From the studio window I can see hints of spring. The cardinals and wrens are singing as they prepare to mate, tones of green are shoving their way through the carpet of brown, and the stems of the rose bushes are softening and turning a violet hue as they hydrate through the roots.
I’ll need to get out there with the pruning shears before the leaves grow in. I never got around to it last year. If you prune a bush too much, it sort of gives up against your efforts and takes on a gaunt appearance. But if you ignore it the branches grow into each other and the thing becomes a heavy, lopsided mess. Sometime last year a deer got spooked and ran through a bush, mostly uprooting the damn thing.
This year I will do better at caring for the roses.
I guess you could say I “just got back from vacation.” Monday was full of travel – a flight from Punta Cana, a drive from Charlotte, arriving home well after dark. The sole purpose was to get home to the dog and relieve the mother-in-law from her volunteer dog/house sitting. “I kind of don’t want to go back,” she tells me the next morning a few hours before her flight. She had spent the past two weeks as a hermit, eating through a stash of groceries and only leaving the house to attend pilates and walk the dog. She looked relaxed. I tell her that she is more than welcome to stay, but the hermitness of her existence may end as the house will now be occupied by two additional adults.
She resigns that she has to return home. She has a husband who is always worried and a dog of her own that she needs to find and adopt.
I was in Puerto Rico for a little bit. Nothing extravagant. A few nights in a one-bedroom mother-in-law (no relation) apartment in a house immediately across the road from Luquillo Beach. From the porch we could watch the early morning surfers take on the crash of waves. As the afternoons grew hot, I found solace in breezy, darkened barrooms drinking my way through extravagant rum drinks and crisp, chilled beers. Since I was last around these parts, Ocean Labs has taken a foothold in the lowboy coolers all over the island. Well made, crisp, delicious.
I am not one for the hot and humid climates. My body runs hot, always has. It takes little more than a wink from an attractive person – stranger or not – to get my blood pumping and sweat pouring. Yet, even with this malady I still find endless inspiration in Puerto Rico. An American territory that has more than held on to what makes it unique. The buildings are the hurricane-resistant, concrete blocks that are also great at keeping out the heat. These concrete walls are little more than canvas for spray-paint – something artists take full advantage by creating vibrant displays of life.
Even in the middle of the afternoon heat, as these two young women were doing.
After a few days on the beach, we made our way into Old San Juan – the ancient city, the island fortress, the catholic stronghold that has long since given way to being a port for the tubby residents of cruise ships. Watch as they shuffle up the island’s lone hill, vacant expression and lumpy backpack, standing at the darkened doorways of shops, restaurants, and galleries – are we allowed to go in there? Of course you are, but if you wouldn’t mind standing aside so I can enter…
Old San Juan has that historic, permeant charm if you know where to look. On the edges are the bright neon signs of corporate chains – the Walgreens at the end of the dock ready to supply you with whatever burn ointments or nausea treatments you may have forgotten, the Harley Davidson store, the Taco Bell, the reminders that yes, this too is a part of America. Make it past that and up the narrow sidewalks made more narrow by lanes of parking and one-way traffic and you might find some gems frozen solid by history. This place reminds me of New Orleans – old, but kept up, aged with stories and disasters, held strong by those who decide yes, THIS is my city. This is where I belong.
One of those folks is Andrew, who visited the city a decade ago and never left. Now he’s bartending in the most beatnik fashion (one for you, one for me) while attempting increasingly complicated cocktails. “I’m from Detroit,” he says, “I love Detroit. I did construction there and did just fine. While I have family in Detroit, I have way more friends here in Puerto Rico.”
We sit at the bar with Andy for a few hours and I’m pretty sure he only remembers to add every third drink to our tab. I have my sketchbook out and brush up a few quick portraits of locals around the bar. One is spotted by Marco – a dynamite stick of a fellow, a boxer and trainer of those Youtube stars-turned-fighters – and he is in love with it. I slice the page from the book and give it to him. His girlfriend, who works behind the bar, jumps up on the counter and nails the portrait to the wall above everything.
My fellow readers, my art is now hanging at a defacto gallery in Old San Juan. Let me know if you ever find it, let me know if it is still there.
Punta Cana, though, is a different story. All-inclusive resorts are anything but inspiring. They all look the same, they all offer the same thing, and you might be the experience you paid for if, and only if, you buy into the upsell at check-in. So it was when we arrived at the Royalton – which was by pure coincidence the same day an American student went missing in the area, a story that made national headlines – a place with jailhouse quality dining and a staff that will give you every reason as to why they can’t just bring you a six pack of Presidente for your room. We’re here for a concert event over the next three nights – Tool, Primus, Eagles of Death Metal, and more – at the Hard Rock, a short walk up the beach. The whole thing is a story of American exceptionalism.
On the shuttle from the airport, we are brought through the outskirts of Punta Cana and Bavaro, in the areas not defined by the tall boundaries of the resort properties. This is where the locals thrive, these are the people who spend their days in the Caribbean sun building the air-conditioned hotel rooms we’re sleeping in. Everywhere you look are piles of garbage. The persistent colonialism of America is the proliferation of single use yet permeant plastics. Emptied soda and water bottles, food packaging, used diapers, dead TVs. There is no unified trash disposal, no trucks to navigate the dirt roads and take it away. So it collects until the regional enforcers are out of town, when it is then set afire.
The guests at the hotels, the ones who drain one bottle of water after another, will complain about how disgusting it smells, all that burning plastic all through the night. “Yes,” thinks the woman who works the front desk, but lives just down the road, “Thank you for all of that.”
I have to take it from a cart left out in the hallway, but I finally get my six pack (well, two) of beer for the room. I pick from it all day while sitting in a chair on our room’s deck/ pool front. A singular Eden, a Private Idaho. An idle mind may be the devil’s playground but the sketchbook gets a workout. At night, during the concerts, stand with the book open in the crook of my arm – drink in one hand, brush in the other, and do whatever the moment tells me to. It’s all a mess, but I don’t hate it. All of these pages are what is stewing, what is next.
Maybe, if you’re frustrated about where you are going or worried about what you should do next, sitting around and doing nothing at all might be the best thing you can do for yourself.
