Well – After begin back from the Peace Corps for about 3 and half years I have finally scraped up enough courage to follow my dream and start guitar making full time.

I just completed a website for my guitar making and realized that I have so much random information online about different stuff that I have done, that its going to be hard to draw any online attention to just one thing for quite some time. In the mean time, I might as well begin using this and other free resources online to publish info about my guitar making.

The Website is www.zebulonturrentine.com

The above guitar was completed in the beginning of December and is currently for sale. It is a cedar topped, traditionally fan braced, 650mm scale length, with a full French Polish of Shellac finish. Its very beautiful and I hope to find a good home for it soon.

At the square I turned right and headed down to Middle Ground, to take a look at how Daniel’s Food for the Poor house is coming along. Daniel is Accompong’s token blind man. In addition, and as if being blind wasn’t sufficient, he also has 12 fingers and 12 toes. Maybe God was trying to compensate for his depravity of sight. Daniel was one of the first residents of Accompong I met. When I first came to town I stayed with Pastor Robin Dixon and his wife Ileen who live a mere 30 feet or so from Daniel’s little one room plywood shack. When I was trying to figure out what my job was, and everyone was asking me what I had in store for them, “Daniel made it very clear that my job was to get him a new house, a request which I discovered to be well worth the effort after inviting myself over one afternoon to find his floor collapsed and his roof leaking. Now, nearly two years later Daniel is getting his house and I’m thankful for that in more ways than one. Daniel reminded me of my job every time I passed him by since the day of my arrival. I tried to avoid him most of the time that I passed him on the road. It’s pretty easy to avoid a blind person if you just keep quiet, but sometimes some other passerby would yell, “hey Zeb” and disclose my presence. Then Daniel will turn around and, facing some random direction, say, “Zeb. Yu not mek nuttin agwaan…yu treat mi bad,” which isn’t the kind of conversation that I would like to have, so I would just tip toe away until eventually Daniel would realize that the person he was scorning was no longer present. Some people say that Daniel is ungrateful, but I knew that this wasn’t true whenever he paused for a few seconds and took in my presence before asking me to cut a back door in the house.

I walked up to the school and headed down the hill where I found Maggi tending her shop. Maggi is Zan’s wife, a meager woman who was bearing a child for the first few months that I knew her. I first met Zan when he was drunk and supervising the building of this shop where I was now eating a spice bun and drinking a Ginger Beer. It was after teaching music class in the school and I was passing by Zan and some others who were sitting in the middle of the road sharing a mixture of over-proof rum and Pepsi, when Zan invited me to join them.

Maggi is one of the many women in Accompong that has brought a baby into the world since I have been here, something that Jamaican women do very well. In the time that I have been here, many of these babies have grown about 2 feet tall and two of them are named Zeb. I remember when Zan and Maggi’s baby was merely a huge belly, now he sits on the other side of the bar giving me a look with eyes of consternation, eyes that seem to be asking me when I’m going to be a father.

I had been in Jamaica about five months when the prices of rice and four, both staples of Jamaican life, had almost doubled. This was bad news for Jamaican men, whose virility is directly connected to the food they eat. If true, then fewer dumplings throughout the course of a day would weaken the sexual stamina of an entire country – maybe not such a bad thing for Jamaica. But for Dowdy and others like him, who live each day not knowing the source of their next plate of food, flour and rice are condiments which have always been sequestered in some way, shape, or form, a source of nutrition that has always been affordable – the absence of which forces many like Dowdy to go far in the bush in search of yams planted by their ancestors who lived hundreds of years without imported grains. My volunteerism was greatly valued in this situation where an extra strong back means more food. With this in consideration, I quickly dressed myself for a day of digging yam and we left for Fern Hill.

The trails with which Dowdy and I navigate the bush are trails that have been used by the Maroons for the past three centuries. This town where I serve, Accompong, is actually a district – about a few thousand acres of land that were given to the Maroons in 1739, after continually humiliating the British in battle. Accompong is technically not even a part of Jamaica. It is ruled by a Colonel and his Maroon Council, a somewhat legislative body of elders that handle all matters pertaining to community development and governance, a job which escapes their jurisdiction only with the case of a capital crime (actually a job which escapes them almost entirely). If you ask a lot of Maroons, then they will tell you that they don’t even answer to the government of Jamaica, rather it’s only the Queen of England who deserves their audience. If you asked me, then I would just tell you that I am a Peace Corps Volunteer who’s not supposed to have anything to do with politics. My job right now is just to tell the story about a really big yam. Right about now, Dowdy and I were getting pretty close to Fern Hill, a hillock way out in the wilderness that used to be a big ganja farm in the 1970′s.

