Spanish views from a small town

When we were married my husband and I travelled to Boston because I wanted to show him where I had grown up. He loved it all (except the food, but that's another story), especially the politeness of the people. He was amazed that wherever we went, people would smile, say "Hello!" or "Thank you!" and look like they really meant it. He wasn't accustomed to that.  Because if you go to an office, a bank, a store, etc., where someone will wait on you, friendliness is the last thing you notice. Yes, they'll smile, say "Hello" and possibly "Thank you" but they'll mostly look like they're waiting for the fly to leave. Especially in banks. There has been a revolution in banking due to the crisis, and banks have swallowed other banks and almost all cooperative banks (that didn't charge for everything) have disappeared into the whale's belly of large, impersonal banks that only look at the bottom line. So, if there used to be t...

The season isn't quite over. In August we tend to have the last celebrations. The first (and more numerous) are in June. No, not weddings, communions. Though they're almost like weddings here. The crisis has stopped some families from going overboard, but it's still too much. I remember my First Communion in Boston. It was in the month of May, and since the church had a school attached, very numerous. All the second-graders who attended the school, and practicing Catholics who didn't, made their communion en masse. No exceptions. I remember we occupied almost half the pews. After private pictures in front of the church, and a short stint at a photographer's studio, we went home, where my mother cooked for us and our guests, ten people total. There were two children invited with whom I played. Though it was May it was cold and we stayed indoors. (Around that date we had a late snowstorm.) That was a typical communion in Boston in those days. In these days here a ...

People think of Spain and flamenco dancers pop into their head. So do bull fights, or the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Maybe beaches. Youngsters in the north of Europe will think of Mallorca and the drunken revelries. But not one of these things is relevant to all of Spain. There is no one tradition that defines Spanish culture. Most likely that is true of just about every country in Europe. Southern France will have different customs from northern France. In fact, there are ethnic minorities in France few are aware of. There are German speakers in Alsace-Lorraine, Catalans and Basques near the Pyrenees, and Celtic Bretons in Brittany. Yet one could say France has been pretty much one country since Louis the Pious in the 800's. Not Spain. Even after the Reconquest and the capitulation of Granada in 1492, the kingdom of Spain was shaky. The Catholic Monarchs were monarchs of their own kingdoms within Spain over which the other had limited rights. Even after the consolidation o...

Today is the celebration of St. James the Greater, apostle and brother to St. John the Evangelist; patron saint of Spain and the reason for the existence of the city of Santiago de Compostela. We take saints seriously here. It's a holiday in the region of Galicia and our "national" holiday in which we celebrate our region and its history and culture. (Every region has its "national" holiday, generally on the day of a saint special to the region.) Unfortunately for the general public, this year it falls on a Saturday so those who don't work on Saturday have no extra day off this summer.  St. James is attributed with having preached the gospel in Spain and northern Portugal. While he was in Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza) the Virgin Mary apparently appeared to him upon a pillar and told him to go back to Judea. He did and was subsequently martyred. With one stone we have the birth of two legends. One is of the Virgin of the Pillar ( Virgen del Pilar ), venerated i...

There is fauna here, though not always visible. There are flies, spiders, mosquitos(!), mice, rats, rabbits, bats, crows, wrens, eagles, falcons, owls, foxes, boars, and the very occasional wolf. It's normal in the house to have the gamut of insects (don't bother with the spray, others will install themselves as soon as it wears off). Also normal are the mice and rats in the barn. The others are strictly outdoor types, and mostly nocturnal, so they tend to be camera shy. So imagine my surprise the other night when, me in the study and my daughter in the kitchen, she asks, "How did the bat get in?"  I go into the kitchen to see a small, black shape quickly flying back and forth the length of the kitchen. I close the door and my daughter opens the window. Two of our cats are in the kitchen, one under the table, not sure what's going on, and the other on the table, full hunter instinct on, trying to swat at the bat. I have visions of hair entanglement and rabies sh...

We live on a country road that has had street lights only since a little over twenty years ago. Before that, when we used to come on vacation, the summer nights would be luminous only with the stars and the moon. And the fireflies. I remember sitting out on the porch at night, looking up at the millions of stars and the swath of the Milky Way we used to be able to see. The first time I saw the fireflies it appeared as if a little star had fallen in the grass. I remember how excited I was to see my first firefly. After that I would watch most nights. And I discovered there were more than one, but not as many as my parents said there used to be when they were young.  But now they seem to have disappeared. I think my daughter has only seen them once. At night now we can barely see the stars unless we look out our back windows toward the dark hill behind the house. We have a street light right next to our house. There is no danger of a thief breaking in under that harsh light. But ...

