In which I buy a cowhide I could have bought in San Antonio for less money

We’d had a boring morning trying to find food in Salta. The farmers had left so the scenery at the hostel was not so great. The Handbook mentioned a great tourist market, so Jeff and I decided to check it out.

I wasn’t impressed with the very expensive wood carvings and twice-as-expensive-as-in-Bolivia Bolivian imports. We were leaving, just minding our own business when I walked past a black and white cowhide (I think it was a Holstein) stretched across a rack. I kept walking, but within a few steps, realized I had to turn back. Something about the hide haunted and drew me. Visions of my weekend house at the ranch flashed into my mind. I saw the rug lying on the hardwood floor in front of the fireplace with me and Mr. Right sitting on it -- naked -- drinking a nice red wine (well, you wouldn’t drink white in those circumstances, would you?).

Jeff walked up and admired it with me. But what would I really do with a cowhide, I asked him? He agreed that it was not really a necessity of life and we started to walk away. Then I decided I should at least know how much it cost so I would know how virtuous I was being in turning it down.

I found the saleslady and asked the price. One hundred twenty-five dollars. That decided me. I couldn’t spend all that money, I told her.

She paused thoughtfully. “It’s $125 for most people,” she said. “But I haven’t sold anything all day. For you, I make it $110.”

No, I didn’t need a black and white cowhide, I told her firmly and crossed my arms.

She looked at me shrewdly then looked over her shoulder before stepping closer to me. She was no novice to this game, I could tell. “One hundred dollars,” she whispered.

I bit my lip. I wavered. Jeff’s gaze swung back to me. “No, no, I just can’t,” I said regretfully.
She moved in for the kill. With a sigh of deep sacrifice, she said, “Ninety dollars,” and looked at me expectantly.

Jeff sucked in his breath. The ball was in my court. How would I respond to this challenge?
I considered the offer. Suddenly, the dynamic of the game shifted dramatically. Jeff decided he was a player. He hurled down the gauntlet and said, “If you don’t buy it, I will.”

Did I have any choice? Really, there was nothing to do but go into the back room where lifted up my skirt, unzipped my money belt, and counted the money out. I was now the owner of a cowhide.

In which we get to see almost-naked Argentine farmers emerging from the shower

When we arrived in Salta, we went to a hostel where Jeff had stayed the year before. It was full, but Jeff persisted and the owner agreed to let us stay in the spare room. The French ambassador had once stayed in this very room, he told us. It was the room under the stairs -- the area used for storing the vacuum cleaner in American homes. About 18" of crawl space surrounded an iron bunk bed that reached almost to the ceiling. Actually, better to say that the ceiling reached down to the bed. I couldn’t stand up straight in the room and I am not tall. I had to walk around the bed away from the door to be able to close the door. “Door” is probably an exaggeration. It was a frame with some screening nailed to it. The screen was peppered with holes -- one conveniently located next to the handle so you could open the locked door from the outside.

The bathrooms were upstairs and weren’t too bad. The shower was not set apart from the rest of the bathroom; instead, it consisted of a showed head placed on the wall across from the toilet (a setup I was to find throughout most of the continent). When the shower was on, the spray drenched the toilet seat and the sink. The manager had thoughtfully provided a nail on which to hang one’s clothes and a squeegee mop to wipe down the walls and the floor, but he hadn’t quite figured out where to keep the toilet paper so it wouldn’t get drenched.

The hostel was tranquil in the afternoon, but later in the evening, the other guests returned -- 15 farmers on a convention. Argentine farmers are young and handsome. But they are also boisterous and wouldn’t squeegee the water off the floors in the bathrooms and left whiskers in the sink. I was in line for the shower and had to sit in the patio watching one after the other of them emerge bare-chested and dripping from the bathrooms, holding their shampoo in one hand and their towels at their waists with the other. It was hell. (See: Chapter One: In Which I See Argentine Men, Who Are Amongst the Handsomest in the World, Probably Because They Are of Italian Descent.)

I didn’t appreciate them so much when they returned drunk from their night out at two in the morning and then left again before dawn. I was tired from having spent the previous night on the bus, but couldn’t sleep well in our cell. Jeff and I compared notes on the farmers. He’d actually had the temerity to speak to one of them; but I’d not been so bold. Two mosquitoes buzzed around my ear all night. A mosquito coil burned in the corner, but was ineffective against the huge holes in the screen door. The lack of rest probably contributed to my totally irrational purchase the next day.

In which I travel through Argentina with Jeff

I had several chores to handle in Santiago, among them being mailing to the US the statue Monica had given me. I was relieved to learn months later that of all the boxes I shipped from Chile to the US, that was the only one that was lost.

My friend Jeff and I were going to travel together through Argentina. We’d arranged to meet Sunday morning at the East Terminal in Santiago. No one was there to see me off, but a friend of Jeff’s made me take several photos of the two of them together next to the bus.

We started the six-hour trip to Mendoza. I didn’t expect Argentina to be much different from Chile, but I was surprised. Just the change in the terrain was dramatic. On the Chilean side of the Andes, the land was green and lush with row upon row of grapevines stretching into the distance. The Argentine side was dry and rocky, with streaks of copper and sulfur and iron running through the mountains. Dry riverbeds ran alongside the highway and a few stunted trees dotted the landscape.

The border itself was high in the mountains and freezing cold. The customs building was a huge hangar without heat. We had to get off the bus and run through the snow and slush to get inside the building where we waited for the customs agents to finish their cigarettes and inspect our luggage. The bags had been removed from the hold of the bus and set on long tables by a man who later came to us with a paper cup with which he collected tips for doing something we had neither requested nor wanted and could have done ourselves. The agents had coats but we passengers had to stand there in our Santiago-appropriate spring clothes and stamp our feet and clap our hands for warmth while we waited. The two agents and their dog stared intently at our faces and poked through a few bags. I don’t know what we would have been smuggling from Chile to Argentina: Chilean grapes? Washing machines?

Closer to Mendoza, I noticed something I’d never seen in Chile: picnickers. They lined the highway. Argentine families had loaded their cars with card tables and baskets of food and were sitting by the side of the road eating their roast chickens and drinking wine. A few men fished in the sluggish stream.

Mendoza was a beautiful city, but too expensive. It was not yet tourist season so we thought we could negotiate a deal at the hostel, but the dueño had other ideas. (He was of the “I only have to sell one ten-thousand dollar piece of gum” school of thought.) We were the only customers he had and he still wouldn’t give us a discount. Not only that, but his wife got upset because we wanted to take two showers each for just a one night stay. (One upon arrival in the evening and one in the morning. Not too much to ask in a rational universe.)

Jeff and I -- both of whom have tastes that run to men -- would have liked to have stayed longer and watched the contestants for the international youth handball tournament -- tall, strapping young men, but at ten dollars a night apiece for the hostel and six dollars for lunch, it wasn’t in the budget.

We spent one day in Mendoza and then took the overnight bus to Salta. Here, we were able to negotiate. Jeff noticed that there was an oversupply of bus lines and an undersupply of passengers and got the ticket agent to knock ten dollars off the ticket price. And I’d thought his going counter to counter asking prices while I had the enviable job of guarding the luggage was just a big waste of time.

We prepared for the sixteen-hour ride by buying wine, yogurt and crackers. Our bus left at 8:00 p.m. Three hours and a box of wine later, we were in the perfect state of mind to enjoy the movie Bird on a Wire, which the attendant thoughtfully provided. We would have been in an even better mood except every time we hit a bump in the road, we spilled a little wine. Good thing the bus was almost empty and we could have our choice of seats.

