From the Editor’s Desk: All’s Well That Ends Well ⭐️

Thanks to a series of problems, we're limping into the final days of this stay in Mexico City. In my case, literally: I somehow managed to screw my knee up in the weeks before we got here--I suspect a torn tendon or ligament, but will find out for sure when we get home--and that's hobbled me a bit. We still walk everywhere, but I have to wear a brace and my knee seems to give out randomly.

I wish it were just that. But this has been a weird stay. And a weird year, really.
Car trouble
In some ways, these issues date back to late 2025 and our final trip to Mexico City from mid-September through mid-November. It's bad enough when your family and friends are all over--our daughter Kelly lives in Charlotte, our son Mark is in Rochester, and we have friends and family back in the Boston area--but being in another country, even one as geographically convenient as Mexico, can make the separation worse. One of my worries is being away from the States when something bad happens, triggering an emergency return or whatever.

We've mostly, but not quite, escaped that, at least so far. That's just luck: Like some Final Destination movie, life, or fate, or per the movie, death, is trying to tell us we're living on borrowed time. It's not clear to me how long this can last. Actually, it's clear it can't last.

We've had issues in the past along these lines. Last summer, we had to fly home a month early when our daughter unexpectedly graduated from college and the school inexplicably decided to hold an August graduation ceremony for the first time in its history.

But we've had more instances when something bad happened and there was just nothing we could do, or when it just didn't work out that we had to go home suddenly, like when our dog passed away while we were in Mexico a few years back. After that happened, Kelly took our cats, which was good for her and for the cats, but also for us, since that's what's allowed us to spend more time in Mexico and split our time more evenly between the two places. But when one of those two cats suddenly got quite ill and then passed away last year, sending Kelly into a tailspin, that was partially offset by our son offering to FaceTime with her from the vet so she wouldn't be alone.

That triggered some good parental guilt, of course, but it didn't make sense to fly home because an old cat passed away in a different state. But then Kelly totaled her car because of course she did, and she had to find a replacement. I figured this would surely trigger an unscheduled flight back to the States, with Stephanie heading to Charlotte to help our daughter with this horrible process. But it ended up working out somehow, and Steph was able to help her remotely. Kelly managed to purchase a new (to her) car and it seems like a good choice.

Bullet dodged, we finished our time in Mexico in 2025 with little more in the way of drama. But once we got home, in mid-November, it got busy.
More car trouble
Kelly and...