It never really got cool there. One time it was cool but so humid one was still left sweating. For all that, you do not have to use air conditioning so much as long as you have ceiling fans. My parents have a sort of air conditioner but they do not use it. And I suppose when I am getting near three score and ten I will probably feel more comfortable in that sort of weather. The effect of all this heat is somehow to generate surplus time. It takes away the will for anything but ambling; it strangely fills one with a tepid impulse to prepare extensively for the next minor event. One watches time creep by with none of its usual alacrity. Those who crave labor saving devices to give them time for other things ought to shut off the air conditioning. This discovery that turning off the air conditioning creates surplus time is among the more amazing discoveries I made on this trip.

Among our other debaucheries we went over to eat at a neighbor’s house. They had us over for hamburgers with the option to include, along with the tomatoes, the ketchup, the mayonnaise, the mustard, the lettuce, the onions, the ham, and the chilies never to be forgotten . . . with all these there was the option of adding a slice of grilled pineapple. Apparently the pineapple on the hamburger is catching on down there.

The neighbors had a square table designed to seat eight comfortably and capable of seating twelve adequately. We would stand to reach some of the food in the middle. There we had the hamburgers with said options, barbeque chips and Dr. Pepper. It was a good meal and everybody else enjoyed the desert. We talked of hard wood floors, of life in Sweden, of life in Durango—whence our hosts, and perhaps of other things. I wish I had eaten more but I am glad I did not. I wish we had talked more but I am glad we did not. I enjoyed the time even though I describe it this way. It was the sort of event that stands on the edge of a knife; fortunately the knife is not sharp on whose edge the event stands; there is a little latitude. Perhaps my trouble is that I have been reading Robert Lee Frost and mixing up his ways with my experiences. Or maybe no enough.

I took three books for reading with me. I thought I ought to take things about which I was not entirely enthusiastic since I would be limited and have more incentive to keep at them. I have wanted for a long while to make it through Don Quixote. I wavered, however, and at the last moment I left Cervantes behind.

I took with me Robert Frost. I have never though a great deal of him but have read more about him recently: his stature in American letters, his understanding of things. I read a few of his essays on poetry, some fiction, some of his poems there. He strikes me much like Yeats only a little worse. Frost has these rambly addresses in the back of this Library of America collection and some of them are really good. His meditative monologue on ‘Education by Poetry’ is full of considerations a metaphysical realist is likely to consider with profit and joy .

I also took Christopher Dawson. I found a collection of his essays on Christianity and European Culture. In one he makes remarks about Eliot’s work which so depends on his, interacting with his ideas. This is a set of essays worth going over carefully. All are short, very lucid, all measured and modest; it is a collection of unglittering treasure. I hope to get up some kind of a review eventually because they are thought provoking.

And I took with me the copious and charming Santayana; his fictional memoir, The Last Puritan. I am afraid many things are taking place over my head in that work, and that makes it loose some of its hold on the reader. It is quite interesting as a piece of fiction, as an observation on humanity, the times and mores. But the though of something going on out of my reach persists, and I keep thinking I ought to have a better education before I can appreciate the work. Besides, it is really copious. Now I have it hanging over me, unfinished, copious, at 50% of 600 pages.

Part of the trouble is that there is only one comfortable reading place in my parents house. There was no question of walking and reading; the traffic and the sidewalks there do no lend themselves; besides, one already sticks out. One wants, in a home, many worthwhile places to read: well lit, but not too saturated with light—I dislike overhead lighting; give me focused lighting and general dimness of atmosphere—and comfortable. Comfort was forfeit upstairs where it was too warm. Downstairs, as upstairs, the lighting situation was bad. There is no joy in turning on an overhead light to read, especially when the light is on a ceiling designed to accommodate Goliath of Gath. What was left was one lamp and one place on the couch—a pretty good place too, but only one. I would have stayed up every night reading, and wanted to, but never did. Perhaps it was the book, perhaps it was the convalescence, but I wonder if the trouble was that I had not worn the life enough.

