Croton Inn, Residents and VisitorsWell, the shopping trip, that I mentioned issuse before last, was a great success, not in a little because of the sharp eye and "know when to bargain" sense of Carol, the Croton Inn bartender, who was my guide. Might be fun, here, to back up and give you a little more about this delightful guest house I have settled into. I might have mentioned before the marvelous cedar and mahogany antiques in the common room, including an absolutely perfect "fainting couch" positioned just in front of the check-in desk, in case the prices make you swoon. Which, of course, they wouldn't, although it did give me pause when they required cash up front, no credit cards taken. The lamps and side tables and rockers are all But, of course, the people are what makes it work. The manager (and possible owner) is Tyrone StCentre (not absolutely certain about his last name), a 55-ish fellow with a burley body and a rolling limp, like from a war injury. He rules all with a growly voice, an iron hand, (yes, including me sometimes) and a marshmallow heart. He has a little apartment at the back of the building, which is also the office. Tyrone is involved in just about everything except washing dishes and mopping. And I've even seen him mopping after a big squall. On the Big Day when they have pudding and souse, Saturday, Tyrone is the one who gets up at 5:30, chops up the piggy face (yes, the whole face, not just the snout), seasons it up and puts on to boil. Then the kitchen staff makes the pudding (blood sausage with cornmeal). They must do a good job of it, because dozens of Bajans stop in for take-out starting at about 11:30 am and ending when it's gone. As a place to get good, fresh Bajan food, I can unequivocally recommend the Croton Inn (it's not all pig faces). Tyrone's girlfriend is Randy. She doesn't actually live here, but stays over sometimes. I know this because when the Submarine folks called at 7:30 am (!) to remind me what time I would be picked up, she is the one who knocked on my door. Randy is an attractive and athletic-looking woman with very short bronze-colored hair, who, when she is here at dinnertime (most of the time), goes into the kitchen and supervises plating the food. She has a nice touch, little okra half-pods standing in a row along side the steamed carrot strips, pretty molded rice, a judicious use of parsley, etc. The bartender/waitress, as I have mentioned before, is Carol. As it turns out, she is not really hired staff, but works only for tips. (Randy, I think, works for love). Carol has a room next to me and is in some sort of transition. We have not become friendly enough for her to tell me yet what sort, but she did say that she did freelance secretarial work out of her home, but that it couldn't work here. Carol is pretty and a bit languid, with a walk and a laugh that attract sexy teasing from all the men. The maid and the kitchen staff (one old and cynical, one young and shy who spends all her free time watching television in the common room) have not told me their names, even when I told them mine. There is also an outside maintenance man, who comes maybe once a week. Tyrone has many male friends who come and sit on the verandah and chat with him from about 6:00 to 8:00 every evening, different ones on different days. And one friend, Colin, who is here every day, uses the computer here sometimes, etc. Colin is a photo-journalist from an African country I have forgotten. He is tall and very thin with a polio-type limp and has dreadlocks down below his knees! Sometimes he stuffs them into a cap, like an oversized train engineer's hat, but mostly he tucks them down into his shirt, where they trail out the bottom like a strange multi-pronged tail. He sounds very British. The other regular is Harry, the steel pan player. Harry plays here every Saturday and comes in for a short beer sometime on other evenings. Harry plays with a karaoke machine and his repertoire is quite romantic--"Make the World Go Away," "Just the Way You Look Tonight," mixed with some Bajan ballads. A steel pan is an interesting instrument that sounds a lot like a xylophone, but looks harder to play. Harry plays a "lead pan" (as in first, not the dead-sounding metal). It looks like a large steel washbasin about 18" across and 9" deep, suspended at about a 45 degree angle at waist height from two slender steel uprights. There are indentations around the pan, twelve large at the edges, 12 slightly smaller the next row in and five small ones in the center, each indentation corresponding to a note of course. The pan is played with wooden mallets, tipped in leather or rubber. A steel pan band would have 8 or 10 instruments and make a lot of noise. Romantic is the exception. Harry also sings in French and Spanish and speaks Spanish very well, all in all, quite a charming man. But he seemed quite startled when I gave him a tip. Maybe you don't tip musicians here. But surely it would have to be a big part of the economy that is so dependent on tourism. Everything is so expensive because it's all imported. Even a banana is the equivalent of 50 cents, and I would be willing to bet that domestics don't make anything close to $10/hour. But they eat pig faces because they want to. Anyway, back to Harry and the Spanish. We know he can do more than just sing memorized words because last night two young Hispanic women dressed all in white came in with a man. "Cuban whores!" hissed Carol to me as she went to wait on them, but Harry greeted them nicely, (called them Senora and not Senorita I noticed) and they had a little chat about something. Then, bowing to them, the only other person on the verandah, an older white guy with a British accent, but local, I think, asked Harry to play "Perfidia." Which he did and the Senoras sang along smiling. Does anyone know what this is about? Then the white guy came and whispered to me, "Cubans, they don't like the kind of music we've been listening to." Maybe I've uncovered a bit of prejudice in paradise? Anyway, you can see that I am settling in here quite nicely after a rocky beginning. I knew I was almost there on Thursday (my sixth day at Croton Inn) when Tyrone pointed out to me the best place to sit on the verandah to see all that was going on and to catch the best breezes. "Then that must be your chair," I said. "No, I have to watch the kitchen too." I read a quote in the paper that sums up my experience pretty well. Garfield Theophilus "Joe" White, a grand-looking Bajan who turned 100 on Friday, says about life, "Sometimes my butter soft, sometimes it hard." He did not add, as many here would "sometimes you suck salt." I don't think I ever got to the sucking salt stage, and now my butter's soft. Hope yours is too. |
||
