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This is the man that once hid a cool, gold shade lipstick inside a bowl of tortilla chips we were eating at Cha Cha Cha, just to trickily surprise me with the present. As my fingertips touched the cold metal cylinder amid the chips, I instantly said to him, my Sherlock-Holmesian pretenses brewing, “A waitress must have dropped it. Let me see the color, and I will tell you who it is immediately!” And, look up, Jimmy is already laughing at me with the I have a secret look on his face. This is the man that once slyly threw a brand new pair of funky-patterned leggings up in the air to land onto my path for me to think that they had fallen from the sky. Presents would just appear and drop magically. And he is also the man that years later fetched me Té de Manzanilla in México at 5 in the morning, using all the Spanish in his bag of tricks, because he knew I was four months pregnant and had massive morning sickness.
On the 25th anniversary of being married to this wacky, wonderful guy, it seems a propos to roll back the time to a fine June of 1990.
Jimmy and I met one sunny San Francisco afternoon - he, freshly dismounted off the DJ booth at Nightbreak on Haight Street, and probably after "putting on a long song" as he later confessed was his modus operandi for when he wanted to be with me, talk to me longer. He used to lay down “Rapper's Delight” – the 14-minute version! – or “Atomic Dog” and jump down the 2 feet off his perch to the level of us mere mortals on the dance floor. The vantage point was real. Jimmy says that he saw me as soon as I walked into the club for the very first time, said later that he thought I “looked too nice to be hanging out at The Nightbreak” (smooth talker), and asked my girlfriend who had brought me there with her to please introduce us. And within a half hour of stepping through the doors, I was being swept up by the person that would change my life forever.
The synopsis of a still-in-progress love that would take volumes of rich and goofy anecdotes to tell is: we dated for a year, got engaged the following fall, and married, once the post Loma Prieta Earthquake dust had settled, in June of 1990. Wedding at Saint Agnes Church, appropriately within two blocks from the figurative bloodline of our 20s, more like a powerful and indispensable aorta, I should say: Haight Street. And the reception was, just as appropriately, at the full-of-sentimental-value, icon of the SF music scene Kennel Club.
For years I will remember the surreal image of my mom and my Argentine aunt in their pretty evening dresses waiting in the line for the bathroom at the Kennel Club. Nothing drives home the strangeness of what you are willing to frequent and experience like seeing a place through your mom's eyes. The funky bathrooms were never more weird to me than after seeing the glossy red-painted walls against my mom's lace, eggshell-colored gown. But that was a great, great venue for our reception (thank you J + B), gorgeous flowers everywhere and great video displays on the walls.
That night, Jimmy and I were finally able to rest and laugh after all the wedding crazy was done. I remember thinking during our wedding day: enjoy and be present. That has always been my thought for brides because I feel bad for those that don't enjoy and remember their weddings because the minutiae of planning and all the hoopla basically forces an out-of-body experience. You want the answer to be 'Yes' to the question: "Where you really there?"
And on the subject of being there...somewhere...anywhere....
The following Monday morning, after our perfect Sunday of decompress at the Parc 55 in downtown SF (cue Petula Clark, Downtown, Downtown..!), we were on a Pan Am flight headed for Santo Domingo. Yes, we are that old, people! Pan Am was still around.
Maybe the unexpected layover in adjacent, troubled Haiti, with armed and camouflage-fatigue-donned guards boarding the plane and oppressively taking over the center aisle, set the tone. Yes, we are fortunate enough to be traveling to a Caribbean paradise, but don't get too comfy, military with guns or sketchy cops (yes, the ones that ask for cash not to take you down to the precinct to discuss your alleged illegal left turn!) may be right around the corner. It happens in any international travel, whether it is in Barcelona or Beijing, somewhere in a little corner of your mind, you will keep a placeholder of worry that will say, "You never know." The ironic thing is that you never know in your hometown either. I could be walking up Sacramento Street to the corner store for a 'banana emergency' run and get accosted by the dude that walks around our neighborhood dressed like King Tut. Or maybe not. He looks like a nice, albeit eccentric, man.
And under that suffocating philosophy you could really miss all Life as we know it. Cloistered in the most innocuous place you can think of, say safely perched in the linen closet, you could really never know. We are not here to be cautiously cautious; we are here to be cautiously adventurous.
