From 2006 - Mexico 04

Could not resist these angles. Often in Mexico homes are built around a courtyard, with nuclear and extended family members in each one. This cage was affixed to the inside wall of such a compound in Matamoros, Coahuila.

As stated in an earlier posting, the Mexican people are a great people, and it's too bad things are getting out of hand down there. I was going to visit my old home in Charcos (a 14 km drive from Allende, Coahuila) to celebrate the 30th anniversary of my first summer there, but cannot - especially with a family to consider back here in the States. So reluctantly all travel down there is put on hold for now.

But that summer of 1980 was one of the best in my life, a pivotal time that steered me in a direction I've never regretted.

It actually started in the summer of 1978. I'd just finished my first year of college at SFA, and needed to make money to finance the following year. My brother was a lawyer up in Amarillo, fresh out of UT law school, and knew of a place where the hiring was easy with a respectable hourly wage. It was called IBP - Iowa Beef Processors, the largest slaughterhouse in the world.

So I headed up there as soon as the spring semester was over. I didn't own a car at the time, so packed a suitcase plus a box or two and boarded a Greyhound bus...my brother had moved out of Amarillo in the meantime to work here in Houston, but left one of his cars for me to buy (a Rambler American, $150) and made arrangements for a place to stay (a plumbing shop, $90 per month including utilities). Thus, at age 19 I was headed into a town I'd never even visited before, where I knew not a soul, to take a job on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse and live in a corner of a plumbing shop. It was exciting.

After my first day at the slaughterhouse I was in the locker room getting ready to go home, and didn't know where to take my work clothes to be washed for the next day. There was a Mexican fellow about four lockers down from me that looked approachable, so I asked him where they needed to be deposited. It became immediately obvious that he didn't know any English, but I'd taken a couple of years of Spanish in high school and we communicated well enough to get me on my way.

Little did I know that meeting Ramón García would forever change my life, and lead me to what would become my chosen career path as well as a greater spiritual security to this day. The angels were with me that summer of 1978.