Dry-Freeze

Picture a house of the sort that is common in Allende or Safon books - a house sort of frozen in the past with crumbling adobe walls, corners filled to the brim with dust and a lost cat or two that make us think of deja-vu.

These houses are always abandoned relics of yesteryear in neighborhoods that saw better days when the Spanish (or the French or the English) ruled over a country now ruled by indigenous left-wing zealots that make up for their lack of education with misguided idea(l)s. The next door cafe - once a sign of progress and richness with a bottle or two of fine wine still left - pleads the passerby for a momentary glance that's teased out of them with a plate of delicately crafted charcuterie.

I walked into such a place but it wasn't frozen; it was alive in its stillness. Because of the memories gathered in the form of forgotten matchbooks and restaurant coasters as well as pictures of the sort you buy on a cruise and that is poorly glued to a laminated piece of fancy looking plastic you could have thought the owner had left the place in a hurry one lazy afternoon and had never come back.

A piece of me lives there.
And that's a poetic way of saying a family member is very much alive in it.

A woman who projects more life than she actually has.

Consider the technological marvel of the project. A small, lightweight box of black magic that makes tiny images - for they must be tiny to pass through those skinny cables connecting it to the computer - into huge high definition pieces of art that would have made 12th century European artists ooh and aah with marvel. We've come a long way since human statues.

Though examples in Paris and Puerto Vallarta might suggest otherwise.

She moves carelessly through a clutter precariously balancing her past and present with no obvious consideration for the future. A yell erupts from her in frustration as she looks for the notebook she is holding and searches desperately for the glasses she has calmly sitting atop her head. Of course it makes sense for the crows' footsteps all over her face to be stretched tight by a magical combination of pigs something or other, blended platelets (her own thank god) and ozone and Co2.

She's obviously found the fountain of youth.

Prescription:
Though the reader might be inclined to finish reading this and perceive a sense of dripping sarcasm I would hope that the melancholy of the beginning be kept throughout.

Maybe we'll all grow up to be whatever age we're supposed to be.