TheExpatJournals.com

All my life, I have longed to live where I have both views of mountains and sea. That dream has finally come true. Yesterday, I walked across Calle Segundo and right into that wide open view of Paitilla. It seemed like a different world merely two blocks away. The view of the city evokes such a different internal energy than the view facing Amador where the mountains of Veracruz, the Bridge of the Americas and the greenery of the Canal banks dominate where there isn’t sea. Fortunately, none of the green is close enough to cause a mildew plague, yet is close enough to create a lovely, peaceful view. Now that’s my kind of green. I have come to associate greenery with intolerable humidity and mildew, nice to visit, lovely to look at, but I don’t want to live in it.

Speaking of nature, I had a visitor this morning. I awoke around 5:20AM, went in to make coffee when I remembered that I had broken a glass in the kitchen last night. I swept with a little brush and pan, but when glass hits a tile floor, it shatters and scatters, nevertheless I postponed vacuuming until this morning. Even in the dim light from the kitchen, in the front of the apartment I saw movement on the floor. My only thought was, “What is that?” Last night, I walked down the alley beside my apartment just to see what people could see at night with all my lights on and decided that while my wonderful Kuba cloth is the perfect little daytime privacy shield, at night, more was in order. While in the alley, there was a little bat all huddled up next to a Union Fenosa box.

At first I thought it was a leaf, but upon closer inspection, I realized it was a bat. For a brief sidebar, I LOVE the sound of the bats at night. Unless you are watching the front of a lightly painted, well lit building, you don’t see them. And even then, you see them fly past rapidly for only a brief moment. But you hear them everywhere. I assume they’re feasting on mosquitoes and for that, I adore them.

Another side note, as if on cue, my writing was interrupted by a mosquitoe attempting to breakfast on me. They buzz around silently, rapidly and so erratically that they are quite difficult to kill. Mosquitoes are different here. It’s like they’re smart and very adept at dodging a blow even if they have landed on you. I just sat on the floor, stretched out my legs and waited. He evaded 4 attempted swipes and usually, after a couple of rapid tries, the seems to fly off and wait until you’re no longer on your guard and are either compelled to sit and wait for him until you no longer have any patience or else get on with your day. And that’s when they move in…when you just can’t stand waiting any longer. With all the dengue fever about, they scare me.

Back to my other early morning visitor, I walked to the front of the apartment to investigate once I realized there was definitely movement and it was larger than a bat. It only took moments to realize I had a rat in the house, not a mouse, a rat. My first thought was to go get the concierge and have him deal with it and the next thought was that I didn’t want to kill it, it just couldn’t live here.

I turned on the overhead lights and that seemed to motivate his departure. He started scurrying around at first. Fortunately, I had opened a large wooden crate of paintings yesterday and the lid stood as a makeshift wall so he was stopped from moving anywhere but the alcove at the front. And then he started jumping as if to get up on a window sill. In that moment, I knew that’s how he had come in. The last two nights have been so pleasant that I left my windows open. I watched him nearly make it all the way up to the window sill only to hit the wall and fall back to the floor. I decided to just watch since he was making the effort to leave, very respectful of him I thought, even if some primal instinct shouted, literally, “Do or Die!”

The next thing I know, he is on my dining room table, not a pleasant thought, but after the sun rose this morning, I’ve seen no evidence of droppings anywhere…the only real problem I have with rodents. Again, thoughtful of him so maybe he didn’t visit too long. Well the dining room table and the chair facing the front window didn’t seem to be to his liking so he was off to the floor again. At this point, I moved a chair in front of a side window to see if he was bright enough to use it as a ladder to his exit. Instead, he went back up to the dining room table, over to the chair at the front and jumped to the window sill and hurried out from whence he came. And I was glad all ended so easily.

I noticed another strange thing this morning…normally 5:30/6:00AM is high tide. It was out this morning. And it made me wonder if perhaps I was mistaken in remembering that it was normally high tide then, you know, one of those things that makes you question your abilities? Yesterday morning, I didn’t wake up until after 7:00, so I paid no attention. Could the tide suddenly shift so drastically overnight? Is this a seasonal thing? Is there some tropical storm in the Pacific somewhere?

