The clear, crisp sounds of Flamenco fill our home, the music of the Bienal 2000 shows we saw in Spain. We have experienced incredible events this year.
Our memories of 2000, this first year of the millennium, are of friendship, trust, love, and marriage and Flamenco. Freddie and I were married on his sixty first birthday, June 10, 2000, on a sunny day at our home on this hill in Soquel (Santa Cruz) overlooking the ocean glimmering in the distance beyond the canyon and mountains.
Our wedding was like a fairiy tale and everything that we had hoped for. Our wedding picture is on our Holiday card this year. Last year we used a romantic fall engagement photo. It has been an interesting year since then. As we recovered from the culture shock of returning from Spain in mid September of 1999, we began to work intensively on preparing for our wedding. It became our consuming focus along with our music and dance and I know that I danced a little less than before with all the other distractions. But it was a wedding well worth it, a beautiful and meaningful celebration of our mutual commitment and our desire to spend our lives together.
But before that could take place, our friend Daniel Staffler called us and asked us if we would like to host a performance in March featuring Miguel Funi, the legendary Gypsy singer/dancer from Lebrija, Spain. Funi would be coming with David Jones, Freddies friend for forty years, from the days of the old Spaghetti factory in San Francisco and Davids wife Clara Mora, a wonderful Flamenco dancer. We had visited them last year in Madrid where they live. Neither Freddie nor I wanted to say no to this opportunity to have such an incredible concert in our home. So we took a break from our wedding planing and Freddie built a wonderful stage in a corner of our living room. We entertained eighty people. It was fun and we spent the following week with our guest artists, joining them in Berkeley for a week of concerts and classes.
Then we started back in on preparing for the wedding. And the wedding really did change something. We both felt different, as if the ritual were a doorway and we walked through. We were in such an altered state that we decided that we had to take an unplanned honeymoon to Big Sur shortly after our wedding, to just experience together, as a newly wed couple, what that was for us, what we had just done, what it meant, how it felt. It was on that honeymoon that Freddie tore his rotator cuff but we managed to control it with essential oils until we returned from our 2000 trip to Spain.
Last July, a day after we returned from Sweets Mill, the music camp we go to every year, our three grandchildren, Kyle, Katie, and Jacie, and their parents, Freddies daughter Maggie and her husband Jason, came to visit us. They are a wonderful, loving family and we had fantastic visit and wished they could have stayed longer. Our grandchildren are great and are a lot of fun too.
After they left, we finished unwrapping our wedding presents, wrote our thank yous and started to prepare for our two month honeymoon to Sevilla, Spain. That honeymoon was an intensive study trip for both of us. Freddie took guitar classes from his teacher Carlos Heredia almost every day. I took one private dance class learning an Alegra and one group class learning Bulera from my teacher, Concha Vargas five days a week. Three days a week I took her palmas class. And of course I had to practice every day so I could learn and polish a whole Alegras before I had to leave. It was more than intensive.
The first month in Spain we also attended almost nightly the shows of the Flamenco Bienal, Sevillas month long biannual Flamenco festival. Most of the current greats of Flamenco perform in this festival and we saw some incredible shows throughout September.
All my writing about this trip and many of our photos are up on our web site: <A HREF=”http://www.flamencoromantico.com/”> http://www.flamencoromantico.com/</A> in the Spain pages. If you dont have a computer and want to see my writings ask me for them and I will send them.
Freddie and I worked really hard in Spain and we were exhausted. The last two weeks we both took classes on the weekend in addition to our weekly classes, pushing ourselves hard because we were only there for two months. We joked that we would take a vacation at our home when we got back. However, a week after we returned Freddie had rotator cuff surgery at Stanford. Is that a vacation? Now he is busy healing from his shoulder surgery.
And I am slowly adding the name Mejia to all my paperwork. My written explanation of why I have added Mejia to my already existing names is on our web site under Marriage Vows. Our web site is growing as we add more writings and photos of our lives as they progress, like a much more fleshed out holiday letter. A quote from our web site Spain 99 writings about Concha, the sweet panther, comes up when you inquire about Concha Vargas in the Google internet search engine. I discovered it by accident when I was in Sevilla teaching my friend Susa about the internet.
My son Elun passed all his doctoral exams in history at U.C. Davis and is now working on his dissertation. His wife Donna just received her doctorate in history. In November they went to Germany. Donna presented at a conference for a week before returning home to teach and Elun stayed on until December 9 to continue research for his dissertation. They are a wonderful couple and seem extremely happy together. We are proud of them both.
Manolo, Freddies son and best man, and Manolo’s wife Alta were here for our wedding and helped us before and after as well. We had a lot of fun with them. They love to laugh. It is so nice to be connecting to this younger generation of ours. All three of our children and their families are such nice people. We are very lucky to have them and are enjoying them all.
I still do my shamanic work and see psychotherapy clients when we are not in Spain. Of course I am also still dancing as well.
And Freddie, with the incredible new guitar he bought in Spain, (a belated birthday gift from me for his sixtieth birthday), practiced every day until his operation. He plays beautiful new falsetas that sound like heaven.
So Freddie and I continue on lifes path together as husband and wife. We still love to share our music and dance with each other. We still hold hands as we take out our garbage, as we sit by my mothers tree, as we inspect and talk to the many plants we are nourishing. We still wake up smiling at each other and being thankful for what is as we look out the window at the growing and blooming vine on the arch which is much more full this year than it was last year, the ocean, the trees with their busy birds. But now Freddie turns to me and calls me Mrs. Mejia. I call him my Mr. Mejia and we laugh.
Flamenco Romntico still fits us, as our lives get better and better. And every day our love grows, even when it seems as if it cant get any better. We want to share our happiness with all of you. We wish you all happy holidays filled with peace, beauty, health, and love.
Love,
Marianna and Federico Mejia
Flamenco Romntico
Marianna & Federico Mejia