The second and fourth Mondays of each month are tango nights at the NorthStar Music Cafe. My friends Tango Mucha Labia are playing in three hours or so, a lesson starts at seven, DJ'd music at 8:00.
Now - at 6:20 - the chairs are still occupied by innocent diners and some kind of pop-based music is on the sound system.
In less than forty minutes the chairs will all moved and a little bit of Buenos Aires will heat up this little corner at the foot of Munjoy Hill ("BA on Munjo", I suppose).
It was a nice walk over here. I've spent the day mostly rewiring my apartment, cleaning and trying to make room for a new computer system. Also to make the place more presentable - though, frankly, who I'd present it to is a complete mystery.
Maine has a reputation - exceeded only by Vermont - as a "lily-white" state and as stated earlier it does have its issues.
This reputation is belied - or denied - by those of us who live in Portland. The largest city in the state also has the most diverse - well, mathematically diverse, anyway - population in the state.
My experience of this is based on hanging out with folks like the tango crew, very well-educated, very-unselfconciously-chic people who have experienced - and now insist on - having their lives spiced by hearing different languages, seeing different faces, thinking different thoughts. They have a sense of self - be it style, personality or just habit - that is delighted by difference.
At the other end are the street people I run into - panhandlers, drunks - or the ethnic folks I know - Somalis, Natives - or married and semi-settled folks - the H's, the W's. All of them are blazingly intelligent and frank and realistic, just like the tango crew.
And then the Orchard crew - dozens of the most diverse, interesting, intelligent folks I've ever seen gathered in one place here in the state of Maine.
So there I am, walking through the gathered darkness of the middle of a Maine Winter. Twenty degrees, snow crunching underfoot. Behind me I hear two women walking, sharing rapid words in Spanish.
I can catch a few, calore (warm), bueno (good) - too fast for me to tell.
Still, it's a comforting sound, musical (George Carlin used to recommend listening to a baseball game in Spanish to really enjoy the music and drama), warm and rich. I think it's odd - both Spanish and Cherokees seem so out of place in the context of this cold place. But, as has been observed before I really like it here - Winter always caught my imagination.
My ignorance is my anonymity. The conversation continues, rich and animated, give and take, not so much an argument as a working out of something. I can't tell.
Home is where you find it, or what you make of it.
Where you are yourself, even if no-one else knows who you are while you are there. As long as you know yourself, every smile has its own lingua franca.
I only know I cannot tell what is said, perhaps only what is felt. Such a lovely feeling for such a cold night.
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