At the credit union where I was finally getting around to dissolving a useless savings account, I get Roxanne, a skinny, high energy Mexicana who ends up talking to me in Spanish while she rapidly punches my info into her computer. We agree that mariachis are essential at weddings, but otherwise no way—wife-beater music. Mexican weddings are the best, but it’s really a good one if there’s a fight, Roxanne grins. I promptly tell her about the brawl at my stepdaughter’s wedding years ago and how they sent the riot police. I do recall that I was appalled but that was then: now it’s just a juicy story. Roxanne says they gave the mariachis a playlist for her brother’s wedding. What was on the list? I ask, brazen in my confidence that I’ll know the tunes. Oh, El Rey, Camino de Guanajuato—I start in, “no vale nada la vida” and Roxanne joins me. In the car going home, I put on the Spanish station and before I reach Colfax, they play it: “la vida no vale nada/comienza siempre llorando y así llorando se acaba…”
Life is worth nothing, you know. It always begins crying and crying is how it ends. Think of the bleak sentiment in that song. And yet everyone who knows it, sings it with gusto, with the joy that Roxanne and I sang it with at her credit union desk.
Butterfly caught in the view from Chapultepec Castle
Your writing prompt, should you choose to accept it: Does the distance of years turn tragedy into comedy? Will that happen to 2020? Alternative topic: are Mexicans fatalists?
Bravo bravo
Always an accomplishment to get any response from Brad Mudge.
Say, Pat, if it turns out you have other useless savings accounts…..(bank routing number en route). The universe has always reached me surest in music; and in my experience music manages the better word edgewise, comic more often than not. When everyone was done talking at Lee’s sendoff in the woods last October, a neighbor no one had ever met suddenly started blasting Bob Dylan. Song selection was not what I hoped for, but you can’t have everything,
Dylan for Lee’s service: she would have appreciated that, but the message was for you.