On Saints
There are some impulses I've learned not to ignore. Smiling at old women. Stopping to pet a friendly cat. Calling my parents when I'm tired and know no one else wants to know why. And on nights like tonight, blind baking. Trusting that what I want to eat will arise from a bowl full of unmeasured dry ingredients, and loving the smell the oven makes when sugar melts.
Tonight Michelle and I went to the Community Music Center in the Mission for the All Saints of the City of Angels book signing. We wandered into a small auditorium of what looked like an old church, stepping off a notoriously iffy San Francisco street and into this homey, bubbling hubbub of Spanglish, silk screens and sangria. I felt like I had accidentally wandered into the family reunion of a clan I didn't realize I belonged to. Most people were speaking Spanish, and at least a quarter of the people in the room carried some kind of instrument, usually some variation of guitar or mandolin. There were lots of seniors with shawls and wise smiles, and just as many short Latino men with long, bound hair.
A young man from Guadalajara stepped up to the microphone with the guitar, which was almost as big as he was, and sang a ballad about Mexican unions. SIndicados. I kept superimposing his face with that of an old guitarrista from Malaga who used to sing canciones at midnight at a tapas bar just minutes from my Fuengirola apartment. There is something about speaking and living in another language that provides the most refreshing escape--tonight I felt like I had slipped into a wormhole, and that instead of being surrounded by people, all I could feel and hear were adjectives and nouns, and that creative way that verbs wound around them. It was a linguistic transcendence, one that might otherwise be attributed to wine-soaked fruit floating in plastic cups of sangria, or that hyper spring evening sensation when the light is just too nice to believe in.
Spring brings the most unoriginal and comforting signs of renewal. Sometimes I wonder if I should be a pagan, or some other earth worshiper. What do I worship? I worship running in the rain, unexpected compliments and that intangible, unutterable link between people who feel linked. I miss that sometimes, and expect it at others.
There's more to say -- a new job, a newer perspective -- but that might have to wait for more profound moments, when I've found my saints.
{ Post a Comment }
{ Last Page } { Page 5 of 22 } { Next Page }
|
About Me
« March 2010 »
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 | |
Links
Julia in the Raw (Creative Writing Samples)
Spanish Travelogue
College of Creative Studies
Post Secret
My Aunty
Categories
Recent Entries
Repaintings, of both personal and artistic natures
A Song for San Francisco
Write about small regrets.
Fiery Furnaces
On Saints
Friends
|
