Today I watched a squirrel use its tail as an umbrella. The driving rain from an incoming storm was pelting it so hard that it squinted its onyx beads of eyes, but it didn't stop eating.
The winds whipped and disheveled it, but it didn't stop eating. This was one purposeful squirrel and I spent a few minutes sitting in our dining room, watching it relish the seed I'd put out on the deck after I noticed that it seemed to be frantically searching for food, even between the floorboards.
Last night, the dogs and I came up to our house in the little city after a long day first of teaching and then of attending the Festival Latino with the students and program colleagues. My husband and I have gone in previous years and I've always enjoyed beelining it to the Puerto Rican kiosk to feed my eternal hunger for alcapurrias, pastelillos, and tostones. I rarely eat those even when I'm in Puerto Rico, so the festival provides a once-a-year reason to break my otherwise strict dietary rules.
This year, however, to the dismay and opposition of Latin@ leaders in Ohio, organizers decided to downsize the festival and charge $1 for admission. The 20 or so booths of food, which used to include Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian, Mexican, Venezuelan, Salvadorean and even Spanish fare (there used to be these fabulous churros), were drastically pared down to only four. When we finally made it into the reduced area allocated to the festival, which was already overflowing with people, the lines in front of the food kiosks were 50-bodies long.
My poor husband, who's a vegetarian, had to content himself with a $5 fruit cup that included half a lime he wasn't sure what to do with and some mango slices that looked quite unripe. I spent almost $20 for my coveted alcapurrias, pastelillos and tostones and for some mango/lemon Italian ice. Not the most balanced of meals, I know, and I'll have to workout hard next week to undo the caloric damage I did in one evening.
When I asked one of the program coordinators today whether she'd enjoyed herself at the festival, she said that by the time they made it through the line to get food from one kiosk, the Health Department shut it down. They apparently told the kiosk owners that they either had to stop preparing one of the items they were serving or shut down and the owners opted for the latter. I guess you don't mess around with the Health Department.
"Which kiosk was that?" I asked, with a premonition.
"You're going to be upset," she said.
"The Puerto Rican kiosk!" I guessed.
I didn't get sick from what I ate (everything seemed to be cooked just right, as it has been in past years at the exact same kiosk) but I was not surprised about what happened since this festival was a total disappointment. Some of the students, who didn't get a chance to buy any food at the festival, had to stop at a fast-food place to get something to eat before returning to the small college on the hill.
What a letdown, indeed. I had talked it all up to the students and to everyone who hadn't been there before, so I ended up feeling rather foolish. Still, almost any excuse to be around a huge crowd of Latin@s in this barren Latin@-less state is a good one in my book, so I'm glad we supported it.
Tomorrow, I go back to the small college on the hill sans the dogs, because Rusty is getting neutered (after 14 years of "intactness"!) on Monday. He's developed a hard-to-cure prostate infection, which might require eventual surgery and rather than taking him repeatedly to the vet, which is traumatic for him each and every time, we opted to do what might ultimately turn out to be the necessary treatment to cure the infection: neutering. We should've done it before, I know, and I hope that even at this late date it will help calm down his anxious-aggressive nature.
Still, I'm worried that because he's such an old dog he might not survive the surgery so I'm going to pray and hope for the best. The old viejolo is my most faithful peludo partner so I'll pray hard that all will go well and that, later that day, I'll be able to come down to get him and Geni, and take them back with me to our little apartment in the woods at the small college on the hill. Once there, I hope they'll each go to their favorite bed and snooze happily away, as they do each and every day we're there.
Like that squirrel I saw today, my plan for Monday is to squint against the driving rain and pretend that the storm isn't raging around me while I do what I have to do.
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