Granada, Nicaragua, Monday, February 13, 2006

​

Yesterday, when I woke up, I heard birds chirping in strange tropical songs, some of them pleasant. Here and there a short tune interrupted my sleep until I slowly got up and out of bed. A sky light in my room let in a shaft of intense sun. Made of a piece of glass set in between the tiles of the roof, it wasn’t held in there by anything other than gravity. The sunlight reflected off of the light baby blue walls was brighter than a lamp.

Part of the deal in staying here is getting breakfast, lunch, and dinner served up by the grandmother, who has my grandmother’s name: Julia. This morning I had bread, watermelon, and cantaloupe with black coffee.

​

The family is busy all of the time. I haven’t yet figured out whose kid is whose, but a toddler is always in the house and there is an infant that is only around during the daytime hours. The kids make the living room smell a little like a baby, in a good clean, life is just beginning kind of a way. The place feels homey, but exotic, with the aroma of strange new foods sizzling or boiling. The cooking never ends.

​

Today was my first day of Spanish classes. I am taking them down the street at Casa Xalteva. The fact that they use the profits to run a home for orphans was a major selling point for me. There are only two of us in the class, myself and a twenty-something sign language interpreter from Alaska named Rachel. Sergio, our teacher, is also in his twenties, and he talks slowly and enunciates clearly so that we can understand him. Four hours of daily Spanish starts to make my head feel like it is going to pop, but it is tiresome in a good way, like exercise. The plan is to get my Spanish language muscles buffed up for the rest of my trip around Central America.

​

*

​

When I was living in Korea I met a Ukrainian. I was on one side of the street waiting for the light to change, and he was on the other. He was absolutely shit-faced drunk. He had that smile that alcohol sometimes brings, like the drinker had an epiphany and was in on some joke nobody else has figured out. He had a Soviet haircut, differing from a flat top only in that it flared out at the sides. We eyed each other as the light was about to change, and as I started walking, he stayed where he was, waiting to talk to me. He greeted me in English as I approached. He was an engineer named Euvgenie who couldn’t find good work at home, so he took his family to Korea. He didn’t know very many foreigners in town so he invited me over to talk with him and his wife and some friends after dinner the next day.

​

I showed up at a big, blocky, Korean apartment complex and knocked at the door. When he let me in, I was struck by how hot his place was. They had the heat cranked. He was in a pair of shorts and a sleeveless shirt as if he were in Alabama in July and not Korea in winter. His kids were running around in their underwear. I vaguely remembered seeing people dressed that way in documentaries about Russia. Did Russians always have their heat cranked up?

​

His friends were other engineers, warm and talkative. His wife pushed food at me every second that I wasn’t eating, and everyone poured me shots of vodka and slid them across the red checkered table cloth at me. I don’t drink, so I turned down alcohol more times in that single evening than I probably had in the previous couple of years. It took on the rhythm of a ritual, someone would push the shot glass at me, and I would smile, say “no thank you,” and push it back. Over and over again. After an hour or so, Euvgenie and his wife broke out a guitar and starting singing Ukrainian folk songs. They were good singers and absolutely unashamed the way you have to be to make a song work. They threw everything into it as if it were a challenge. After each song he would translate the gist of them for me. The prettiest song also had the best theme. It was a love song and the chorus went something like: “Don’t be sad walking in the rain looking for somebody, because somewhere somebody is walking in the rain looking for you.”

​

As cheesy as it is, we write so many love songs because love is so worth writing about.

​

*

​

This evening, at the house in Granada, Julio’s son Michael was playing a Metallica song on an acoustic guitar. So far it has been nearly universal that the younger Nicaraguans love heavy metal music. This is so unexpected, even though when I went to South America, they had a similar love of hard rock and heavy metal.

​

I was in a strange mood. I didn’t want to bother the family but I wanted to talk to somebody so I explained to him that I could show him a couple of other Metallica songs (that are not at all about love) “Enter Sandman” and “Hero of the Day.” We set up chairs out on the sidewalk in front of his house and sat there with his father, Julio.

​

Music makes it easy to break the ice between strangers. For the next hour or so we played songs for each other, he played a few he knew from the radio, I played a few for him and his dad, Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and Hank Williams “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” I also played him a song that I wrote for my girlfriend Jeanine back when I met her in Seattle. Michael was impressed that I would do that. He had a girl that he liked, named Vanessa, and he has been trying to write a song for her but didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of, or anyone to help him proceed. I had to have him explain these things a few times slowly as my Spanish took its time returning, like the strength in an arm that had been in a cast. At one point we laughed at the difficulty of having someone who speaks lousy Spanish trying to help someone write a good song in Spanish for a girl he hardly knows. As the music echoed off the narrow streets, I noticed something about him that reminded me of myself. Michael was about twenty or twenty-one. He had that urgency that I remember from being that age, and an optimism that the luckiest among us don’t lose. I remember such a rush to get living in my early twenties, and to do so by having a woman to love. It was my primary thought then, and seemed to be his now. What I didn’t realize then was that I needed to get my own act together first, and then everything else would follow. My older brother Al told me that once when we were in his pick-up truck, pulling up to the T-intersection past the High School, back on the island in Maine. He told me if I got my own act together, there would be no end to the women who would show up. I remember knowing he was right, but also knowing that I wasn’t going to do anything about it.

​

Michael told me he wanted pointers on how to sing better, and on how to write a good song. I had him pull the guitar close to his chest so that he could feel the notes.

​

“The music and your voice should become the same thing,” I said, “And sing with confidence. Whether it is good or not, always act like it is and it’ll take you a lot farther.”

​

This is the most important, to sing like you mean it. If you want to belt out a good love song, you have to sing like that Ukrainian couple in their own home, like you are only really doing it for yourself, because in the end that is the only way you’ll be any good for anybody else.