CHRISTMAS IN JULY

it was a good thing that there was quite a bit of reading that needed doing this week, because there was quite a bit of recovery that needed doing after friday’s early christmas meal. granted, we were still in the first part of november -- and not in winter proper -- when the group convened at the bodega across the street from the restaurant for drinks at two, but the sun was shining and had warmed the air to a degree at which it might have been summer -- not summer here, of course, but imaginably somewhere else -- and the pleasant temperatures held well after we had finished the comida de la navidad itself and moved to the covered patio of one of the cafés on the alameda. And hence the joke, which was toasted with coffees and digestifs to spirited rounds of “merry christmas.” twelve hours later, as i was putting the mistress of ceremonies into a cab at close to five, i had long since regretted my choice of footwear, but my short walk home wasn’t going to do anything worse to my feet than had already been done, and my socks had already been well ruined with blood. and it was from that observation that i planned to write something about our christmas in july the next morning, an observation that i made around three-thirty at our final stop, a venue off of calle calatrava that i knew hosted regular flamenco shows but had no idea drew a more standard dancing crowd afterhours on weekend nights. at the time i made it, that observation seemed to me intensely charming, not to mention evocative of the valiance of my efforts to give myself over to the spirit of the day and night as it moved me from place to place. so i was smiling as i danced where i could amid the tightly packed crowd and as the conversation permitted. Before it was just the two of us we were three, accompanied by a german man, “lolita,” who produces the most prominent flamenco periodical in his country and who was in sevilla for the weekend for an international flamenco conference. at the previous stop (where most of the rest of the group had ledft us), the subject of our conversation had somewhere turned to semiotics, and i’d flailed, literally, in spanish and body language to depict an epic conflict between roland barthes and noam chomsky to the german. so, although i did enjoy his company, i was relieved when he excused himself to get whatever sleep he could before his morning business and left me alone with my hostess to not much talking at all. besides, the two of us had charmed each other enough already, and it was time to relax and enjoy not really being able to enjoy any more drinks. but that didn’t stop them from coming. maybe it was just our proximity to the bar -- and that we weren’t showing signs of instigating an end from our side of it -- but both of the bartenders came around whenever there was a lull in orders to join us in rounds of shots on the house. and whether they were tequila or honeyed rum, most of the second halves of my companion’s shots ended up in what was left of my glass of cruzcampo, possibly as a jesting challenge to an earlier assertion i’d made that someone who’d lived in portland for as long as i had could keep downing beers unto forever. but, i’m chalking the hospitality up to the presence of my companion. i can attest that the charms of a woman from san sebastian who neither dances nor plays the guitar nor sings and who owns a flamenco school in sevilla are endless, and when i kissed her into her cab, none of those charms showed any sign of waning, even for the hour or the alcohol. when i made the observation that had kept me smiling until we parted ways and i walked my ruined socks home two hours later, i had planned to use it as the departure for what i would write about the festivities in the morning. but there aren’t really mornings where a day and a night like those ones come from. luckily, the postal service had made a visit while i was gone. i don’t have a chimney, so someone must have buzzed them in. in any case, i had a box, and in that box i had some books. i was given quite a bit of advice on a variety of different subjects over the course of that first day (and night) of christmas, but “live it” is the only one that i feel compelled to recount so long after the fact. i can’t say whether my participation in the comida or the long hours of reading that have followed is the better example of following that advice, but to say so is, i suppose, to acknowledge the possibility that it might be both. or so i’d like to think on the eve of another friday. hmph. so it is written; and so it might be done. live it. and keep reading. merry christmas. and stay in school. you never know when that anecdote is going to come in handy.