It used to be so easy. Every January, I’d give my gardener, Pablo, about 700 pesos ($35 U.S.), and he’d go five miles down the road to the tax collection office in Chapala and pay that year’s vehicle registration fee. No appointment necessary. No legal documents were required. All he needed was my license plate […]
A few days ago, while rinsing my mouth after vigorously brushing my teeth, I heard a click in the sink. Whatever it was went down the drain before I could see it. At first, I thought maybe a crown had popped off. But on further inspection, I saw that a lower left molar had broken
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The holiday season is finally over, and the lines at the checkout counters are back down to being almost bearable. I don’t know where the Three Wise Men bought their gifts for the Christ child, but if they had to stand in line at Walmart, they would probably never have started the gift-giving tradition. Speaking
Years ago, I was a volunteer crew member on a square-rigged sailing ship owned by The Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California. The crew would gather every Saturday to maintain the ship. As a reward, we would get to sail it for two weeks at the end of summer. Occasionally, we had some inner-city teenagers
When I was growing up in Chicago, we took the Halloween cry of “trick or treat” literally. If people were too stingy to hand out a treat, they were fair game for a trick. For the most part, people were willing to provide candy to all the ghosts and goblins. There were always a few
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Years ago, at the Guadalajara airport while I was retrieving my suitcases in the baggage claim area, something unusual happened. I saw a yellow Labrador Retriever sniffing around the carousel. I figured he was looking for fruit, bombs, or drugs. I didn’t give it a second thought until he stopped dead in his tracks and
Back in the 1960’s, I lived in Chicago. The public high school I attended had 1,400 students. Those of us who were college prep students were required to study a foreign language, though I doubt that many of us thought we’d ever travel to a foreign country. I don’t remember any kids in my high school being
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A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting of some columnists from El Ojo Del Lago. One of my colleagues, Jackie Kellum, writes the column “You and Your Doctors Are Your Medical Team.” She mentioned that she was running out of ailments about which to write. I can only say, she apparently doesn’t watch
Almost every afternoon, you can find me having a cappuccino at an outdoor table of the Scandinavia bakery in the Centro Laguna mall. That’s where I sit and dream up most of the articles I write for El Ojo Del Lago magazine. Typically, my stories are about something silly that happened to me. But today’s
When I was a kid, fishing and preparing to go fishing were a major part of my life. We lived in Chicago, and summer weekends, my brother and I would ride the Montrose Avenue bus down to Lake Michigan, where we could fish for perch from a long concrete breakwater. We started out with simple
