SOMETHING HAPPENED TODAY: SAN MIGUEL AND COUNTRY MUSIC
Compared to yesterday something happened today. In the early afternoon I met Martha Nelson at Pulp and Spout Vegan Cafe For lunch. She is setting up two yoga weeklong retreats in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico in January. This last January I spent a month in San Miguel during her yoga weeks and joined in some of their activities and stayed in the house she had rented when there was free space. She was inviting me to come again as a hanger on, enjoying the activities and some of the meals but not doing yoga. And I am very interested because I like spending time in San Miguel and I really like being in the company of friends while I do it. She is going to figure out my costs and let me know. I look forward to it.
Then in the evening I stopped by MAD Brew House and Pizzaria to listen to country music. Baxter, from Barnardsville, a large man with a bushy red beard and a very deep voice sang song after song. What was very apparent from the time I sat down was that the audience was not the Capitola folks, transplants from afar who were escaping urban life for life in the rural mountains. This crowd were all local folks. The grandparents of the woman sitting across the table from me had run a small grocery store with the only gas pump in town in the building that became the Star Diner with the old gas pump and the antique car sitting in front simply there to give contrasting atmosphere to the expensive gourmet meals in side. It was a place to throw expensive birthday parties and festive Sunday brunches and not for those who had long lived in Marshall. Now the Star Diner, with the pump and car still in front, has been flooded and closed and the owners are starting up a Star taqueria across the road in the diner that had been where the long time residents hung out, now after the flood, is shifting upscale like much of the rest of Marshall.
The crowd listening to Baxter was raucous, hooting and hollering and exchanging banter with each other. The songs were a mixture for me of Merle Haggard and Johnnie Cash with his voice just as deep and resonant as theirs. I’ll include a video of his playing which is hard to hear over the talk of people on the front porch of the restaurant.
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BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 