En el mar

My father (“Pop”) invented the world’s most lyrical alarm clock. As if by magic, the sultry, mellifluous sounds— trumpets, violins and guitars—of the mariachi disrupted my siblings and my childhood dreaming every Saturday morning. The soprano gravity of Mexican crooner Javier Solis’s booming, yet velvety soft voice pulled my half-asleep body towards its source: the hulky Panasonic cabinet record console with the built-in speakers. The Panasonic took up a big part of the red-carpeted space of our crowded Salvadoran immigrant apartment on Folsom street in San Francisco’s Mission district.

The Javier Solis album—one of Mom and Pop’s favorites—had a lot of great songs, the most beautiful of which was a song I hated because it meant my brothers, sister and I had to clean the red-carpeted living room. In 1970s San Francisco, the soothing beach music of Cuando Calienta el Sol felt like the screech of forced labor, the mellow music that denied me time that could’ve been better spent at Beach Chalet, the soccer field that faced a real gorgeous beach like the one Javier Solis was getting all hot and bothered at in the song.

Siento tu cuerpo vibrar cerca de mí
Es tu palpitar, es tu cara, es tu pelo
Son tus besos, me estremezco, oh, oh, oh

I wasn’t so sure about all that delirio and bodies vibrando against each at the beach oh-oh-oh stuff, but, as a member of my brother’s rather suspiciously named Salvadoran and Mexican kid soccer team—Club Conquistadores—I did love playing ball at Beach Chalet. If we won our games, sometimes we’d run across the Great Highway, slipping off our soccer cleats as we celebrated in the sand and surf by sliding down the dunes of Ocean Beach. If we lost our match, we’d wash away our sorrows with the waves, staring at the slaughter left by seagulls and other birds—crab shells and other carcasses on green carpet of slimy things spit out by the gorgeous Pacific. Eventually, I had to drag my victorious or defeated and sometimes muddy Conquistador boy’s body to our crowded Folsom street apartment—to the housecleaning drudgery signaled by Cuando Calienta el Sol.

With the passing of the years, however, the ebb and tide of my love-hate relationship with Cuando Calienta el Sol eventually came to a happy resolution: I grew to love the song and the images and memories and love of the Pacific ocean and its beaches it inspired. Forty-plus years later, I listen to the song and now I am the one vibrando with delirio as I oh-oh-oh with my beloved at the beach, nostalgic for the ocean after so many years of family, fun and life on its shores. At a time when climate change is heating up the Pacific and other oceans, there’s a tragic irony setting in at the sound of this sublime song about ‘when the sun heats up.’

The sun Javier Solis sang about combines with greenhouse gases to heat not just our bodies but the Pacific ocean itself. The shoreline and dunes I played on as a little Conquistador are eroding at an accelerated pace, as the warmer waters cause sea levels to rise. Further along the coast in either direction, children play on a California coast challenged by climate change; Seaside cliffs in my niece’s former hometown of Pacifica are crumbling to the point where houses are falling; Capistrano beach kids enjoy a boardwalk that’s being bolstered by bulldozers pushing boulders to create a gigantic barricade; All across the state, kids are learning to see the Pacific as place that’s as much about fear as it is about fun. These days, I still listen to Cuando Calienta el Sol with passion and nostalgia for la playa of childhood days past. But, with the advent of brave new world of my adult life, I listen to the song with an added concern, a concern for the kids of the future who will play on increasingly dangerous dunes, a concern for the Pacific, the source of so much joy and beauty its ancient waves make and inspire beautiful music, a concern that moves me to make sure that the music of the sun, ocean and beaches never ends.

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