essays

Holding On to the Magic

I have often heard that the brain is the most powerful sex organ. Powerful or not, it is certainly the last to give up, as a visit to one of our dance spots on Saturday night will prove. There, victims of this stubborn sex organ twitch and jerk to the strains of Proud Mary, oblivious to the fact that their mojo is missing. Obviously, this is one of those moments that sneak unobserved into our lives, like peeing when you sneeze and viagra, the moment that Proud Mary starts to seem like a rocking dance song. Hello? It’s not. “Cocaine” is a dance song. “Shout” is a dance song. Anything by the Black Eyed Peas or Michael Jackson.

Don’t they know, these men who once wore their slippery polyester shirts half unbuttoned and the women who wore sequin tube tops over spandex jeans, that the first time they ask a band to play “Jeremiah was a Bullfrog” there’s no turning back? Seriously, what happens to baby boomers and their ability to get their groove on?

I was born in 1958, a few years before the Twist changed the world, as people say. The Stroll, a seriously sexy song, had been out for a couple of years. Even the Madison was a pretty groovy line dance situation, far more than the abominable heel clicking nonsense being taught to unsuspecting grandmas these days. (Oh, I’m on to you, line dance teachers! No, it is not cool to do country line dancing. Not. Cool. Nor is it a good way to meet men, because you’d only meet one who was willing to do country line dancing, a disqualification so comprehensive that it ranks higher than being registered as a sex offender.)

Throbbing rock and roll and dance floor foreplay is our legacy, isn’t it? That’s what being a baby boomer is all about..we’re the generation who broke the chains of dance position. We do dirty dancing!

Last night I wandered over to Cafe Adelitas, a boite around the corner from my house. The Lucky Dogs, a justifiably popular band, were playing, and I know the guys. This has none of the cachet that “I know the band” has backstage at an Eagles concert. Here, it’s impossible to not know the band, as there is a small pool of musicians who group and regroup regularly, and can be found at the gardening supply store or waiting to get their blood pressure checked when they’re not playing. They have a following among the dancing gringos, and play all the favorites, whether they like it or not.

The Cafe is around the corner from my house in the village of San Antonio, and I told Bruno I’d meet him at the plaza, so I had occasion to walk over alone, taking my time and thinking about Mexico. It was well after dark, and only one out of three street lamps has a working bulb, so the lighting I walked by was iffy. Still, there was added illumination from doorways that opened into living rooms where Mexican families waved hello as I ambled by, and from a bright moon that made the cobblestones glitter like a dirty river, so the street was never fully dark. The weather was perfect, of course, as it only knows one way to be around here, perfect. I passed a dog or two, old friends who thumped their tails but didn’t bother to look up. I enjoyed it. It suddenly occurred to me that over thousands of vacations in thousands of enchanting locations, I have always tried to grab and hold on to the magic of the place where I visited, a magic that was wanting in the place where I had to return at the end of my rented week.

Until now. Now, I’m satisfied with the magic where I live, of which there is plenty

Elliott Joachim pulled the plug on life in Metro D.C. and headed South of the Border. In her blog, Lifestyle Refugee (honey, what the hell are we doing in Mexico), she regales you with how a middle range baby boomer builds a new life in Ajijic.

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