Carol warned me about thieves too, "It could be anyone, someone you see everyday and think is your friend." Her boyfriend Juan's backpack––passport inside––had been stolen from the front porch of the casita that she rented from Selvin. All she knew was that the thief was sly and familiar. Beamer the dog didn't bark or fuss or nothing while Carol had been just inside. "It could've been Anyone...", she emphasized. It could even be Fifi the flaming housekeeper who washed her sheets and turned her water back on when the construction workers goofed and who she adored. It could be any one of the construction workers, or a neighbor.

Here in the tropics the walls are made of rotting wood and merely suggest the idea of separate space, there is no glass in the windows of homes and the distinction between indoors and outdoors is dryish verses wetish, an unimportant distinction to insects or thieves.

Do not believe the fool who tells you tropical beach life is *easy livin'.* There are the mosquitoes, and worse, there are the chitras, silent black specks of insects that nip at fresh tourist ankles. Mold and rust and rot are as guaranteed as gravity. ¡Qué bonito, lindo y Hermoso! There are also hurricanes.

During one of our drives into town Selvin expressed his frustration with the wasting-away nature of traditional building materials and threatened to only use concrete and cinder blocks from now on. My heart sank, I am enchanted by the wasting-away architecture, Selvin understands.

When my slow desert-mind finally figured out how to keep my clothes dry, I was in love. Happiness IS dry pants! I was particularly in love with the quarters that Selvin had donated to my cause, gratis. The building was a row of rooms on stilts made of rotting wood. I selected the choicest room, a very exciting walk across the creaking, crumbling veranda. I could even put my lock on the door when I left for the day.

The choicest room, of course, held the religious relics of prior guests that the other rooms did not contain, candle drippings, ashes of bug coils, Nicaraguan coins (Punta Uva is located at the farthest end of Costa Rica from Nicaragua), a cardboard cut-out of a "fashionable" woman selling something? and a man's button-up shirt with ships printed on the fabric. This room even housed a mattress, which I touched gingerly and only when absolutely necessary. My hammock swung comfortably in the rafters. Perfection.

Carol smokes big fat Bob Marley joints filled with brown Costa Rican dirt weed, all day long. And so did I whenever we hung out together on her porch. She confided in me that she is The 'Deep Throat', infamous informant of the 70's Watergate Scandal. Deep Throat is alive and well, another ex-pat living out her last years by another beach in the Caribbean.

Her retirement came a tad early when the bosses of her government job in Florida discovered that she had used a work computer to send a treasonous email of a photograph of the huge banner that hung outside her home. It read something like 'Impeach Bush Now'. ha.

At times during our conversations she would pause and note how little she missed her boyfriend Juan. She very much expected to miss him while he was away in Florida, and to be sure, she did miss what she called that 'hunk of meat at night'. She definitely did not miss his grumbling, farting, belching and tantrums.

One tantrum in particular took place just before he left. He screamed and hollered, called her a witch and accused her of stealing his passport and pretending that someone else took it, so that he couldn't leave as planned. US passports can be sold in Puerto Viejo for US$1,000 each.

Carol's response was to feel terrible and awful and guilty and responsible and like a fool of fools for leaving the backpack unattended. I imagine Juan to be delightfully charming and sexy for a man in his 70's. I've never met him, but he must be.

Carol also told me about the origin of the artifacts in 'my room', Laurel. Laurel is Selvin's former lover who also sold him the property that 'my room' stands on. When Laurel blows through town she stays in that room, drinks, hangs out with dudes, whatever, and also screams and cries and wails and moans for Selvin, awakening all of Punta Uva. As far as I can tell --she haunts the room. I wondered if she was around when Juan's passport was stolen.

Days later I woke up to the voices and movements of men on the stairs. Secretly I dreaded the thought of sharing my perfect space with more than the three sleepy bats guarding my door. On the stairs and in the room next to the stairs were many dudes, hanging out talking. I recognized only one of them. He worked for Selvin and his foot was swollen to the size and shape of a soccer ball.