Speaking of unpacking my crate of paintings, the steel frame of my most beloved has rusted and I have no doubt in my mind that was from the two months I `did’ in La Cresta. I still cannot believe the level of humidity and the resulting mildew and rust inflicted on my possessions during such a relatively short period of time. Again, my Miele vacuum springs rusted after 7 years of being just fine. A 120 year old African bowl now has a chip and serious damage to the patina due to cleaning the mildew I couldn’t keep off of it. That bowl survived Africa, God knows where else, a year in Panama and then I finally had to move it out of La Cresta before I left lest it succumb completely to the hell hole of breathable water that place was. Only there did the plywood crate grow mildew and now that it’s finally open, I see the mildew went all the way through the wood and thank God I got out when I did for fear of the amount of damage it would have done to my paintings inside.

Those paintings have done more traveling than I have. They were packed last December, stored in a basement in Queens for two months before embarking on their sea cruise to Costa Rica where they were then shipped to Bocas and from there to Panama City. The crate was dry when I left Casco Viejo on July 6. Though they were wrapped in plastic, foam and cardboard inside, the plastic wasn’t sealed and so the mildew moisture took it’s toll on the steel frame and now, I’m at least finding it somehow cathartic to sand away the rust. Everything in this new apartment will be so very clean, everything. And yes, that has entailed cleaning every possession I own and yes, that is a huge job. Think about it…what if you had to thoroughly clean an apartment in every nook and cranny, every corner of every window sill, every cabinet shelf, every door molding, every baseboard shelf, every floor, wall and fixture and, at the same time, clean every sheet, pillow case, towel, pillow; every sock and item of clothing you own; every basket, every piece of wood, every shoe, every condiment bottle, every knick knack, every piece of plastic…literally everything you own. My maid is in Bolivia since about a week before I moved. I found out last night she’s not coming back until the 28th of September. She told me she would be away for 3 weeks, but it has turned out to be 5. Part of me doesn’t mind that she has missed the massive effort because quite frankly, I’m yet to meet anyone who would do it as thoroughly as I want it done. Though, to complain for a moment, I am tired of spending 12 hours a day cleaning. Hey, at least I’m getting a good upper body work out with the sanding.

And this crate for my paintings was custom made, is huge and with contents, weighed 197 pounds. I fear being able to replace it should the need arise again. Without the space to store it, that is not an option, so the plan is to cover the outside in finished plywood and turn it into a huge coffee table. The tide is almost in now. It’s 7:42. I must remember correctly because the huge white herons are out for their morning breakfast and that is normally fishing in tidal pools when the tide is out. I suppose they haven’t adjusted to the change yet either.

I know to some the huge deal I make of my paintings, their storage and their care may seem ludicrous to some, but let me qualify why I think of them as beloved possessions. There was a magnificent artist named TL Lange. (You can see lots of work he called his `corpo crap’ here: http://www.grandimage.com) TL was like my brother. We used to spend on the average of about 20 hours a week together and rarely did a day go by when we weren’t at least on the phone with each other. Next to my son, TL was the person I loved most in this world. He had a protégé named Patrick Atkinson, another supremely talented young painter who, today, cannot paint enough to keep up with the demand for his work. Patrick is 26. The three of us were what Patrick’s lovely Mom, Dulce, called `chosen family.’ There was something between the three of us that I cannot explain. We were bonded in some ancient way and so good to and for each other.

The large oil in the rusted frame I unpacked from the customized crate that will become my coffee table was a gift from TL, who died in January 2002. He was 36 years old. I still talk to him almost daily. Patrick and I were inseparable for the following two months. Many reached out, but it seemed only he made any difference to me and only I made any difference to him. Later, Patrick ended up tattooing the title of an email I sent him on his forearm…Precious Continuum. We swore we would get matching tattoos, but still haven’t. Maybe we will some day…if I could ever figure out what I would be willing to live with permanently and, of course, my deeply rooted fear of needles might be factoring in as well.