We saw only the first twenty minutes of the movie before we stopped for supper -- included in the fare -- at a restaurant (which looked like it used to be a gas station) in the middle of the desert. A fire crackled in an outdoor grill and two skinny dogs circled it hopefully. The restaurant looked like a dive but it served excellent barbecued chicken. I took this as a good omen about the trip, but then awoke the next morning to discover the bus attendant was serving only disgusting sweet biscuits for breakfast. Then he put on the second movie. It was horrible. Dennis Weaver was driving down a lonely western highway and a trucker started to follow him. The whole movie is Dennis’ voiced-over thoughts and panic and the trucker looming behind. I wasn’t interested in watching but there was no escape.

The lovely countryside was not to be, either. Argentines seem to consider “side of the road” synonymous with “dump.” Plastic bags, milk bottles, and cans covered the ground. I even saw a dead horse bloating in the sun. Someone had thrown up a few seats back and I discovered a huge hole in the seat of my only pair of pants (which I happened to be wearing). We’d left the nice part of Argentina.

In which my second trek across South America begins

My trip began the night I left Temuco, the city in southern Chile where I’d been a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. I’d envisioned scores of friends and well-wishers waving good-bye to me from the platform as the train pulled away, but only my counterpart Monica and her husband stood shivering in the cold August night. I’d waited until just before the train was to leave to board; even so, Monica ran inside the coach to give me one last good-bye, then waved madly as the train finally rolled out.

I held the going away present she’d given me. It was a carving of a Mapuche woman offering her breast to what appeared to be a child of at least three years. Even though I’d spent two years working with the Mapuches, I’d never quite become accustomed to the casualness with which the women breastfed their children or the age to which they did it: it was not uncommon to see three-years-old children walk up to their mothers, unbutton their shirts, and suck. I’d thought that I’d be able to avoid such culturally-different sights once I’d left Chile, but now I had a statue to remind me constantly.

I put the statue on top of my backpack and leaned back in my seat. Chilean trains are wonderfully plush. The sleeper cars have wide padded velvet seats that fold out into beds. Unlike the buses, which have loudspeaker systems that carry music to the willing and unwilling alike, the trains are quiet. The only noise is the soothing clack of the wheels on the track. The only disconcerting part of the ride is the jerky lateral motion to which you are subjected when you sleep in the top (a.k.a. “cheap”) bed. It’s impossible to lie on your side because your body does not have enough points of contact with mattress to stay put. Fortunately, drugs such as Valium are not under prescription in Chile.

I tried to read my book (one of the many I’d packed in to my backpack -- the right book was so important to a traveler’s image), but the lights flickered too much and I finally gave up. I asked the porter to make up my bed and tried to sleep, but visions of my trip marched through my head. I had it all planned: Not only would I meet the perfect man -- intelligent, witty, and single, but I would also land the perfect job by accident. On the train to Cuzco, I would find myself sitting next to another American, who, unbeknownst to me, would be a partner at Highly Prestigious International Consulting Firm. He would ask what I’d been doing with the Peace Corps and I would tell him modestly of my tremendous accomplishments with Casa de la Mujer Mapuche. He would say, “You know, we really need someone with your intelligence, creativity, and language ability at HPIF. Could you come to work for us as soon as you return to the U.S.? We’ll pay you one hundred thousand dollars a year.” I would demur and say I would need to think it over and he would thrust his card at me and say, “We’d give you two months of annual vacation as well! And dental!”

I was also sure that I would run into James Spader, the thinking woman’s sexy actor. (At the time, Kenneth Brannaugh was still with Emma Thompson, so he was off limits.) He would be making a movie in Bolivia and I would meet him at a café, where he would tell me that their business manager had been struck with severe giardia and they were desperate for a Spanish-speaking business person to handle things on the set. He would offer me tons of money to work for a short time, then would ask me to be his girlfriend.

It would be tough to work it all in, given that my ten-year college reunion was only three months away and in Texas, but I would manage. (I was determined to attend my reunion. I’d been going to the gym for three hours a day for six months in anticipation of seeing a former boyfriend. He would look upon my well toned body -- I had managed to make my thighs bigger by lifting weights, but besides that, I looked OK -- and regret the day he’d decided his life was complete without me.)

Eight hours later, I awoke and found myself still in Chile, with neither a job nor a boyfriend. I got dressed and climbed down from the bunk. Not all of the bottom beds had been made up and restored to their chair states yet; the only available seat was across from a stocky man with long, curly hair and a long, curly beard. He stared at me intently, then asked, “Are you German?”
I was used to this question. Chileans usually assumed non-Latins were Germans, not Americans, maybe because Chile has a large German immigrant population. I have blonde hair -- well, light brown but as soon as I’m in the sun for a while it’s blonde -- and blue eyes.

“No,” I answered. “I’m from the United States.” I’d learned quickly in Chile that I could not call myself “American.” Chileans would retort that they, too, were Americans, as were the Argentines and Bolivians and everyone else on the continent. I would try to explain that in English, the only word we have is “American” -- that there is no way to say “United Statesian” as there is in Spanish, but never had much success.

“No, no, no,” he said impatiently. “Your ancestors. Are they German?”

“Well, some of them. How did you know?”

“I’m a geneticist. You have blue eyes. They’re recessive, you know.”

Yes, I knew that.

He pulled out a newsletter. “I’m the president of the World Society of Alternative Medicine. I’m going to Santiago to give a press conference.” He leaned forward. “I’ve found a cure for AIDS!”
“That’s good news!” I said as I drew away from him. I know a night in a train without access to a shower hadn’t exactly left me smelling like a bed of roses, but he had emerged from bed smelling like he’d been working in the garden for a month without deodorant. And I at least had figured out that it was possible to brush one’s teeth in the train bathroom.

“You know, ‘AIDS’ is the wrong name. It should be called ‘IIDs’ for ‘Inherited Immune Disorder.’ It’s actually a genetic disease that can be cured by treatment with amino acids. I have a one hundred percent success rate curing people with AIDS.”

“If it’s a hereditary disease, why has it just shown up now?” I asked.

“But it has been here before! Only it was called by other names!” He lowered his voice and spoke darkly. “What do you think bubonic plague and smallpox really were?”

I murmured politely and looked out the window, watching the vineyards and the mountains slip away and trying to figure out how long before we arrived in Santiago and I escaped his overwhelming body odor.

He continued enthusiastically. “My special medicine -- these amino acids -- cures rheumatism, tumors, and menstrual cramps. Drugs are what make people sick! Why do you think they’re called ‘antibodies?’

“AIDS is just a big hoax by the drug companies. My medicine makes super-humans! I have ten children and not one of them has ever been immunized. And not one of them has ever been sick!”

I challenged him. “Not all medical treatment is drugs. What about operations? Would you operate for, say, a burst appendix?”

He answered solemnly. “I wouldn’t have to. My appendix would never burst.”

In which we go hungry on the train from Cuzco to Puno

From Cuzco, Kelly and I took a ten-hour train ride through the altiplano (the high plains) to Puno, which was at the time (this was 1994, I think I mentioned), the epicenter of the Peruvian terrorist movement. Had the internet been around and had our parents had any information whatsoever on what was going on with the Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path), they would have been panicking at the idea of their daughters traveling alone in the area. Their two blonde, definitely not from there daughters.

In other parts of South America, Kelly and I could blend. In Santiago, in certain neighborhoods, and in other cities, if we didn't open our mouths, nobody would know we weren't from there. Chile is an immigrant country. The main feeder countries are England, France and Germany. Don't quote me on that - I'm basing that statement on my remembered observations. There are a lot of green-eye blondes in Chile. There are cities where, in the early 90s, you would hear as much German as you did Spanish.

