Goodbye, Buck.

It's a sad day in Bakersfield, California. Buck Owens died yesterday at the age of 76. (Read more about him here.)

I pretty much grew up in Bakersfield, but it wasn't until much later that I learned about "The Bakersfield Sound" that Buck pretty much invented with Don Rich in the 1950's and 60's.

Instead, my early (y)ears were filled with Styx, Steely Dan, and The Police (all thanks to my brother), and Duran Duran (which I blame on no one but myself). It was the early 80's, and Buck Owens was just a sequined country singer on a TV show called Hee Haw.

Even so, the Country side of Bakersfield was there throughout my childhood, close enough that I didn't have a name for it. My friend Beth competed in rodeo and spent her weekends out at the stables; many of my classmates were ranching kids who would show prize-winning cattle at the Kern County Fair. While the rich kids were skiing in Tahoe, the local kids were castrating sheep with the 4H Club.

By middle school, my male friends were using chewing tobacco just like their brothers and fathers were, giving plenty of product placement to Copenhagen and Skoal. They'd hold court in the back of the school bus holding small brass spitoons, cussing, laughing and posturing. When we had fog delays*, it was not unusual for the posse to crawl onto the bus having shared a flask of Jack Daniels or Southern Comfort. As impressive as they were in their giant belt buckles and boot-cut Wrangler jeans, they were still fairly new to drinking, and the results were not pretty.

(*If you've never spent a winter in the San Joaquin Valley, it's difficult to appreciate the central role that Fog plays in daily life, both as cause of terrible car accidents and, alternatively, boredom. From November to March, schools are routinely affected by 3-hour "fog delays" and all-day "fog cancellations".)

When enough of us were old enough to drive, a bigger Bakersfield was revealed: one whose main pasttime involved cruising down Chester Avenue, driving out into the fields (cotton, oranges, almonds-- take your pick), and drinking.

A typical Saturday night started with the cruising, and here, I was all set: my boyfriend, Dickie, had a '56 Chevy pickup truck with all the original parts. Primered in white, the Chevy was a perpetual work in progress; Dickie would save up money from his job at the garage to get "the next piece" chromed: the front bumper, the back bumper, the grill. (Our relationship lasted until the rear-view mirror, at which point the brake lights came on.)

Still in the front-bumper stage of our courtship, though, we found cruising a perfect way to while away the earlier part of the night. See and be seen. Drive slowly, check out your friends and foes in each oncoming vehicle, all the while tuned in to KUZZ. Listen to Merle Haggard, Hank Williams Jr., the Charlie Daniels Band, Dwight Yoakam. I suppose Buck was in the mix as well (knowing as I do now that he owned KUZZ), but his sound was nothing I was specifically aware of.

After cruising, we'd head to The Couch.

Now in any other city, The Couch might be a seedy lounge or a bohemian nightclub, but in Bakersfield, it was... a couch. In the middle of nowhere. In a field.

The older kids had inherited a partying routine that entailed buying beer in town, grabbing two or three old tires, and driving out to the Couch. Pop open a beer, set fire to the tires, take a seat, and there you have it: instant fireplace, long-burning, no clean-up required. (Mom and Dad, take heart: all told, I went out to The Couch only once or twice; chalk it up to the stench of burning rubber and the unspecified fear that something terrible was likely to happen out there.)

Enter the rear-view mirror: at the age of 16, I left Bakersfield to attend school in New Mexico., where I discovered Pink Floyd, the Dire Straits, and Bob Marley. Meanwhile, back in Bakersfield, Dwight Yoakam was busy convincing Buck Owens to join him on a remake of "Streets of Bakersfield," a move that launched Buck Owens back into country music stardom and appropriately rewrote his Hee Haw years as a mere footnote of his musical career.

Buck opened the Crystal Palace in 1996, the same year he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. With a new generation of Buckaroos to back him, he took to playing two shows every Friday and Saturday night at the Crystal Palace, a pace he maintained almost until the end of his life.

In 1997, I stopped through Bako on my way home from Namibia. My friend Michelle and I wandered through the museum and took turns posing in front of a bigger-than-life Buck, all bronze and magnificence. For us, it was a just wacky little excursion, but it was also my first real introduction to the music of Buck Owens.

Since then, his music has come to mean something very special to me, for reasons I've largely failed to describe here. Suffice it to say that I'm sad at the passing of Buck Owens.

