A MEXICAN PINATA PARTY

Maybe it was the look of vacuous joy on the face of a dog character that normally looks inquisitive in his television appearances. Or maybe it was the soft neck and legs attached to a rigid, weighty torso, but this piñata didn’t seem right. It was way more Goofy than Blue. I paid 200 pesos, the equivalent of about $20, and hiked the thing under my arm for the 1-mile trek home through Sayulita’s dusty streets. None is paved save the one leading out of town to the narrow coastal highway.

A little town on the Pacific outside Puerto Vallarta, Sayulita has been discovered in recent years by hip Norteamericanos looking for a kid-friendly wintertime beach destination. My friends organized this trip, which coincided with a painful anniversary for me, and asked me to join with my daughter Aryana. I have the privilege and burden of raising this magical little person on my own, thanks to the tragic loss of my wife Karen in childbirth. Karen somehow lost a lethal amount of blood a few hours after giving birth in Bozeman Deaconess Hospital, leaving me alone with an incredible gift. Lucky for me, Aryana has acquired Karen’s capacity to enjoy life, charm, mischievous smiles and sass, and not to mention Karen’s good looks. (Unfortunately, Aryana has my light-colored, tangle-prone fine hair, better known as Maffly Head.) Last year on the anniversary of Karen’s death, which occurs two days after Aryana’s birthday, our old friend John E. and I skinned up Mount Ellis with a plastic bag full of Karen’s ashes and tiny bone fragments. In a spot with views of at least six mountain ranges, we released the dark gray powder to the wind whipping out of the southwest. Then we tore up the untracked slope down Ellis’ east face, the one covered in a forest of snags.

Instead of brooding in the snow, I opted this year to spend the first week of February partying among friends with kids in a warm, light-filled place. I began obsessing over a piñata the minute I stepped foot in Sayulita, and my search led me to the blue dog. For me, the piñata party was to be more than a celebration of Aryana’s birth. Blue’s demise at the hands of little girls swinging a stick was to symbolize breaking the cloud of grief that has hovered around me for the last three years. It didn’t unfold quite the way I planned.

Like any other place in Mexico, there is an acceptance of hazard in Sayulita that would never be tolerated in the U.S. Kids ride standing up in the backs of pickups, random dogs, hung with testicles that look more like tumors than reproductive equipment, nap on your beach towels and pretty much everyone sports a beer bottle at the pool. Sayulita’s boat concessionaires would beach their crafts by running them full throttle toward the shore, through the crowded surf, then tilt up the outboard motor as they glided up the sand. Back home, lawyers and insurance companies have eliminated this kind of risky conduct, but here, hazardous fun remains part of the fabric of daily life.

I was thinking about these things when we began demolishing Aryana’s piñata, which proved to be a product liability lawsuit waiting to happen. Blue was strangely heavy for something ordinarily comprised entirely of paper products. His legs would collapse under his own weight every time I set him down on the walk home and the long neck would bend down. On Aryana’s birthday, the kids, exhausted from a day of building sand castles and fighting over beach toys, fell asleep before dinner. So we postponed the piñata party till the next afternoon. But we ate the birthday cake in honor of my friend Felicia who just turned 40, so I had to hit the streets of Sayulita again in search of another cake, which I found at a pasteleria on the central plaza. The next afternoon, Bert and I slung Blue from a rafter in the palupa hut by the pool. After watching me stuff candy into the dog’s chest, the girls sensed Blue was a sacrificial creature designed to suffer for their pleasure and began assaulting and fondling him.

Wielding the handle from Bert’s collapsible avalanche shovel, the girls took turns whacking Blue, but to almost no effect. The piñata was not nearly as flimsy as it appeared, so the adults took a round of turns. After a few exploratory jabs, I knocked all four of Blue’s legs across the lawn with a single swing. But the candy-filled torso remained, dangling from the rafter in sheer mockery of the devastating blow I thought I had delivered. The girls began sensing a fraud.

With a few more adult assaults on Blue, I discovered the piñata’s torso was actually a terra cotta pipe. The candy was, in effect, encased in a ceramic bunker. There was no way to break up the piñata without a) ruining Bert’s avalanche shovel, and b) sending ceramic shrapnel flying over a group of small children. So I cheated and manually pulled out the candy and threw it.

Some piñatas are for busting up and some are just for looking at. Blue, apparently, was one of the latter.

Brian Maffly can be reached at brianmaffly@gmail.com.