Dear Porterville,

After several busy, but tiring days, we are following God's very good example and resting on Sunday. Our indolence thus far today would make Him proud. Between the early morning flight from San Francisco, our late arrival in Oaxaca and a long evening of conversation with Paul and Georgiana Flowerman on the eve of their departure from our house, and a sweaty day of errands in the scorching heat of the waning dry season, we felt sleep deprived by the end of the week. So, today we are catching up, laying about the house, reading books and old New York Times magazines.

The house is ours alone now. The Flowermans left Friday for Puebla and on to the United States. We said our goodbyes at Don Beto's, a small restaurant near the river. The Flowerman children, Emiliano and Camila, were teary-eyed as they ate tostadas and drank foamy pineapple aguas, mixtures of juice and water. For the last year, they have taken horseback riding lessons down the road and had just said goodbye to the American family who runs the stables. When we left the house a half-hour earlier, Emiliano carried a bag of limes and apples to feed his horse, Zapo (short for Zapoteca). Leaving Oaxaca is harder on them than on Paul and Georgiana, who know they must return to the U.S. to work. After lunch I watched their green Jeep drive north along the dusty river road, loaded heavily and packed tightly with their belongings. That morning, Paul had overpaid the local carpenter (210 pesos) for a sheet of plywood that he laid across the roof of the Jeep then buried under a bulging mound of clothing and suitcases wrapped in large waterproof bags like river rafters use to keep their gear dry. From the rear of the Jeep, three bicycles hung from a rack, giving the vehicle an incongruent American appearance that would not have seemed the least bit unordinary in a line of vacationers waiting to enter Yellowstone Park but here in the midday heat amid the passing dump trucks, aging buses and sagging Nissan sedans was an oddity that declared, Foreigner! The Flowermans had already shed the Mexican skin they wore so naturally. Driving away from me toward the California border was an American family. The United States lay ahead, but in many ways they were leaving their home behind.

Oaxaca is not yet our home, and whether it will ever be that I cannot say. I, like all of you, are very American in ways that are not immediately self-evident. We have an expectation of a way of life that is elusive here, if it exists at all, and the primary characteristic of that life is service. The U.S. economy is a service economy and it provides for we Americans a level of care and catering unequaled elsewhere in the world. We expect a full range of municipal services - water, sewage, garbage, electricity, telephone (and, now, rapid Internet connection). We expect food to be delivered. We expect stores and gymnasiums to be open on Sunday. We expect public safety. We expect all this and more, and become outraged, partly because our various taxations put us in the role of customer to the government's provider, when the level of service drops below whatever our personal threshold of expectation is. Of course, not all Americans can, or want to, take advantage of all these services, but for the financially able the choice is theirs.

I think it was Jimmy Carter who coined the phrase "diminished expectations" and then found out quickly that the electorate prefers its presidents to enhance not deflate expectations. If you come to Mexico, though, prepare to lower your expectations at the border. The garbage service here in San Pablo, Etla, is an example. Monday and Friday are garbage days. Twice-a-week pickup, you're thinking, that sounds like pretty good service. And it would be, if it actually happened. Most Fridays and some Mondays the truck doesn't come at all. When it does, the driver stops a few hundred yards down the road, apparently having decided that the half-a-dozen houses above that point aren't worth the effort needed to negotiate a truck the size of our California condominium up our dirt road. The driver announces his presence, which varies week to week by as much as four hours, with a tinkling bell. The proper Pavlovian response to the bell is to run to the truck with your assorted trash and toss it aboard yourself. The driver reserves the use of his hands to accept the 10- or 20-peso tip you give him for his service. Should you be engaged in some activity that prevents you from hearing the bell (I expect few showers are taken during the window of trash opportunity) or not be at home, then you and your coffee grounds shall not part company for another week.

This service is supported by my property taxes, which were $18 this year, so I cannot complain of over-taxation.

These and similar experiences require most Americans, particularly those like myself who are low on patience and high on addiction to modernities, to adjust their attitudes. Things happen slowly here, and not because of some "mañana" complex. I've certainly spoken enough about the misplaced perceptions held by many Americans about the Mexican willingness to work. This country is all about work. No, life moves slowly in Mexico because the country simply doesn't have the infrastructure built to speed it up. There are not enough phone lines, sewage systems, water pipes, traffic lanes or garbage trucks to serve a population whose growth rate is only exceeded by its desire to modernize. Parts of Mexico, even here in Oaxaca, one of the country's poorest states, look just like Arlington, Texas, or Corte Madera, California. We sought refuge from the heat last night in an air-conditioned movie theater, one of 15 screens in a shopping center that aside from the goofy names of some of the stores (Liz Minelli clothes for women) was made from an American template. The mall is a façade, though, a shimmering, neon-lit veneer laid over a rough cut society that still can't fully feed or clean itself nor graduate more than a third of its children from high school. Eventually, though, as Mexico slowly matures, as subsequent more middle-class generations move the lagging parts of the country from the Third to the First world, the mall will represent the ordinary and not the extraordinary.

KT and exploited both halves of the Mexican economy the last couple of days as we filled in behind the Flowermans with household necessities. We blitzed through Sam's Club, scooping up several fans to cool us in the evening and a CD player and stopped at the new Office Depot for crooked-neck bedside lamps and an emergency light for power outages. But we headed to the teeming aisles of the Mercado de Abastos to buy straw floor mats from stalls crammed to their laminate ceilings with woven goods, and to consult a very energetic owner of an agriculture supply shop about a herbicide that might give us an edge over the deep-rooted plants who insist that our garden is rightfully theirs. Some people might say that Abastos is the real Mexico. They are partly right. Abastos, which I'll try to describe more fully another time (the closest equivalent I can think of in the U.S. is Canal Street in New York, but multiplied in size by 10), represents Mexico's rural, communal heritage, a place where whole villages come to buy and sell on market day, where each transaction requires the personal involvement of the seller and the buyer. Sam's Club is also Mexico, though. It provides, for better or worse, depending on your attachment to tradition, the efficiency Mexico lacks in so many other sectors. Oddly, Sam's is not cheaper than the traditional markets, or even competing grocery chains such at the nationwide Gigante, but it is cleaner, brighter, faster. It gives Mexicans in their own land a level of service and consumerism that, until recently, they had to cross the Rio Grande to experience.

I hope all is well with everyone. Stay in touch.

Love,

Tim