All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [81]
It’s good and bad, he says.
There’s money and there’s work, but what’s the point if you can’t live where you grew up, where it’s the most beautiful, lo más bonito. He sighs. “You get a little older, and everything always changes,” he says.
“Así es la vida,” I say. I’m considering turning back around, but it’s one in the morning and we’re nearly there.
“Así es.”
A little later, coming into view of the reservoir outside of town, the driver asks if I’ve been to San Miguel de Allende before, and I say I lived here for a while, as a child. I can tell that gives me a little credibility; I haven’t just read about the place in Sunset magazine and decided to come down to build a big dream house. “Fue muy mágico,” I tell him.
It had indeed been magical. In 1971, Mom got the idea to take us four daughters to Mexico for the summer. This was before her Outward Bound trip, but she was already on her adventure streak. She wanted us to see something of the world outside Littleton, a suburb where most dads worked for aerospace companies and almost everyone voted Republican.
But Mom could venture only so far outside Littleton. Since we weren’t going to move out of the suburbs—Dad, a pediatrician, had an established practice in town, and they both enjoyed the sprawling lawn and proximity to the mountains—she brought other cultures into our home. Or, as we kids saw it, she brought home strays. Every few months, new people would take up residence in the guest room: Navajo children, a Cuban family, Swiss exchange students, visiting Greeks. During the Vietnam War, she opened the door to several antiwar students who were participating in a program called “ATSIV,” which is “VISTA” spelled backward, in which instead of going into poor neighborhoods to work, postcollege kids went into wealthier homes to “raise the consciousness” of the suburbs and to have a nice free place to stay and meals to eat between demonstrations. June, my favorite of these ATSIV students, splashed around naked in a fountain in downtown Denver just to see what would happen (she got arrested, then eventually went on to drive a cab, join a cult, adopt a guru-bestowed name, and settle in a communal house in northern California with both her boyfriend and her ex-husband, practicing visualization and taking esoteric workshops in self-improvement).
My father wasn’t exactly thrilled with this parade of visitors, though he’d go along with the invasions cheerfully enough as long as he could occasionally shut the door to his den, light a pipe, and read in peace. Dad sometimes lost his affable composure when a hippie student crashed his motorcycle trying to put it in reverse or played Frank Zappa really loud when he came home from seeing wailing babies and fretting mothers all day long, and then he’d decide his consciousness had been raised quite enough. He was more interested in the foreign students than the political ones and eager to inflict his Spanish, French, or German on whomever was passing through. Now and then he went off to work on a reservation with the Native American public health services and is proud to say he’s the only white guy you’ll ever meet who can do a complete physical in Navajo.
When Mom brought up the idea of moving to Mexico for the summer, Dad was initially reluctant. It’s not as if you could trust the hippie students to mow the lawn in perfectly even stripes, the way he does. But as with most things—voting Democrat, getting a toy poodle, hosting radical prison activists for cocktails—he eventually went along with Mom’s idea. She’d heard about San Miguel de Allende from her friend Janet MacKenzie, another of the dozen Democrats in Littleton, whose artistic and worldly tastes far transcended the