Morgan writes:

Ok, I don’t speak the lingo and it is embarrassing. Was never good with languages and know many musicians for whom it is difficult. Why is that? But it is a beautiful language and not as difficult as some to learn. If I come back,  I’ll give it a go. Just did half of my walk for the day, one hour +. Down to the school with Patty and on to The Instituto and then to Juarez Park and up the hill to our casita. The park is very beautiful with all sorts of plants. On the way there one can eat at a Texan’s barbecue joint. No thanks. 

 

On the weekends the town becomes crowed with visitors from Mexico City and many other places. Very festive with bands in the park. By the way, Doc Severson of the Tonight show back in the, “Here comes Johnny” (Carson) days lives here and we’re told that he has a wonderful group comprised of trumpet, violin and guitar. We hope to hear them. 

 

The Mexican people here are warm, kind, gentle, forever ready to return a big open smile and beautiful. And yes, they are slow. Very  civilized like some other cultures like the French for example. Their priorities include an enjoyable life and not part of the “rat race” of cultures like their friends north of the border for example. Of course there are exceptions. Mexico is a beautiful country. I have traveled a good deal of it starting back when I was in college and traveling with bands to El Paso and crossing the border to get cheap brandy, etc. Border towns, as we know, do not represent the country well. My first trip into the interior of this magnificent country was with my first esposa, Jane, together with Jim and Sherry Lewis over forty years ago. We drove the Lewis car and   it was a fabulous trip. We traveled from Brownsville, TX through many beautiful villages and cities all the way to Manzanillo, when it was still a small fishing village on the Pacific coast. We spent about two weeks in Mexico and spent maybe two hundred dollars a couple. A couple of years later Jane and I came with Don and Nik Owens. It was then that we discovered the beautiful city of Guanajuato, high in  the mountains about 40 miles west of San Miguel. It was a crazy drunken trip and also most wonderful. Jane and I took our beautiful young daughters to Monterry sometime after that. On the two prior trips, my mother and father kept the girls in Graham, Texas. I did stop here on the way to Mexico City in the late 70’s when Lucinda and I took a train from Laredo, stopping here in San Miguel for the night. There were no hotel  rooms so we shacked up with some college kids in one big room. It was Christmas time. There hasn’t been train service to here for 20 or more years. We spent new year’s eve in an Italian Restaurant in Mexico City, then flew to Oaxaca, another of my favorite cities in Mexico and from there to Merida and drove to Cancun and took a ferry to Isla Mujeres.

 

Patty and I traveled  in my father’s old Dodge from Dallas to Laredo to Saltillo in 1982/83 where we were but a fraction away from being slammed into by an oncoming semi truck as the old Dodge slid on wet pavement past an alto sign onto the bypass. Our lives were spared and at about the same moment my father went into a coma in a Graham, Texas hospital. He died on January 1st while we were in San Blas, a Pacific fishing town. Later in the 80’s P and I went to Cozumel, wonderful island, and some time after that to Cabo San Lucas, which we did not care for – both during Christmas vacation times.

After all the trips to Europe over the many years, Mexico is still the dearest to me.