By E.G. Brady

My old friend “A” of Forcados fame, possibly the last of the great Canadian bullfighters, was telling me about a European industrial tycoon father-in-law he almost got saddled with, who would say (with a thick Czech accent) things like, “When you marry my daughter, you won’t be teaching English anymore, you’ll be working for me. My grandchildren must have everything they need.” I’m so lucky! Just to give you, indulgent reader, an idea of how fortunate I am in the father-in-law department, let me tell you the story of my first excursion with my then future suegro. His daughter and I were playing the dating game, and I was still at the trying-to-get-in-good-with-her-family stage. Slim, vigorous, not that much older than I am, he was always very nice to me in a casual, joking sort of way. Usually I’d see him in the back patio at his workbench making jewelry, and one day he suggested we go up together to las minas, the mines. His wife cried out in horror, “Oh, no, not las minas, it’s so dangerous, you can’t take him up there!” which only made us machos more determined that we should go, so we agreed to meet back at the house at 7 AM the next day. We remained adamant throughout breakfast, while la Sra hovered over us with coffee and advice and fresh tortillas, and my beloved remained abed in the back room, but as we approached the hillside bus stop he observed that the weather did not look favorable and maybe we should go into town instead. He showed me a jam jar full of water and fire opals, golden opals, even black opals from his hometown in Jalisco. They blazed iridescently in the morning sun. We hailed a passing bus and went to an upstairs restaurant in the Mercado, and spent the morning drinking Nescafe waiting for an opal buyer who never arrived. He mentioned that he was a card carrying member of the local