But in rural Peru, populated by Aymara and Quechua (again, don't quote me - I could do some research, but I'm lazy - these are just the groups I remember as living in that area), we did not blend. They were dark skinned and dark haired. Kelly and I were not. The women wear brightly-colored sweaters on top and several full skirts at once. The bottom layer is usually a crinoline and the top layer is made of brightly-colored pillowcase satin with three or four horizontal pleats sewn about three inches above the hem. On top of this is a giant apron behind which they tuck their hands, their nursing babies, and their money. They wear their hair long in two braids that fall down their backs and are tied together at the bottom with ribbons. On their heads they wear bowler hats. From the back, all you see are these plump multicolored figures with dark vertical lines dividing their backs.

I don't think they wear underpants, because when they need to go potty, they just drift out into the field, stop, pull their skirts out, and hover. Then they stand and come back. Done. It's actually a good system. There are no trees around. No materials for making paper. You work with the environment you have. Don't fight it.

Kelly was wearing white, which by now was beige. Yes, she had indeed packed only white clothes.

I was wearing black. I had traveled before. She had not. We did not blend.

This was when the Sendero Luminoso was killing foreigners. We didn't know about it. We weren't paying attention to such things. Not that it would have been so easy to get the information. We had our weekly Newsweek, but who knows what they were reporting? I flipped straight to the movies and gossip section when I got my mail.

Now that I look for hard data, I see that they had murdered 16 foreigners from 1989 to the time we took our trip. We probably would have said, "Oh, we'll take our chances."

So we were on the train. It was beautiful countryside. High in the mountains with that beautiful clear yellow mountain light. The sky is the most amazing blue. I still remember it, almost 20 years later. Nothing but blue skies and golden meadows. And very poor people, of course. When there is no manufacturing, when there is nothing to do but subsistence farming and even that is limited to potatoes, there is not much opportunity for wealth creation. The weather is crummy up there: cold and windy. Even the children's skin is already starting to turn to leather. But the countryside is gorgeous.

We had reserved seats, but the Quechua who boarded, sacks of potatoes, chickens, and babies in tow, packed themselves in the aisles. There was hardly enough room for the food vendors to pass through. Yet they did, with candies, cookies, tangerines, bananas, empanadas, bread, hardboiled eggs, fried trout served with sides of salad and boiled potatoes, and a large, newspaper-wrapped package that opened to reveal an entire side of roast mutton that the seller hacked at with a cleaver.

I looked hungrily at the fish and the mutton, but Kelly claimed that you couldn't pay her enough to eat that stuff - that it all probably carried cholera and typhus. Don't laugh. People still get those diseases. So I peeled another tangerine - fruit you can peel is usually safe no matter what - and gazed wistfully across the aisle at the people who were eating the trout with no apparent ill effects.

We arrive in Puno, a pit of a city, and left the next morning by bus for La Paz, one of Bolivia's two capitals. Once again, we were the victims of Peruvian petty taxation. Upon arrival in Copacobana, the bus attendant walked the aisle to collect an admission fee. I asked if going into Copacobana was optional. No, he told me. It was obligatory. Apparently, nobody had thought to include this fee in the bus ticket price.

The same oversight occurred when we had to cross Lake Titicaca. (Stop laughing. That's really what it's called.) We were ordered off the bus and onto the ferries run by the Bolivian Navy, motto: "Toward the Sea." It seems that Bolivia, a landlocked country, one of two in South America, the other being Paraguay -

wait. Now I have to check to make sure that I am correct about that because there is no better way to drive traffic and get comments online than to make a mistake. And yes, I am correct. OK, back to the story.

has never given up hope that the decision of the 1878 War of the Pacific with Chile will be reversed and Bolivia will get northern Chile back. Kind of like Mexico demanding the return of Texas. Wow. That Latin America history class in college sure didn't go to waste, did it? And yet I am unemployed! Can you believe it? I can't, either!

At first I thought how nice that we didn't have to stay on the bus for the crossing, but then I realize that once again, they were extorting money from us. We had to pay our own ferry fares.

We finally got to La Paz without incurring further expense. La Paz, as far as I could tell, is a distinctly unremarkable city, although I didn't see the entire place. It's dry and dirty without parks or any green spaces. (Again, I didn't see all of it. I didn't get into the nice neighborhoods. I am assuming there are nice neighborhoods.) Bolivia, besides being known the world over for the quality of its cocaine, is the poorest (or was, at the time) country in South America and it showed. There didn't seem to be much money devoted to infrastructure or public services, especially sanitation. If you've ever been in the stairwell of a parking garage on the east coast, you know what I'm talking about. The entire city reeks.

As far as the minor things - food, for instance, La Paz was also backwards. The restaurants were not very good and were also expensive. We got really excited when we saw a Denny's. You may scoff once you've spent a year in a place where you cannot afford to eat in the good restaurants, where they oversalt the food in the inexpensive restaurants, and where they slaughter sheep behind your office and leave the butchered meat hanging on the banister for two days, but our hopes were dashed when a Bolivia Peace Corps volunteer told us the food was really bad there. I went to a market and found some anemic-looking turnips, then peeled them with my Swiss army knife, and ate them raw.

The one advantage La Paz has is great shopping. I was especially happy to be traveling with Kelly at this point. She is an extremely efficient shopper and is the fastest charger in the West. My Mastercard almost broke in half, but what was I supposed to do in a place where I could buy handknit alpaca sweaters for $30 and handwoven alpaca rugs and blankets for $20? Really, I had no choice.

The rugs and blankets were a good investment. I still have them.

The sweaters, not so much. There are only so many sweaters you can wear. And, as it turns out, there are no bright green sweaters that I want to wear. If only I had realized it at the time. Or sweaters with jolly happy scenes knit into them that make me look like a kindergarten teacher. What was I thinking? Where were Stacy and Clinton when I needed them?

Oh, the perils of vacation sweater shopping.

We learn from our shopping mistakes, don't we?

And then we find new shopping mistakes to make, and yes, I'm talking to you, cute orange wedge shoes that felt just fine at the fancy consignment sale at the JCC last year but turned into a vise when I wore them to dinner. How many times must we make the same shoe mistake over and over? How many, I ask you? They never stretch. They never stretch.

We had to return to Chile. It was either two hours in a plane or $100 more for shopping. Twenty three hours in a bus it was.

At 5:30 p.m., we were at the bus station, sleeping pills, snacks, and Walkman - we could share the earphones between us - in hand. Rugs, blankets and sweaters dragging behind us to be stowed below.

In the first hour of the ride, we congratulated ourselves for saving so much money by taking the bus. We ate all the food we'd brought, but drank none of the water because we took immediate notice of the fact that the bus company had decided to maximize ticket revenues by installing two seats where the toilet normally would have been. In the second hour, we had to stop reading our magazines because it got dark and there were no reading lights on the bus. (Kelly's boyfriend mailed Glamour to her every month.) (Yes, we were in Peace Corps lite.) We talked about food and wondered what the Quechua women next to us were drinking from their hip flask.

"Water!" they shrieked when I asked them. Then they collapsed into a fit of giggles.

Their giggling did not distract us from our serious debate about whether Michael from thirtysomething was a brooding hunk or just a jerk. As I reflect on it now, I have to go with jerk. My tolerance for not-niceness has plummeted to zero these days.

In the third hour, we stopped for a 20-minute dinner break that lasted 70 minutes. While Kelly and I were tapping our feet and pointing at our watches, she nudged me and asked if that man drinking a liter of beer was our driver.

In the fourth hour, we discovered why he was drinking: he needed to be relaxed to drive over the road that has just ceased to be paved and was rocky and rough. At the time, there were not many paved roads in Bolivia. I remember going over some of the mountain roads - unpaved, narrow, hairpin turns - closing my eyes and thinking, I'll bet there are no atheists on this bus right now.

The jolting didn't distract us as we tried to sleep because we were too preoccupied with being cold and wishing we had our blankets from the luggage hold. In the morning, we discovered ice on the ceiling of the bus. It was about then that we started think it might have been worth the extra $100 to fly.

