Occasionally I have been asked by various people whether or not I believe in miracles. I usually say I believe in preposterously unlikely events. If pressed, I will sometimes say that there are phenomena that can’t be explained. Here is an example.

Picture this. A young man leaves the monastery at the age of 20. He has never dated, learned to dance, kissed a girl. He is as socially naïve and inexperienced as it is possible to be at that age in the 1950s American culture. And shy, painfully shy.

That summer he gets a job as a lifeguard. Talk about an experience an ex-monk dreams about. He is a lifeguard. Girls like lifeguards. He likes girls and is a lifeguard. End of story? Well, no…it turns out this young man looks like he’s around 13 years old and all the teeny-boppers love him. Girls his own age think he’s in Junior High. This does not enhance his experience with girls at all since he has a conscience and won’t mess around with little girlies. In any case, they still write him at college for over a year. Bummer.

So he goes to a little college a continent away. This school studies weird stuff. They don’t have text books. They go to the original sources. For math they go to Euclid and Ptolemy. They study ancient Greek and translate Euripides, Aristophanes and Herodotus. They read plays, history and philosophy from the Greeks who wrote them. This does not trouble the young man at all. He’s already had much of this material at a nice Catholic college when he was a monastic guy. He had taken five years of Latin. He was good at math. He already knew how to prove the Pythagorean Theorem.

There was this girl in all of his classes. ALL of his classes. She was pretty and smart, but she was clueless when it came to Herodotus and Euclid. Even though she was right out of high school, she knew the ropes when it came to the boy/girl business. One day she asked him if he would help her with her math. Another day she asked him if he would help her translate Herodotus. During one of their study sessions, she said she had to go get a coke. Two hours later he was still waiting. So while he walked back to his dorm, he saw her talking to a guy in a cozy alcove. She called the next day to apologize, but he was having none of it. Right. That night they were studying Ptolemy and Aristophanes again.

This turned out to be a regular thing. He was good at math and language, she was a good kisser. Each brought skills to the relationship. He fell in love and as hard as that is to believe, so did she.

A year passed. He stayed for the summer, got a job with a big electronics company called Westinghouse, became an “apprentice electrical engineer.” That is a code word for ‘gopher’. The girl went home, got a summer job, made some money and came back in the fall. They decided to get married. They had no money, so their friends helped out with food and decorations; it was a great wedding attended by friends from their former college and work. To save some money, they chose a date near Christmas so that the church would already be decorated. The minister’s wife played the organ, a gift since they couldn’t afford to hire musicians. Afterwards, the young man invited the entire entourage to their apartment to have a snack and a drink. Picture this: fifty people in the bride and groom’s tiny apartment with no bedroom a pullout couch. The bride apparently still loved him in spite of his excessive dumbness, but there was probably a lot of eyeball rolling.

Oh, yes. I forgot to mention that the wedding took place on December 21, the looooooongest night of the year. Good deal for the groom. Poor bride.

Fast forward. It is fifty-two years later. They are still married. They’ve lived in six countries, traveled around the world, had adventures and produced four children.

And they still love each other.

So what do you think? The very first girl the young, ex-monk dated turned out to be the love of his life. That has got to be more than luck, more than a preposterously unlikely event.

A Miracle? Maybe.

Valerie and I spent ten days in Belize. Daughter Leslie was going, but couldn’t due to surgery and an amoebic infection. Valerie’s little sister, Judy, whom I have known since she was in the third grade, went with us. And I should not forget our Scottish friend, Liz, who went with us last year to the Peruvian Andes. “If it isn’t Scottish, it’s Crrrrrrrrrap!!!” as the skit on SNL used to do.

To begin with, it will stretch credibility to know that the fastest way from central Mexico to Belize is to go from Guadalajara to “W” airport in Houston, two hours flight time north, then to Belize City, three hours south. All other options involve three changes of planes, overnight stay in some godforsaken place or expensive. Against my natural disinclination to have anything whatsoever to do with anything “W”, I booked the flight.

Arriving, we stayed in a hotel for a day, boated to an island, Caye Caulker, where young folk hang out. It would be great for a month of lolling, partying and sleeping. We were picked up the next day by Israel, a driver sometimes employed by MET, Mountain Equestrian Trails, our hosts for the week. The lodge is large, thatched roof, big bar, nice lounge area, no electricity, no TV. Ahhhhhhh! The huts we stayed in, also thatched, were large and comfortable. We lit kerosene lamps each night, there was a full moon while we were there. The proprietors were living off the land, next to a large Mennonite farm, a interesting and courageous young couple with three wonderful small children. Daniel, a friend helping out, is an artist and Chicano originally from East LA, moving to Belize to pursue his artist ambitions.

The next day another couple showed up, Bob, a retired paper factory owner in his seventies and his younger, fiftyish, bride, Cindy. Over cocktails, Bob expressed his belief that Valerie was intellectually challenged because she voted for Obama. As it turned out, all others both staff and trekkers including the Scottish one, were un-American too, being Obama fans. This provided a challenge to Bob and Cindy when it came to conversation. You are in pretty close quarters on a trek like this, so we decided to limit our discussions to non-political issues when talking to them.

