Past Karma or Future Karma?

My friend Jane asked me the other day what was the long-lived attraction I had for Central America. She noted that other friends we have in our white North American circle have a life-long attraction to black friends, travel in Africa, and others are drawn again and again to Asia and so on.

This question made me think. I remembered that my teacher John Gardner had asked me if I thought I had a strong past life among the Mayans. I thought about it a bit and had to say "No, I don't feel that." I had had feelings of familiarity in France and Greece. I 'knew' I had lived in India. I answered John that I thought the Mayans I knew were leading me into the future, rather than echoing something from my past. But that was after I had spent a good deal of time in Central America.

One one very obvious level, it was practical. It was nearby. It was mostly inexpensive. Spanish was a language I could easily understand. (I had studied Latin and French for many years.) My country was very involved in our various evil doings down there. On the other side, I didn't have any attraction to Spanish or Spanish history or art or music. That has changed over the years, but that was the way it was.

I was certainly attracted to the  Cuban revolution and that handsome Che Guevara. Who wasn't?

My first two attempts to visit CAmerica were thwarted. When I was ready to go on the Venceremos Brigade , a pregnancy interrupted my plans. When I was going to study at Ivan Illich's school in Mexico, an outbreak of equine encephalitis had us turn back at the border. Years later, when I had three kids and had just gotten a divorce and lived way in the woods in New Hampshire, I was bitten by the bug again.

I had no money, as usual. But in the cabin we bought there was a beautiful Steinway piano. Not a grand...I don't know what the one size down was called. Frances and Fredrick Day had built the cabin in the late twenties or early thirties. Fredrick was a play writer from Greenwich Village who was a founder of the off-Broadway theater, Provincetown Playhouse. In those days, New Hampshire was a very long way from New York City. Frances told me that cars were so few that they sometimes didn't pass more than 6 cars on the whole trip. They built this woodsy cabin with the help of the boat builder Hereshoff. The Days were great yachtsmen as well as artists.

The cabin was built around living trees which lived on when we bought the place. Fritz Day felt he would need a piano to write his musicals. He commissioned some guys to transport the piano to the house before construction was finished so that he could build around it. Frances later told me that the guys bringing the piano arrived in a state of near nervous breakdown because they had never been in the country. When the so-called driveway ended and they had to carry the Steinway over a stone bridge over the quarry pond they thought their lives were over.

This brings us to Mexico. The Days had used the cabin two or three weeks a year for over 50 years. They had built other such magic hide-a-ways on the islands of Maine. So, not only was the piano installed before the house was finished, but it had sort of survived 50 years of scorching heat and freezing cold in an uninsulated, unheated cabin. It was hopelessly degraded. At the time, 1986, it would have cost me $35,000 to have it fixed. It would have been worth a great deal repaired, but it still would be in that cabin, so I sold it to a guy who loved and fixed pianos for $4,000. I decided that it was finally our chance to get out of Dodge.

I had heard a marvelous violinist, can't spell his name...Miija Progognick play. He never recorded. I heard that he was going to do a world tour and play at sacred sites. Chartres cathedral, Egyptian Pyramids, Monte Alban, Oaxaca, Mexico!!! I took some of the piano money and bought tickets for my three kids and myself. It was a great starting idea. Hear the concert!

That is how my love affair with Central America began in earnest. Like any love affair, it has brought me some of my greatest joys, (Cuba, Guatemala) and some of my greatest heartbreak (El Salvador). About the karmic implications, past or future, I will explore them another day. When people ask me why Mexico, I have to say, "Well, there was this piano."