All Wrong, As Usual!

OK, look—if this post is more all-over-the-map than usual, there’s a reason.

The damn iPod is all twitty again.

Or rather, it’s following its own internal logic.

Here is—I think—the explanation. 

I had a hankering to hear the opus 40 cello sonata of Shostakovich. So I went into iTunes and looked it up. And there was the big boy himself—Rostropovich, for whom the sonata was written. 

Well, that’s like hearing King James read the Bible. Nobody has ever said Rostropovich couldn’t find his way around a cello.

Eleven bucks—I nabbed it. 

Plus I got a zillion other pieces—this must have been a box set with five or six discs.

And each disc starts with the number one.

Get where I’m going? 

Right, came to the end of the 1^st movement, and then got a tango by Astor Whatever-his-name-is (Pizzarella? Doesn’t seem right…).

Fine, listened to that. Then got a bit of Prokofiev. Then the second movement of the Schumann cello concerto. Then the second movement of the Shostakovich.

Well, I either pressed the damn shuffle key again (possible) or the iPod is playing EVERY track 1 before it progresses to track 2 (likely).

Well, I’m nothing if not resilient these days—thanks, Wal-Mart!—and the purpose of the daily trot is just the trot. And saying, of course, buen día to everyone I meet.

Especially strangers.

It was a thing of Sam Walton’s—the ten foot rule. You gotta say hello, smile, and offer help to anyone within ten feet. That’s if you’re in a store. Otherwise, just smile and say hello.

Well, I did it, of course. Franny must have had some effect on me. Remember that “regular morning hour” her report card adjured on her (not sure that’s correct) when she was a kid? 

Well, when Sam speaks, you listen!

It’s part of making the day. If you’ve been laid off, you don’t get up and lie on the sofa. You grab your shoes and iPad and get moving.

And saying hello to people makes friends, connections. Which is why I was talking to Elvin, the 64 year old Nuyorican who’s working on the building next door.

Fascinating guy. Lives in La Perla, one of the most storied communities of Puerto Rico. Quite literally, the social anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote extensively about it in 1967 his book La Vida.

OK—for people who don’t know Puerto Rico. Viejo San Juan is the oldest city on the island, and was walled / fortified by the Spaniards. It’s charming—got blue cobblestones that are iridescent when wet, wonderful colonial architecture, vibrant Caribbean colors.

La Perla is its shadow.

Almost literally.  Because the walls are still intact, and the community is wedged between the walls of the Old City and the sea. Take a look!

 Charming, right?

Yes and no. La Perla sprung up quite spontaneously about a century ago. All the cooks and servants for the rich people of Old San Juan, needed a place to sleep, right? And nobody had much money (‘cept for those rich people, who even so may not have had much…). So they went through the gates of the walls, past the cemetery, and found a little land. Built a little house with whatever they could find. And that’s where they lived. 

Everything was fine, and, in a sense, still is. Everybody knows Elvin, the guy I was chatting with yesterday. Everyone likes him. His shop is right in front of the beach, and he sleeps with his window open—no bars, unlike the rest of us. Nothing but salt air between him and the sea.

Sleeps well, too.

Unlike the rest of us, who are living in fear, in gated communities behind barred windows and doors. Oh—and the latest trend? Putting GPS sensors in your kid’s backpacks, so you can track ‘em if anything happens to them….

But if you’re safe in La Perla, you’re safer than anywhere in the world.

Why?

“Anyone messes with my stuff, I spread the word. They find out who did it, tie him up, and throw him in the ocean.”

Remember—there are sharks off the coast of Puerto Rico.

And the “they?”

Well, Spanish is less fussy about specifying the subject—less fussy than English. You can say lo encuentran—literally, they encounter him—and everyone gets it.

But the they may well be somewhat different than the good, hardworking types of a century ago. And La Perla is perhaps not quite so poor. The wood shacks have become concrete houses, over the years. And one of them—you can see from the safety of the walls—has a swimming pool on the roof.

Overlooking the ocean.

Nice!

So it’s not quite the community that Elvin remembers as a kid. His aunt raised him in La Perla. When she left the house, she told her neighbor. Neighbor looked after the house. Aunt came home, cooked, and gave the first plate—arroz conhabichuelas, no doubt, and hmmmm….I can taste ‘em!—to the neighbor.

Actually, the whole neighborhood ate together. People brought what they had, passed it around, sat, talked, laughed, told stories.

Oh, and watch out—‘cause ANY adult could smack a kid who needed it….

Well, those days are gone. Elvin worries, thinks Puerto Rico is going to hell in a hand basket. 

“I hope it doesn’t go the way of France,” he said.

“Two hundred years ago?” I said, startled.

Remember when kids knew about the French Revolution?

“Yup,” he replied.

Well, he’s a good man, my new friend Elvin. Just one little thing.

He’s technically a squatter. 

And that’s where Harry comes into the picture.

“Did you once tell me that reality is different in Puerto Rico? Years ago, in Chicago?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Look, there was land that nobody wanted and there was wood that nobody wanted and Elvin’s aunt’s father or grandfather needed a place to sleep, so what’s the deal?

Turns out that somebody wants it, now.

“Sometime between 2005 and 2007 Donald Trump was fascinated with La Perla as it would be a great place to make a resort. He was looking at it from above and wanted to walk down and see it closer but his bodyguards wouldn’t let him. La Perla residents saw this, heard him [sic.] we know what’s going on. Also some Spanish developers apparently have their eye on the area as well,” Gómez told reporters.

Go ahead, google “La Perla Puerto Rico Donald Trump” and you’ll get the prdailysun.com article from which I stole the above.

Well, I started this post by typing out the title—All Wrong, As Usual. That’s because I had read an article about how to create a great blog. Gotta have keywords right near the top (“keywords?” ummmmm???…). Gotta put in links. And tags.

I was going to tell you that I’m doing this blog all wrong.

But then Elvin jumped into the post, and then La Perla, and now we’re forced into the question of whether we’d prefer to have Trump / Spanish developers and a resort or…

…drug dealers reclining in their infinity pools after a hard night’s work in the puntos de drogas or…

…the remnants of the descendents of Elvin’s aunt, who still remember a place that was and that now isn’t and that still is.

And I’m doing it wrong?