WHERE IS HOME?

by
JOHN SCHERBER

WHERE IS HOME?

         Where is home?  I know it’s out there somewhere.

         Here in San Miguel I recently attended a talk by Richard Blanco, the poet who read at President Obama’s second inaugural, and again for the recent reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana. As the openly gay son of Cuban parents, born in Spain and raised in Miami, he has sufficient reason to be asking this question too, perhaps more than most of us. It is no surprise that he feels a relaxed and supportive welcome in this town that shelters eight or ten thousand expats, also severed to some degree from their origins as a matter of choice.

         Blanco has resolved his search in a series of brilliant poems and in a book on his childhood in South Beach. While his answers are uniquely his own, his questions will stimulate another series from expats here and elsewhere. Let me offer a few of my own answers:

         Home may be where the heart is, but it’s also where the snow isn’t. I’m writing this in the middle of September, a time, when back in Minnesota, we were busy raking leaves. We were checking the insulation in the attic. We were topping off the antifreeze in the car and making a note to use a more lightweight variety of oil at the next change. In spending 58 years there I always knew I had given over too much of my life to the frigid burden of snow boots and down jackets, but in the long demanding grip of jobs, family ties, and friendships, it was hard to find a method of release. Living in México now, I have seen how escape is accomplished by the pros––with tunnels and bribery, a means we never thought of up north.

         Home is where you can stop being yourself, that is, the self you thought you needed to be, the one you had to be to keep your career track open, to keep your kids in check and on the way to being good citizens of a country you were no longer sure you wanted to live in yourself.

         México has a more relaxed system of identity that does not question your ability, even your right to be somewhat different from the photo on your driver’s license––if you even have one. It does not ask what you formerly did for a living. If it asks anything at all, it’s what you are doing today. It does not demand to see your credentials. You are, after all, alive and here even without them. Nothing more is required.

         Home is not needing to be trendy. Even if you weren’t aware of needing to feel trendy before, you will feel even less so here. Being cutting edge is only understood in reference to a machete, or to the man who makes the rounds of the neighborhoods on his bicycle, blowing a harsh whistle, ready to grind your expensive German cutlery to a fine and rapidly vanishing edge for ten pesos. (today, sixty cents U.S.) After six visits you will be carving your roast with a very pricy set of icepicks.

         Home is where not everything works. I wonder if this is any different? It certainly differs in what doesn’t work and what does. It works, for example, to pay five dollars a month here for water that we can’t drink, when before in Edina, Minnesota, we paid ninety-nine dollars a month for water we also couldn’t drink (for different reasons––it tasted vile), but which came with a nice bi-monthly color brochure that told us how good it was. We used to keep that piece of propaganda on top of the five-gallon water bottle in our kitchen dispenser. At least we felt better about it. Here in México we don’t feel as good when things don’t work, but we know we’re getting a better deal on failure. That’s worth something.

         Here the power goes out just long enough to require us to reset all the clocks. Everything you buy now has a clock on it that needs to be reset. There is no reason for this. In Minnesota we lived in a wooded neighborhood (Indian Hills) where the power lines had naïvely been run through the trees. Every time a high wind came through the lines went down as dead branches fell on them. One weekend in May we had houseguests for three days and our power was out the entire time. I did a run to Starbucks every morning, cursing.

         In the eighties there was a movie I never saw called Stop Making Sense, featuring The Talking Heads. The irreverent perspective of its title has stayed with me. Since the turnout didn’t demand a sequel, I believe the entire crew drifted down here and infiltrated the government after shooting ended, where they remain firmly in control today. Their fine hand can also be observed in all the utility companies.

         These are superficial signs of home. Richard Blanco was talking more deeply about identity and how it plugs into our sense of place and family. After eight years as a willing exile I think home is a portable unit, self-contained, and in this country, run by solar energy. We love the sun. We need the sun, because central heating rarely penetrates this far south.

