Front Porch Coffee

Yesterday morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. This song wasn’t horrid like the title says, merely very curious. It was being played over a megaphone on top of the house kity-corner to the one I live in. It was being played very loudly, too. I didn’t really understand the lyrics, could only make out something about jesuchristo, then something about jamas asi o algo asi. Anyways, I was only bit annoyed; by now I’m accustomed to things happening unexpectedly in the morning (machine-gun-fire story coming soon). The part that mildly annoyed me was how the chorus had this terribly screechy and out-of-tune violin part.

Then the song finished. Phew! I thought to myself–now onto a different song, or if I’m lucky that was just some good-morning-world greeting from friends to another friend. They have different ways of showing friendship here.

Silence…for a few moments and then the music started up again, the same song.

Uh-oh..this cannot be good, I thought. I thought right. This song, at first innocently curious, for 14 hours repeated, became horrid.

At eight-thirty p.m. yesterday I left the house to go to the office. I’d spent the better part of the day making soup and reading and was at my wits end with this horrid song. I’d tried thinking about it as a joke, and this worked for a while. I tried enjoying it, and this worked for a while. I tried making fun of it in my mind, and this too worked for a while. I finally plugged earphones into my little mp3 player and used this, but the earphones aren’t sound isolating so I had to use serious volume to overpower the neighbor’s megaphone-piped screechy-violin song. Finally at eight thirty my head hurt too much to think or really do anything, so off to the office I went, and there I found good peace and quiet–it was wonderful.  I’m ashamed of it, but I actually did have brief thoughts to wait till a bit later at night when there’s good darkness and then to hurtle a rock at this screechy-song-spewing megaphone. Honestly, I thought about it–but no, that’s not a good thing at all. I quit the ideas of destruction or violence, but remained very bitter and somewhat angry at whatever ridiculous person, the ridiculous person who thought it some sort of stupid joke to play the same horrid song all day long.

This morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. Again.

Yes, you guessed it, the song with the out-of-tune screechy-violin chorus. However, there is a saving grace, and because of this saving grace I actually laughed out loud (lol!) when I heard the song pipe up. Today is the first day of work–a day I’ll spend at the office, not at home, not near this horrid, horrid song. Because of this, I laughed–those silly fools, their snarky joke today will fall on nothing but an empty house. Bahahaha. I have to say that, at the office the night before, the resident security guard Don Alvaro had mentioned that an old man had died and the music was some sort of tradition, some custom of the indigenous people–that didn’t really strike me as too important though. It paled in comparison to both my headache and the concept of this ludicrously snarky joke. By morning today, I’d practically forgotten what Alvaro had mentioned.

There’s a little tienda, this tiny snack store, a stone’s throw away from the office; I’m a ten-a.m. regular. At least two or three days out of the week I head down to the tienda to quench the jones for some sweet and salty treats; sometimes I go healthy with juice and a piece of bread, other times it’s Coca-Cola and chips.

As I was walking out of the office to the little tienda thinking about Coca-Cola and chips, I heard music. It was the screechy-violin-chorus song! I heard it faintly, growing louder; I froze in my tracks and looked to my left down the dirt road towards where the music was coming from. There was the funeral procession, forty or fifty people: family members and friends. All the men were dressed in old suits dirty with road dust and the women in traditional woven skirts and blouses, all of them somber and quiet. Towards the back of the group was a beautiful ornate coffin on the shoulders of five younger men. I walked to the side of the road and stood, cap in my hand, thoughtless. Walking next to the pallbearers was an older woman with a single candle. The small yellow flame, barely wavering in the calm breeze, was hardly a notable thing in the bright midmorning sun of a cloudless sky. One man was carrying the megaphone mounted on a tall two-by-four, another was carrying the stereo and battery, a third the cables that carried this song from the stereo to the megaphone to be sounded out in static-heavy reproduction for all to hear, as if it was transmitted from a poor radio station or a radio station in a town very far away.

They passed by me and proceeded on to the cemetery, led by a pastor with an old and worn bible in his hand.

I ate lunch at home in peace today, the song wasn’t playing any more. The man who had died was 65, I don’t know if he left behind a wife or not.

The end.

Edit:
Later, I explained this a little bit to my sorta-boss and really-mentor, Danery. As I got to the point about hearing the song and realizing that the funeral procession was passing by, I thought of my friend who died and his funeral and what it was like to see soldiers and his brothers and his coffin being carried by them and I nearly started crying right there half an hour ago. And right here as I type this in the office I’m a hairs-breadth away from falling apart into a bawling mess. Asi anda la vida.