listener supported WNYC Studios. Food Tula. The sun has already set and all that's left is a strip of orange in the sky.

The people here are the last dragglers from a day at the beach,

and there are lots of them,

listening to music, flirting, posing, drinking, swimming.

This is dusk at Ocean Park on a Sunday.

It hugs Santurse in San Juan, but if you squint, you could be in Miami, tons of oiled, glistening bodies.

It's honestly kind of a cheesy beach. And this is where I confess that I like Ocean Park. It

feels like a public park and I just love watching everyone.

There are always different clusters of friends, the fitness buff, the coccolos, the surfers,

the hipsters, the troopi goths, the tourists,

the caccos, all enjoying the same space, all blasting different

competing music, topped off with Montecaldos and medayas for sale, and even some fenced-off

sea turtle nests.

Sylvia Resash, the singer, was born and raised here in Santurse a century ago.

So she might have had this speech in mind for one of her most famous Boleros, Olas and Arenas.

Maybe she also stood here, at dusk on a Sunday and contemplated this relationship between

sea and sand before putting pen to paper. She sings from the point of view of the sand, stretched over the beach, and she pleads with a wave that almost touches her, but then pulls back.

Heres to the immeens a whole, then pulls back. This wave sometimes crashes against wet sand and she gets her hopes up,

this wave sometimes crashes against wet sand and she gets her hopes up thinking that it'll reach her.

Her voice rolls like the surf and you can feel her loss.

Grasping at a lover who is as completely indifferent to her as a wave is to dry sand.

She has a way of getting into you, like it's so passionate and you feel very connected to the island to Puerto Rico.

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