Anniversary of an Infarction

Blog Song for the Moment

"Condition of the Heart," Prince, Around the World in a Day, 1985

January 16th, 2006, Martin Luther King Day.  One of the worst years of my life had just ended--a year of a series of family and financial crises, capped by the termination of my visiting appointment at Wabash College.  Wabash did the right thing, I knew even then.  While I learned a great deal about teaching (and being a full-time academic) from my fellow faculty and many fine students, I'd become increasingly unhappy working with the cultists of all-male education, and their unspoken rule: If you can't praise the Wabash mission to the high hills, then keep your trap shut.  Still, I felt burned.  The college had used my work with students to raise money from alums, and I had done a lot of other service.  It was my bad though, not Wabash's, that I'd done so much service instead of doing what I should have done--research, writing, and finding another job.  Fortunately, a good friend from grad school days plucked me up and eased me into a visiting position at Albion College.

So on that day I was house-sitting for an Albion professor on sabbatical, in a place just a few blocks from the Albion campus.  Around two or three am, I woke up from a terrible dream.  My bedroom was upstairs, and I was there in the dream, but the room was now huge.  I lay on my bed in the middle of it, and I could see a dark doorway between my feet.  I heard a steady rhythm of booms downstairs, as if someone were pounding away on a timpani in the basement.  Then I noticed my chest was opened, as if it were a cardboard box, and when I looked over the one flap underneath my chin, I saw two arms trying to line my empty chest cavity with a white kitchen garbage bag.  They were making a hash of it, and I was irritated, and that drum downstairs kept banging away, and I hissed "Here, let me do it," and I grabbed the bag.  Then I woke up.

It seems so obvious now that some sort of myocardial event had just occurred, but I don't know if I had just experienced an infarction, or if it was yet to come (I love that word, infarction; the OED defines it as the "action of stuffing up or condition of being stuffed up," but for me it's a rude-sounding word that would likely make my grandkids giggle, a healthy giggle over a life-changing, or life-ending, event). I wandered around the house for a few hours, discombobulated.  I couldn't focus on anything, couldn't shake the dream from my head, nor the vague sense of dread--as if I were playing the Sesame Street game of "One of these things/is not like the other," and my life depended on it, yet unable to find the damn thing that didn't belong.

I ended up sitting on the back porch in the hushed, early morning dark, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette (I know, I know).  Finally, I decided to go to my office.  Work might erase the dream and the dread.  I remember bitter cold on that walk, though according to the Farmer's Almanac, even with wind chill, the temperature would have been the high teens or low twenties, which hardly qualifies as bitter to me.  About halfway there I suddenly felt as if I were walking in icy quicksand.  I felt no pain, no shortness of breath.  I just couldn't get my body to move.  I thought about sitting down on the curb, just rest a bit, but by then I must have been suspecting something was really wrong, I was beginning to get an idea of which thing that was not like the other.  I talked my body into moving again, and slowly crossed the short distance to my building, made it to my office, got online, and checked a website that gave a list of symptoms for heart attacks.

I knew I was at risk.  My two grandfathers had died in their 40s of heart disease.  Both my parents had high blood pressure, and so did I.  I smoked, and recently experienced a great deal of stress.  But I dithered.  I didn't want all the fuss of going to the hospital--I didn't want to appear a hypochondriac.  It may have been around eight am when I called a friend, and described what had happened.  He said get myself to an emergency room, call 911.  But this friend, god love him, tends to be an alarmist at times, and his anxiousness on my behalf only seemed to make me sink further into lassitude.  I didn't want the drama; I'd had enough of it already.

But after mulling it over a while longer, I thought, "Crap, let's just get this out of the way." I shuffled back to my house, got in the jeep, and drove to the emergency room in nearby Jackson.  Here my memory gets even more sketchy.  After describing my moment of quicksand to a nurse, there was a flurry of questions, blood drawn, an EKG, and then suddenly I was on a gurney getting shoved into an ambulance.  I woke up the next morning not knowing why I was in the hospital, or how I had gotten there.  Apparently the anesthesia they gave me had amnestic side effects, and I must have been on some sort of narcotic because when a doctor came in and told me that he had cleaned out the 99% blockage and placed a stent in my left descending artery--the widowmaker--I thought, "Well, how very interesting."  A bit later, or maybe it was before, a nurse checked the dressing over the plug in my groin, sealing the entrance point for the catheter.  If it opened, I might bleed to death in a couple of minutes.  As she checked me she asked me to warn her if I was going to cough or sneeze, and told me not to laugh, which, of course, I started to do.  I cannot remember what started me off, perhaps the bit of repartee we fell into while discussing my condition?  Or was it the absurdity of this rather attractive woman with her hands near my privates in a most unerotic tableaux?  Or it was the drugs still at work?  Whichever, her stern order to stop laughing worked.

