Toward the end of my tenure as a Peace Corps volunteer I was making plans with my buddy Mike about where and for how long we were going to be traveling afterwards before we flew back stateside. I had some money saved up but it wasn’t much. Then one day, in the B box among my mail, was an envelope with the return address of my Uncle Jack. I had not heard from him in about a month or so. I sat down in the lounge to open what mail had arrived in the last month since I had been into town.

When I got to Jack’s letter, I tore it open with a smile on my face. Jack was a great writer of letters, I had been writing to him for years, and of all the people that I had been writing to from Africa, he, uniquely, could relate to the stories about Africa that I wrote in my letters home.

Jack, in his slightly younger days, had lived abroad. He had been a bookkeeper for a lumber harvesting company in Honduras for 15 years. I remembered his stories in his letters about watching the mountains around him near Tegucigalpa become denuded of trees. As time went on, the mountains which had been forested when he first took on the job, starting at the base, and moving upwards, were being completely cleared of trees, which were hauled down to the lumber mill where he worked, and sawed up into planks, and loaded onto boats, sold to wherever.

Eventually he quit the lumber mill, and had bought a small piece of property nearby which he named El Rancho Espiquindije. It was only a couple acres of land, but on it, he raised tomatoes, which he sold to the church and a wholesaler.

Later, as his years there mounted and he became more aware of the effects of his aging and the lack of decent medical care, he sold the rancho, and moved north to Oaxaca Mexico. About 6 years before my wife Jenny died, we flew down to Oaxaca to visit him.

We hopped on an Aeromexico plane and flew from Austin to San Antonio to Mexico city. Our flight was delayed in getting there, and we arrived at the Mexico City airport about an hour after the late flight that went to Oaxaca had left. I had been sleeping on the flight and woke up just as we were coming down into the valley where Mexico City is. I glanced out the plane window and sat up in alarm. We were diving right into a large brown lake. I gripped my arm rests and wondered if I would live through the crash into the water. Just as I thought we were going to crash, we lowered through the surface and I realized that it was smog over the city that filled the whole valley from rim to rim.

Landing at the airport, the Aeromexico customer service lady, whose English was only slightly better than my marginal remnants of two years of high school Spanish, eventually made us understand that they would put us up for the night in a hotel nearby, and we could catch the morning flight out to Oaxaca.

“Where is the motel?” I asked her.

“Right over there,” she replied, and pointed out of the window.

I looked out and saw the Holiday Inn in the near distance, maybe a quarter mile away. But between us and the hotel was a wide river of highways. More lanes of traffic than I had ever seen in one place. Going every which way and full of cars. But none of the highways that I could see actually went towards the hotel.

“Catch a taxi, show him this voucher, and he will take you right there,” the nice lady told us.

So, Jenny and I hoisted our luggage, and caught a taxi out front. The taxi took off, and we spent an hour going up one highway, then seemingly back the opposite direction on another highway until finally we pulled up under the porte cochere of the Holiday Inn. It was a harrowing journey, expertly handled by our taxi driver, with honking horns, and people cutting in and out of traffic the whole way.

We checked in, and were assigned a room, and the bellboy put our two suitcases on a cart and said “follow me.” We got on an elevator and went up to the third floor. He turned left and down a long hallway, and stopped at the end of the hall, the last door on the right. 

As I caught up, I realized that it was the end of the hallway because right after our room, the floor was missing. There had been an earthquake about a month before we got there, and part of the hotel had fallen down. The end of the hallway was an opening and it looked down on… well, rubble. The concrete floor and walls and ceiling were broken off jaggedly, and beyond our room there was nothing but open space and a huge pile of broken cement blocks and debris down there several floors below us. And no barrier for customers at all, not even a 2×4 across the end. The bellhop took us inside, and dropped our suitcases, and after I gave him a tip, he jokingly said with spanish and hand motions not to turn right if we got up and wandered around in the night. Haha. The… what was now “outer” wall of our room had several large cracks running across it, through which the breeze wafted in. Oh goody.

We got through the night without more of the hotel, and our room in particular, falling down and killing us. I had no way to let Jack know that we had missed our flight, and assumed he would have seen that we were not on last night’s flight, and would come to meet us in the morning.

