A Sobrecama for My Someday Bed

Click here for a quick experience.

I think I read this on Facebook: every time your heart is broken, it has the opportunity to get bigger. This morning I am walking with a cracked heart and everything is getting in ... color, generosity, beauty, friendliness. I am walking on Paseo Montejo, leaking las lágrimas onto the sidewalk.

Huge, wonderful buildings
on both sides of the tree-lined
street.

This is a rich street in both history and money ... monuments, old money, old houses transformed into new hotels, restaurants, museums and some waiting for the inevitable changes to come. Half of the calle has been closed for family Sunday so it is filled with people ... riding bikes, walking their dogs, walking together for the sheer joy of being out on a glorious morning. Above is a 30-second experience of the morning.

I love my new book
which is actually two books in one ...
and their generosity to a stranger.

There are some vendors and artists set up along the street adding color and variety to the day. A school has set up a playground designed to give children a chance to move their bodies so they are hop-scotching, jumping through tires ... Playing. A table of used books attracted me so I asked the young people for what I was looking for ... A book in Spanish that I might be able to read.  They found one and then explained that this was a book exchange.  When I explained that I didn't have a book, they gave it to me. Normally, I'm not sure that such generosity would have brought tears to my eyes, but today it did.

Translation of the fine print below

Further down the way, I found this sign and was preparing to ask the holders why this was the best six months of their lives when I noticed the communication going on between them and a young couple in the street.        

It soon became obvious that the sign was meant for the couple. The young woman was crying.  Soon I was crying again.  I hope my heart is getting bigger ... It certainly is cracked.

The happy couple ... may your joy be eternal.

Fine print on the sign reads: 

       Place me like a seal over your heart, 
       like a seal on your arm;
       for love is as strong as death
          — Song of Songs 8:6

Monument at the end of
Paseo Montejo and a reminder
of the deep history ... and
the deep wound of this land.

This is a land of a thousand pains (as are most lands once you scratch the surface) but Mexico's pain and its strategy for dealing with it  both seem closer to the surface. 

I'm sure it wasn't a logical, well-planned decision but the Mexican way of dealing with pain seems to be celebrating. Celebrating family and life with color, music, togetherness and humor. Even celebrating death with all the same ingredients as they celebrate life.

Color on a restaurant wall -
exterior

Inside a "mall"

Staircase in a hotel

Hotel entrance

Always flowers and color.

And humor ... Sign reads:
I, too, am part of the "new era."
Conserve me!

My new "someday bed" cover

Julio Cham, salesperson
estraordinaire.

A couple of hours later ... There's something to be said about retail therapy … I now have new bedspread to go with a bed I might have sometime in the future … or might not. For now, it will go on my bed in San Cristóbal where I will enjoy it for the next four months. 

In the process of buying it, I met Julio Cham, as charming a sales person as I’ve met. He told me my Spanish was bueno; I knew it was a blatant sales technique but it was fun to hear anyway … and someday it might just be true, just like my someday bed.