Washington, D.C.: Shame and Celebration at a Museum

The museum's exterior is quite a departure from the National Mall's usual white marble. It's
just across the street from the Washington Monument at the western end of the Mall.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture (click HERE for its website) has been open a couple of years and continues to draw crowds big enough to require timed entry passes (admission is free).  Jane and I visited in April 2019 during a brief trip back to where we formerly lived in Maryland.  We were there to see friends and family, but this museum was on our must list as well. Our niece, Sharon, who lives in D.C., joined us at the museum.
     When we lived in Talbot County, Maryand, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, there was and still is on the grounds of the county courthouse a memorial to "the Talbot Boys," white locals who left Talbot County during the Civil War to take up arms against their own country and to fight to keep slavery intact. Maryland was a slave state though it did not secede from the Union; its slaves had to wait until after the Civil War to be freed since the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the states in the Confederacy. I wish the people who in the 21st century still support honoring the Talbot Boys would visit this museum and see (and read about) the horror that was slavery.
    Slavery isn't the only source of American shame on display at the museum. There's sharecropping, often described as worse than slavery; Jim Crow laws; lynchings; and more. Emmett Till, the 14-year-old from Chicago who was brutally murdered near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1955, is given a lot of attention because it was his death (and his mother's courageous decision to let the public see his horribly disfigured face) that spurred people like Rosa Parks to action. His original casket is on display at the museum and people file past as respectfully as if his body were still in it. (He was reburied in a new casket after his body was exhumed for a DNA test.) Even today there is controversy about what should be done with what's left of the the store where he was accused of the capital crime of showing disrespect to a white woman (click HERE for New York Times article).
     The museum also celebrates accomplishments. We were there for a special exhibition on Oprah Winfrey, going from her early childhood in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to her early TV career in Baltimore, Maryland, to her current status as one of the nation's most iconic and charismatic media personalities. And one of the wealthiest. You'll find your favorite blues and R&B and rap and jazz artists, too, along with writers, scientists, educators, actors and politicians.
     This is an educational museum. There are a number of artifacts -- including a segregated railway car -- but this is foremost a museum of words and pictures. You have a lot to read as you start three levels below ground and work your way up from the depths of the slave trade.
    Here are a few photos that I hope will encourage you to visit the museum.

Visit the museum's website to obtain a timed entry pass, but when we
were there they were letting people enter up to an hour earlier than
the time on their passes.

Escalators link different levels in the above-ground
portion of the museum. Start at the lowest below-ground
level, though, and you're walking up ramps. 

This is Queen Ana Nzinga who in the 1600's reigned over Ndongo in the Congo River Basin. She
converted to Catholicism and formed alliances to resist the Portuguese in Central Africa. The quote
from William Cowper is, I think, meant to be ironic. He was a leading British intellectual and
poet in the 18th century and was very much opposed to slavery.

The slave trade didn't spring up overnight, and although we think white cotton farmers
in the American South were the prime beneficiaries, many others found ways to profit,
including Africans who captured and sold humans and Creoles who made contacts
between sellers in Africa, ship operators and eventual buyers in the New World.

I had long known that many European, especially I thought British, ships transported
slaves across the Atlantic. What I learned here was that almost every European nation
(even Denmark!) was involved in this trade, and often the governments were invested.

Signage such as this gives visitors new ways to think about our history.

Faces from the 19th century.

Blacks weren't wanted in Union uniforms when the Civil War started, but when the Confederacy
promised freedom and land to slaves who fought, Lincoln and the Union had to match the offer.

Mound Bayou is a town in my home state, Mississippi. I had not
known it was started as a community of freed slaves -- freed
by Jefferson's Davis's brother, Joseph. This is part of an exhibit
on all-black communities in the late 19th century.

The Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and '60s receives considerable attention. Growing up then in
Mississippi, I remember the attitude among whites was that people were coming down from the North
just to stir up trouble. People who got killed were asking for it. Black children killed? Their
parents should have been tending to their own business.

This early 20th century rail car has segregated seating areas, one
marked "colored only." The differences, however, are slight,
mainly that the whites had a larger restroom.

Posters called people to action in the fight for civil rights.

There is almost too much to see, to read and to learn in the museum.

The many accomplishments and successes of African Americans in the arts are given their due.

One of Chuck Berry's Cadillacs is on display.

