When Fouad Lakhdar returned from Fez, Morocco, to Guadalajara June 7, after a family “visit” that, due to Covid-19, mushroomed from three weeks to nearly four months, he might have felt rather dazed.

Even though she is a foreign service career veteran, the new normal of “doing business” has presented challenges for Eliza F. Al-Laham, the recently arrived U.S. consul general in Guadalajara.

There’s a moment in “A Piece of Work,” the documentary about her life, when the late comedian Joan Rivers brandishes a blank page from her appointment book and asks the cameraman, “You want to see fear? I’ll show you fear.”

Mexico may not lag far behind its northern neighbors in numbers of anti-vaxers, but judging from the excitement around the announcement of superlative Phase 3 trial results for two dual-dose Covid-19 vaccines — from the giant New York-headquartered Pfizer and the much smaller, Massachusetts-based upstart Moderna — any resistance could soon fall like dominoes on both sides of the border.

It shouldn’t have taken a global pandemic to summon our better angels, but Covid-19 has brought out the best in many of us, proving again what Abraham Lincoln asserted in his inaugural address in 1861: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.

Many people living along the north shore of Lake Chapala have spent time gazing across the lake, wondering just what it’s like on the south shore.