I think the most striking difference I noticed was the speed at which life occurred in the states. After residing in Costa Rica for several months, probably even rural Alabama would have seemed revved up, but plopping ourselves into the middle of New York City ended up as a true shock. We felt like the Borg, or some other alien creatures whose experience of time was geologically slow, so slow they don’t even appear to be alive or moving to humans. And not only was everyone speaking, walking, moving, and driving incredibly fast, there were emergencies all over the place. I stood at the counter of a copy shop at one point, waiting for some copies of my manuscript (I had come to learn that copy technology in Costa Rica still resided somewhere in the Bronze Age at this time) when a person came rushing in, shouting that they had an emergency.

 

 

Then there were conventions like automatic doors that ended up startling the hell out of me. In Costa Rica, electricity was way too expensive and dear to waste on such a frivolous activity as doors opening by themselves. I’d forgotten all about automatic doors, in fact. So when I stepped up to a grocery store one afternoon and the doors swung open with a loud, sibilant hiss, I nearly had a heart attack. I jumped back, alarmed, in turn scaring the shit out of several New Yorkers who probably thought I was trying to evade some knife-wielding assailant. It took me awhile to get the hang of escalators again, too. Fears I’d harbored as a toddler came back to haunt me as I felt concerned that I was going to get my timing wrong and step on a crack and topple backward as the stairs lifted, or that I’d get sucked down into the escalator if I didn’t leap off soon enough at the end. At night, the urban lighting seemed so extreme and Las Vegas that I experienced an odd jambalaya of emotions that ran the gamut from disapproval of the profligate waste of energy to thinking, “Oo! How pretty!” to feeling really sad that I could only see one star in the sky and that was probably not a star, but a high-flying plane. Everything felt noisy, busy, mechanical, and artificially charged.

 

On the other hand, it was very nice not to be inhaling diesel fumes everywhere, and we didn’t have to worry about drunks stretching out for a little nap in the middle of an unlighted highway in the middle of the night—or, for that matter, that the highway might just end since it was in the process of being constructed, but no one deemed it necessary to erect any signage to that effect, so you could just go hurtling off into space when the pavement simply ended about four feet above the ensuing ground.

 

At any rate, it was wonderful to see my family all congregated in New York. My sister Cathy, the one who was getting married, looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her—except, perhaps, when she was six years old and won a complete Easter outfit including dress, shoes, purse, and hat, in a drawing. In contrast to me as a child, a tomboy who favored corduroy overalls, jeans, and shorts, Cathy loved to get dressed up. She had socks edged in lace, underwear adorned with ruffles across the rear, and seven petticoats, which she wore all together under her skirts so that they would stand out like a ballerina’s tutu. Cathy loved to get dressed up in fancy gowns, so it’s fitting that her career of choice should be that of a harpist. No one, except for perhaps an opera diva or high fashion model, has as much of a professional requirement to get dressed to the nines.

 

Now, I will say that occasionally I liked dressing up in a wide strip of cloth fastened around my underpants, a pajama top, and a towel tied around my neck in order to transform myself into “Bolo Girl,” a superhero who could stop criminals in their tracks by hurling a bolo around their ankles and tripping them up as they fled banks and markets. I practiced this activity on the railing in front of our house but I had one serious problem that prevented me from actually going after criminals fleeing banks and markets. My bolo was a rubber ball attached to an elastic cord, a snapped-off portion of those bolo paddles that everyone in the early sixties was blapping around in an effort, I suppose, to improve their dexterity. Either that, or drop their IQ about thirty points. And I couldn’t figure out how to keep the bolo from whinging off my target and rocketing back to bop me in the leg, leaving the criminal free to resume their flight and possibly take a shot at me in the meantime.

 

My other sister, Lynda, interestingly enough, possesses a much more similar style to my own, even though she grew up in a separate household and we had a greater age difference. Cathy is two years younger than me while Lynda is ten years older, our father’s daughter from his first marriage that ended in divorce. Lynda is a talented painter who lives in Eugene, Oregon now and has for quite some time, although she grew up in Wichita, Kansas. She has a delightfully nutty, playful sense of humor. For instance, she and the woman who cleans her house have a game they play where one of them hides this plastic trout somewhere in the house until the other one finds it and hides it someplace else. When she sends me a box of candy, I never know when I’m going to find a rubber frog or bat nestled in amongst the mints and toffees, its eyes popping out and mouth agape.

