It was 1983 or maybe 84. Susan and I had decided to take a brief escape from our medical work responsibilities to visit Mexico City. We had friends in Austin who had grown up there and knew all the things that we should see. We bought a package that included tours of the sites of interest including its archeological wonders. We set off one weekend and landed in Mexico’s capital.
Our tour booked us at the Maria Isabel hotel. It was ample and very modern. Down the street, the majestic statue of “The Angel of Independence” towered over the street. It had actually just been restored after the 1982 earthquake had toppled it.
On the morning that we were to visit Teotihuacan with our tour group, we overslept. That kind of thing is usually (almost always) my fault. We got up for breakfast only to realize that the bus had left us behind. Fock!
Susan suggested that we see the concierge. Shit, I didn’t even know what a concierge was! We walked up to a podium where a handsome fellow asked how he might help us. We explained that our tour to Teotihuacan had left without us because we had been late to awaken this morning. He smiled and told us that there were two other tourists in the same predicament. He asked whether we would be willing to share a car to the site. We agreed.
Our fellow tourists were a fellow about our age and his tween daughter. They were both very personable. Our tour guide arrived in what was a worn 70’s-model land-yacht – maybe a Plymouth or an old Cadillac. It was long ago, and I do not recall that level of detail. He drove us to the site, and then proceeded to give us a tour of the archeological marvel. He was a fountain of archeological history. He helped us to understand the Codices, and he walked us up this pyramid and that. It was a delightful trip that would only have been diminished had we been just another couple of “Muppets” in a tour group.
After quite the lengthy visit at the site, we went to the site’s restaurant where we invited our driver and tour guide for a meal. It was the least that we could do for a fellow who had rescued us from what might otherwise been a failure of a vacation day.
The remainder of our visit, we ignored the tour group, for the most part. The one day that we went out with the group we realized that they were not the people with whom we would choose to tour – especially a pair of ladies from Spain who spent most of the time bitching about how “this cathedral had nothing over the cathedrals in the homeland,” and similar stupid nonsense. Thank God, we didn’t have to spend more time with those morons!
I find myself contemplating the concierge this evening after I have watched John Wick 3 – Parabellum yet again. I wanted to watch it a few nights ago, but it was not available on HBO Max, Amazon Prime or Netflix. I hate it when that happens. I love the last part of the movie where Vivaldi’s Winter is played against a montage of violence. Susan ordered the entire John Wick movie archive for me without saying a word. The Blue Ray arrived yesterday. I played it last night, and I revisited the last part tonight.
The Concierge in this story is a fellow whose name is Charon. You will, most likely, remember that the mythological Charon was the ferryman who took the deceased across the River Styx from this world to the next.
I think that the Concierge is due our appreciation and respect. Whether he is helping us rescue what would otherwise be a failed vacation or ferrying us from this world to the other, the Concierge merits our appreciation.