Boing!

I left my apartment to greet Mexico, cloudless and cold, on this November morning. Near a corner taco stand, a disheveled man walked up to me, grabbed an empty Boing bottle from the establishment's stash of returnables and hurled it in the street.

"Va Mariana!," he yelled as the bottle splattered into glass shards, no doubt destined for neighborhood tires.




I continued undeterred but slightly alarmed. I am reminded of a decade old memory:

I was running the loop of my neighborhood on Lookout Mountain; I pushed through an epic hill to find a copperhead, the width of a grapefruit, sunbathing in the middle of my path. Now, any child of the Appalachian Mountains should be able to tell you that the fatter the snake, the older and, consequently, the more venomous. With few options and little reaction time, I acted as if nothing had changed. Just kept going.