Curiously, I did not know until my discharge that I had suffered a myocardial infarction, and it wasn't until a follow-up appointment with the cardiologist that I found out that the heart attack had left no permanent damage.  So I was fortunate (or blessed, depending on your views of providence) on a number of counts--1) walking into frigid air makes the heart work ever so much harder, and I made it to and from my office, and to the hospital, after two myocardial episodes; 2) that I even survived the heart attack(s?); and 3) no permanent damage.  We can add another.  According to my most recent stress test, my heart is in excellent condition.

I still often think of that dream, especially around MLK day.  I've done a little poking around in healthcare and medical journals, but can't seem to locate any studies the association between heart attacks and dream states and dread.  I don't think the dream caused the heart attack, of course, or that it predicted one, though it may have been my body, working through my subconscious, trying to tell me "Hey, Andy, we've got a problem."

An initial foray via Google brought me this tidbit from an Australian online health magazine:

Thomas Luscher told the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna that, although heart attacks occurred throughout the day, their incidence increased after midnight, and peaked between 3am and 5am.
"What's interesting is that this is when dreams become more frequent and vivid," said Dr Luscher, a cardiologist at the Zurich University Hospital.
"Maybe there's a link which should be investigated."

'Well, how very interesting,' but if important, why only one guy in Austria raising this issue and whose words get picked up by some Ezine for senior citizens in Australia?  

A longer search with academic search engines did not give me much more.  There's lots of stuff on connections between mental and emotional states and heart conditions--there's a US News and World Report article that sums this research up nicely, saying, for example, "It's long been known that acute emotional states--like rage, fear, or panic--can trigger cardiac events that literally 'scare you to death.'"  But this is still treating the mind and emotions as causal factors of a physical trauma.  I'm more interested in what the mind and heart are doing in response to such a trauma.

I'm sure there must be more work out there that my inexpert searches did not locate. If any of the two or three of you that happen to read this blog know of some leads, I'd welcome them.

And a belated happy Martin Luther King Day to you all.  My drama isn't comparable to the national trauma he lived, faced, and which killed him.

Peter Gabriel: Still Holding the Line

I first listened to Peter Gabriel my senior year in high school, thanks to my neighbor and fellow West Albanian, Pat Hawke, who was always giving me the heads up on new music.  He lent me Peter Gabriel, and I gave it a listen, but except for "Solsbury Hill" and "Here Comes the Flood," the album didn't really grab me. Gabriel's music wasn't very accessible to ears used to Supertramp, Kansas, and Fleetwood Mac. So I kind of forgot about Gabriel.  I ended up missing a lot of music coming out in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, partly because of my Christian fundy stage (1978-1981), and partly because I was off in Guatemala for Peace Corps (1984-88).  In between, I think I wasn't listening to much besides Bruce Cockburn. Anyway, it must have been 1989, we were living in the Lower East side then, and Margo and I went to see Say Anything, and there's that great scene with Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holding up a boom box blaring Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," trying woo back Diane Court (Ione Skye). That song did immediately grab me, and I remember later asking some friends if they knew who did that song.  They looked at me like I was an idiot and said it was Peter Gabriel.

So that got me into a Peter Gabriel kick, and though I haven't become an aficionado, I've gotten a lot of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure from his music over the past twenty years.  Recently, Gabriel released New Blood, a collection of covers of his 80s hits reinterpreted with classic orchestration.  I think the results are pretty uneven.  The orchestral intro to "In Your Eyes" sounded to me like a soundtrack to some bad Merchant Ivory knockoff, and the orchestration on "Red Rain," "Mercy Street," and "Solsbury Hill" seems just too delicate to fully deliver those powerful songs.

