"I have to say that the Holy Week traditions of Cuenca are disappearing," I told one of my teachers, disapprovingly, in careful Spanish.
"The land is disappearing," said one local environmentalist, Barbara Rich, pointing to fly-over aerial maps that show solid development on what was open farmland fewer than 10 years ago.
Both are refuges for the fast-disappearing Indian one-horned rhinoceros, and the sanctuary at Manas is known especially for its tigers and leopards.
This sort of behaviour does not take place only in the debauched, drunken world of movies; the recent history of literature is also replete with disappearing acts and one-hit wonders.
Is it disappearing jobs, or disappearing values?
Clearly Tibetan is not one of those disappearing languages that experts say are becoming extinct at twice the rate of endangered mammals and four times the rate of endangered birds.
"The skilled labor source that we depend on is rapidly disappearing," says Ralph Broetje, president of Washington's Broetje Orchards, one of the largest privately owned orchards in the country.
For much of my career, I've been one of those poets, arriving as if by magic at the start of a school day and often disappearing as quickly as I'd arrived, even as much as I like to maintain meaningful relationships with the schools I visit and see the work live on beyond the workshop or project.
Some victims will likely never be found – one common form of disappearing kidnapped victims at the time was by drugging them and throwing them live in to the ocean.
"There are many orchestras in trouble and some are even disappearing, even though the cost of one jet fighter would wipe out the deficits of all the European orchestras for 10 years.