In the 22nd hour, after we had crossed the Chilean border, where we had to get off the bus, show our passports, be sniffed by German shepherds, have our luggage sniffed by German shepherds, and wait in a very, very long line - the entire process took over an hour, we stopped for lunch. Two Bolivian men sat by us and proceeded to interrogate us about our ages and marital status. When we informed them that we were 28 and 30, they nodded and told us politely that we were very well preserved for our ages.

We thought so, considering that the hip-flask-toting Quechua women ten years younger than us looked like leather.

They were far more concerned when they learned we were unmarried. "You're missed the train," they told us. "Now you'll have to be tias. Haven't you met any Chilean men?"

When we told them that Chilean men were just a bit machista for our tastes, they mused that we hadn't met any Bolivian men yet and that such an encounter could change the course of our lives. For the better, one would assume.

After having heard this sort of thing for a year now (although most people were polite when they learned I was a spinster and would change the subject to the weather), I was fed up. I asked, "Is it possible that I don't like men?"

Their jaws dropped. Their eyebrows flew up. They stared.

Finally, one of them turned to the other and said, "This soup is really good, isn't it?"

They left us alone after that.

We got back to La Serena, where Kelly lived. An American friend of hers whose husband worked at a gold mine (literally and I mean that literally) was out of town, but had left the house keys for Kelly so we could stay there. The house had all the major appliances: washer and dryer (at my house in Temuco, I washed, or that is, my cleaning lady washed my clothes by hand in the bathtub), microwave, TV with cable, VCR, and a CD player with a huge collection of CDs. Every evening, we sat in front of the picture window that overlooked the ocean and watched the sun set while we sipped gin and tonics, listened to KC and the Sunshine Band's Greatest Hits, and waited for our clothes to machine dry. That was a vacation.

In which Sly really does criticize how I eat bacon

I am going through some old emails and found this one from Primo. Remember the Bad Bacon Eater episode? He had forwarded me an email from Sly and Doris:

I was also put off by the obsessive way she ate her bacon, which I considered more than weird. If, in company, one doesn't want to eat what is served, either refuse it or don't eat it. What she did was kind of an insult to me.

Then they went on with some more great parental observations:

I guess I will have to remind you that you are THE LIGHT of ourlives. Your sister is dead, and the pain doesn't diminish much with time.

Your stepbrothers, despite the caring we tried to exhibit during their upbringing with [their mother and stepfather], have proven to be grave disappointments in multiple ways. Your new love has two siblings,which should be of some comfort to her and her mother and a potential "extended family" for you.

I encourage you to cultivate Ted's family tie because, without his bullshit, he seems to have a keen mind. We will never be able to understand Jack because he simply doesn't communicate with anyone.

[Ted's wife] is also a very complex and interesting person--her sense of entitlement seems to have come from her upbringing as a diplomat's daughter in households that always had servants and "uppity" social circles.

In which Kelly and I take the train back from Machu Picchu

I feel as if I should be labeling these posts "Peace Corpse" or "Peace Corp." There are people who were in the Peace Corps who spell it that way. Honest.

I told you I would tell you about the train trip back from Machu Picchu. And I will.

After the tax us to incremental death drama in Tacna, we arrived in Cuzco without further incident. We found a pension that was perfectly quiet at 11 a.m. but that was within drunken shouting and urinating distance from a cantina at night, so we did not sleep tranquilly.

Actually, we suspected something about the urine, both because we smelled evidence and we saw signs saying, "Do not urinate here." You can tell a lot about a place by what is forbidden. It's usually not necessary to tell people not to pee in a spot where they are not going to pee anyhow. In Ecuador, I saw signs on the buses pleading, "Don't spit here!" I tried not to touch anything.

In France, the sign on the train said, "No smoking." Well, what it really said was, "Defense de fumer." And, in a perfect example of French, "You're not going to tell me what to do," insouciance, a Frenchman was sitting in front of it, smoking. When I asked him why he couldn't just move to the smoking coach to smoke and let the non-smoking coach be smoke free for those of us who would prefer a smokeless environment, he just looked up and blew a smoke ring at me. I don't know if that was a commentary on my abysmal French or on what I had intended to ask him.

We verified that the shower had hot water. I had learned my lesson on that during my post-grad school travels in Europe. In Greece, I had discovered that the showers had hot water only in the afternoons after the water had had time to heat. It was held in barrels on top of the roofs. If you wanted to bathe in the morning, forget it. I mean, you could, but not with hot water. Nope, only in the late afternoon, after you had spent the day roasting at the beach and were hot already anyhow. Then you could cover yourself with more hot water.

Now I knew to ask. And to verify. Trust, but verify. That was my motto. Verify that the shower had a heating source that would not electrocute me. It wasn't until that evening that we discovered that they didn't actually use the hot water tank the manager had shown us. Electricity is too expensive, they said. Instead, there was a solar shower that gave hot water between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Who knew the Peruvians and the Greeks had so much in common?

Then we discovered it didn't matter at all that there was no way to heat water in the evenings because after 8:00 p.m., there was no water at all. Which lends a new meaning to the concept of a "dry" city and put a new question on my checklist before choosing a place to stay.

Speaking of "dry" places. Have I told you my joke about dry? There was a Peace Corps volunteer in my group who was from somewhere on the East Coast. He liked his beer. A lot. He was applying to PhD programs. He had applied to Texas Tech, in Lubbock, where I lived as a kid for several years.

"You know Lubbock is dry, don't you?" I asked as I watched him drain the last drop from his Genessee.

"Yeah, I know it doesn't rain a lot out there," he answered.

I tilted my head as I considered how to answer him. "Maybe there's something you should know," I said.

Kelly and I got up the next morning and took our cold, cold showers in the cold, cold bathroom. Cuzco is cold. It is high in the mountains - 11,000 feet. We had been taking diamox to prevent altitude sickness, but all that does is keep you from vomiting or passing out. It doesn't keep you from being short of breath or really, really tired after walking just one block. So we were cold and had no energy.

We trudged our way to the train station for the early-morning train to Machu Picchu. I won't even try to describe Machu Picchu. I can't do it justice. I will leave that for writers far more talented than I. Besides, I think it's kind of boring to describe what a place looks like when all you have to do is look at a photo. I will say, though, that it's about the only place I've ever been where I didn't think, That's it? That's all? The buildup actually did not do Machu Picchu justice.

The train ride back, though. We had reserved train seats on the ride there. Even though we had seats, that didn't stop the train company from selling additional tickets and cramming people in the aisles. People and their goats and their chickens and their children. You can fit a lot of living beings in the aisles of a train if you don't care about knocking into the people who are sitting in the seats. That they have paid for.

On the ride back, not only did we not have reserved spots, but it appeared that there were three times as many riders as seats. I don't know if there had been multiple trains out to Machu Picchu in the morning and only one train back or what, but there was a mad dash for seats. The guidebooks and word of mouth warned us that one had to throw onesself through the window to get a seat. It wouldn't have been such a big deal except it was about a four hour ride and who wants to stand that long?

When the train finally arrived, we pushed our way to the front of the crowd and jumped onto the coach, hoping to be lucky. But the people in front of us kept moving, so we knew there were no seats - until we saw one next to three Peruvian men, who were guarding it jealously from all takers. When they saw Kelly and me - remember, this was almost 20 years ago, they motioned to us eagerly. Not above using our sex and our blondeness - I was blonde once upon a time - to our advantage, we squeezed into the small space and looked smugly at all the long-haired, unwashed hippie backpackers crammed into the aisles. The cold shower that morning had been worth it.

