53. CIA Spy

53.

I am walking down the street when a man in a brown suit stops me. His Spanish is pretty rapid but I catch the drift of his harangue.

He says that everyone in town knows that I am a CIA spy—but he assures me that I should not worry. He says that he will gather a group of men who are eager to hear whatever I have to say. He slips me his address on a scrap of paper and says he will wait for me with his friends in the morning.

But the next morning I am on the first bus out of town. I am about as far as you can get from being a CIA spy and I have nothing at all to say to his gang of nincompoops.

That’s how I cope with my own fear right now. That is, I run from possible conflict!

Polly, who, like me, prefers to travel alone, told me she had conquered her own fear by realizing that basically only three things could happen to her: she could be robbed, raped and/or murdered. Once she faced this fact, she became serene. She is a very special kind of person.

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