When we last left off, a tall cool woman in a black dress was walking down the street while my friends were saying, “¡Buenas nalgas!”

If you've ever experienced "melancholy", it happened to me on the last day in Mexico. Classes ended on the last day of July 1976. August 1st fell on a Friday. Everybody had to pack up and go home. There was not a dry eye anywhere. Some of the kids were on a chartered bus taking them back to Chicago, and they left right after lunch. Since I was driving on my own, I hung around until after supper. I was very homesick, but didn't want to go back to my humdrum job in Oklahoma.

Well, like an idiot, I dressed in my good dress slacks and a dress shirt, got everything loaded, and left Monterrey about 7 pm. I got to the border in Laredo about midnight. So there I was, a college kid, in a red sports car, crossing the border at midnight on a Friday night. I don't smoke, but apparently the border guards thought I did. They searched every nook and cranny of the MGB but didn't find anything (which would have been a surprise to me!).

After they released me from customs, I got back on I-35 and drove north until about 3 am and pulled over in a rest area and slept in the seats, with the tonneau cover zipped over my head. The next morning I drove straight through to Oklahoma and got back home about 4 pm.

What really made it melancholy was that Al Stewart had just released the song "The Year of the Cat". It’s actually about an oriental adventure, but I had just been living those words and there it was on the radio.

"On a morning from a Bogart movie,
In a country where they turned back time,
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.
She comes out of the sun, in a silk dress running like a water color in the rain,
Don't bother asking for explanations, she'll just tell you that she came,
In the Year of the Cat."

I had just spent 5 weeks living those words. Well, except for the part about the beautiful mysterious lady. Every time I turned on the radio, it was that same song with those melancholy words.

"She doesn't give you time for questions,
As she locks up your arms in hers.
And you follow till your sense of which direction completely disappears.
By the blue tiled walls in the market stalls there's a hidden door she leads you to,
These days, she says, I feel my life just like a river running through the Year of the Cat."

It felt so good to be back home, to see my dad, and my friends, and even my wicked stepmother. I had learned about La Borboletta, la flor de canela, and The Promise of a Fisherman. But that melancholy persisted.

"She looks at you so coolly,
And her eyes shine, like the moon in the sea,
She comes in incense, and patchouli,
So you take her, to find what's waiting inside,
The Year of the Cat"

A few of the students had been offered jobs to stay in Mexico and teach classes in English. I could have done that. But no, I had to drive my MGB back to Oklahoma and find a job as a Spanish teacher. And again on the radio, those same melancholy words:

"Well morning comes and you're still with her
And the bus and the tourists are gone
And you've thrown away your choice and lost your ticket
So you have to stay on.
But the drum beat strains of the night remain and the rhythm of the new born day,
You know sometime you're bound to leave her,
But for now you're going to stay,
In the Year of the Cat."

Since I missed the job market while in Mexico, I had to stay on at my humdrum job in Oklahoma. The next Spring I married my future wife (now divorced) and started my career as a foreign language teacher a year later in a little town west of Kansas City. I taught my ex-wife how to drive in the MGB. We made 3 or 4 trips to Cleveland and had a few other adventures in the MGB. But after a few years it needed a valve job, and we ended up trading it off on a Toyota. Melancholy.