But I liked what Gabriel did with "San Jacinto," which is somewhere in my top 100 songs of all time.  According to an interview Gabriel did for the New Blood production,  the lyrics recall a conversation he had with an Apache man about the rite-of-passage he underwent to become a warrior.  This rite is juxtaposed with a commentary on the commodification and consumption of the Native North American culture that Gabriel witnessed in San Jacinto (in California, near Palm Springs).  Reminds me of my one visit to Kaneeta way back in 1979, which now lures people with this catchy slogan: "Escape to where the fun shines!"

Peter Gabriel, San Jacinto, IV (1982)

Listen to the original version and you will hear the four stanzas unfold in distinct ways, though a repeated melody of synthesized chimes connects the first three (lyrics below).  Gabriel starts off soft, his usually gravely voice smoothed.  Then there is the transition with female vocals saying something that I've never been able to figure out, but, anyway, the song continues to build, adding instrumentation and volume, until Gabriel shouts, as if from a mountaintop, "I hold the line!"  Heavy bass and dark horns make it all sound so dire, and he falters for a bit--"think I'm losing it"--before sweeping on to his declaration.  But holding the line is not about resistance, it's about survival.  And the last stanza is sung in a tone that suggests weariness more than confidence.

And I suppose that is what initially drew me to the song.  I didn't (and don't, or can't, really) identify with Gabriel's narrative posture as a Native North American, but musically the song seemed so close to how I've felt at times, of near losing it, of persevering without a great deal of confidence.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
San Jacinto lyrics
Thick cloud - steam rising - hissing stone on sweat lodge fire
Around me - buffalo robe - sage in bundle - rub on skin
Outside - cold air - stand, wait for rising sun
Red paint - eagle feathers - coyote calling - it has begun
Something moving in - I taste it in my mouth and in my heart
It feels like dying - slow - letting go of life

Medicine man lead me up through town - Indian ground - so far down
Cut up land - each house - a pool - kids wearing water wings - drink in cool
Follow dry river bed - watch Scout and Guides make pow-wow signs
Past Geronimo's disco - Sit 'n' Bull steakhouse - white men dream
A rattle in the old man's sack - look at mountain top - keep climbing up
Way above us the desert snow - white wind blow

I hold the line - the line of strength that pulls me through the fear
San Jacinto - I hold the line
San Jacinto - the poison bite and darkness take my sight - I hold the line
And the tears roll down my swollen cheek - think I'm losing it - getting weaker
I hold the line - I hold the line
San Jacinto - yellow eagle flies down from the sun - from the sun

We will walk - on the land
We will breathe - of the air
We will drink - from the stream
We will live - hold the line
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The new version keeps the compositional design of the original, but the orchestral instruments make the tone lighter, replacing somberness with a meditative spirit.  Gabriel has thirty more years on him, and perhaps he's too old, too wise, to wallow in direness.  The musical transition from the third to the fourth stanza is almost upbeat, but it soon returns to melancholy. In the last passage, as the flutes die out and the strings move into a minor key, we hear in the background labored breaths, and it feels to me as if now the issue is not just weariness, but loneliness.

However one interprets these musical texts, they are both beautifully rendered, and if you're a Peter Gabriel fan, New Blood deserves a listen, though it may not get your admiration.

Peter Gabriel, San Jacinto, New Blood (2011)

Stress and Snails

I have been incredibly stressed these past few months for a variety of the usual reasons--conflict at work, worries about family, aging, blah, blah, blah. . .


I had a routine stress test with my cardiologist last August, and she said, looking at the pictures of my heart at work, that she wouldn't have known from the evidence that I had suffered a heart attack.  Good news, she said, but added that I had to learn how to manage stress better--though I'd said little about that to her.  I guess she reads minds as well as hearts.


So I've been doing a few things to try to reduce stress.  Conveniently, reconstructive knee surgery in late July means I've been going to rehab twice a week, where the PTs work me over pretty well--the exercise has felt good.  And I try to get in for a massage session once a week.  My wife tells me that recent reports show that massage lowers blood pressure, and that, combined with increased exercise and quitting smoking (umm, well until last week), must explain the lowest blood pressure reading I've had in a long time at my recent doctor's visit, 118/60 (by the way, my family doctor, John Duhn, is the greatest; he listens well, explains well, and is fellow fan of universal, single payer healthcare).


Another thing I've started just recently is to sit down with a book of poetry while I eat breakfast.  I read this one a couple of days ago, in a collection that might make the more sophisticated poetry readers cringe, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times.  It's called "For a Five-Year-Old," by Fleur Adock, a New Zealander who ended up in England.  Turns out she was born the same year as my father, 1934.  Knowing that makes me read it as both the child and the parent.