 

 

My parents were there, too, of course, in a very happy and festive mood, my mother in particular since Cathy had decided to plan the entire wedding herself. And our aunt Hattie attended—another artsy member of the family, our dad’s sister who lives in New Hampshire—while Aunt Connie, who never passed up a family gathering nor an excuse to party, flew in from Oakland. It ended up being a whole lot of my favorite relatives gathered in one place. Cathy was not only truly radiant (men’s heads were turning as she walked down the street, snapping so fast I think a couple of them might have sustained neck injuries) but amazingly and characteristically calm about everything, and everyone was having a ball.

 

Richard had business to attend to while we were in New York, as the Keltons had arranged several meetings with buyers for various stores and distributors, including Federated Stores, which provides merchandise for department stores such as Bloomingdale’s. He had brought suitcases full of samples from Paladin, the import-export company that he and Paul had started; they hoped to get a feeling for the market for Costa Rican merchandise in the States. While I hung out with my sister to help her with her wedding, Richard spent a lot of time rushing around Manhattan in cabs, dragging these suitcases uptown and downtown to presentations and dinner dates. Once he got over his reverse culture shock and acclimated to speed once again, he pleased cabbies no end by paying them extra to “step on it” and rush him to his tightly scheduled meetings—until one cabbie fulfilled his instructions so enthusiastically that Richard ended up scared shitless. He decided that most cab drivers probably didn’t need any extra inducement to charge through the streets of Manhattan like maniacal speed freaks trying to disprove the law of physics which states that it’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light.

 

The day of the wedding, the sanctuary filled pleasantly with people and the organist, a friend of Cathy’s from Julliard, played lovely classical music. Mary Beth preceded me down the aisle, since she was the maid of honor. At the rehearsal the night before, the minister made a big point of telling us that we should not be in any hurry during the ceremony, that we should take our time making our way to the altar. The biggest mistake he’d seen members of wedding parties commit, he warned, was walking and moving too fast.  I could tell that Mary Beth was paying heed to the minister’s advice, because she was walking very slowly—so slowly, in fact, that she was having a hard time keeping her balance on the heels that Cathy had picked out for us, and she was wobbling ever so slightly.

 

I hadn’t worn heels in at about ten years, so I waited longer than I was supposed to in order to walk somewhat briskly and keep up a sort of gyroscopic motion that would propel me forward and prevent me from tipping over sideways into someone’s lap, which I figured would be much worse than zipping along a little. I glanced up at the front of the church, where the minister was looking at me askance while Rob’s two groomsmen made their appearance, clearly obeying his instructions to move slowly as well because they were creeping toward the altar at a rate of about one millimeter an hour. They reminded me of Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons.

 

However, we all made it safely to the altar, where Rob looked extremely dapper and handsome in his tuxedo and Cathy, of course, just exuded delight and joy, and I surprised myself by getting all teary. I’d never felt weepy during a wedding before, but something about my little sister getting married brought up all kinds of complex protective, proud feelings, along with intensely heartfelt desires for her happiness; so there I was, sniffling like crazy.

 

After the wedding, we had a terrific time at the reception, where I tried not to drink too much champagne but failed. I have a weakness for champagne, I’m afraid. At one point, I returned to the bar to refill my glass, murmuring apologetically to the bartender, “I hate to make a pig out of myself, but—”

 

“I’m afraid you’re far too late for that,” he interrupted, giving us both a good laugh. We partied till the cows came home, and then sat down and had one final glass of champagne with them (okay, not really—I made that part up), and then we made our way back to our hotel, somehow ending up with a platter of paté and two bottles of champagne.

 

And the next morning, while my sister headed off to St. Thomas for her honeymoon with her dashing, handsome new husband, Richard and I made our way back to paradise, feeling as though we’d been blasted with eighty-mile-an-hour winds for an entire week.

 

 

*Intro:

 

At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.

 

This is Chapter 25 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.

 

This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.

 

 

**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.