Shopping During a Pandemic

As we read about the opening of States in the USA, I am struck by how different things are here in our UNESCO Heritage town of San Miguel de Allende. Our mayor instituted a lockdown in early March that shut pretty much everything down. Subsequent pronouncements pushed for mandatory mask-wearing (not always observed) and even roadblock health checkpoints. On June 1^st, a Phase 0 condition* was deployed with the opening of medical professionals, restaurants that pass a health certification, and shops. Entering a restaurant requires dipping the soles of your shoes in disinfectant, signing name, date, phone number, and temperature (taken with a handheld infrared thermometer). Then a squirt of alcohol gel and entry to a layout with tables spread wide apart. The staff often have disposable menus, wear gloves, and always have masks.

Grocery stores have been open throughout this period but they too have imposed safety precautions. Usually they do temperature checks, provide exclusive early shopping hours for seniors, have one-way aisles, spacing marked on the floor, and of course do a squirt. Some even provide awkward disposable gloves.

I approve of pretty much everything our town and the retailers have done with one exception. A national chain of fabric stores, Parisina, has an outlet in San Miguel. They chose to deny entry to anyone over age 55. Instead of creating separate senior-only hours they have shut out a significant portion of their customer base. AND, they are the only comprehensive fabric store in town. Despite my hat, mask and sunglasses, they wouldn't let me in. Call me super-frustrated.

* Phases 1-4 will open other types of businesses, parks, etc. as conditions warrant. Sadly, since over 60% of our local economy depended upon tourism, hotels and AirB&Bs will not be opened until Phase 4.

 

My husband's dad and Hitler

This post was written by my husband, Erich Almasy

Today is the 75th anniversary of the day that the American public learned that Adolf Hitler was really dead after taking his own life in his underground Berlin bunker on April 30th (or May 1st). It seems strange today that our Russian “allies” who occupied the bunker’s sector in Berlin kept secret the details of Hitler’s death and that 50 days would pass before the Western Allies would know the truth.

According to the June 20, 1945 front page story in the New York Times, my father, Canadian Army Sergeant Otto Almasy, and his colleague in the 10th CounterIntelligence Corps, British Army Captain K. W. E. Leslie, interrogated German policeman Hermann Karnau and determined that Adolf Hitler was in fact dead, thus becoming the first Western Allied soldiers to confirm his death. During the nearly two months previous, rumours had abounded about the Nazi leader’s escape, with unconfirmed sightings of Hitler in Argentina, the Vatican, and South Africa. Karnau was one of Hitler’s police sentries and witnessed the burning of the bodies of the Nazi leader and his recently-wed wife, Eva Braun.

My younger sister and I grew up hearing very few war stories, since Papa, like most WWII veterans was loathe to speak of it. But I do remember mention of him being the first (sic) Allied soldier to know that Hitler was dead. I’m not sure how much I believed it then, but a few years after his death in 2004 I discovered the online New York Times archive that contained the front page article below. 

One final remembrance about my father. In January, 1990 as part of his first-return trip since the war, we travelled to his former home of Vienna and then visited Berlin just two months after the fall of The Wall. We still needed to pass through Checkpoint Charlie, although there was a large hole in the final barrier that two teenage girls dashed through so they could get a picture with an East German VoPo (Deutsche Volkspolizei) guard. Yes, selfies existed before the iPhone.

My father was quite philosophical about the liberation exuberance we saw everywhere in Berlin and as we took our personal souvenir pieces of The Wall he commented that in his life he had seen tyrants more than democrats. He wasn’t positive that even the United States was immune from autocracy but he hoped that like Germany, if it ever came to that, maybe we could force a similar change.

San Miguel Widows' Club

Until tonight, every expat and snowbird we have met in San Miguel, who expressed any kind of political opinion, has been very liberal and virulently anti-Trump.  Tonight we were having dinner at a lovely restaurant with outdoor seating, and even though the tables were widely separated, we couldn't help but overhear the conversation among four elderly ladies, elderly being defined as older than me.  At first we were amused by their discussion about disposing of the remains of their deceased husbands - "he didn't want to be buried next to his first wife" - and talk about their amorous adventures between marriages, but then the conversation turned to the issue of removing Confederate statues.  These ladies all seemed to be from the South, Texas and North Carolina specifically, and two or three of them didn't like the idea of removing what they said was "history."  One lady said, "But would you want a statue of Hitler?"  None of them responded to that.  She also said she had not known until recently that the Civil War had been about slavery!  No response to that either.  Then another lady said she was hoping they could hold out until November and how Trump had done so much for Black people.  WTF???  What planet has she been living on?  They soon realized that we were listening to their conversation, and that was the end of the political discussion.

