Two Hours in Douglas Once a Month

crew of cute Wal-Mart carriage collectors

Once a month I drive an old lady to Super Wal-Mart in the border town of Douglas, AZ. I hang around and wait while she shops, then I take her home and help her with her groceries. For this she pays me $30 and buys me lunch at McDonald’s, where we meet when she’s finished shopping. I don’t ask for the food, she orders for me before I get there (I’m usually late) so I say thank you and eat it. We both like to check out the Mexican guys and compare notes. The lady is a 70-year-old widow, but she still likes having boyfriends. She’s actually a tough old bird and I’ve learned a lot about what it’s like to date 70-year-old men who still haven’t grown up and never will!

1 lb. and 4 lb. packages of lard

Rollback! 8 lb. tubs of lard on sale

My trips to Douglas Wal-Mart are always an adventure, even if I don’t leave the store. I did leave today though, because I’m broke at the moment and Wal-Mart’s Health & Beauty Aids section is a dangerous magnet for girlie longings. Before I left I passed by the lard department. I am fascinated by the amount of lard sold around here. Lard comes from the fatty tissue of pigs and is used in Mexican and many other types of cooking. Some stores arrange the lard packages in enormous pyramids in special displays not even in the lard aisle. Back in Connecticut, no store manager would dare make a lard pyramid, no matter how much fun. Lard comes in 1 lb., 4 lb., and 8 lb. containers. The 4 lb. size is packaged two ways, your choice of cardboard box or handy plastic tub.

G Street, Douglas

Then I headed downtown. Douglas is a US/Mexico port of entry, and like most border towns, it’s gritty and bedraggled and you don’t hear much English. Some of the stores are bright spots though, even if many of them don’t bother to put their signs up in English. Douglas was established in 1901 as a smelter site for the Bisbee copper mines and it has a colorful past. The jewel of Douglas is the historic Gadsden Hotel, still in operation, still grand—but one lovely hotel can’t save a town. The city keeps trying to revitalize the downtown area, but it always looks the same, dusty and depressing. The people who work in the stores are nice though.

purses and shoes on sale for 9.99

bright dresses for beautiful girls

Marilyn Monroe lives on, in the most unlikely places

prints for sale in a shop window

got gas at Border Mart

Barky, barkier, barkiest

Jasmine I-don't-need-no-stinking-leash Argosy

Every afternoon at sunset I walk with Jasmine into the neighborhood, weaving in and out of road and desert and yards and parking lots. Jasmine stays right near me or heels on my left when there’s traffic. I keep a leash tied around my waist but rarely need to use it. A command to a dog is whatever you say it is, and when I want her to heel I say “stay with mommy Jasmine.” She is all business on our walks, totally different from the number-one barker she is whenever a person or animal walks by our house, or when a vehicle passes that she doesn’t like. She hates the local garbage truck. They all do. It’s a big noisy contraption. They try to chase it by starting their barking as the truck comes rumbling down the street, then they run around the house as fast as they can to the other end of the yard to bark at it some more after it passes. But, the barking can get annoying and sometimes we have to yell SHUDDUP or SETTLEDOWN or KNOCKITOFF.

Sometimes a neighborhood dog will start a large-scale howlfest, and there’s no way you can shut them up until they’ve finished. I can hardly think of a house in our neighborhood that doesn’t have at least one big dog whose job it is to guard that one piece of turf—all connected to the next piece of turf by field-fencing or chain link. We live on the edge of the neighborhood, on the side of the street that is bordered by the desert behind us.

So when we walk past other people’s yards it makes their dogs bark. But Jasmine takes her responsibility to guard me so seriously that she ignores all dogs. Most dogs just bark at us, but some dogs throw themselves repeatedly against gates or jump up so high I think another inch and we’re dead. Some dogs are loose. Jackrabbits leap about ubiquitously. Quail and roadrunners and a hundred other kinds of birds flitter and strut. We pass a through a feral cat colony. But Jasmine and I hike on. I am so proud of her. People say she looks a little bit like a coyote, and she’s just big enough at 45 lbs. to look like she might hurt somebody who tried to harass me, which I believe she would but have never had to test. Jasmine is the snippiest dog we have—she comes from tough beginnings and still has some wildness in her and I love her even more for it.

If I have to pass a permanently chained dog it ruins my walk and my day and thinking of it now fills me with grief and disgust. Ya feel that?

When the moon is full and bright in a clear sky, it makes the coyotes howl and in turn, the neighborhood dogs. There’s an awful lot of barking late into the night. This is the barkiest neighborhood I’ve ever lived in. You really just have to cope.

Jasmine and me