Something About Mexico

I’m Tracy. David and Leslie, are my siblings and Carolyn is our mother.  She is the woman who, in her sixties, announced to my very patient father that they were leaving their life in Houston's "Texas chic" Museum district neighborhood in order to move to Mexico where she was going to sell silver so gorgeous that said museums had been moved to acquire the stuff.  The fact that my parents have gotten cooler as they've gotten older makes me re-think what seventy looks like.   Kind of like Mexico made me rethink what home looks like despite the fact that I now have a very comfortable life of my own in Newport Beach, California.  If you know anything about Southern California, you have a pretty good picture of the extent to which my comfortable life is truly comfortable and if you don’t, take my word for it. Life. Comfortable. But something changed three days ago. 

I returned home from my first trip to Mexico’s interior and I find that I’m pining deeply for what I’m honest enough to say is a less comfortable life.  I feel like I did when I fell in love for the first time with an exotic boy from Appalachia during a summer adventure with friends. (and for the record, because my mother will read this, I was 17, utterly clueless and I was boy crazy.)   My husband probably feels like my mother did at the end of that summer when I wasn't as happy to see her at the airport as she would have liked.   I'm only being mildly dramatic when I say I feel bereft.

See, there’s something that Mexico does to you that borders on the transformative, and I am very much inclined to keep its secrets to myself because I don’t want you to know them..  If you do, you’ll move to Mexico and tell all your friends, which will in all likelihood turn places like San Miguel de Allende and Dolores Hidalgo into gated communities, a thing for which I’d have a hard time forgiving you.

  The internist I saw for all the years I lived in Austin, Texas once told me that geography wasn't a factor of happiness.  Meanwhile, three days later, I left the sparse shade and triple digit temperatures of Texas for Newport Beach’s cool Pacific breezes.     Let me tell you, geography is a factor in happiness, and Mexico makes me happy, a truth that would have made me spray the mouthful of Mailly Grand Cru I just drank all over my laptop in fits of hilarity just a month ago.  I got over the summer of 17 boy.  I can already tell you I won’t ever get over Mexico. Mexico and its people woke up a very big sun in my bones.

 That’s what I’m going to tell you about.   Come with me.  I’ve got to show you a few things you really need to see. Just don't tell your friends.

Tracy in Newport Beach