******

In the cool mid-morning mist a giant swallowtail butterfly flirted with the nectar of the marigolds and orchids that lined the path leading to a region of Jamaica where no white men had ever walked, much less dug renta yams. Nowadays, with all the people in the world and their seemingly vain struggle for creativity, it was rather comforting to know that I was doing something special, or even that I was, in fact, somebody special. It was in this time, as Dowdy and I pushed our iron forks into the soft soil of the Cockpit Country, that our desires of recognition were met with a friendly gathering of mosquitoes. Yes, for a few hours we would be the climax in what would have been an otherwise starved and boring mosquito life. In a place where the largest source of warm blood is a parrot, you wonder where Cockpit Country mosquitoes receive their nutrition. You can at least understand why they are so excited to have you over for dinner. This was life reduced to simplest terms in every way – Dowdy and I digging for food, for sustenance, releasing a body heat that becomes a honing mechanism for a wilderness full of hungry mosquitoes. Hell… everybody just wants to know where their next plate of food is going to come from. Isn’t that the simple fact of life? Eating and having sex. For mosquitoes, you certainly can’t have one without the other.

The tropic of cancer burned away the morning mist, revealing a sun that reminded us of the unpleasant connection between work and eating. Although the pile of renta was gradually growing, the amount of food for the amount of work involved left something to be desired; maybe large game like deer or a stream with fish. No, only parrots, pythons, and mosquitoes have found accommodation here in this place – a myriad of jagged, limestone boulders, rotten woods, and lush flora that eclipse a porous jungle floor of hidden sinkholes and mosquito infested bromeliads, a terrain more suited to transporting water than humans, a job that the Cockpit Country does very well being the recipient of the second highest rainfall on the island. It would be nice if it decided to collect and store some of it, but it just goes straight through the ground, making this lush landscape completely useless when it comes to the task of supporting human life.

We were already tired of digging before we even saw the big yam vine that climbed from the ground, to the limb of a tree, to the very endless woodland that lay beside us. It was a tell tale sign that something large lay underneath – something that could not only be eaten, but bragged over. Maybe it would even attract females. Maybe there was some connection that could be made between the size of a guy’s yam and his… Was this the connection we were looking for between food and sex? No, nowadays females don’t want anything but cell phones and sunglasses. Too bad for Dowdy and I. Too bad cell phones and sunglasses didn’t grow on the magnanimous vine that stretched out to choke the strongest Brasiletto tree in the forest. Even so, the yam beckoned our greatest efforts, the kind of effort that recalls Hank Aarons 700^th homerun, or Lindberg’s landing in Paris. Dowdy and I had to prove that this yam could be unearthed.

Dowdy is probably my best friend in Accompong. This friendship was well earned, because Dowdy is the beneficiary of my most successful project. It wasn’t really a project as much as it was a simple suggestion, but his case was a good example of what could happen if people in Accompong actually took more of my suggestions. Anyway, so one night I am drinking a beer over at Dowdy’s and the man is just sitting there smoking a spliff when he turns to me and complains “Zeb…moneh not a run mon.” To any hard working American this makes stunning sense coming from a man who is doing nothing. Well, all I did was suggest that in his “spare” time when he had his hands free, he could be doing something – making something – like…I don’t know – like a spoon. The next day I saw Dowdy, and he had already completed one spoon and started another. By the end of the week he had three spoons. To make things even better, he sold all three the next week. And on top of that, some guy in Maggotty saw him making a spoon and commissioned one big spoon from him. He must have made 5,500 Jay those two weeks – (7,500 JMD = 100 USD). Now, making wooden spoons is a residual income for Dowdy and another guy named Bungo. It’s is always nice to see the power of a simple suggestion. Ever since, Dowdy has been a guy who has always appreciated what I have been trying to do, the service I have been giving. This service is a complex kind of thing; it could be writing a grant and implementing a big community project, or just going in the bush and giving a guy like Dowdy an extra hand in getting some food. Going out with Dowdy and digging for yams is sometimes the best use of my time when so many of the problems this island has, like its struggle to feed itself, are due to larger, outside forces that I can only have a short term impact over. It was nice to be out in the bush looking for yam, where getting more food is about patience and skill, not the size of a guy’s wallet.

