It took me an hour and a half to shake loose of Mexico City.  The remainder of the 288 miles to Oaxaca City took much less relative time and was much more beautiful.  The states of Oaxaca and Chiapas would become my favorites in the country.

    iOverlander took me to a parking lot in the middle of old Oaxaca City.  A nice man, maybe in his 30s, showed me around Estacionamiento La Soledad (Solitude Parking).  It offered both daily and long-term parking for cars, buses, and work vehicles.

    Jovan, his wife (Erika) and two children (Jade, 12 and Jovan, 8) lived in some sort of setup on the second floor of the place.  Jovan himself would sleep on the ground in a storage closet – its door ajar – both as a kind of human guard dog and to attend to clients who might enter at any time.

    Both of the children were beautiful and had great gleams in their eyes.  They were interested in and respectful of me – in my Americanism as much as anything.  Even one posting up in his van in a parking lot was still perhaps one of elevated status – certainly one with thousands of miles ahead of him and the means to pay for it all.  Then again, perhaps they were just nice, well-mannered kids.

    In addition to parking, the business supplemented its income with a small, simple snack bar and five pay toilets.  Erika and the children helped out with these offerings.  The snack bar was self-explanatory, and the pay toilets cost 4 pesos ($.20) and came with a small, nicely folded stack of toilet paper.  Extra toilet paper was provided at no additional charge.  At one point I counted about 15-20 toilet takers in an hour.  Vehicle owners would come in, the children would take their money, dole out the toilet paper, and quickly return to being children.

    Alma had given me a parting gift from Mexico City.  As if she hadn’t given me enough.  I shared my orange cake with Jovan and the kids.  He had quit school at age 14.  Little Jovan was very proud of a tiny blue toy car.  He liked math but laughed when I said he should become an engineer or an astronaut – as if such becoming were something so simple.

    Jade loved to laugh and professed to like architecture, especially churches.  Jovan reminded his daughter to share her popcorn, then bought us all elotes (corn on the cob covered with mayonnaise sauce, chili powder, cheese and/or lime).

    There was much love and joy here.  Aside from a walk down to the plaza, the Convento de Santo Domingo, and a day trip to the ruins of Monte Albán, I spent much of my time here at a parking lot in the center of Oaxaca City.

    I happened to be there for the Super Bowl LI.  The family didn’t know much about it, but Jovan ended up bringing the TV out of his home so that I could watch the big game from the comfort of the parking lot.  The TV was set up right next to the snack bar, which offered ice cream, sodas, candy, and snacks.  Perfect.

    It was time for another reality/inequality check.  The cost for a 30-second ad during Super Bowl LI was about $5M, or $116,667 per second.  Using the generous figure of $6 per day as the average for Mexican wages, that single second represented the year’s work of 116 Mexicans – the entire 30 seconds equal to the yearly salary of 3472 people.  There were 50 commercials during the game.

    Imagine building a fire hot enough to burn 1166 hundred-dollar bills per second.  That would be one hell of a fire.

    The average cost of a single ticket to the big game was $5200.  There were 70,807 people in attendance.  The total amount spent simply on tickets would pay the wages of 255,692 people for their collective 531,839,244 workhours in one year.  The game lasted about 3 hrs 45 minutes.

    This is to say nothing of the money spent on plane tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, taxi rides, memorabilia, food, and drink to, from, and in the host city and stadium.  It also omits money spent by tens of millions of Americans to, from, and in stores, bars, and restaurants.

    Watching these well-compensated gladiators against the backdrop of such opulent waste was almost too much.  I usually don’t care too much about who wins the Super Bowl, but I really didn’t care this year.  Neither did my newfound friends, these young Mexican children who carefully wadded up toilet paper for their customers.  From my vantage point, not only did I not care about the game, but I was more than a little ashamed by the absurdity of it all.  

    I learned much about privilege and inequality during this roadtrip.  This was a big one.  

    No one chooses where and to whom they are born.  No one deserves what they get.  And yet, many who are financially fortunate do not understand that, for reasons unknown, they simply won the cosmic lottery – that they could just as easily have been born somewhere else, to someone else, with much, much less than they could ever comprehend.

    I told Jovan about Montana – about its lakes, rivers, mountains, small towns, and good people.  Without a thought, as I had done countless times before, I said, “You’ll have to visit sometime.”  I shall never forget the look in his eyes, which made me hear what I had just said.  I may just as well have asked him to come and check out Venus.

    It wasn’t even a thought.  Such words, such notions, such casual invitations were so in the realm of possibility for me and many of my people, that I didn’t consider the impossibility for some.  Or maybe I was just saying what you say.  You rich people.  You comfortable people.

    We may have been sharing a parking lot in downtown Oaxaca City, but we lived in different worlds.