I finally got the Aribnb listings up and running properly and we got a few guests. It is great to see things through other people’s eyes. So far, they LOVE it up here….quiet, cool, and no mosquitos. Here are the links for Airbnb.

Blue Balcony Room

Room Upstairs

Jeff's Room

I haven’t written anything for a while now because I have been in Jamaica so long it has become my new reality and I don’t notice stuff anymore This story is about Titchfield Hill,

a cool old part of Port Antonio, home to the hardest-to-get-in-to high school around, a Jamaican army base, various hotels from modern concrete to ancient colonial styles, good looking new houses and lots of decaying old masterpieces. Bobo spent much of his youth in this funky neighborhood.

When we go there to visit, Bobo is greeted with delight by people who knew him as a kid. They call him by his childhood nickname “little Stevie Wonder.” Now there are new gangs of “yoots” hanging around on the street corners. We slowed down to check who they were, but Bobo didn’t recognize any of them.

The location of the army base use to be a huge open area with ruins and old cannons and lots of fruit trees, a “meditation point” where Louis would do his chanting and down the hill, Bikini Beach and the Errol Flynn marina. Bobo lived on the beach and farmed a hillside and sold his veggies in the market. Waynie, who made a living doing acrobatic shows for tourists, told me Bobo would go off laden down with produce and come back home at night with loads of cash. “Little Stevie Wonder,” indeed!

One personality from that time, who still lives up there, is Accro, who name stems from “acrobat” I lately learned. “I used to do flips and all of dem tings,” he explained to me.

Accro told me he believes in “faith and patience.” Wow, just like Shirdi Sai Baba, “shraddha and saburi!” I showed him a picture. The Sufi saint looks a lot like a Rastaman!

Accro acquired an abandoned lot right opposite the gate to the army base. He paid the overdue taxes and got a lawyer and the whole nine yards. “I started with nothing,” he told me. Now he has constructed a fetching little shop. It is carefully painted in red, green and gold. The front door has half of a Jamaican flag and half of a Union Jack along with an effigy of a lion’s head. Across the road, some unusual benches and tables are constructed into the casuarina trees, also nicely painted in high gloss Rasta colors. He has a huge “yaad” which is swept and maintained and clearly fussed over.

He used to run all his errands by bicycle. Down the road to the wholesale shop and back up the hill with two crates of Red Stripe on the fender. If it rained, he had an umbrella. Lately he has acquired a minivan, also carefully maintained with some recent body work and a plan in place to purchase various parts. The back window declares this vans name as “the Black Scorpion.”

People stop by all day to buy this and that, including a bird-like old gent with the beautiful new shoes who was there when we were visiting. He bought a white rum with Boom! which put him in such a good mood he purchased another.

Accro explained to me that he must calculate closely how much margin he needs to make on each item. He complained about “de yoot-dem,” who bargain when buying their three-at-a-time cigarettes. Accro is a serious and hardworking businessman.

The Jamaican army was hosting the annual influx of its British colleagues, and this was Accro’s peak business season. Bobo brought a bunch of T-shirts and other items from his shop in the Musgrave market for him to sell: Bob Marley T-shirts and Rasta caps from when I used to send down postal boxes of yarn. A perennial favorite with soldiers is Rasta caps from China with fake dread locks attached. Accro had also set up a barbecue pan and was serving jerk chicken to the soldiers during this short window of opportunity. The soldiers sat around and drank beer and socialized. “They are going to deploy you to the Ukraine!” the locals joked.

Accro is in a relationship with a pretty German lady. She works as an architect for the German government designing elementary schools and such. She explained to me that she has 13 (or was it 23?) years to go before she can retire. In the meantime, she gets one month vacation a year and spends it with Accro in Titchfield. I wish them well, but it seems a difficult situation. She comes for her annual vacation which involves a certain letting off of steam. Whereas this year, certainly, Accro was in full, serious, business-season mode.

The fence for Titchfield high school is a bit down the road. Vendors under parasols sell candy and so forth through the bars to the kids. One of these came over and asked Bobo, who is grey bearded now, for advice on how to build his house, presumably on “captured land.” Bobo, who has been there and done that had much advice to give.

One good aspect of Jamaica is you get points for being old! In good old woke and politically correct Burlington, Vermont with all its Progressives and “Black Lives Matter” posters I feel invisible. Here I am “Miss Becky,” and sometimes even “Empress!”

Bobo likes Italians, “Dem jus like Jamaicans only dem white. “Vinyl Sunday,” is a street party in the town of Drapers where an Italian expat DJs reggae oldies. At this party one night, one of the young Rasta yoot-dem came up to us and told me what a great guy Bobo is. “He is showing us how to be a

MAN!!” he told me. “He is my elder!” I was so proud. Bobo is a mensch fi true! A “Rastamensch!”