Where to even begin this time? One week of this place gives enough material to write a book on. It is so different, yet similiar at the same time. I have never been anywhere with more ubiquitous small scale commercial activity, of every conceivable kind. I have never been anywhere with more beautifully pastel-painted architecture along quaint narrow streets. I have never been anywhere with more garbage strewn absolutely everywhere.
Guatemala would not be for everyone. One moment I think it is the greatest, most colorful and fascinating place in the world. The quaint but vibrant streets, the friendliness of the people, the Mayan women and girls in their beautiful bright dress, etc. The next minute I want to run screaming back home again. Enough with the trash! Enough with the packs of stray dogs (who live on the trash)! Enough with the buses with no shock absorbers, packed like sardines, with vendors who nevertheless squeeze on at every stop to hawk fruit cups or candied peanuts! Actually I love the transportation system here. It is pretty much of a free-for all. There are no government run transit systems like TriMet. Rather, anyone who wants to run a bus just has to buy an old school bus, paint it up in flaming colors, get the appropriate licensing and official registration (i.e pay off the appropriate official), and hire someone to hang out the door yelling the destination and taking the fare. There are also hundreds of microbuses and taxis to fill basically every niche of public transportation need. As for the traffic, it is also a free for all. There are a few traffic lights in Xela (a city of 125,000 or more) but for the most part each intersection is, like everything else, a zone of pure libertarian chaos. Somehow it works, a maelstrom of cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. Forget about having the "right of way" as a pedestrian or bicyclist. There are lots of bikes and pedestrians, but it is basically each to his own. Claim your space and go. The sidewalks are interesting. "Uneven" doesn't come close to describing them. It is basically a different sidewalk, at a different height, in front of every building. God help you if you happened to be in a wheelchair. Implementing the ADA here would cause a major upheavel in the infrastucture and economy. Probably for the better, granted, but don't expect it to happen anytime soon. Civic services work sort of differently here. For example there is no garbage service at all, outside the main city districts. Thus the trash everywhere. And road paving in any area outside the center is up to the people who live along the road. They can collect among themselves and pave, or have rough dirt. Thus the road up to the outlying (but still populous) neighborhood where I have been volunteering on a project this week is paved, then dirt and rocks, then paved again. The local mormon church wouldn't pony up for paving on the stretch past their church/compound, thus it is dirt and rocks. They apparently justified this by saying that most of their members walk to church anyway. Well, okay and fine, but it is a very good illustration of the collision between libertarian/inactive government and the "tragedy of the commons." Want to see what Grover Norquist's version of America would look like? Come to Guatemala.
But Guatemala is also the most vibrant place I have ever been. The flipside of a do-nothing government and the accompanying bad roads, horrible public schools, dodgy to non-existent water systems (everyone who can afford it has a big tank on top of their house for backup when the water pressure is bad, which is daily), etc., is a massive proliferation of small scale private and family-run enterprise. There are a couple of supermarkets in Xela (owned, I am told, by WalMart), but the rest of the city is a zone of constant selling and buying of everything you can think of. Want a spool of thread? A trumpet? An AC adaptor for your cell phone? A toothbrush? A photocopy? A chicken? There will be a little store or stand to supply you with just that. And the markets: Xela´s daily ones are big enough, but Friday I went up to the weekly market in the nearby town of San Francisco del Alto. Think of Pike Place Market in Seattle, times 50, with livestock. Mayan villagers walk in with their loads on their backs or horses, or riding in pickups, the women all amazingly colorful in their traditional woven dress, hair ribbons, etc. The men pretty much wear neat slacks or jeans, shirts, and leather shoes. Everyone gets their shoes polished. There is no apparent class distinction between the guy getting his shoes shined and the guy shining the shoes.
I could go on. I spent several mornings this week helping to build a solar shower for the daycare center for indigenous children (whose mothers must often ride the bus into the city to work) that the Pop Wuj language school sponsors. Lots of digging in hard ground, hauling buckets of sand and gravel. Kind of par for the course for me. The children there are absolutely delightful. They are constantly bright, smiling, open, playful yet gentle with each other.
I just now got back from hiking with a group up Tajulmuco, the highest mountain in Central America (nearly 14,000 feet.) It was cold up there. No snow but frost. Nice pines and meadows, then alpine treeless for about the last 500 vertical feet. On the ride back to Xela in the microbus, I was amazed to see dozens of spandexed road bikers riding up and down the fantastically steep and long grades. Also lots of folks out grazing their leashed cows on the grass of the highway shoulder. Good way to keep it mowed.
As you may know, I have embarked on an 8 week sojourn to Guatemala to study spanish and learn something more of this wider America we live in. I will periodically send a dispatch. I actually wrote this a week ago.
First impressions of Guatemala: huge sprawl of city lights from airplane approach at 4:30 AM, looks like any other American city from that vantage. An airport that proclaims to be in the process of becoming ¨La Mas Moderno de CentroAmerica" but which right now is very circa 1983 and seems like probably in the throws of one of those endless reconstruction projects. Ride from airport to Galgos bus terminal: the city so far looks pretty modern. Shining glass or concrete mid-rises. No skyscrapers to speak of.