Fifteen days of leisure and adventures in the Dominican Republic…. We started our honeymoon at the famous and beautiful Casa de Campo resort, for which, we were often reminded, Oscar de la Renta had designed all the interiors. The funny and wonderful thing about the DR is that we would have room reservations made in advance but once we arrived and we mentioned it was our honeymoon, everything would be upgraded. Jimmy would laugh at the flurry of activity and smiley ushering of us that would take place, once I lobbed up those three magical words in Spanish: Luna de Miel. The management switched us to a huge villa room with more bedrooms than we could use and 5 balconies (we counted). You want a view of the turquoise sea? We've got three. You want a view of a palm tree lined expanse or of the golf course? We've got that.
The problem was, if you have ever met us, you will know this: we are not fancy people, and especially at age 25 and 31 respectively, we were more 'Globe Trekker' than 'Lifestyles of the Rich and (Dominican) Famous.’ After a couple of days of super manicured, super orderly, and super gorgeous, we were ready to go off exploring. We asked the manager if we could go off grounds for a visit to the town of La Romana. “What do you mean?” he replied with perceivable brain fritz ensuing and too late to summon back a composed expression. He tried to reason that it was not as safe as just staying in the compound; he asked what it was that we needed or what we were missing that prompted the request to go outside the resort. We assured him that we just wanted to see the Dominican Republic.
The driver told us about 5 times that he would be picking us back up at 10pm sharp, nervously lingering on the goodbye like a parent dropping off his kid at their first school dance. I think it was not a reflection on the safety of La Romana but more on us. Did we look wimpy? Maybe it was that we floated on that thick, rosy cloud of 'totally-in-love-with-each-other' too deeply to look like we could be alert for anything else. But we survived that excursion that night, despite the angst of the reluctant manager and the driver. People were friendly, the food was really authentic, Merengue and Bachatas were wafting from everywhere - small, brightly-colored, open restaurants and miniscule stores.
A few days later, we were heading across the country to the North Atlantic coast in a rental car. It was time to say goodbye to the artifice of Casa de Campo and really dig deep into the country. We drove all night, passing Santo Domingo barely, but not ‘barely’ enough to avoid the run-in with Señor Sketchy Cop and his under-the-table-payout-or-go-to-jail request, and then continued onto the freshness of the mountains on our way to the northern town of Costambar. In the journey you hit some descent size ranges that are lush with vegetation, accentuated that night by a warm, pouring rain.
Jimmy and I had a good strategy: spend a couple of days in each location, basically beach town hopping, setting forth a la brava. We had a couple great stays, and one creepy experience at a "teaching hotel" run by a really young staff of trainees - all formality and politeness. The uneasy feeling of that huge hotel was that it was empty of other guests and the rooms had a never-used, musty dustiness that was hard to conceal with a mere change of sheets and opening wide of windows. The desolate halls gave it the feel of a modern architecture, concrete version of the mountain inn in "The Shining." We almost half expected Creepy Tricycle Boy to come whipping around a corner shouting the Spanish version of "redrum" (except "asesinato" is too long a word to successfully be made eerie, even if spelled backwards). But that was the only rare experience in our trip. We were there one night settling on this will-do resting place after the long drive.
Once we were settled for a few days in Costambar we set our sights to the East, to the town of Sosua. We called a good hotel and reserved a room. This is the era when things used to happen without Yelp and smart phones. Yes, long, long ago things used to happen and people really accomplished things with travel guides (printed on paper!) and phone books and borrowed hotel lobby phones.
Our next amazing stop was the local transportation purveyor, Yuyo-Rent-Moto. I will always remember Yuyo, with his Dominican too-hot-to-move-fast swagger, his 4-inch Afro pressed down by a little hipster black hat, and his leaning toward laughing hard at anything around him as if just for the emphasis of agreement. "You are here from the United States? Hahahahaha!" "Let's go get you one of these scooters over here. Hahahahaha." We were there to rent a moped to travel around town while in Sosua. The plan was simple: I would take a taxi with our luggage in tow (because we had been fully unable to pack lightly for this 15-day trip - my 5 new, pre-wedding gift bathing suits alone... - and let's face it, doesn't Honeymoon = you gotta look cute?), and Jimmy would follow in the moped.
We went over Yuyo's very specific, and bilingually-splayed paperwork - 1. NO make wheelie. 2. NO make championship. - and were on our way.
The hint here is: picture this moped contraption that Jimmy was driving. It was no Yamaha or Honda but maybe more like a Casio, with a motor that was less of a Vroom! and more like the high-pitched Eeeee of a midnight mosquito at your ear.
