Stories of survival and perseverance
By Miguel Hernandez Chavez

Under the Pepper Tree: Stories of Casa de los Angeles was written by Donna Quathamer, who founded Casa de los Angeles in September of 2000. The book tells the stories of the single-parent families who are struggling to make a better life.

There is so much to learn from their stories because, actually, their stories are our stories. We are connected by spontaneous conversations. We are connected by land without borders. We are connected by experiences, by relationships, by the human spirit, by the same need to be loved, to be cared for, to be seen. Quathamer says that she wrote this book, “Hoping that if even one of these stories speaks to you in the depth of your heart, you know just a little more of Casa de los Angeles and the people of San Miguel de Allende who have so much to teach us.”

Under the Pepper Tree: Stories of Casa de los Angeles is available at La Conexión, Aldama 3; Spanglish Caffe, corner of Marte and 20 de Enero; and at Casa de los Angeles, Prolongación Pila Seca 18 (corner of 28 de Abril) in Colonia San Antonio.

Excerpt from Under the Pepper Tree

Alberto, Dolores, Carlos, and Juan all belong to Maria del Carmen. The oldest is seven and it pretty much goes down by “stair steps” from there. Carmen heard of the daycare center from one of our moms. Word of mouth publicity can’t be compared to any other.

Carmen and her brood of children live way on the other side of town in an area called San Luis Rey. It takes them a long hour to walk to arrive at Casa de los Angeles since she had no money for public transportation. How are you ever going to get your children all gathered up in the morning and ready to go, drop some off at school and others at the daycare center and get yourself to work on time? All walking. And you know how slow a long walk can go with four children in tow. Carmen was determined to do it because she knew that her life will be better with a regular job and her children in a safe place. Okay, we will try it. The day after the three youngest were accepted, the children each came with a toy to donate to the guarderia. Toys of their own that 

they chose to give…a truck without wheels, a doll with one arm, a top with a string in knots. All of that was a year ago. Their lives have changed. They now take a bus into town. Four pesos a day each way that Carmen can now afford. Life has changed for this little family. Life is better. Life is good.

Correction for November Author’s Sala events
By Carol Lopes

Literary Event
Author’s Sala
Fri, Nov 9, 5pm
Posada San Francisco
Cnr San Francisco & Hidalgo
50 pesos

Due to a scheduling conflict, the date for the November Author’s Sala that was published in last week’s Atención was incorrect. Please see the corrected date above.

Stephanie Bennett Vogt

Stephanie is New England's leading expert in the field of space clearing. She ended a successful twenty-year teaching career in 1996 and devoted a decade to the study of clutter and its effects on people.

Stephanie’s new book Your Spacious Self: Clear Your Clutter and Discover Who You Are, on which this talk is based, offers a fresh approach to clearing that is radical in its message and elegant in its simplicity.

Leona Rachel Citron

San Miguel writer Rachel Citron was a Rasta queen, living in the bush of rural Jamaica in a hidden sugar cane valley for nine years. Her book, The Jamaica Story, is a riviting account of this rare experience.

Lynette Seator

Scholar and poet, Lynette Seator’s new collection Flowers and Dust, is a work in progress as she continues to absorb the life she is living in Mexico, her home for the last five years.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Five eclectic nonfiction titles 

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
—Sir Richard Steele

I read a lot of nonfiction. I love history; I love biographies, I love books about climbing Mount Everest and smokejumpers and going to sea. I don’t care much for philosophy or science (see next week’s column), but I read almost everything else. A friend once suggested that, for an aspiring fiction writer, I read far too little fiction and far too much nonfiction. I think I’ve evened out since I moved to San Miguel, reading tons of both. In coming months I’ll discuss biography/memoir, history and travel, but for now here’s an eclectic and desultory batch of books I’ve read recently.

The Lost Painting, Jonathan Harr, 2005. An Italian named Giampaolo Correale decides to create a database of Italian art tracing every artifact from its conception to the present day. He hires two graduate students to research two identical paintings attributed to Caravaggio to determine which is the authentic painting. While searching the archives for mention of the paintings back to the sixteenth century, they discover information that may lead to a Caravaggio missing for 400 years. A gripping story of research, the restoration of art and how paintings are authenticated. If you missed Harr’s earlier A Civil Action, take a look at it, too. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Excerpt: “Around the table, the topic of conversation is an artist who lived four hundred years ago, named Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Sir Denis has studied, nose to the canvas, magnifying glass in hand, every known work by the artist. Since the death of his rival and nemesis, the great Italian art scholar Roberto Longhi, Sir Denis has been regarded as the world’s foremost authority on Caravaggio. Nowadays, younger scholars who claim the painter as their domain will challenge him on this point or that, as he himself had challenged Longhi many years ago. Even so, he is still paid handsome sums by collectors to render his opinion on the authenticity of disputed works. His verdict can mean a gain or loss of a small fortune for his clients.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell, 2005. This book explains how decisions that seem to be made in the blink of an eye aren’t. He illustrates his thesis with real-life instances of both good and bad decision making. After the excerpt that follows, Gladwell explains how the lieutenant knew the floor would collapse. I found this one a real page-turner.

