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Mary Staub
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She drove all the way down with a Greyhound bus from New York City to México, D. F. How long does it take? 100 hours? 100 years? 100 years of solitude. We met in Puebla, Volkswagen city, near the Popocatépetl. We had dinner with guys from Quebec, and couldn’t guess a word they were saying. We continued the journey together South. Always South. Mary was doing the Spanish talking, I was doing the Mexican nodding. We bought papaya, and mango, every single day. And Mary was eating peanuts anywhere we went. Maybe she was doing a Hänsel and Gretel trail to find the way back to New York. We went into the jungle in Palenque where I shot a picture from the same angle my grandfather did, maybe in the 1960s. We continued to the Cataratas de Agua Azul. And there we got robbed. Two guys jumped out of the jungle. They had a rifle and a machete. We got robbed, is actually not accurate. I got robbed (they took my camera with the picture from Palenque and they intended to take my shoes: not the right size). Mary is this kind of person who just doesn’t get robbed. She merely gave them five dollars out of mercy (Mary full of Grace), like a tribute for the fact that we crossed the holy land of their ancestors. Then we ran. South. All South. Yes, we ran very fast. Heart beat of 220. We continued. South. Chiapas. San Cristóbal de las Casas where Mary wanted to stay in the Casa Na Bolom, doing research on lost languages or something else. However, we continued to Oaxaca. We played basketball on 3000 meters. We did handstands on the basketball field on 3000 meters (we once tried to walk down the Freie Strasse in Basel, handstand wise. Guess who succeeded). Then we went to see the Silent Ocean. Mazunte. We separated. Mary stayed, I don’t know for how long. 100 hours? 100 days? While I drove up to Acapulco, imagining a life as a cliff diver. We met 100 years later again under the Brooklyn bridge.

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Mary Staub