by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

I had moved twice in three weeks. I was only four days resident in my new apartment. It was Thursday, and I was under the usual, intense pressure to get Lokkal's Friday newsletter published. The phone beeped. It was my friend Veronica messaging to ask if I would come "mañana" and stay at her place for four or five days to dog-sit Canela.

Veronica and I were a couple for seven years. That ended almost three years ago, but I'm still in love with her dog.

With boxes still all over my new home I had been looking forward to getting the place somewhat in order. But Veronica is on vacation from her job as a school teacher, and she had an opportunity to go with some friends to a guitar festival in Patzcuaro and, as I say, I'm still in love with her dog.

That last thing I wanted to do was to put things into boxes and bags and pack up my car again. But that's just what I did with what I thought I would need for the next five days (food, toiletries, electronic devices and clothes, both clean and dirty - Vero's washing machine is much larger than the one here). After already having very recently packed all my things up twice, the process brought on a mild post-traumatic stress, reminiscent of the way that the food which made you sick becomes repellant to you for weeks or months after the illness.

Finally, after hanging my bicycle from a bike rack on the back of the car, early Friday afternoon I drove over to her place in colonia Allende. The dog, outside on the front patio, recognizing the sound of my car, was overjoyed to see me. Where else do I get such a welcome?

After an extended, very physically session of saying hello, and then my stowing away the perishables in the fridge, our first order of business, was to take a bicycle ride together down the hill of Cinco de mayo (then along Las Moras and down again on Guadiana) and then back up, with me rolling and Canela trotting alongside. As with all things, Canela is really good about this, obeying voice commands when it's time to cross a street, and staying up on the sidewalk, usually.

The next day, Saturday, we took another bike ride, this time stopping to shop at the Saturday Market. I put a collar on her, so if we did get separated people would see that she wasn't a street dog, but I didn't bring a leash. She's very good about minding her own business.

Monday, we went for another ride. The local (Mexico City) team of a Korean energy master, whose workshop I've been promoting, asked me if I would post some flyers for the event around town. So, late on that pleasantly overcast morning, Canela and I were off again, pedaling and trotting up to and around el Centro, where she was, as always, very well-behaved.

I can't announce the thing yet, but on our way back home, feeling very good about finding places to post a dozen flyers, I stopped in at a business and, introducing myself, spoke with a woman, whose participation will be key to Lokkal's increasing success, here in San Miguel and in other cities. She loved Lokkal. It was just what she was looking for. She would recommend it to her colleagues, write endorsements for it and get her colleagues to write endorsements. The fact that she was a dog-lover and that leash-less Canela was behaving herself so perfectly, clinched the deal. What a good dog.

I work too much, spending too much time staring from the same focal distance at the computer screen. It's ruined my vision. I should take more breaks. In my new home I've positioned my work space so that the large living-room window with its panoramic view frequently distracts me from my work. At Veronica's the dog serves the same purpose, staring up at me, hoping to persuade me that it's time to go for another walk.

I've noticed that more than my cat, Fellini, likes food, he likes to be fed. Getting food triggers the same feel-good hormones he gets hunting, catching, torturing and devouring a mouse. Canela has a similar, primal, hunting reaction when she finds scraps of food on the street. For me a walk is a walk. But for Canela it is a culinary tour.

Last Tuesday was a fast day for the Jews, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which happened twice on that same date (the 9th of the Hebrew month Av) some 650 years apart. Late that afternoon, moved by Canela's imploring eyes, I abandoned my strategy of conserving calories and took her on our second walk of the day. We had strolled a long way down Cinco de mayo almost to la Salida a Celaya, when a friend driving up the street stopped his car and said hello.

The traffic being very light, and my friend being very interesting, I encouraged him to pull over and talk for a while, which he did. His "illegally" parked car caused some slight impediment to the flow of cars, he observed, "I don't like when other people do this." But the real blockage was caused by the ice cream man pushing his bulky, orange tricycle up the hill.

After 20 minutes of pleasant conversation, I invited my friend to give calorically-challenged me a ride back up the hill while Canela exercised herself, running alongside the car (a game she is used to), mostly up on the sidewalk, except when we had to give a wide berth to the ice cream man still pushing his tricycle.

Veronica came back, yesterday, Wednesday, late in the afternoon, delighted with her trip. I had been gradually packing up my stuff that day, and now finished, again somewhat stressfully:

A) because I had left my use of Veronica's hand-held vacuum to clean my car (transporting 30 plants twice gets messy) for the last minute, B) because I had three stops to make, and a dinner guest coming over at 6:00, and C) because I am just tired of moving my things around in bags and boxes.

I got home, as it turned out, with just enough time before my guest arrived (mercifully late), to bring everything in from the car and straighten the place up a little; placing all the boxes that weren't there already into the back bedroom, and closing that door, and giving a light sweep and mop to the kitchen floor; the white tiles are nice, but they really show the dirt.

The beer was already cold when I bought it, on one of my stops on the way home. The red sauce, made earlier that day at Veronica's, needed only the addition of mushrooms and zucchini while the pasta cooked.

The rabbis say, "Change your place, change your destiny." And, indeed, my life has changed. Packing everything up (two times in three weeks) has allowed things to reemerge in a new configuration. The rabbis also say, "As below so above," and, true enough, corresponding to my new apartment's panoramic vista, my psychological / spiritual horizon is much wider. The world stretches out before me. What will I make of it?

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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