Soon the taxi had put over a mile distance, leaving Jimmy and the Yuyo-Rent-Moto-mobile in the literal dust. And then half hour into the trip, it happened: "brrrumble-brrrumble-brrrumble" - the sound of a flat tire. The taxista was as fast as a Dominican could be in procuring the spare tire at the side of the road (remember to put into that equation: the heat!). I would take long turns taking a deep, eagle-eye-straining look down the lonely highway for Jimmy and the moped, and then I would take a seat in the taxi to rest from the beating Caribbean sun. I thought my ratio of looking out for him to not looking out for him and resting in the shade was perfection, but... all of a sudden the mosquito moped sound was at my side and then gone with a way too fast Doppler effect! I ran out, screeching for Jimmy but he was gone - soon a little dot in the empty road ahead - never heard me, never saw the taxi.
The taxista did his best, but it took a long, long time to finally get the tire replaced, made longer by the 'Jimmy doesn't know' clause. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like for Jimmy to get to the hotel's front desk to realize I had not checked in at all and no one had seen me. He doubled-checked, and tripled-checked with the concierge, and brought out the little portion of Spanish he knew back then in our early years together. In his frantic state, he kept urging the perplexed hotel clerks: "¡Mi esposita! ¡Mi esposita!"
And here it is...mental note: don't teach your husband weird Spanish.
I had given Jimmy cutesy phrases to say in Spanish, with a heavy dose of the ever-present tendency for Peruvians to over-use the diminutive. It just makes things so much more friendly. You don't say, "Ella es China." - She is Chinese. You say, "Es Chinita." and all at once you have sweetness and reverence put into the mix. Peruvian Spanish is a symphony of little, teeny tiny, friendly nouns full of –itos and –itas…. from hijitas and perritos to casitas and comiditas. But, for the life of me, I can't remember telling Jimmy the diminutive when referring to me as his wife. So I had set him up: there stood Jimmy - a grown man, in a room full of grown men - calling out desperately for his little wife, never knowing that there was another, proper version of the word to use. And then I try to picture the hotel staff: Why the hell is this guy using the cutesy 'mi esposita' if he is in such a tizzy... or maybe he is talking about someone that is really, really small.
That was the day that, to Jimmy's shock, he found out about the word "Esposa." That temporary ‘You never know’ moment in the Dominican Republic ended with a happy, relieved reunion so that we could be here today, 25 funny, wild, loving, and action-filled years later. So perhaps one's unknowns will mostly turn out great. Walking into a funky bar in the Haight, you never know…
With much gratitude and love, to beautiful Haninah. Thank you for introducing us.
Rapper’s Delight - performed by The Sugarhill Gang
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cELt9nCWY_0
And here is the awesome, full, 14-minute version with lyrics!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAnojTvyc0g
On the 25th anniversary of being married to this wacky, wonderful guy, it seems a propos to roll back the time to a fine June of 1990.
Jimmy and I met one sunny San Francisco afternoon - he, freshly dismounted off the DJ booth at Nightbreak on Haight Street, and probably after "putting on a long song" as he later confessed was his modus operandi for when he wanted to be with me, talk to me longer. He used to lay down “Rapper's Delight” – the 14-minute version! – or “Atomic Dog” and jump down the 2 feet off his perch to the level of us mere mortals on the dance floor. The vantage point was real. Jimmy says that he saw me as soon as I walked into the club for the very first time, said later that he thought I “looked too nice to be hanging out at The Nightbreak” (smooth talker), and asked my girlfriend who had brought me there with her to please introduce us. And within a half hour of stepping through the doors, I was being swept up by the person that would change my life forever.
The synopsis of a still-in-progress love that would take volumes of rich and goofy anecdotes to tell is: we dated for a year, got engaged the following fall, and married, once the post Loma Prieta Earthquake dust had settled, in June of 1990. Wedding at Saint Agnes Church, appropriately within two blocks from the figurative bloodline of our 20s, more like a powerful and indispensable aorta, I should say: Haight Street. And the reception was, just as appropriately, at the full-of-sentimental-value, icon of the SF music scene Kennel Club.
For years I will remember the surreal image of my mom and my Argentine aunt in their pretty evening dresses waiting in the line for the bathroom at the Kennel Club. Nothing drives home the strangeness of what you are willing to frequent and experience like seeing a place through your mom's eyes. The funky bathrooms were never more weird to me than after seeing the glossy red-painted walls against my mom's lace, eggshell-colored gown. But that was a great, great venue for our reception (thank you J + B), gorgeous flowers everywhere and great video displays on the walls.