That's the Capitol dome in the distances, as seen through the
grid that sheaths the museum's exterior.

After the African American Museum, we went to
the National Portrait Gallery to see the celebrated
portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama.

Amy Sherald's portrait of the former
first lady is very elegant, but Jane and I
agreed that it's not a good likeness.

Kehinde Wiley's portrait of the former president, in addition to being a good likeness,
is interesting in composition and concept. The various flowers popping out from
the vines relate to aspects of Obama's life, such as his childhood in Hawaii
and his father's origins in Kenya.

California: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Desert sunflowers create a field of yellow in front of the Santa Rosa Mountains.

Spring 2019 has been a time of bloom booms in the deserts of Southern California. An unusually wet winter has not only ended years of drought, it has spurred billions of wildflowers to explode with color in otherwise brown or gray landscapes.

One of the best places to see this fairly rare phenomenon is Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, about two hours northeast of our home in San Diego. It's an easy day trip, but next time it happens, we'll try to stay overnight so we can see even more.

Anza-Borrego is more than 600,000 acres of diverse desert landscape including and east of the Peninsular Mountains of San Diego County. (It encompasses several other mountain ranges, too.) Our drive took us on winding, high-altitude mountain roads with cliffs on one side and sheer drops on the other, and across flat sandy desert floors. The mountains appear as heaps of gigantic boulders, many of them seemingly poised to roll down and squash passing cars. Temperatures in the park in summer can reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 52 degrees centigrade), and visitors are warned about car breakdowns in the park's vast expanses: "Will you be comfortable if you have to spend a night or two in your car?"

Here are some snapshots of our visit to the park.

Wildflowers and cacti spring from the desert sand,

Sand verbena.

Dune evening primrose.

It looks as if imagined by a water-color painter, but the landscaping is entirely natural and unplanned.

Desert lily.

An unexpected treat near the park and near the town of Borrego Springs
was a field of gigantic metal sculptures created by local artist
Ricardo Breceda. Flower visitors can simply turn off  the paved road
and drive up to see these rust-colored wonders. 

A cricket and a scorpion. 

Grapes are forever harvested in a large installation with many figures such as these.

Mexico: Ajijic, Expat Haven on Lake Chapala

Signs such as this have recently been placed in communities surrounding Lake Chapala.
This is on the malecon (waterfront walkway) of Ajijic.

One of my oldest friends, a fellow Ole Miss alumnus, has been living for 14 or 15 years in Ajijic. He moved there from San Francisco. Like me, he has spent much of his life as far away from our roots in the Magnolia State as possible. Jane and I had time off over Thanksgiving from helping out with our granddaughter in San Diego and spent a week with my friend, Ralph, in Ajijic. It's  pronounced ah-HEE-heek.

Read my column about expat retirees, including one in Ajijic. Click HERE.

To reach this small town, we flew on the bare-bones Mexican airline Volaris from Tijuana (using the Express Border Crossing bridge to walk into the airport after parking our car on the U.S. side) to Guadalajara. Ralph picked us up for the half-hour ride to Ajijic. Although Ralph has a lovely Spanish Colonial-style home with a guest room and a swimming pool, we stayed at a nearby bed and breakfast (Casa Tres Leones, click HERE for website) thanks to my allergies and Ralph's two dogs and two cats. 

Ajijic markets itself as an affordable retirement haven for Americans and Canadians, and the town of about 12,000 has more than 1,000 full-time expat residents. Another 700 or so have winter homes there. We saw car license plates from several U.S. states and Canada. With an elevation of about 5,000 feet, Ajijic has a constant spring climate, though rainy and dry seasons break up the year. The average year-round temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The town is on the northern shore of Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest lake at about 420 square miles. It's surrounded by mountains that are part of the Sierra Madre range. The lake moderates the temperature in waterfront communities like Ajijic, making it warmer during the "cold" months and cooler during the summers. Although it's very scenic, the lake's questionable water quality discourages boating, swimming and fishing. 

For such a small town, Ajijic has a great variety of restaurants, from small traditional Mexican eateries like Chile Verde (click HERE), which is popular with locals and expats alike, to more sophisticated places like Pale (HERE), a Spanish place where we ate three times. Our last meal was an off-the-menu rabbit and chicken paella for three. The young co-owner and chef said it was the first time he'd made rabbit paella since opening the restaurant 18 months ago. It was delicious. 

