There’s an advantage to being a “foreigner mom” here for Mother’s Day: you get to be fêted twice! There will be loving phone calls, and emails, and hugs and kisses on Thursday, the 10th, and then again on Sunday the 13th, when Americans and Canadians –like me- celebrate their moms. My cousin (who’s back down here, visiting again) and I decided to celebrate the day - without children! I think that’s a grand idea. Yeay, moms! And then, the folks at the Tribune might organize a dinner for the moms (and grandmas…) of all the kiddies featured on the cover of last week’s issue of the paper. They did that in past years, so who knows?
Living here, in the land of mañana, one must learn patience, lots of patience. Nothing gets done in a rush, and even the governments are in on the game – not like the telephone company that will cut off your service if you’re one day late in paying your bills... The municipal real estate tax department is a good example. Every year, they try to entice folks to pay their back taxes (that were never collected) by offering them 50-75% discounts on the accrued interests. I guess they’re not convincing enough though, ‘cause they haven’t been too successful thus far… A couple of years ago, I read about the city of Rajahmundry in southern India, where tax defaulters were forced to face the music (literally) in a most innovative fashion: “The municipal authorities that were owed more than $1.2 million dollars in outstanding taxes sent teams of drummers out with tax officials on a door-to-door collection drive. Drummers pounded outside the offenders’ homes, refusing to stop until the harried residents settled their bills. In less than a month, the city drummed up 74% of the money it was owed, and tax collection has hit an all-time high of 95%”! Can you imagine if Puerto Vallarta’s City Hall adopted something of the kind? They could probably collect a whole bunch of $$$ for the city’s coffers. I know for a fact that some of my neighbors have NEVER paid taxes on their properties, and for some of them, it’s been some 30+ years - tax free. But at the same time, Hacienda (Mexico’s equivalent of the IRS or Revenue Canada) says it would like condo and time-share owners to register, so that they may be taxed on the revenue they derive from leasing or renting their beautiful homes and condos. We’ll just have to wait and see who pays up first. Their job will become even more difficult when all those hundreds of condos in the towers being built around the bay are sold, and the owners who don’t live here year ‘round rent them out…
Although the powers-that-be have finally agreed to change the name of this section to “Living in Vallarta” instead of “Opinion”, and I’m very grateful for it, I do have something that may be considered an opinion this week… Regarding this whole “parks vs. parking lots” situation, in my opinion, I never saw Hidalgo Park as a park per se. All I ever saw was a whole bunch of stands, selling all sorts of souvenirs and trinkets, and of course …delicious crêpes in the evening. Benito Juarez Park? Shameful, abandoned, uncared for, dirty, filled with mud during the rainy period. So I wasn’t really upset when they said they would build a parking garage there. But Lazaro Cardenas Park was something else altogether, again, in my opinion. Although it may not have been Central Park, or Mount Royal Park in Montreal, it was really a park, with grass and beautiful old trees and a lovely little gazebo. Now that it looks somewhat like a park again, I still wonder what the politicking was all about with regard to the lot right next to it, which is still an eyesore, and a breeding ground for those godawful dengue-carrying mosquitoes. Why didn’t they use that space instead, like so many had proposed, for the parking garage? I don’t know.
April 28th marked the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of Expo 67 in Montreal, Québec, my former “home town”. Wow, how time flies! Decades… gone. I was supposed to work there, at the Dow pavilion, but I blew it ‘cause I didn’t like the company’s president as much as he liked me… But I did get to enjoy those six wonderful, surreal months. Except for the ’76 Olympic games (for whose stadium we paid for years and years), I don’t think I ever saw that city so united, French and English setting their differences aside for the duration, so much joy, optimism. Hair was long, skirts were short, and the future looked oh, so bright. It was ...the best of times. Of course, we were younger then. But everything was perfect then, and anything seemed possible.
I wonder a lot, and my wooden Don Quixote hasn’t helped me with any input, he’s been wondering too, pondering, for nearly two years now. We both wonder about the situation in Amapas and Conchas Chinas, with all those towers built on slopes way steeper than the 15o set as a limit by the city regulations, and all those other towers being built right at the mouth of the river, about the back-and-forth double-talk whenever all those government bigwigs are interviewed about that and the city dump which was declared obsolete over six years ago, about the long-awaited convention center whose construction –all prefabbed in Guadalajara- appears to have stalled once again (see why we need patience?), about the hundreds of millions invested in the airport expansion to service all those people going to Nuevo Vallarta and other points along the north shore of the Bay, thinking that they’re going to spend their holidays in PUERTO VALLARTA, ‘cause that’s what their travel agent told them, about the promises made to reduce the number of buses downtown …among many other “wonderings”. And why didn’t I notice that there would be a quadruple (!!) arrival of cruise ships at the end of April? Never did get to see that “Regal Princess”…
There are some six veterinarians listed in the Puerto Vallarta telephone directory as living in the city proper. Most of their ads show an emergency phone number to call in such cases. Just so you’ll know, not one of them responded, and one of the automatic messages even stated: “you cannot leave a message for this person as his message box is full”! I couldn’t reach anyone, and my dog died. I will never know if a veterinarian could have saved her. I’m just sharing this with you because if you have a pet you love, it might be a wise move to ask your vet for a real emergency number, one that will be answered – just in case.
When I spoke to my friend Angela early the next morning, this wonderful lady who has taken in so many street dogs and cats over the years said to me, “you know, at first, when one of them would die, I would cry and cry. But then, after thinking about it a lot, I decided that my job here was just to offer these little creatures a loving home, and a good life, for however long I had them. I’ve been able to handle it better now, now that I look at it that way.” How wise!
If you are one of those people who give credence to astrology, this month of May is seen as particularly special because there will be two full moons instead of one - an event that occurs approximately every 2.7 years! That means that this month should be ideal for doing things you'd only dare to do “once in a blue Moon”, which is what the second full moon is called.I wish all the moms a most Happy Mother’s Day, filled with hugs and kisses and lots of loving. And I hope you gentlemen enjoy it too. Show your wife, mom, grandma, how much you love them – tell them! And not just on Sunday, but often! Hasta luego. pvmom04@yahoo.com
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