Tag: Puerto Escondido

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My Partner, Mi Compañera

This woman chose, of her own free will, to live with me almost two years ago. She has changed my life altogether, in sickness and in health, and we’ve developed a unique kind of mutual love and respect. Tinka and I have known each other a long time, each coming to Oaxaca about fifteen years ago as determined expats.

Lately we both got tired of living solo lives. I had a little house in Reforma; eight years ago she built herself a lovely place in Puerto Escondido. But things have changed there and she wanted to spend more time in Oaxaca City. So she proposed we join forces and she would split her time. I would visit her at the beach periodically. Friends going back to the states bequeathed to us their Oaxaca apartment which we remodeled, thanks to her contributions and some stuff from me.

We both grew up as privileged kids but in different ways. Tinka’s father was an IBM exec whose job was to set up offices in the Far East. She spent her youth in Bombay and the Philippines, later in suburban New York, learning about the world if not much about America. I grew up in a well off Chicago shoe business family, later to live and work in many places including New York, DC, Virginia and New England. See bio here.

We’ve both been married twice—each learning what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Tinka loves to travel; I’m getting too old and crotchety for that. Our tastes in food usually coincide, sometimes not, and we adjust. We may like different kinds of people and are mostly tolerant of the other’s taste. My long-term interest in music? Well, there we live on different planets, but so be it.

As some of you know, I spent many years in politics. Now Trump has brought us together, and we outdo each other in vitriolic comments, though she gets further into the weeds about the latest outrage than I do.

Most of our life together just works because we try to attend to each other’s needs. To illustrate: I’ve been sick for about two months with a miserable UTI infection, and you know how much fun it is to be around sick people. Tinka asks what she can do for me, shops for me, does most of the cooking, drives me to the doc, and tries in many ways to make things better. And she’s not cloying about it. I’ve never had treatment like that.

Our home has a roof terrace that she has totally transformed with plants into a horticultural welcoming spot. It makes the place beautiful and unique. And it keeps her busy because she is the kind of person who always must keep engaged with something.

So I’m thrilled that she keeps engaged with me, and I with her. Sometimes in old age things really do get better.

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Good Places Gone Bad

Condos next door, Puerto Escondido

In my life I’ve been very lucky to spend time and live in some desirable places: venues like Greenwich Village, Martha’s Vineyard, Little Compton Rhode Island, Chesapeake Bay, the coast of Maine. I took vacations to rare places like Tortola, the Leeward Islands and, years ago, Cozumel.

Now we learn that Cozumel, home to great scuba diving and laid-back Mexican charm, has been totally taken over by giant cruise ships. They disgorged some “1.2 million cruise ship passengers aboard 390 ocean liners in the first three months of 2023.” The place is now like St. Thomas and much of the Caribbean, host to hordes of vacationers seeking a charm that has vanished.

New York, the Vineyard—where we owned a small house—and even the fisherman’s backwater of Little Compton have been taken over by the rich and infamous who have transformed what was charming and unique into vacation spots for the masses with condos, hotels, Airbnbs, and freaks on mopeds.

You’re probably aware of how the process works. The word gets out from savvy travelers who tell their friends and cohorts about their wonderful discoveries. As in politics, word of mouth is a powerful change agent. Then come the speculators, sensing big profits, and the developers who build on models of what they know will sell.

The glowing reviews in respected travel publications just fan the flames and bring more vacationers who want a piece of the action. I wrote a blog last year about how some of us in Oaxaca respond to this.

Every new Travel+Leisure piece or New York Times article just brings in more of these vagrant deadbeats. They descend on us like the locusts. So we, or some of us, find a perverse joy in taking their money and making fun of them.

In smaller communities like Puerto Escondido, where I spend a good deal of time, demand can outrun supply, so prices go up and services go down. The infrastructure (water, health services, electric, internet, etc.) cannot keep pace. When my partner built a house here twelve years ago on a quiet street away from downtown there now loom five-story condos that are often in violation of the building codes. Trucks and construction noise abound. Real estate values skyrocket. Some old-timers want to move out.

One likely reason people are constantly searching for the perfect getaway is to escape from American culture. This is part of what drove me to Mexico some fourteen years ago. Today it’s the advent of Trump, the continuing tolerance of gun violence, the collapse of a working polity, the coarseness of American life, climate change—any or all can drive one to search for a better land.

And yet we know the transformation of good places into tourist havens has been going on for many years. It might be that laissez-faire economics also has something to do with this. People are encouraged to do whatever they want in the name of freedom, and desirable communities enforce few regulations. And many such places seem happy to sell out charm and uniqueness for the tourist dollar.

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Oldsters Partying in Puerto

The other night it was a mixed group, oldsters and mid-oldsters and a few younger people. I was probably the most senior of about thirty people there to exchange silly Christmas gifts and watch the sun go down over the Pacific. I knew only about four of these folks and thus looked forward to another evening of isolation, boredom, and social constipation.

This is what happens to many of us, old or not, as parties find us standing alone, drink in hand, listening to the noisy chitchat, resenting the loud music, deciding whether to approach a group and break into their conversation.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this. I used to be a jovial party-goer and party-thrower in my youth, big drinker, life of the party. (See “Nothing Succeeds like Excess.”) Aging often produces a slow process of withdrawal from all that, which is no bad thing. After all, how much small talk can you generate? Who wants to hear more stale political opinions, gossip about the neighbors, indulgent talk about oneself, with never a question about you?

At the party in question I came in with my partner, felt awkward and out of place, said a few hellos, and sat solo for a while to watch the sunset and plot my next (if any) moves. I made up my mind to tough it out so I went to sit with a younger couple eating dubious hors d’oeuvres and had a nice exchange with them.

The rum punch was good and I found people approachable. The gift exchange turned out to be fun, and the atmosphere changed from small pods of talkers to participants in an engaging group activity. I almost felt glad I’d come.

The small group I hang out with in Oaxaca was nothing like this mixed bag. Beach people are different. One older tanned guy in Hawaiian shorts looked like my old college roommate and never stopped talking. Other oldsters simply sat and said little. Women, as usual, carried the day and brought things to life. One looked like Kyrsten Sinema even to wearing a brassy Sinema-style dress. I kept ascribing personalities to these characters.

The point of all this is that aging produces in some of us the urge to withdraw (see “Retreat of the Elders”), which occasionally can come on strong. I’m not a recluse and I do like people, but in small groups or one-on-one. Most parties I can do without; this one—good for observations—wasn’t too bad.

Forced intimacy in any circumstance may work for the young. For most oldsters it just pushes old buttons.