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor, we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil. 

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

I had those snail moments, too, as a child: We are not the kind that hits others.  We are people for whom silliness is a virtue.  We are not to cheat at games, or throw tantrums when we lose.  We believe music to be beautiful and essential, along with wandering through forests, climbing mountains, and sleeping by rivers.  We absolutely do not, whether angry or not, call our best friend, a Japanese-American, a nip.


As a parent and grandparent, and watching my daughter raise two of her own, I am fully aware of the baggage we bring to raising children, and the detritus of daily life that swirls around our answers to a child's question, worry, or upset.  Lord knows I have had, and have, my inconsistencies--the little rages hovering around my moments of gentleness--and that I have betrayed and displayed my harsh edge, yet "that is how things are."  Or as Bruce Cockburn sings, "that's the burden of the angel-beast."


I treasure those childhood lessons, and that gives me hope that some of that treasure has been passed on despite myself.

WWJD? Bully a gay kid?

The anti-bullying law now under consideration in the Michigan statehouse includes language that "prohibits the law from being used to take action against people for a statement based on a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction."  Apparently, for some Michigan Republicans, God doesn't seem to mind bullies who pick on homosexuals.


Tea Party activist Rich Swier doesn't even think physical and emotional abuse of homosexual youth is bullying.  "It is peer pressure and is healthy."

It's all so bizarre.  Think about it.  If religious belief or moral conviction transform an abusive act into acceptable behavior, do agnostic and atheist kids get to shove fervent evangelical heads into toilets?  Does it free Green activists to shout belittling jibes at littering louses?  Do Jehovah Witnesses, when no one's looking, get to smash the sack lunches of good Christians who dutifully say the Pledge of Allegiance?


And as for Swier, who apparently also has it in for Muslims, what twisted prism is he looking through that transforms a sick bully into picture of health?


Thankfully, the Republican Speaker of the House opposes this clause, and hopefully will get it stricken from the text.



[Source: Buckfire and Buckfire.com]

A modest proposal for reducing unemployment

Obama's fiscal infusion approach to reducing unemployment is simply too little, too late.  I have a better idea.  Reduce unemployment by reducing the number of job seekers--present and future--through what we can call "enhanced natural attrition."  There are already some proposals out there that can we can use to accomplish this.





1) Enhanced natural attrition through liberating the environment for entrepreneurs.  Governor Rick Perry is a big advocate of this, arguing that onerous federal environmental regulations raise the cost of production to such a point that employers can't increase production and hire more workers.  He's right, but what we also get from ending those oppressive protections of the environment is the side benefit of increased externalities--companies pass on the cost of production (the cost of say, air or water pollution) to the public space, where workers live.  Studies show that typically it's the poor and marginalized workers who end up living in the more toxic spaces, so we can enhance the natural attrition of this population by increasing the toxicity of places where they live.  With shorter life spans and greater infant mortality rates, we reduce the number of present and future job seekers, with the added benefit of reducing applicants for this or that social and welfare service.  And our brave, risk-taking entreprenuers, with lower costs of production, will make more money so they can once again own that second, third, or fourth home, thus boosting the real estate and home construction sectors.  Just one of many possible multiplier effects!


2) Enhanced natural attrition through more efficient healthcare delivery.  Some of you liberal naysayers out there will likely point out that increased toxicity will lead to greater public healthcare costs.  I'm a step ahead of you.  It won't if we, as Michelle Bachman so wisely advocates, dump Obamacare.  We need to liberate health care insurance companies, drug companies, and all for-profit entrepreneurs in healthcare provision from onerous rules that make them offer services to populations that can't afford them.  We can enhance the natural attrition of this population of job-seekers that can't take care of themselves, thereby reducing the number of job-seekers, and those who probably can't even work anyway.  What a plus!




3) Enhanced natural attrition through improving national security.  The neocons, like those at The Project for a New American Century, had it right.  We are a benevolent hegemon, and need to stop apologizing for unilateral intervention where needed to protect the picket lines of empire, and nip evil regimes in the bud before they flower into real threats.  We've done Afghanistan and Iraq; it's time for Iran (and damn, we missed our chance in Libya, though Syria's still a possibility).  We can enhance the natural attrition of working class folks who happen to be in the armed forces through expanding the scope of armed action in the Near East.  What liberals might sneeringly dismiss as a quagmire is really a wonderful opportunity to reduce the number of job-seekers (and future ones they might produce), and, get this, with all the privatization of security-related operations, we simultaneously create more jobs.  It's perfect!