But there was a price to pay for this seat. We had to sit next to these guys, none of whom were particularly couth. One of them was finishing his supper, which consisted of greasy meat (guinea pig, perhaps, and no I am not joking - in the depiction of the Last Supper on the wall of the cathedral in Cuzco, Jesus and the disciples are eating cuy, which is roast guinea pig) on a paper plate. He sucked the bones, licked his fingers, burped, and casually tossed the plate out the window.

Kelly said, "Oh gross," but even this was not enough to make us budge. We were not going to be grossed out of our seat by a finger-licking litterbug.

Then they started talking to us. "You're not from around here," they said perceptively.

We tried to pretend we didn't speak Spanish, but had to come clean when one of them told us he was getting off in two stops and we could have an extra seat then. We decided to be polite and suffer their conversation.

Don't be all, "Oh you girls are bitches. They were just being nice." This was a different culture. Latin men look at American women traveling alone and think, "Slut." They've seen American movies. They know what American women are like. They'll sleep with anyone! You don't think so? What's the plot of Mama Mia? Even I cringe at that one. A woman invites three old boyfriends to her daughter's wedding because she doesn't know which one of them is the daughter's father. It's a little crass, don't you think? Not that that sort of thing doesn't go on in South America - there was plenty of shacking up and sleeping around going on in Chile, but it's a little more discreet.

I got tired of being hit on in South America. I assure you, I was not the poster child for being hit on in the U.S. But by mere virtue of being a young American woman back then, I was easy in the eyes of Latin men. We were tired of it. We did our best to ignore the approaches.

But in this case, we decided to be minimally polite in exchange for a place to sit.

And then we cast our indignant principles to the wind. The door opened and in walked two gorgeous Brazilian men. They tried to place themselves and their backpacks in the aisle behind us, but the people sitting there wouldn't let them. Kelly and I looked at each other and it was as if we were communicating telepathically. At the same moment, we turned to the men, beckoned to them, and said, "You may stand next to us!"

Yes. Complete hypocrites. That's what we were. Superficial hypocrites. We didn't want the finger-licking Peruvian guys, but the Brazilians? Come to Mama, Mia.

We turned our backs on the Peruvians and focused all our attention on the Brazilians, keeping their interest by promising them they could have our seats when we got off the train.

We would have had a perfectly charming evening with them except for the fact that Brazil had just won the World Cup and some idiot just had to bring it up. Actually, that idiot was one of the Peruvian guys sitting next to us.

The next thing we knew, the entire coach was involved in the discussion. What were the pivotal plays in the series? What had Brazil done since the last time it won the Cup? What would have happened if Italy's best player had actually played?

"Wouldn't have made any difference," boasted Brazilian Number One.

"How do you feel about that?" I asked the tight-lipped Italian who was sitting across from me.

Men were shouting their opinions from all sides. When we made a stop, the guys standing outside yelled through the windows. Sports hell.

A woman sitting behind us - American - tried to get the Brazilians' attention, which we had lost for good, by feigning illness. Kelly and I rolled our eyes at each other. "Oldest trick in the book," we muttered. For the next three hours, we had to occupy ourselves by debating whether the "Can't be younger than my brother" rule applied to the Brazilians, whom we had discovered were all of 19 years old. For the record, we decided that the rule did not apply in the southern hemisphere, where people mature faster.

The rule turned out to be irrelevant, though, as all they wanted from us was a place to sit. Oh well. There were plenty of old Peruvian guys who thought we were hot.

In which Sly and Doris give us something to laugh about

On Sunday morning, when I wanted to bake cookies, Primo got all, "Whoooooo!" because he thinks the kitchen will turn into a big mess and it's soooo stressful. "There will be dishes all over!" he said. "How can I relax?'

"Because I'm not going to ask you to do any of the dishes?" I suggested.

"But you don't do them right," he answered grumpily.

"Your standards are too high," I told him.

"Yours are too low."

"Your parents think it's the opposite," I said.

We both laughed. How to unite people: Well, you know.

In which Kelly and I go to Machu Picchu but get sidetracked by the airport in Tacna

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, thanks to my country director's very liberal interpretation of the Peace Corps vacation policy, we got five weeks of vacation a year. Not that being in the Peace Corps wasn't already like being on vacation all the time, although I did go to work every day from nine to five and try to improve sales, cut expenses, and reduce accounts receivable.

Unfortunately, although those were my objectives, what I ended up spending most of my day doing was telling the interns that even when I wasn't in the office, I didn't want them to smoke - yes, I could tell that they'd been smoking in there the night before, I could! I could smell it!, asking my co-workers not to put their crap on my desk, locking my toilet paper in my desk drawer, and sitting through eight-hour meetings in which we debated should the mission of the organization be to serve Mapuche women or young Mapuche women.

And I was cold all the time, which is not my idea of vacation. And when I rented a room from Maruja la Bruja, I had to heat water on the stove to bathe because it was too dangerous to try to get hot water to emerge from the shower. [See: How I almost electrocuted myself taking a shower.] And there were bedbugs. So maybe it wasn't like being on vacation at all.

But the five weeks away was like being on vacation. Because you know, it was. A vacation.

My friend Kelly and I decided to go to Machu Picchu. Just one small country away. Might as well. As long as we were there. We took the bus to Arica, in the north of Chile in the Atacama desert, which purports to be one of the driest places on earth. No recorded rain in hundreds of years.

I believed this when I discovered I could not flush the toilet in any public place. Our bus stopped at a remote outpost. I, who had been experiencing some distress, ran to the bathroom. Then realized there was no way to flush. Emerged. Asked the bathroom attendant what there was to be done. She explained that after everyone had taken care of their needs, she would take a bucket of water into the stall.

Oh no, I explained. That would not be a good idea.

But that's how it's done, she said.

No no no, I said. I must have the bucket now.

But one must wait until everyone is finished!

I assure you you do not want to do that.

I insisted. And insisted. She surrendered. Gave me the bucket. I know the people who followed me thanked me, even though they didn't know why. And we'll leave it at that.

We got back on the bus. Stopped again a few hours later in a small Aymara village. Waited for the llamas to get out of our way so we could look inside the whitewashed church in which crucifixion scene painted on the wall showed Roman soldiers dressed as Spaniards.

When we got to Tacna, on the other side of the Peruvian border, we decided we'd had enough of buses and that taking a 26-hour bus ride through the mountains at night was probably not the wisest thing to do. I don't remember if it was because we were concerned about the roads, the driver, or the Sendero Luminoso.

Instead, for a mere US$45, almost 10% of our monthly stipend, we could fly from Tacna to Cuzco, the base city for Machu Picchu. Oh, the travel agent added, there is a $5 airport usage fee. We assumed she meant that fee was included in the price of the ticket and wondered why she was even mentioning it to us. Whatever.

Smug in the knowledge that we had gotten a real bargain, we arrived at the airport the next morning at 5 a.m. and pushed our way to the front of the mob waiting at the ticket counter, which we had to pass even though we already had our tickets.

England, Costa Rica, and the U.S. are the only countries I have ever been where people actually line up.

The mob seemed to be unusually grouchy, even for 5 a.m. We discovered why when the ticket agent told us we had to pay an 18% value-added tax on our tickets. There must have been a pact amongst the travel agents in the region that none of them would breathe a word of this to clients. Not a single customer there had heard about the tax before and boy were they mad about it.

The idea of collecting the tax when the ticket was sold had apparently not occurred to anyone. It would have occurred to Kelly and me because we are both organized businesswomen who would say, "Why not collect all taxes, fees, and other monies related to the ticket at once and disburse them to the appropriate agencies later as this will make things easier for the customer and also reduce manpower and operational costs associated with collecting said monies," but they hadn't asked us. They never do.