         Home is a shell that protects us from inclement weather, but more importantly, it harbors our ambitions, supports our dreams, and nurses our hopes as creative people living atypical lives among kindly strangers. It travels well, because as compact as it is, it still provides sufficient room for all of our essentials, even if we prefer to get our jeans in Laredo.

         At the heart of this durable shell is our identity, which is the essence of home. It is not the title we have, or what we own, or the image we wish to project; but what we do every day of our lives. That defines us as the individuals we are. And we are all individuals before we are Americans, women or men, adults or children, Catholics or Moslems, Trumpians or Hillarians.

         Home is where we are, not what we left behind.

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AN EXPATRIATE'S TALE

By

JOHN SCHERBER

AN EXPATRIATE’S TALE

         Earlier this year, a woman said to me at a cocktail party, “So you hate the United States?”

“What?” I’m sure my eyebrows leaped nearly to my hairline with surprise. I wondered whether she’d been lying in wait for me.

          “You call yourself an expatriate. You even admit it right here.” Her left hand raised my own book as an indictment, and her extended right forefinger stopped an inch from my sternum, already scarred from previous encounters of this kind. You never know what to expect at a book event. I knew she owned a number of my mysteries, set mostly in México, where I live, because I’d autographed three of them for her at a book signing earlier. She’d also picked up my nonfiction book on the life-changing experience of many Americans and Canadians who also live in San Miguel de Allende.

         “I am an expatriate,” I said, calmly, trying to smile.

         “See! I read that on the cover.”

         “But being an expatriate has nothing to do with a lack of patriotism, it merely means a person who lives in a country he wasn’t born in. You must be thinking of ex-patriot; someone who’s turned against his country. It’s a different spelling, like here and hear. If you’d been born in Minnesota, where would you choose to live?”

         “I think I would’ve declined to be born in Minnesota. My family’s all here.” As if making a point I couldn’t refute, she walked away. I didn’t know whether she’d gotten my message or not, but I still appreciated her as a reader. They come with all different points of view.

         In that book in her left hand, which I’d titled San Miguel de Allende: A Place in the Heart, I investigated what it meant for 32 different people to leave home, often at an age well past youth. To leave the familiar behind and encounter––usually with some discomfort––a new country and a new set of friends, a new way of life. Usually the reasons are about experiencing a new culture and a different kind of weather, as they were for me. And they’re always about reinventing yourself against a background that in México I think of as simpático. It welcomes people in a mood for a lifestyle change.

         But how does it work, really? What is the detail? On the Internet you can easily see the colonial architecture, which reminds you of Europe. After all, San Miguel was founded in 1542, a date when the founding of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts was still 78 years away. It’s old in its bones. You already know in your joints that winters are starting to tell you in unpleasant detail what it means to continue in the climate where you live now. You know that real Méxican food is great, because you subscribe to Bon Appetite magazine, and you also know you can’t get the real thing in the States without a lot of research. It doesn’t hurt that México is also top heavy with charm and character, and the people are warm and inviting.

         But you can’t get by on great food alone; you need Internet, golf, a top-notch dentist, good health care, a trained mechanic to maintain your car, and a sense of community and security––a challenging word, since you’ve read about the drug wars. You know what all the commentators are saying. And even though you realize that it’s all because they are competing for your drug dollar, you don’t use drugs other than Lipitor and Viagra, so it’s definitely not reassuring. Amen.

         It turns out that it’s not about Lipitor. It’s about heroin and cocaine. If that’s your reason to come to México, stop reading right here and stay in San Francisco or Austin. But if you have other reasons to check out this lifestyle, you will do so in a greater degree of safety than you could in the States, contrary to what the media there would have you believe.

         What is the solution to this ugly dilemma? Well, it turns out that staying safe requires nothing different than the method you already use––and it’s been working for you quite well all your life. It’s called savvy. You know the trouble spots in the United States or Canada. That’s easy, and you respond by avoiding them as you lead a perfectly normal life. But you do not shun Pensacola because the thought of visiting Detroit makes you queasy.

