Page 6 - Panama Review

IT AIN’T OVER TIL THE FAT LADY SINGS (But She’s Warming Up)”
By this time, my wife is filled with overwhelming grief. I comforted her as best I could by letting her know it was not her fault. This was something we both missed and were unaware of. However, in my mind, I was thinking, “Hey, I’m a U.S. citizen, my passport works just fine. I should go without her.” Then I suddenly became afraid. Not because of what I said, rather it was as though she was reading my mind. She looked at me all grimly and said, “You should go without me.” It was as though she was reading my mind. Oh no! I exclaimed to her. I would NEVER leave you behind. In my mind what I was really saying was, “Oh hell no, I’m not falling for the banana in the tailpipe trick.” I would never live that one down from her after she sobered up from this devastation. I would never hear the end of it. I suggested that we just go home and regroup. After all, we still have at least two weeks of vacation to use. She emphatically replied, “No! We are going to book a hotel here and figure something out, we are not going home.” One thing 35 years of marriage has taught me, if mama isn’t happy, then nobody is happy. And Mama was not happy.
Hours after one of the most disappointing events in our life had taken place, we are sitting in the bar area of the Los Angeles Hyatt Airport. We checked into our room, my wife once again felt overwhelmed by the visa situation and I comforted her with a hug and the reassurance that we would figure this out. It was shortly after my second or third or fourth drink that the electricity throughout the entire hotel went out. Could it get any worse at this point? Don't answer that, of course it could and it did. Let’s just blame it on the al-al-al-al-al-alcohol. That’s all you need to know. The fat lady started to hum the song made famous by Johnny Mathis and Denise Williams, “Too Much, Too Little, To Late (It’s over).”
The next morning we wake up, she on her iPad and me on my iPad, feverishly looking on vacations sites for places to go. The back-and-forth conversation went something like this, “How about a cruise? No! How about San Diego? No! Just there last month. How about the UK? No! Probably need that damn Schengen Visa there too. What about Panama? Hmm, that might work. I looked up the Panamanian Consulate on my iPad and called the Panama consulate in Houston, Texas to see if there were any visa restrictions. I called the office in Houston because that was the only number I could get through to. I discovered, with much consternation due to the previous days events and through the broken English of the telephone representative from the Panamanian Consulate, that there were no restrictions. I gave my wife the thumbs as I profusely thanked the representative on the phone and my wife gave me that universal finger that told me I am number one for making a bad situation worse with my actions from the night before. So my wife, with the mastery of an outbound call center
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