OUTSKIRTS OF TOWN BLUES
By E.G. BRADY

It was my wife’s idea to build a house an hour’s bus ride from the Golden Zone. Here in Mexico they have a word “mamitis” which refers to a common condition among Mexican women who suffer great anxiety pains if they move further than a stone’s throw away from their mothers. Luckily, my mother in law has always been very nice to my face, and she still holds out hope that I will somehow, someday be baptized Catholic and thus acquire a soul and become fully human. So we get along great, and it’s always a hoot when she drops by morning, noon and night to keep us informed about all the relatives’ fascinating medical problems, gently scold us for raising our children wrong, and show us all the secret herbs and bat wings she has collected for her cauldron... Under different, more normal circumstances she might be a nuisance, but where we live, she doesn’t even make the Top Ten Annoyances list. BB King sings about moving to the outskirts of town to get far away from the iceman, the milkman and the mailman. I wonder just how much further out I’d have to move to get away from the peanut man. This guy has a baritone like a bull-horned foghorn, you can hear him for miles, and he wanders in circles around our hill booming out one word- “rui-DOOOOO!!!!!” Over and over. All day long. This is (appropriately enough) the Spanish word for noise, and for some unfathomable reason in local jargon means “Stale, moldy
peanuts for sale.” Then there is the water truck whose horn is drowned out by the brakes, which sounds like two thousand blackboards being scratched by ten thousand fingernails. Worst of all is the choir of roosters and their harems that skulk around my window and haven’t even the decency to wait until dawn before they start stabbing me in the eardrums with their shrill staccato versions of Reveille. But they keep coming back. Oh, to be back in the U.S., where you can keep a 12-gauge around the house to defend yourself from such invasions! Then there are the hot-blooded neighbors who express affection by screaming at each other. Also, the candy cart man who whistles like an ambulance siren, and the nice folks across the street, who have one helluva sound system, but only one badly recorded cassette tape to play, which includes Seasons in the sun, Uptown Girl and that classic song that asks the musical question, where oh where can my baby be? Come to think of it, maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have a shotgun. Not being a morning person, listening to this cacophony as dawn spreads her rosiness across the sky drives me stark raving ape. I feel tortured like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, where he keeps waking up to Sonny and Cher singing I got You Babe. Well almost. But this is not a movie, this is something I have to live with. Every darn day. Oh, well, at least there’s a bright side: I don’t need an alarm clock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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