Write your Congressperson today!  Let's abandon the fantasy of increasing the number of jobs available and instead demand enhanced natural attrition of job-seekers!

Perry's Pre-Presidental Prayer Rally

Picture from NPR

Texas Governor Rick Perry's decision to attend "The Response," a prayer rally held yesterday at Reliant Stadium in Houston, has provoked another round of debate over the role of Christian evangelicals in politics. Perry and rally organizers maintain the event's "entirely religious."

I know there are people, critics, that say this is just some political event," Perry said. "Well it's not that. This event is not about supporting some organization...It's going to be very simple...It's just a time to call out to [God] and that's it and lift Jesus’ name up on high."

Event organizers on the call stressed that the event is designed to be entirely religious. They said attendees will be encouraged not to wear political shirts or bring political signs to the event.

"This is not an issue of who's going to be our president...It absolutely has nothing to do with that at all. it's about making Jesus king...," said Jim Garlow, a California Pastor.

But the absence of campaign material or speech hardly renders the rally apolitical. Governor Perry is using his political position and stature to encourage attendance to a large public event, in the context of his possible run for the GOP presidential nomination. Also, the full title of the rally has obvious if vague political ramifications--"A call to prayer for a nation in crisis--as does Perry's video invitation to attend the rally:

. . .As an elected leader, I'm all too aware of government's limitations when it comes to fixin' things that are spiritual in nature. That's where prayer comes in, and we need it more than ever. With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis, people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help. . .

To assert that government cannot do anything about certain economic, social, and moral problems is a political claim, as is the diagnosis of those problems--that their source is spiritual. Moreover, as NPR reports, the homophobic American Family Association (AFA) is paying for the event, and is bringing in some evangelical heavyweights with big political chops--James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family), Richard Land (principal lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention), and Tony Perkins (president of the Family Research Council). The AFA has also invited a small cast of luminaries of the fringe Christian right:

--John Hagee, a San Antonio evangelist whose endorsement was rejected by John McCain in 2008 because of Hagee's anti-Catholic statements.

--Mike Bickle, a founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., who has called Oprah Winfrey a "pastor of the harlot of Babylon.

--Alice Patterson, founder of Justice at the Gate, in San Antonio, who has written that there is a "demonic structure behind the Democratic Party."

--And then there's John Benefiel, head of the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, who once said this about the Statue of Liberty: "You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor.

So arguing that the event is all religion and zero politics is, at best, disingenuous, and predictably, critics of the religious right are all over this--the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS), Right Wing Watch, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, or watch Stephen Colbert's send-up here.

Colbert wryly notes that the prayer rally "doesn't cross the line between church and state; it erases it," echoing the ACLU's worry that taxpayer money might be contributing to the event and, or the AUSCS's argument that Governor Perry is using his office to promote a particular religion. Really, though, the criticism is about the policies and people Perry associates with by sponsoring the rally, such as the Right Wing Watch's reference to prayer rally speakers as Perry's "extremist allies. . .who are dedicated to bringing far-right religious views, including degrading views of gays and lesbians and non-Christians, into American politics."

Is this prayer rally really a big deal? I doubt the ACLU's Freedom of Information request for rally records will reveal use of taxpayer funds, and it really amounts to a kind of nuisance suit. Whether Perry is throwing his governorship behind a particular religion is a stronger point. He did make his invitation as "an elected leader," and did invite all other 49 state governors. And if you check out what The Response states as its core beliefs, this event promotes a standard orthodox evangelical Christian position. That is, it's sectarian.

But does Perry's sponsorship of and participation in the prayer rally mean that he put the weight of the government of Texas behind a particular religion? Did he violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment, or the "Freedom of Worship" section of the Texas Bill of Rights?

