Inside and Outside the Station Wagon

As a child, I once mistakenly pressed the "B" button in the elevator in my grandparent's Miami Beach apartment building, and found myself intruding on the custodial staff at lunch time. There was an absolutely revolting smell I couldn't identify. It felt like a violent attack (if you told me it was mustard gas, I'd have believed you). I mashed the "door close" button, desperately trying to escape.

It was garlic.

As a child, my parents would drive around the Lower East Side looking for parking so we could eat lunch at Ratner's. We passed malevolent-looking people lazily hanging around on the sidewalk. So these were "the mean streets!" How fortunate I was to live where things were NICE!

I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life on such streets while suburban douchebags gawked from air-conditioned station wagons.

As a child, Ricky Ricardo's band always sounded alien and a little corny. "Not our kind, dear."

I just hit a link and got a live audio page blasting intense salsa music. I'm not on this particular recording, but my friends are, and I didn't just enjoy it. From here in Portugal, far from that vibrancy, it was like a booster shot of essential missing vitamins. It reconnected me with my deepest heritage.

I'm not describing changes of taste, or even of mind. These were something more than that: reframings. And frames are strangely uncanny things. They can't be reconciled, because, obviously, they're differently framed! A framing is a distinct universe.

I chose, early on, to dive in to the full gamut with unashamed promiscuity. Not just emulating The Other, but becoming wholly part of it. I.e. reframing. There's plenty of upside. I can't imagine life without garlic or salsa, and my writing and musical careers both hinged on this. But the downside is that, at age 63, parts of me don't match up with other parts. I've been people with no connection whatsoever to other people I've been.