I was thinking of the things I’d have to say when I get to Colombia. Aguepanela (or aguapanela) is one I’d like to say, after I say un chocolate and un café con leche, or un tinto. Panela, in Mexico, is a white, heavy, wet and leaking sort of cheese something like cottage cheese in a solid clump like a brick. But in Colombia such a thing is a quajada—which word I think more aptly describes the inert substance, but that may be due to it being the word I originally handled it in; I don’t know. The word panela still is used in Colombia for what in Mexico would be called piloncillo. It is brown sugar but not much like what you would get in the USA. Piloncillo comes in cones and when you shave it off it is nothing like the grains in bags that they must somehow treat to achieve here. Panela, the same thing as piloncillo, now, but in Colombia, comes in bricks and they take big chunks of it dissolved in hot water and—like most civilized hot beverages—often add milk to it. That is aguepanela (Agua de panela, only in the highlands of Colombia they have a way of dropping out Ds and other interfering letters when they speak).

El chocolate is another thing I’ll have to say if I am going to get any, and I want to much, since that too is different. Its kind of like hamburgers and hot dogs. They don’t really know how to make hamburgers or hot dogs down there, as far as I remember, not really well. If you think of a place where the best such are made by the worst fast food places, you’ll have an idea how it is. You might say what you get is not entirely unlike a hot dog or a hamburger, when you make an effort to ingest it. Here persons make chocolate out of powder grown in little packets in laboratories and it might be described as not entirely unlike chocolate. It is the sort of thing one might get when one pressed the hot chocolate button on a drink machine found in a space ship powered by an infinite improbability drive. In Colombia, where the chocolate is rich and frothy, they would be very puzzled to learn such substances are ingested by human beings.

Pan con queso I seem to remember. Pan, o pan con queso? One might be asked. Well, that recollection is vague, but the question seems a legitimate one. They would bake some bread rolls (nothing like fresh baked bread, that is another thing that, it seems to me, expensive transportation infrastructures destroy—may the transportation in Colombia always be so bad that walking to shop at little local shops is never obliterated, and may the transportation infrastructure of all lands decay and perish mostly. You know what you get when all your shopping has to be done by hopping into a car instead of walking? Large grocery stores and convenience stores attached to gas stations—and what a repugnant notion it is to buy food at a gas station) with cheese sprinkled on the top. I remember, for some reason, that the bread you have with hot chocolate sometimes comes with cheese. Of course, it could be just bread with cheese along with it, not bread with cheese baked onto it. Or it may be I am conflating the practice of having bread with one’s hot chocolate, which is occasional, with the unvarying practice of dropping cubes of cheese into the hot chocolate itself—el queso se funde y el final de la taza del chocolate es distinto al final obtenido cuando uno acaba sin gozo alguno la taza de la substancia aguada a la que le ponen por aqui el curioso nombre de hot chocolate.

There is much to avoid in the food there, do not get me wrong. The whole leg of chicken boiled in broth and served with the extremely unappetizing skin still clinging to it, for example—and yet I have no doubt the chicken itself was not raised in some darkened, cavernous barn and still tastes better. One ought to avoid places where instead of beef one might get donkey. But I can’t remember ever being disappointed by a potato there, or an avocado. And the fruit ought to be wondrous. I was never one for tamales or mute, but empanadas now . . . that might be breakfast, lunch and supper.

Ostias con arequipe. Was it ostias? Hosts. No, obleas. Obleas con arequipe. I think oblea means wafer, but they also have the habit of transliterating: Galletas wafer—with the W sounding more like a G+U = guafer; this habit confuses me sometimes They had these large waferish, brittle, mostly flavorless wafery things they sold joined with a layer of sweet arequipe. Arequipe is some kind of caramelized milk that they call dulze de leche in lower places and cajeta in Mexico where they do seem to have a tendency to match the wrong sound up with things more often than not. Arequipe is brown and creamy—like the word—sticky, very often, and actually comes with a variety of consistencies and textures. You can get it in a bowl and just eat it straight, if your mother will permit it. The bowl it comes in might come with a little wooden spoon.

There are places in Colombia where the thing to eat is ants or even fried goat. I was not reared in such places and am not even curious about such things. No, no quiero fritangas de chivo. They eat goat in northern Mexico: have whole restaurants in Monterrey where the thing to get is chivo. I am a man of the chicken, the pig and especially the cow. There ought to be good cow down there. You find an asadero where they cook half a cow on a spit over a wood pyre, to which one has to say: un poco mas, por favor, y mas aji (aji being their local hot pepper type of thing, wonderful with a taste I haven’t run into since and wonderful to numb the tongue so that when one drinks one’s soft drink after it, all one gets is the sense of fizz).

