natural sounds

Barrett Golding recently reminded me of an old public radio favorite of mine, the venerable, mercurial Carmen Delzell, who seems to subsist in places where everybody thrives … and thrive in places where everyone around her is only subsisting.

Carmen’s the type of person you used to hear a lot from on public radio, right in the middle of shows like All Things Considered (back when people like Joe Frank used to host, I guess), but  now appears only on the rare one-off special (like the excellent Stories from the Heart of the Land) and some very occasional appearances on This American Life.

Producer-extraordinaire Jay Allison included her in his Life Stories series, a few of which ended up on The Savvy Traveler, a show I edited and produced way back when, as “postcards” Carmen sent to program host Rudy Maxa. It was a conceit that never really worked for the show — Carmen’s melancholic way of life never meshed with Rudy’s “up and at ‘em” attitude and the show’s consumer-oriented focus.

But I sure liked them.

This story, in particular, called “Carmen’s Boyfriend,” with its slow, minor-key guitar, and its slow, minor-key pacing and delivery steals the romance from travel and replaces it with a mournful longing that, I think, more than a few of us feel.

This is great, I told myself, as I wandered through the market pretending not to look for him. “Who needs him,” I’d say as I peeked into the cantinas where no women are allowed, but I knew he’d sold his guitar and wasn’t playing anymore. I even drove to the Red Cross homeless shelter to see if he might be there.

But then the brakes went out of my Isuzu and I demolished the small aluminum car in front of me. Since I had no Mexican insurance I had to leave my car as collateral until I paid the damages.

Suddenly I felt very far from home.

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I saw Carmen a few years later.

She was passing through LA on her way back to Mexico from India. Some flashy gentlemen she’d met had paid her way and she turned the trip into a money-making business expedition. Her trunk was full of silk saris, bangles and earrings she was going to sell in flea markets all along the US-Mexico border.

I wish I could remember more of what we talked about then. It was the last time I ever spoke with her.

(Thanks to Jay, for letting me repost the piece, which, he’d like to add, was made possible by the Open Studio Project with funding from the Corportation for Public Broadcasting.)