Amedeo and I arrived in Mexico City late at night after a long day of air travel. We dumped our bags at our downtown hotel and walked directly to a nearby 24-hour taqueria. Amedeo had vowed to eat tacos every single day during our trip. We devoured 10 between us that night, sticking to familiar pastor and suedero rather than brain or eyeball or other above-the-neck offerings. Amedeo downed a half-litre of agua de jamaica, a hibiscus drink he swore he didn’t like when I’d made it for him at home in Calgary.
As we sat there weary and greasy-fingered, Amedeo thanked me over and over for bringing him to Mexico. “We’ve only been here an hour,” I said. “We’ll see if you’re still thankful after a few days.” I was joking. My heart swelled. I felt like a good dad.
I wrote about becoming a father In these pages shortly after Amedeo was born, when I enumerated the things I vowed to do with my new son. I’ve made decent progress on the list over the last 14 years. We’ve tossed pebbles into rivers, as promised, and I’ve carried Amedeo on my shoulders. I haven’t shown him how to tie a necktie or open a bottle of wine yet, but a few months ago I bought him his first safety razor and taught him how to shave. In that essay I also wrote: “Together we will send postcards home from Africa, where we will travel to see the Sahara.”
We haven’t gone to Africa. Besides a brief trip to Halifax, Amedeo and I had never travelled alone, just the two of us, anywhere. By the summer of 2023, when Amedeo was 13, I felt we were long overdue for our first overseas father–son journey. The promised Sahara trip seemed a bit ambitious for a 10-day summer jaunt, and nobody writes postcards anymore anyway, but I wanted us to go somewhere more adventurous than a beach resort or corporate amusement park.
Amedeo thanked me over and over for bringing him to Mexico. “We’ve only been here an hour,” I said.
The previous few years hadn’t been easy on Amedeo. His mother and I split in the spring of 2020. Then his grandmother, whom he adored, passed away. The pandemic intensified all the regular adolescent anxieties emerging from Amedeo’s graduation from elementary school to junior high, and from child to teen. Our relationship had evolved into something completely new, because so had we. All of a sudden he held opinions on politics and human rights. All of a sudden he was taller than me. And I was a single dad, all of a sudden. I’d turned 50 that spring and that mattered too. Our first trip together would be the happy milestone that lightened my middle-aged millstone.
Because everything about our bond felt new, it felt important to me that we travel to someplace we’d never been. Somewhere new to both of us. We would be equals in this way. I vowed to be a responsible dad and an affable companion, but I didn’t want to be a guide. I wanted to stay out of the way of Amedeo’s experience, and not block his sight- and heart-lines.
So we chose Mexico City. We planned on visiting the Pyramids of Teotihuacán, floating on the ancient Xochimilco canals, and watching some lucha libre. Compromises were made. Amedeo nearly died of boredom when I suggested we visit the Frida Kahlo museum, for example. Fair enough. I didn’t care much about what we did or didn’t do. I just wanted to spend time with my growing son in the place where I am most happy: in a foreign country among strangers.
I embarked on my first substantial trip after university when I signed on with an overseas volunteer organization. I spent three months teaching biology to high school students in Ghana. When my placement ended, I strapped on a blue backpack and wandered through eight West African countries for the next nine months.
I turned 25 on that trip, but I was always among the oldest travellers in the hostels I stayed in. My fellow backpackers were mostly gap-year kids in their late teens or freshly minted undergrads in their early twenties. I envied them. They already had a deep sense of the world I lacked. I regretted not having started my own wanderings earlier.
Should we go to the family-oriented wrestling show or the espectacular? “No brainer. I want spectacular.”
As if to make up for lost time, I engaged with everything I could during my time in Africa. I filled my journals with a year’s worth of experiences I still think and talk about. I was cut in a knife robbery in Togo, and witnessed strange religious rituals in Benin. I helped a paleontology team unearth dinosaur fossils in the desert—hence my Saharan fixation. I read dozens of books in dozens of cheap hotel rooms and sent rambling handwritten letters home. My first pen strokes as a writer. I survived a near-fatal bout of malaria, too. Had I not fallen ill surrounded by Peace Corps volunteers with a cabinet full of emergency meds I might not have returned. I still can’t donate blood.
