On California Street
As I sauntered through the bustling noon crowd toward the Versateller machine at Bank of America, I viewed my busy surroundings with a great deal of pleasure, as I had been doing every day this week. I looked upwards at the enormously tall buildings, intricate structures of metal and glass, reflecting northern California’s springtime sunshine. I enjoyed watching the diversity of people around me: the yuppies in business suits and briefcases, the more casually attired repair and maintenance workers, and the ever-present homeless specimens of humanity with their cardboard signs and creative approaches to monetary acquisition. Then I saw the trite billboard for the California Cheese Association that read, “Why Hearts Are Left in San Francisco—It’s the Cheese!”
At once, I drifted back to a time, even before Howard Davidson, to my freshman year when La Sierra University was still La Sierra College. I had been dating Rafael Gonzales, a wonderfully talented tenor from Argentina, who had needed a piano accompanist as he performed in the local Spanish-speaking churches. He was a large young man, but extremely refined in his mannerisms and obviously intelligent. He was immediately impressed with my musical skills, and eventually came to adore me for personal reasons as well. But his dark skin and non-Caucasian features did not endear him to my racially prejudiced grandmother when his adoration of me became too evident.
It was Rafael himself who painfully broke the relationship. “Juliana, you are the first woman I’ve ever been in love with,” he wrote in a poignant goodbye letter, “and I know that if I ever fall in love again, it will have to be with someone who is as wonderful as you are.”
As a touch of irony, Rafael and his equally gifted sister Lourdes, barely two years later, produced a recording with both Howard and me providing the accompaniments on organ and piano. And, later still, Rafael and Lourdes were soloists in Howard’s and my wonderfully fantastic musical wedding. After that, Rafael went off to Ohio to take the dietitian curriculum at Kettering Medical Center. The last that I had heard about him, he had married someone named Elsa. She must be as wonderful as I am, I had thought.
Through this momentary reverie on California Street as I crossed in front of a cable car, I could hear Rafael’s strong, romantic voice singing, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco...” And as I watched his gestures and listened to his inflections, it was clearly in the same genre as the fastidious queens I had come to know so well. I wonder where Rafael is now and how he and Elsa are doing.
Epilogue:
It would be decades later before I would ever know what happened to Rafael. I saw his sister Lourdes once in 1997 when Howard and I attended Alumni Homecoming at La Sierra that year. Rafael and Elsa eventually moved to Puerto Rico, which is where they were living when Dr. Rafael Gonzales died on September 11, 2018. I felt a sadness that I never saw Rafael again and especially that I never met Elsa, the woman who is “as wonderful as I am.”