He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it. Then Spain is going to repeat a lot of stuff. Beginning with Franco. Yes, you would think that a dictator who died just forty years ago would be remembered along with his deeds, but not in this country. Older people will sometimes talk about him, usually with nostalgia. They'll say that under Franco the Guardia Civil would patrol all the villages on foot and if anything ever got stolen it would appear the next day, etc. Yes, the quasi-military police force would patrol on foot, but they wouldn't be looking only for thieves. They would be listening to people talking around them and if someone were acting suspiciously. They could bring someone in for questioning on a whim. That, the older people choose to forget. But younger people mostly don't know anything about Franco. Some don't even know he was Spanish. That can be because of two things. Parents our age and older, who have had it with grandparents who never stopped ...

Whenever I have a little health problem, such as a sudden skin eruption, strong cold, slight fever, etc., I don't go to the doctor. Because I would need an appointment. There is never an opening on the same day and by the time there is an opening, I could be dying. To be seen as an emergency case means that unless I'm dying I will probably be waiting four hours before I'm called in, looked at, and given a prescription, all in three minutes. When I notice something start up I do what most people here do, I go to the pharmacy. There, I'll get something for my affliction. Or be told to go wait in the waiting room because the symptoms are troubling. Now, a pharmacy in the U.S. is a walled off and probably glassed off area at the back of a drugstore where you hand in a prescription and after a few minutes the pharmacist hands you a bottle of pills. If you have any health questions the pharmacist will almost always tell you to ask the doctor and he will NEVER give any medic...

I've seen them today, ready to pounce on the unwary tourist. They were carrying sprigs of rosemary in their hands, wearing flouncy, long skirts, their shiny long black hair pulled back into buns, their swarthy skin even darker from the summer sun. They were Spanish gypsy women, ready to divest a tourist of fifty euros for "reading" their palms. Yes, they exist. Or, rather, they propagate a myth from the past for their benefit. Most gypsies nowadays live from selling clothing and other things in the weekly markets, others from finding junk to sell to the junk dealer, a numbered few from drugs and even fewer from continuing the myth of being able to see the future. These women travel in small groups, waylaying people to see if one will fall. Generally, they do fall, but mostly foreigners. The gypsy will come up to you, holding out a sprig of rosemary, pressing you to accept it. They claim it will bring you luck because it has been blessed by a gypsy witch. If you accept i...

My daughter was waiting for me to pick her up at the beach. Next to her were a couple of girls whom she didn't know, also waiting. They were about a couple of years younger than her and talking about subjects they would have to study next year in school. One of them was philosophy. One of the girls asked the other, "What do you study in philosophy?" "What they said years ago, the philosophers and stuff they thought about. And I don't know why, because it just doesn't interest me at all." My daughter, who is studying philosophy at college, was doing a jaw-drop in her mind. That's the way it generally is. Teenagers usually develop an allergy to thinking about anything other than the here and now. Most kids have never been taught that today is a step to tomorrow, not just a day to lie about, do nothing, and get drunk as a skunk. While that has happened in every generation, it seems to be reaching epidemic proportions now. Where does the fault lie? ...

Yesterday my daughter went to renew her national identity card. First, she went to a photographer for the pictures. She found one in the historical area of the city and went in. The photographer told her to sit on a stool, snapped a couple of pictures and went about printing them. When he brought them out to her she was surprised at her image. The photographer saw her surprise and explained. He said he had changed an eye that was too small because of her glasses and erased some blemishes on her forehead and a mole on her cheek he had thought she wouldn't want on the photo. He didn't know who he was explaining to. My daughter is eighteen but she isn't like most eighteen year olds. She dresses the way she wants to, not the way everyone else dresses, and couldn't care less about her image. If she has blemishes, she has them. If you don't like them, don't look at them. As long as she's clean she doesn't care if she doesn't fit others' expectations...

Last night, as I was about to take my daughter to meet with friends for a night out, I saw that my father hadn't closed the basement door after saying he would close it. A small explanation here. My eighty-four year old father lives in his own house. We live right next door. The basement door of his house looks out onto a shared patio and we come and go through it all day until he closes and locks it in the evening. Normally, he closes it around seven o'clock because he likes to go to bed early. But last night at eleven it was still open. I closed it and went upstairs to exit through his front door. He was up in the kitchen, warming some milk. How strange! I asked him why he hadn't closed the door and he answered that he had just opened it because that's what he did every day at the same hour. We had a small, fast discussion in which I pointed out that it was eleven at night and he said it was early morning. In the end, it turned out he had fallen deeply asleep, had sle...