As they were leaving, I told them that I was planning on getting rid of my husband, who was sitting at my table, and I wondered if there was a widows club in San Miguel.  They said there was and I would be welcome to join.  Sad, but funny.

I was a Playboy centerfold, Miss March 1967

It was a nice morning in March, 1967.  I walked in the front door of Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, and heard someone say, “There she is.”  I looked up to see the stairs on each side of the entrance and the balcony above filled with boys, all grinning, laughing, nudging each other and all of them looking at me.  I glanced around to see if there was anyone else they could be looking at, but no, I was the only one there at the moment.  I had no idea what was going on so I just proceeded to homeroom feeling puzzled.  All morning long, boys were staring at me in the hallways and laughing, exchanging comments with each other, but no one would tell me what it was about.  Finally at lunch time, feeling totally perplexed and a bit angry, I cornered a friend of mine and demanded to know what the hell was going on.  He looked around cautiously and then pulled something out of his book bag.  It was a Playboy magazine.  Now I was really puzzled. I had no idea where this was going until he opened it to the centerfold and showed me the top part of it.  I gasped and my eyes bugged out.  I thought I was looking in a mirror.  Miss March was a dead ringer for me!  At the time I always wore glasses and Miss March was wearing glasses almost identical to mine.  How many centerfold models wore glasses???  I was completely stunned, but insisted on seeing the rest of the centerfold.  Poor Miss March had the BIGGEST pair of breasts I had ever seen, so big it is a wonder she could walk upright, and this was before silicone!  Just my luck. The absurdity of the whole thing hit me, and my friend and I sat on the floor laughing our heads off.  

My friend was the yearbook and school newspaper photographer and he had a fun idea.  Miss March wore her hair piled up on her head, so he suggested that I should pin up my hair and he would take a photo of me holding up the centerfold, just the top part, next to my face.  I assumed the photo would be just for him and me.  I thought it would be hilarious, so the next day I arrived at school with my hair pinned up.  Naturally this set off another near riot.  My friend took the photo, then proceeded to print up dozens of them which he sold for a buck apiece.  Oh well.  I have a good sense of humor so I proceeded to autograph the photos for the guys saying things like, “Dear Tom, I will never forget the night we spent together. Love, Fran.”  (Fran was her name.). 

After that first day in school, I did a terrible thing to my mother.  I bought a copy of the magazine and when I got home, I put on a shaky voice and said, "Mom, I have something to tell you.  You'd better sit down."  She looked very upset, and I don't even want to imagine what she thought I was going to say.  I hemmed and hawed as if I were afraid to tell her and then said in a plaintive voice, "I did it just for a lark.  I never dreamed they would use the pictures."  Then I handed her the Playboy and opened it to the centerfold.  She looked at the photo in horror and said, "Oh Cindy, what have you done??"  She was absolutely convinced it was me.  She was in such agony that I couldn't let her suffer for too long, so I opened up the centerfold so she could see all of it.  Somehow, she realized it wasn't me...  

My friend is now a film editor in Hollywood.  He did Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, all of Sean Penn’s movies as well as Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, A Star is Born and Into the Wild.  He has two academy award nominations, and he still has the negative of this photo in his files. 

Me, not airbrushed, with Miss March

Fran

It was a dark and stormy afternoon...

