My younger sister, Barbara, called tonight.

It was good to hear from her. She�s been in Mexico since August, staying with one of my uncles. I also talked to one of my cousins. Briefly.

My cousin grabbed the phone long enough to laugh and say, �Memo! Your sister is crazy!�

�Of course,� I countered, �She�s a Lopez.� More laughter, then my sister was on the phone again. I was able to speak to her for a bit more, but then she asked to speak to my mother.

It turns out that she is going to spend more time there than she thought. She won�t be back until sometime in March. I just realized that means this will be the first Christmas that the whole family won�t be together. Hmm�I guess it was bound to happen, and 23 years is a pretty good streak.

Actually, the Christmas after Luis was born, I�m pretty sure he was still in the hospital. (He was born in June, by the way,) Still, this is a bit different.

But I�m sure my sister is learning a lot. I had gone to visit Mexico (the Madre-Land) for the first time when I was 10 years old. I had traveled all over, visiting family and eating only Goldfish crackers.

But the time I spent with my uncle (on my mother�s side), Tio Pepo, is the most memorable.

In those wacky, by-gone days as a ten-year-old, I had wanted to be a veterinarian. My uncle, I had discovered with delight, was a veterinarian and had his own clinic.

I told him about my desire to be a veterinarian just like him. He didn�t say �That�s my boy!� and he didn�t say �You should probably think about it.� Instead of encouraging or discouraging me, he offered to let me help out at the clinic. I was quite excited, especially when I got my very own lab-coat. It was a bit big, but I didn�t care.

It was very interesting work.

One of my jobs was to care for a dog that had been bitten by a snake. The dog was alive, but was in pretty bad shape. I remember being confused because I had expected at most, a couple of puncture wounds, but the skin and tissues around the bite had been dying for some time, crippling his hindquarters. This, I learned, was �necrosis.� It was caused by the snake�s venom.

The dog was unable to stand up, and too weak to even eat. It was my job to keep him clean, fed, and comfortable. This was more difficult than I had first thought. Since he couldn�t really eat solid food, I would feed him a kind of dog-food paste with a large, needle-less syringe.

I was only ten years old, so I wasn�t that big. The dog was almost my size and I had to keep his head up so I could squirt the food paste into his mouth. After tiring myself out trying to lift up his head with one arm, I ended up just sitting down and cradling his front-quarters in my lap. I would talk to him while I fed him. �Don�t feel too bad,� I would say to him, �Astronauts have to eat paste like this, too.� His tail thumped feebly against the cold, gray, floor.

And that�s how I would feed him.

A few days later, I came into work and his kennel was empty. My uncle told me that the dog hadn�t been getting any better, and the owner had decided to put him to sleep. He then informed me that my job that morning would be to clean out the dog�s kennel. As I was scrubbing the concrete floor I thought, �I hope they at least took him out of here for a little while before they did it.� I imagined him basking lazily in the summer sun on a patch of cool, green, grass that was still damp from the morning dew, and managed to feel a little better.

A feeling of claustrophobia welled up in me.

I scrubbed faster.