Spanish views from a small town

As a preschool child I watched Sesame Street and The Electric Company . They were fun to watch, and I loved to watch Bert and Ernie arguing. They helped me as they helped a lot of other preschool kids with numbers, letters, etc. They also gave me an unintended boost. They helped me understand English. At home we spoke in galego (Galician), my parents' mother tongue and the language spoken in Galicia, where we were born. It's similar enough to Castilian so that if you understand Galician, you understand Castilian and can usually speak it. It's also similar to Portuguese, but the enunciation changes enough to not ensure understanding spoken Portuguese if you speak Galician. Since at home the only exposure was to Galician, watching those two programs on television made sure I at least understood English. When I began kindergarten I didn't have many problems understanding. Others, however, had problems understanding me, especially at first. A classmate, years later, tol

My husband this year collected a lot of firewood for the winter. We hired a splitting machine and those logs were splintered lickety spit in two days. At a much better rate and less cost of muscle than if my husband were to have done it all by hand over the entire summer. Well, the firewood was intended for the coming winter, but we've had to start the pile already. In August. While July may have been the hottest month on the planet so far since record-keeping began, in our little corner it was a normal month. It and June were a bit dry, so some areas were worried. Mostly along the coastal stretch the temperatures were normal or a little under average, though we had the usual few days of wising for an air conditioner.  In the interior they followed the national average this year - broiling! So when August rolled around we thought we'd have more of the same. No. Except for about six or seven scattered days at the beginning and last week, including a couple the pyromaniacs de

There is a little village in the province of Badajoz, region of Extremadura, right on the edge of northwestern Andalucía, that is a typical southern Spanish village. It has a little over a hundred inhabitants and consists of a long street with a few outlying streets. It's houses are mostly white and rarely higher than two floors. It's in a very backward area, historically speaking; electricity first appeared in the seventies and running water and paved streets in the eighties. The main income is from olive trees, wheat, and sheep herding. I've never been there, but I assume it is a tranquil place. But its name is synonymous with terror. It is the place where the largest massacre since the twenties took place, in 1990. It's called Puerto Hurraco. The story has elements from the Hatfields and the McCoys and from the Capulets and the Montagues. That is probably why it has made its way into the folklore of la España negra , black Spain, stories that seem to come from a de

This afternoon my daughter is going to pick up her new phone. I'm sure many teenagers out there have already picked up at least five smartphones since they've first had a phone. And I bet almost every time, after a month they complain that their phone is getting old. Not my daughter. I had to fight with my daughter to change phones. This will be her third phone since she was fifteen. And only because the first was stolen. She has a Nokia that looks like a Blackberry, with all the buttons. The screen is a tiny, normal screen. She has dropped it at least five hundred times and it has the scrape marks to show for it. But it still works. She finds it enough for her needs. But now it's showing problems. Messages aren't reaching her on the messaging network she and her friends use. She has to keep turning it off and on sometimes just to be able to write a text. It's now showing a tempramentality that would make a saint swear. And she's no saint. So she has now doubl

This afternoon I had a trip to the airport to pick up my brother-in-law who was flying in from Barcelona to spend a couple of weeks visiting his parents. It's August, the month for vacations and visits home. More than half the tourists visiting Galicia are emigrants who have come to visit family. There has been a new airport terminal in Santiago since September of 2011. It's a large, white box of a building with a slightly domed ceiling and plate glass windows stretching from floor to ceiling. It's divided into two main floors and three basement parking garages, including the rental cars. The bottom floor, where the taxis wait in line, is dedicated to arrivals. It's a long, empty area broken by two elevators and staircases, and a small café. There's only one arrival gate with opaque sliding white doors into which you can see baggage carousels only when passengers come out. That's where everyone stretches their head, trying to see if they can see who they'v

August is almost over and the recuperation exams are nearly here. This is the last week of studying for those who want to recuperate the subjects they failed in June. Some have it more difficult than others. There are those who, after doing nothing all year, expect in two months to learn enough to pass maybe five or six subjects at the beginning of September. And who also think they will enjoy summer at the same time. The Spanish system of education is different. (What isn't, in Spain?) To be promoted from one grade to another, you cannot have failed more than two subjects. If, at the end of June, you have failed anything, you can recuperate that subject at the beginning of September in a species of final exam. If you have failed up to two subjects and don't recuperate them in September, you can recuperate them in January. So, if you fail math in June and September, you go on to the next grade, where you will study that grade's math. The year you failed you study on your