Dowdy was the first one to start digging. It didn’t take much time to realize that this yam was different than the others. The first two feet of digging led to merely soil and rock. The head of the yam stood proudly above a foot that lay buried somewhere out of sight, there underneath hidden rocks, roots, and soil. After about an hour of switching yam digging shifts, the hole was large enough for us both to work simultaneously, yet it had become obvious that the yam had tricked us. The soft, delicious creature had taken a different path through soil, a soil that was quickly growing harder.

Far from water, far from women, far from home, far from the bottom of this yam, we sat on the edge of a three foot, horse shoe shaped hole that searched for the growing direction of a fickle root. Now it had become clear that if the yam was to be unearthed, then there was only one more direction that it could have gone. So we continued. Why? Good question. We had already enough yams to fill a couple of bellies for a week. Women just wanted cell phones and sunglasses. We had worked ourselves to a state of exhaustion. I’d like to think we did it for the same reason that when asked why he climbed Mt. Everest, Sir Edmond Hillary proclaimed, “Because it was there.” And much to our chagrin, it was. Who could to deny the existence of the largest mountain in the world? Yet who would ever care about the largest yam? People like to climb mountains. They just don’t go around digging holes, trying to reach some underground, penis-shaped piece of starch that no one has ever seen before.

The ensuing labor was monotony at its best, maybe even a little symbolic of the plight of the farmer with an iron fork amidst an agriculturally industrialized world. Most of the men in Accompong are farmers by profession and they farm most of the same things that farmers in the flat lands farm with a tractor, except they do it with a machete and an iron fork, because the Cockpit Country isn’t the kind of place that likes tractors, or maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, working by hand brings a joy to farming for me. It makes following a yam’s path through the earth something like an art. The soft exterior of the yam can be damaged with a careless cut of the machete or a quick jab with the fork. As Dowdy and I slowly separated the yam from the soil, it became increasingly clear that the yam for which we were digging was no ordinary yam. The real problem after digging three feet in the earth for a yam with no end in sight can only be explained from the viewpoint of a man that has just digged all day. That is to say, he’s damn tired. What started like an innocent search for food had turned into a battle between men and yam. All that kept our tired arms digging was some sense of purpose, a purpose whose importance was perhaps as deep as the yam, a purpose that was being tested with every scrape of red dirt. As we dug, the evening sky was growing gray – a view which became our means of unwinding a tired back and neck that had bent double from morning, digging for a yam that seemed to have no end. But turning back was no longer an option. After a man works this long for something so tasty he can’t leave empty handed. Perhaps one can even say that there was something more we were searching for in that ground, nothing we wanted to take home with us or thump our chests in pride over, but an exalted experience, a mutual story that was not only epic, but edible.

As a soft rain began to fall, man, mosquito, and mud merged into two beings that would have frightened the devil himself. If the gates of hell were unearthed somewhere in that hole, then the devil would have quickly begged for forgiveness. The nice thing about rain is the way that it softens the soil. As the twilight hours ensued, that hard, dry, red crust quickly became slippery and soft, but it did the trick. After a whole afternoon of work, the contour of the yam’s foot was beginning to say hello. A slight curve which became less and less slight as Dowdy and I, exhausted and hungry, revealed what seemed to be the end of our journey to the center of the earth. At this point in yam digging all that is needed is a little shake to ensure that the rest of the yam could be pulled out. If you had dug all day without rest to reach the end of a giant yam, would you then not, in the end, give it a little shake, a little test, a peculiar nudge as you turned to your friend with the grin of, not so much success, but the sincerest form of contentment?

The rain had stopped and there was very little daylight remaining when the yam was pulled from the hole. I was in the process of telling Dowdy not to twist or lift it, out of the fear that all that work would be in vain had he pulled it out in two or three pieces. But luckily, the yam let go and Dowdy, even more tired than me, sat to examine the fruits of our labor, the yam that had taken us four hours to get out of the ground, the fine feast that awaited us. As we took up the crocus bag of yams that were dug earlier in the day it became increasingly clear that this almighty yam would need a private escort, a single, designated back to ensure that it could reach town in one piece.

******

There is a point in the day when it seems as though light will last forever, when the sun reaches a particular spot in the sky and refuses to move any farther. Then, there is a point immediately afterwards in which the light begins to quickly fade into the night. I think that the same thing can be said about aging. I can remember a time when my grandparents seemed as though they had actually ceased aging, and I hadn’t seen them in 17 months when I saw them in a picture that was mailed to me. I guess there’s just a time when we begin to realize that things have been changing. It was at this time, as we had settled on departure, that the sun was also making its final farewell. Yams on head and tools in hand, we raced against darkness to reach back, a decision which needed no discussion, the dissent of which was shared only by the swarm of mosquitoes.