We went to three kinds of neighborhood. Should you go to Mexico your host might not think of it, so ask him to take you through a rich neighborhood, a middle class one, and a poorer one. All of them will be clogged with cars. The rich and the middle will have more plants about. You will see more of the houses of the middle and of the poor, and more of the walls and gates of the rich. You will not see many of the wealthy walking unless you go to a parking lot. You will see the middle and the poor walking, waiting for the bus or a taxi. Above all you will notice the kind of houses and the neighborhoods each lives in and see the difference very clearly. I am all for classes; you may think of me as an elitist if you like for I am no egalitarian. It is interesting to observe and to note the differences, but perhaps what makes it more interesting to me is that I am closer to having access to all three, being from Minnesota and all.

One is closer because the dollar will buy you more there and because you can, as an outsider, move among them, in some ways, more easily. Besides, our middle classes have a higher standard of living than theirs do: we can get into their higher classes. A lot of this is carried out in the mind, the division of classes is as much a spiritual thing, as much a matter of conventions as it is a matter of money.

We penetrated into each of these classes by going to eat where they do.

We went to Saltillo (an older city, founded c 1580) and ate at a respectable establishment where the wealthy are fond of eating. The service was good, as everywhere, but a bit more solicitous. As in every other place, everything came served with refried beans and tortillas on the side. Nobody is so enthusiastic about Mexican food as the Mexicans, for they are incorrigible. At a restaurant such as this, however, you have no reason to wonder about the food; it is all of the best quality, which is what sets it apart. And the appointments are of the best: the table cloths are not only present, as opposed to mere place mats, they are usually interesting and of pretty heavy material, the silverware is of a heavier and less perishable variety, the crockery is more pleasing, and so on in every respect. It is the sort of place where one is not loath to discover what the bathrooms are like. In this one they had a glass jug full of mouthwash and disposable little plastic cups stacked beside it, besides ample space and marble, etc. So much, then, for the upper classes.

Of the middle class we had our greatest taste. The most characteristically Mexican place was a buffet which was across from the Sheraton. Some convention or something was streaming people across the street to Los Generales. It was interesting for having the sort of food about which the locals were enthusiastic. Not that the rich are so enthusiastic, or that the poor can afford it, but those there were lined up. One had to wait in line every time one wanted to get some food. The waiters got drinks and brought salsa and tortillas; they also removed used plates and bowls. This place had table cloths and it was in an old building, but it was more crowded and less fine. Besides, the idea of serving oneself is not very aristocratic. The appointments were not so good; the prices were more reasonable.

We also went to a more modest buffet, a cafeteria to be exact. There I had the best deep fried chicken cordon bleu I have ever had. It was here I ordered the corn which was excellent if oily. One cannot avoid oil there, if one is so unnatural as to want to. Have you ever tried deep fried chicken cordon bleu?

Three other places I will mention in connection with the middle class. They have large restaurant chains of course. Of these, Sanborns is the greatest and in my opinion the very best in all the world. Sanborns has the restaurant behind a shop full of gifts, books, and magazines. In the shop they usually have a counter, like a diner or a soda fountain (which it was originally, the first in Mexico), although I do not remember that this is the case in the newer places. Sanborns has the virtue of picking old buildings and restoring them, giving to the restaurant the atmosphere of the place, and so there are many different Sanborns. If you go to the flagship Sanborns in downtown Mexico City you will find yourself in the house of tiles, eating in a covered courtyard of a mansion built in the 16th century. The restaurant is almost 100 years old. I would consider a trip to Mexico City just to visit a bunch of Sanborns worthwhile. What I like more than anything is how they seem to preserve an old urban culture; they suggest to me the times in which they began during the early decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is the old booths, perhaps the chairs, perhaps it is the cloth napkin flat for a placemat and the second one folded up between the silverware, perhaps it is the outlandishly dowdy uniforms they make the waitresses wear (designed in the 19th century, no doubt), perhaps it is the feeble attempt at a buffet nobody ever seems to make use of, perhaps it is the coffee. Somebody hit pause, and the places I have been to are far older seeming than one would think marketable; and they are usually crowded although I can not remember ever having to wait for a table. (I am not making it up. I do not understand how it works.) Sanborns is owned by the very richest man in all the world, Carlos Slim. I reckon his smartest move was made on the day he decided to buy Sanborns.