Special Note on the Avocado: El aguacate is coming more into use in the cuisine—or whatever you call the phenomenon—of these northern climes. We have one a week or so ourselves. Since it is not the sort of thing you can really cook, like lettuce, its uses are limited to those in which the lettuce might play a role. In a salad it is excellent, and alone, provided it has enough salt—that is key—it is excellent as well. My concern in this note is with the use of the avocado in sandwiches and hamburgers. It is a slippery fellow, the slice of avocado, and so it is my recommendation to persons using the avocado everywhere that they either scoop it out with a spoon and so mold it, in a way, to the curve of the sandwich when finding a place for it, or else place the slices on the bread itself, under the meat and cheese, you see, in order to keep it from slipping out.

The picture of a sunny kitchen greets me on the desktop, by coincidence. I have a memory of a sunny kitchen in Colombia that is with me every time I think of the perfect arrangement. It was a booth, of sorts, in an A-frame in a place I think was called Moniquira but may have been Morca or good old Mongui. The sun came on us and we ate sitting at our own private booth around the table, like a restaurant all for us.

That, of course, is my idea of how my wife should run the kitchen: a restaurant all for me. I’m very pleased with the progress of it so far, and I am happy to report that so is she. The irony of it all is that I’m not so great a judge, it seems. She took a test with General Mills for whom she tastes food and brought home a little of the sample that they tested. This concoction determines what quality of a taster a person is: if the concoction is repugnant one is a super-taster, if it is unpleasant one is in the middle, and if it tastes like water one is no taster at all. I tasted it without knowing and told her it was like water.

No surprises there, and hence perhaps my sometimes morbid concern with the texture of what I eat but especially the unusually exaggerated role my imagination plays in the meals I enjoy . . . or not. Of course, the test has the disadvantage of being one of those scientific things: a thing I would never trust unless I had no other alternative, like modern medicine. It is also reported that many who make their living tasting wine have scored as I, though it may mean that field, like any other field, is rife with frauds.

I just got back from another satisfying meal—at least I think it was. Before that I went to the library where a satisfying time was had reading a book not entirely without merit, sitting in the sun inside the glass, and watching all the weird who go there, including some very young persons interested in tasting the smoke of cigarettes or their companions. I had some coffee too, and wondered if I had any way of knowing if it were really good. I seem to have enjoyed it. It reminds me of the last and culminating experience of a trip to the central library in Columbus: the coffee with a double depth-charge. Something about quintessentially strong coffee and the freedom of a day away from work mingle in that memory. But knowing what I know, it may just be that I was savoring in the only way possible to me, the actual flavor of coffee.

Now I am left wondering what the world must taste like. Ah well, like Santayana says, it’s all illusion. Apparently he allowed for evil and for good illusion, which seems to me to introduce a concept into the illusion that is not illusion. Perhaps he did not say it’s all illusion and the trouble is I only think he said that—an illusion. Well, if it is an illusion, then when it comes to what I’m tasting, I seem to have picked a jolly good illusion.

Bucaramanga lies in la zona calida, in the department of Santander, Colombia. We lived there first when I was less than five or five. I remember the neighbors to our right had an ice-cream cone making business and we would sometimes get the fragments and flawed cones hot off the press. They had yellow cones and pink cones, and the pink cones were the rare ones, though they seemed to taste the same. I also remember the neighbors on our left had some kind of wholesale supply business. Once their back room, the bodega, was filled to the top with bulk-packaged toilet paper, and what a time we had climbing around on that.

Soon we moved from the torrid zona calida up through the zona templada and right into the zona fria in the town of Sogamoso, in the brick baking regions (el ladrillo y otros productos de arcilla) of the quiet department of Boyaca of the potatoes and the onions (the potato is a thing of infinite variety, and to eat again the boiled and salted small, yellow potatoes is one of the joys I anticipate). Beyond the zona fria only the zonas de paramos y glaciales extend into the thin air.

And there in the zona fria of la cordillera oriental de los Andes Colombianos was the happiness of my childhood. And there, I find, when I think of the enjoinments of agrarians, critics of modernity, reprovers of consumerism, presentism, and all that jazz, is where my heart tends to incline in its futile yearnings. (Una finca por ahi, bajo los eucaliptos, entre los sauces en la alta montaña donde viene la neblina por la mañana a la hora que se huele la arepa y el café con leche.) I have been thinking about it because at last we took the plunge and bought the tickets and are headed thither for a week, my wife and I.

