When I first came to San Miguel in 2009, I enrolled in a Spanish-language school called El Centro Bilingue, and there made the acquaintance and later the friendship of a woman from Japan named Satomi. We spent the rest of her vacation time palling around together, sharing meals and having adventures finding various sites in town with frequent stops for photographs. Many of these experiences found their way into my first book about San Miguel, “A Lifetime to Get Here.” Years later, Satomi returned to SMA and stayed with me on a couple of occasions, and even though there were many, many years when we did not see each other or even exchange emails, we were always in touch around Christmastime.
Fast forward almost 14 years, and I received an email from Satomi—just a week or so before Christmas—informing me that friends of hers, Attila and Mary, whom she had met in Ohio, were coming to SMA for about a month and would I like to meet them? Well, of course I would, and did. Mary and I exchanged emails and nailed down a date for lunch at the Santa Ana Café in the biblioteca. Conversation flowed easily, and they shared with me the horrors of their Air BnB: in a lower-class colonia, not the ”middle-class neighborhood” the Air BnB write-up had promised, directly across the street from an entertainment venue that played loud music all night long; an uncomfortable, saggy mattress; lots of noises, including barking dogs and borrachos (drunks) from the establishment across the street; trash everywhere; and on and on it went. Their first night there, they were not able to get to sleep until 6 a.m., when the source of all of the commotion finally closed. They were desperate to find another place, but this was Christmas week and everything would already be taken or be way out of their budget.
After lunch, I invited them to accompany me back to where I live, Casa de los Soles, to see if they had any vacancies, as I knew they would be as comfortable, happy, and well-rested as I was living there. By some miracle, Soles did have an apartment vacant until the date they planned to leave, and it was the exact same apartment I had lived in happily for nine months as I awaited the vacancy of the 3-bedroom, 2-bath place across the patio. I mean, what are the chances?
After checking with me on a number of details about the offered apartment and after much unpleasantness with the owner of the Air BnB in the process of getting out of their agreement and receiving a very small refund, they gratefully moved to Soles, and as Mary said, “had the first good night’s sleep since they’d arrived in SMA.”
Attila is a guitarist, and I was invited to an open mic performance at Paprika two days before Christmas, which I was pleased to attend, where, in addition to many “old hippies” playing familiar songs from our era, the much younger Attila beautifully performed four of his original compositions. During some idle conversation at the venue, I learned from Mary that her husband’s middle name was Joseph. I invited them to come to my place on Christmas Eve for a drink and some nibbles. And I expected we would continue to see each other during the rest of their time in SMA.
Tracing the line between me meeting and befriending Satomi and us keeping in touch all of those years and then being introduced to Attila and Mary and them winding up in my former apartment, well, if that isn’t magic, and maybe a little bit of Christmas magic, too (need I remind you of Mary and Joseph looking for lodging at this time of year?), well I don’t know what else to call it!
Cynthia Claus, 12/24/22