Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals Read Online Free PDF Page B

heart-to-heart interrogation.
    â€œAll this CIA stuff that everyone is talking about. Maggie, I just know it has to be true.”
    â€œCathie, you really can’t tell anyone. This is serious.”
    â€œOh, I won’t. I promise.”
    â€œBesides, my job—it’s nothing that important. I just take down messages.”
    â€œOh my gosh!” my mother screamed.
“You
are an agent?”
    â€œYou said you knew,” poor Maggie said aghast, realizing she had just entrusted one of the nation’s secrets to a woman who would from then on refer to her as “my best friend, the CIA agent.”
    Of course the magic word was “ambassador,” and any time the word got brought up my mother was quick to remind us that she had been invited to the American ambassador’s house on not one, but two, occasions. And although she had never met the man personally, she had had tea with his wife. My mother had turned into a Third World socialite.
    While she was off eating finger sandwiches and teacakes, my brother had painstakingly downloaded
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
on a disturbingly slow Central American Internet connection and had set about to turning himself into an anarchist chef—which actually did have its bright side. Because my mother refused to buy the ingredients he needed for his experiments, he had been forced to learn Spanish on his own and when it came to chemicals and fireworks, he had become quite fluent. Now he was able to complain about his life in two languages: “Honduras is a pit. When are we going to move to a country where I can actually get a DSL line?” he would gripe, in between blowing up small portions of the country.
    Meanwhile, my father had been busy with a project of his own. “Jalapeño chili peppers,” my mother explained. “Your father has become a jalapeño-chili-pepper farmer in Honduras.”
    Most people, upon hearing such news, would have reacted with some surprise. I, however, did not come from a typical family. “Again?” I asked.
    My mother rolled her eyes. “Again,” she said.
    My father had tried farming once before. For years as a mining engineer, he had felt something was missing from his life: poverty, we assumed, because he rashly quit his well-paying job in Peru and moved his wife and three daughters to the backwoods of Tennessee. We were all to take part in his dream of self-subsistence—though when we first got there, there hadn’t been much to subsist on. I was only seven years old, but it didn’t take me long to notice that we didn’t have a house to live in. “Quit complaining,” my dad scolded me. “Look at the bright side. We have a car.”
    And the bright side was, it was a big car—one of those 1970s station wagons whose seats fold back—which was very convenient when a family of five (Richard hadn’t been born yet) was going to sleep in one of them.
    My mother had her doubts about the whole project, but my father remained upbeat.
    â€œDick, you’ve never been a farmer before. How will you know where to begin?”
    â€œDon’t worry, pookie,” my father answered in the same tone of voice that had gotten my mother to agree to the whole scheme in the first place. “I have a lot of books on the subject.”
    The sight of my father sprawled out on the grass in front of our station wagon reading about agriculture caused a great deal of laughter among our neighbors. After all, they were real farmers. Their farms had animals, unlike ours, which just consisted of two hundred acres of vacant land, half of which was a forest infested with wild boars. But within two months, my father had planted an orchard, bought us a trailer, built us a greenhouse, and had become a major source of information for the farmers who now timidly trekked over to our land to ask my dad’s opinion on pesticides, planting times, and harvesting seasons.
    My