Dowdy and I reached back to Accompong just as the sun lost its ability to light our path, after which we went our separate ways to clean up the mess we had made of ourselves. I would say that we took a shower, but that isn’t very useful terminology in a culture that baths from a bucket. In Jamaican lingo, it would only be proper to say that we held a fresh. I think it describes the act of getting clean pretty well no matter what process you choose to achieve it. Whatever way I used to get clean, I did so quickly in anticipation of eating, more specifically, in enjoying that giant yam that took almost half a day to retrieve. After holding a fresh, I quickly got dressed and scurried down to Dowdy’s shop where he was there tending to the cook-fire. There is something that I never want to leave behind – cooking by fire. Using electricity or gas will never achieve the flavor that food obtains when cooked over some burning wood. While Dowdy was bent over blowing on the coals I left with the knife to prepare the yam for eating. There was a nice place in my stomach that I had reserved for this yam and the sooner I filled it, the better.

If you have trouble finding a yam this big, then you are most likely searching for something that isn’t there anymore. I searched in the crocus bag, I searched in the corners, I peeked over the pot on the fire, but this thing that claimed most of my time today was gone. I assumed that there was some logical explanation for the missing yam. And out of all the explanations that Dowdy could have given me, I would have never guessed that he had given it away. Here I am, mister self righteous servant of the people, and there was an unmistakable twinge of rage that lingered in my heart over what should be seen as an amazingly generous act. Apparently, Cham, one of the poorest members of the community, had come by before I had finished by fresh, and Dowdy just handed the yam over to her as though it was nothing, no second thought, no tinge of remorse in its departure. When I asked Dowdy what the hell he was thinking, he merely replied that he was happy to have it to give. I don’t think it would’ve been too tactful of me to tell him about that spot I reserved in my stomach for it. All I could do was just except that, amidst all the hustlers, gangsters, and ganja, there is a certain grace in this culture that I had overlooked and that I could learn a great deal from, a little rule about what could be owned and what belongs to everybody.

In the end, that little spot in my stomach welcomed the other yams that, although smaller, quelled our hunger and fed an evening of story trading, stories about a yam, Yam Almighty, a story which slowly faded away as the sound of rain on the zinc roof persuaded a trance whose purpose has yet to be explained, a trance which occupies a good portion of the time that we are allowed to call ourselves alive. While hundreds of tourists exacerbated their Margarita induced highs, Dowdy and I slept and dreamed about all the giant yams we would never find and that no one would ever find because, unlike mountains or homeruns, yams are edible and found beneath the soil of an island of which, to the rest of the world, is only a coastline – white sands, blue waters, Rastafarians, and women in bikinis.

Morning came without the rain, and the sun dried the red soil of the Cockpits once again into a hard sandy crust which fertilized the blooming morning glories, whose nectar fed the great swallowtail butterfly, whose beauty provided a perfect target for the black-billed parrot. And the magnanimous vine that stretched out to choke the strongest Brasiletto tree in the forest reached up for something greater to hold on to, something more, someway to win the great, woodland struggle for solar nutrition, waiting for two more hungry Jamaicans.

The Colonel is not a bad guy at all, despite the many harsh words that people use every time that his name is mentioned. Let it be a good example of how difficult it is too be a leader in Accompong. From my time here I have pretty much decided that every Colonel in the past operated in much the same way. He is a generous man, and every time that I “accidentally” stumble upon him in a local bar he will buy me a drink.

This was my second time to the Appelation Guitar Festival. The first time I had a beautiful woman in tow, now I had the forever smug and satisfied Rafael Scarfullery, a first rate friend and guitarist from the Dominican Republic. I remember the last trip I had made here was also my first guitar festival and one of the happiest times of my life, probably because of the woman that I had with me. Hanna was a French exchange student from a little business school in St. Nazaire when she came strolling through the university cafeteria one normal afternoon and interrupted my infatuation with some chicken nuggets. A month later I was driving her around in my old Nissan pick-up truck to romantic places like Staunton, Virginia and the Appelation Guitar Festival. I was walking out of a master class with Rafael when a young man stopped me and asked me if I had been here before, at which I gave an affirmation, and he asked me what happened to that pretty girl that I had with me the last time. I probably told him the truth, a thing that I used to do several years ago. If I knew then what I know now, then I would have used it as an opportunity to boast.

