Mofongo

Three days in Puerto Rico

I’m a plantain now.

Because I ate a lot of plantains. In Puerto Rico. Where I was on a trip with Casey, her family, and her sister’s fiancé family.

Her sister is getting married and this vacation was mutually concocted as a family melding trip. It worked. They love each other, already did, we love each other, and everyone enjoyed each other’s presence. Which is saying something, not only because of the social assumptions about “in-laws” and extended family, but also because the island was a sweltering sauna while we were there, sagging anybody’s patience under a ton of wet bricks. The meteorologists said stay inside, use air conditioning. We went to El Morro and the beach instead, and no one snapped at each other.

I’m not kidding, though: these are all such sweet people and I was lucky to be included on the trip.

On one afternoon I took a walk by myself around the Condado neighborhood and took some photos.

At the edge of the neighborhood, before it turns into highway and low-rise tenement land, I turned a corner and saw two kids smashing bottles with pieces of pallet wood. I was thinking, you could call their pastime “delinquency” but it was really more like half-delinquent, half-public-service, because the bottles were on the ground anyway, and weren’t they speeding along their decomposition? No? Well, in my book their smashing was totally harmless and curiosity-based, not a gateway drug into smashing more important things. Every kid should have an opportunity to smash a bottle once in a while.

More colorful-er homes in the continental U.S., please.

The cobblestone streets in Old San Juan have this beautiful, iridescent blue tinge to them. Some of the stones are replicas, some are originals; the originals are pieces of 18th-century slag (a byproduct of iron smelting) that were carried to the island by Spanish colonists as ballasts for their ships before being repurposed as pavers.

We ate at the restaurant with this plaque outside its door. I looked up its claim later and it seems mostly true. People have been drinking rum with pineapple in it for as long as rum and pineapple have been within arm’s reach of each other, particularly in Cuba. But in 1954, University of Puerto Rico Professor Ramon López Irizarry invented a new way of making cream of coconut and it changed the pineapple-plus-rum world forever. Bartenders at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan started using it and in 1963, so too did Don Ramon Portas Mingot at Barrachina. By the end of the sixties it was cropping up in cocktail books and pop culture all over the world. Don Ramon gets some credit.

I love the type on this school—and found out later it’s a Montessori school.

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Now, at home in Chicago, until Avrom Farm Party, working and sessioning.

Thank you for being here,
Spencer