         It will be no surprise that the same approach works well in México, where there are 2,500 municipalities. The drug battles are focused in between twelve and fifteen of them. The safety level in the other 99½% is about the same as living in rural Iowa. Naturally, it still pays to avoid cows with horns.

         Once over this hump you will discover a lifestyle blooming with options. Do you have a fondness for horses? Equestrian sports are everywhere in México, from cow sorting to dressage and jumping. Are you a fan of the arts? Art galleries and studios abound. Lessons in painting and sculpture are offered around every corner. Like to dig in and serve your community? San Miguel can supply more than a hundred ways to improve the environment and the status of local people. Or would you just like to kick back and relax after a demanding career? The jardin, our local plaza, is San Miguel’s living room, like others throughout México, where expats and locals mix and trade stories from the weather to life in general, to sports and culture. All this with 340 days of sunshine a year. Don’t miss the chamber music and jazz festivals, the annual writer’s conference, the opera scene, and the dozens of active art galleries.

         Tired of tortillas? Try the two world-class supermarkets at the edge of town, or the Office Depot, the Liverpool department store, and the other big box stores in close-in neighboring towns. How about a Sassoon-trained hair stylist?

         Many of these points focus on San Miguel de Allende, my own town, but similar resources flourish all over México, as do expat communities where others who’ve been there a while can show you the ropes. The communities are supportive of newcomers and the Internet can readily tell you what’s going on almost anywhere.

         México is an opportunity not to be missed, so don’t let yourself be stopped by the border––if it’s anything like mine, your future has no borders.

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By

JOHN SCHERBER

        

EXPATS IN A DIFFERENT WORLD

         One of my favorite house museums is the Gene Byron Museum in Guanajuato, the capital of the same state in México. It lies in the close-in suburb of Marfil, one of a string of silver ore processing haciendas that were mostly owned in the middle of the last century by a group of Canadians.

         They had been originally built to extract the silver from the ore coming from the great Valenciana Mine, the largest and most productive in the world, not far away. As the technology changed, these estates lost their purpose and their value and fell to ruins. When the Byron property was purchased in 1954, there were no roofs left on the main, two-story building. Burros were housed on the lower level.

         Gene Byron was a Canadian actress who was born in 1910. She first came to México in 1942. There, sometime later, she met the man she married, a Spanish pediatrician named Virgilio Fernandez. Born in Spanish Morocco, raised in Seville, he was eight years younger than Gene, and he had gone to medical school in Monterrey. He had been in México since 1939. Together they restored the main building into a long, two-story residence to house their creative life together.

         Gene died in 1987, at the age of 77, from a smoking related illness. This was one of many things Dr. Virgilio told us as we sat with him near the entrance on this visit. I had heard he was still alive, but I did not expect to meet and talk to him at the age of 97. Here he is with my wife, Kristine.

         Later we toured the house, left as it was when Gene died twenty-eight years ago. She was a woman determined to leave her mark on life. The house is full of her paintings, including this self-portrait:

         The only painting on the main floor that is not by Gene Byron is this portrait of the young Virgilio Fernandez.

         As well as art, she was a designer of stone carvings and crockery, and of the gardens that front the long façade, graced by a series of arched windows. The metalwork that appears throughout the house, the light fixtures and sculpture, is all hers.

         The house was often filled with creative people. Garth Williams, the illustrator of children’s books, died in Marfil in 1996. He was famous for his iconic illustrations of Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and many others. Another frequent guest was Fletcher Martin, the American painter who studied with the great Mexican muralist David Siqueiros. He retired to Marfil in 1967 and died there in 1979. Artists and writers of that era knew of this house and visited it when they came through, almost like a pilgrimage site. The home of Gene Byron and Virgilio Fernandez was the center of the artistic and intellectual life of the Guanajuato expat colony in the 20^th century.

         As I walked through those rooms today I felt I could hear the echo of those voices. It was a different time for México and for expats. I believe there was less emphasis on retirement and more on living than in today’s colonies in San Miguel de Allende, Lake Chapala, and the beach communities.