I asked Rafael what he did that made the performer request our removal and he just gave me that smug Rafael chuckle that is so contagious. I must admit that I contracted it. Even though it pretty much annoys everyone else, it helps make life feel a little less serious, makes little situations like these seem quite ridiculous. Before I would have pondered over who was to blame, and become defensive over the matter, but with a guy like Rafael, all you can do is just laugh. After taking our new seats Rafael set down his paper and we both watched the competitor perform Bach’s Allegro from the BWV 998. I thought he played well considering what he had just done.

The car used to be considered white. The bumpers were almost certainly chrome. The rubber on the flattened tires was cracked and the foam in the seats was pushing through here and there. Along with the various forms of rubbish that had made a home on the floorboards there were weeds that had pushed through the steering column, and a litter of black pellets that hinted to a colony of rats – no evidence that it was a vehicle of value.  Back when my sister and I used to enjoy each other’s company, before I sharpened knives, made guns out of sticks, and developed my own style of cong-fu, we would use the car to practice our steering, an activity that initiated future road-way debates on each other’s driving skills. If driving skill was measured by our system, then roads would have to be made pretty crooked. It’s a lesson we learn pretty quick – that shaking the wheel back and forth isn’t what makes the car go, a right of passage for all children is to realize that the movement of a car’s steering wheel is directly related to the preservation of life.

I think back and try to reason with little Zebulon. I try to tell him to stop while he can still claim it was an accident, a stupid misfire that should have careened into a Yankee patrol. But the cinder-block merely bounced off the windshield to the ground, initiating a curiosity over the effort that destruction required, the curiosity that has left so many good cats dead.

Safety glass was invented in 1903 by Edouard Benedictus. He discovered it by mistake when he put some cellulose nitrate in a flask and accidentally dropped it the next morning. The cellulose nitrate left a thin layer of plastic on the inside of the flask that caused the glass to hang together after it was dropped on the floor. Nowadays it is meant to protect drivers and people who like to break glass from the blades of razor sharp glass that would have otherwise flown into our bodies upon impact. Instead it was designed to be extra resilient to impact, yet fragile enough so that, when penetrated, it crumbles into a million little squares. I guess that the windshield of a car was something mysterious to a young man who spent most of his time absorbed into a wonderland of imagination. It seemed so important and impermeable, that clear force-field that shields the passenger from the outside world, yet mom and dad used the image of our little bodies flying head first through it so we would keep our seat belts fastened.  Luck would have it that safety glass was designed to break. Just think how unsuccessful it would have been had all those beltless passengers exploded against the inside of their car windshields? I mean, chances are you’re pretty much a corps if you go flying through the glass, but at least there are not pieces of you lying in your family’s laps. Thank Mr. Benedictus.

In school they always taught us that we could be anything we wanted to be and do anything we wanted to do. It is an all-American mind set, that one’s destiny and success is controlled by his willpower. If you first do not succeed, try, try, try again. And I did – again and again and again. It is funny how that same virtue which led to the destruction of the car’s windshield is at the same time, the champion of old fashioned, American values. Perhaps my father didn’t understand this. Perhaps he didn’t understand the kind of effort and meticulous concentration I used to break the glass, the same meticulous patience that had earned me the most praiseworthy accomplishments. It was at this time that I noticed an anger in my father that I had never seen. Sure, I had seen him kicked by a few cows and had seen him hit his finger several times with a hammer, but this was different because it was directed at me, the same anger that caused him to kick back, to throw his hammer. I realize that if my father was ever going to hit me, then it would be now, and I even somehow understood and accepted that I deserved it. His red face and violent restraint, everything indicating I had crossed a line that was beyond my comprehension, so far beyond it that explanations could be justifiably replaced with a good beating.

It was a classic scene in which father and son stood straining to face one another, neither ready to look into the other’s eyes and see something human, see the disappointment, see something of which both would be ashamed. That is how we humans are able to justify violence. We look away, take a step back, and strike, shoot, stab, destroy the connection. Somehow my intuition knew this, and it would have been right had it been anyone else’s father standing there in front of me.

My father collected himself enough to reach into his pocket, pull out his pocket knife, unfold it, and hand it to me. My sweaty, shaking palm reached for the handle as I received this tool with which I was to cut a switch, to choose the knotty twig that would be used to strike my body. My father stool waiting in front of the dairy barn, beside the apple tree, while I carried the knife in my tear soaked hands over to a hedge.

