Fifteen Million Pesos-Worth of Sheet Metal

There’s quite a stack of calendar pages in my life’s rear view mirror, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point. However, I’m still young enough to dream, I guess. I may have recently decided what I want to be when I grow up. It may not be what my readers were expecting.

Of course faithful readers of this spaced-out space know I’ve spun the tumblers of occupations many times in my life. Everything from a welder in the desert to a near-arctic handyman, with lots of incomprehensible stops and temperatures in between. Most of those stops were just me trying to get by in a world bent on pooping in my punchbowl pretty regularly. Like a lot of my brethren, you’re forced to choose from a very limited selection of grocery enhancers that’s on offer at any given time. If my wide range of affairs over the years signifies I’m a polymath, I assure you I’m a very dumb one, and doing it with a financial gun to my head at all times.

There was little time for dreaming about how I’d like my life to be ordered. I was just trying to feed my kids without being forced to feed one to the other. I might have been tempted to sell them to the circus, but they closed them all down after the elephants joined a union or something. The option of getting a few bucks by selling our tots for medical experiments dried up pretty quick, too, when the public school system started their free, forced injection and vivisection services and crashed the market.

But even at this late date, I still dream. I think I want to have hot and cold running potato chip faucets in every room. I may want to purchase Saddam Hussein’s used living room furniture. I might want my swimming pool to have more hot babes in it than JFK’s secretarial pool. I may want to be something when I grow up, even though I already have.

So I see a business across the street here in Mexico. It’s outfitted with three, deep, offstreet garage bays in a neighborhood where such a thing is unheard of. On the weekends, the bays are closed with elegant Zorro-style wrought iron gates, not the brutish, inelegant overhead doors we favor in the states. The climate here doesn’t require total enclosure of almost anything. In some of the older houses, many of the main rooms are gathered around an open interior courtyard. Kitchens and dining rooms are literally outdoors, even if they are under a roof. If the temperature dips to 60 degrees in this burgh, they set up shelters for people to warm themselves in. It’s hot here, they’re accustomed to it. No one is crazy except Americans. In Maine, for instance, people pretend they live in San Diego, and live in houses built to suit anywhere but Maine. Their children stand in the snow at school bus stops in January in shorts and a tee-shirt. They’re cold, but they’re cool, as we used to say. Everybody in the Yucatan knows its hot, and lives like it’s hot.

This part of town, Centro, sort of, Zona Paseo Montejo in particular, is kitted out with colonial houses and businesses all touching each other. A parking space on the housing side of the sidewalk is spoken of in hushed tones, accompanied by extra zeroes in the real estate peso department. So the purpose of the office across the street would have been obscure to me even if their sign wasn’t in Spanish. The structure itself was only half the conundrum. All the bays, and every parking spot for fifty yards on the curb out front was adorned with a car I could never afford, even if I was willing to part with both kidneys, instead of just one. There were BMW land yachts and myriad Porsches, Land Rovers, and Jags, plus wonder of wonders, the occasional big, black Suburban, a vehicle almost unheard of around here. The side view mirrors whack pedestrians in the head on both sides of the skinny streets as they drive along.

When the first Mercedes something or other rolled up this morning, I was thoroughly vexed. I decided once and for all that I needed to know what they were doing over there, because I wanted to start doing it as soon as possible. Drug lords? Nah, they’re closed on the weekends. Drug lords are like 7-11s. They’re always open, and their clientele requires daily fixes. Slave traders? Unlikely. You can get your pool cleaned for $2 a week around here. A slave would be superfluous. My thinker-upper went into overdrive, and I began to come up with very wild guesses. Is alchemy a thing after all? I didn’t spot lead ingots being loaded in, or gold bars being loaded out, so ixnay on that. Are they selling crypto bucks they manufacture on old Dells and sell to fools with new Apples? Very unlikely. The cars across the street were elegant, not ridiculous atomic doorstops like the Lambos and Veyrons that are favored by the Ukrainian internet scam set.

What could possibly merit three garage bays full of cars too expensive to lend to Top Gear, because they might scratch them? I had nothing to go on, until I noticed the little, stylized feather in the center of their sign. As it turns out, that’s the traditional way to notify the public about what goes on in a certain type of office in Mexico.

I think I want to be a Notary Public in Mexico.

I’ll have to hedge my career bets here. I’m not sure I want to be one, because I have no idea what they do around here. I have to go by surface evidence alone. Then again, one only went by surface evidence when judging Grace Kelly. It could soften her allure if you knew she walked around her palace eating beef jerky and telling servants to pull her finger, then delivering on the threat. It’s an IKEA world all around, and you can be certain that there’s a particle board interior 1/32″ below the sexy wood veneer on most everything and everybody. We’ll stick to what we can see, and worry about the rest later.

So a notary public in Maine is just a tubby girl who works in the credit union and has a stamp and a pen, and will notarize a bill of sale for a battered bass boat you sold on Facebook marketplace. I don’t know exactly how cool it is to be a notary in Mexico, but I’m beginning to think it’s more along these lines:

So, at the risk of repeating myself, I think I want to be a Notary Public in Mexico. I’ve been going to the gym, and my forearms are already pretty strong. I’d be a natural, I think, if I could figure out what they hell they do that merits fifteen million pesos-worth of European sheet metal parked outside.