Taking a Visitor to See the Ruins

Paulla Gunn Allen's Taking a Visitor to See the Ruins succeeded in Cicero's theory of humor in which "...we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh."
As a person who has seen the cliff dwelling and pueblo villages, I completely expected that the author would be taking her friend to see an ancient native american ruin. Once the two arrived at a high-rise apartment building, it was clear Allen was playing a trick on her friend.
We soon find that the relics Gunn refers to are actually her mother and grandmother, cue the laughter.
The short piece fits in with Cicero's theory, but I think Grawe's theory of human survival as well. The women, Gunn tells us, "...still live in pueblo style in high security dwellings way up there where the enemy can't reach them just like in the olden times." Here we see that Gunn's mother and grandmother are still surviving, in a metaphorical sense, just as their ancestors had.