Columns

Jose Maria (“Chema”) Flores, a dark, crease-faced campesino of 57, was having family problems. He and his wife, Lupe, have eight children. One of their older sons, Jose, had gone off some time ago to dabble in crack and marry a woman also drawn to drugs.

Morey Leonard lived alone. He was a quiet man of 75 who dealt with his five-year bout with illness in a private way. No complaints to friends or acquaintances. His kitchen and refrigerator were stocked with nourishing stuff. No junk-food, no high cholesterol or high sugar-foods. No booze – unlike earlier times, times that were now catching up with him. His maid found him on the living room floor unconscious when she made her regular Tuesday cleaning-day round. She immediately called the Red Cross.

The New Year’s first days – and weeks – traditionally pique the challenging urge to create a list of well-intentioned resolutions. For many people this is a briefly uplifting but ultimately doomed effort. It seems natural for humans to pine for ambitious, scribbled columns of what turn out to be miracles.

Feliz año, and best wishes for running into at least a few revelatory, unintentional encounters as this new year gets underway. Experientially edifying moments. Some people talk about experiences because they were fun. It makes them happy, and that’s good. But often unforeseen experiences change our lives, teaching us things that change us, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small.

Christian colonists in the New World were often hostile to celebrating Christ’s birth. In North America and in Nueva España – Spain’s Latin American conquests – some didn’t like the idea at all. There were divisions in their own ranks. Sometimes it was a rejection of established Christian dogma, sometimes of widely accepted Christian practices. Sometimes liturgical history.

This busy past week at Lake Chapala offered numerous proposals to help tackle currently-noted local dilemmas, meaning, the well-attended public security meeting at Ajijic’s Hotel Real December 7, and the community-centered conversation it has stimulated. Hopefully, the most effective, not merely the most dramatic, of these proposals can become permanent community-wide behavior and thought.