It's a quiet and mercifully cool Sunday afternoon, and I've got Buck singing "Above and Beyond," turned up real high, so that he can be heard by a good number of my neighbors here in Merida. I'm singing the harmonies, taking pleasure in the almost visual brilliance of his music. That's the best I can do for now.

Cancun at its best

I may have boasted that I was going to stop through Cancun on the way home from Tampa. Silly me, for being so literal.

Let me just say that Cancun is fabulous from the air. Especially when you have a window seat. And you've been drinking. Since before noon.

Which, of course, is a function of having changed planes in Miami, so infamous among travelers that there's a webpage dedicated to Killing Time at Miami International Airport, not to mention a pee-your-pants funny article by Dave Barry, who includes this unbiased review of MIA:

• MIAMI AIRPORT: Sucks
  Perhaps you think I'm being harsh on MIA. Well, perhaps this is because you do not have to use it a lot. I do. Almost every week, I get on a plane there, and, if all goes according to plan, the plane lands in some other city. I am almost always struck by the fact that the other city's airport, big or small, is a WHOLE lot less hostile to travelers than MIA, the airport that proudly proclaims to visitors from all over the world: ``Welcome! You Are In A Hellhole!'' I have ranted before about the bad design, the confusion and the insanely overcrowded, last-chopper-out-of-Saigon ambience at MIA, so I'm not going to dwell on it here. Nor am I going to mention the Soviet-style monopoly food service, which, in some of the grimmer parts of the airport, offers a bill of fare consisting entirely of hot dogs that I believe were originally placed on the grill by Ponce de Leon. (Dave Barry, Maimi Herald, Sunday, August 2, 1998.)

It therefore makes perfect sense that there was a bar next to my boarding gate, and that it opens at 6 a.m.

Now, I've never been much of a drinker (except when I was in college, and whenever I attend TESOL conferences, as per my previous posting), but Miami International Airport actually inspired me to think the thought (man, I need a drink!) and drink the drink (no mojitos available, so I opted for a rum and ginger ale), all so that I could walk the walk of a now de-stressed traveler and actually enjoy the flight to Cancun.

And I was rewarded. If you've never flown over the Florida Keys, oh... my... god. It's spectacular (and that's not just the liquor talking). If you can't afford to charter a private plane, it may just be worth the chaos of MIA so that you can take in the seascape between Miami and Cancun.

If only we didn't have to land...

Okay, you do the math, since I clearly didn't.

It's mid-March. In Cancun. Where the vernal equinox is observed as it has been for centuries, with loud, newly braided co-eds flip-flopping their way to everlasting sun damage.

With nary a hotel room to be found, my choices consisted of sleeping on the beach (um... no) or catching the next bus home, to Merida.

This is where the act of traveling becomes a destination in and of itself. The taxi becomes the journey, the plane becomes the destination, and the destination becomes... another point of departure. This is where I am, because to wish it were any other way would be to deny reality.

And so I found myself talking to yet another taxi driver, this time en route to the bus terminal.

More and more, I'm convinced that taxi drivers are some of the wisest people on earth, transporting, as they do, over time, thousands of people of every stripe imaginable for the myriad reasons that prompt us to leave our homes for this thing called travel.

This driver, who indulged my request to take photographs "of the beautiful highway" through his windshield, was a real pro, fully protected from mishap by a dashboard St. Christopher, (color-coordinated!*) patron saint of taxi drivers. I can't say that I minded.

* Don't forget that you can click on any photo to see an enlarged version of it. Enjoy.

TESOL... what's there to talk about?

As you know, I'm in the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). Those of us who work directly with ELL's (English Language Learners) teach ESL (English as a Second Langauge) or EFL (English as a Foreign Language)-- a distinction that rides on whether we're teaching in an English speaking country like the USA (where it's ESL) or in a country where English is not widely spoken in everyday life (where it's EFL), like Mexico, Thailand, France, Chile, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and... you get the idea.

Every year, ESL and EFL teachers, teacher educators (that's me), and administrators from all over the world come together for the International TESOL Convention. This past weekend, some 4,000 teachers from about 180 different countries attended up to seven days of workshops, presentations and social-professional events in Tampa, Florida.

(Social-professional events would include the excellent breakfast I had with colleagues on Friday morning. We caught up on each others' lives and then talked at length about plagiarism and the teaching of writing-- as valuable or better than many of the formal presentations I attended. Same goes for the afternoon I spent drinking mojitos, but I digress...)

