Violence exploded in the Middle East recently. I had to think of expatriates like myself. Miscalculation by barbarian terrorists led to a little bit of a war. Lebanon was (its hotels finally full again as it began to recover from a costly civil war) filled with foreigners.

Suddenly they were rushing to asylum and needing military protection to get out. United States Marines finally arrived to help U.S. citizens, the French had many thousands of its citizens to rescue, and other countries worked to evacuate foreign service workers, tourists, business people, and expatriates from many countries.

So why am I here in Mexico rather than home? What makes an expatriate? How did it happen to me? Are we ex-patriots? Why here and not some other somewhere? What happens when paradise meets violence?

America cries over immigrants looking to work, but gives them (normally) civil rights and protection. What happens to expatriates when the bombs fall, the terrorists send rockets, the guerillas arrive, or anti-Americans make violence in that piece of paradise where ex-pats live? Does the consulate race to protect, does the country care about the foreigners in its midst, and where does the man without a country run? It is a question of the nature of being American whether living in Kansas, San Juan, Barcelona, Beirut, or Bacalar.

My diaries and observations as an expatriate in relatively peaceful Mexico have languished. I had given up on this personal journal of life away from "home" as too difficult. In this case, personal observations are also global and political. They are about the state of the world, the severe divisions and divisive economics of America, and about health and being one's own doctor.

There is a theme I must write about — staying alive after a heart attack, surviving heart failure, and watching the medical news. But that, too, comes under the label of "how I expatriated" or "why" and, ask people in the States, "why there?"

I always hoped to be one of those American artist-writers expatriated to the Left Bank to become part of an Utrillo cityscape. That was in the days just as the Hippies replaced the Beats.

That was when the world was smaller and younger. Perhaps we were more innocent. Instead, I grew slowly older and hustled clients and made pictures until the genetic jokester dealt my heart a blow.

It isn't Paris but Bacalar, a small, Mayan village on the shore of a beautiful but now dangerous lagoon near the Belize border. It was as far as my Bronco wanted to take us and seemed like paradise ten years ago. It isn't Paris and there is no "American community." There is no Mary Cassat nor Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald and Zelda. Ernest isn't nearby in Cuba.