Over the din of protesting flyers to be, we looked at each other, chuckled indulgently, and noted that indeed, when one is in a third-world country, one must expect this kind of thing. One must expect inefficiencies, some of them deliberate. Sometimes, they are means of increasing employment. Sometimes, they are means of reducing fraud. The more people involved in collecting money, the harder it is to steal it. Think about that, churches that have only one person counting the collection plate. I am always shocked to find that any church in this day and age can have money stolen from the collection plate. The way you do it is you grab three people from the congregation to count after the service is over and their counts all have to tally. It's that simple, people!

We paid without protest, then passed through the elaborate security system - the hall - to the waiting room. I guess they didn't care if they were hijacked. Hijackers never want to go to nice countries. They just want to go to hellholes. Peru was already a hellhole. I mean, it's a beautiful country with good food, but the Sendero Luminoso was making things a nightmare for poor people. I don't know how Cuba could be much worse. Actually, at least in Cuba, people would be warm. Peru is cold as heck in the mountains. So yeah, they didn't seem to worry much about hijackers. Although buses got hijacked. So go figure.

We wondered when we would eat again. There was no cafeteria - this was a minimalist airport. Apparently, the government had figured out it could make money by taxing the heck out of passengers but not by selling them food? Peru, I'm disappointed in you. Or I am disappointed in the 1993 you.

At five minutes to 6:00, we lined up to board the plane, which allegedly left at 6:00 a.m., although time has a totally different meaning in the southern hemisphere. Six a.m. could mean "any time once it gets light."

The ticket taker looked at my ticket and told me I hadn't paid the airport usage fee.

We shall leave the debate over whether one should be charged for walking into a building to get to an airplane for another time.

Yes, I did, I told him calmly. Had we not cleared this up yesterday with the travel agent? It was included in the ticket price.

He said no, I didn't have the appropriate orange sticker on my ticket.

Well, I demanded, Why didn't they tell me this when I paid my 18% value-added tax and they re-wrote the entire ticket?

He just shrugged and pointed me to the Airport Usage Fee Pay Window.

Confident that this was a mere administrative misunderstanding that I, because of my command of the Spanish language, could clear up in no time, I strode with determination to the Airport Usage Fee Pay Window and waved my ticket in the agent's face. Note that this window is not to be confused with the 18% Value-Added Tax Window. That was a separate window staffed by a separate agent.

I have paid this tax! I announced to the agent. It was in my ticket price!


He shrugged and indicated that I lacked the orange sticker.

NO! I maintained. I paid it, I paid it, I paid it! My voice rose with each declaration and tears of anger and frustration welled in my eyes, but to no avail. The agent merely stared past me with blank bureaucratic indifference - he would have been a Miami DMV employee had he been American - at the passengers behind me who, in an attempt to board the plane before it left, were reaching over my shoulder and frantically shoving US$5 bills into his hand.

Just pay! Kelly hissed.

Oh like I should trust someone who packed all white clothes for a three-week trip to Peru and Bolivia?

Pay! She said. We're going to miss the plane! Then she remarked conversationally, This is a perfect example of commitment escalation like we learned in business school.

I looked at the runway. The line was getting shorter. I looked back at the agent. He was looking at his fingernails. He didn't care. He was paid no matter what. He was quite unlike the bus drivers in Chile, who got a cut of the fares. This was good if you wanted to catch a bus. All you had to do was wave one down and it would come to a screeching halt, but not so good if you were already on a bus and wanted to get somewhere already. The bus was always stopping! For other people!

I pulled five dollars out of my pocket, threw it on the counter, hissed that I knew I was being cheated and that I hated his stupid country, thrust my ticket at the agent for the sticker, gave my ticket to the ticket taker, and ran on the plane.

Whereupon after some reflection and thought I realized that the ticket price had not included the airport usage fee after all and that I had wasted a perfectly good fit.

Next time: We take the train to Machu Picchu and sit next to two beautiful Brazilian men who are too young for us.

In which Sly and Doris take the kids for a special treat

Remember how I told you about the summer we spent on my grandparents' farm? Did I tell you the part about how my grandfather rented a pony from the Amish so my siblings and I would have a pony to ride? Well he did. They might not even have charged him. He used to drive them to the doctor and other such things. Maybe they just lent him a horse to be nice. Or maybe not. Those Amish are capitalists. Which is fine with me.

There are a lot of Amish in that part of Wisconsin. It's not unusual to see a horse-drawn buggy on the road. Even more not unusual to see horse-drawn buggies in the parking lot at K-Mart in Medford. Then, if you go to the Amish grocery just off Highway 29, from which I have bulk spices that are almost 15 years old - when I bought them, I thought I was going to be using a lot of mace and allspice, but really, does anyone need a half a cup of that stuff at once? - you really see the buggies. Young Amish women, wearing their caps and their dresses with white aprons pinned to the front, run the store. You can get some good deals in there, but you have to know your prices. Just because something is in a plastic bag with a white sticker on it being sold by the Amish doesn't mean it's a deal.

Anyhow, my grandfather probably got a good deal on the pony because he was always doing favors for his Amish friends. My brother, sister, and I had a pony to ride for the summer, although all we really did was go in a circle while my grandfather held the long rope that he'd attached to the pony's neck. There was no galloping out through the hayfields.

That had to wait for when we visited my Aunt Mary and Uncle Hugh in Colorado. My uncle is a real cowboy. He grew up in Prussia, which is now part of Poland, on a farm with horses. During the war, his mother taught him to embroider. He embroidered the beautiful rose on my aunt's wedding gown. When the Russians came, they fled over the hill in front of the soldiers. He found some American soldiers and asked them for food. The cook told him they'd already eaten but he could eat what he could find in the kitchen. My uncle crawled inside the big soup pot and licked what remained on the sides.

He made his way to the US and worked on a ranch in Kansas. Put himself through college. Started buying land and horses in Colorado. By the time I was old enough to care, he had several horses. We lived in Texas, so would drive to Colorado to visit. Each visit included at least one horseback ride, which was about as glamorous a vacation as I could imagine as a kid.

I got to ride horses with my relatives. My grandmother taught me to make bread, apple strudel, and pie crust. I knew how to make pie crust from a very young age, which is one of the reasons I was so annoyed with Doris the time she tried to teach me how to make pie. I KNOW HOW TO MAKE PIE! And she didn't even do it right.

My other grandmother let my brother and me clean the bathrooms at the Shell station she owned. You might not think that sounds like much fun, but we thought it was cool. When we were done, the mechanics would pull a bottle of Coke out of the machine for us and hand it to us, icy cold. As my mom never had pop in the house, this was a special treat.

The station is gone, replaced by some other brand. The house my grandma lived in is gone, too. The people she sold it to smoked in bed, set the house on fire, and killed themselves.

Don't smoke in bed.

Granma Sylvia would also take my siblings and me to the Shopko in Marshfield, 35 miles away from her house, and give us each a dollar to spend, which was a lot, as we only got 25 cents a week for our allowance. On the way, we would say a prayer to St Christopher, a small statue of whom stood on her dashboard. St Christopher has been de-sainted. But we never had an accident. I say those results speak for themselves.

My uncles would take their teeth out for us. When you are six, that is high comedy.

My grandparents and relatives did cool things with us.

When Primo was a little boy, his grandfather taught him to play pool. He would visit his grandparents at their little retirement village in Florida and do grandparent things like go to the beach. He says his maternal grandparents - the ones Sly thought were stupid, uneducated, and unsophisticated and hence not worthy of respect - were the nicest people he had ever been around.

Now I am getting to the point of this story.

Guess what Sly and Doris did with their grandkids the other day?

Guess.

What would be a fun thing to do with your grandkids who are home from college for spring break? What would you do with your grandkids whom you hadn't seen since Christmas? How would you form sweet memories that your grandchildren would later pull out of their minds after you were dead and say, "Oh I loved spending time with my grandparents! They were so sweet and so fun and they just wanted to make me happy?"