Anyway, I arrived in Tampa on Wednesday night ready to dig in. On the way from the airport to my hotel, I chatted with my cab driver, himself an adult ELL studying toward his MBA. Having already ferried several other TESOL folks to the convention center and surrounding hotels, his curiousity finally got the better of him as he asked:

What do you talk about, anyway... I mean... besides English?

I think this is a perfectly reasonable question. In fact, imagining that some of my own readership might be wondering the same thing, I thought I'd share with you a few representative topics-- keeping mind these are but a smattering of the 500+ presentations that took place this year. Here's goes:

The Basics:

• Tips and Techniques for Developing Better Readers
• Improving Speaking and Listening Through Audio Journals
• Effective Student-Centered Vocabulary Activities

Hold on... no, wait... you did not just mumble the word "boring" to yourself, did you? Seriously, this stuff is exciting to us!

But lest you think that we're only about the two of the R's (readin' and [w]ritin'), we've also got:

• The Language-Math Connection
• Teaching ESOL through Science Fair Projects
• Leading Best Practice in Business English

In other words, we're practical people; we like to make connections between language and what one does with it.

Hmm... but maybe we sound a bit too practical. We're plenty capable of sounding super-academic, too:

• Expert and Novice Processes in Revision Tasks
• The Sociopolitical Genesis of EFL Attitudes and Motivation
• Building Legal English Corpora for Classroom Purposes

Indeed, the use of corpora and the application of corpus linguistics in language teaching continue to be hot topics in TESOL. (For more info on corpus linguistics, read this article.)

Then there's the tech-related stuff, which we call CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning), with such topics as:

• Using Wikis to Advance Narrative Writing Fluency
• Automating Distribution of Listening lessons via Podcasting
• Using the Webcam for Pronunciation Practice

...not to mention a gaggle of presentations on the use of weblogs for teaching writing.

Finally, just in case you haven't yet formed a clear idea of what we talk about at a TESOL conference, we have these to offer:

• Second Language Learning is Not Doomed To Failure
• Am I Just Teaching English?

and my personal favorite:

• There Was Deviations But There Was Rules!

Are you still here? Let's play!

If you've read this far, I think you deserve to have some fun. Therefore, I'll wrap things up with a brain teaser:

Each year, TESOL identifies a theme for our conference. Presenters often allude to the theme by weaving key words of the theme into their presentation titles. So-- Based on the titles below, what do you think the theme was for this year's conference?

• Daring to use Corpus Activities in Classrooms
• Leading Best Practice in Business English
• Daring to Enter the Blogosphere
• Leading With Action Research for Content Teachers
• Dare to Moodle
• Leading with Persuasive Speech

Hint: The theme consists of three words, at least one of which appears in each of the six titles listed above.

That should be enough for you to make a decent guess or a wild fabrication. Post your guess in the "comments" section under this posting, then check back in a few days to see the results. Prizes will be awarded for the most imaginative answer and the most humorous answer, as well as for the right answer.

(Note: No cheating! TESOL people who already know the answer are not eligible-- though you're welcome to post creative answers. The rest of you can have at it, but no Googling allowed.)

Candy from a friend

I'm on the road these days, and don't have a chance to write today... but my friends at Yucatecan Living have written a lovely piece on the Yucatecan sugar addiction. Read this posting and enjoy! And then send my friends a comment on their blog. :)

Sometimes, it's them...

Don't fly away! This entry is about technology, but read it anyway...

One of the big themes I touch on in my work (technology training) is the pitfall of failure coupled with self-blame; whether it's the DVD player, our cell phone or a website, when something doesn't work, we often assume that we just didn't do it right.

Such has been the case with my first attempt at audioblogging (two postings earlier). I'd had a wonderful, easy time uploading my audio file and transferring it to my blog on Sunday night. I tested it on my testing blog, it worked, and I had every reason to believe that you'd be able to listen to my song on Monday morning.

Not so. One report after another dribbled in (for your entertainment, see the "comments" under that blog entry), and the message was the same every time... it was a no go. No sound, no "play" arrow, freezing computers, frustration. Sigh.

My response was to visit five internet cafes in three hours so that I could test the connection and see if it was a bandwidth issue. By Monday afternoon, my success rate in playing my audio file was zero; my failure was as profound as had been my victory just 24 hours ealier.