For a week . . . how will I find it? Grown, perhaps, beyond recognition. The fields (potreros) that lay at the end of our street where the dirt road continued will probably be ‘developed.’ The place I left when I was 12 years old will be smaller than formerly, no doubt, not so open and more filled up—I have read it on message boards. It had two traffic lights, neither of which worked, and I wonder if they still get away with that. El transito y el polvo.

I was remembering how we did not have a telephone in our house and how it seems to me now that everybody was getting telephones in their house when we were there, as I remember the novelty of prank calling was a big thing with our friends across the street; and I wonder: can it be that in the early 1980s they were just getting telephones wired into all the houses? We never had a phone when we lived there. There was one next door, in the house that we started to use for a church and was left from the woman who owned it once she died of cancer. She had run a school and perhaps needed to telephone to make it seem official; Doña Guma, she was, and her son was Armandito. I finished kindergarten and did first grade there: the kindergarten and first graders were in the back room, a roofed in patio, and the second and third graders were in the garage. In those houses, the garage was within the house and had no great separation between itself and the living room—and yes, some people who had cars actually parked them in the garage itself. But we never owned a car there either.

We ranged free in that place, as children. We walked to school and then walked home. But we walked everywhere, the only rule, as I remember, was that we had to be back for supper at . . . 7? I never remember any baby sitting happening to us, but then I never remember my parents going out to eat without taking us, or attending concerts or other functions in Sogamoso, like they did in Mexico City. Probably, this was due to the fact that there weren’t any. And I was trying to remember the lay of the land, the distances, the landmarks in my mind: the slaughterhouse and the train tracks, the center of town, the various parks, the streets with shops, the various churches, the various empty fields, the farmacias, lotes de tejo, the place where they sold chicks and you could see them on trays, panaderias, restaurants, bridges, river, slummier sections, la plaza de toros . . . and I realized we ranged pretty free in that place, collecting beetles, chasing sheep, climbing trees, rummaging under the portones of junk yards for strange bits of metal, spark plugs and other such treasure, buying gum until I got a wad stuck in my hair and it was banned, picking worms out of beans in our friend’s backyard, attending circuses, scattering mounds of sand piled for a building project on the street in front of a house, trampling my father’s garden, nursing abandoned fires with twigs and garbage, and the great seasons of collecting bottle caps.

And the people? That is the curiosity. Will any of those people with whom I went to school be there and recognize me? I them? Will I see wise Nestor who was the friend of Jorge who read encyclopedias? Will Carlos Andres Perez Pulido be there with his ears sticking out, or persons answering to the name of Yuber, Osvaldo, Ivan Dario, Javier, Ileana, Magda, Yolima and Natis? If I return to the Colegio Bilingüe Alejandro de Humboldt will I meet the bearded Don Pedro who wore a white lab coat, taught egregious English and hurled chalk and erasers at unruly third-graders who cringed in the corner and refused to stop making muecas at the rest of the class?

Sometimes I wish I could get a steady enough trickle of income by writing: then I would take my wife there and see about settling in among the folds of the Andes, under the swaying eucalyptus and the slow-moving clouds.

Well, today another faithful old radio bit the dust. It was one of the old, heavy, rounded CD/Radio/Cassette players which have characterized my life since time out of mind. Not that I listen to the radio that much, as the chattering of inanities and the irrationality of it all get to me more often than not. This is probably due to the fact that I listen to pay attention more often than perhaps other people do, as I listen to books while I work and have been doing that steadily for some four or five years now. Another of my quirks that I have not been as zealous for as much as formerly is the pausing of music when I have to go outside of the range of hearing. I just hate to miss a part of it. (You know, that is really how I developed a good love for the operas I love. I would hear an aria and get the opera, then considering it unscrupulous just to harvest an aria out of it, listen to the whole thing for the sake of an aria and so I grew rich.) And so, as well, it might be said that I have lived a life in some ways characterized by these great, black plastic electronic devices.

I remember the ones that only had a tape player and radio. The dial of the radio was rather prominent on some of those (a great long spread for the needle to range, a prominent and large knob), and what they had in common was their excessive flatness. It might have been something of the general squareness of things back then, and they may better be described as rectilinear. A simple, old tape player—the rectangle with one square speaker after the part you put the cassette in and with the buttons in front of where you load the tape and then a handle to top it all off—was recently added to our household goods, and I was struck again with the flatness of the thing.

