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Now then, this will be a short post, because in just an hour or so, I’ll have to take my non-ESA to the vet.

What? Surely you’ve heard of ESA?

OK, I’ll stop trying to shame you—I didn’t know about it either, until this morning, when I was awoken by the sound of a jackhammer below the balcony. This was both usual and unusual, since it is Saturday morning—a time normally devoted to getting rid of and over Friday night. So why were they working?

Well, in fact they have been working for months, now, and on Saturdays and even Sundays. And on the next block, they’ve even taken to working evenings, to lessen the number of days of annoyance as we speed along toward Christmas.

And what are they doing?

They are destroying and then restroying—well, seems logical to me, computer—the street outside. The street had been asphalt you see, unlike other streets in Old San Juan, which have wonderful blue adoquines. Here, see for yourself:

Well, most of the streets have these blue iridescent (especially when wet) cobblestones, and so somebody decided (somebody who lives in a gated community far, far away from the old city) to put in cobblestones everywhere. There was just one little problem: the charming old blue cobblestones are no longer made, and even if they were, they couldn’t be used. Why? Because the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture would never allow it.

It’s odd, though strangely logical—anything new in Old San Juan cannot look old. Instead, it has to look new. So therefore, the new cobblestones are not lovely iridescent blue but an ugly dull grey. Take a look….

Well, the new adoquines are made locally, so that’s a stimulus to the economy. And of course, it took about six months of labor to de-and-re-stroy the street. Oh, and the sidewalks? They used to be a very nice slate. Now they have to be a somewhat darker stone—could it be granite? Don’t think so….

Well, all of this doesn’t come cheap: one source said that repaving a four or five block street had cost more than four million bucks. And the street—Tetuán—is right behind a street that has various good and expensive restaurants. Since the kitchens are all in the back, and since the kitchens’ vents are churning fumes out during hours of operation, Tetuán has become a virtual back alley. There’s nothing there, and the smell—to me—is atrocious.

But it got done, and it got opened, and the photographers came and the media as well and the mayor at the time—Jorge Santini—was happy. That lasted about a week, until he noticed—the restaurants were throwing their greasy trash out on the sidewalk, and the adoquines looked awful. Here’s a lively account of the matter:

Tanta fue la rabia que le dio a Santini que, en la misma Tetuán, advirtió que aumentaría las multas por tirar basura y desperdicios en la calle. Fue incluso más lejos y dijo que, para comer a expensas de tirar manteca, mejor era cerrar. Poco le faltó para añadir que mejor era no comer.

“Es un crimen ambiental lanzar grasa de esa manera”, dijo en un arranque de peritaje en asuntos ecológicos y aceitosos.

Dejó claro, además, que la capital tiene que estar “a la altura” del millón de cruceristas que recibe cada año. Pudo haber dicho también a la altura de los residentes, pero ni modo.  

A rough translation:

Such was the rage that it gave Santini that, in the very same street, he warned that he would increase the fines for throwing trash and wastes in the street. He went further and said that, to eat at the expense of throwing grease, better it would be to close. He only missed adding that better it would be not to eat.

“It’s an environmental crime to throw grease in this manner,” he said, breaking down into an expert in ecological and greasy affairs.

He made it clear, as well, that the capital has to be “at its highest” for the million of cruise ship visitors which it receives every year. He could have mentioned it being at its highest for the residents, but no matter.

Ah yes, the residents, of which I am one. Or rather, the prisoners, since it was impossible, for the last six months, to be in or especially work in my apartment. Whatever noise the three jackhammers and two generators the narrow street reverberated with was deemed insufficient was augmented by the happy shouts of a horde of workers, all of whom separated from each other when attempting to communicate, all the better to strengthen their vocal chords. What am I trying to say? It was ferociously loud.

And hot, as August and September are, in the gropics (meant tropics, but shouldn’t there be a word “gropics?” Like it, somehow…), hot like hell itself. Oh, and did I mention that Luis, the sculptor, came back—and resumed his creative endeavors, which apparently involve banging violently the floor above me with various blunt (I hope) objects?

Well, guess what? The street, at long last, is done. So why, I asked, was there someone with a jackhammer out there at 8AM on a Saturday morning? Easy enough to see: it was the water company, and what are they doing? What they do, which is to break up the sidewalk, shattering all the lovely granite that was so costily (well, we have “expensively,” don’t we, computer?) and arduously and most especially noisily installed.

Mr. Fernández can be easily persuaded to launch into a jeremiad about this, a jeremiad in which the British will be held up as behaving in a civilized—OK, civilised in the honor …err, honour—manner by carefully removing the slate on the sidewalk, placing it neatly to the side, going about their subterranean business, and then neatly replacing it, so that passerby never knew that anything had occurred.

Unfortunately, I observed this on my first trip to London.

