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| Adventures in Spanish Wine |
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| Columns - Karma |
| Written by Aleeza Solowitz | Saturday, 04 February 2012 - 21:28:06 |
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I’ve recently had a particularly amazing evening on my feet, theoretically dancing with a Spanish boy from my childhood. He is now a man, of course, but other than that nothing has changed except for our lives in-between the markers of time...
It was on the evening of one of the famous outdoor, underground dinner parties my house-mate and I throw every Sunday night in the summertime. I was in my bathroom putting on the final touches, sweeping up the last curl of my lashes, when I heard my name in broken English “Is Aleeza live here?” whoever it was must have been speaking to my brother who was outside on the patio smoking a cigarette, probably pondering his own life, as most people do when they smoke cigarettes alone on patios looking out onto the hills. I set my mascara down on my dresser thinking it was too early for any of my guests to have arrived because the sun was still up; I walked out my door and saw this face that I haven’t seen in 12 years. A man now and very handsome, one who speaks 5 languages with his happy, tired eyes and sweet, well traveled, bearded face. I haven’t been filled with so much happiness...it seems like—in forever; all these feelings came back and in that very moment, my life rewound. He dropped his bags remnant of a military husband and I ran to him like a proper wife, we hugged long enough to try and make up for the past 12 years, I don’t know if I have ever hugged someone as tightly as I did him, I’d look at his face then I’d hug him again to make sure it was real. It was perfect timing. The night went on, everyone at the dinner party loved him, he helped us out in the kitchen, he was my porrón drinking model to all the guests (a porrón is a traditional glass wine pitcher, typical of the Catalonian region of Spain, where we lived. It’s like a cross between a wine bottle and a watering can). It’s something that I traditionally do to get our guests to try a mystery wine and it’s fun to watch everyone translate the way it’s supposed to be done and get wine all over their bibs…He is a professional porró drinker, as am I. Needless to say it was a magical night. In addition to this, every 5 minutes he called me beautiful and pretended to eat my shoulder, my neck, my arm…I hadn’t seen him in 12 years, so I think that’s his way of saying he missed me, to make sure I am real. I was the American girl back then and he was the fun, sweet and goofy guy everyone loved, that wore Gandhi glasses and oversized striped handmade sweaters his grandmother probably made for him. Sometimes I would fall in love with him, everyday for at least 5 minutes…it could last for up to 12 hours, depending on the day. Sometimes I just fall in love for the sake of falling somewhere. (I’m a klutz, a walking hazard, I fall going up the steps to my house, on an uneven sidewalk, hiking, even standing still.) But falling for him was different—it actually felt good to fall, for once in my life. The next night, he took me out to an amazing dinner by the sea—it was one of the loveliest nights of my summer—the food, the conversation, the Malbec, the music. Maybe it’s the idea of him. Maybe it’s the idea that he has since moved to Milan and rubs elbows with all the fancy Italian designers he does the runway shows and photo shoots for. Maybe I’ve fallen in love with the fantasy of moving to Milan and the fact that he’ll call me beautiful every 5 minutes and bite my shoulder; he can do my hair every morning before I go off to work at some fancy Italian butcher shop during the day and then give me a deep conditioning treatment at night as I write. We go back and forth between Spanish and English, I throw in some Catalan, his native tongue because I love that language and I speak a bit of it. It kills him when I speak in Catalan. He calls me beautiful again and grabs me by the face and kisses me on the cheek, it makes me feel appreciated and I can’t think of one soul who doesn’t want that. In the mornings during his visit, we woke up together and stayed in bed for 10 minutes talking and giggling like we did when we were fifteen and I’d make him a cup of black coffee with 5 tablespoons of sugar; how he likes it, sweet, like him. I will take the leftovers from the dinner he insisted on cooking from the night before, add brown eggs and make a scramble out of it. Then I just watch him eat it on my peg legged dining room table as he praises my home cooking. So what exactly is it that I am searching for? What we are all searching for in the end: to essentially be desired, to appreciate the love of one another and take notice of the little things that make life sweet. I may never take that trip to Milan. I may never run into his arms in my cashmere sweater and end up with him as I had imagined in moments of time and which I am still not opposed to. But what I did end up with is a different perception of what things could be like: I discovered a new kind of feeling that I never knew existed, like an astronomer discovering a new galaxy. What an amazing feat. What an amazing thing to have felt. A light bulb goes off in our heads at some point and then when we reach that light, you can see for miles what you could never see in the dark and the formula contrasts and contracts and we do what we do with it. Life goes on, we make new loves, we learn, we grow and people make us better, love makes us better, you just have to feel it. |
| Last Updated on Monday, 31 August 2009 23:02 |
I feel like new life has been breathed inside of me; it’s funny how one person can come back from your past and unexpectedly change your life forever. It’s not like we ever lost touch in memories, but we were 15 year-old, silly kids living in an old Pueblo in Spain, running around like little wildfires with our tightly knit group of friends. The moments we all shared then, would mold and shape, who I would become as a woman...but the moments we shared tonight resonate on my breath like the Spanish wine that we drank well throughout the sunset.
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