But here's the clincher: I couldn't access the website of the company that supports my audioblog, either. That's when I started to suspect it wasn't me, and that it wasn't you. Maybe it was them.

And so it was; after visiting a few online discussion groups, I learned that my audioblog company, CastPost, had found themselves overwhelmed with traffic on their little server. Coincidentally, this happened sometime early on Monday morning. They solved the problem last night (Wednesday), and voila! My audioblog is working!

The thing about technology coupled with failure and self-doubt is that it's self-defeating. Do your best not to go there. If you're frustrated with a gadget like your DVD player, ask a friend to give it a try, read the manual, sleep on it, and try again.

If it's website-related, it's a bit more complex, since you've got a lot of actors on the stage here: the web designer, the server that hosts the website, your browser, your internet service provider, even your own computer. Any one of these can have a bad day, and the results are borne out on your screen. Sometimes, the only solution is to walk away from the computer, go have yourself an espresso (or other drug of choice), and give it another try later.

So-- I want to thank those readers who struggled to make it work the first time, then returned to give it another try this morning. Thanks for not giving up, and thanks for adding your comments. And thanks to CastPost, a little start-up company in California, for offering their services for free-- it's exciting to be involved with such a new (free!) product, even though that means going through a few ups and downs.

If this is your first time hearing about the whole affair, fear not! Scroll down two entries, and you'll find a "play" arrow...

Meanwhile, I'm here in Tampa for the week, attending our annual TESOL conference (Teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages). There are about 6,000 of us here from all over the world, including a bunch of tech-heads whose brains I plan to pick.

Oh, and about the butterfly (at top), it was just a lure for you visual types. I found this pretty little guy at the university, sitting peacefully on a plant outside my office. He flew away moments after I took this shot.

I'm off! More on Mexico in my next entry.

Outside In

I've been here just shy of two very different months. My first month was all about what I could see outside... and from the outside. My second month, by contrast, has taken me inside: inside the university, inside neighbors' homes, inside the worlds of those I now call friends. Progress of a kind, but if I'm not careful, it could be just... like...

Life in Washington DC, where months can pass without my going to a Smithsonian museum or the Kennedy Center. Maybe that was part of it: my Inside Washington and my Outside Washington had grown too distinct. So I've taken it as my personal challenge in Merida to cultivate both of my Meridas, Outside and Inside, in the months ahead.

Danzon (pronounced "dan-ZON") figures prominently in my Outside Merida. A descendant of late 19th century ballroom dance in Cuba, Danzon has it all: live music with a horn section, men in white fedoras, and everyday people who aren't looking to impress anyone. Danzon is a welcome contrast to the many cultural demonstration-performances sponsored in Merida, which while beautiful, are as much spectacle as spectacular.

In short, what I like about Danzon is that more people do it than watch it.

If you head to the Parque de Santiago on a Tuesday night, you'll see Danzon in full swing: hundreds of couples dancing a mix of cha-cha and salsa to Latin big-band tunes from the 1930's and 40's. There's not a lot of smiling or talking going on: no showing off, no period costumes, just couples, some elegant in their movements, others not.

In fact, on first glance they seem almost joyless, but time tells me there's something special going on here; I see many of the same couples on Sundays when the same band plays at the Parque Santa Lucia. Daylight lends a different mood to the affair, with folks greeting one another and talking between dances. Even so, dancing, the couples move like their Tuesday night selves, with the same, seemingly stoic commitment to enjoyment.

And me? When I go to Danzon, I dance some and gawk more, and this pays off: I find if you watch people long enough, they will eventually disprove what you think you first noticed about them.

After weeks of going to Danzon, I find myself at the Plaza Santa Lucia on a cloudy Sunday morning just before noon. The turnout is low, maybe because it's cold by Merida standards. Then I see this man, and he is exuding joy, letting it shine outward, from the inside. He sees me and waves.

Could it be that others are feeling the same joy? It's actually a beautiful day for dancing, the music is good and rhythmic and romantic, and yet the dancers' faces are unreadable. Are they keeping their joy to themselves, on the inside, where they can savor it? Or is joy just not a necessary part of the equation? I suspect I'm missing the point with my concerns about joy; perhaps there's something else.

I have no idea, of course. This is a place where people don't always smile for pictures, where dignity and composure might be more important than happiness, where happiness might be alive and well Inside Merida.

