Spanish views from a small town

Yesterday, Palm Sunday, was the start of Holy Week. Many Spaniards are still religious and will attend Masses and processions this week. The cities in Galicia with the most visited services are Foz, Viveiro, and Ferrol, though almost every city and town has some kind of procession, at least on Good Friday. The most widely known throughout the world are the processions in the cities of Andalucía, especially Sevilla. Some of these are nocturnal, and truly fascinating. One wonders how no fire ever gets started, with all the candles. Most people who join the procession are there because they are practicing Catholics, but every year there are more foreign tourists who simply want to see something they're not used to.  This year it seems the weather will be sunny and hot in most of Spain. I'm sure many are happy about that. In recent years rain has had processions cancelled, because most of the figures are historically important and their integrity cannot be risked. Whenever a proc...

I hate pedestrian crossings. Not as a pedestrian, but as a driver. Yes, they're necessary. Yes, drivers have to show respect to unprotected pedestrians. But some pedestrians should also show respect to harrassed drivers.  Some times I drive up to a crossing and someone is meandering across, checking their phones, oblivious to the fact that a car is waiting. They could be walking in the park just as well. These people will not see you even if you honk your horn. Other times someone is walking on the catwalk. A turn of the hip here, a twist of the shoulder there, and you are obliged to stop and admire the latest fashion of Me . Then there are those who cross leisurely and may glance down at you, challenging you to make any gesture of protest. These are likely to whip out the phone and call the local cops with your license plate number and accuse you of verbal assault if you dare show any sign of impatience. My favorites are the last-minute crossers. You approach a crosswalk a...

Yesterday morning I saw an update from the New York Times on Facebook talking about an airplane that had just crashed over the French Alps. As the hours wore on more information came in. It was a low-cost German airline flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. There were a hundred fifty souls on board. At least forty-five were Spanish, around sixty German and another forty of other nationalities, including Turks who were living in Germany. But during the afternoon other details came in, including that two opera singers were returning after performing a Wagner opera at the Liceu in Barcelona, and that one of them was returning with her husband and baby. Another detail was that eleven high school students with two of their teachers were returning home after an exchange with a high school near Barcelona.  The stories were all saddening, but, somehow, that story threatened to drag me into an agony of empathetic despair. The kids were around fifteen and sixteen years old and I remembered ...

From the air small villages and towns look neat and tidy, tucked into different squares of green that look well tended and carefully nurtured. As you drive through those small towns and villages, though, the squares of green are more often than not run over by brambles and shrubs, left fallow years ago. The villages and towns are neat and tidy, but you will see shells of houses, sorry structures that look unloved, with shuttered windows and falling tiles. Every village and town have abandoned houses, whose owners have died, leaving no descendents, or who simply can't keep up a property that to them is not worth the bother. In our village there are two abandoned houses, large and manorial both. One is almost in the woods, next to the dolmen lately rediscovered, the other is at the crossroads. The one near the woods must have been built about seventy years ago by one of the richer people in the village. But his son eventually lived in the old house on the main road and when the fat...

Just last week some neighbors "discovered" a covered dolmen in the woods behind our village. I put in the quotation marks because those same neighbors and others throughout the years already knew the area. They had played there when they were children and had never realized just what they were playing in until one of them took a walk through the woods the other day. It had never come to the attention of the authorities, so it has probably been untouched, except for unknowing children, for hundreds of years.  The strange thing is that it's almost intact. The only uncovered area is the entrance, where the stones are still standing, holding up the dirt around it. It's only missing the cover stone. Of course, it may have been dug up hundreds or thousands of years ago. Nearby there are some other dolmens that were examined by archeologists about forty years ago. All were empty except for one that had a Roman spear abandoned in it. We're surrounded by history here. ...

But not any time soon, though. From when you ask for an appointment to the moment you actually sit in the specialist's office you will have noticeably aged in the time that has gone by. When you start to have a certain ache somewhere or your general practitioner thinks it would be best for you to visit a specialist there begins a journey whose end is lost in the mists of time. And, of course, it depends on the specialist. Forget about getting rid of any pain in your bones and joints. Unless it's an emergency and a bone is broken, getting a traumatologist to see you for your first appointment is a lot like undertaking a journey from Boston to San Francisco walking. And you'll probably get there before you get called for your appointment.  One December my husband had a sudden pain in his right knee that made working very difficult and sleep almost impossible. He went to his GP and was told to make an appointment with a traumatologist. He was given the first appointment for...

