Cumbia in Carmel

 Los Angeles, California

We flew home from Monterey on Election Day. Our flight was delayed by an hour which stuck us on the 405 at rush hour. I was anxious to get home to watch election returns, and looking forward to finally land back in my home after an oddly hectic travel day. Monterey is an hour's flight away. How is it that our travel time amounted to six hours? You can actually drive from LA to Carmel in five.

I am retired and I am aware that to many people this means travel. Occasionally someone will ask me if I am traveling a lot now that I am retired. The answer is definitively no. Are there places I would love to see for the first time? Yeah, I guess so. Are there places, besides Carmel, that I would love to revisit? Kinda. But the truth is that I really do not like the travel part of travel. And as time goes by, that travel part is enough of a deterrent that I am more or less fine with not traveling much. In the last few years, Joel and I have traveled to New York City and to Santa Fe, New Mexico. They were great, fun trips. But I'm not longing to go anywhere else at the moment, except to return to Carmel. Always Carmel.

And speaking of Carmel, it was a wonderful! The first night there, we met a couple who recommended a restaurant in Monterey. The next morning, another couple breakfasting beside us, told us that it was their favorite restaurant. We ended up going there for both my birthday dinner and our final (and election-eve) night. They had the most insanely wonderful oysters. The first night I followed that with steamed clams. That last night I ordered sand dabs. Both were perfect. We sat at the bar and watched boats pulling into the marina at sunset. Joel had a lively conversation en español with the bar back, Luis, who is also from Mexico City.

One evening, as we had last year, we sat on the stones ringing the median strip of trees on Ocean Avenue, and watched the Halloween parade. The Halloween parade is really a commemoration of Carmel's incorporation 130 years ago. You have to love a city who starts a parade with a police patrol car looping the street while loudly playing the song The Monster Mash. We raced over to AW Shucks as the parade finished, for more oysters and crab cakes.

So there was eating, and walking, and some shopping. We also went out to bars to watch the World Series. Not as much fun as when the Dodgers are in it, but we marveled at how astoundingly well the Brewers played. And then, one night, there was...salsa dancing! It was the first time I have ever danced salsa in Carmel/Monterey. The club was close by, right in town at the Plaza. As we walked in, the young woman working the door (Cal State Monterey Bay, golf scholarship) explained to us that this was a salsa club. It was latin dance and there was a class going on which we were welcome to join. Or we could just watch. I held up my shoe bag. What's that? she asked. My dance shoes. She suggested we just go on in.

And it was a terrific little club. The floor wasn't too crowded. Dancers pretty much respected each other's space. The DJ played great music, and at a volume which enabled you to actually speak to each other. Joel is still leading with his left hand, solamente, but he effectively led me through a couple of salsas, a bachata, and a cumbia. No cover charge and all the free water you needed to drink. It was like a throwback to earlier times. Especially the volume issue. In LA we all wear earplugs. I just don't know why LA is so loud in so many ways.

There not being salsa clubs in the area has been one of the things Joel has raised as a reason not to move to Carmel. Well, we can now check that box. And the truth is, I would move there in a hot minute if he would agree. But for now, it's a we'll see. My salsera friend, Joy, once said that I'll try is the latino no. I'm trying to figure out if we'll see has another meaning or hidden message. I guess we'll see...

Happy Happy Birthday

Carmel-by-the-Sea, California 

One of my favorite birthday cards ever, one that I bought by the score and sent to a collection of friends and family, featured a cartoon of two men seated at a table in a restaurant. The caption read: Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Yo-Yo Ma dine together. One is saying to the waiter: I'll have the mahi-mahi; The other says, I'll have the couscous. Inside, the card read: Happy Happy Birthday.

As I wrote, I sent this card to a bunch of people and told others about the card. Not everyone found it as hilarious as I did. This, I am sure, says more about me than them. I have a rather quirky sense of humor. I will say that my brother-in-law (a four-night Jeopardy winner, by the way) also found it very funny, and I stand by it being so.

So, here we are, back in one of my favorite places on the planet, celebrating my birthday. It's kinda a big one. Back in the day we only considered the decade birthdays to be 'big,' Those and the milestone ones: Sixteen when we got our driver's license that gave us wheels; 21 when we ordered our first 'legal' cocktail. I have great memories of both those birthdays. But I've had some really downright horrific birthdays as well. Birthdays, like life itself, live on a spectrum not a dot.

My last big birthday was five years ago when we were just coming out of the pandemic. Joel took me to a restaurant in West Hollywood where we sat at the bar and ordered oysters. That's been our birthdays tradition since we were first together. We had to show our vax cards to the masked doorman to enter the restaurant. Afterwards, we went to a club to dance for the first time since early 2020. At that time, I was using a car wash service that came to my house during the pandemic, and one of the guys had recommended this latino club. He said it had  featured a band when he had gone the previous weekend. I looked it up online and saw that it was a band we knew well.

We entered the club wearing our requisite masks, and again showed our vax cards. The club was rather dark and fairly crowded, but we found a small banquette table along one wall adjacent to the decent-sized dance floor. Joel went to the bar, and I surveyed the population. I scanned it twice, just to make sure. It appeared that I was the lone non-latino occupant in the entire club. And I felt certain that many of the faces staring back at me realized the same thing.

Now, to be clear, salsa clubs in Los Angeles generally are predominantly latino. But there is always a mix of other ethnicities. There are a fair number of Asians dancing, as well as African-Americans. In early classes, I practiced dancing with an Armenian man. And even though white guys aren't known for their dancing (unless their surnames are Astaire, Kelly or Baryshnikov), I've danced with a few who could handle their own on the floor. But, in this club, on this night, there was only one non-latino in the club, and that was moi.

I pointed this out to Joel when he returned with our water. He had already noticed. Don't worry, he said. Wait till they see you dance. And when the band started up, we walked onto the dance floor. We did not, however, dance salsa because the band who we knew from salsa clubs where they performed salsa and bachata, was only playing cumbia.

For a bit of history, cumbia is a dance that originated in Columbia and then was adopted, in a big way, by Mexico. Joel grew up dancing cumbia from a young age, taught by his mother and aunts. In a salsa club you probably won't hear/see cumbia or if you do, it will be one song. But this club was all cumbia with just a little bachata thrown in for good measure.

When Joel and I were first together, he taught me cumbia, but we don't often get an opportunity to dance it in the clubs. So, on this night, the only white woman in the club danced cumbia all night. I don't generally notice people off the floor when I am dancing, but Joel said we were a big hit at the club. I didn't care. I was simply overjoyed that we were sharing oysters and dancing again after about twenty months of almost complete isolation. It was a big birthday, and a happy, happy birthday, indeed.