Mom, Jerry, Dad, Me

It was a dark and stormy afternoon.  May 1, 1954, a day that changed the trajectory of my family for many years.  We had been in town (Shawnee, Oklahoma) grocery shopping, and on the way home, the weather was awful.  We had the radio on in the car and there were warnings about severe thunderstorms, but no mention of a tornado, although it is taken for granted in Tornado Alley that there is always that possibility during Spring.  The sky looked ominous in the southwest, which is where tornadoes always come from, because in our hemisphere, the spinning monsters always travel from southwest to northeast.  If you look at tornado paths plotted on a map, they are always relatively straight lines going in the same direction.  Fortunately for us, Dad was worried, so as we entered our farm, he drove past the house and pulled up next to the storm cellar in back.  The cellar was just a hole in the ground with a mound of earth over it and a door on a low slant facing away from the path of the storm.  When Dad stopped the car, Mom said she was going into the house to wash her hair in case anything bad happened.  At that moment, Dad decided we needed to get in the cellar and yanked open the door. He told Mom to get in but she didn’t want to because it was full of mud and water and she had her good shoes on.  I don’t remember getting out of the car, but I remember standing on the ground outside the cellar and seeing my baby lamb, Woolly running toward us.  We had been bottle feeding Woolly, I guess because his mother either died or wouldn’t nurse him for some reason.  He was my pet, slept under the house, and always came running to meet us when we came home.  Dad pushed Mom into the cellar, then picked me up and literally threw me in head first.  I slid down the wet dirt slope and landed in the water that had accumulated.  As he threw me in, I was screaming at him to “get Woolly.”  I don’t remember if I knew exactly why we were going into the cellar, but I definitely knew we were in danger and wanted Woolly to be saved as well.  When Dad pushed Mom down into the cellar, she had my little brother in one arm and her purse on the other.  Days later, they found her purse way down in the pasture.  Dad came in after us, pulled the door shut and held onto the rope attached to it.  He couldn’t hold it down and the door went flying off.  I was standing on a little child’s chair in the corner of the small space and Mom was trying to cover me and my brother.  I held on to her.  Apparently my brother and I were both crying.  Dad watched our big Packard go spinning up into the air and come crashing down not too far away.  There were 2x4s rammed through the car including a big one that went through the windshield and was embedded in the front passenger seat. If Mom had been sitting there, she would have been dead for sure.

Little house that blew away

The tornado that hit us was massive, cutting a swath a half-mile wide.  There was no visible funnel, just a huge black cloud on the ground.  I don’t consciously remember the freight-train sound that Dad described afterwards, but for years I had nightmares where I would wake up in terror, but there was no image in my mind, just a feeling of terror.  I’m pretty sure the nightmares were caused by the sound of the tornado.  After things seemed to be over, Dad poked his head out of the cellar, said “Well, the house is gone.”  Turned around and said, “The barn is gone too.”  In fact, pretty much everything was gone.  They had purchased the farm in September of 1951 just before I turned 3.  It had a small wooden house, a Grade-A dairy barn, chicken coops, a rabbit hutch, and a large enclosure for pigs.  We raised goats and a few sheep along with the chickens, rabbits and pigs.  Dad sold goat milk to the local hospital and other folks in town. (I didn’t know I had lactose intolerance until college because I grew up drinking goat milk.)  There was also a wonderful fruit orchard which had been overgrown when my parents bought it.  They had cleaned it up and I have memories of picking cherries and peaches, although I think I ate more cherries than went into the bucket.  All the fruit trees and the pecan trees were torn up, roots and all, with only a couple of pecan trees surviving.  All the fences were gone too, so we couldn’t keep any of the animals that survived.

Dad went off to see if the people who lived down the road were OK.  They were hurt, but not too badly.  Before too long he heard our friend Wanda, the mother of the two boys I grew up with, running down the road in the rain and screaming hysterically.  Their farm, a mile away to the west, had not been hit, but they lost power, so she went looking for a phone to call the power company.  The first two houses she saw were destroyed, and as she came over the low hill, she could see our house was gone as well. There was so much debris in the road that she stopped her car and ran to our place oblivious to the downed electrical lines.  Eventually Mom carried me out of the cellar and put me in Wanda’s car.  I wanted to see what had happened, but there were dead and dying animals all around, so she covered my eyes.  My brother and I were taken away, I don’t remember to where, and somehow Grandmother and Grandpa came to get us and took us to their home in Oklahoma City. 

Dad with Flapper and Fanny

Dad had to borrow a gun from our neighbors to put some of the terribly injured animals down.  A few goats lived and some of the chickens and rabbits as well.  Woolly did not.

Over the next few days, Mom and Dad worked on the property trying to find anything that hadn’t been destroyed.  They put some items in the kitchen sink, but looters came out and took the sink and the stuff in it.  Dad had to sleep on the property with a gun to deter the looters.  Other people came out during the day, sat on their cars or pickups drinking beer and watched while my parents looked for our things.  They thought it was amusing, I guess.  There were other people, friends and acquaintances who came to help.

After a week or two, a moving and storage company parked a moving van on our place and we lived in that for 6 months while my parents constructed a concrete block building which was designed as a garage big enough to fit two cars with some extra space on one side and with a rectangular room in front.  The front room had a bathroom, a very small kitchen, a bar-type table for us to eat at and an area that was our living room.  They didn’t have enough money to build a real house, so the plan was to live in the garage for awhile and then build a house next to it.  We lived in that small space for five years.

I was 5 and 1/2 when the storm hit, but I have a huge number of memories from before the tornado.  I guess the farm was a wondrous place for a kid, which is why I remember so much from before.  I know a lot of people who say they can’t remember anything before age 6 or even 7. That just seems weird to me.

The block house a bit later