I like to drive. I like to take the car and go for a long drive along sweeping roads and lanes, listening to the motor and feeling the road beneath through the steering wheel. There are some mornings when I will go out for no reason at all, just to breathe in a change of scene and think my own thoughts in the driver's seat. How far I drive depends on what time I leave the house and the cost of gas. I've gotten used to driving with a stick shift and I've gotten used to the vagaries of Spanish roads and Spanish drivers. I had an easy start after all, I learned to drive in Boston. I don't know why, but Boston drivers have long been known as aggressive and inventive drivers. More so, even, than New York drivers. Even so, when I was learning to drive I thought I would never be able to drive in Spain. From vacations I had spent here during my childhood my impression was the Spanish drivers were worse than Boston drivers. And there was a time when I thought getting a lice...

Milú was born in our barn almost eight years ago. He was one of a litter of seven and the only one still living after a year. From the beginning he wanted to be with people and would climb on my father's shoulder and sit there. He was born with health problems, though. His tail was broken at the tip probably since before birth. His eyes were always teary and no amount of drops would clear them completely. He would get diarrheas and had problems with his teeth. But he didn't seem to care. He was a very tranquil cat. He lived for eating, sleeping, and finding a warm lap. If someone was sitting down and he was nearby, he would try to squeeze himself onto the available lap. He didn't care who it was. He even tried to crawl into my students' laps if they let him. He avoided violence at all costs. Sometimes two of our other cats would get into screaming fights and he would find a place to hide, only coming out hours after the disturbance. He simply wanted everyone ...

I remember seeing that slogan on billboards over thirty years ago back in Boston for a brand of cigarettes that was aimed at women. And while the company was telling women that they were a long way from the days when smoking was frowned upon in women, the truth is that women have travelled a long way in this past century. Though they still have a long way to go to be considered a complete social and work equal with men. Of course, in countries like Spain it seems they have travelled two centuries in just over forty years. "Guide for the good wife." To begin with, during Franco's regime they were treated as minors practically all their lives. Men came of age at twenty-one. Women came of age at twenty-five. And they could not leave the parental home before that. They could only leave to get married, with parental permission. When my mother was married, back in 1953 (she was twenty-four), she ceded all legal power over to her husband. That meant she couldn't get a...

Goodbye, my love, goodbye. I don't know why that song by Demis Roussos came into my head. But it got me thinking. And I thought about an airport, where saying goodbye can be so hard. And I remembered taking my husband's eleven-year-old niece at the beginning of January to the airport to go back to her parents in Mallorca after a Christmas visit with her grandparents. And I remembered picking up my brother-in-law just before Christmas at a train station when he visited his parents from Barcelona. And I remembered all the times I went to pick up relatives and drop them off. And how scattered we are. And how this is a country of emigrants.  Spain, and especially Galicia, has been sending people abroad since the end of the nineteenth century. Before then, actually, though that's when it stepped up. In the early part of the twentieth century most left for South America, Cuba, and the U.S. Every family had someone "facendo as Américas" , doing the Americas, working ab...

Years ago, the small township where I live was known to be one of two towns in all of Spain with the most bars per inhabitant. Since back then there were probably less than eleven thousand people living here, that's a lot of bars. In the middle of town you really can't go five steps without seeing another bar, tavern, tea shop, or café. And they all have licenses to sell liquor. Liquor isn't as regulated as in America. Almost every establishment where you can sit down and drink sells liquor. There are no special liquor stores, either. Here you buy your wine, beer, and hard liquor in every grocery store and supermarket. That was one of the things that shocked me a little when I moved here. Alcohol is not seen as such a demon as in the States. Kids can buy and consume wine and beer when they're sixteen and other alcohols when they turn eighteen. Wine actually forms part of Spanish gastronomic culture and some meals are unthinkable without a bottle of wine on the table. ...