Leaving for Mexico

I left New York City on a Greyhound bus.  The last person I saw in the U.S., other than the ever changing bus passengers and the people in the many bus stations I passed through changing bus drivers and buses every 8 hours during the 42 hours between New York City and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas was Michael's wife M'nique.  Before leaving for Mexico, I sold almost all by belongings; cookware, art supplies, books... and left my apartment on Ocean Avenue for my mother's house in Flemington, NJ.  I was with my mother and her husband Bruce until they left for France and I went to spend my last week in the U.S. with Michael and M'nique in their apartment in Alphabet City... Michael had returned from Mexico 3 weeks earlier and had a bunch of photographs to develop.  We went up the river to Suffern, New York where the brother and brother-in-law of of Michael's new friends Leticia and Alfonso lived and worked in a photo shop.  Also living in Suffern were Leticia's 18-year-old son Alfredo and her mother, all of them from the little village of Paso Doña Juana, Veracruz.  I would later see Leticia's mother at Lety and Pancho's cabin on the beach when my mother and Bruce visited us almost a year and a half later.