Back in Antigua Yet Again

I arrived in Guatemala City early Monday morning, cruised through customs, and was first greeted by the familiar face of Maco, a sweet Guatemalan taxi driver who is friends with Jose and Lucky. He stood patiently among the throngs of drivers and cabbies waiting to solicit or collect passengers leaving the airport. Maco held a piece of cardboard with block letters that spelled "Mer," a sight that has come to be quite comforting when landing in a notoriously dangerous country. I half dozed in the backseat as we eked through Monday morning traffic and headed towards Antigua. Big hugs and smiles and a late breakfast of eggs and tea at Jose and Lucky´s and then I settled into my room and crashed hard after a sleepless red-eye flight. Walking the streets of Antigua yet again, everything is familiar, nothing seems fresh or new....the anonymous young transient hippies and do-gooders are mostly different people than those I last saw eight months ago, but they all look the same, act the same, pose the same at the No Se bar, walking over the cobblestone streets, sitting in internet cafes talking too loudly in Dutch or German as they skype Europe where girlfriends and moms peer back through pixalated screens. And my arrival at No Se felt warmly familiar. My friends slowly trickled in for big hugs and boisterous hellos and the banter started immediately....Michael (a middle-age Brit whose nickname, for reasons that have never been adequately explained to me, is "Auntie Barbara") greets me with the line "Hello Mer, are you now willing to have sex with me?" My dear sweet friend Mike wispers¨"welcome home" in a long embrace and then vocally contemplates a new business venture for me, "Mer´s Merkins," apparently based primarily on it´s alliterative quality and proximity to pussy. Kevin continues to assure me he will turn me straight, in time, and confirms that I am, in fact, his daddy. I am sure there are many who would find such banter offensive, but to me, it was all positively charming and lovely. Of course what I have cited above are just a few excerpts of the bar banter that is well known to those who stumble into (or are summoned by some strange force) to the bar Cafe No Se. But as the evening stretched into the wee hours this banter only peppered the more substantive conversations that included disclosures of heartbreak and grief, rants on US politics, news of art openings, talk of writing, and an unfinished conversation considering, from a social-psychological perspective, inter-generational and crosscultural interpersonal communication....or something like that. Then we all landed at Mike´s appartment good and drunk and most suited to call it a night. Instead, we attempted to sing and dance. No one was hurt. And as far as I could tell, fun was had by all. And out of defernce to a friendship, I will not disclose the happenings in the cab ride home....sufice it to say, the evening was appropriately punctuated.