Don’t Know When I’ll Be Back Again: Moving to Mexico

[We’re recounting the difficulty of obtaining legal long term residency in Mexico. You can see the whole saga here, in reverse order]

John Denver, just like Jimmy Buffett, had one good song in him. Unfortunately, their entire careers happened after that one good song. It’s the way of the (music) world.

At any rate, our bags were packed, and we were ready to go. A hard deadline concentrates the mind. Plane takes off on a certain date at a certain time. No backsies. No refunds, no exchanges. Be there or be square.

We stuffed each of our four suitcases with 49.5 pounds of our old life, and set off on for a new one. We’d been up since 2 AM the night before the night before, and we never did go to sleep on Hejira Eve. We left for the airport at around midnight, to catch a 7:00 AM flight. Yeah, traveling is like that now.

Go ahead laugh at me. Of course, we were driving to Logan Airport in Boston. I had no idea exactly what would befall us there, but in my experience, Boston is the epicenter of befalling shit, including the occasional tunnel ceiling slab. My friends here in Mexico chide me for looking both ways before I cross a one-way street. They’ve never been to Boston. I don’t mention that I also look up after looking left and right.

Go ahead, laugh at us. There was a bomb scare at the airport that overnight. The Gropers weren’t on strike exactly, but they were still unpaid at that point, and none too happy. The lines were prodigious, even at 4 AM. It wasn’t debilitating enough, so they made us take the cat out of the bag.

I can’t believe we actually let the cat out of the bag. I’ve heard that expression umpteen zillion times. I’ve uttered it septillion more times. But until then, I was never asked in earnest to let the cat out of the bag. In an airport TSA line, with a thousand onlookers, a bunch of dogs present, machines beeping, lights flashing, a cover version of Leaving on a Jet Plane by the Fifth Dimension playing on the muzak, between microphonic excoriations to stop leaving our pistols in our carry-on bags.

The cat was freaked out already, of course. She’s quietly crouched in 1/10th the total volume of the tiny bag she’s in, shuddering, drinking nerve tonic and chain smoking. But they want us to double down, and let the cat out of the bag.

My wife, who is shy  and polite, but quite brave, volunteered to take one for our team. I was busy explaining all the various tech equipment in my carry-on to an agent who didn’t know what a computer was. So my wife let the cat out of the bag, and held onto it for dear life. It went spastic, but somehow she held on to it.

They weren’t interested in the cat all that much. They just looked around the bag to see if it was stuffed with Claymore mines or cocaine or something worth stealing. Then they let my wife put the cat back in the bag. They proceeded to wipe down my wife with cloths to make sure she didn’t have an explosive residue on her. You know, from our cat, Patty Osama bin FARC Red Brigade Hearst. My wife asked if all the blood on her hands, arms, and chest would interfere with their ministrations. They said no, so we were passed on to the plane, in search of peanuts, Sprite, and band-aids.

Go ahead, laugh at us. We got to Miami, the only stop before heading over to the Yucatan, and got on the next plane. A woman’s voice came over the intercom. This the captain speaking…

Please insert hidebound, bigoted comments here, about wishing you heard some form of Top Gun voice from the cockpit. I don’t have the strength. But I will admit my wife and I rolled our eyes reflexively at the same time. And we weren’t disappointed. By that, I mean we were disappointed. The plane backed up ten feet, and shuddered to a halt. Then we were treated to two solid hours of staring out the window at the same patch of pavement, while the pilotess chimed in every few minutes with announcements like: it’ll just be a few minutes, minor technical problem, teams are on the way to diagnose, just a few more minutes…

Many of the passengers grew restive. I was sanguine, mostly because I was getting a lower back massage for two hours from the little girls sitting behind me, kicking the seat non-stop. Very invigorating. They perhaps sensed that I hadn’t slept in 36 hours, and wanted to help me stay awake.

After two hours of this, another voice came over the intercom. Unlike the last 22 announcements, It was pitched in the Barry White register, and sounded like Clint Eastwood. This is the captain speaking…

So they’d found someone who knew where reverse was on a 737, and plugged him in. Hallelujah. Five minutes later, the plane took off, and nothing could stop us but antiaircraft fire, and I hear Cuba is fresh out of that, among other things. When we landed in Merida, we filed out of the plane, took that familiar left turn at the cockpit door, and almost felt sorry for the female pilot, now sitting in the right-hand seat, looking sheepish.

Almost.

[To be continued. Many thanks for reading, commenting and hitting our Ko-Fi tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]