(One of the great things about Mexico is that they have not joined the modern, paternalistic, puritan and reprehensible practice of banning smoking in restaurants. To me a restaurant does not smell right if there is none of the cigarette lingering about it. The restaurants on the chain are the ones most glorious for this.)

Of the other restaurants on the chain, Vips has good locations, but they are modernizing their great, round, orange booths for stuff more cramped and beggarly. This is the place with paper mats and napkins, unfortunately, but the coffee is stronger. Still, they make the waitresses were pretty formal uniforms. They try to ape Sanborns by having the gift shop in some of them, but it is not de rigor. We went to another such place on the chain but it is not worth mentioning. What is great about them is that they still preserve a distance between the waiters and the clients which is better than the informality the casual uniforms correspond to, something Mexican that makes me want to write about it with a fountain pen, slick back my hair and grow a little mustache like Igor.

The trouble with the places where the poor eat is that you could die of eating there if you are not inured, if you do not build up an immunity. There is nothing in the flavor and nothing in the price to stop you, quite the contrary. You might, if you had an imagination, start to wonder about the provenance of this or that, but usually the flavors are strong enough to concentrate your attention and keep the imagination from wandering. It is the ambiance that leaves a lot to be desired in the eating of the poor. The owners of these minute establishments are resourceful and ingenious about arranging a counter and a kitchen on a cart with four wheels. I remember walking past a narrow hallway in Saltillo. I looked in and saw people sitting at narrow counters against both walls and in the dingy depths a window behind which was the kitchen from which the food was being sold. There are some foreigners who live in Mexico who become enthusiasts of the taco stands and the crowded counters. We were never very much so with one exception. Prudence and culinary temperance (a general gastronomic inadventurousness and a certain love of comfort, it may be more accurate to say) has generally kept my family from frequenting or much patronizing the lower end of Mexican cuisine.

However, the neighbors decided to block off the street and have a celebration of independence on our last night there. They called in the caterers; these turned out to be two round women who in a garage set up the equivalent of a roadside stand. We had fried everything with cheese and salsa. These neighbors of my parents are of a curious emerging lower upper class. In this neighborhood they were almost all young, one or both of them work and commonly in IT, have a few small children, and are aiming to move ahead, to move out of the neighborhood. But their tastes are not that different from the next Mexican when it comes to food. When the steamed corn vendor pedals his contraption through the neighborhood he gets business.

So we had deep fried potatoes, deep fried flautas, deep fried enchiladas, deep fried sopes. A great deal of oil, everything with cheese, some refried beans, lettuce, green sauce all provided, but no place to eat. They probably stood leaning against cars or with their plates on the hoods of trucks. We went back home and ate with the assistance of many napkins. Mexicans are wonderfully neat at eating.

As you may surmise, we did a lot of eating there, beginning gradually and culminating with the feast of independence.

The Mexicans are very enterprising. Everybody has a little business, everybody is working at something no matter how implausible. There are little stores squeezed into the most unusual places. They will sell anything from lottery tickets to fruit juice walking between the cars at traffic lights. It is true that many of them are limited in the options they have, but for all that they try their hand at whatever they can, and they have multiplied the options they have despite the limitations. All of them do it because they want to get ahead and they have not despaired of doing so. Private enterprise is pretty rampant down in Mexico. I had to be a stranger again in Mexico to notice it; perhaps it was because I had been reading large tracts of Lukacs.

