Holiday Letter 2000

 

Our memories of the year 2000, this first year of the millennium, are of friendship, trust, love, and marriage. Freddie and I were married on his sixty first birthday, June 10, 2000, here at our home on the hill in Soquel (Santa Cruz) overlooking the beautiful ocean glimmering in the distance beyond the canyon and mountains.  

Our wedding was beautiful and everything that we had hoped for. One of our wedding pictures is on our Holiday card this year. Last year we used an engagement photo. It has been an interesting year since then. As we came to from the culture shock of returning  from Spain in mid September of 1999, we began to plan 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 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, Freddie’s friend for forty years, from the days of the old Spaghetti factory in San Francisco and David’s wife Clara Mora, a wonderful Flamenco dancer whom we had visited 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 first tore his rotator cuff but we managed to control it with essential oils until we returned from our next trip to Spain.

In July we went to Sweet’s Mill, the music camp we go to every year. A day after we returned, our three grandchildren, Kyle, Katie, and Jacie, and their parents, Freddie’s 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. The grandchildren are great and are a lot of fun too.

Then we finished unwrapping our wedding presents and wrote our thank you’s 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 Alegría and one group class learning Bulería from my teacher, Concha Vargas five days a week. Then, 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 Alegrías 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, Sevilla’s 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: http://www.flamencoromantico.com/  in the Spain pages. If you don’t have a computer and want to see my writings ask me for them and I will send them. 

We both worked really hard in Spain and we were exhausted. The last two weeks Freddie and I both took classes on the week end in addition to the weekly classes.  We were pushing ourselves hard because we were only there for two months. Freddie and I joked that we would take a vacation at our home when got back. However, a week after we returned Freddie had rotator cuff surgery at Stanford.

Now that I am back, I am slowly getting the name Mejia added to all my paperwork. My explanation of why I have added Mejia to my already existing names in 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 my web site Spain ‘99 writings about Concha, the sweet panther, comes up when you inquire about Concha Vargas in the Googol internet search engine. I discovered it by accident when I was in Sevilla teaching Susa about the internet.

My son Elun passed his exams and is now working on his doctoral dissertation. in history. His wife Donna just received her doctorate in history.  In November they went to Germany. Donna presentied at a conference for a week before returning home to teach and Elun stayed until almost Christmas to continue research for his dissertation. They are a wonderful couple and seem extremely happy together. We are proud of them both. 

Manolo, Freddie’s son and his 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 continue to do my shamanic work and to see psychotherapy clients when I am not in Spain. Of course I am continuing my dance 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 is playing beautiful new falsetas that sound like heaven. 

So Freddie and I continue on life’s 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 mother’s 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. 

So Flamenco Romántico still fits us, as our lives get better and better. And every day our love grows, even when it seems as if it can’t get any better. We want to share our happiness with all of you.

We wish you all happy holidays filled with peace, beauty, and love.

Love,

Marianna and Federico Mejia