Columns

“Hearing Things? Seeing Things? Many of Us Do?” was an Oliver Sacks’ article in the New York Times this week helping launch his book, “Hallucinations.”  It points out that such phenomena are experienced by nearly all of us at some time in our lives – though we tend to keep that secret.  Sacks is the much-acclaimed author, practitioner and professor of neurology and psychiatry, who has written 12 books regarding patients’ experiences with neurological disorders.  His most well-known books: “Awakening” (made into a Oscar-nominated film, starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams),  “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and “The Last Hippie,” also made into a film.   He presently serves as both clinical professor of neurology and consulting neurologist at the center of the epilepsy at the New York University School of Medicine.

By Monday, the prolonged temporada de lluvias (rainy season) that was still blessing his chayote field had given Nando Flores a near-permanent grin. Nando is a campesino whose livelihood depends to good extent on a variety of agricultural pursuits. Though the year’s hefty corn harvest was finished early in October, a number of farmers and ranchers had planted chayote, a late rainy season crop that thrives on, but recently has seldom received, late October moisture. Still, vine-climbing chayote demands a lot of work: an elementary short-posted two- or three-wire support, plus a lot of irrigating. And because of current low prices, many campo families were reluctant to plant chayote this year. But those who did got an unexpected late-season gift of nourishing rains.

Canada’s government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper will spend 28 million dollars over three years to call what many Canadians term “surprising attention” to the bicentennial of the 1812 war between a young United States and the British Empire. That war was carried out primarily in Britain’s “North American northern frontier” as it is identified by Jim Guy, professor emeritus of political science and international law at Cape Breton University.  (Note for non-Canadian readers: The word Canada comes from the Iroquois word “Kanata,” meaning “village.”  A Frenchman, Jacques Cartier, transcribed the word as “Canada,” applied first to the village of Stadacona, then to the whole region of New France.  After the British conquest of New France, the colony was renamed the Province of Quebec.  Following the American revolution, New France was split into two parts, Upper and Lower Canada, often being collectively, but not officially, known as “the Canadas.”   The national title  “Canada,” was decided on July 1, 1867, at a conference in London, in which 17 other names were offered, but Canada was unanimously adopted.)

On November 21, 1877, General Porfirio Diaz, military hero of Mexico’s liberals, entered Mexico City after opposing one of the nation’s great liberal presidents, Benito Juarez (primarily out of pique), and then (out of political opportunism) Juarez’s much disliked, much less liberal successor, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado.  Diaz immediately called for a new election, flourishing his political (and soon to become ironic) banner:  “Effective Suffrage. No Re-election.”  He won by a landslide, one that had been cunningly launched a year earlier by a group of aggressive New York/Texas-based U.S. businessmen.  As early as December 1875 Diaz had visited New York and New Orleans.  In January 1876, he was in Brownsville, Texas, for intensive consultations with the town’s creator, the wealthy and inexhaustibly shrewd New York-born businessman, Charles “Don Carlos” Stillman, and his son James.

In an unusual, disconnected flock of days, there seemed to blossom a series of notable small and large events tagged by one observer as “reach-back days.”  And it was, to younger people, a long reach – touching the Sixties.  For people of a certain age, it was yesterday.  Locally, this coincidence of like-minded events was initially noted with the appearance of the Lakeside Little Theatre’s  September 19-October 7 performance of “Quartet,” an amusing and touching story of four successful, and now aging, opera singers who unexpectedly come together at a musician’s retirement home in England.

Mexico, as most people reading this know, is giving Columbus a pass this week, and celebrating El Dia de la Raza, Friday, October 12. Locally, this “day” is overshadowed by the massive celebration of the Virgin of Zapopan. Yet, for a great many Mexican citizens — and long-time foreign Mexico aficionados — who’ve been taught the importance of La Raza,  October 12 is a useful time to reflect on the Republic’s splendidly complex and contradictory Day of the Race — which was quickly morphed into Day of the People. Those four words (in Spanish or English) inevitably call up the name of the “father” of this Republic’s modern educational system.