Hugo Schwyzer

I’m a little bleary-eyed this morning after two back-to-back nights of five hours of sleep. Eating a vegan diet does enable me to cut back a bit on the number of hours I need, but I still seem to do best when I’ve had a minimum of six. Given how busy our lives are without human children, the real question we both have is how it is that we will adapt to having a kid. What does it look like when two Type A personalities who want to go-go-go 18 hours a day suddenly have a small child? No, we’re not announcing anything, folks — just musing together. Some things will have to give, and that’s a prospect that fills me with considerable ambivalence.

We’ve had some of my wife’s family in town, and last night, my wife, brother-in-law, and I took their mother to see Juanes at the Nokia Theater downtown. Juanes is, as most of my readers will know, one of Colombia’s two most famous rock stars (the sublime Shakira is the other). We’ve been fans of his for years, and even though I have only a limited understanding of his lyrics, I’ve always found his pop hooks to be particularly infectious. It was a delight to see so many multi-generational groups in the audience last night; though my wife and I brought her dear mother, I saw several grandmother-daughter-granddaughter pairings enjoying a Mother’s Day evening out together. The audience was, of course, overwhelmingly Latino, but not exclusively so.

When Juanes dedicated one number to the Afro-Colombian people, my wife and mother-in-law exploded with delight. My mother-in-law was born into an African-Colombian family in Santa Marta, on the northeastern Colombian coast; she bequeathed to my wife that marvelous mixed heritage of West African, Spanish, and indigenous American influences. Too often in Colombia, “whites” ignore or malign the sizable Afro-Colombian minority. To have Juanes, the consummate Colombian rock star and perhaps, after Juan Valdez, the nation’s most recognizable male export, celebrate the African influence on his country and his music was welcome indeed.

I danced in the aisles. While my wife and in-laws moved their hips with easy and rhythmic abandon, I danced in that traditionally self-conscious white boy way. When it comes to distance running, I know how to center myself in my core. When it comes to dancing, however, my center seems to be located in my trapezius muscles, and I scrunch my shoulders and rotate them while shuffling my feet. I was teased good-naturedly by my family and by others around me, but I was happy as a clam. The fact that I understood about 50% of what Juanes said from the stage struck me as a special triumph.