Serial (The Quickies), Part 4

4. In Nicaragua ballet is not considered a career for a man. All Rubén’s classmates from Jesuit school studied engineering or agronomy and then managed their families’ vast farms, growing cotton in the old days (before the world price collapsed), then peanuts, also sugar cane, palma Africana and coffee. Such was not even possible for Rubén. When Rubén saw --stretching end on end before him - the sugar canes waving their razor sharp leaves in the wind, he felt the urge to leap and twirl in tune with that wind. On his father’s coffee finca he performed duets with coffee trees at dawn. He spent exactly one miserable month at Rochester Institute of Technology before heading to New York City. He got a job waiting tables. Then he met Sara Whitby who fell for him so hard she could have cracked concrete. He took classes at Juilliard and danced everywhere he could. For Rubén, the lasting significance of his brief marriage to Sara was that she introduced him to her chiropractor.