Patrick had stopped painting and during that two months after TL’s death, I sent him into TL’s studio to work. Later, he presented me with his first effort from there as well as an unfinished work in progress that had been in TL’s studio for ages. Those were the other two paintings in my crate. They’re not just paintings to me. They are pieces of my heart. The large piece of TL’s is paper on canvas. It’s now bubbled in it’s mounting and I feel, once again, something akin to resentment towards my time in La Cresta, not too terribly different from the illogical anger that bubbles up inside when your child is threatened, like perhaps when you’re in a car and some driver makes a bonehead move in front of you. Normally you might just curse at them, but if your baby happens to be along for the ride, you have a moment of feeling homicidal rage for the possible consequences that never happened. And then it passes. Did you Dads feel the same way or is that only the proverbial `Mother Lion’ type of instinct?

Sometimes, I miss TL so much I can’t believe it’s this strong after years. Maybe it’s the season…this was the first year I wasn’t in NYC for September 11th since 9-11. And that year, I kept wondering exactly why I was supposed to experience that so up close and personal. When TL died 4 months later, I was there for everyone else. It came naturally and I realized that what I had learned my experience around 9-11 was now in play. One of the only ways it seemed any of us could get out of the horror settling into our own minds was to get out of ourselves and be there to help someone else. Focusing on someone else temporarily alleviates trauma. That September, as people began to get back to some semblance of normality, people moved back into their self-contained spheres as per the New York norm. And we were finally left alone for long stretches of time, no longer able to escape that which bounced off the walls internally with no place to land. But I suppose if one takes a cue from nature, when a traumatic injury occurs, the body goes into shock and you cannot feel the impact of the trauma. That’s nature’s protection. I think it works mentally in the same way. There was the equivalent to mental shock and when that started to wear off was when the real grief’s presence was no longer deniable.

And TL was there to comfort me. He cooked. I stayed at his house in the mountains. We watched movies. We had coffee on the deck while watching hummingbirds in the feeder three feet above our heads. And the world’s beauty began to exist again. It was TL who opened my eyes to art in any real sense. It was he who gave me an appreciation especially for texture and patterns and the very aesthetics I find so abundant in the old in Casco Viejo. Maybe I always had it, but it was TL who made me aware of it. He used to try to get me to paint. He truly believed that anyone could paint. Not me! I do wish sometimes that I could show him the abstracts I find in photo form. Maybe I do have an eye for what I enjoy seeing, but he had the ability to create the aesthetic, not merely appreciate it.

One of the reasons I loved his work so much was the texture. He used so many odd elements in his work, so nothing was ever flat, it was always dimensional. And that lack of dimension is why I don’t find art here that I can appreciate beyond some mental observation. It’s all flat with lots of colors, stereotypically speaking. And there is already so much color to be seen in Panama, that to add to the smorgasboard seems overkill….been there, done that…ah, you Painter, “Have you walked out your door lately? Can you create instead of merely reflect?” Arrogant, perhaps, but I can be opinionated and I just get to accept that I’m wired that way. Besides, you know what they say about opinions? So no, I don’t find texture or dimension or depth in paintings in Panama, but I do find it everytime I walk anywhere in Casco Viejo. It’s like living inside an incredible work of art for me. Every little patch of peeled paint, every smooth circle in the center of the brick of the cobblestone streets, the ever changing color of the sky and the sea, the tiled roofs, the nacre of the Cathedral reflected in the evening spotlights, the bright white of the buildings against a dark night sky, the parks, the monuments, the architecture, the odd array of people including the man who walks around with a stack of newspapers on his head or the Kunas or the old women and young children…this neighborhood is living art. Everywhere, everyday, at any hour, there is something beautiful to see and something alive to feel. And now, in this apartment, I have also found what you must have in order to appreciate all of the above, a tranquil place where peace can be found.