On Tuesday, a  ten year-old British boy on the beach in Benidorm saw a strange silver and green fish swimming near him and tried to touch it. The fish, trying to placidly swim amidst strangers, decided he'd had enough and bit him. The boy surely ran howling from the water after the bite and the beach was temporarily closed while authorities searched for the fish. Up to here, fine. There are always species out there that resent man's intrusion on their beaches. But from there it just happened to blow out of proportion. The British newspaper, The Daily Star, ran the story on its front page with a photo of a great white shark and the headline, "Jaws Attack Off Benidorm". Immediately the story was plastered everywhere. A shark attack on a populated beach in the Mediterranean! No beach is safe anywhere! The truth was the boy was given first aid treatment for the small, circular bite just above his waist at the beach and that was that. The fish wasn't found and the sh

Yesterday afternoon a 63 year-old woman named Josefa had to leave the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries to go to prison on the island of Lanzarote. She couldn't because, after three days of being on a hunger strike protesting her prison sentence, she fell down in a dead faint before being led onto the ferry and was sent to the hospital. So what? Well, she was being sent to prison for six months because she hadn't demolished the house where she and her two children and three grandchildren live.  Yes, only in Spain. Her story began almost twenty years ago when she found herself divorced with two children and nowhere to go. So she built a small shack on a piece of property she had inherited from her parents. Over time her daughter added three children to the family. They lived off sporadic jobs they could find, and at the moment the grandmother, Josefa, is receiving an unemployment check of 320 euros a month until September, and her daughter 400. Her son isn't receivin

Europe as a region seems to have a short memory span. Around seventy years ago at the end of World War Two, it asked for clemency as millions of its citizens began migrating for many reasons; looking for loved ones, a new chance at life, or as a result of ethnic cleansing and redistribution of borders. They tried to go mostly to North America, Australia, and South America. Now Europe is being asked for clemency by millions from the Middle East and Africa escaping from bloody civil wars, uprisings, and meteorological devastation. But Europe has become deaf. These days we are seeing news about the island of Kos, in Greece, just off the coast of Turkey. Thousands upon thousands of refugees from the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, all the way to Pakistan, are arriving each day on boats. But it's not just Kos, it's all the other Greek islands that are right up against Turkey's coastline. In the month of July, about fifty thousand people arrived in those islands. I

Days are getting shorter now we're past the midway mark of August. It's almost a quarter past ten and the sky is a gradient of blue, navy up above and turquois at the horizon. Back in June the sun would be just touching the horizon at this hour.  Already the night is turning cool. A month ago you could still feel the heat of the day at this hour. Now it's cool enough to put on a sweater to sit outside under the yellow glow of the streetlight. A little later on I'll start to close windows to avoid having a chill breeze settle over me as I try to sleep. The blanket on the bed is welcome now and some nights I'm thinking of piling on another one. Today was a beautiful day, but the past couple of weeks have been cool and rainy. The house hasn't accumulated as much heat as usual this year.  In the morning the sun comes up later and makes it harder to get up earlier. In June the sky was light around six. Now at seven it's still grey. I feel sleepier later in th

I have various health problems, but the one that drives me insane and that I wish would disappear from the face of the earth is my headaches. Except for the night before last I know what usually triggers them. So, whenever my period shows up, or I'm out in the sun all day, or the thermometer climbs up to Mt. Everest, I know I will have a headache. The problem is the painkiller. When my husband got up yesterday at seven I asked him to please make some coffee. As soon as he left I stumbled downstairs. The light coming in was still grey and it was overcast, but no lights, please. I swallowed an ibuprofen with some hot coffee and I stumbled back upstairs, where I doubled the long pillow behind my back and sat up while the hammer pounded in my head, trying to break my head open from the inside. After an hour, it started to pound a little less hard, and I slithered slightly down into the bedclothes, but remained more or less sitting, and fell into a nap. A half hour later, when my radi

One could say alcoholism is a scourge that has plagued mankind since the first beer was created in Egypt, or the first wine in the Caucasus mountains. Not everybody falls into it, but those who do create a hell on earth for those surrounding them. My mother's father was a victim of that scourge. It has always been normal to drink wine from childhood in Spain. Every household in every village has at least one grape arbor that will make at least one barrel of wine. Until the last fifteen or twenty years every household picked their grapes and made their wine between September and October. Now, though, wine drinking has fallen and not everyone makes wine. Those with better vineyards sell their grapes. Others have taken them down. But it used to be the norm that everyone drank wine, even the children. Children would get a few drops in the bottom of their glass which would be topped by water or gaseosa , a soda similar to Sprite or 7Up. However, drunkenness has always been looked down

My grandmother had two children. By two different fathers. Whom she never married. Automatically, I know what most will think. The same as most will think of a woman these days who passes through the same circumstances. But my aunt was born in 1918 and my father in 1931, and at that time, though not quite kosher, it was considered absolutely normal. The close your eyes, turn off the lights mentality toward sex really came into being when Franco came into power. At least in Galicia. Franco was a misogynist who imposed his and the Church's viewpoint that sex is only to be used within the marriage for procreation. That became the imposed viewpoint of the then emerging middle class, which is why for many years it's been considered a shame if a young woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, and why when that happens, she always has to marry the father to erase any dishonor, even if the couple are teenagers. Now things are changing, and though you're still considered loose if you sle