         This great stone house, built in the sixteen hundreds, continues as a center of living culture. Every Sunday there are concerts on the second floor, now one long hall with a vaulted ceiling, since the bedrooms have been removed and a grand piano waits on a platform at one end. The vestibule at the concert hall entrance was once Gene Byron’s painting studio.

         When we left we stopped at the gatehouse to say goodbye and to thank Virgilio Fernandez. It was not hard to imagine him wandering through that hacienda, every square foot of which must speak to him of those rich and rewarding times, both the hours and the years. Since silence fell, he has been its stalwart guardian, and has endowed it in his will. He and Gene had no children, but they have left us an ageless memorial to their life and times.

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WRITING UNEASY RIDER

By

JOHN SCHERBER

WRITING UNEASY RIDER

         After writing twenty-four books I am once again part of a writer’s work group here in San Miguel. Seven working writers meet once a week to offer critiques of each other’s work. This is not the kind of group where the members are given a prompt, followed by twenty minuets of rapid writing, and the comments may only be positive.

         All the material has been read in advance before the meeting. This is a setting where anything goes, within the bounds of normal supportive civility, but a thick skin is a useful garment to wear, since we are all committed to tell the truth of our reactions. This is how we improve our work.

 Martina

         The obvious benefit is the criticism from other writers. This is not the same as an editor’s view, and that’s good. My experience is that many editors are failed writers and tend to have a formulaic approach. The phrase we want to hear most in this setting is, “This part (or character) isn’t working for me,” followed by the reasons why, and possibly a hint about what might work better.

         But there are also other benefits. One is the need to be insightful about what others are doing, which requires a thoughtful commitment to understand both their premise and their technique. This is particularly helpful and challenging when what they are doing is something that absolutely has never occurred to you. Stretching to understand it, to generate insight into what would improve an approach you have never considered for yourself and never would, has the benefit of allowing you to return to your own work with an expanded perspective. You have stepped out of your own bubble. We can improve not only our ability to critique other writers, but also ourselves by doing this.

         In this group several are doing memoirs, one a romance, another is working on a thriller, and I’m writing the fourteenth mystery in my Murder in México series, titled Uneasy Rider. The romance, the thriller, and the mystery all fall into the category of genre fiction, which is often thought to be formulaic (and too often is), but my experience with mysteries is more flexible. To me, detective fiction has an opening with a crime and a closing with a solution. That’s as much definition as I require. The area between, essentially the entire book, is open to the sky and may contain any set of elements at all that advances the story. The fundamental skills that apply are little different from those in literary fiction. The needs of pace, plot, characterization, and writing skills, are all the same, and this open-ended feature applies to romance and thriller as well.

         Uneasy Rider is mainly set at an upscale equestrian property near San Miguel that I call Rancho Aria. The occasion of the story is a murder, but like much of fiction, the subject is the truth. The process of investigation is that of uncovering the truth on the way to solving the crime, but as the reader discovers, little of this falsehood is the cause of the murder, it only appears as if it might be. As one of the main characters, Maya Sanchez, says, “All masks are off now.” This is the book of mine that has been making its way, chapter by chapter, through the writer’s work group.

         I am now in the final revision phase, and the group will be going through the later chapters and helping me get it right. I am aiming at publication in the second half of October.

         More than some of the others in this series, Uneasy Rider is a whodunit. It has some deep psychological roots in several of the characters that I found challenging to develop. I believe that while we may see someone across the room or on a bus that we would like to use in our story, the character and makeup of the person who emerges on the page comes largely from our own mind and experience. While we are specifically no one that we write about in fiction, we are also everyone, including the villains.

         So here comes Uneasy Rider. It’s been a stretch for me, as many are. Someone once asked my painter/detective character, Paul Zacher, how he knows when a picture is finished. He replies that he sets aside his brush when it stops fighting him. I learned this from my own painting, and it is no less true of writing.

         I wanted to call this piece Uneasy Writer, but I didn’t, because I am more excited than uneasy, and the fight on this book is not quite over yet.

         Excuse me while I step back into the ring.

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