Hot Dog Days of Summer

The terns are going crazy this morning, diving and screeching. Large schools of little fish are just a few feet from shore. You can see the gray outline just below the surface - a movable feast. The sound of the surf is rhythmic except for an occasional flap, like a snapped towel. The dog next door barks at the old SUV that's just launched a boat from the beach, beach launching a necessity because the tip of the boat ramp at Islandia broke off and then most of the ramp crumbled away.

I can hear these sounds because I have the doors open. Day three without air conditioning. The end of summer came a week early.

Of all the summers to have been in a house and out of the trailer, this was the perfect one. I'd like to give the universe a big shout-out for conspiring on this. It's not that the trailer doesn't cool down in the summer. Oh no, that AC keeps the inside of the trailer muy frio - enough for a sweater during the day and a comforter at night. It's being closed-up that's the problem. The humidity makes it impossible to keep doors or windows open so there I would sit in that aluminum trailer - Canned Annette. I craved a house, room in which to move around. Certainly summers in Kino would be more tolerable if I had a home.

So the universe gave me a home and the home is nice, I'm not complaining, but the summer was still hot and still I stayed indoors. The nights do not cool down here. There's no refreshing early-morning breeze from the sea. I stayed indoors with the sliding glass doors pulled closed, the roller shades in the bedroom pulled down, and I spent nearly four months in bed reading. At least when I think about the summer that's what I remember. That and those unusual thunder storms.

Summer hibernation. The opposite of what you all up north experience in the winter. Except in the winter you have warm malls to explore, warm movie theaters, warm restaurants. In Kino there are very few options for escaping the heat.

But enough of that. This kind of weather, this is what the snowbirds come to Kino for. Cool mornings, afternoon breezes. Mosquitoes gone. This house is a perfect happy hour house with that long patio and abundance of chairs. Around eight o'clock Saturday evening, after an impromptu happy hours(s) gathering, we decided to go for hot dogs. If you've not experienced a Sonoran hot dog, you're really missing something. I like mine with doble weenies.

We walked the five blocks or so to the hot dog stand, stood around the cart eating our doble weenies, then made our way home, past the local drunks. As we passed what used to be one of the puta bars one of the guys in the group standing there said "Hola Marie Antonietta." I said hola and we exchanged como estas? Ah, one of my friends from the puta bar. We walked by our ex-security guard who was sitting on a step drinking beer with another guy. The security guard finally got fired after three trailer break-ins and one fisticuffs with a gringo resident who accused the security guard of doing the break-ins which is a pretty safe bet.

Unfortunately that dog woke me in the middle of the night but it was worth it. As my friends know, I'm pretty bored with the food here but not with these babies. Fortunately the hot dog stands don't come out until late at night so I probably only have a couple of them a year. A summer of in-bed reading topped off with hot dogs...I'd be about the size of Gilbert Grape's mom.

Time to end this rambling. My friends will be here any minute to walk the beach. We're heading into town this time because the beach is flatter and a little wider in that direction. We're going to have to dodge boats and dead fish so it may slow us down a bit on our quest to shed those hibernating hot dog pounds.