Nowadays that's almost impossible, no matter where you are. Which is why the novelist and essayist, former drummer and sometime lyricist for Chick Corea and others was of two minds about writing the book. He did not want to encourage a mass tourist invasion of San Miguel, similar to that ignited by Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. Certainly, he did not want titillated tourists knocking on his door, as happened in Cortona, Italy, to Frances Mayes, best-selling author of Under the Tuscan Sun. It hasn't happened.
Most people get bored after a weekend.
Insects and illness are as much a part of his narrative as are purple bougainvillea climbing blue patio walls and market days in the plaza with its sights, sounds and smells. If we suffer from one misapprehension as North Americans, it is that we feel the rest of the world suffers miserably because they're not us. What I've discovered is a rich, festive, resonant culture, in spite of economic duress. Her book of photographs with text, Mexican Tiles, will be published in the spring by Chronicle Books. In San Miguel, where they are surrounded by Mexican families who have become friends, Cohan and Takahashi have never felt danger.