Padre Apla’s

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The Room Where Father Stanley Francis Rother Was Murdered

There are not many Americans who are idolized by the Maya people. One exception is a Catholic priest from Oklahoma called Father Stanley Francis Rother, who was appointed to run the church of Saint James the Apostle in Santiágo Atitlán from 1968. He learned Spanish and the local dialect of Tzu’utujil Mayan, and over the years became a beloved figure to his parishioners. Maya fabrics started working their way into his liturgical vestments, and the statues of saints in his church were lovingly dressed by the local people.

In August 1981, Padre Apla’s (Maya for “Francis”), as he was known, was threatened by right-wing death squads and ultimately murdered in his own bedroom. That bedroom, a few steps from his church, has been turned into a museum. Although most of his body is buried in Oklahoma, his heart was removed and is buried under the altar of his church.

Statue of Saint with Votive Candles

I visited the scene of his death on two consecutive days. Each time, it was filled with Maya who prayed and sang songs honoring the priest who had become one of them. I noticed that the Catholic church is considering him for sainthood and has designated him as Blessed Stanley Rother. At the same time, one wonders how he could simultaneously please the Maya people whom he loved and the conservative bishops to whom he reported.

Votive Figures Dressed in Maya Garb Lining the Church Walls

There are not many North Americans held in high regard by the Maya. In fact, it was John Foster Dulles and the CIA who, by deposing Jacobo Árbenz, President of Guatemala, in 1954, started the long civil war that finally ground to a halt in 1996. Even today, I deliberately avoided encountering the Guatemalan army, who seemed to be all over the place, and who have an unsavory reputation for massacring their enemies, the tribal Maya.

 

Ten Years Ago

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The Sunken Garden at Victoria, BC’s Butchart Gardens

I have over twenty thousand photographs stored in the cloud at Yahoo Flickr. Sometimes, when I don’t know what to write about, I just scan through some of my older pictures. This time I decided to look back ten years. My vacation that year was to Seattle and British Columbia. The pictures of me at that time showed me to be much heavier, probably close to 230-240 pounds. Now, thanks to diabetes, I am closing in on 200 pounds.

The pictures of Martine show her to be much happier. Ever since 2013, when she started complaining of back pain, she has been less willing to travel. The last good trip we took together had been in 2011, when we spent three weeks in Argentina and Uruguay. There was a period of several years recently when she has been depressed and made several attempts to live elsewhere on her own. Lately, she has been less depressed and even laughed on occasion. Still, she has let her passport expire and shows no interest in traveling abroad any more.

Probably Canada has been her favorite foreign destination, to Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, and particularly New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

My favorite destination in the trip we took ten years ago was Butchart Gardens just north of Victoria. Both Martine and I love botanical gardens, and Butchart is a world-class place for people like us. My favorite part is the Sunken Garden, which used to be a quarry. It took nine years to convert the five acres of disused quarry into a faerie-like collection of beautiful flowers, trees, and shrubs. And, because we are much farther north, the nature of the plants is so different from what we have in Southern California’s Mediterranean climate.

 

Tikal At Long Last!

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The Great Plaza at Tikal

Ever since I started reading about and visiting the Maya back in 1975, I had wanted to go to Tikal. There was a slight problem: Guatemala was in the middle of a Civil War between the Maya and the military that was to last until 1996. During that time, Guatemala was red-flagged by the U.S. Department of State as being dangerous for Americans to visit.

Finally, in January of this year, I spent two days visiting the ruins at Tikal. After all this time, I expected that the Petén region was a tropical hellhole and that I would be assailed by mosquitoes, high humidity, and torrid temperatures—none of which I actually had to face. The rainy season had ended in December, and my visit coincided with below-average temperatures and humidity. In fact, Tikal was downright pleasant.

Temple II at Tikal

When I was visiting Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s, I had climbed all the major pyramids at Uxmal, Chichen Itza, El Tajin near Papantla, and Teotihuacan. In fact, I had lost my fear of heights by climbing pyramids. There was something about the structures at Tikal that was particularly forbidding: They rose quickly to precipitous heights. After losing a few tourists who pitched headfirst down the steep pyramid stairs, however, Guatemala and Mexico decided to close a number of the structures to climbing. The temple above can be climbed using a steel staircase with guard rails at the back. Compare that with Temple I, just a few hundred feet away.

Temple I: Closed to Climbers

Because Tikal was at the tail end of a particularly exhausting vacation, I did not climb any of the pyramids. My feet were aching, so I contented myself with taking pictures from the ground level.

 

Nobody’s Perfect

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John Wayne (1907-1979)

In a 1971 interview appearing in Playboy magazine, John Wayne said a number of things that proved once and for all that he is no one’s idea of a Progressive. Here are a few snippets:

  • “I believe in white supremacy…. We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.”
  • He regarded Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider as homosexual films.
  • “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from [the Indians], if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”
  • On the subject of slavery, he said that he didn’t feel any guilt about the U.S. history.