Which means that they don’t do what the boys did below—leave a pile of shattered granite shards around a gaping hole, over which a wooden saw board has been placed. Nor do they do what the gas company did down on Tetuán Street, which was to take the jackhammer to several hundred of the 164,700 new adoquines, breaking them up, piling them on the sidewalk, and leaving a crater several feet in diameter in the street, which is now impassable. Oh, wrong—passable if you drive on the sidewalk, which is no problem.

See?

“It’s the quietest building in New York,” said John, and it’s true. How true? I tested it the next morning, and spent a lovely five minutes hearing the clock tick. And now?

Back home!  

(Update on this highly important post—the little granite shards surrounding the water meter are not there. Instead, they have been whisked away? But why? Why go through all that trouble? Then I remembered—in the last craft fair—seeing someone selling little granite paperweights, the stone appearing identical to the sidewalk stone. But that wasn’t the point. On the stone had been painted the flag of Puerto Rico, and it has to be said: so lusty is our love of our island, that you can sell anything as long as it has the flag of Puerto Rico. Wow—so that lady walked away with a purse-load of twenties! See? There’s a purpose for everything….)

Our Glorious Gobe

It’s not a jackhammer; it’s actually a tractor with a super-sized jackhammer attached. And it’s right outside my apartment, making enough noise that I cannot hear loud music played at full volume on my iPod.

The purpose? The jackhammer is drilling 6-inch diameter holes in the pavement of the street. After the street has been completely pockmarked, another tractor will come, scoop up the asphalt, and dump it into a truck. Then, the street will be remade in brick.

Why? Well, parts of San Juan have the famous iridescent blue adoquines or cobblestones. Here—have a look….

Very beautiful, very slippery when wet. So the mayor, or rather ex-mayor, decided to make all the streets in Old San Juan adoquined.

The problem? The real adoquines got their lustrous shiny blue because of slag put in the ballast of ships transporting goods to the island. Now, however, there is either no slag, or there are no ships—I’ve no idea which. And anyway, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which defends greatly the patrimony of Old San Juan, would never allow anything new which looked old. Anything new has to look new—see? Otherwise a new thing could be mistaken for an old thing and that would be very, very bad.

The solution, therefore, is to pave the street with a dullish, blue-gray brick—which very quickly becomes stained with whatever fluids cars leak—and that means removing the asphalt and preparing the ground to receive the bricks.

And does anyone need the streets to be brick, you ask?

Of course not. The city doesn’t have a library, much less a zoo. There are very few parks, and those that exist tend to be vacant and disheveled. That means that the only thing a parent with a child can do in San Juan is

1.     go to the movies

2.     go to the mall

The point of this all, then, is not to beautify a city already very beautiful but to spend some federal funds, employ some people, and do something visible in a visible place.

Oh, and speaking of money—everybody wants to know: what happened to the billion dollars that were earmarked for the special communities fund, set up by the redoubtable Sila Calderón? Yes, she was our very first lady governor—evil tongues dubbed her “the governess”—and she was a tigress in championing her special communities.

Yes, these derelict communities of (usually) squatters needed all the help they could get—the roads were unpaved, water and electricity spotty, no recreation fields or basketball courts or baseball diamonds. So Sila stepped into the picture, or rather into one particularly down-at-the-heels community, Barrio Obrero, or the Workers Neighborhood. And speaking of heels, there Sila was, wearing her trademark canary yellow dress with Armani shoes to match, tittering on a plank of plywood stretched over a sea of mud; her eyes narrow with terror, her mouth clenched in a smile. Once in the house, she demonstrated the presence of water in the new kitchen sink by washing dishes—something she had never done before, since her father sold virtually all the ice cream on the island for decades; the lady is loaded. But dishes she did, as a large and very black woman—presumably the missis of the house—stood by and watched in puzzlement.

Well, I was once asked what exactly Sila built with that billion dollars, and wanting to be truthful, I responded—signs. Yes, signs that got put up next to the basketball court with no baskets or the community center with the broken out windows, and which remained there for four years, resting in glorious silence as residents of the special community strolled past with their midday beers.

So—where did the money go? Well, Sila harbors dark thoughts about her successor, a man from her own party who would go on to be hauled into Federal court for various shades of fraud. Oh, and then there was the next governor, of the opposite party—so he’s a likely suspect as well. So now the new governor—of Sila’s political ilk and so to be trusted—is gonna investigate, since the money is gone and the neighborhoods continue special, instead of ordinary.

But here’s the great part. Is La Gobe, as disrespectful tongues dubbed her, content to sit back and let the current governor conduct the investigation? Not she! She’s gonna start her own investigation—to be absolutely sure that there’s no trickery, no chicanery, no playing footsy with the truth.

Well, well—she’s a powerhouse, our Sila. And no, it’s not true that her disappearance for a month after winning the election—time lesser individuals spend thinking about their cabinet choices—was spent recovering from a facelift.

