Music and a Dream

Something was pulling me up from deep sleep... I gradually realized it was music coming in the window. It wasn't the usual brass band that practices nearby. No, it was guitars and male voices, on a CD, coming from a couple of blocks away. It must have been deafening there.

Kelly was stirring too. He checked the clock; it was just before five. "It's a fiesta to wake up Kelly and Rosana," I muttered. As I slowly returned to sleep, I reflected on how extremely different Mexican and North American cultures are regarding sounds. Herein Mexico, there never seems to be a sense of intrusion when people play their music, loudspeakers blare out Mass from the church, or whatever. Someone said to me the other day, "Mexicans can sleep ten feet from a barking dog." I laughed at what this captures with a broad brush.

I slid into a dream of the two cultures. I was in a several-room house with some Mexicans. A Canadian woman walked through without acknowledging any of us, perfectly normal behavior for her culture, but I felt the sense of affront move through the Mexicans I was sitting with as she did this. I felt it too and said to myself in the dream, "How rude!" But the Mexicans were thwarting me too. There was something I wanted to do that seemed completely logical to me. I don't remember what it was but I do remember the feeling of perplexed frustration that they were literally standing in my way, just because it didn't make sense to them.

When I got up this morning, it was quiet, with just the sounds of birds and lawn sprinklers. The ubiquitous "Zeta gas" call from the truck with propane cylinders wasn't even to be heard, though it's getting closer now as I write. The music and the dream had left me with a sense of the subtle complexity of truly feeling at home in this different world that is Mexico.