I sent my last email from my desk at a quarter past six, and was off to the bridge and the dog waiting to be fed. The weather had changed every minute all day. Patches of raincloud drifted from neighborhood to neighborhood, blue sky between. I drove west on Broadway toward slate gray sky. At noon we walked to the Bay in sun, and clouds built up over the Richmond. “Looks like we have forty-five minutes before it rains,” I said in my postmodern laconic drawl, and I was only off by an hour and a half.
The street seemed dry this evening heading for the bridge, but tires still raised mist.
Driving the morning I listened to a CD a friend sent me, a band from Bolivia, and the rain parceled my commute into ten-minute increments. Sun on the east Bay Bridge span, rain on the west, and sun again in North Beach. The band played “Amame,” the tenor quavering at the upper limits of his range. The band was new to me, but the song familiar. And then another began, and I slowed to hear the whole thing before arriving.
Solo por tu amor yo me moriré
porque bien los sabes, cholita linda,
cuanto te quiero.
Y solo por ti mis padres dejé
por seguirte a vos
que me has cautivado con tu querer.
The song was an albazo, a genre popular in Ecuador. Twenty years ago I listened to it late into the night. The nights. I am a little surprised the album still plays that track, that it is not so worn the vinyl is translucent. I tell myself I have no favorite song, and I am sincere in saying so. I am easily swayed. Any song that distracts me becomes a momentary favorite, and then my allegiance shifts from Peru to Madagascar to Uzbekistan.
Of all the favorite songs I have had, that song is the one I like the best. I listened to it every night in those days, and this morning, and again on my way to the bridge. A few words half understood, a movement of vibrating air against the ears, and old, old longings come to the surface like whales off the Farallones. It was half a lifetime ago. I have the life I wanted then, more or less.
I am the same person I was then, more or less.
The sky was clear over the ocean tonight, a gray horizon band sinking into twilight. A new moon, the thinnest perceptible crescent, chased the sun into the dark Pacific. This morning we were woken by hail, and wind, and rain in torrents. Last night the wind near blew me off the bridge, three times. This morning Zeke and I walked in wet sun. The creek was brown and gnawing at its banks.