The next morning we caught the flight south, and landed in Oaxaca. We wandered around the arrivals gate for an hour, but no Jack. I gave a taxi driver the address that I had for Uncle Jack, Apartado 62, Oaxaca Mexico, and he took off, eventually depositing us in a square by a huge church. There didn’t seem to be any houses or pensiones anywhere in sight, just city buildings and the church. I asked him if he was sure this was it, and he said “Si! Si! Para alla!” and pointed to a building. We went over and in the front door, lugging our suitcases. I immediately learned a new word in Spanish. “Apartado” means post office box, and there we were in the post office. Well, poop.

Jenny and I lugged our suitcases back outside, and sat on a bench in front of the church. “What should we do?” Jenny asked. “Hell if I know.” I answered. The solution to finding Uncle Jack seemed insoluble. Oaxaca was not a small city. But I had married a teacher, and she came up with the most sensible solution we could think of. She would sit with our suitcases, while I went and found a papelaria, an office supply store, and bought a piece of posterboard and a magic marker.

I came back with it and gave it to Jenny. I sat and tried to figure out what to put on it. I finally decided, in my very poor Spanish to write… “I am looking for my uncle, Jack Birchall. He lives near here, but I don’t know where. Do you know him? Can you help me find my uncle?” I wrote the Spanish words on the back of my boarding pass from the flight, and Jenny, in her extremely neat teacher writing, wrote it on the poster board with the marker. We leaned it up against our suitcases, and sat back to see if it would help find my uncle.

There were lots of people passing through the square, and many stopped to read our sign, and had discussions with each other in rapidfire unintelligible Spanish, and they shrugged and shook their heads no. We sat there for about three hours. Jenny got bored and walked over to the church and went inside. With her being a recovering Catholic, I figured she was going inside to pray that we find Jack, but later she told me that she just wandered through the magnificent church, in awe of the beauty.

As I was thinking about trying to find a hotel where we could park our suitcases, I looked across the square, and there came Uncle Jack walking to the post office to check for a letter that might tell him why we weren’t at the airport the previous night. I hollered at him, and he came over and laughed at the poster. Jenny came walking out of the church, and I introduced her to my uncle, and we walked back to his apartment, about 8 blocks away.

Jenny and Jack hit it off like kindred spirits and we spent a fun two weeks seeing Oaxaca, and Monte Alban ruins, and Mitla the City of the Dead, and Tule, the biggest tree in the world. I was running for exercise in those days, and every day I would wake up at dawn, put on my running shoes, and jog through the just waking up streets of the city, watching the guys who sweep the streets, and the young girls going to their jobs. I would end the run at a cafe on the zocalo, the city square, and drink coffee and eat pan tostada con mantequilla, toasted bolillos with butter, and wait for Jenny and Jack to wake up and wander down for breakfast.

Back in Swaziland years later, I ripped open Jack’s letter, and inside was a check for me to use as traveling money for my journey after Peace Corps. 

Jack, who now lived in Georgetown Texas, at a retirement community, was a computer guy. Though home computers were just now becoming more prevalent, he was on top of it all, with software programs on floppy discs and a color printer, and he had printed out the most professional check I had ever seen, including using an embossing machine for the dollar information on the check. It was a work of art. It was light green in color, and had all sorts of artsy checkish things around the border.

In Barclays bank, in Mbabane, where my direct deposit (also a brand new concept) paycheck came, cashing a personal check could take up to 3 weeks or a month to clear and be deposited in your account. I had 3 weeks before I was planning to leave on my post Peace Corps traveling, and I hoped it would clear before then, so I could get the money and close out my account.

I went up to the window with my fancy check, and presented it to the teller. He looked at it, then did a double take. He lifted his CLOSED sign into the window, motioned the people behind me to go to one of the other windows, and said, “Wait right here. I will be right back.” He took my check to a desk where a manager sat, and showed it to him. The manager looked at the check intently, evidently reading every word. He said something, and another manager came from the back room, and took the check, and looked it over carefully. He said something, and all of a sudden, it was like a vortex, sucking every other person working behind the counter to come over to pass the check around and exclaim about it. There was a clump of about 10 people looking at the check, and talking about it. All the other teller windows had come to a standstill, and people were looking through the glass to see what was going on, and muttering unhappily.

Finally, the back room manager initialed the check, and the teller brought it back to the window, took his CLOSED sign down, and smiled at me. “Do you want to cash this or deposit it?” he asked.

“Cash it,” I replied, “and I want to close my account out too.” My last paycheck had been deposited by Peace Corps, so I didn’t need the account any more. He cashed me out, and I walked away with my traveling money in my pocket. Even though it was actually a personal check on my uncle’s account, it looked so official that they cashed it without the waiting period.

It is how it looks that matters. 

Art matters