Excerpt: “Gary Klein, the decision-making expert, once did an interview with a fire department commander in Cleveland as part of a project to get professionals to talk about times when they had to make tough, split-second decisions. The story the fireman told was about a seemingly routine call he had taken years before, when he was a lieutenant. The fire was in the back of a one-story house in a residential neighborhood, in the kitchen. The lieutenant and his men broke down the front door, laid down their hose, and then, as firemen say, “charged the line,” dousing the flames in the kitchen with water. Something should have happened at that point: the fire should have abated. But it didn’t. So the men sprayed again. Still, it didn’t seem to make much difference. The firemen retreated back through the archway into the living room, and there, suddenly, the lieutenant thought to himself, ‘There’s something wrong.’ He turned to his men. “Let’s get out now!” he said, and moments after they did, the floor on which t
hey had been standing collapsed. The fire, it turned out, had been in the basement.”

Things to Bring, S#!t to Do: My Life in Lists, Karen Rizzo, 2006. I can’t believe someone kept her lists and made a book out of them, but here it is. From her first documented list made in 1972 with her favorite song, color, person, place, etc., to a list of things to buy in September, 2005 (Mutant Ninja toothpaste, colored Band-Aids, tiramisu) the author keeps us entertained.

Excerpt: Father’s Day 1982

Bring to hospital (her mother’s recovering from surgery)

Lox and bagels

New flannel nightgown

TV Guide

People magazine

Norman Cousins book

Fresca, butterscotch candy, pears, Jarlsberg cheese

pink nail polish

Silly String

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier, Thad Carhart, 2000. In France you can’t just walk into a used piano shop and buy a piano. If you try, they tell you they don’t have any pianos for sale. They explain the ones you see are being repaired for their owners. You have to be recommended by a customer, as the author learns when he notices a piano shop in his neighborhood. Eventually he’s allowed in the back where the sale pianos are kept. I taught piano to small children in a Montessori school and I learned much I didn’t know about the instrument in this charming and informative book.

Excerpt: “Around the edges of the room, behind and around and even under the pianos, in every available corner, lay scattered parts and pieces that had been removed from them. The legs of the grand pianos lay alongside, an anthology of furniture styles stacked high in a pile. Music stands, pedal housings, fall boards were all similarly grouped together, each one reflecting a different era and style.”

The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean, 1998. The New Yorker writer researched and wrote this book about a man named John Laroche, an orchid thief in Florida’s Everglades looking for a rare and elusive white orchid. I lived in Florida for 25 years and learned mountains of information about the state in this book. I knew nothing about orchids except what I learned from reading Nero Wolfe mysteries, and learned a lot more about them. I love it when the learning curve goes straight up!

Excerpt: “The great Victorian-era orchid hunter William Arnold drowned on a collecting expedition on the Orinoco River. The orchid hunter Schroeder, a contemporary of Arnold’s, fell to his death while hunting in Sierra Leone. The hunter Falkenberg was also lost, while orchid hunting in Bogotá. The hunter Klabock was murdered in Mexico. Brown was killed in Madagascar. Endres was shot dead in Rio Hacha. Gustave Wallis died of fever in Ecuador. Digance was gunned down by locals in Brazil. Osmers vanished without a trace in Asia. The linguist and plant collector Augustus Margary survived toothache, rheumatism, pleurisy, and dysentery while sailing the Yangtze only to be murdered when he completed his mission and traveled beyond Bhamo. Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.”

Next week “Book Fever” takes the pulse of Bill Bryson. Then we’ll look at what others in San Miguel are reading in nonfiction. If you’ve read a good nonfiction book and would like to share it with others, please email me at marciabookfever@hotmail.com.  Include the title, author, date copyrighted, a few lines about the book and a short quote, usually the first paragraph or so. Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.

Word Watch
By Bill Gallacher

cuestionar (vb) To question, yes, but in the sense of to call into question, or to doubt, with the noun cuestión meaning issue, or matter. If we are dealing with a question to which a definite answer is expected the verb is preguntar and the noun una pregunta. When Hamlet says: ‘To be or not to be: that is the question,’ is the question una pregunta or una cuestión? I suppose it all depends on what Shakespeare meant, and does anyone really know? (Pregunta is the received translation in Hamlet, although personally I question this.)

damnificado (adj) Basically an adjective, but mostly used as a noun with the meaning of injured. Somewhat surprisingly, a damnificado is guilty of nothing, except perhaps of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Los damnificados are the victims of disasters such as floods or earthquakes, and there is some logic in describing them as having been sent to a hell of sorts.

escape (n.m) The verb escapar does equate fairly well with to escape, but the noun has another rather specialized meaning, when employed in: CIERRE TU ESCAPE, surely the most ignored traffic sign in all of Mexico. Any guesses? Well, the escape refers to the exhaust system of a truck, which the driver is supposed to close when traveling through a built-up area. Closing the exhaust escape increases fuel consumption, and many truck drivers prefer to leave it open. Hence those machine-gun-like noises you hear late at night on the main roads into town. In another context, cierra tu escape, por favor might serve as a kinder, gentler version of cierra tu boca.

Bill Gallacher is compiling a dictionary of Spanish words and phrases potentially confusing to English speakers. Selections will appear as a bi-weekly column in Atención.