The long wooden table, the soft velvety voice lulling us to pick up our pens and travel to the untold images of our senses. Gold winged birds perched up top evergreen-looking trees, construction saws grinding, the ocean framing the horizon. We reach for our buried words, and allow new images to prompt our thoughts and feelings, no bills to pay, no mail to sort, no goals to fulfill.

Oh Mexico, how you beckon us to a yesteryear as we try to go back in time, you try to move ahead, and we dance in the middle as we meet, both trying to be like the other. Why do we need to travel to uncover our dreams, to hear the music that moves our souls and turns back the clock or stops it just long enough to peer into the looking glass of how we might live?

Vibrant colors, foot massages on the beach, people selling, constantly at you, but only to make a living not a profit. Like in a jungle, there is order to the wild sights of the city they call Puerto Vallarta. The most important symbol, the smile, a universal language understood by all. I will remember to use it more.

Great food concoctions like the Michelada, a large cup filled with beer, tomato juice, topped with grilled shrimp, a large slab of jicama, corns nuts, ribbons of carrot and hot sauce and a straw. Construction workers line up for this meal, only 4 pesos, after a day of construction using pulleys, not cranes, to haul heavy objects up tall buildings, defying gravity and all odds of success.

Without understanding the language, we absorb it all, not with our heads but from our hearts, the parrot squawking, the lone folk flute, its melody wafting into our day dreams, the constant white noise of drilling and sawing of a paradise being expanded, serving as reminders of a different place, a special place that I would like to bring home with me but will need to leave behind. From Cuban liquor and hot salsa dancers, to gay bars throbbing with a disco beat, female impersonators singing, “We shall survive,” both serving to connect the arteries to all of our hearts.

I do not want to forget. I wear a turquoise ring like a child with her favorite toy to bring me back to the joy, the possibility of what can happen when future worries slip away and present tense envelopes the senses. They are always near, these memories, to be called upon each day as we arise, a break from the pain, which is necessarily a part of it all. Vacations, time stops, we are present tense and in the moment, all is okay. I will remember, I will remember …