I was going to tell the story of our return trip to Rota chronologically. But since my objective in the return was to recapitulate my life at home – that would be: reading, writing and …well, watching baseball (at home) but staring blankly at the Atlantic Ocean (here) – such a simple (and boring) chronicle might lose what precious “audient” I might have join me in this space.

“Carol was up first as usual, and went about her morning doing whatever it is she does before I join her for coffee. (This generally means her having two cups of coffee, running the dishwasher, doing a laundry, going out for  groceries, shopping for souvenirs and deciphering  the cable remote before I would eventually rise to stumble into my day.)”

  So, I plan to jump around in both space and time to bring the very best stories, adventures and amusing anecdotes that we’ve either experienced or that I’ve more or less made up as if I were a MAGA presidential candidate. Here’s the first one.

  On our first night in Rota, I awoke from a troubled sleep to find a giant cockroach – not simply metaphorically speaking  either – scuttering to race me to the commode. My first thought was: don’t let Carol know about this. My second thought was (this was the middle of the night remember) Look, Franz, can we just declare a truce and you just disappear?

  File not found but happily our room number was.

I went back to bed thinking we had a deal (okay, he managed to dodge my slaps with a flop-flop like he was an Olympic water polo champion). Carol was up first as usual, and went about her morning doing whatever it is she does before I join her for coffee. (This generally means her having two cups of coffee, running the dishwasher, doing a laundry, going out for  groceries, shopping for souvenirs and deciphering  the cable remote before I would eventually rise to stumble into my day.)

  As I got up this day, however, Carol looked at me and shouted: “There’s a cockroach the size of Buick on your shoulder!” (The Buick reference might have come from a Woody Allen movie, come to think of it.) Now mind you, my frenzied jumping and slapping merely matched Carol’s a couple of nights earlier when she felt something fall on her head during the night. It was a cricket. She had shrieked, though. in a way that had me thinking then it had been something more like a buffalo that had dropped. I didn’t shriek that same way in my own clash with entomology, but that has nothing to do with viewing cockroaches in a more literary light.

 The room where it happened (entomologically speaking)

I tell this story to illustrate a truth I’ve learned in my years with Carol: you shouldn’t try to keep infestation a secret from her; the truth will out and it will just be worse. Once I had tried to conceal the ordinary fact that there’d been a mouse in our room in a New Orleans hotel. (In that city, the mice usually work the night desk, while the roaches serve as bellhops.) Later, flying home, she noticed one  skittering across our terminal gate. I couldn’t hold it in, and admitted to the previous night`s visitor. She made me promise never to lie about anything like that again. That inevitably led to me emptying out a local Home Depot inventory of mouse traps the evening I copped to a mouse having scurried out from under our living room couch.

  Rota welcomes us back.

So, it’s no surprise that here in Rota a cockroach would perch itself like a f@#$*&g bluebird on my shoulder the very moment Carol happened to walk into the room.

  Now that’s what I call a Kafkaesque moment.