Supreme Court "incorporation" decisions since the 1947 Emerson v Board of Education case have made state and local governments subject to First Amendment religion clauses, though disagreement remains over whether the Establishment clause means no government involvement with religion (an ironclad wall between church and state), or whether it means government can be involved in some way as long as it does not promote a particular religion (a porous wall). In practice, clearly the latter interpretation has held sway, with government activities beginning with prayers and monies going to Congressional and military chaplains. Perry didn't do all that much different than from our presidents have done since Eisenhower--preside over an annual prayer breakfast, except, granted, The Response was hardly ecumenical in comparison.

Texas language is a little more explicit:

No human authority ought, in an case whatever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.

So the question goes back to whether Perry's action constituted a Texas government preference for a particular "religious society or mode of worship." I'm no constitutional expert, and am even less familiar with Texas constitutional issues, but it seems to me that Perry violated the spirit of law, but not the letter. He sponsored and participated in The Response as an individual, not as the state of Texas. Still, he didn't seem to make an effort to make it clear he was going as an individual, and not as a governor with presidential ambitions. And inviting all other governors to attend a public event associated with religious leaders that have an obvious political agenda makes his "what's-the-big-deal" position rather dubious. Perry's either obtuse, or just simply dishonest (thank goodness obtuseness and dishonesty aren't unconstitutional, or a lot of us would be in trouble).

Still, I think the critics were too strident. They only strengthen the seeming new norm of vindictive politics--we win the argument by either shouting louder, or telling opponents to shut up, that they do not get to assemble, speak, or practice their religion if it contradicts our policy positions. The critics also confirm what some Christian fundamentalists have complained about--that they are victims of marginalization.

So, critics should have simply reported on Perry's pre-presidenital-bid prayer gig, and not said 'you can't do that.' The reporting's enough. He has clearly shown his cards: he's siding with the militantly anti-gay crowd; he doesn't get the pluralism of the US religious landscape, evidently thinking our crisis is the result of not enough Americans sharing his particular fundamentalist faith; and he apparently thinks public piety will make up for economic and social policies that have left so many lives in disarray.

Shamelessly paraphrasing Proverbs 29: 18, his campaign will perish not for a lack of a vision, but because of it.

Gentrification, Grifters, and Graffiti

Me with wife, Margo, and cat, Raymundo, in our first Peace Corps site, San Carlos Alzatate, Guatemala, 1985

When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala some twenty-five years ago (1984-1988), Sexta Avenida in Guatemala City's Zona 1 was my main route on foot to anything I needed or wanted to do in the capital. I'd usually stay at the Chalet Suizo on 14th street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, kitty-corner from the Parque Concordia, and right across the street from another one of Ubico’s medievalist fantasies, the Palacio de la Policia Nacional, a castle of crenellated walls, bastions, and bartizans, apparently awaiting the onslaught of commie catapults. I remember the twelve blocks on Sexta Avenida from 18th Street to the Parque Central as a river of bumper-to-bumper traffic and sidewalks streaming with pedestrians picking their way through vendors selling newspapers, used textbooks, trinkets, porn rags, candy, and fruit slices. And there was that heady mix of exhaust, piña and piss, with small splashes of women's perfume and men's cologne.

The picture on the left was taken in 1987, early in the morning before the normal traffic arrived. You can see the cigarette/candy vendor rolling his wares to wherever he’s going to open up shop. The Lux was the place to go for second-run movies—and (I shake my head at the memory), a place where you could still smoke inside the theater while watching the movie. Up the street was the then swankier Capitol theaters mall. The other way, The Pan American for breakfast, when flush with cash and willing to deal with the dour servers who resented scruffy Peace Corps volunteers asking for umpteen coffee refills. For dinner, Picadilly’s or maybe the Fu Lu Sho (I felt a pang of kinship with Francisco Goldman’s character, Roger Graetz, from Long Night of White Chickens, who also hung out in those places in the 1980s). There might be Kandy’s or Pops afterward for ice cream. But usually I was on this road to get to the Peace Corps office several blocks beyond the National Palace, or hit my favorite librerías and ferreterías in the area for office supplies and hardware. And Café León on 8th Avenue was mandatory, one of the few places downtown back then to find export-quality coffee.