My malaria-scarred bloodstream wasn’t the only affliction I brought home from Africa. I returned to Canada with a case of persistent wanderlust. Meeting locals and like-minded travellers in dilapidated buses and filthy hostel dorms made me profoundly happy. I loved getting lost and unlost, and travelling with neither itinerary nor purpose. I’ve had the great privilege to travel widely in the years since, and this feeling has never waned. I love engaging, even briefly, with people whose lives don’t resemble mine. Travel should not be a self-aggrandizing activity but the opposite: a humbling exercise of empathy. Those faraway interactions still fulfill me. To borrow a Neko Case lyric, I’ve learned the most tender place in my heart is for strangers.
I wasn’t so naïve as to think I could impart all of this to Amedeo during our 10 Mexican days. I knew I couldn’t simply hand down my wanderlust the same way I did my high school wrestling jacket—which Amedeo promptly outgrew. But I wanted to see how our journey would stir his own tender heart.
I quickly learned Amedeo shares my general disinterest in sightseeing and souvenir shopping. He bought some small gifts for his mother but nothing for himself. I was tempted to buy him the set of knock-off Harry Potter Lego called “Justice Magician” we found at the vast Sunday flea market. Amedeo had little interest in taking photos—we had this in common too—so I had to shoulder the responsibility of documenting our trip. Each time I passed him my phone to take a photo of me, he snapped several duck-faced selfies of himself first, then laughed when I discovered the gag. I deleted most of them. The ones I saved will be my souvenirs.
Amedeo also shares my appreciation for the absurd. During our afternoon at Teotihuacán, we watched in rapture as a man laid a purple yoga mat in front of the Pyramid of the Moon, sat down cross-legged, and attached a copper antenna to the top of his head. Amedeo grows weary of my dad jokes, but laughed out loud when I suggested he ask the spaceman for his wifi password.
My attempts to speak Spanish to restaurant and hotel staff annoyed Amedeo at first. He couldn’t understand why I’d try to communicate in a language I don’t know when the locals I was talking to likely spoke English. After a few days, he was doing the same. I’ve seen grown-up travellers flounder when confronted with a language they cannot speak, as if the foreign words immobilize them. The language barrier didn’t faze Amedeo, though. Any time someone addressed him in Spanish, he responded with a few hand gestures and the polite crumbs of Spanish we’d gathered. My heart swelled again.
Still, sometimes Amedeo seemed more interested in telling me about the shenanigans of his beloved cat back home than all that was going on around us. I thought of a conversation I’d seen between Anthony Bourdain and Iggy Pop. After answering several probing questions, Pop remarked on Bourdain’s curiosity. Bourdain replied, “It is my only virtue.” I wondered if curiosity could be taught. Maybe the best that parents can do is to expose our children to the new and unfamiliar and hope they care enough to notice. Or, better yet, leave well enough alone and let our duck-face-making teenagers grow into the people they are going to be.
Amedeo is nearly a man. He’s not my shadow.
I enjoy waking early when I’m travelling. There is something beautiful about watching a city rise at dawn. I wanted Amedeo to see this too, but I let him sleep in. This was his summer holiday, after all. I didn’t need to impose my rituals on my slumbering son. Besides, years of solo travel has made me value these solitary mornings. Slow coffees in the hotel café while Amedeo slept upstairs became a new ritual.
I had to pull him out of bed early one morning to begin a day-long street-food tour we’d booked. Amedeo’s foul morning mood softened with his first bite of chocolate conchas. He quickly warmed to our guide, and engaged with the others on the tour even though he was the only kid. My son isn’t shy once he gets some calories in him. Amedeo tasted almost all of the dozens of foods offered to us that day. Green chorizo. Mixiote. Quesadillas made with corn smut. The oil-bathed tacos de canasta were his favourite. He only passed on a plate of fried grubs, beetles and scorpions. That I helped raise an adventurous eater ranks as one of my greatest parental accomplishments.