On account of his injury, Miguel had slept the night there, on the floor with no blanket, no nothing. I dragged over the mattress from my room and a sheet and blanket from Carol's.

The night before was the first night I helped out in the kitchen of the Restaurant. Selvin's cook had the flu. Turns out Miguel was the cook with the flu. But he wasn't sick when he told Selvin he was sick and asked for money for the clinic. He spent the money on rum, got wasted, then got himself physically thrown out of a house party. It was the landing that caused his foot to swell up like a soccer ball. And now he really did need money for the clinic and for the ride there. Do children in Costa Rica read fables like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" ?

Eventually I ended up living in Carol's casita, dog and cat-sitting while she visited family in Florida. On account of the thieves I was instructed to not leave anything valuable in the front room, lock up when I went out, shower the dog with affection, feed the cat and to "trust no one".

The move suited me perfectly considering a war had recently broken out in my quarters. La Guerra I called it. La Guerra between myself and the 100 mosquitoes that bloomed suddenly. I fought hard. Patience my weapon. At least 30 kills before I even unzipped the mosquito net attached to my hammock. I waited for the noisy vermin to rest their wings in a valley of the net and then CLAP! Yes, there was blood. I became a warrior that morning. The naive hippie who could smilingly convince cute lone skeeters to refrain from snacking on her died that day. Mosquitoes don't listen more than they need to to save their greedy mosquito asses, nor do they seem to have good communication among themselves. Ants do. They listen and they talk to each other. Selvin talked to the ants eating the plants in his garden, the leaf-cutter ants that look like top-heavy sailboats as they march forward carrying impressive pieces of leaves upright on their backs. Magical creatures. They not only listened when Selvin explained the situation, they understood, and they ceased pilfering his food.

Around this time I encountered Tosh, the obsessive-compulsive British dance deejay who not only kept his room as shiny tidy as a laboratory, but also traveled with a laptop. Naturally we fell into the habit of watching movies and smoking grass and snorting cocaine and watching movies and smoking and snorting and watching and conversing throughout. Tosh told me about ancient Tibetan pressure points found deep inside folks throats and the bizarre tools needed to find them, and of the isolated natives of the North coast of Panamá and of the dangers of the city of Colón (there are thieves there!). We discussed the characters of Punta Uva, Carol and Juan. How Juan is addicted to crack, not just a friend of cocaine as Carol had implied, and how Puerto Viejo, the neighboring town is a cracktown, que làstima. Tosh felt that Carol should just let the old man indulge in his last years and I said, "yea, but she's gotta live with him." And Tosh reiterated what Juan had suggested to him --that Carol may have lifted the passport, so Juan wouldn't leave, which I knew was nonsense. Juan was away at rehab. Carol didn't know if she wanted him to return.

At some point during one of these talky-talk evenings on Tosh's porch Selvin happened by. His behavior was cagey and he focused his green eye on me and Tosh. I then understood that Selvin believed that he and I were some sort of an item. Some how in the ocean of flirtation that is Latin America, Selvin's gifts of frangipani flowers and maracuya fruit and even the stolen kisses had not registered to me as anything more than, well, tropical hospitality.

Life went on. I continued to play cards with Miguel in the afternoons and feed him food from Carol's kitchen, until the day I stopped bringing him meals, without warning, which I felt was the best medicine. In the mornings I would assist Roberto with the remodel of the expanded dining area of the restaurant. Some evenings I would do the dishes for the kitchen. My Spanish couldn't help but improve. The mystery of the stolen passport intrigued me. I even made a wish and then forgot about it...until it came true.

Selvin insisted on taking me to dinner the night before I bid "adiós" to the small community of Punta Uva. It was my birthday and his wife was out of town. Over lasagne and chicken marsala the subject of Carol and Juan came up. And without any hesitation and even a little eye-rolling Selvin delivered my wish. "Juan sold his own passport in Puerto Viejo to pay off dem drug dealers. I saw dem down there the day before he left." I grinned widely, "Thank you Selvin, your eyes Are amazing!"