Breakfast in Africa, Dinner in Cancun

Breakfast in Africa, Dinner in Cancun    
      
     Our three-day trip to Nairobi on a flatbed truck takes us across Tanzania into the Serengeti grasslands. The hours pass as I watch people in the fields carry bundles of wheat on their shoulders. I watch the brown-skinned women carry their babies into thatched roof homes, to eat, sleep, and dream. As the day passes into dusk and I watch the dying red embers of the sun.  
     At the Kenyan border, the customs man boards our truck to look at our papers but our attire is the focus of his attention. “You two look good in those potato sacks,” the grinning man says.  
     “Burlap is the new silk where we come from,” I say with a smile.  
     Soon we pass onto a bridge. My wife sings Frère Jacques to our baby, a song a Peace Corps member taught her on the truck ride. I watch the concrete and steel collapse into contorted heaps. I see rice from the truck stream into the rushing waters in the chasm below. I spring out of the truck, into the air, and watch falling people, and pieces of concrete and steel, swirl around me. Then I hit the icy water and sink into its depths.  
     I rise and am walking out of a tropic sea onto the beach where I am greeted by Mariachi music coming from a daiquiri hut where a bartender named Julio offers me his frozen concoction. There my wife waits in a full-length sarong along with our son, all grown up and a Latin charmer in his Cuban suit like he’s waiting for a hot date. I lie with my woman in a hammock sipping my fruity drink. Africa to Mexico in the blink of an eye. The whole family got vacation leave from earth. Good karma is frequent flyer mileage for the afterlife.