Crashes, Bars, and People

When I walked out my building’s door this morning, I saw a motorcycle parked there, perpendicular to the cars,  had been knocked over. It smashed its handlebars into the back of a small car decorated with warm and loving stickers. The panel was crunched. It’s fiber glass could not resist the falling bike

I do not know who the car or the bike belonged to. Nor do I know who knocked it down. 

Parking places are scarce in this older part of town, El Centro. People drive around to look for one on the streets or they search the underground parking the city and private businesses provide. My neighbors who have cars (some do and some do not) have contracts  at some distance.

Once in Sugar House, Utah, I came out of a coffee house to find my sedan I’d parked on the busy Highland Drive with its side smashed. No vehicle stuck around to claim responsibility. No driver left a note. I was panicked for a minute about what to do and decided I had to call the police to make a report.

Fortunately there were witnesses. As I calmed down, they showed up and stayed to tell the cops. It turned out a public bus side swiped my car.  At least that was now officially registered. 

They bureaucracy of the agency tried denying it, but the police report made all the difference. I do not even know if the bus driver filled out an incident report which he should have. In any case, the bus company and I  entered a period of struggle. Finally, they had no choice but to pay: my insurance went after them. And they had to give me a rental car, though they tried to give me one with advertising for them on it.

Screech,  I do not know how this fits together, such is the way of accidents. I can only imagine locked brakes sounding like the shrill breaks and squawks of a beginner on a tin whistle. 

Tonight, November 2, I, a beginner, spent a couple of hours in a bar playing Celtic music on that tin whistle in a pick-up group. Odd encounters from earlier times pushed me into athis different reality. 

I’m a bassoon player and do not know how to play the tin whistle but I can figure it out with a little work. A student from Ireland gave me a token of himself when he presented me with one. As I had to get rid of almost all my belongings before coming to Spain, in a split second, I put the whistle in the to keep pile. And here I am with it as the only instrument this former musician brought to Spain and it's my entry fee into a new world. 

Over the years, I have spent little time in bars.  As someone raised Mormon, the culture of such places was foreign. When I ceased to care so much about the religious issues of identity, I just did not have the custom of going

The learning curve of the culture left me with little desire to cross those boundaries unless I was with a group of people who were going there. I have done my duty, to be sure, serving people from a pitcher of beer when I have gone without me drinking any, though I am not a rigorous tea-totaler. 

Once upon a time I got caught not drinking while serving by a significant Peruvian anthropologist who was twelve years older than I, Juan Ossio. His. formative studies of historic messianism—resistance through ritual—in the Western Peruvian Andes had already caught my attention. 

He visited the University of Texas Austin where I was a graduate student. After his talk, we Andeanists went to an outdoor bar. Pitchers of beer were ordered and I did my thing. Ossio interrogated me as to why I was not drinking. 

I had to tell him about my background as a Mormon. He dismissively told me that with that and my refusal to drink I could never make it as an anthropologist in the Andes.

But I did and oddly, it was my Church that killed that career path when they took away my funding and my job. Without those, I could not afford to do field work nor travel to professional meetings, though I kept trying.

Once ensconced in Utah Valley University, I was able to recover a bit, but those key missing years were a gap that hurt and was ultimately unfillable.

That accident of being crushed by power in a community invoked a collective response much larger than a single individual. I raised my fist and resisted, sometimes with others, but at times alone. (A poem written and read in the Salt Lake First Unitarian Church during the depth of those days can be found here: https://avoidingentropy.blogspot.com/2025/11/it-happens.html )

Ossio accompanied lMario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s great novelist, in an important if controversial 1983 commission to the community of Uchuraccay, during Peru’s years of internal war, to investigate the killing of journalists. Later, Ossio became Peru’s Minister of Culture.

His writing has been informative. Beyond that, I learned from him what a snake pit the professional world is in Peru. Unfortunately, our paths never crossed again after Austin.

In a wrenching transition, let’s go Back to the bar today. I had a great time. Though I did not play anywhere near my former standards, I enjoyed playing jigs and reels with two violinists and two guitarists, the violinists from opposite ends of the US and the guitarists from Scotland and Wales, the Celtic fringes.  When I could not play because of key or because they had no sheet music, I sang.  

I walked away and thought now, as I get ready to turn 71, it is time to get over myself and learn to enjoy bars. I do not have to drink, because I really do not enjoy that although I no longer have a religious prohibition against it. 

Bars are about so much more than drink.  They are social places where people gather to hang out. 

So here we go, on the day the motorcycle destroyed the rear of the car in front of my house, I crossed to a different part of life, in a sequence of random associations that somehow seems significant. I now accept having bars as part of my life and enjoying them. While I could still reminisce with Juan Ossio, sadly, it is too late for me to meet Vargas Llosa. He died some six months ago.