And now, for a song...

That's right, it's time to try something new, so here we are: audioblogging! Just click on the "play" button and you'll hear my first attempt.

Note: if you're accessing this page from a wireless internet connection, it might not play so smoothly. If you've got DSL or cable internet that's not wireless, you should have no trouble listening to the song.

Anyway, give it a try and let me know how it comes out on your end. :)


Powered by Castpost

Serenity now!

Who knew I'd return to Merida and find... politics. Suddenly I seem to be everyone's idea of palanca (leverage), and if I play my cards right, I just might be...

With all of these words and ideas floating around in the air, you can understand my wanting to harken back to my peaceful day last weekend when it was los monarchas who were floating and flitting to and fro. (Come on, what better time to pull out to and fro than with butterflies?).

We're talking here about the great state of Michoacan, due west of Mexico City. We'd heard that getting there takes a while, about three hours. Fellow Fulbrighter Stephany and her husband Victor, still recovering from weeks of overactivity from various conferences, decided they were up for the drive, so we dragged our butterfly-motivated selves out of bed and were on the road by 7:30.

Let me say here that the drive from Mexico City to El Roasario, Michoacan, is no fewer than 4.5 hours. Victor deserves several trophies for his excellent, tireless driving. We made good use of our time together, though: we're all talkers, so when we weren't grooving to Stephany's eclectic mix of CDs, we were placticando. (My dictionary tells me that the verb placticar (to chat or to talk over) is uniquely Mexican-- I'd be curious to know where else this verb is used. It took me a while after arriving to realize folks weren't saying practicar, to practice.)

Anyway, we made it to El Rosario by noon, a photographer's least favorite time of day but the perfect time to see a sky full of monarchs-- by noon, the air is warm enough for butterflies to fly around without losing body heat. Imagine us with our cameras photographing the, er, sky... at high noon, trying to capture the uncapturable.

Neeless to say, I have no convincing pictures of our butterfly sky, but I did manage to catch a couple of monarchs in this picture of Victor and Stephany, walking sticks in hand.

The first portion of the path leading to the butterfly sanctuary is lined with souvenir shops and kitchens, tempting on the way up and irresistable on the way back down. (Eating hot-off-the-griddle blue corn tlacollos made for a heavenly reward after our hike.) Here, still pre-hike, we bought our walking sticks before turning our attentions to the sometimes-steep 2K loop ahead of us.

Ahead of us was... the essential, nourishing familiar. Soon after you pass the last shop on the way up, the noise of commerce dies away and you realize you're no longer in El Rosario, or Michoacan, or even Mexico. You're in Nature. Some things are universal, and I think the smell of pine trees and dirt kicked up by hikers is one of them. Breathe it in, and you're transported the first forest you ever hiked in. (For me, that's the San Bernardino mountains surrounding Idyllwild, California.)

But this sight of monarchs, hibernating here in this little spot of forest in Michoacan, is unique. Describing what we took in that afternoon is a little bit like photographying the butterfly sky at high noon... fleeting.

Hopefully, this shot captures something of the wonder-- the dark clumps you see weighing down the branches are monarchs, huddled together by the thousands to conserve body heat so that they might survive their upcoming travels to North America, Canada and elsewhere. (Click on the photo to see an enlarged version.)

It's still pretty much a mystery as to how the descendants of these monarchs, still to be born abroad, will undoubtedly find their way back to their ancestral tree in Michoacan. One article I found suggests that the mountains of Michoacan are uniquely magnetic as a result of volcanic activity, and that this serves as a beacon for the returning monarchs. One of the signs we encountered during our hike posited that the thousands of dead butterflies left behind in Michoacan descompose to provide the returnees with the scent of homecoming. I imagine it's a combination of these and many more factors.

It seems we humans are so attracted to singularity-- the reason we feel sad or happy today, the solution to a problem, the best way to teach... the monarchs are here to remind us that the world is complex and mysterious, a confluence of interdependent factors.

But I'm getting philosophical again. Suffice it to say those butterflies were damn pretty, we had a awesome time finding them, and by the end of the day, Victor still at the wheel, we were absolutely pleased that we'd dragged ourselves out of bed that morning.

My little piece of Carnival

involved standing on a corner vying for a place to stand and a view to photograph. I wasn't the only one.

