Tonight’s WPCA-FM story broadcast was Futuro De Oro, “Golden Future” in English. The title is taken from the name of a sea bluff slum outside Tijuana, Mexico, where people from Mexico’s interior have come in the hopes of finding a better life in the city than they had in their previous homes in the country’s interior. However, like any city anywhere, Tijuana was unable to keep up or ahead of an influx of new settlers, so things like water and sewer were unavailable in Future de Oro. People bought their water from trucks hauling it from wells down by the sea below the squatters’ shacks on the bluffs. Roads were axle busters and children living in the tar paper shacks suffered malnutrition.
Those conditions were appalling to the young woman in the story who was taken around by a young man who had a hot sports car and a special dining place south of Tijuana in Ensenada. I believe Casa Rey Sol, the oldest French-Mexican restaurant in Mexico, still is there. In the story, the young woman, a law student, and her boy friend, heir to a family business, have opposing views about what to do about poverty, about war, and about what to do if drafted into the military. Can they resolve their differences? Read Futuro de Oro to find out!
Futuro is a “talky” story with the arguing interspersed by Baja driving too fast and near sliding over the ocean- kissing cliffs into the sea. It does raise our never-resolved issues about how to raise people from poverty into a better life. Generation after generation we’ve never really solved it, despite philosophical and political efforts to find a remedy.
Again, I am grateful to WPCA-FM for its monthly broadcasts of my stories. As I’ve said, I never know ahead of time which of my 27 stories they will select for you to hear.
People have asked whether, now that I’m retired, there will be more stories. I’ve said that I really don’t know. But around 4 a.m. the other morning I had the bones of a story come–that’s the way my stories have come, usually with dialogue first and in the wee hours of the morning–and since that morning there has been nothing. This possible story felt longer than the short stories I have been publishing. Perhaps the “nothing” is because I’ve been busy with “life”, as well as putting the finishing touches on Gretel and Andy, God’s Gift, Marina’s book in which her Seeing Eye Dogs, Gretel and Andy, talk about what life is like as a guide dog. It’s a cute book and informative. You can get it for $15 on Amazon.com and your favorite book store. Marina also has written a draft about her early life in war-time Berlin, Germany and I have done a first draft of my own growing up in the Hollywood Hills, a rural oasis in the middle of a major metropolitan area. Both of these accounts will demand some of my time and may just crowd out stories for awhile. We shall see.