Bus terminal, one of several, sort of circa 1973 but better than Seattle´s. Three hours until 8:30departure so I take a long walk south through Zona 1, the older, architecturally nicer but seedier part of town, to the massive palace building and back along streets which become practically thronged by 7:00 AM on a Sunday morning with market vendors rolling out their carts, food starting to fry, red Mercedes school-bus city busses whizzing past belching diesel, screeching to a stop to pick up passengers. By 8:00 the activity is in full swing, merchandise of every conceivable variety: shoes, backpacks, cell phones, toys, toothbrushes and toothpaste, huge weird vegetables, bags of apples, ice cream, you name it. I buy a breakfast of fried torilla/pancake thing with some kind of green chile and meat in it.
Bus from the City to Quetzaltenango/Xela where I am studying spanish: a bus obviously retired from U.S. Greyhound service about 20 years ago, to judge by its suspension, 5 jarring hours alternately hurtling and crawling along winding highland highway, the driver sometimes recklessly passing slower trucks on blind curves, past steep ravines and slopes of pine and gardens and goats, tiny tin or tile roof farmhouses, brightly dressed Mayan women sometimes walking along the narrow shoulder. Multiple stops for endless road re-construction projects, at each stop one or more enterprising locals hops on and hawks food: hot tamales or chile relleno in small soft tortillas, cokes, candy.
Finally Xela, pop. 125,000, less modern looking than much of Guatemala City, mountains around, sky threatening to rain. Arrived at the school, Asociacion Pop Wuj, and met my homestay hosts, Lydia and Carol (Guatemalen, not english speaking.) Their house like many is a shabby blank facade on the outside with an oasis-like little courtyard garden of flowers and grass after passing through a passageway.
Here is the text (more or less) of the eulogy I delivered at Lisa Locken's memorial service on Saturday March, 10 in Minneapolis. Writing and preparing myself to give it was an amazing challenge, but I'm told it came off beautifully. I can say in hindsight that Lisa asking me to give her eulogy was a wonderful parting gift, drawing something out in me that I barely knew was there.
When Lisa asked me to give her eulogy she gave me a couple of pieces of guidance. One of them was to make it brief. So I'll do my best at that, although in truth there is a lot that a person could say about Lisa Locken. There was a lot to her. But to me that is a measure of the breadth and eclecticity of her interests. She was not about one "single" thing or theme. She was a woman who came of age in a very complex and transformational time in American society and culture, and her life was a willful reflection of that.
She was born Lisa Florence Duckstad on the hottest day in the history of Fargo, North Dakota, 106 degrees Fahrenheit on July 6, 1936, a record that still stands. She was the second child of John H. Duckstad and Althea Reed Duckstad. By profession, her father was a school administrator and her mother a teacher of home economics. With her sister Edith (my Mom) and brother Bob, Lisa grew up in the towns of Carleton and Park Rapids, Minnesota, and Ironwood in Michigan's upper peninsula. And every summer the family spent as much time as possible at the cottage built by Althea's father John Reed on Big Twin Lake in Becker County. Lisa, Bob, and Edith have continued this tradition every year of their lives up to the present time. I can attest that some of my very fondest memories of Lisa, and in general in my life, are of visiting the cottage and anticipating Lisa's arrival late on a Friday night after driving (often at reckless speeds) up from the Cities, getting in at midnight laden with bags of goodies from Byerly's or Lunds.
I don't feel qualified to speak in detail about Lisa's childhood but I do recall her describing her very first memory, which was when she was only 2 years old, in Carleton, and the family's house caught fire in the middle of the night. The neighbors next door took Edy and Lisa in during the event so they could be safe and out of the way. Lisa desperately wanted to watch through the window at all the exciting commotion, the fire trucks coming and firemen fighting the fire, but the drapes were closed and they told her not to look out. She felt quite indignant, like "I'm not a baby!" and she tried very hard to sneak peaks out the window.
Lisa said that as she grew up her best educational experience was competing on her high school debate team on, in her words, "an equal footing with boys" in a time when "girls had few opportunities to be competitive." In that and in her long and accomplished professional career she acknowledged the influence of "several excellent female role models," among them her mother and her Aunt Florence Reed Owens, who for many years was the director of the Fargo YWCA.
Growing up, Lisa had a natural inclination to artistic expression and creativity and so she attended the University of Minnesota and earned a degree in Fine Arts in 1958. Although she was a very talented artist and never forsook her creative pursuits, she decided early on that she did not really enjoy or wish to pursue the aspect of a professional art career that is most vexing to many artists (including myself,) and that is the necessity of relentless hobnobbing and self-promotion to would-be patrons in the world of high-art patronage and social circles. So she took her related talents as a communicator and writer and went to work in 1963 for the Bemis Company, first as assistant editor of the company newsletter and rising to become the Director of Corporate Communications. She also served on the Board of Directors of Bemis from 1973 until her retirement in 1996.
