Bobos in Paradise

"Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad."

-Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

Just crawled out of the dentist's chair after visiting the Harrison boys for my six month cleaning. Such nice, well-raised young men, both of them. This town's lucky to have them.

Being good hosts, they set the televisions in each exam room (why do we have TVs in exam rooms, BTW?) on neither Fox News nor MSNBC, but rather streamed an anodyne series on HGTV following two American couples looking for a home in Mexico. I found the reality drama fascinating, but maybe for all the wrong reasons.

For starters, I was immediately impressed that Mexican realtors are cut out of the same unctuous, overdone mold as most of their American counterparts. Teeth too straight, agreeable to every dumb observation that flowed from the mouth of their entitled American customers.

And boy was there a lot of dumb on display among those Gringos. The first couple were at least my age, but walking stereotypes of everything America hates about Californians. She's a plastic surgeon's work in progress, boobs way too big and perky for a relatively short, athletic frame skinned in a wrinkle-less, cocoa tan. He's purple from the steroids, veiny and rippling, looking like he's chiseled out of granite and maybe 25, but for the much older, deeply lined face he can't do much about.

As they toured home after home, it became apparent that she's impossible to please. The master's too small. The bathroom for the guest bedrooms is tacky. Granite countertops over tiled cabinet sides? Ye gods. And where will our little Buster go to do his business without a suitable yard?

The list went on, and on, and on.

Eventually we met Buster, a little yip yip dog the wife has forced onto the roid rage husband, who seems strangely okay with the whole emasculating experience of carrying around a shaking, panting little rat canine. I've seen this in real life as well. Always baffling to me.

For the next offering, we were presented with two overpaid BoBos (bourgeois bohemians, if you've not encountered the phrase) looking to pick up a little more debt by buying a condo in Puerto Vallarta. Their realtor was dissonantly thin, blonde and blue eyed in this sea of poor Mexicans who drifted around in the background throughout the home-shopping adventure. The would-be buyers were dressed like such schlubs that I found myself distracted by the question of how two thirty-year-olds, dressed like they'd wandered out of a homeless camp, would be able to close on a $500,000.00 second or third home. But I guess that's just my grumpy old man coming out. I'm sitting in a monogrammed shirt in a law office, and likely couldn't muster the scratch to buy a trailer in San Felipe, which was my grandfather's favorite Mexican getaway during the last couple decades of his retirement.

Watching these folks walk through nearly new, spotless homes furnished in whatever a Californian with a degree from Cal State thinks constitutes authentic Mexican decor, reminded me of just how undesirable an alternative this would be for P and me. The homes tended to be in developments filled with identical townhomes or condos that could have been plucked from Escondido or Costa Mesa. Which of course means you're getting away from your obnoxious suburban neighbors by purchasing a second home surrounded by obnoxious, suburban neighbors.

But to me the worst of it lies in the squat, brown natives who seemed always on the periphery of these journeys into the Yanqui enclaves. The very idea of living in an impoverished society where they speak another language, and hide what must be a deep resentment and contempt behind the smile they don as they hand you a towel by the pool or bring you a margarita, doesn't sound like something I'd experience on purpose. So we won't.

Instead, P and I are kicking around looking at a condo on Canandaigua Lake, among the prettiest and most pristine of the Finger Lakes. It's close to Corning, close to Rochester, close to skiing at Bristol Mountain. Most of your renters come from within a couple hours. And the towns that line the shore of the lake seem like functioning communities without the stunning wealth gap that's inherent in the third world retirement option. We haven't bought anything yet, but as we look ahead to days when our health starts causing us to slow down and lose the ability to maintain a big farm or a historic home, the option of a condo looking across the lake, in a community filled with very nice people and an excellent hospital sitting twenty minutes up the road, has a certain allure.

But now to pay for all that. The plan this morning is to pound through some filings for which a deadline looms later, then leave for the farm around lunchtime, handling conference calls right up through five eastern from the truck, after which, Elohim willing, I'll step into the number one tee box in Perry, and call it a day