For a second straight day chemo has backed off and every little thing outside my bedroom window blazes with joy: a mother and small child crossing the street hand in hand, the scrape of a neighbor's snow shovel clearing the walk to his door, the arrival of a UPS truck and the thump of a delivery on the porch, each moment as fresh as the first day of creation, as full of promise as a second chance. 

This sense of wonder must be one of the greatest gifts a respite from sickness can bring. I experienced it once before. During my first few weeks of recovery from heart surgery, I remember, the glow of every instant seemed to stop time; I felt that, for a while at least, I had the power to look with clairvoyance at the whole course of my life. Most of all, I wanted to see Mexico again.

My brother Jim got in touch with two of our childhood friends from Cuernavaca, Kathy, who, when we left Mexico for New Hampshire in the summer of 1956, sailed with her Hungarian parents to East Berlin, and Tobianne, who stayed behind, married and moved to Mexico City. As soon as I felt well enough to travel, we agreed to meet again in Cuernavaca, for the first time in fifty years.

Tobianne rented two cabanas for us at a hotel within walking distance of the center of town and for a week we visited each others' old schools, looked for each others' childhood homes, visited our parents' old haunts and cafés, and reminisced over long sunlit lunches and star-filled evening strolls.

As a child I'd never needed a siesta; as a sixty-year-old man recovering from surgery, though, I'd rest for an hour every afternoon under the watchful eye of my doctor brother. For almost the first time since childhood, we were spending whole days together again, sitting on a veranda for breakfasts of fresh fruit, pan dulce and scrambled eggs, standing side by side in the bathroom mirror, brushing our teeth and taking turns to spit into a sink with faucets marked "c" for "hot" and "f" for "cold," sharing the same bedroom and talking ourselves to sleep every night.

These new Mexicans had grown tall and lean, free of the poverty and hard labor that bent the backs and thickened the bones of their parents and grandparents. Prosperity had brought them the means to buy cars, dress like Americans, push fancy baby-strollers, and grow old. In some ways, though, Mexico hadn't changed. If I paid attention, I could still feel the surge of magic that had been the deepest part of that country for me, its power to fill each day with transformations.

Then, as now, in a single step, you could pass from scorching sun to shade, from the safety of a sidewalk to a sudden death by reckless drivers, from an arbor full of butterflies emerging from their cocoons to a field buzzing with wasps draining fat caterpillars to husks. In the span of an hour a rainstorm could burst out of nowhere, flood the streets, wash the sky and disappear; within a short walk of town you could still find trails where shards of obsidian from ancient Aztec blades leapt up from their hollow hiding places in the dirt. And, in the most surprising revelation of all, as Jim and Kathy and Tobianne and I reminisced and compared notes, our memories uncovered a richer, more complicated past than I had ever known.

As boys, Jim and I had been shaped by the myth of machismo, the unrelenting pressure on every male to show contempt for fear and suffering, to live hard and die young as a man of action, a lover of women, a father to many, a drinker of oceans of alcohol, a creature of excess, trusting in the moral superiority of one moment's drunken act of vengeance over a lifetime of good deeds. As girls, though, Tobianne and Kathy remembered a more loving Mexico. From a childhood of coddling and compliments to an adulthood of holy motherhood, they lived in a land where, regardless of their often awful treatment as individuals, women were fawned upon as emblems of perfection. No man ever spoke of a woman he had wronged with pride, only with regret. No man ever spurned by a woman vowed revenge, only a quick death to end his grief.

The animosity I felt from my own countrymen in the States had also been only part of the story. As Kathy and Tobianne remembered it, my father's stand against the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was an inspiration and an act of courage to the expatriate left-wing community of Cuernavaca. Our family, far from wearing the stench of treason, had been looked upon as royalty. I felt another burden lessen, too, that I had carried quietly inside me from my childhood in Cuernavaca. As the youngest in the group, I had chased after Jim, Tobianne and Kathy as unattainable explorers three years ahead of me in life. As we opened our hearts during that reunion, I learned how much I was in their thoughts too, and could feel a real companionship at last.

On the last night of our reunion we shared a meal outside Jim's and my cabana and talked under the stars. We joked that a common legacy of our lives as émigrés was the difficulty of making commitments, or following a schedule, or making promises we weren't certain we could keep, or saying a simple goodbye. Still, without setting a firm date, we agreed we'd try to see each other again and keep our past alive.

Fifty years before, on an equally starry night, I remember saying my first goodbye to Mexico. The following morning my Aunt Janet and I would board a plane in Mexico City on the first leg of our trip to my grandfather's house. Unable to afford plane tickets for everyone, my father had made plans to drive my mother, Jim, and Mimi our poodle back to America in the family car.

I felt a thrill that night that I was finally leaving the rough ride of Mexico behind. And a deep sense of loss. Mexico had never offered me a resting place but I had loved it deeply. In return, it had taught me to see the world with passion, given me a second language to speak and dream in, made me fight for what I had, and, after stretching and breaking it open, handed me back my heart.

Why did it take so much effort, or the long grind of an illness, to catch these moments of grace? It made me think of the meaning of remission. Remission was the whole purpose of chemo, to push the illness back. But chemo, like any struggle for survival, was sending me back, to find some healing and strength I had never known were there. It struck me as odd, but there was another word hidden in the middle of "chemotherapy" I hadn't noticed, though I must have written it in the past week a hundred times or more. It was "mother."

Ravine of the Salto de San Anton, photo by Thelmadatter,

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