This afternoon, shortly after lunch, there is a saint's procession in town. The entire town. It's motorized. The church isn't trying to force religion upon us with that, it's simply that the saint being honored is the patron saint of travellers, and by extension, of drivers. This midday there'll be a Mass and then the priest will come out and sprinkle holy water on all the cars participating, blessing them. Then the cavalcade will set out all over the township, with Saint Christopher in the lead. The Church took Saint Christopher off the liturgical calendar in 1970 because his veneration only dates from around five hundred years ago, not from Roman times, which is when he was supposed to have lived and been martyred. Despite that he is still venerated locally in different parishes throughout the world. And drivers are loath to stop believing in him. In fact, many cars and trucks have little statues or medals of Saint Christopher on the dashboard. Our car is second...

I went to a funeral yesterday. A modern, twenty-first century funeral that has taken us one step further away from our past and our acceptance of death as a part of life. It used to be so different. Granted that I'm glad some things have changed, it still seems we're trying to negate death by pushing it out of our lives. Now, when someone dies, the undertakers are called. They come, collect the body and take it to the funeral home. The family simply has to get dressed and follow. At the funeral home they are assigned a viewing room. It's a large room, with sofas and straight chairs lining the walls. In one corner there is an area, walled off and with plate glass, behind which the coffin is arranged along with the flowers. It's a cold room, a refrigerator, really, which helps keep the deceased decent during the two days of the viewing until the funeral. No one can touch the body, except the immediate family when everything is first set up and immediately before the trip ...

Do you have a health problem? Particularly, ugly warts on a visible part of your body? Visit San Benito on his feast day, June eleventh. All you have to do is dip a hanky in blessed oil, rub it on your warts and presto! warts be gone. Though if you have any other health problem, he'll also help you get over it. You just have to rub the blessed oil over the afflicted part of the body. Now, while there are many parishes that celebrate San Benito (Saint Benedict), the most miraculous one is in the monastery of Lerez, right next to the city of Pontevedra. After all, the traditional song goes: Si vas a san Benitiño, Non vaias ó de Paredes. Que máis milagreiro é O do conventiño de Lerez. (If you go to little San Benito, Don't go to the one at Paredes. Because more miraculous is The one at the little monastery of Lerez.) There are many ancient beliefs like this one that were once attached to a local deity. With the advent of Christianity, the miracles were taken over by ...

I'm guilty. I have done something that perpetuates a crime. At the same time I have helped some people that were going through a bad time. I have bought illegal shellfish. I knew at the time that it was illegal. However, I could trust it because at that time the red tide was not affecting the beaches and shellfish was begin dug up and sold legally from the same beaches. Also, shellfish from the beaches around us do not need to go to a purification plant because the water is deemed clean enough for immediate consumption of the shellfish growing in it. But the people who sold it to me had no license to dig it up and sell it. They were furtivos . A furtivo is a permanent fixture of the beaches in Galicia. You will find them mostly at night, darting on a beach, digging at low tide for clams and cockles while keeping a lookout for any guard who will send them running for the woods, hiding their merchandise to come back for it later. Because to dig for clams, cockles, and razor clams,...

I remember when I was a little girl that in the month of August my parents would take me to the Italian festivals in the North End of Boston. There the Italian community celebrated (and still does) the more prominant Italian saints. I remember food stands and stands where you could buy curiosities, like a blue rabbit's foot my mother bought me one year. I also remember the processions carrying the saints. The funny thing is I don't remember the street music, but there must have been. Italians are much like Spaniards when it comes to celebrations. They exalt them with music. Well, every time we came here on summer vacation we would go to a local festival and I would be reminded of the festivals in the North End. In the smaller villages during the afternoon there are pasacalles , where small bands or bagpipers travel to different villages of the parish and play up and down the lanes. With them goes the fogueteiro , the man who lights a rocket firecracker and with its noise aler...

It has been said that punctuatlity is the virtue of kings. In that case no one in Spain wants to be kingly. I've also heard that punctuality is the virtue of the bored, which would mean boredom is as rare as a street carpeted with ten euro bills. If you make an arrangement to meet someone at three o'clock, don't worry if you're late. If you're at the meeting place at ten past three, the person you're meeting will probably be there at quarter past. If not later. For some strange reason, punctuality is not a trait of the Spanish character. One would expect that of a doctor's office or a flight, where there are always delays and the flight never leaves at the assigned hour, nor does the doctor see you exactly at the appointed time. But the lack of puctuality extends to almost every aspect of life. There have been important exams in my daughter's life, where punctuality is required if you want to get in and sit them. However, people have been allowed in ma...

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