A week before Thanksgiving 13 years ago I moved to México. Since then I've adapted to many of México's eccentricities.
Even the noise doesn't get to me like it used to. México, or maybe it's old age, has taught me how to wait: "This too shall pass." Then, with no roosters crowing in my backyard, I've been lucky to live in relatively quiet neighborhoods.
Recently though, visually I've come under assault, and at close range. This, from a new, wholly unexpected manifestation of Mexican exuberance, Christmas lights. Now before you accuse me of being Scrooge or the Grinch let me plead my case.
I work in front of a seven-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling, second-floor window up here on the hill that forms the northern edge of town. The view goes on for miles, drawing my eyes therapeutically away from their cramped, fixed staring at this computer screen. Even eyes need to stretch.
During this cold season, the sun pleasantly slants in, perfectly warming me while I work. At night I look out, communing with the comforting Mexican night, sprinkled distantly with the lights of the city.
I didn't notice when he put them up, a month ago already. So, it was a shocking surprise when a set of Christmas lights strung over the street between my neighbor's house and mine flashed on for the first time, especially as all of them blinked on and off in a chaotic, high-speed display.
My reaction was primal, like when after nicking your finger with a knife, you look down and see bright red blood beginning to flow. A similar primitive response was triggered in me when that aggressive spectacle turned on. My instincts registered, "Something is very wrong." But unlike a single nick of a finger, the Christmas lights were a continuous attack on my senses, an ongoing gashing of the silent, holy night.
In the box, in the store the lights are soothing, almost hypnotic, even with the device that controls the rate of their blinking set to maximum. But strung out across the road, without any relationship between several hundred little colored bulbs madly pulsing on and off several times per second, the effect is crazy-making, especially when you cannot look away.
Then, again making matters worse, my largely sideways view greatly compacts the display, amplifying its garrish effect. Then, each of the many dangling individual strands of lights (the "icicle" configuration) sways independently in the breeze (or blows erratically in the wind), thus greatly compounding the visual cacophony, bringing on motion sickness in the well and seizures in the epileptic.
I restrained my first panicked reaction, and did not go out and cut them down. Instead I strategically hung a shade so as to blot the offense out of my view.
Each night since, minus the panic, I've done the same. Well, not each night, as mercifully sometimes they forget to turn them on. And not all night, as sometimes they are late to turn them on, or early turning them off. They being his extended family with whom my neighbor shares his house.
I will admit that now and then over the course of the last month I've found myself admiring the spectacle, but only for a moment or two. Any longer than that is a horror worthy of a torture chamber: "Please, please, please, make it stop!"
I started sleeping with my bedroom door closed, because the hyper-accelerated light show reflects in off the living room wall and wakes me up. It's hard to sleep in a discotec, even one without a sound system.
My neighbor works as a driver for a car service. Some weeks ago, returning from my afternoon bicycle ride, I found him outside working on his car.
After making some small talk, including praising his Christmas lights, I asked him, as casually as I could, if he might turn down their velocity. I pointed out that there was another display of the same lights just down the street blinking much more slowly.
Most neighborly he agreed, but then pointed out that as the blinker control device was suspended midway in the display 15 feet over the road, resetting it would take some doing.
Well, Christmas was coming, and the holiday season had to end some time soon. After 13 years south of the border, I could tough it out. But then Christmas Eve delivered a present that I never would have wished for.
A more frontal view from my bedroom window *
Home alone, I looked up from my computer screen, when I became aware of another set of lights pulsing through my living room. Lifting my makeshift shade, I saw, in the street, in front of the open door of my neighbor's house, below the hateful Christmas lights, an ambulance parked with all its doors open.
Curious and concerned, I watched. After a few minutes I saw the attendants carry out my neighbor, the patriarch chauffeur, and put him in the ambulance.
The next day, when I asked one of his teenage granddaughters, she had no information about her grandfather's condition. The day after that, several stacks of folding chairs, ominously appeared just inside their front door, leaning against the wall. The day after that I noticed the tell-tale black ribbon over their door. Later, a tarp was strung from the house's front wall to accommodate those who would come to pay their last respects.
The second night of the wake, having offered my condolences to the widow earlier that day, I was roused from my work by a dissonant chorus of car horns, as if someone had just gotten married, getting louder as it came up our usually very untrafficked street. It turned out to be a parade of taxis and car service drivers come to pay a final tribute to my neighbor.
Staring out my window at the procession, I was touched. It was really quite an honor, especially considering that at 9pm on a Friday night they were all losing fares.
With the period of mourning, the Christmas lights are extinguished. Although México famously has a different attitude towards death, I expect that is the last of those festive lights for this season. Maybe next year, if I'm still here myself, if I catch them in time, as the main witness/victim of the spectacle, I can prevail upon the widow to slow down the lights' hellish rate of blinking.
I'm very sorry someone had to die for it to happen, but I'm glad to have back the darkness of night.
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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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