Later, on a protracted horseback ride through the jungle, he sidled up to me and whispered like an old spy movie, lest my wife overhear his question. “Psssst,” he hissed in my bad ear, “What do you think of people who go overboard on the environmental issues?” I looked around furtively lest my wife be listening, and hissed back: “Not much. I think wackos on all sides are basically wacko. Like the Right Wing Nuts who insist on making gay marriages a constitutional issue and justify their position on some scriptural quote taken out of context.” I didn’t have many conversations with Bob the rest of our trip, try as I might to discuss off-shore drilling, torture and the supply-side economic principles involving the availability of cheap labor in Mexico.

We went to limestone caves, once inhabited by Mayans, caused by what was once an inland sea. Drawings on ceilings, caused by man or nature, who knows for sure, were everywhere. We swam in pools below lovely waterfalls, cool but refreshing. My horse, Mariposa (butterfly in Spanish), was impervious to any of my commands, verbal or otherwise. She did what the horse in front did. Most of the time that was walking or trotting but once or twice a real canter. This was a learning experience for me. I basically have no ass and it is difficult for me to get the rhythm the horse makes….so my posterior and the horse’s back are in direct conflict most of the time. I learned, though, so no further removal of substance from my backside occurred.

We went to three Mayan ruins, the most spectacular of which was Tikal in Guatemala. It was once a 35 square mile metropolis inhabited by around two million people. Our guide said that there seemed to be consensus on the ‘disappearance’ of Mayans. It seems they needed huge amounts of wood to bake the soft limestone that made up their temples. So over a period of a couple of hundred years they deforested their place of habitation, built amazing structures, some of them ten stories high. Eventually this caused a climate change: much less rain, drought, famine…so they moved on to repeat the process. Our guide, a young man named Luis, was a native of the region, spoke English, Spanish and Creole fluently, apparently knew a few bad words in Mayan too. He is going to the University of Texas as well as making a living as a guide. I asked him what he thought when he took people on tours here (he tended to be a little condescending in some of his explanations, perhaps justified by experience, I don’t know). He looked at me for a long moment and said slowly, “Immense pride.”

I confess I immediately thought of that night in Blessington, Ireland, July 21, 3:00 AM there, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I had been a part of the Apollo project….IBM had both the guidance computer on the Saturn V booster and the moon landing navigation computer. I thought President Kennedy was full of it when he announced a moon landing before the decade was out, but this stupendous feat was not only a miracle of technology for the time, but a miracle of cooperative management: hundreds of companies, dozens of countries, uncountable governmental agencies, underappreciated (by me) brilliance of the astronauts….I felt, like our guide, immense pride that morning. Just after the “One small step for a man, one giant stride for mankind” comment, the doors to the common room in that little hotel burst open and a handful of Irish well wishers came in with beer and Irish whiskey, slapping us on the back and congratulating us as if we had somehow done it too. Amazing.

On our last day, we went to a cave owned by a young man, Bol, who had bought several acres some years before. He had accidentally discovered the cave which was covered by a large boulder, while walking on a hill one evening. He found many artifacts, bones, pottery, drawings. I asked him the same question and he got misty eyed. “My ancestors lived here,” he said.

That afternoon and evening was spent with cocktails, exchanging views on our trip, the Mayan ruins, our horsemanship or lack thereof…except for a verbal assault by Bob and Cindy over dinner. We had avoided political issues since they seemed to have volatile reacts over any difference of opinion, even minor ones. But when the subject of travels came up, Valerie told a story about a time when someone asked a group what they most loved and what they most hated. Most, she said, mentioned people or places. Valerie said she had answered, “My passport….I love it because it allows me to travel and I hate it because the government decides where I can go and not go.” It was not meant to be a political statement, just an observation about our original passports when we lived in Europe. Bob stormed up from the table saying, “Oh, great, there’s an intelligent observation: everyone can go anyplace. The world would be in chaos!” He wouldn’t talk to us the rest of the evening and there was an embarrassing silence in the room at his overreaction. Cindy remained at the table to declare we were not only un-American since we live in Mexico but pagans as well since we didn’t openly profess Jesus as our personal savior. I was fed up and went to bed early. Bob had been so openly rude to Valerie, it was either that or knock him on his ass….which is normally not a reaction calculated to promote good feelings at the end of a week long adventure.

So it was back to Houston, then to Guadalajara, arriving at midnight. A good trip in spite of Bob and Cindy, not as spectacular as the one to the Andes and Machu Picchu in Peru last year, but good nevertheless. Judy and I have always been close and had a lot of fun together. Liz, the six foot Scottish lady (she definitely isn’t crrrrrrrrrrrapp!) talked non stop, splendid company. There were three children of the proprietors hanging around and we both had a lot of fun with them, precocious kids and home educated. I helped Katlin with her math, built Leggo structures with Logan and teased the 18 month Cyan unmercifully…she apparently liked it since she giggled all the time.

I presume Mariposa was indifferent to my absence, but you never know.