Sugar Shack, JMN, photo.
Mimsy and Chance Lafarge went to Cloudburst for the weekend to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Drove up in two cars with Dandi and Mitch Oddbocker and Shay and Rafe Bickford. Planned to split up on Saturday so Mimsy, Dandi, and Shay could do girl stuff, and Chance, Mitch, and Rafe could do guy stuff. They’d all meet back at the hotel for beers before dinner.
On Sunday the guys would play golf. The girls would shop and go to a club called The Stirrup to see the male strippers. They’d all meet back at the hotel for beers before dinner.
Friday night Mimsy gets a call from the Finger Hut back home. Her youngest son Cisco, it turns out, has phoned in an order for sixteen deluxe pork finger baskets. It was to feed the junior varsity, he told them. Mimsy said, “You didn’t fill the order, did you?” Posie the manager said, “Yes, I did, but the credit card number Cisco gave me is invalid.”
Mimsy said a cuss word to herself, she told me, wondering why they didn’t run the dang card before they cooked the food. Anyway, she paid with her card, then called Shyanne to go pick up her brother’s food and tell the team to eat it on the patio, not inside.
Well, Shyanne drove into town and got the food, but bless her heart, she didn’t close the tailgate of her doolie before she drove back. All those dinners blew out on the highway without her knowing it. For near a hundred dollars nobody but the varmints got fed.
Mimsy and Chance read Cisco the riot act when they got back. The “credit card number” he gave the Finger Hut was the serial number on his Gameboy, which happens to have sixteen digits. Cisco claimed it had been Rodeo Peavey’s idea, as if that mattered. These young’uns! If they had half a brain between ’em they’d be dangerous.
(Stag Country, Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
“Los meros meros” again
Juan Rulfo, Campesinas de Oaxaca, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/four-photographs-rulfo/
Guillermo Chapa was a member of the culture I was assigned to teach Spanish at as a rookie assistant-prof at Pan Am-Brownsville. I said teach “at” instead of “to” because almost all my students already knew the language — I had little to teach them there. The courses I was charged with were abstruse (“comparative-constrastive Spanish-English phonetics and phonology”) and cultural. I knew a lot about the formalities of Spanish and some of its literature. Guillermo knew a lot about the realities of being Hispanic in Texas. We hit it off.
I went with Guillermo and his friends to see a Mexican movie across the border in Matamoros. I can’t remember the title. At one point the screen filled with quietly intimidating men exhibiting distinctly Native-American gravitas and wearing imposing hats. “There they are,” I heard Guillermo murmur reverently, “Los meros meros.”
The Mexicanism and how he said it stayed with me: “Los meros meros.” Without delving too deeply I took it then and take it now to mean something like: The men you don’t want to mess with, who will remain dormant and benign until and unless their community needs them; the backbone of their society, rooted in Pre-Columbian times, icons of long-suffering durability.
That’s just an approximation of what the cinematic image and Guillermo’s comment meant for me at the time. The term “mero” is cognate with English “mere,” but the two terms parted company in this Mexican idiom. There’s nothing “mere” about Los Meros.
Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.