So now the Professionally Outraged (who are permanently P.O.’d) want to do with the Duke what other protestors did to Confederate battle flags and statues of Robert E. Lee, namely, wipe their memory off the face of the earth.

While I cannot personally countenance what Wayne said, I think it is ridiculous to consider changing the name of the John Wayne Airport in Orange County to some more innocuous person who was never actually caught saying something unpopular in public. No doubt, such persons may exist. I myself have said and done a number of things which are equally reprehensible. After all, I was the son of a George C. Wallace supporter and (back in Czechoslovakia) a Jew-baiter. It was not until I divested myself of my Cleveland background that my thinking has been more politically correct.

As nasty as some of John Wayne’s beliefs were to me, I continue to enjoy his performances in Westerns by John Ford and Howard Hawks—even while I deplore some fave projects of his as Big Jim McLain (1952) in which he played an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Commitee (HUAC) and The Green Berets (1968) in which he was gung-ho on the Viet Nam War.

John Wayne was a man of his times. By the time of the Playboy interview, he was already ill and probably bitter about the direction the country was taking. I see no reason why we have to make him an unperson for some words he said half a century ago.

 

Tianguis

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The Labyrinthine Markets of Mexico and Central America

There is nothing quite like visiting the weekly markets of Mexico and Central America. Although supermarkets and department stores do exist, the average indigenous Mexican or Guatemalan would prefer dealing with vendors at a market. The experience, for one thing, is personal. One can bargain and—if one does not have the wherewithal—get something that’s not quite so good, but will do in a pinch.

The above photo was taken at the market by the second class bus station of Antigua. Below is a scene from the Thursday market at Chichicastenango, where the women shown prepared a great breakfast of beans, eggs, fried plantains, and atole (a hot corn beverage) for just a few quetzales.

These Women Prepared a Great Breakfast for Me in Chichicastenango

Many of these markets are great places to have a meal. I remember having venado (venison) with rice and fresh corn tortillas at the main market in Mérida, Yucatán years ago. The food is usually good and inexpensive, probably your best best for cheap food anywhere in Latin America. Of course, not all markets are good; but I have fond memories of many simple, tasty meals. There is never any pretense: It is quite simply the food of he people.

At Chichicastenango, I also bought a beautiful straw hat for the latter part of my trip in the jungle. I expected heat and sun, but I found that I had created something of a bugbear about visiting the jungle. Although I didn’t need the hat, it sits right next to my computer as I write this. I always admire the multicolor woven hatband that came with it.

 

“Calm in Their Diminishing”?

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A Scene from the Series “Life After People”

This poem from the late Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) presupposes the earth in transition from human domination. It appeared in the November 5, 2018 issue of The New Yorker. I wonder how much this kind of thinking is related to a feeling that our noble experiment has failed under a storm of red MAGA hats.

Peaceful Transition

The wind comes down from the northwest, cold in September,
and flips over the neighbor’s trash receptacles.

The Halifax newspaper says that mansions are falling into the sea.
Storms are rising in the dark Pacific.

Pollution has infiltrated the food chain down to the jellyfish level.
The book I am reading is called “The End of the Ascent of Man.”

It says the time of human dominion is done,
but I am hoping it will be a peaceful transition.

It is one thing to think of buffalo on Divisadero Street,
of the Golden gate Bridge overgrown in a tangle of vine.

It is another to open the door of your own house to the waves.
I am hoping the humans will be calm in their diminishing.

That the forests grow back with patience, not rage;
I am hoping the flocks of geese increase their number only gradually.

Let it be like an amnesia we don’t even notice;
the hills forgetting the name of our kind. Then the sky.

Let the fish rearrange their green governments
as the rain spatters slant on their roof.

It is important that we expire.
It is a kind of work we have begun in order to complete.

Today out of he north the cold wind comes down,
and I go out to see

the neighbor’s trash bins have toppled in the drive
I see the unpicked grapes have turned to small sweet raisins on their vine.

I see the wren has found a way to make its little nest
inside the cactus thorn.

 

Images of a Grittier America

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Burlesque Performers

In the photographs of Weegee (born Usher Fellig in Austrian Galicia in 1899), the streets are not paved with gold. They are occasionally paved with the bloody bodies of slain hoods. According to Edward Kosner writing in the New York Review of Books:

He snapped his mesmerizing photographs in a sweaty frenzy between seventy and eighty years ago. There are two haughty dowagers accosted by a shabbily dressed drunk woman at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera; children sleeping on a fire escape in a slum; a man arrested for cross-dressing grinning and baring his thigh in the back of a paddy wagon; a panoramic mob filling every inch of sand at Coney Island; an anguished mother in a black kerchief staring at the tenement fire in which her daughter and granddaughter are perishing. These familiar images were captured by an immigrant working in the depths of the Depression and wartime for a couple of dollars per newspaper shot.

