By one of those mysterious coincidences which keep life interesting and challenging, my dear mother-in-law was scheduled to fly to Minneapolis the very day that (for the first time in a decade) a full fledged hurricane assailed the fair shores of Sinaloa. Storm clouds had been brewing all week. You see, my wife and her sister in Minnesota, so close in age and temperament, have carried on a lifelong childish rivalry for their mother’s attention and affection, and the plot kept thickening as the day of departure approached. For one thing, their mama did not want to go, in fact dreaded the trip. She had already spent one of the coldest Januarys ever recorded up there helping care for a newborn, and swore she’d never go back, but the arrival of another baby obligated her to go. When I looked at her travel itinerary, I knew there would be trouble. It was a one-way ticket! A quick call to our handy Mazatlán consulate confirmed my anxieties: foreigners visiting the US by plane on a tourist visa should have a round trip ticket, or they may be turned back at the point of entry. “Would you please explain that to my suegra in Spanish?” The nice lady did so, which made it sound so much more convincing than if it had come from me. Well, the sister in Minnesota thought that we were inventing excuses to keep her mother down here, while my wife accused her of conniving to keep her mother up there indefinitely. One way ticket, indeed! Fortunately, I managed to buy a dirt cheap charter ticket back, thus earning lots of brownie points and making amends for some sins past, almost. There was harmony in the family again, and things were looking good. Sure, there was another hurricane on the rampage down by Acapulco, but they always veer west and head out past Baja. We awoke Saturday morning to the sound of the pounding rain and an eerie

howling. Three-dimensional sheets of water were coming down sideways and blowing right through the brick wall onto our bed. The howling emanated from the overtowering antennas atop our hill, whipping around in the gale, held erect by dozens of spidery cables. The angry clouds blotted out our view of the neighbors’ houses. It all kind of reminded me of springtime in Seattle. Takeoff was scheduled for early afternoon, and as the morning progressed, conditions worsened. The local TV station was off the air since dawn, the radio kept playing banda music, and the airline kept telling us to call back in an hour. Finally, I took it upon myself to declare the obvious: we couldn’t make the flight. A duck couldn’t have made it. The only way to get to the paved road from our remote neighborhood would have been to wrap up in plastic bags and slide for half a mile through a river of mud into the lake at the foot of the hill, then wade another half mile to the blacktop, and even then the highway was closed and how would we get back if we couldn’t go forward? My negative pronouncement led directly to a flurry of heated long distance calls. It seems that Minnesota was blessed with one of those lovely mid-western autumn days, which made it difficult to visualize the weather down here. Surely I was exaggerating to keep my mother-in-law close to me! If no taxis, buses or all-terrain vehicles could make it through, just call the airport and tell them to send transportation! Words cannot express my joy when, hours after the plane was supposed to have left but still hadn’t arrived, the airline upgraded the flight from “delayed” to “canceled,” not only saving me a hundred bucks in rescheduling fees but, most important, proving me right again. Happy epilogue: the following Saturday bloomed warm and sunny, and we all rode out to see La Abuelita ascend serenely off into the friendly skies. What a relief!