LUNCH AT ELLIOT'S HOUSE
LUNCH AT ELLIOT'S HOUSE
Sunday was a day for church, Chucho, cocos, and coca.
[(Rear) (L - R)] Gabriel, Emily, Martha, Efren
[(Front)(L -R)] Nadia - Chucho - Lulu - David
After Church, Grant, his wife Nadia, and their daughter Valeria, picked me up and took me for cocos at the home of Nadia's father - Chucho, mother - Lulu, and brother - David, the baby of the family, the only one of Lulu's children not married. I also met Arturo who is Lulu's grandson and about David's age, about seventeen. Both boys are still in school.
We were joined by another of Lulu's three daughters, Emily, who, like Nadia, teaches English in an Elementary school, and her husband, Elliot, who drives taxi.
I was lucky to have Nadia and Emily as translators because Chucho, Lulu, their six children, three son-in-laws, two daughter-in-laws and several grandchildren, speak no English and Grant doesn't speak Spanish.
It doesn't look like it, but
this street was built by the govt.
Chucho, Nadia's father, owns a small house on a small piece of land, in a new subdivision, on the West side of the city. Chucho has his own coco, coconut, tree beside his house. He also has a Papaya tree, a Mandarin orange tree, a banana tree, and a lime tree as well as many flowers.
(They call limes, lemons and lemons, limes. They serve a slice or two of `lemon' with most meals.) Coca of course is Coca Cola.
The noon meal consisted of freshly picked coconuts, Mandarin oranges, and cold Coca Cola, purchased from a neighbouring home.
With a long pole with a hook on the end
Chucho brings down the fruit or coco.
To pick the cocos, Chucho used a long pole with a hook on the end. He put the hook around a coco, gave the pole a hard pull, and stepped back out of the way. Expecting to see a hard round ball, like the coconuts I get from the store, I was surprised when a large green object hit the ground. Chucho used his machete to trim the end of the coco until he reached the nut, the hard brown shell that I know, inside, then pierced the end so that the water, what we call milk, could be drank. Mexicans, at least Chucho's family, prefer to drink the coconut water while it is thin and colourless.
Chucho trims the husk away from the nut
to open its end and get the water.
After they have drank the water Chucho splits the coco open with his machete. Inside the large green fruit is the brown nut that I am familiar with. The shell, thin and soft, contains only a thin skin of white meat. They much prefer this to the thick white meat inside a thick hard shell that I am used to. They picked an older coco so I could see how the water had turned milky and the shell and meat were thicker and harder but generally they leave these older cocos, much preferring the younger, tissue thin, meat.
The older cocos will eventually fall off the tree, with a reverberating crash, if they land on the metal roof of the house.
Lulu showed me their little orchard, picking bananas and oranges for me. Used to getting such fruits when the skins are yellow I was surprised to find that they picked them while the skins were mostly green, yet the fruit inside was surprisingly ripe and very delicious.
Lulu used a long pole, not as long as the coco pole. The loop on the end of the pole narrowed at the far end. Under the loop was a small cloth basket. Lifting the pole so the basket went around the outside of the oranges she would pull the pole until the branch of the tree was in the narrow end of the loop and then give a slight tug which pulled the fruit from the branches and caused the oranges to fall a short two or three inches to the bottom of the basket.
The banana trees were short and the bananas were within arms reach and a bunch is usually hanging in the house within easier reach.
We had been eating outside but when the rain started we moved inside. While rain pounded on the metal roof, Chucho and I played dominos with Arturo and David.
I was invited back for lunch the next day. Lunch being the biggest meal of the day and knowing that I was a picky eater I was given a choice of menu. However, I didn't know any of the names of the dishes that were being offered.
With Nadia and Emily translating, the ingredients for the various dishes were described to me. Other members of the household joined into the discussion and it was, after much laughter, decided that I would be served corn soup. The bases for this meal, other than corn, which is a staple food in their diet, was the first chicken to wander into the kitchen. She was quickly caught and leashed to a tree in the front yard so she would be at hand for preparation the next morning.
| Washing Up Lulu (L) and Emily clean up after lunch.
| Martha's
|
|---|
To the soup of corn and chicken each person added their own fresh ingredients of finely chopped radish, celery, or onion. The ever staple torta, tortilla, was also served. Not a person who normally likes boiled meat I found the soup quite delicious and after much prodding, I don't like beans, I did put some frijoles fritas, fried beans, on my torta. (By the time I left Mexico I was eating frijoles fritas, like every Mexican, with every meal.)
Though I had gone to Tuxpan, primarily to enjoy the warm water, and one Sunday evening three young ladies tried to entice me to join them for a night swim, the weather was never warm enough.
On a blustery, cloudy, afternoon, after a lunch of fried chicken and tortas, at Elliot's house, where we were joined by Chucho and Lulu, Grant drove us to the beach.
They assure me this boat will float when the tide comes in.
