Hola From Mexico

 

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In November my husband Will and I took our first holiday outside of Canada in 2 1/2 years. We flew to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on the Pacific coast, and spent our first week in Bucerias, a town on Banderas Bay north of PV and popular with Canadian snowbirds. 

Will and I have visited Bucerias before, but hadn't stayed overnight. We rented an Airbnb apartment that was a steep climb up a hill from the main street and beach. Our reward for this exercise several times a day was a glorious view from our deck of the town and ocean. 

This part of Mexico has relatively low reported COVID-19 cases, but low vaccine rates compared to Canada. We found the health protocols were pretty good. Large stores, restaurants, and crowded outdoor areas like markets had temperature-taking machines and hand sanitizer at the entrances. Mask recommendations were everywhere and observed to varying degrees. Our mostly outdoor lifestyle made us comfortable. Every day was sunny with highs around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). Great for the beach and pool, but hot walking up that hill mid-day.

A highlight of the week was a leisurely breakfast at Karen's, a beachfront restaurant, with my writer/editor friend Marie, who moved from Calgary to Bucerias eleven years ago. I met Marie through the Puerto Vallarta Writers Group, which I joined after my first trip to the area. The group emails were a warm reminder of my sunny times in Puerto Vallarta. Shortly after I joined, the group decided to publish a short story collection and invited members to submit their writing. I was thrilled when my story, Freezer Breakdown, was accepted and appeared in the collection, which Marie co-edited. The following year the group published Coast Lines 2 and another short story I wrote made the cut. Unfortunately, the Puerto Vallarta Writers Group folded shortly afterward, but Marie and I kept in touch.

Our second week, Will and I moved south down the bay to Nuevo Vallarta, where we rented a beachfront condominium with his sister. Our first full day we took a taxi to Sayulita, a surfing/hippie town up the coast. It was Sunday and Sayulita was packed with Mexican families along with the out-of-country tourists. It was fun to watch the surfing action on the beach.   

 

In Nuevo, we rented bicycles for two days to explore our local area. We wound up exploring more than we liked when we got lost trying to find Ernesto's, an out of the way restaurant we've enjoyed in the past. It turned out to be closed. Hot, hungry and thirsty, we biked back to a traditional Mexican restaurant we'd spotted on the way, and added a new restaurant to our favourites list. 

 

Refreshed by our fajitas, enchiladas and and drinks, we pedaled 'home' and cooled off at the beach, and later with an evening swim in the pool. 

This time of year, sea turtles hatch from nests all along the beach. On a morning walk, we watched the babies crawl over the sand to the ocean.

  

On a walk back from the pool, I made a new friend.   

 

         

We're now wrapping up our trip with ten nights in downtown Puerto Vallarta. It's a change from our first two locations. Streets are crowded with people. About 100 restaurants within a few blocks of our hotel tempt us with low prices and atmospheric settings on the beach, on sidewalks or in leafy courtyards. 

Our big excursion was a boat tour to Animas, a beach not accessible by vehicle. On the way, we snorkeled at Los Arcos, Puerto Vallarta's iconic rock formation. I saw a few fish, but would have been happy just to swim by the rocks and through the rock tunnel. The trip involved numerous transitions between boats, piers and shorelines that I couldn't have managed without the guides' helping hands. Most of our fellow passengers were younger than us and Mexican. Information in English was minimal and occasionally inaccurate, which made for some surprises. They became part of the adventure and the whole day was a lot of fun, capped by Mexican party games on the return trip.  

Los Arcos

Tomorrow, my birthday present from my kids will be dinner at The Iguana Restaurant in Casa Kimberly, the former home of Elizabeth Taylor. The actress's affair with actor Richard Burton during the location filming of the movie The Night of the Iguana launched Puerto Vallarta's tourism boom. The restaurant has panoramic views of the city and bay. We've booked a table for sunset. 

Looking down from The Iguana Restaurant

Burton and Taylor in Puerto Vallarta during the filming of The Night of Iguana

A few days from now we'll fly home to Calgary, where there's snow on the ground and temperatures around freezing. I see snowmen and reindeer holiday decorations all over Puerto Vallarta, and they seem weird in this tropical climate.     

  

              

 

Will we write about the pandemic?

 

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When I attend Zoom meetings with other writers, someone always asks if we'll write about the current pandemic in our fiction. Invariably a couple of people reply they're so so tired of COVID-19 that when it's over they won't want to write or read anything about it. They hope to move on and write stories that imagine the pandemic hadn't happened.  

 

Given publishing timelines, most novels published the past year were written before the authors knew about COVID-19 or anticipated its enormous impact. This winter I've read a few novels set in our contemporary time and have had no trouble reading about people meeting in restaurants, attending parties and generally living like it's 2019. The only novel that jarred me was one that specified the year was 2020 and mentioned COVID-19 as a past event. I assume the author added this topical reference on the assumption we'd be done with the pandemic by the book's fall release. My conclusion is you can write a contemporary novel that ignores the coronavirus, but it's best to either keep the year vague or indicate that it's set before March 2020, when only someone living a cave would have missed the great changes to our society.     

