I was here all alone at my place in Mexicali, trying to write an essay, when Olga and her girls and their kids came over with a cake and a gallon of Ice Cream. They sang the Happy Birthday song in Spanish. This was a good thing to do since it was my birthday, July the first. I opened a bottle of Champaign and we had a happy moment.
The heat was getting the best of me. I am starting to feel it more than I used to, so I escaped. I went to Mexico City. It is over a mile high in elevation, definitely a lot cooler. I walked the streets of Tacubaya and wondered if my father and my grandfather walked these same streets when they were a boy.
When I wore out my welcome in Mexico D.F. I returned home, again by bus. Along the way we stopped in a small City north of Hermosillo to rest. I relaxed and bought a Coke! I was in the back of the depot near the bus, when the whole Universe exploded.
The Desert is famous for these unexpected things. A wind came up, very suddenly, it seemed like it was blowing about a hundred miles an hour. Through the years I have learned to expect and to accept these fierce and sudden things that happen in the Desert.
The wind caught the High Voltage wires in the back of the Depot. Everything was thrown into darkness, except for the huge flashes that the high voltage wires were making as they hit the ground in between the Busses.
The Screaming of the women and kids joined the weird sounds that the wires made when they hit the ground and flashed. Everyone started running in all directions in a panic. I stood leaning against a column drinking my Coke. This way nobody would run into me and knock me down.
The wind continued to blow, and then the rain started. The drops were huge, one drop was big enough to fill a cup. In no time at all everything was flooded. We boarded the bus and soon we were under way. A few minutes later we were out of town and on the highway.
I looked out of the window and the Desert looked white, I checked with my fellow passengers and they answered very casually that it was snowing out there.
I looked out of my side window again and it was snow! It was a hundred mile an hour blizzard. Snow in the Desert, in the middle of summer, in the middle of July!
Then I relaxed, stretched out and fell asleep
28 of July 1986
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