Privet hedge is an invasive species to Tennessee’s Central Basin, a kind of vegetative form of cancer that made itself at home first as a property line, then as bows and arrows for neighborhood kids, and finally as a substitute for native trees. It is a gangly growing plant proliferating in bushes of straight, resilient twigs that grow at about a quarter inch in diameter. They all looked painful to me, but some of them were heavier and raspier than others. I stood there searching, thinking, trying to lengthen the time between my choices and their consequences, wondering what kind of switch would find favor with my father’s intentions. Would he be angry if I chose a wimpy, soft one? I was ashamed but didn’t want my father to think that I couldn’t take a good thrashing. But those heavy, knotty ones looked fierce, like they could draw blood. Eventually, there it was, a switch that could arouse neither suspicions of cowardice nor pride. I would have liked to cut it quicker, but my father’s pocket knife was duller than a spoon, and I began to think that I would have fared much better had my dad just beat me with the knife. It took some courage to accept my punishment, but I did return to face my father and place the weapon in his coarse fingers.

He stood with his head bowed to the ground, a father doing what he could to make sure that his son would not be a hooligan, and he slowly rotated the piece of privet between his thumb and forefinger, searching for truth, searching for the right words that could prevent the seemingly inevitable violence. It took a while for us to gather the courage to look at each other, but when we did a silent line of communication opened, and all at once he understood, he saw that I understood. There was no need for words, no need for swinging a stick, merely a simply question that reaffirmed his assumption that I realized my wrongdoing.

Volvos are some of the most respected cars in the automobile industry, above everything else renown for the durability and protection they offer in the time of an accident. But what made this car so special was that it didn’t belong to us. It had been in safe keeping for a friend, just sitting there in the field all my life, slowly awaiting this day. That is what really made my father upset. He had to call his friend and tell him that his son had just obliterated the windows in his old Volvo. That must have been pretty difficult for him to do. I can imagine he felt more shame than me, with all the pride and effort he put into making sure that I would turn out to be a good guy. Would they think that he was a neglectful father? Would they wonder how any kid would even be given the capacity to do such a thing? Would they ever understand that his son was just ridiculously imaginative and thorough, committed to finishing every job that he started. Even when it is breaking out the windows of an old Volvo, my intuitive desire for symmetry and perfection was shining through my work, determined not to leave anything undone. Unfortunately, another man’s trash is always another man’s treasure, and if there are any real lessons to be learned here then we will first have to accept that even Volvos can’t last forever. Eventually we have to let go of whatever it is in our life that we are trying to preserve, whether it’s an old car, our youth, or a sense of place.

I will never forget that day because my father never hit me. It was an expression that no matter how valuable the car was, there was no size of privet hedge big enough to bring back the windows in the car, no car valuable enough to warrant a father’s violence towards his children. Where most fathers would have struck their sons for destroying the car, my father refrained and showed me that there was nothing material I could destroy that would be more valuable than our mutual respect for each other.

Today is sunny and mild, a big change from the last three days of rain. I had planned on washing this towel that was long overdue a good cleaning. It started to smell like road kill about a month ago and now…I wont even say anything. The point is that it was ready for a wash, but the rain kind of called for a bit of rescheduling. So, today I washed it and you don’t have to go around saying that this Peace Corps guy named Zeb is a dirty dude, because now it is clean and I am not dirty anymore. It’s not really my fault that it got smelly though. I live in a damp, mildewy basement that gets about as much sunlight as the deepest caves in the Cockpit Country. Everything feels damp down here even if you don’t expose it to water, so the idea of hanging something up to dry is pretty well out of the question.

There are quite a few parrots in captivity in Maroon-Town. This of course is illegal, but Maroons don’t seem to be too concerned with this little law. They have bigger fish to fry with all the drug trafficking and illegal firearms to worry about Babylon coming to confiscate their parrots. After about a year and half here, I can now say with utter confidence that I know the name of every parrot in the Cockpit Country. I could know the name of every parrot in Jamaica, but I am sure that there is some Kingstonian hippy out there who thought they were better than everyone else and named their parrot Rainbow. Still, I have never met a captive parrot who has not been given the name Pretty. Indeed, for such a beautiful bird, I guess it fits right in with Jamaican pet naming- every cat is Puss, every bird is Pretty, and every dog is…you guessed it – Dog.