Truth and Consequences
            by Leigh Douglas Reimer

Marty and I were planning our honeymoon. Terry Sawatsky got involved in planning it in an odd way; as a matter of fact, he was actually going to be be part of it! As in going to accompany us on it!  What!? you ask. Yes, it was true. (I think John Cleese would have approved!) You must remember that long ago people had double weddings, as my parents did with my Aunt Tina and Uncle Ben Hiebert, and here we were now in a quite old-fashioned way about to share our honeymoon with this red-haired (and might I add, fearfully intelligent guy, a smartness that came in handy as events later indicated).
     I was totally blindsided. I don’t recall how it happened, but suddenly the plan included us travelling together for part of the holiday. It’s not that I regretted adding Terry’s (and his new wife, Millie’s) company. We fully loved the two of them, and had often spent excellent times together on adventures of one sort or another. Actually, I am remembering that slightly wrongly because I should have said that we wouldeventuallyhave those adventures. We really only started them after the wedding when the four of us began to go camping, visit at their house on Dorchester, play Romoli together and skip Adult Sunday School at Charleswood Mennonite Church to have coffee at the MacDonals west of the church along Grant Avenue. But here we were planning a double honeymoon. And yet I knew that if we were to share our honeymoon with anyone it would have been Terry and Milly because Terry was my best friend from adolescence and Millie had become a precious one ever since Terry introduced me to her as his girlfriend. 
     The second phase of the honeymoon was a trip into Mexico. We had intended, as we planned, to meet the Sawatsky’s in the city of El Paso, sister city of Juarez, Mexico. When we were still a few hundred miles from the border, we stopped for gasoline in a town called Truth and Consequences. Almost a city, really, of some 5,000 people and half a dozen fuel stations, it was a lovely place and my lovely wife and I were generally having a lovely little time. We had a  new, souped-up 1970, tangerine-coloured Volkswagen Beetle (with smart-looking, inverted Siberling tires), the New Mexico desert bathed us with fragrant, hot sun, the sky covered all our travels in a blanket blue as could possibly be, and the desert birds and insects astonished us with their amazing variety. Our senses showed us a world so different from Winnipeg’s, a good thing when you’re honeymooning. Tomorrow we would arrive in El Paso and connect with our friends. Excitement about traveling  together had been growing ever since we left the Grand Canyon with its strange and unwelcome calamity (a calamity that we wished to forget but never would!).
     So, nearing Truth and Consequences we decided to fuel up.We had a doubt that there would be gas available before we arrived at the border. As we pulled into a service station—and I think it was an Exxon—I looked across the street at another service station and, low and behold, there shimmering in the heat was the mirage of Terry’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Well, I said to myself, maybe it looks just like his, but it can’t be! Can it?      
     No sooner had I noticed the yellow bug than Marty pointed and called out that it was them, that, Yay! we had found our friends! And sure enough, about then Terry shouted, “What’s wrong with you! What are you doing here? Don’t you know we’re not supposed to meet yet?” We laughed, we patted ourselves on our backs, we hugged, and then we started to fuss about the fact that this extraordinary meeting, this extraordinary coincidence, had happened in, of all places, Truth and Consequences! How wonderfully odd that moment. Could the world get any smaller than that? Could anything better happen on a honeymoon?