Food remained the engine that ran our entire trip. We lined up for late-night churros, and drank hot and cold chocolate in cafés. We’d spend a pittance on lunches at simple taquerias. We broke the bank at restaurants in swanky neighbourhoods like Roma and La Condesa. One night we dressed in our fancy clothes and wandered through Parque Mexico before dining at Botánico. We ordered tomato and peach salad, gnocchi amatriciana, grilled cod with pea salad and a kalamata olive crème brulée that Amedeo resisted sharing. At one point my mother sent a text reading, “What else have you been doing besides eating?” Not much.
There was, of course, the wrestling. Weeks before our trip, I’d purchased tickets to a lucha libre show at Arena México, the city’s hallowed “Cathedral of Wrestling.” When I asked Amedeo if he’d rather go to Sunday’s family-oriented show or the Friday night espectacular, he said “No brainer. I want spectacular.” I booked seats in the fourth row, as close to ringside as children were allowed to sit.
Most of the matches involved six wrestlers or more, with complicated rules Amedeo and I never did figure out. No matter. We were there for the spectacle. The show was high-flying and acrobatic—far more dynamic than the North American version I’d obsessed about when I was Amedeo’s age. We joined the crowd cheering Místico, a wrestler in a silver mask and white contact lenses who was clearly the night’s hero.
Amedeo enjoyed himself, but we both knew this was my thing. A couple of times I spotted him smiling at my excitement. I’d spent 13 years relishing all of Amedeo’s tiny joys. The previous spring I watched his star turn as the villain in his junior high school play. I was just as thrilled by his weary post-play antics with his castmates as I was with his performance. I find nothing more rewarding than this conjoined happiness. At the cathedral, though, our roles were reversed.
As soon as we left the wrestling show, I got us lost on public transit. This had become another of my daily rituals. The Mexico City subway system was designed in the 1960s with pictograms for each stop so non-Spanish-speaking visitors to the city during the 1968 Olympics, and riders who couldn’t read at all, could easily navigate the city. My own ineptitude overwhelmed these generous accommodations every time. After the espectacular we made a long walk to a subway station where I dragged Amedeo in and out of the same subway car three times because I wasn’t certain where it was going. Then we transferred to a bus heading the wrong direction. I eventually gave up and called an Uber.
I can’t recall the number of times Amedeo has tried my patience over the years. Children do that, of course. But during those fraught moments on the Mexican subway, with my directional incompetence testing Amedeo’s goodwill, he never once lost his patience with me. If he rolled his eyes, and he probably did, he must’ve done so when my back was turned. Amedeo treated my failings with grace. For the second time that day I felt our roles reversed.
One night, in our hotel room, I mentioned to Amedeo that almost all the significant travelling I’ve done in my life has been alone. I wasn’t used to travelling with another person. He told me he thought this was sad.
I wanted to tell him he is wrong. I wanted to say that being his father is the only thing in my entire life that has made me happier than being out in the world alone. I wanted to explain that solitary travel means engaging with a place directly, without a companion standing between you and your experience. It means never having to compromise. Never having to make a plan. Never having to rely on anyone or be relied on. And travelling with a partner means entering a high-risk time warp: two people learn more about each other in a day on the road than in a month back home. This can be beautiful. It can also be disastrous.
But Amedeo is also right. There is something sad about my solitary time away. I am my best self on these solo journeys and nobody I love gets to see it. They get a lesser version of me. Less patient. Less adventurous. Less observant. A little less kind, even. I’m not proud of this. Maybe that’s why our trip to Mexico meant so much to me. As Amedeo enters his last chapter of childhood, I wanted to show him the man I could be.
Since we’ve been home, Amedeo regularly tells me he misses Mexico. When I ask him why, he mostly talks about the food. I choose to believe there is more to his longing than those tacos de canasta, as tasty as they were, but that’s enough for me for now. Besides, he also told me he wants to travel with me again. “Just to eat,” he said.
We should plan something soon. Amedeo starts high school this fall, and very soon he won’t want to travel with me anymore. That should make me sad, and I suppose it does in a way, but I feel nothing but joy when I imagine him in some faraway place. Gangly and tanned. With a beard worthy of his Indian-Italian genetics. Dumping a dirty backpack onto an even dirtier hostel bed. Discovering the world on his own without me.
Our happiness will be conjoined there too. The most tender place in my heart belongs to him.
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books, including Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers (2021), and is a former writer-in-residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program. His essay “Fatherhood” was published in 2010.
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