La Sexta wasn’t much different during my research stints in 1992 and 1994, but now, as you can see in the picture on the right, it has been transformed. As I reported last year (Goats in Guate), the city decided to turn the avenue into a pedestrian mall with a bike lane and route for a rapid transit bus (the bus service was not yet running as of early July). The Lux now features soft porn flicks, and the Cine Capitol (below left) is now a megapaca—basically a thrift store selling used clothing imported from the US and elsewhere. There are pacas all along the way, odd notes in an urban renovation designed to make an area more upscale (the missing letter in Capitol hits that note again). If you want to catch movies worth watching now in Guate, you have to head out to zone 10. The restaurants and ice cream shops of my past are still there for the most part, except for the German place where I used to get my periodic dose of potato pancakes; it burned down years ago. But now there are a lot more US fast food joints and spendy coffee shops and restaurants. Café León held on too, but now is a pleasant Starbucky’s kind of café instead of a no-frills store.

The city cleared the streets of vendors, shunting them up in a long row of stalls on the already crowded and competitive 18th Street—I don’t know what happened to those who couldn’t afford the rents. Gentrification has its price—and as is the case everywhere it seems, it’s the poor that pay a chunk of it (you can find a brief story about La Sexta and its renovation here).

There are still many office supply and bookstores on adjacent streets, with dusty, faded window displays that may not have been changed since Ubico’s time, though sadly, far fewer used bookstores where I made some great finds in the 1990s. My favorite hardware store, El Globo, is still there. During my Peace Corps days, I’d walk in, eye all the sultry steel and glittering aluminum hanging from floor to ceiling in this huge room, and feel for a moment that I really was handy with a spade, a master of the hammer, a wonder with the machete--I might just need that wood plane, or a roll of barbed wire. For something, I was sure. Then I’d start the four-step process of getting what I really came for, like a little box of nails, and receive another of my many lessons in Guatemala on how to get over my often unreasonable impatience (Worker 1: helped me locate product, if I could remember the Spanish term; Worker 2: took my order at the counter; Worker 3: took my money and carefully, slowly made out the receipt; Worker 4: upon proof of purchase, handed me the product after carefully and slowly wrapping it in brown paper).

Curiously, during my visits to Guate these past three summers, I've felt a vague urge to enter a ferretería and shop for I don't know what. It wasn't nostalgia. It was like what I imagine a phantom limb may feel like, an itch in empty space that needs scratching. I'd joke with my research assistant, Heidi, slowing down in front of a hardware shop and wondering if we needed a blowtorch or a pickaxe, and I guess that was my way of scratching the itch of memory. And there were lots of other itches, and though I tried ot keep it in check, Heidi had to live with quite a bit of reminiscing, poor woman.

For a few weeks, I worked at the Guatemalan Supreme Court’s Archivo de Tribunales where there was a depository of military tribunal records. That meant dropping off Heidi at the Archivo General near the Parque Central, and walking another mile (see map to the right). I’d cut through the Parque, and take La Sexta up to 14th street, cut left, passing below the battlements of the Palacio de la Policía Nacional (below) and, depending on my mood, hook a right on either 7th or 8th Avenues.

One day right by the Palacio, a 30-something man in a suit greeted me and wondered how I was finding Guatemala. We ended up talking about my Peace Corps past and present research, and his days in Ohio and his current work as a school teacher.

Four blocks later, at the 18 Calle, I realized what this was about. I stopped and asked him if he wanted money. He said no and asked me to sit with him on a bench. He had something important to say to me. I sighed and we sat, and while I kicked myself I heard about his sick father, his troubles with the Education Ministry, his empty pockets. I slipped him what I had in my pocket, around fifteen quetzales. While he looked nervously over my shoulder, he told me God would bless me, and then scurried off. I got up and turned to see a group of young men eyeing me cooly. One of them mimed a kiss at me and suggested the next time it would be his turn. Thusly blessed, I moved away at what I hoped was a dignified pace, and buried myself in a sidewalk crowd.

But happily there were very few days where I felt like prey, and was free to observe the life of the street. If I chose 8th Avenue, I'd run into more noisy traffic, and a growing number of people as I neared the Supreme Court. It ended at 20th Street in a crowded block of little diners, sidewalk stands, and vendors wandering about selling umbrellas, watches, pens, cell phones, and sunglasses--the necessary accessories of the clerks and lawyers, most of whom already seemed to have cell phones pinned to their ears (I even saw security guards and military police chatting away on them while on duty).

And there was the incessant cry of "Tramites, tramites!" When I worked at the Supreme Court archive in 1994, there were orderly rows of suited men in and around the Supreme Court plaza, each with a chair, a little table, and a portable typewriter. They were there to help people do their "tramites," literally 'procedures,' but in this context this meant selling the service of composing and filling out the required legal documents. Now men and women hawked this service on the street, stopping likely customers, and I assumed they worked out of offices nearby, using computers instead of typewriters.