What experiences would you want to share with your grandchildren?

Here's what I would do.

I would know what my grandchildren liked to do and what they thought was special and then I would try to make that happen. If it were something extravagant or expensive, it might not happen exactly, but I would try to get close. Suppose my granddaughter wanted a trip to Paris. If I couldn't take her to Paris, I might suggest that we put together a scrapbook of things about Paris. Maybe have a Paris-themed movie marathon. Cook a French meal. Do something Paris-y and French.

If my grandson wanted to be a ball player, I would take him to a ball game. Go to the batting cage with him. Collect baseball cards.

Sly and Doris' grandchildren like basketball, bowling, listening to music, going to the beach.

They are not political activists.

They are college freshmen.

Sly and Doris took them to a lecture on global warming.

Which is pretty darn lame.

It doesn't even matter where you stand on the issue. I am not getting into a global warming debate. But taking your grandchildren to a lecture on global warming is dull, dull, dull.

Why didn't they just say, "Yes, we know you're on spring break, but we think you should still be in class, so we're going to drop you off at your old school for the day."

Or why didn't they say, "Hey! We've rented a bunch of documentaries about wood from the library! Seven of them!"

Or, "How would you like to spend a few hours cleaning the cat box and the bathrooms? For free? While we criticize how you do it?"

Sly and Doris = most boring grandparents ever.

What did your grandparents do with you for fun?

In which my yenta dad doesn't forget his mission

I was hanging out with my dad and his cancer roommate, Jim. Jim had prostate cancer. It had metastasized.

Prostate cancer confined to the prostate is not the worst, but prostate cancer that has metastasized is very bad news.

Jim had almost no visitors. He and his wife had divorced years ago. He had a stepdaughter who lived a few hours away who came to visit once on a Sunday but couldn't come very often because she had work and it was a long trip.

My dad had lots of visitors because he and my mom had lived in San Antonio for about 15 years before the Sicily adventure. So we shared our visitors with Jim. He was a nice guy and we didn't want him to be lonely or feel left out.

He had nobody to take care of him when he left the hospital. He lived far from his stepdaughter, not that she would have been able to do much. When you work full time, it's hard to take care of a sick person.

Primo and I watched the movie 50/50 last night, about a man who gets cancer at the age of 26. He tells his artist girlfriend of a few months that if she wants to break up, that's OK, because it's a lot to ask of someone to take you to chemo and take care of you when you are throwing up in the middle of the night. She refuses to break up, saying she wants to take care of him.

I rolled my eyes. "This is not going to end well," I said.

Even when you love the person you are taking care of and have a lifetime history, it's very hard. You resent the cancer. You hate that everything in your life is about cancer. You hate the damn hospital and the fear and the despair and the not knowing. Towards the end, we all, my dad included, just wanted it to be over. He would wake up in the morning and say, "Why didn't I die last night?" He felt guilty that our lives were consumed with his cancer. All we wanted was to spend as much time with him before he died. But we still all hated the cancer.

Someone I'd only known for a few months?

No way I would take on his cancer. No way.

And of course (spoiler alert, so skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the movie, which you should because it's not often that you see a cancer comedy), she does ditch him, but only after being a really bad cancer girlfriend. She didn't want to ruin their karma by seeing him getting the chemo, so she just dropped him off at the front door of the hospital and then forgot to pick him up. I didn't blame her for not wanting to be his girlfriend any more, but I do blame her for not breaking up with him right away.

Back to Jim. He was being released, probably because there really wasn't anything else they could do.

"But who will help you?" I asked, which was, in retrospect, not the most sensitive question I could have asked.

"I have a plan," he assured me.

Dumb me. I thought he'd lined up a home health nurse.

He hadn't.

He had a plan for everything not to be an issue any more. When I found out, I was very sad. Nobody should have to die alone.

Unless the person is a real meanie jerk.

But a nice person like Jim shouldn't die alone.

Back to when Jim and my dad were still alive and in their room. I was sitting on my dad's bed talking to him. Yet another doctor made his way in to check my dad.

My dad introduced himself and me, then asked the doctor about himself. He always asked where the doctor was from, then about where else he had been stationed, then about family. He did the same thing with the chaplains. He got several visits every week from the hospital chaplains. His favorite was the Episcopalian chaplain, a woman. My dad, a lifelong Catholic, liked to talk to her about theology. When she showed up, he would tell us that we could go get lunch or take a break.

With this new doctor, my dad went straight for broke. "Are you married, Doc?" he asked.

The doctor shook his head. "No."

Have I ever told you that when I was in grad school and my parents were working in Saudi Arabia that my dad told me in a letter that he had started a support group called "Grandfathers without Grandchildren?" He was dying to be a grandfather. He loved little kids.

My grandmother was on the same bandwagon. She sent me a letter asking me if I had considered marrying a widower who needed help raising his young children. (Because that's just what every unmarried woman wants: the chance to raise a dead woman's kids.) "A friend of your mother's married a widower. They live in Marshfield now. She is very tall."

Blessherheart. I loved my sweet grandmother who gardened, taught me to make bread, walked to 6:00 a.m. Mass every morning, and made sure everyone around her, including my schizophrenic second cousin, was fed, but we had different ideas about life.

I wrote back to my dad and told him I could start my own club: Unwed MBA Mothers or Daughters Without Children.

I knew what he was getting at with the doctor. I had to head him off.

"Not married?" my dad mused.

I casually leaned over and took my dad's hand. I squeezed. Hard.

"What's your specialty?" I asked the doctor, trying to change the subject.

"What a coincidence! My daughter here is sing- OW!" my dad exclaimed as I squeezed his hand again.

The doctor looked confused. Jim jumped a little.

I looked at the doctor, blocked my left hand with my right as I pointed to my dad with my left, mouthed, "Morphine," and looked back at my dad. Except of course my dad was stone cold sober. He was just a father with a mission.

Jim looked at me and raised his eyebrows. He knew my dad was sober. They'd been talking about their days in Vietnam and my dad's mind was as sharp as a tack. He would get worse as he had to have more and more morphine, but on that day, he was just fine. He'd even been to physical therapy.

"He's the only patient I've ever had who asked to go to therapy," the therapist said.

"I'm bored and I want to exercise," my dad shrugged. He didn't feel too awful once they got the fluid off him and started him on painkillers and got him through his first round of chemo. The first time wasn't so bad, at least not in the first few days. It got worse every time, though. Chemo is really nasty.

The doctor told me his specialty. Which I don't remember because this was 15 years ago. He wasn't a surgeon or a nephrologist because those guys had already come and gone and said they couldn't do anything. This was a teaching hospital, so maybe he was just a wandering student doc, although he looked older than that. But cute. Older but cute. I wouldn't have minded knowing more about his singleness, but it was too weird to have my dad broker the deal.

I had nothing to say about his specialty. What are you supposed to say. "Oh! Cardiology! Well, there's a profession to love!" See? It looks stupid in writing, too. Here it is, 15 years later, and I still have nothing clever to say back to this guy. I probably just smiled and mumbled. That was my usual strategy when put on the spot. I might even had said something stupid like, "I was going to go to med school, but then I took freshman calculus and chemistry and realized I was not smart enough. Plus I realized I don't like being around sick people." Which is not the right thing to say when you are around sick people, so let's hope this sentence stayed in my head and did not come out of my mouth.

My dad tried to steer the conversation back to the doctor's marital status, but was unsuccessful. The doctor left and I was relived. I looked like crap. When your dad is in the hospital with serious cancer and you are spending every other night in the chair in his room, you don't spend a lot of time on style. You just wash your hair, brush your teeth, and hope that your socks match.

