The rear of my new home
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by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

This is my last night in the apartment I have lived in since I moved to San Miguel, almost thirteen years ago. Arriving on November 17, 2011, by Thanksgiving I had found it and moved in. My ex-wife was quite willing to put me up for a longer stretch of time. She told me that my ex-mother-in-law remarked, "He got an apartment so soon?" which I took as a dig at my ex-wife, who, as I say, was, and still is, the soul of hospitality.

I've described this apartment, here at the end of a dead-end alley behind the church in San Antonio, as "bien mexicano," very Mexican. Built without a plan, haphazardly, bit by bit, on a low budget, by people who took no pride in their work, it has a cobbled-together feel, to put it charitably. The floors are not all on one level, containing surprising, even dangerous, steps up and down. The ceilings sag, and contain rough spots that even heavy texturing cannot completely hide. Then, there's the plumbing.

Recently, with the change of residence looming, I'm seeing the place in a very different light. And, as part of this revisioning, it has dawned on me that I have a perverse affinity for such ramshackle "architecture" and "design," if you can use those terms to describe it..

Lake Terramuggus
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When I was a young boy, my family had a cottage at Lake Terramuggus about 30 minutes away from our suburban home in West Hartford, Conneticut. The place was old and not lived in. It was small, shut up and musty, containing a cramped kitchen, a living room, a single bedroom, and a wrap-around, enclosed porch. I remember my sister napping as a baby in the bedroom. I remember tumbling off the sofa with my brother through the window that opened, rather inexplicably to me then, from the living room onto the porch. I remember people in the kitchen, but I don't remember anyone ever sitting down or doing anything else in the living room. Only thirty-minutes away from our suburban home, we never passed the night there.

The place was always an outdoor affair. A weekend summertime magnet for both sides of our large, extended family (Mom and Dad both had a lot of siblings), there were often a lot of uncles, aunts, and cousins around. The kitchen was used for some food preparation, but meals, as was the case with everything else, were always outside, on the picnic table or, if there were a lot of guests, a blanket or chair on the lawn. The grill, set on bricks over a firepit on the corner of the property, got a lot of use, with sweet corn baking in the embers.

The lake cottage had a musty, shut up smell. And by pleasant childhood association, I still can't help but relish the scent of fresh air mixing with stale. Sometimes I can get a whiff of that exiting my apartment or standing close to a window.

Our beach
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When I was still a young boy, we gave up the lake cottage and started summering at the Connecticut shore. Forty-five minutes away in another direction, there we did spend the nights, every night from the last week of June through Labor Day. Those beach cottages were also quite basic, somewhat unfinished or bare-bones, nothing like our suburban house. Most ceiling lights were operated by a hanging cord. Their sinks and toilets were vintage. Their non-bearing walls, between rooms, were just a sheet of paneling, with a single horizontal two-by-four securing the sheet along its middle.

My romance with substandard housing continued in various farmhouses around the University of Connecticut, and then, at naturopathic school, in a dome in Sonoma County's idyllic Coleman Valley. Up in Vermont the place I built wasn't substandard, but it was rustic, and, despite some great features, never really finished.

So, predisposed by happy childhood memories to roughing it, I have found myself for the last 12 and two thirds years, until tomorrow, in a near-derelict near-hovel at the end of a dead-end here in the mountains of Mexico. But recently things have changed.

The two advantages of my situation, cheap rent and privacy, evaporated when my landlady returned from the hospital with a new hip and took up residence, here on the first-floor, in a room that was formerly my office, generously yielded to her in favor of her convalescence, by yours truly. I could make do with my diminished floorspace. I could soundproof the door between what still is my living room and what was my office. But I can't soundproof or make do with my landlady's two noisy caretakers, A and her boyfriend. The worst of it is them parading through the patio, right outside my windows, on their way to and from the second-floor, the landlady's former abode, where they have taken up residence. And the worst of the worst is their calling out to each other, loudly yelling, one outside upstairs and one inside downstairs or vice versa. Installing two roof dogs up on the second-floor roof is also very ghetto. But I don't really hear the poor creatures except when they are half-starved or a thunderstorm is rolling in.

My once sacred space
*

With the office I was paying a rent of $5500/month, a steal really. Without the office, I expected to pay less. "Less space. Less rent," seemed obvious enough to me. But A wanted me to sign a rental contract for $7500, and put down a deposit for that much again, which is especially insulting after the many improvements I've made to the place over the years. Really, in terms of the physical space and what things cost these days, it might be worth it. But a home is not just a floorplan; it is the sanctuary, the privacy, and I've lost that psychic space.

This week I've been moving, transporting my 12-years of accumulation from colonia San Antonio to the house a friend, J, is renting on the far northern edge of town. Since Monday each day, after packing, I take a carload up to colonia Insurgentes and spend the day setting things in order. Today I hired a truck and moved all the big and/or heavy things.

Ram Dass said that there were a number of boxes that he moved around with him from house to house, boxes that he never opened. I have a few of those myself. I'm going to give away some things I'll never use. How many sets of sheets do I really need?

My friend, J, who invited me to come live with him rent-free is directing a vampire movie, a Mexican version of a popular European franchise. The billionaire German producer and his girlfriend, after reading J's screenplay, had trouble sleeping for two nights. The German, jetting around the world, is late paying J the next installment for the project. J, already behind on the rent, is counting on that money to fend off his landlady, who is, understandably, already irritable. I suppose it's hard for a billionaire to imagine how $15,000us dollars could be important to someone.

It's good to be out of my former apartment, to be getting out. With the new regime, this once charmingly quirky corner of San Miguel, like somewhere out of a Garcia Marquez novel, has rapidly become a slum. Roof dogs now defecate, whine and bark up on the roof where once I used to do my morning yoga.

The view out back
*

The new house is wonderful. It literally backs onto the vast open space north of town, with cliffs, caves and an abandoned hacienda. The view is life-giving.

The new house's architecture and J himself are beautiful and accommodating. But, with the uncertain finances, I've had cause, once or twice, to wonder what I've gotten myself into. I'm going to keep most of the boxes packed and see how it goes. Who knows, maybe I'll get a part in the movie.

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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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