To the right you can see the Supreme Court and its largely empty plaza. I'd enter through that dark space at the lower right of the picture. The Archivo de Tribunales had a staff of five when I worked there in '94, and a nearly soporific atmosphere. Evidently there were few investigating past judicial proceedings in a country where violence had trumped the law for so long. I was often the only one there toiling away through military tribunal records.

The 1996 Peace Accords ending a 30 year civil war opened the way for the 2009 Ley de Acceso (akin to our Freedom of Information Act, but much more liberal). The archive now has maybe fifteen staff, all of them on the move, taking requests for copies, making copies, preparing documents for the archive (which involved slamming bundles of paper on a table to tighten them), while also managing to make snack or lunch orders, get their shoes done by a shoe-shine boy, share shopping finds, and discuss the World Cup. No falling asleep here.

I'd come here a year ago and was told that no one knew offhand where the military tribunal records were, and the index for the collection was missing. But they said try again with a formal request some other time. So I returned this year, a bit more insistent, and made it beyond the front window to the office manager. She looked at me steadily with her light green-brown eyes, with a slight smile on her face, as if she were waiting for an answer to a question she had asked. When I just simply smiled in return, a little mystified, she handed me a piece of paper. I saw dot-matrix print and my signature at the bottom--my request for permission in 1994 to examine the Tribunal records. "Fijase," she said, a Guatemalan word that often precedes bad news, the index was indeed gone, and the collection was stored in a distant warehouse. But, luckily, I had written down parts of the index, and it turned out those case files were on hand. And the the following day I could finally answer her question. "I'm sorry it took me so long, but I remember you." She had been the receptionist back then, this chatty, vivacious twenty-something who was always tossing her curly hair. Now she was reserved, all business, and appeared embarrassed that I hadn't recognized her. I wanted to tell her, "Sister, we all got old," contemplating all the ways my body had begun to break down in the past seventeen years, but didn't think that would help.

Memory is a tricky thing, of course, and is often the occasion for misunderstanding, argument, and pain. I'm not just talking about questions of accuracy, but of what we decide to remember, and how we remember it. This is true for both individual and collective memory. Hence we have our vitriolic debates over the history curriculum in schools, the disagreements over who or what to commemorate with monuments, street signs, or holidays, or fights over access to private and public records. Guatemalans have more dire decisions to make regarding what goes into their public memory. Talk about real phantom limbs: over 200,000 Guatemalans killed or disappeared during the civil war.

Some--probably university students--have made their arguments with graffiti on 7th Avenue. They want someone to pay for the grievous sins of the state. They want the public to remember the civil war as an act of genocide against Guatemala's Mayan population (see pictures below). And there's some nostalgia there, too, for the revolutionary past: "Turcios Lives" is a reference to Luís Turcios Lima, a graduate of US Special Forces training, and one of the leaders of the 1960 military uprising that would be crushed, and then return as a guerrilla movement. And there are the newer voices trying to be heard in the public square--from the feminist scrawling "Women in Resistance" to the marches and demonstrations I witnessed around the Parque Central, sponsored by the GLBT community, AIDS activists, and sex trade workers.

Clearly, La Sexta is not the only thing in Guate undergoing wrenching change, but it would be a mistake to reduce Guatemala City to my inevitably selective memories, skewed anyway by my disposition and predilections, and perhaps the sweat dripping into my eyes as I walked to work. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes and images here complicate the story we usually get in the US news, equating the country with rampant crime, political intrigue, and social conflict. Guatemalans lives are more mundane and richer than that.

"JUSTICIA POR GENOCIDIO" (Justice for genocide)

"JUSTICIA DONDE ESTAN?" (Justice, where are you?)

"AQUI SI HUBO GENOCIDIO" (Here, yes, there was genocide)

"JUSTICIA" (Justice)

"JUSTICIA" (Justice)

"NO MAS IMPUNIDAD. BASTA" (No more impunity. Enough)

"NO OLVIDAMOS NI PERDONEMOS" (We don't forget nor forgive)

"TURCIOS VIVE" (Turcios lives)

"MUJERES EN RESISTENCIA" (Women in resistance)