Dancing in The Mission

The first thing I see as the escaltor to the street at the 24th St. BART station lifts me to the outside are huge cement tiles imprinted with modern designs, set on a lined cement wall. Immediately my body relaxes, like I've found something I didn't know I was searching for, like I had been unconsciously holding my breath and now I can exhale and breath in something fresh and new.

Salsa music is playing as I step out into The Mission. Could it be live music? Oh yes! a five-piece band playing in the light winter sunshine. At least fifty people are watching, but one man, one lone man, is dancing. I settle into the edge of the crowd; I know this is going to be good.

He is brown, with thick short-cut black hair that is mostly silver and white on top. His trousers, collared shirt and zipper jacket are pressed cotten; his shoes leather with thin soles, the best kind for dancing. He has been doing this for decades I can tell. He dances that way I do when I am in my kitchen and I've just made coffee and the morning sun is shining and the right rythym hits just so.

Everything is in his feet. His body, his hips and arms, they follow, but his feet are tapping to the music, step step step cuff, step step step cuff, that is the touchstone, he never misses it. He dances on the beat, and then, oh yes, taken by the sun and the sound he dances in between the beats, on top of the beat, to the side of the beat. He finds the pauses and the waterfalls surrounding the beat and he rides them in a cascade to the bottom, then hits ground again, unerring - step step step cuff, step step step cuff, right there like he never left it. His arms swing wide, he approaches the beat like a new lover: anything can happen; ecstasy in his eyes.

I want to stay and watch him for as long as he dances, I want to throw my bag and coat on the sidewalk and find freedom in the sunshine in the middle of the beat. I know that place.

But in the ten minutes that I have been watching, three men have already approached me - two asking me to dance, the third chatting away about his recovery. I like him the best. He is not trying to take something from me, so I can bear his presence a bit more. He tells me the band is Cubano; he tells me he is one year in recovery and his sponsor tells him to do random acts of kindness now and then. He presses a pair of Native American beaded earrings in my hand as a gift; they are made by his friend Lily, for whom he now sells jewelry. The other week he made five hundred dollars for Lily, and when he went to see her she was eating bologna. He said "Lily I just made you $500, why are you eating bologna?" and Lily said, "Because I like bologna." He makes me laugh, but what I want most is to be free like the man in the leather shoes and the music and the light. I cannot dance there like no one is watching me, and I cannot continue watching this man in peace as I would like.  But I am free to move; so I step into the sunshine and breath, and walk.