  Timeline of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada, January - April, 2020  

Other writers in my Zoom meetings expect they will explore the pandemic in their fiction, as they would do with anything that affects them profoundly. Some have already written short stories and poems about it. COVID-19 can be central to a story or simply part of the landscape. Your protagonist might be working from home, instead of going to her office. She might engage with friends and family on Zoom, in addition to the usual phone calls, letters, emails and text messages. When she does meet someone in person, his mask--or lack of mask--becomes a descriptive detail like his hairstyle or baseball cap. She might suddenly realize she's standing too close to him and leap backwards. The pandemic could provide our stories with fresh descriptions, until they become overdone because everyone is writing about COVID-19. There's a risk of saturating the market with too many coronavirus stories for readers who will have largely put the pandemic behind them. 

  

Writers can avoid dealing with all this by setting their stories after COVID-19, which, hopefully, won't be far in the future. But, in the post-pandemic world people won't necessarily be partying like it's 2019. How soon will it be before we're comfortable shaking hands with strangers and hugging acquaintances we meet? Will we stop doing these things for good to avoid catching all kinds of viruses? The common cold can drag someone down for weeks. The regular flu can kill. Is a handshake worth the risk? For these same reasons, will stores maintain some of their protective measures--plexiglass at the checkout counters, socially distanced lineups, one way aisles and hand sanitizer stations? Will buffet dinners be a thing of the past? Will airlines require passengers to keep wearing masks on planes or will most passengers choose to to wear them to avoid sharing diseases? Writers will need to know these details if they send their character to an exotic location or to the grocery store.     

 

This makes me think that writers of realistic contemporary fiction will have to deal with the pandemic, whether they want to or not. I suspect that when we're over COVID-fatigue most writers will find themselves processing the experience in their memories and work. Already, I feel a bit of nostalgia for the early days of COVID when few people wore masks in public and grocery store shelves were often picked clean of canned goods, frozen vegetables, milk, eggs and, of course toilet paper. One store I went into had a clerk guarding a stack of toilet paper to make sure no hoarders grabbed an extra package. That's a detail future readers of COVID-19 stories will find bizarre and informative about our pandemic.                             

 

 When will we feel comfortable in crowds like this?

 

Music Soothes Troubled Times

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This winter, a friend coaxed me to join her choir. This wasn't something I'd thought of doing since high school. During my childhood and teens, I belonged to choirs at school and church. I enjoyed them and continued to like singing alone or at occasional public events, despite my diminishing vocal quality. No longer able to hit the high notes, my range became limited to about five notes. My voice cracked and stained by end of each song. The tones fell flat, to my own ears. 

My friend got into choir for something to do after she retired. Before then, she'd had no interest in singing and, unlike me, hadn't taken piano lessons as a kid. She explained that some choirs required auditions. Others don't, including Shout Sister, her all-female choir.

She gave me printouts of lyrics to her group's current roster of songs. Leonard Cohen., Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles; my long-time favourites. I had spare time and was looking for activities this winter, since I was away from home in Ottawa, helping a relative through medical treatment.

"I've arranged for you to try out the choir this week," my friend said. She'd also convinced the  administrator to give me a special rate if I decided to stay, since I'd only be there for part of the year.

"Okay," I said, because she'd gone to all this trouble.

Wednesday afternoon, we drove to her choir practice at a local church. About seventy women, mostly seniors like us, stood in a horseshoe shape facing the choir leader. No sheet music. The notes  rose and fell with the leader's hand, a method of music reading I found easy to follow.

The meeting brought back memories of my youthful choirs. "Don't interrupt the line of music by taking a breath." The director echoed my earlier choir leaders. "Sustain the last note." The large group sang harmonies that sounded lovely to me. I found myself able to sing all the notes. Either the organizer selected songs suited to amateurs or she arranged them for unpracticed female voices.

Best of all, for those two hours of song I forgot my worries about my family member's health challenges. The choir had me hooked.

I looked forward to the weekly sessions. After two months, a woman I talked to during the break  convinced me to participate in the next week's concert at a retirement home. Performing with the group was fun and gave a new dimension to choir practice. Our concert ended with the 1970s O'Jay's anthem, Love Train, which urges people around the world to join hands and form a train of love. At the rousing finish, we were supposed to join hands with the person beside us. Some of us did; others refrained.

The following week our choir session was cancelled due to COVID-19. It soon became clear we wouldn't be singing for weeks and months. Then the organizers set up practices on Zoom, a virtual meeting site that has taken off in this time of home isolation.

I'm not swift with technology and worried I wouldn't figure out Zoom, but with a little advice, Zoom worked easily and well. Now, I follow the leader on my computer screen, while thumbnail pictures of choir members appear along the top or side. During breaks, I switch to gallery view, with thumbnails filling the screen. The first two weeks, over fifty members signed in each time. I'll miss week three since I'll be driving from Ottawa, west across Canada to my home in Calgary .

At the virtual Zoom session, the director puts us all on mute, since the system can't co-ordinate our voices. I discovered my voice doesn't sound as good alone as I sounded to myself with the group. It still cracks and strains for those high notes.

I wouldn't want to start with choir online, but virtually continuing with familiar faces and songs was more satisfying than I'd expected. Again, for those two hours, choir brought me out my despondent mood. For the first time since this mass isolation began, I felt that most of us won't be permanently damaged and we'll return to our humankind.

Shout Sister operates in numerous Ontario locations. Ottawa has three branches, with our afternoon group the most recent sister. Here's a YouTube video of one of our older sister groups performing Ben E. King's Stand By Me, a song our newer group learned this year. 

I have several friends in Calgary who belong to choirs. A year ago, I asked one of them what he gained from being in a choir. He said, "When you sing together, you make each other so much more." I agree.