Our last morning at Casa de Nueva Esperanza we wake, pack, clean, breakfast, say farewell to the parrots, and get a taxi that miraculously accomodates the three of us and our (physical) baggage and check into the Hotel la Mansion del Bosque, the place where Debra and numerous of her friends have usually stayed in previous visits. We stow our bags and, waiting for Beverly to pick us up in her car, take a stroll through Benito Juarez park whose entrance is catty-corner from our hotel. (NB: the term stems from English adoption of the late medieval French word “quatre,” then often spelled “catre” and describing the diagonal position of dots on the four of dice or cards.)

Lovely park and garden: entrance lined with jewelry and kid-toy vendors, large play area with all sorts of apparatuses for kids, basketball court, raised bandstand, paved paths meandering through varieties of fountains and foliage. A frequent venue for weddings, we’re told.

Beverly arrives and we load into her Honda and head out of town for Zandunga, one of Debra’s favorite activities. We get a little lost on the way but everyone except a couple of teenage girls tries to be helpful so, after an hour, we arrive in the middle of nowhere off a sort-of side road and are directed to park in a large dusty lot with quite a few other cars.

Zandunga is a live jazz and music venue founded by the eminent guitarist Gil Gutierrez and his wife Rebecca — guess who does the organizing and directing of the myriad staff here in the rolling hills outside San Miguel while Gil and his 5-piece band play with several guest-shot singers and a lot of elan. (The Z-word originally meant a traditional Mexican waltz but became the unofficial anthem of the Tehuantepec isthmus in Oaxaca, the province in which Gil was born far south on the underbelly of Mexico along the Pacific Ocean.)

The venue, the food, the music, the drinks are lovely and lively and loud and NOW! and crescendo across the dry dusty valley under a white-hot sun burning in a cloudless azure sky. A light breeze flutters hundreds of small frilly flags hanging from the roof and the horns cut through the heat and just make the feet move so even the tables of us aging bougie hippies with huaraches and sweat-stained Tilly hats hoping we still have the moves and that table of women of a certain age dressed to the nines coyly looking at who’s looking at them get carried to that place where music IS the heart of Mexico and you forget yourself and just gotta dance (h/t to Tom Wolfe?).

We take a direct route back to the city where we spend the late afternoon in Beverley’s three-story condo with water and tres leches cake. Since we’ve been eating and drinking all day, we forego dinner and retire early.