If your name is Mary Jean Smith and you come to Spain on vacation, when you sign in to your hotel or pension, the receptionist will probably say, "Welcome, Ms Jean." He didn't make a mistake reading your name. It's just that his name is possibly Antonio Martín García, and he is Mr. Martín. Everyone in Spain has two surnames and is called by the first surname, which happens to be handed down from the father, and therefore the most important one. So, automatically, when people see three names together, they assume the last two are the surnames. This tradition goes back to the beginning of the Registro Civil in 1870 in which all births and deaths are inscribed, when parents were obliged to register their children's birth and give them surnames. That was when the rules were established giving every child his father's surname (patronym) and his mother's surname (matronym). Therefore, for example, if someone named Juan Martínez Soria marries someone named M

Some years ago whenever you visited some houses in the surrounding villages, as soon as you walked up to the gate you would be greeted by the intense, deep-toned, frenzied barking of a dog large enough to eat you. Alarmed, you would look around before entering and you would be relieved to see the dog was chained up. Inside the yard, you would see that the dog would be on a long chain, have a couple of old pots nearby with food and water and a place where it could sleep sheltered from the weather. And it would transcend, as the owner talked about what a great watch-dog it was, that the dog lived all its life in that corner of the yard, fed only left-overs or bones. And that was considered normal among villagers that had practicality on their minds. Something similar occurred with cats. They have long been considered working animals and even easier to take care of than dogs. Because cats were free-roaming, living in barns and fields, living off the mice and rats they would hunt. But th

Anyone who has had a childhood blessed with books will always remember a few with nostalgia. They will become touchstones with the past, in which when we conjure up the story, we will remember our surroundings at the time we read it, though we won't remember most likely how old we were or what year it was. We will remember every detail about the book, even where there were stains, or a blurb from the jacket if it had one. But the frustration will be in the titles. There are a few I remember from childhood, but I don't remember any of the titles except for one or two. I remember there was one about a Nebraska girl who lives on the Oregon Trail with her aunt and uncle. Her parents have left her there with them for some reason before continuing the Trail. They promised her they would send for her at a future date. The girl is desperate and tries to join a wagon train once or twice as a stowaway. She is caught and returned. The last time she runs away she is found, but accepted a

Like so many other women in this world I have a mother-in-law. Imagine all the connotations of this word and now add another. She's a Spanish woman who has lived in a rural village all her life. She gossips, she hates books, she loves celebrity talk shows on television, and she's always telling you what to do. Having raised six children and buried three, she is the only one who knows how to correctly raise a child. If you do it this way, she'll tell you modern methods don't cut it because she did it that way and they came out big, strong, healthy oxen. In other words, someone to visit every few days with closed ears but not someone to live with. Sometimes, though, she'll ask me if she can accompany me on my weekly shopping trip because there'll be things she needs and she hasn't got a car. Those Saturdays my spirits fall three stories to the floor. She'll begin in the car, telling me about the latest my father-in-law did (they don't get along, but

The spirit of wanderlust is upon me. This afternoon, after I finish classes, I'm thinking of getting in my car and going somewhere. I should be thinking about washing clothes, washing some windows, taking some of the inch-deep dust off the bookcases, but none of this sounds appealing. What sounds appealing is getting in my car and pointing it in an interesting direction. So, where? I don't know. I have images in my head of the road trip I'll take down to Portugal next month. But that's an all-day trip I can't quite fit into two hours in the afternoon. City or country? If I choose city it'll probably be Pontevedra or Santiago, the two small cities that are closest. Vigo and A Coruña are too far away. They need more dedication. Country? There I have more options. I can go up to the hills again. I can try a different route this time and avoid the tourist hordes. There are supposed to be archeologists digging Neolithical burial mounds ( mámoas ) along the road lea

Spaniards are at heart anarchists. They don't trust government or government officials, even those they've voted into office. I suppose it's because of history.  Those who have fashioned the laws throughout the years have always had their own interests at heart, not the common people's. History has made people leery of new proposals set out by the government. If they're handed something they take it suspiciously, waiting for it to blow up in their faces. They're right, sometimes. For example, to buy a new car there are incentives from the government. I think the latest was fifteen hundred euros if you also turn in a car twelve years or older. But at the end of the year, you have to declare those fifteen hundred euros as income and pay taxes on it. The bomb had an egg in it. Since so many incentives from the government come with hidden bombs, the carrot has never quite taken in Spain. The stick is better understood. And in the understanding, side paths are take