out-age everyone in the room by at least a decade. Did we just not do enough partying when we were younger? Are we trying to make up for lost time and the fact that we had children when we were in our early 20s? Did all the other baby-boomers get kidnapped by the x-generation who think our age group has a lot of money? (We were spared, because they know we don't have any.) If so, where did they hide all those senior citizens--in those old abandoned brick buildings in Syracuse?
But we are meeting one of my former students at Punk’s, Mark. Mark is 21, and he will drink anything anywhere with almost anyone. He can guide us through any social nuances we may have missed during our previous encounters with younger adults. Do men still shake hands? Does the old guy buy the younger one the first round, or is it the other way around?
Plus, do they have any strange customs in Candor, NY that we have not seen? I've never been there in the dark. Do you have to drink beer there or would a nice chardonnay be out of the question? Am I expected to break dance to any Michael Jackson music they play, or can I beg off? I'm wearing cords; am I overdressed? I just don't know. Maybe Mark doesn't know either; he's from Syracuse. We don't want to offend anyone. In hindsight, I probably should have arranged to have the white-haired lady who cut my hair in Candor last week meet us there. I tipped her $2, so she would help. She would know everyone and could introduce us around. Man, now I am really nervous.
several hours later.........
We went, we saw, we conquered.
to be continued..........
Punk’s Place: did we make it home?
On Saturday, Management, Mark and I went to our new favorite bar/club in Candor, NY--Punk's Place. Mark had gotten there before us and reported that the 2-7 crowd had just left. You know what I'm talkin bout--the guys who sit in a bar all afternoon on a Saturday and drink. A few scary characters, but nothing we haven't seen in bars from Korea to Costa Rica. I will join them some Saturday for a while; has to be some good material for a book there.
But by 8, an entirely different crowd appeared. I was completely surprised that the average age of this clientelle was about 45. Maybe I was wrong about all the senior citizens being locked up in abandoned buildings in Syracuse by younger people. Maybe it was the other way around. Or, the older group made the younger ones stay home and babysit. Or, there are no longer any young people left in Candor; they all moved to Ithaca. Maybe Candor is comprised of people under 18 and over 40. I will explore the demographics of Candor further when we attend the Fall Festival there next weekend. I should have pumped the lady who cut my hair last week for this information.
Almost everyone there came as a couple. Where are all the swinging singles you are supposed to find in a place like this? What if I had been single and I wanted to dance with someone? Mark came stag. What in the world was he supposed to do? We ate our reubens, drank some beer, and listened to one set of the band, which was excellent, by the way. I hate about 90% of the bands I hear these days, but these guys (Giant Steps) were really good musicians. I barely had to break dance at all, but I understand why the word "break" is included in the name of that dance form.
Management and I left about 10:30, so maybe the youngsters came after that. Baby boomers, the custom these days is not to even go out until 11 or so. If you come before that, you look desperate. You have to walk into these places like you don't really care if you are there or not. Then, order a beer like you were asking to borrow a pencil. No big deal. You don't really care if you drink or not. Look around like you don't really see anyone but, in actuality, you are scoping EVERYONE out. Very kewl. You might leave at any minute, and they would hate to see you go. Your leaving would be a big loss. Everyone would follow you out the door, bar revenues would collapse for the night, and the band would take an extra long break. In the old days, you could smoke a cigarette during this initial phase of your night and you would look very James Dean-like. Now, you have to chew gum and you look very Goldie Hawn-like. But these are the times in which we live.
Fender-bender in Costa Rica
I stayed remarkably calm throughout the entire event; my wife was a bit less so. When I saw that motorcyclist fly off his cycle onto the trunk of a parked car, my heart stopped for a minute. I was turning right into a parking space without my turn signal on, he was passing me on the right, so there was plenty of blame to go around. Fortunately, he was physically all right.
The damage was minimal, mostly lights on all vehicles concerned, but the official reporting took half a day. We waited in the center of Uvita, a coastal Costa Rican town, until the police and an insurance guy from a town 90 minutes away arrived to fill out all the reports. I was instructed by the transito that I could show up in court in Ciudad Cortez within eight days, but my car rental company told me that they will do that; that is why I signed all those papers when I got the Nissan 4x4 on day 1.
After all these years of driving in my favorite country, it finally happened. Nice that it didn't occur during one of those times when I was driving over the Cerro de la Muerte in the dark, in the fog, with trucks passing on blind curves, with a thousand feet of drop off the side. That would have ruined my year. I guess this is why I have never been a fan of cars or of driving. I learned at an early age how these machines can change your life forever.
When a fender-bender happens in the states, it is inconvenient, but it is really not that big of a deal. If your vehicle is undrivable, we take it to the shop and we get around some other way for a while. We take a cab or a bus or our neighbor who has a car delivers us where we need to go. Heck, most of us have a second car anyway, so we use that one until the first one is repaired. But in places like Costa Rica, it is a big deal to have your only mode of transportation down. Bus transport in the capital is great, but not out here in the boonies. Most ticos do not own a car or truck, some have a motocycle or a bike, and most walk nearly everywhere. So this guy who richoched off my rental car will not be able to drive his “moto” until he gets the money to fix it properly. Life gets instantly more difficult---to get to work, to get to market, to conduct business at the bank. (He will apparently receive insurance money, but it will take months. I will have to pay for damages to the rental car up to the deductible amount.)
You could gauge how important this incident was in the daily life of a tico because of all the locals who stopped by to get the story. The cyclist must have described his version of what happened a dozen times to friends and relatives while we waited for the authorities. When gringos passed by, they barely noticed. I didn't get to explain to anyone what happened. There was an American eyewitness, however, who was drinking coffee only a few feet in front of where the accident occurred. Terri Peterson gladly came to my rescue and volunteered to be a witness, if necessary. Turns out she runs eco-tours from the southern part of the country, so this is my chance to give her a plug.
But from the crowd of ticos, you would have thought there were 2-3 bodies lying on the pavement instead of some pieces of broken glass and plastic. Fortunately, the owner of the parked car was a guy named Eddie that I had just met 15 minutes before at the nearby gas station. He had lived in the states for 16 years, so he served as my interpreter with authorities. My Spanish is perfectly fine in a bar or restaurant, but explaining a car accident to the police is another matter. All in all, I guess it made for an interesting morning for Uvitans.
In the mid-80s, we lived in a mountaintop village in Costa Rica with our three children for a year. We had no car, so we walked everywhere. It was really work to get food and to do errands. And then, whatever you bought, you had to carry home. After a while, we bought a horse, and life got immensely easier. I lost 25 pounds that year, and I was not overweight in the least when I got there. Can you say emaciated?
So I feel badly that I caused, or was involved, in a disruption of the normal flow of events in this man's life. The accident gave me something to write about; it