Some people naturally have their eyebrows tickling their ears….

Sort of looks Chinese, doesn’t she? And no, she doesn’t go to the same hairdresser as Ronald MacDonald….

Twinkling Puerto Rican Stars

Well, it was a day Franny got into me, or rather behind me, forcing me out of bed and then after the morning coffee out the door. I had to go hear, she thought, a bunch of kids from 47 Puerto Rican high schools recite from memory a poem in English. The winner of the competition would be sent to Washington DC to represent Puerto Rico in the national competition, which comprises all the fifty states plus the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Poetry Out Loud, it’s called, and it was only started in 2006. It got to Puerto Rico in 2008, and there were only eight schools participating. Now, it’s 47, and not just in the metropolitan area—it’s all over the island.

Across the nation, the program, which is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, draws in 365,000 participants annually. On the island, the program is jointly sponsored by the Department of Education and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.

Well, it would be something to see—what would Puerto Rican kids choose to read? Would it differ significantly from the poems gringos chose, or does adolescence carry the day, trump all, shatter the cultural / language barriers.

I was also curious—for many of these kids, English is a second language. How will they navigate Shakespearean English? What about the accent, the intonation? Not for nothing was my mantra “333 jewelry thieves” at Wal-Mart. If you can manage the “th” and the voiced consonants of “V” and “Z” (plus get a good “L” which for many Puerto Ricans is an “R”) you have the basic artillery. But how well can you fire it off?

I’m sorry to say that I can’t completely tell you. The contest was to begin at 9, it actually began at 9:30. A long video from last year’s competition was shown. The Director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture was introduced and spoke highly important words about culture (she also, by the way, referred to the contest taking place this morning as the “national” contest and then went on to give her best wishes to the winner who would represent Puerto Rico in the—also—“national” contest. Even poetry is no refuge for ideology….) At this point, we were introduced to the head of the English Department of the Department of Education, who also assured us that culture was important, and then went on to quote a bit of Dickinson—a nice touch.

It was now 10:15, and we had yet to introduce the judges—who came out solemnly as their various academic and professional achievements were listed. So that took some time, since one of them could barely walk, and nearly catapulted down the stairs from the stage.

This left us free to hear the rules of the competition—no pictures with flash, no applause between poems, no cell phones except on vibrate. These rules had to be repeated three times in both English and Spanish, since—well, it’s generally a good idea. We do many things very well in Puerto Rico, but there are times when our zeal, our zest has to be reined in. Otherwise, Mamita will burst onto the stage after her child recites, hug the child, beam at the audience, stand proudly and pose with the child while all 70 uncles / brothers / sisters / aunts / grandparents take pictures and then post on Facebook. Remember—we gotta get out of here by three o’clock.

It took me back, somehow, to the spelling bees that the State Journal used to sponsor. The parents in the audience, nervous for their kids, almost more nervous than the kids themselves. The cameras , the teachers and officials—my own mouth was dry, my palms sweaty, just seeing it.

Well, it was 10:40 by the time the first child stepped foot on stage—with a solid, creditable job of “Alone,” by Edgar Allan Poe. You’ll know it, of course:

From childhood's hour I have not been


As others were; I have not seen


As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

Well, I understand that—what teenager is not feeling that’s he’s never been as others are? But I was jolted indeed when the next teenager stepped out, and announced that she would recite “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

Is this real—I thought? Are we all seriously going to sit and listen to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star?” Somebody is going to start giggling—I had an obvious candidate in mind, and was preparing to dash out the theater—and this kid is gonna be sunk. And what sadistic teacher / mentor suggested this awful choice to this kid? What had she ever done to warrant this? Look, I don’t like kids myself, but neither do I think they should be treated cruelly.

Well, we sat there and took it—we parents and teachers and sibling and interested others. And she got through it, and nobody giggled, and I thought that even on an island where the inexplicable happens with astonishing regularity, I had just seen something wonderfully strange.

It was later, at home, that I wondered—is there something I’ve missed in Twinkle? Are there literary merits, wonderful nuances, subtleties and shades of meaning that I’ve been unaware of? Is it just me?

Well, I looked it up, and if there’s anything there, I can’t find it. But it was a thing to hear, on a Saturday morning in the Santurce sector of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Alas, it was now close to eleven—I had to get home, eat something, and then go off to the Plaza, to read the portion of 30,000 names allotted for today.

But the handful of kids that I had heard today told me something. There’s a wonderful spirit, a wonderful naturalness in the people, and the kids of Puerto Rico. They were nervous, of course. But something in the air, in the spontaneity, in the emotional lifeblood of Puerto Rico comes through despite the dry mouth, sweaty palms, butterflies in the stomach.

Get ready, DC—you may have a surprise!