This is a picture of part of my family during a "villa inspection" trip to Playa BLanca, in the state of Baja, Mexico, the location of our villa-to-be, at least hopefully. Left to right: mi nina, Jessi, my esposa, vicki, mi madre-in-law, Gloria, my nino Jared, y mi nino-in-law, Brandon. (I know; I need to look up that word in-law in Spanish).
Vick and I are looking forward to spending several months a year at our Mexicano Norte beach retreat. Sadly, construction of the villa remains a year behind schedule--it is definitely being built on manana time, but that's OK. That's why we love Mexico and its people.
Vick and I have always lead a pedal-to-metal, never-slow-to-fifty-five lifestyle, where naps were out of the question and sleep was an inconvenient necessity. But we made a rule: When we hit sixty, we get to go Mexican--all the way, not just on weekends, I'm talkin' seven days a week. I'm not just talking Taco Bell; I'm talking the whole enchilada, total adoption of the laid-back, "no problemo," have-another-margarita-if-we-want lifestyle for which we have envied our hermanos y hermanas to the south. They know how to appreciate life, something about which we, Americans, seem to get confused.
"There is a season (turn, turn, etc.), and a time to every purpose unto Heaven," and it's our time to kick back, make the most important task of the day that of watching the sun set, content to surrender ourselves to the glory of nature, ready to place our humanity in a less magnanimous perspective, looking forward to luxuriating in open-ended acts of reflection. Yeah baby!
When we turned sixty, for the first time in our lives, we became content to drive fifty-five (even on my Harley)--well, maybe sixty is more accurate. Consequently, when our Mexicano amigos finish building the villa (on manana time), we will begin enjoying it (on manana time). So don't be surprised if you get an email or phone call from us one of these days that simply says, "Hasta manana mis amigos." And for several months a year, intermingled with commutes to Utah for grandchildren and mountain fixes, it will be tortillas and coffee for breakfast, tortillas and moonlight strolls on the beach in the late evening, tortillas and all-you-can-eat lobsters-for-twenty-bucks at a little fishing village down the road called Puerto Nuevo, and margaritas and tortillas on the balcony of our villa at sunset. I might even engage in book-a-day marathons when I get the urge, in between playing one of my Spanish guitars and painting mousterpieces, of course. Won't that be something?
And if we're lucky, we'll have lots of visits from children, grandchildren, family, and friends with whom we'll happily share the sunsets, the dolphins, and, of course, the warm tortillas.
And I have to tell you, the sunsets in Northern Baja are beyond spectacular. Few of nature's extravaganzas surpass the splendor of a mind-mending ocean sunset. Yes indeed, we plan to make attending that show a nightly ritual--one in which we will engage with the sanctity of a religious experience, sitting on our cushioned beach chairs as the sun takes center stage.
And we'll also keep a keen eye out for dolphins, who appear to share our infatuation with the sun's nightly rite as they frolic five hundred yards off shore, engaged in a friendly game of "Who Can Get the Most Air?" with their closest friends, launching themselves like flying fish, suspending momentarily before gravity brings them home again, leaving no trace of their aerial performance--unless I happen to have been fast enough to capture it on my digital camera. And then, thirty yards north or south of the exhibition, they repeat their sacramental rite again and again, in celebration of new beginnings, new life, new days to seize--or maybe the other way around. Side bar: For me, "Carpe Diem" used to be synonymous in meaning to my favorite Dylan quote, "If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying." In my first lives, those in which I made a distinction between being young and old, instead of being "forever young," I interpreted those famous phrases to mean that, if I slowed down (to fifty-five), failed to grasp every moment with the urgency of a child on an Easter egg hunt, then, I was engaging in wasteful, even terminal behavior.
Today, I don't merely perceive those quotes differently--I perceive them to be antonymous to my original perception, and I have a feeling that others of my generation, now in their sixties, all products of the "sixties" (which includes Bob Dylan, incidentally) can relate to my freshly attained perception. Praise God and the sun, who, in their infinite wisdom, have permitted us to see the light, soak it in, become converted with the enthusiasm of "Born-Again Christians" to a philosophy that suggests we stop seizing the day and begin letting the day seize us, that we stop trying to bake more tortillas than we could ever eat and allow ourselves to smell them for a change as they emerge from an open-hearth oven. I now believe that if we start smelling warm tortillas with the regularity of a sunset that we will remain engaged in miracle of being born, and, therefore, have no time for dying. Sorry, I love dolphins, Dylan, and freshly-baked tortillas.
Back to my sunset vision. Close your eyes. We'll sip our drinks, kick back, and watch the sun melt into the horizon, as the light wanes, morphing slowly through every color in a rainbow: reds along the edge of the watery horizon melting into yellows and oranges above, which blur their way into purples while purples fade to soft blues and soft blues dissipate, fog-like into grays out toward the edge of the sunset where light finally fades to black, causing even the ocean to appear to have vanished, except for the rhythmic reminder of waves rolling onto the beach, like clockwork, night after night, a fresh cast of colors with each performance of its one-act play, the stage of which is the horizon, providing evidence of God and goodness, my wife, Vicki, of course, at my side, sharing these moments, not hoarding them or even trying to maximize them. It doesn't get better than that. We're ready. Maybe our Mexican villa builders could hurry just a little though.
I guess I could have just painted a picture since this is my art blog, but, in this case, I think a thousand words might have been better.
