JANUARY 5, MONDAY

FLYING TO MEXICO

Luckily my granddaughter, Hannah, was flying back to graduate school in Boston at 6:40 a.m. and I was flyihng to Dallas at 7:00 so I stayed the night at my son, Tom’s house, and caught a ride to the airport, driven by Kathy, Tom’s wife, at 5:15 a.m.. There I found that I was flying with Ruth and Kaitlin who were also going to be at the yoga retreat in San Miguel de Allende. As we were waiting at the gate a man came by and asked me if what he was holding was mine. I was confused and then horrified. I had dropped my passport somewhere in security and it seemed a miracle that he had somehow located me among the hundreds of people at the airport, although on reflection, Uncle Sam was already shadowing me through the airport and knew just what gate I was leaving from and my passport picture made it easy to find me at the gate. But this was a rocky start and must have made Kaitlin and Ruth wonder what kinds of blunders on my part they were going to have to deal with on the trip.

We should have had a two hour stopover in Dallas but that stretched to more than four with gate changes as well as the crew and planegoing to the wrong gate to pick us up. So we got to Leon two hours late.

What struck me first about the airport in Leon was how friendly the official people were, particularly the young woman who checked my passport and asked me about why I was visiting Mexico. In Asheville TSA was all business and orders to Stand this way or that as I was going through security which they finally let me through after they claimed I had metal in an elbow. This might have rattled me so much that I dropped my passport.

In Leon the shuttle driver was there and a group of about ten of us were driven for an hour and a half at sunset across barren mountains with miles of dried brown grass and a spotting of low green trees. Finally, out of this desert, appeared the lights of San Miguel de Allende.

As we entered town I was bewildered. I didn’t recognize a thing and the town in the dark looked grungy and like all the villages we had passed through until we got close to our rental house when the streets began to be all cobblestone and the open doorways revealed beautiful, expensive shops within. When we entered our rental house it was like entering a palace.

Only then did it dawn on me that San Miguel de Allende is a sprawling town and on the outskirts ordinary Mexicans live their daily lives while the one corner of San Miguel around the huge cathedral fronting on a beautiful park beside the art institute had been preserved and beautified as an expensive retreat for wealthy Mexicans and expats from all over the world. This doesn’t make San Miguel less beautiful but it is a reminder of the gap in Mexico and everywhere between the rich and ordinary people.