Playa de Tuxpam, Tuxpan beach, on the Gulf of Mexico, where the water in summer becomes too warm for pleasant swimming, is the main tourist attraction of the city. Mexican tourist come from many miles, when the weather is nice, to frolic on the miles of soft sand that taper slowly into the surf.
While Nadia went to work, schools have so many students they double shift the students with morning students and evening students, schools being open from 6 AM to 8 PM, the rest of us went shopping, Tuxpan is a shoppers paradise with stores open until 8:30 every evening, and walked the seawall.
Can I have one?
Later we went for an evening snack and there was some confusion as to who was going to pay. Chucho and I split the bill with the proviso that I would pay the next time. We made arrangements to meet the next evening at the Centro.
I walked Chucho and Lulu to the main street where they caught a bus home by simply flagging a bus that had there destination painted on the windshield. Buses and taxis honk at people standing along the side of the road to get their attention. If it is going in your direction you lift your hand and they stop. If there are no cars parked along the curb they pull out of traffic but if there are cars parked they stop in the middle of the street and following traffic must stop or go around them.
Walking back to the Centro I heard a loud bang and saw a large crowd gathering at the edge of the Centro. Across the street there was a Volkswagen van emitting a cloud of smoke. Pushing through the crowd and crossing the street I could see that someone had placed a smoke bomb behind the van. It was so close to the van that the smoke was going into the motor compartment and up through the air intake at the top of the van making it look like the van was on fire.
As I could see the police were arriving and there was no danger of fire, I left. I crossed the street and had just climbed the stairs to the Centro when someone tapped my shoulder. It was Efren with his wife and two year old son.
I strolled the Centro with the young family, trying to make conversation. Efren having had an American friend, a few years ago, knew a few words of English, very few. We talked mostly with sign language while he gave his son a ride on a mechanical horse.
Efren told me that he and his friend used to communicate with the use of a dictionary. I had looked at one a couple of nights previously but hadn't bought it because it was too big to fit in my pocket. After Efren and his family left I went back to the book store and, as it was still open, purchased a dictionary.
This reminds me that this incident happened before I had lunch at Elliot's because when I went there for lunch I had the dictionario with me and was trying to tell Chucho about the bomba de fuma by looking up the words.
This made a great impression on the family, that I would go to the effort to try to learn their language.
The next evening I met with Chucho and Lulu and bought them supper at a little restaurant facing the Centro. I had the closest thing to Canadian food on the menu, a hambergasa.
More than one restaurant serves hamburgers but they only have one style and that is a cheese and bacon deluxe which includes a slice or two of papaya. Beware of the papas, or patatas, fritas, French fries, as they don't sell a lot of them and you may get left overs from the day before. One restaurant gave me a mixture of old and new.
Most stores carry `papas fritas' in the bag. These are much like the potato chips we get in Canada. If you want a real taste sensation try the ketchup flavoured chips with chili.
While having lunch at Elliot's I met Gabriel, the third of Lulu's son, who cross shifts on the taxi with Efren. Gabriel had stopped by to finalize a barbecue they had been planning for several weeks.
I was invited to chip in forty pesos along with all the family members. The money would be used to purchase, beef, pork, tortas, coca, frijoles, charcoal and other items necessary for a party.
Saturday night arrived and so did most of the family members. Martha's husband was the only family member who wasn't there and I was the only person there who wasn't a family member, but I was treated as if I was. Elliot spent most of his time sleeping because he had to go to work at midnight.
The charcoal they had purchased was not the briquettes as we know them but burnt pieces of wood. It was hard to light and everyone made a game of taking turns blowing on the coals to get them hot.
When the meat was finally cooked others would cut the meat into tiny pieces and roll it into tortillas. They laughed at me when I just took a piece of meat, placed it between two tortas, along with some frijoles fritas and hot sauce and called it a torta sandwich.
Gabriel's house is on a corner lot in a new subdivision in the North East corner of the city just a couple of blocks from the house that Grant is building. In front of his house is a street with a house on the other side. To the side of his house is an unfinished street with a hay field on the other side. Despite the rural setting the party was not spoiled by insects.
The rain held off, the temperature stayed warm, and the party continued outside, even after I knocked down one of the wires that held a light strung on the clothes line.
Entertainment, charades and musical chairs, followed the feast and lasted into the morning.
My final visit with the family was when Grant walked me to the bus Monday evening. His wife and daughter, joined by Martha, came to say good bye. Unfortunately I didn't have time to say good bye to Chucho, Lulu or the rest of the family.
While having lunch at Elliot's the sun had come out for awhile. Many houses use cloth on a string in doorways for doors. One of Elliot's doorways was in a good position and had white cloth for a door so I used it as a background and did some family photography. Later at Gabriel's I found a smooth wall and a big armchair and took some more family portraits.
When I got back to Vancouver I had my slides made into photographs. Eight by tens of the families and a snapshot for each individual family member. I sent these pictures to my new friends in Mexico wrapped as Xmas presents.
My way of saying `thank you' for the wonderful time they showed me while I was there.
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