Things are much flatter nowadays, I much suspect—though I am not such an one as to run after all the latest little contraptions with their requirement that one insert the speaker inside of one’s body, surely a distasteful notion to decent persons everywhere and remarkable in that we seem to have become unnaturally accustomed to the thought that having ourselves plugged into a machine that it is no longer a repugnant thing; nay, verily, it is, it seems to me, a great deal of the basis of the appeal and not the least reason for white cords–which stand out–to be preferred, which is deplorable; fashion has probably always (though I am not the person to tell you about fashion) partaken in something of the irrational, I suppose, but this fashion of being plugged right into things with wires coming out of oneself (rather than clamped on one’s head—all of which makes you think that ancient persons who devoted themselves to the production of irreplaceable violins had ideas superior to those of the chaps who produce the small devices full of perishable circuits) does not, I think, tend in desirable directions—but the flatness of an older age contrasts with the bulk and roundness of these radios that have characterized, as I have said, such a great part of my life.*

And the blackness of the plastic was another thing. I remember how they came: dark and with a certain brightness to them. I remember the flexible gleam of the cords. Inevitably, these black boxes collected dust. I do not know how fastidious other persons may have been about the dust collecting on these large, black devices, but as I general rule I was seldom overly fastidious about it. Every once in a while I would wipe it off with a finger, but seldom did I take any cleaning agent or moisture of any sort to the thing. It was the proper ageing and familiarity of the thing that it collected—perhaps for mysterious reasons electronical—a dimness of dust. For all that these devices were round they had awkward angles, troughs to house the antennae, holes for plugs of various description, wells into which the handle sank, folded, swung, and other such articulations which tended to invite dust.

And the dust tended to settle. I have never seen an old radio of that description cleaned and returned to its former glory. I suppose that were I to trade in such goods, I would see such a thing, but acquisitiveness is not something with which I can be said to be afflicted. And so I know the dimness and familiarity of the mortality of their dust. Eventually they stop playing CDs—usually this first, though I still have one at work that only does CDs still, having developed a great fondness for the flavor of the tape that spools inside the cassette, it seems.

Well, their era, as I believe I have said above, has dimmed and wanes. I just threw one into the dumpster. It was probably purchased in Ohio, though it may have been purchased elsewhere—how is one to keep track of such things. The dust on it is the dust of former days and former places and will soon lie buried in a landfill for perhaps nameless ages.

*An egregious paragraph with at least three levels of interrupting, parenthetical dilations. It makes demands on your attention, and worse, on your intelligence, I know. I do not apologize.

This winter’s day is bright the way that June is bright. So intense is the sun that even well below freezing the water is trickling and standing on the paths, escaping from the ice which holds the scattered snowflakes.

A long crack runs down the middle of Shingle creek, following its turns inexactly, but extraordinarily prolonged. It reminds me that from Mr. G.K. Chesterton I have learned to look at the world with a wild eye when I catch myself wondering what it was decided to break the surface of the creek in half. I see a flock of birds leap into the air, fan out and wheel abruptly, vanishing, as if rehearsing for their springtime joy [lets try to stay in formation, lads, and perhaps make that turn tighter by a notch]. The grass beside the path is growing wan in winters wind. It murmurs mournfully: the ghost of summer’s grass in plain view; a banner of death; a skull grinning with anticipation of the resurrection, chuckling like dry grass: heheheheh.

Thank God for the books of Mr. G.K. Chesterton. Though nobody will find me the greatest enthusiast for his fiction (perhaps because I do not understand it), I am not last among those who admire his work, especially the non-fiction: the autobiography in which he takes a childhood memory and by means of gratitude turns it into a symbol of his religion; the wild defense of Orthodoxy; the way he indicts the respectable businessmen of ancient Carthage going in their business suits to church to roll another of their children into Moloch’s arms; books that have changed my experience of the world in the February sun.

The jungle is a predatory place: you have the smell of it—the smell of earth and moisture, you have the unabashed fecundity, the wet, the sinuous, the tangle of growth, its quiet sense of reaching, lolling, dangling, growing; you have the creatures: sloth and snake, hideous frog and delicate frog and stupid, staring fish; and you have the suggestion of the predators: lithe and tawny . . . formidable, unseen.

The conservatory is a place of peculiar smells. Strange, artificial breezes waft toward one odors not routinely encountered. Flowers bloom there, water drips and murmurs, soaking and flowing with peaceful purpose. You can smell the water, the plants, the soil. And birds are heard. One wonders about the insect, though one doesn’t see any. The flowers and the ferns grow lush and modest in their warm and in their cool adjoining climates.

People? Flower connoisseurs go slowly, talking with their hands behind their backs. Other persons peer under the ferns, seeking . . . insects? Mothers are there, with toddlers: they descend and they invade. You understand the frayed edges of the lowest plants. It is a place of quiet, calm, and running water, all within fragile glass walls.