9 April 2020. Casa Oaxaca.
Casa Oaxaca--that's what the banner over the doorway announces, but lettered delicately in an arc on the window glass we read, Mi Casa--which gets to the heart of the matter. Closed up now, along with almost everything else, but as I walk by in the early evening, wind blowing in off the bay, the effect is almost the same--always inviting, a panorama of color, everything hand-made--artesaneria--crafted, all from Oaxaca. Just like the man who's run the place for all these years. I should know his name by now. A little formal, in the Mexican way, I'd notice his presence behind one of the counters, adjusting a hanging figure of a skeleton (Día de los muertos) or one of the small folklore dolls in front. He invited me in once--although I think he thought I wanted to bone up on my Spanish. Argentine, in any case, which misses that Mexican lilt--and sometimes the sly humor that often pretends to be what it's not. He pulled out a large map--like one of those Miguel Covarrubias paintings I discovered only later, with dozens and dozens of small images of people, animals, fish, birds--a tiny woman in traditional Mayan dress holding a child in the crook of her arm, a clump of green bananas in the hills above Tepíc--the passenger steamer putting in at the port of Veracruz, or a sheaf of grain (?) on the edge of the Sonara desert. all with a glowing red-gold Precolumbian sun presiding over the violet waters of the Gulf. Just like the shop itself, in fact--that same array of beautifully colorful detail everywhere you looked... But actually the map was to teach me something--how could I not already know?--that there were some 200 native languages in México, he said--even more--and I think he was proud of them all--in the collective, and one by one... Just like the beautiful things he'd chosen for the store...
I found out later that the man's son, another Antonio, had once been a student of mine, years before. Saw him emerge from the doorway one day, we recognized each other. I'd always liked him. We smiled back and forth. I'd had no idea of the connection. Made the place special in yet another way.
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Next door, at night sometimes, through the window of the Acupuncture shop--the Chinese man at an old desk, covered with papers and brochures, leaning forward over a bowl of food, small black-and-white television on a low stand just opposite. Everywhere else darkness...
