Know That Voice Anywhere

I took a ride today.  It’s a fine autumn day.  If you’re reading this and you have never visited Beijing, it is the only time to visit when you’re likely to have some fine weather.  The summer’s hot and the winter’s cold and during the spring the dust blows in from the Gobi desert.  The fall has two months or so that are quite reasonable.  The gym is closed on this second day of October the second day of the National Holiday.  So for the second day in a row I make my way out for a prolonged bike ride to get the heart moving. 

Returning to the compound after completing my giant’s rectangle of a ride, I heard an old New Yorican salsa tune.  Who is that voice.  Ah, I know.  That’s Cheo Feliciano.  I’d know that voice anywhere, though I can’t place this song. I’ve got my iPhone up in the best pocket of my short-sleeved shirt, as the head phone cable seems to flicker when I keep it in my pants pocket.  And regarding the phone I notice it says Joe Cuba. 

Joe Cuba and band from these year are is wonderful.  He must have been one of the only, major New York salsa groups to have the xylophone represented.  And the overall tempo and has little to do with Cal Tjader, the west coast vibes man.  Rather it was edgy, pushy music of sixties New York until we have the cross over work that yields Bustin Out and beyond.   And with that I put the phone back in my pocket.  But a nagging feeling kept pulling at me.  That voice is Cheo Feleciano.  Could it be that he played with Joe Cuba?  Indeed I looked it up tonight and he did.  That’s why he appears on Fania in the early seventies, seemingly out of nowhere with the fully realized song “Anacaona.”  He was the star vocalist of the Joe Cuba band.  Missed that.

I was so disappointed this morning.  I was chatting with someone on the phone, looking over what I’d written the night before and . . . it was gone.  The computer had rebooted and a draft had been lost.  I couldn’t believe it these days of regular auto-saving that the draft I’d worked on for an hour or more wasn’t lying about somewhere in an auto-saved something. I searched in every manner I could think of and came up with nothing.  I must have been presented with a draft to save and clicked the button in haste that said I didn’t want it.  And now like all those authors from centuries passed, who had their manuscripts destroyed by fire, I must sit down, in my own modest way and rewrite the same arc of emotion I’d outlined the other day.  The task felt doubly arduous as I wasn’t chiseling something from nothing but rather trying to redo, reimagine what had already been completed. 

And just now, for the first time in nearly five months, my writing is current.  I still must edit a bit and chose photos and publish, I ploughed through on this vacation day today and wrote entry after entry from the notes that I had taken for each of the days concerned.  Tomorrow I will begin to get them all up and on line.

Tuesday, 10/02/18