My dad scolded me: "I'm trying to take care of you! He could have been The One!"

Maybe. Maybe I blew it. But finding a husband was not at the top of my list at the moment. Bless my dad's heart.

In which my dad is a pincushion for a medical student

My dad was in the hospital. They'd diagnosed cancer and he'd started the chemo, which was brutal. His hair had started to fall out. We had a little head-shaving ceremony outside my mom's room at the temporary quarters on base.

Wait. Let me give you some more context. My parents had moved to Sicily in August 1996 so my dad, who had been retired from the air force for about 14 years, could take a job teaching junior high math and science to the kids at the American navy base on Sicily.

In November 1996, he thought he'd pulled a muscle running a 10K.

It wasn't a pulled muscle. It was non-Hodgkin's blue cell lymphoma. I think it was stage four. If it wasn't when he was diagnosed, it became stage four pretty quickly. Stage four is the last stage. Then you die. If you get cancer, you want stage one. Of course, you don't want cancer at all. That's the best situation.

He had had a major physical before the Dept of Defense schools hired him in August. They don't want to hire sick people to be teachers and pay to send them abroad. That's a waste of money. There was no sign of cancer when he had his physical, but it showed up very soon after that.

After being medivaced back to the US in December 1996, he was at Wilford Hall medical center at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. I was living in Austin and unemployed, so I spent a lot of time down at the hospital. My mom was trying to find a place to live - they had realized my dad would probably not be returning to teaching very soon - and get their stuff shipped from Italy back to the US. It was a time when organized people triumph and disorganized people crater. My mother could move an army with her logistical skills, but even as uber-organized as she is, doing all this while her husband was in the hospital fighting cancer was brutal.

She had to return to Italy to receive their household goods, which hadn't even arrived by the time my dad got sick, and have them shipped back. Even super organized women can't be two places at once. When she went to Italy, I covered for her with my dad. Even when she was in San Antonio, she had things to do that only she could do, so I spent a lot of time just sitting with my dad.

I had been very discouraged that I couldn't find a job after the Peace Corps, but now I am very happy that I had that time with my dad. It was a blessing and a gift. Back then, I was so worried about my employment situation, but if I had to be unemployed for a year to be able to be with my dad in the last months of his life, it was a fair tradeoff. Now I am unemployed again and apparently unemployable, but nobody in my family is sick. I'm not sure how to classify this one.

I want to say something about "fighting" cancer. I hate it - hate it - when people praise cancer survivors as being "fighters" and "tough."

What cancer survivors are mainly is lucky.

When you say someone who survives really fought or really wanted to live, what you are implying is that someone who dies from cancer just didn't fight hard enough. Just didn't want to live enough.

I know that's not how you mean it. It never even occurred to you. But when I hear it - when other people who have lost loved ones to cancer hear it, what we hear is, "Only the people who really want to live survive cancer. Only the people who do it right live. If you die from cancer, it's because you did it wrong."

Which is not true. My dad didn't want to die. We sure didn't want him to die. But not everyone is cured. Someday, maybe, I hope. But today, people still die from cancer and it's not because they gave up. It's because they were unlucky.

My dad was in the hospital. We got him a day pass to leave and spend some time outdoors - it was a nice February day in south Texas. He was too weak to spend much time doing anything but sitting, but we pulled some chairs out to the sidewalk in front of my mom's room and sat in the sun.

Because of the chemo, his hair had started to fall out. Chemo kills all the fast-growing cells in your body. These cells include cancer cells, but also include hair cells and white blood cells, which is why some people lose their hair and why most people going through chemo have to be very careful about germs - they have no resistance with their white blood cells wiped out as part of the cycle.

The falling hair was becoming a nuisance. He asked us to cut if off. My mom had gotten an electric razor from somewhere. She must have borrowed it from some San Antonio friends. She is one of the most prepared persons you will ever meet, but even my mom doesn't carry an electric shaver around with her as a matter of course.

She does carry her gardening and house tools with her when she travels by car, though. The first time she came to visit me in Memphis, she spent the days doing minor repairs on my house and working in the yard while I was at work.

My mom is the houseguest you definitely want to return. She does not lie around waiting to be entertained. She doesn't complain that she can't watch TV and she doesn't drink all of your booze. She finds problems to solve and solves them and then she helps with dinner.

I asked my dad if I could give him a mohawk first. He rolled his eyes, maybe remembering my brother's mohawk when he was in high school.

At least my brother never got a tattoo. Hair grows. Tattoos are forever. I am very glad tattoos had not become fashionable when I was in high school. Not that I would have gotten one - I faint when someone pierces my skin with a needle, which is the appropriate reaction.

I shaved the sides of his head, then my mom took a photo of him smiling uncertainly with his mohawk.

It was not a pretty picture. He'd been in the hospital for over a month and had gained a bunch of weight (edema from when his kidneys started to fail before they started the chemo), then lost it. He was now much thinner than he had been, and he would get even thinner yet before the chemo was over. His normal weight was about 170, which is average for a man of 5'8". At its lowest, he was about 120 and skeletal. He was too weak to move. When the young airmen would change his diaper and his sheets - oh, yes - that is one of the things that happens with chemo - you lose control of your bowels - the one would lift my dad in his arms like a baby and hold him - a cancer pieta - while the other stripped the bed and re-made it with clean linens.

The entire time he was in the hospital, I never heard any of these young men ever call my dad anything but "sir." None of this first name business. Bad enough to lose your physical dignity but to lose all psychic dignity as well? That would be too much.

I shaved the rest of his hair off his pale head. He smiled again. A very small smile. It's hard to smile when you feel like crap and know you are probably going to die a lot sooner than you had planned.

A few days later, they wanted to give my dad a lumbar puncture. The test was to see how far the cancer had spread. The doctor came in with a team of medical students. The one intern was about to do her first lumbar puncture.

They can't anesthetize you for a lumbar puncture. I guess it's because you can't anesthetize bone? Any physicians reading please chime in.

My dad was wearing a hospital gown and nothing else, which was fine because he was covered with the bed linens. But the intern needed to have his back exposed to her. "Lie on your side and be perfectly still," she instructed as she pulled back the sheets and lifted his gown away from below his waist.

"I'll wait in the hall," I told my dad, as I could see that he would be almost naked for this procedure.

I stepped into the hall and stood next to the door. A few moments later, I heard a smothered scream. "Come back in here!" my dad gasped.

"I don't want to see your penis!" I told him in a loud whisper as I leaned around the door frame. And I didn't. Sooooo inappropriate.

"I don't care," he breathed. "Come back in here and hold my hand."

I walked back into the room carefully looking at my dad's face and not anywhere else. I sat next to his shoulder, still looking toward his face, and holding his hand. He clenched it so tightly that it hurt.

The intern couldn't get the right spot. Her face set with determination, she tried again. And again. She poked that needle in against the bone.

My dad squeezed my hand harder. He bit his lip, but I could still hear his moans. I felt the tears rolling down my face. I hated that intern. I hated her.

She finally got the needle in the bone. "Be very still," she warned, as she sucked out the fluid.

I stroked my dad's bald head and squeezed his hand back as the intern pulled his gown down and put the covers back. I didn't even look at her. She was dead to me.

I know she was just doing her job and that everyone has to learn somehow, but maybe she could have practiced on something or someone who wasn't my dad first. I felt sick to my stomach then as my dad breathed heavily and quivered in pain and I feel sick to my stomach now as I write this, 15 years later. I can still feel his hand squeezing mine so hard that it hurt. But I didn't mind: I was glad to share his pain. If I could have, I would have taken it from him and felt it all myself. Is there anything worse than watching someone you love suffer?

The tests revealed nothing. The cancer had not spread that far. Yet. Extra pain. For nothing.