Though the desfile infantil is one of the smaller parades featured during Carnival week, it still drew a cast of hundreds to Merida's sidewalks: mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, all here to see their tiny family representatives float down the street, resplendant in their satin, felt, and tule.

We waited together in the afternoon heat, anticipating sweet smiles and beauty pageant waves. And then it came-- a parade of the children, eyes wide and full of... JOY...LEss...ness. That's right, joylessness.

This should be of no surprise to any of us. I mean, come on-- whether we're talking about the Disneyland Parade that my school's marching band played in when I was thirteen, the Halloween parade that my friend's kids were in last October, or this desfile infantil in Merida two weeks ago, the reality is the same: marching in a parade is not nearly as fun as it's cracked up to be.

Sure, costumes are fun!-- until you have to stand in line, in the heat, waiting for your group's turn to walk down the street. For me at the age of thirteen, it involved a wool uniform with fake epaulets and a big, wooly hat that evoked images of the London Guard run amok in Southern California. For these five year olds, it was sticky combination of lamé, humidity, and mermaid pasties. Cute, yes. Sweaty and irritable, definitely.

But enough about me. The fact remains that parades are best carried out by adults-- preferably adults who have access to beer so that they can withstand the wait time and the heat, so they can trade in their daytime work masks for their nighttime Carnival costumes and take joy in the freedom of outrageous anonymity.

All said and done, the best view I got was after I'd left the parade route, when I came upon this post-parade mini harem waiting for their parents to pick them up. No longer under the public eye, they eyed each other, perhaps getting a glimpse of what it means to be grown up with make-up and sparkles.

I think I'm starting to understand. Sure, the kids probably had more fun anticipating the parade than being the parade, but they also got to be a part of something much larger, something they will need when they are older: a chance to escape.

KATravels... subscribe via email!

Thanks to my friends at Yucatecan Living, I found a tool that enables you to subscribe to my blog via email.

What does it mean to subscribe? Simple-- whenever I post a new entry, you'll receive an email of that entry. No more having to check in to see if I've posted something new.

If you want to subscribe to KATravels, simply

• enter your email address into the little white box in my sidebar (on the right, just below my profile);
• click "subscribe".

The subscription company, Bloglet, will send you a confirmation email, which you should keep. That's it. Simple and free.

On a separate note,

we *did* get up early enough this morning, and we made it out to Michoacan. The monarchs were out in full force, filling the air, awe inspiring. More on this in my next posting. Meanwhile, get signed up and drop me a comment or two. :)

Blur of color in motion

This pretty much sums up my time in elegant Mexico City, unless you want to get into the the other senses (which I'll hold off on for now).

I've been here in DF for almost a week, and just wrapped up two days of exchange (ideas, energy, experience) with the other 50-some Fulbright scholars who are here in Mexico for the year. It's been hugely enriching to learn what everyone is doing. I plan to share some of my colleages' stories here in KATravels in the weeks and months ahead, so keep checking in.

Anyway, the Fulbright cat herders, knowing how to kick things off right, treated us to a night at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where we got to see Mexico's famous Balet Folklorico in action. After changing seats twice in the nose-bleed section, I got the shot above from a lovely box seat.

This, however, may well be the sexiest thing I've ever seen on stage-- a man walks out alone, holding a rope. He slips it into a lasso, and for the next 5 minutes, he dances alone with his lasso, which jumps overhead, underfoot, to the side, always in tact, spinning.

The woman enters, and she's as transfixed as the rest of us. She flirts with him and he flirts back, but the lasso never stops. He's got it whirling around himself like a hurricane; the rope rises and falls, creating a funnel around the man. He is the calm eye, and she is being blown... away... until... she... jumps into the eye. She wraps her arms around the man, he grabs her waist with his free hand, and for the next 10 minutes, they kiss and dance and embrace. The other dancers join them, the music in crecendo, until the whole stage is whirling around the lasso, the man and the woman.

And that's Mexico City, too, in some sense: it's the center of a wheel, with each road running along its own spoke. Our conference now concluded, we're all heading back out to our respective sites, many of us by bus, some by plane, to places like Hermosillo, Oaxaca, Puebla, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Morelia. Twirling and spinning out into Mexico beyond DF.

Me, I'm enjoying two more nights here with friends before I twirl myself back over to Merida. If we manage to drag ourselves out of bed early tomorrow morning, we'll drive to Michoacan, where millions of monarch butterflies are hibernating for a few more weeks before they stretch their wings and head north.