Molars, Flores, Dollars

​It’s Constitution Day here. Not exactly Carnival meets Supebowl but the streets, jardins, and restaurants of SMA are oddly full of competing touristas on a warm and sunny Monday with the fiesta civil. And because it’s now February, gringo deep winter tourists are starting to descend as well but are still outnumbered by Chilangos on their day off. No contest really. Of course, the irony of celebrating the Mexican constitution while ours is currently under stress on the day that Claudia Sheinbaum shall we say, tamed Señor Tariff for the time being isn’t lost on us. What’s really not lost is a yearning nostalgia for a sharp, serious, composed, confident and glib communicator at the nation’s helm as I watched the Mexican Presidente address her countrymen over the weekend, facing a looming economic catastrophe via their closest ally with calm and purpose. She’s a smart cookie…remember when we had those in office as opposed to forelock-tugging careerists?
 
It’s also Candelaria (yes, SMA has almost as many tourist-drawing festivals as my old parade-loving hometown along the low crescent of the Mississippi.) Like almost all fiestas here, it’s an imaginative appropriation by the Catholic of the pagan. It’s melding the feast of The Purification of the Virgin Mary which is a rare holdover from the Jewish ritual of purifying the obviously impure mother 40 days after giving birth with the Aztec begging the gods for rain and a bountiful maiz harvest. In the Anglo Christian world it’s mostly the celebration of Mary presenting Jesus at the temple for the first time a la Luke. But here it’s all about pagan tamales and atole because of the stirrings of spring. Most importantly to our viaje a la sombra de México, it signals the beginning of a two week gigantic “flower show” when scores of garden plant, shrub, tree and especially succulent growers from everywhere in central Mexico but mostly Puebla come to town and set up shop in the park here. Traditionally it’s been held in the lush European-style Parque Juarez in the southern, more gringo part of town but this year it’s taken over the newer Zeferino parque which is much nearer to our house here in the northern less gringo part of the city. I’m betting the banda, cumbia, ranchera music that breaks out at the end of each selling session was a bit too much for those snowflakes in Guadiana so now it echoes off our faux Barragán rectilinear architecture over these two weekends. I’m good with that! However, the bad news is there’s easier parking at Zeferino* and so we have already zipped over twice in our Naranja Nissan Kicks to scoop up lots of crazy succulents we don’t need. A small pay back to the local economy which may still get hit by deferred tarrifs.
*Zeferino is the self-taught engineer cum architect who constructed San Miguel's Disneyesque pink Paroquia!
 
Finally, since evidently the underlying theme of this post is guilt of economic hegemony, I suppose it’s time to confess our all-in participation in the thriving pull of dental tourism. We’ve had a local dentist here for several years for whom we save up our routine visits at approximately one tenth the cost of his estadounidense counterparts. Last spring however, I developed some more than routine issues that my guy here said would be better handled by endo-ortho-surgical specialists, so I decided to take my uninsured dental self to three different practitioners in CT. They pretty much all came to the same conclusion for hefty fees, one if not two of my aged teeth needed extraction for more hefty fees. Upon returning to SMA, I went to a new team of similar Mexican dental experts who had come highly recommended possessing some of the most space-age equipment I’d ever seen for the care of molars and incisors. Drs Hugo, Hector and Oscar not only came to the same conclusion as the CT drs but actually found the cause of the complication which the US practitioners hadn’t noticed but indeed harkened back to issues I had some 40 odd years ago. Suffice it to say two extractions, a related surgical procedure, a biopsy and bone grafts came to $720 USD. And what do we charge the cartels for all those illegal AR-15!? Now there’s a trade imbalance!