The shopping scene is not so bright. We had thought that we'd do a good bit of our Christmas gift-buying here, but what we wanted -- handcrafted baby clothes, blankets and other easy-to-pack textiles -- were very similar to Mexican goods sold in San Diego and not exactly bargains. We came home with very little despite having made it to the town's quite good Wednesday street market and having gone into most shops in the "Corazon de Ajijic" more than once. Some of the local art, however, was very interesting and well priced, but hard to carry on an airplane. The town is something of an art colony, and Ralph has filled his house and garden with wonderful works by Ajijic artists. 

In addition to eating and drinking too much, we three went on several excursions. The first was to Mazamitla, a small town at about 7,000 feet in the Sierra del Tigre mountains on the other side of the lake. Another was to Teuchitlan, a couple of hours away on the other side of Guadalajara, where we visited the Guachimontones, circular pyramids more than 2,000 years old. We also went to Guadalajara where we had lunch in a neighborhood cafe near the center of the city, which is the second-largest in Mexico. Another outing was a drive further east along the lake through a couple of indigenous villages. The condition of some roads in Jalisco are excellent by any standards, and others show why Ralph and so many others there drive Jeeps or similar vehicles.

Here are some snapshots from Thanksgiving week, 2018: 

The western end of Ajijic's
one-kilometer malecon.

Another view of the malecon.

A wall at a skateboard park along the malecon.

Residents have donated several ancient sculptures that
are displayed along the malecon.

An egret finds a perch along the malecon.
An unusually long rainy season has caused
an exceptionally high water level in
Lake Chapala.

A movie theater competes with clothing vendors
along one of the main streets.

The weekly Wednesday street market offers a wide range of produce, including
the largest cauliflowers Jane and I had ever seen.

Shoes, watermelons, pineapples and more. 

People were eating breakfast around 10 a.m.

Murals enliven many streets in Ajijic.

This artist went beyond a simple mural to create a bas-relief underwater world.
Lake Chapala seems to have thousands of pelicans.

A gas delivery on the main shopping street.

We were in Ajijic for its annual late November 10-day fiesta.  The Ferris wheel and other rides
blocked the main shopping street.  During the fiesta, early morning (like 6:30 a.m.!) fireworks
can be heard throughout the town, ostensibly reminding people to go to early mass. They are sometimes
followed by loud band music, drumming and singing. "I should have told you to bring
ear plugs," my friend Ralph said. 

Terracotta skulls adorn the walls of a building
across the street from the town's main church, each
bearing the name of someone who has died. 

This work (a celebration of Mexican independence?) is part of the wall of skulls.

A mural near the main plaza celebrates, I suppose, some aspect of local or Mexican history.

That's the main church in the background as
fiesta-goers start to fill the streets in the center
of town.

Dancers in the courtyard of the main church.

It amazed me that narrow streets could accommodate
carnival rides such as this. 

The inside of the dome above the front porch at Casa Tres Leones.

The three lions of Casa Tres Leones.

The lush garden at Casa Tres Leones, with the pool to the right and the breakfast terrace to the left.
Although we were told the pool was heated, it was in the shade for most of the afternoon
and never was warm enough for wimps like us. I imagine that during hotter weather,
it would be absolutely wonderful.

This is the malecon at the town of Chapala, a larger town to the east of Ajihic.

A flying dancer on a pole atop a circular pyramid in a visitors' center mural depicting
the Guachimontones 2,000 years ago. This site became known in the last half of the
20th century and excavation wasn't completed until the 1990s. 

Visitors read about another mural at the visitors' center.

This large circular pyramid is called the Iguana. It was once topped with a pole for
a flying dancer. The other platforms formed a circle around the Iguana and also
connected it with other circular pyramids. This complex was built by people
known as the Teuchitlan Tradition to honor a wind god.

At 7,000 feet, Mazamitla sits amid a conifer forest, providing wood for building.  Promoters have
labeled the town "The Mexican Switzerland" because of the chalet-like architecture.

A covered sidewalk along Mazamitla's main square.

The main church in Mazamitla.

It was interesting to see that the president (who seems to
relish closing the U.S.-Mexican border) is as beloved
in Mexico as he is in the saner parts of the
United States. This cap and tee shirt were
on sale at a Canadian-owned shop in Ajijic.
The airport in Guadalajara sold similar if
less vulgar anti-Trump tee shirts.