When we came back after two weeks in Ireland we went to the post office to pick up our mail. Nothing brought home to me how much we were in our own place than hearing a person in a public place address us with an appreciable Minnesota accent and help us with a matter of more than citizenship. The matter of ones own mail is a matter of residency. It was a matter keenly absent after two weeks in Ireland.

I have seldom encountered people more friendly than the Irish. There is, however, in the accent which I realized with a sense of loss in Chicago I would no longer hear regularly, there was in that accent something different, behind the friendly eye the distinction, the distant closed door of meeting a stranger. After two weeks of European ways, of Irish ways, of being a foreigner although anglophone, the sense of belonging that I experienced at the post office in Minnesota came as a strong emotion. One of the best things about traveling, my wife observed on that occasion, is that it makes you glad to be home.

It is a curious sense of belonging—or of not belonging—one gets; it depends on so many things. Primarily it depends on language since ways of saying are ways of thinking. Having the same habits, knowing the tacit agreements, the conventions, an unconcern about procedures and approaches play into it too. But I think ways of speaking are the most obvious ways of knowing you belong.

When you go to Mexico you are no longer among anglophone strangers. It is interesting to see one of those shut doors behind the eyes open when you speak Spanish to them in a pretty mild American accent and with bits of expression not based on alien constructions. I do not know what does it more: the ability to know which consonants must not be overpronounced and which ought to sound forth or the prolongation of vowels. (For example, most Americans will turn the first syllable of soldado into a sound something like the English word soul. They will make the second D as prominent as the first one. In some places, you can get away without even pronouncing that second D, especially in the Colombian highlands. The consonants in Spanish are always playing tricks like that. Unless you know it naturally, it requires too much thinking to make scrupulous pronunciation and conversation simultaneously feasible. Of course, not many care all that much. Nor is this trick of writing and speaking limited to Spanish; this also happens in English. It happens because writing is a limitation of speaking; we do not really have as many letters and combinations of letters as we have sounds, and we do not want as many complications in our writing. I was listening today and noticed how little the T in think is pronounced—“I ’hink so,” or “I ’ink so” being a pretty common way of pronouncing the word; the T is overpowered by the consecutive Is. Nor is it lazy as some who are wont to overpronounce things giving a sort of priority to the written over the spoken word might be inclined to believe. Kinglsey Amis has some interesting words for such people.)

The great difference between Spanish and English is in the pronunciation of the vowels. I have a mild accent because my vowels get a little rounded, like milk that is not entirely sweet, giving me a vague accent. Fortunately this is not so noticeable in short pronouncements. When I said: “Quiero un poquito del elote aqui,” the woman thought I spoke Spanish well enough to remark about it. Had I said: “Quiero un poquito del elote aquel,” she might have asked me if I were a Mexican.

If you put an idiomatic expression in without any self-consciousness—most foreigners using an idiomatic expression, it seems to my observation, manage to broadcast that what they are saying carries some mental peculiarity by the way they say it—you might fool a native speaker. I did not say “un poco” which would have done and might have been taken literally. “Un poquito,” you see, with the diminutive, gives your request a polite modesty; it is a certain colloquial deference that is calculated to fill your plate. Had I thrown in the remote demonstrative, rather than pointing and using the adverb which combination is only semi-verbal, depending as it does on the gesture, I would have shows greater linguistic ability, the powers of one proficient. While these things I explain seem elaborate when they are articulated, I do not think they are ever entirely lost; they are a tacit part of everyday speaking.

Ladies and gentlemen I have gotten off of the griddle on which I climbed when I descended—with a great and painful discomfort to the ears, I might add—to that land that lies all around the massive, dorsal mountains: Monterrey.

Convalescing requires time, and time is a commodity they seem to have more of in warm, lethargic regions. I have put in my time, and now I hope for some reflections. I intend to indulge this power of recollection and reflection to a great extent, so much so I am creating a new category for it.

Be warned. If you are intelligent, you might want to find another blog to read. I intend to write without any mitigations.