Body of a Gunshot Victim Lying in the Street

Weegee’s pictures were shot with a Speed Graphic in high-contrast black and white. A few of his pictures show people celebrating, but most are somber pictures of a society peopled by floozies, cheap hoods, juvenile delinquents, and other victims. Through sheer persistence and bloody-mindedness, Weegee became something of a celebrity with his photographs. He took to calling himself Weegee the Genius and hoped to become a celebrity himself—and he was one, but always in a minor key.

A Thug (or Victim?) Being Hauled Off to the Police Station (or Hospital?)

Hollywood gave us one picture of life in America, but Weegee presented us with a grittier alternative America. The men wore suits, hats, and ties, but one had the feeling that was most of their wardrobe. Look at those faces peering through the car window in the above photo. These people will not be found in screwball comedies. They don’t have English butlers, and their wives are not dressed in the latest fashions from Paris.

 

Draining … Drained

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I Felt Hurled Back into Childhood

When I was a child, I suffered intensely from allergies. My nose was frequently blocked, so that I had to breathe through my mouth, making me feel as if I had ingested a bucket of fine sand. My mother would boil up a big pot of water and add salt to it. She had me cover my head with a towel and bend forward to inhale the salty steam. Not that it did me any good.

For decades now, I have not had the experience of having my nasal air passages totally blocked … until this last week. I got a cold which in itself was not that bad, but as soon as I climbed into bed, my nasal passages shut down a la my youth. My doctor recommended something akin to my mother’s remedy: Shoot distilled water up my nose that contains powdered salt with sodium bicarbonate. This actually works, and I am finally able to sleep in bed again.

My cold was not that bad, but the long recovery is a pain. It seems as if I fill endless handkerchiefs with mucus that has the gluey texture of rubber cement. At the same time my cold began, my eyes started to water and itch again. I have spent the better part of a week draining in various ways—and that has tired me out big time. I attribute this illness to a cold snap that has hit Southern California right after I returned from Guatemala. It seems that the temperature has not climbed up to 70º Fahrenheit (21º Celsius) since the start of the month.

Eventually the temperature will rise and I will have drained out the last cubic centimeter of mucus as well as whatever is discharging from my eyes. Until that time I will just have to be patient.

 

A Gift from Our Father

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Look Closely Lest You Be Fooled

This happened years ago while my brother and I were still in Cleveland. Our Dad had gone shopping at the West Side Market for various Hungarian provisions and came back with gifts for us. He had been approached by a street vendor who sold him two “hot” watches that had “fallen off a truck,” a Bulova and a Hamilton. Dan and I looked at the watches and laughed. The Bulova was actually a Bolivia; and the Hamilton, a Hormilton. I still have the Bolivia, which ceased working decades ago. It appears that the watch vendor had made a profit on the deal.

Although our father felt like a fool for buying counterfeit watches with a one-jewel movement that may function for upwards of two weeks, I cannot recall thye incident without once again feeling affection and a sense of loss. Alex Paris died in 1985 at the age of 74—which, coincidentally, is my present age. I think of him frequently and cannot look in a mirror without seeing his face looking back at me. I have been told I look more like my mother, but there is still a lot of Alex in me as well.

For an interesting old Popular Science article on counterfeit watches written back around the time my father found his bargain, click here.

 

Ruins in the Middle of a Banana Plantation

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Bunches of Bananas Wrapped in Blue Plastic

In my last post about Guatemala, I wrote about road closures from a village protest. Once that cleared up (after about an hour and a half), we finally made our way to Route CA-9 which connected Zacapa to the Caribbean at Puerto Barrios. A bit past the halfway point, after having passed numerous eighteen-wheelers bearing the logos of Dole and Chiquita, we made it to the Maya ruins at Quiriguá. It was smack in the middle of a banana plantation, much like the one illustrated above.

While still on the plant, the bunches of bananas were all wrapped in blue plastic. This was a Guatemalan invention (since practiced worldwide) which help protect the fruit from insects and keep it at a sustainably high temperature.

Isolated Stelae Protected with Thatched Roofs

What made Quiriguá so interesting were the giant stelae commemorating the rules of various kings. These are the largest of any Maya site in Mesoamerica. Unfortunately, many of them are badly weathered, more so than at Copán, where the stone is more resistant to the tropical rain. There are buildings and ball courts at Quiriguá, but these are no match for Copán.

Yet, interestingly, little Quiriguá managed to conquer Copán and sacrifice its god/king, 18 Rabbit, in the 8th century AD.

Detail of a Stela

It doesn’t take long to visit Quiriguá: I took about an hour and a half, some of which time was eating my lunch, consisting of a bottle of mineral water and a small bag of corn chips. (I skipped a lot of meals during this trip because of all the time I spent on the road.)

My hired car was waiting for me in the parking lot, and the driver was pleased that he’d be able to get back to Copán before nightfall.