I might add that in her long career at Bemis, in which she received a number of awards and became an officer of the company, she managed (by her own admission) to arrive an hour or more late to work nearly every morning for over 20 years. I think that considering her professional success, this kind of radical claiming of her own time and schedule was probably a key to that very success. I take heart in that.
And at a time when women were first entering the corporate world on a widespread basis but still very often expected to be full time wives and mothers, Lisa solved this dilemma by bucking tradition and deciding not to have children of her own. At the age of 31 she married her longtime boyfriend John Locken on Bastille Day, July 14, 1967. Bastilee Day was John's favorite day, the day of uprising against tyranny. John was 14 years her senior, an editor and freelance writer. He was sophisticated, a man of wry humor and sleight-of-hand tricks, which my brother and sister and I remember well from our childhood. Most of us know that John became too much of a drinker, but in time he was able to recognize his addiction and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous. Lisa supported him in this and became and active member of Al-Anon for the rest of her life. She took great spiritual strength from the 12 steps. It became a very important part of her life and her spiritual outlook. From her bed soon before she died, she asked that we post the AA Serenity Prayer here at the service, and you can see it on the front of the program.
When John was diagnosed with cancer Lisa supported him steadfastly until his death on their 19th anniversary, Bastille Day of 1986. I remember her describing how on that day she had brought a portable record player into his hospital room and played selections of his favorite music, and although he was unable to speak, his heart pressure rose over 20 points as the music played. Then later in the day as his pulse was weakening and he was about to go, she played the song "Singing In The Rain" and there was a perfect correspondence between the end of the song and his last heartbeat. I mention this story because to me it is an indication of the kind of care and thoughtful devotion Lisa had toward the people in her life. She was a person of enormous generosity and encouragement. She had an amazing knack for understanding a person's interests and inclinations and giving them some form of support or encouragement that either directly supported them or spurred their imaginations in new and entertaining ways. Being an artist myself, I was inspired first of all by her as an artist, which growing up I always thought of her as, with her paintings hanging on our wall at home fomenting my brain with the very idea of being an artist, and painting paintings. And later when I did become a practicing artist she supported me more than once in the simple and concrete way of purchasing pieces of my artwork. For a young artist this was a huge reinforcement of the idea of oneself as an artist.
I must also mention what many of you here know very well, that Lisa was possibly the most inspired gift giver any of us has ever known. She had an amazing knack for finding fun or whimsical and stimulating items, an intuition for finding things that were entertainingly appropriate for each person on her long list.
And of course Lisa was a very avid lover of nature and flower gardening and wildflower photography. She deeply loved being outdoors and she took many hundreds of rolls of pictures of wildflowers. You can see some wonderful examples of her photos here today. After retiring from Bemis in 1996 she became an active volunteer at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden here in Minneapolis and became the editor of the Garden's newsletter the Fringed Gentian for the remainder of her life.
One of the things that really struck me about Lisa in what turned out to be her later years was her huge intellectual appetite and her openness to new and stimulating ideas. She took classes, attended lectures, read hundreds of books. She was an active member (and a board member) of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Minnesota. She was a voracious reader and her bookshelves I can tell you are practically breaking under the strain of books on every imaginable subject, particularly cutting edge science and spirituality. Although she gave up the traditional religiosity of her upbringing, Lisa was deeply interested in spiritual matters, both in theory and as a matter of active personal seeking and practice.
Aside from individual acts of encouragement and inspiration, there is something even more essential that I want to convey about Lisa: that she was a connector and an inclusivist. She welcomed people into her world and brought people together. I’m sure many of you here have examples from your own lives, but to give just one small example, my immediate family and I have had the pleasure of getting to know our 2nd cousin Caddie Frink because Lisa invited Caddie into her sphere and to the Duckstad/Reed cottages many times in the summers. Lisa decided decades ago not to have a traditional nuclear family of her own, but the winning tradeoff that so many people benefited from is that her world, her sphere of concern and devotion, extended to a huge array of people, one of whom I count myself indescribably lucky to have been. It is hard to believe she is gone; she was such a vital and youthful person.
In closing I'd like to offer some words of Lisa's that I discovered in going through books at her house. They are from a work-page section in a book on personal growth and spirituality, some questions that the book asks and then you write your response. The first is "What do you think to be the purpose of your life?" and Lisa wrote down "To Live fully, to create, to focus on what needs to be done on the planet and my backyard; to illuminate, crystallize, to GIVE, to SHARE." (Her emphasis.) The second question was "What are things presently in your life that give you the most happiness or pleasure?" and she wrote "To see the sun rise on cool autumn mornings at the cottage with Samantha [her beloved cat of 12 years], to do wildflower photography, to talk to people, to have adventure, PIANO!"
I think we can say she succeeded in these things. And in a very real way she was a shaper of many lives and the very worlds that we inhabit. I certainly know she was that for me. I've realized in this time just how much of my very sense of who I am and the world I inhabit I owe to her positive influence. And an influence like that I believe is absolute and eternal. I mean that in the deepest philosophical, metaphysical sense. It is what is most real. The only thing I can say to that is Thank You, Lisa. Thank You.