That night, Jimmy and I were finally able to rest and laugh after all the wedding crazy was done. I remember thinking during our wedding day: enjoy and be present. That has always been my thought for brides because I feel bad for those that don't enjoy and remember their weddings because the minutiae of planning and all the hoopla basically forces an out-of-body experience. You want the answer to be 'Yes' to the question: "Where you really there?"
And on the subject of being there...somewhere...anywhere....
The following Monday morning, after our perfect Sunday of decompress at the Parc 55 in downtown SF (cue Petula Clark, Downtown, Downtown..!), we were on a Pan Am flight headed for Santo Domingo. Yes, we are that old, people! Pan Am was still around.
Maybe the unexpected layover in adjacent, troubled Haiti, with armed and camouflage-fatigue-donned guards boarding the plane and oppressively taking over the center aisle, set the tone. Yes, we are fortunate enough to be traveling to a Caribbean paradise, but don't get too comfy, military with guns or sketchy cops (yes, the ones that ask for cash not to take you down to the precinct to discuss your alleged illegal left turn!) may be right around the corner. It happens in any international travel, whether it is in Barcelona or Beijing, somewhere in a little corner of your mind, you will keep a placeholder of worry that will say, "You never know." The ironic thing is that you never know in your hometown either. I could be walking up Sacramento Street to the corner store for a 'banana emergency' run and get accosted by the dude that walks around our neighborhood dressed like King Tut. Or maybe not. He looks like a nice, albeit eccentric, man.
And under that suffocating philosophy you could really miss all Life as we know it. Cloistered in the most innocuous place you can think of, say safely perched in the linen closet, you could really never know. We are not here to be cautiously cautious; we are here to be cautiously adventurous.
Fifteen days of leisure and adventures in the Dominican Republic…. We started our honeymoon at the famous and beautiful Casa de Campo resort, for which, we were often reminded, Oscar de la Renta had designed all the interiors. The funny and wonderful thing about the DR is that we would have room reservations made in advance but once we arrived and we mentioned it was our honeymoon, everything would be upgraded. Jimmy would laugh at the flurry of activity and smiley ushering of us that would take place, once I lobbed up those three magical words in Spanish: Luna de Miel. The management switched us to a huge villa room with more bedrooms than we could use and 5 balconies (we counted). You want a view of the turquoise sea? We've got three. You want a view of a palm tree lined expanse or of the golf course? We've got that.
The problem was, if you have ever met us, you will know this: we are not fancy people, and especially at age 25 and 31 respectively, we were more 'Globe Trekker' than 'Lifestyles of the Rich and (Dominican) Famous.’ After a couple of days of super manicured, super orderly, and super gorgeous, we were ready to go off exploring. We asked the manager if we could go off grounds for a visit to the town of La Romana. “What do you mean?” he replied with perceivable brain fritz ensuing and too late to summon back a composed expression. He tried to reason that it was not as safe as just staying in the compound; he asked what it was that we needed or what we were missing that prompted the request to go outside the resort. We assured him that we just wanted to see the Dominican Republic.
The driver told us about 5 times that he would be picking us back up at 10pm sharp, nervously lingering on the goodbye like a parent dropping off his kid at their first school dance. I think it was not a reflection on the safety of La Romana but more on us. Did we look wimpy? Maybe it was that we floated on that thick, rosy cloud of 'totally-in-love-with-each-other' too deeply to look like we could be alert for anything else. But we survived that excursion that night, despite the angst of the reluctant manager and the driver. People were friendly, the food was really authentic, Merengue and Bachatas were wafting from everywhere - small, brightly-colored, open restaurants and miniscule stores.
A few days later, we were heading across the country to the North Atlantic coast in a rental car. It was time to say goodbye to the artifice of Casa de Campo and really dig deep into the country. We drove all night, passing Santo Domingo barely, but not ‘barely’ enough to avoid the run-in with Señor Sketchy Cop and his under-the-table-payout-or-go-to-jail request, and then continued onto the freshness of the mountains on our way to the northern town of Costambar. In the journey you hit some descent size ranges that are lush with vegetation, accentuated that night by a warm, pouring rain.
Jimmy and I had a good strategy: spend a couple of days in each location, basically beach town hopping, setting forth a la brava. We had a couple great stays, and one creepy experience at a "teaching hotel" run by a really young staff of trainees - all formality and politeness. The uneasy feeling of that huge hotel was that it was empty of other guests and the rooms had a never-used, musty dustiness that was hard to conceal with a mere change of sheets and opening wide of windows. The desolate halls gave it the feel of a modern architecture, concrete version of the mountain inn in "The Shining." We almost half expected Creepy Tricycle Boy to come whipping around a corner shouting the Spanish version of "redrum" (except "asesinato" is too long a word to successfully be made eerie, even if spelled backwards). But that was the only rare experience in our trip. We were there one night settling on this will-do resting place after the long drive.
Once we were settled for a few days in Costambar we set our sights to the East, to the town of Sosua. We called a good hotel and reserved a room. This is the era when things used to happen without Yelp and smart phones. Yes, long, long ago things used to happen and people really accomplished things with travel guides (printed on paper!) and phone books and borrowed hotel lobby phones.
Our next amazing stop was the local transportation purveyor, Yuyo-Rent-Moto. I will always remember Yuyo, with his Dominican too-hot-to-move-fast swagger, his 4-inch Afro pressed down by a little hipster black hat, and his leaning toward laughing hard at anything around him as if just for the emphasis of agreement. "You are here from the United States? Hahahahaha!" "Let's go get you one of these scooters over here. Hahahahaha." We were there to rent a moped to travel around town while in Sosua. The plan was simple: I would take a taxi with our luggage in tow (because we had been fully unable to pack lightly for this 15-day trip - my 5 new, pre-wedding gift bathing suits alone... - and let's face it, doesn't Honeymoon = you gotta look cute?), and Jimmy would follow in the moped.
We went over Yuyo's very specific, and bilingually-splayed paperwork - 1. NO make wheelie. 2. NO make championship. - and were on our way.
The hint here is: picture this moped contraption that Jimmy was driving. It was no Yamaha or Honda but maybe more like a Casio, with a motor that was less of a Vroom! and more like the high-pitched Eeeee of a midnight mosquito at your ear.
Soon the taxi had put over a mile distance, leaving Jimmy and the Yuyo-Rent-Moto-mobile in the literal dust. And then half hour into the trip, it happened: "brrrumble-brrrumble-brrrumble" - the sound of a flat tire. The taxista was as fast as a Dominican could be in procuring the spare tire at the side of the road (remember to put into that equation: the heat!). I would take long turns taking a deep, eagle-eye-straining look down the lonely highway for Jimmy and the moped, and then I would take a seat in the taxi to rest from the beating Caribbean sun. I thought my ratio of looking out for him to not looking out for him and resting in the shade was perfection, but... all of a sudden the mosquito moped sound was at my side and then gone with a way too fast Doppler effect! I ran out, screeching for Jimmy but he was gone - soon a little dot in the empty road ahead - never heard me, never saw the taxi.
The taxista did his best, but it took a long, long time to finally get the tire replaced, made longer by the 'Jimmy doesn't know' clause. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like for Jimmy to get to the hotel's front desk to realize I had not checked in at all and no one had seen me. He doubled-checked, and tripled-checked with the concierge, and brought out the little portion of Spanish he knew back then in our early years together. In his frantic state, he kept urging the perplexed hotel clerks: "¡Mi esposita! ¡Mi esposita!"
And here it is...mental note: don't teach your husband weird Spanish.
I had given Jimmy cutesy phrases to say in Spanish, with a heavy dose of the ever-present tendency for Peruvians to over-use the diminutive. It just makes things so much more friendly. You don't say, "Ella es China." - She is Chinese. You say, "Es Chinita." and all at once you have sweetness and reverence put into the mix. Peruvian Spanish is a symphony of little, teeny tiny, friendly nouns full of –itos and –itas…. from hijitas and perritos to casitas and comiditas. But, for the life of me, I can't remember telling Jimmy the diminutive when referring to me as his wife. So I had set him up: there stood Jimmy - a grown man, in a room full of grown men - calling out desperately for his little wife, never knowing that there was another, proper version of the word to use. And then I try to picture the hotel staff: Why the hell is this guy using the cutesy 'mi esposita' if he is in such a tizzy... or maybe he is talking about someone that is really, really small.
That was the day that, to Jimmy's shock, he found out about the word "Esposa." That temporary ‘You never know’ moment in the Dominican Republic ended with a happy, relieved reunion so that we could be here today, 25 funny, wild, loving, and action-filled years later. So perhaps one's unknowns will mostly turn out great. Walking into a funky bar in the Haight, you never know…
With much gratitude and love, to beautiful Haninah. Thank you for introducing us.
Rapper’s Delight - performed by The Sugarhill Gang
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cELt9nCWY_0
And here is the awesome, full, 14-minute version with lyrics!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAnojTvyc0g