Spanish views from a small town

I am becoming increasingly reluctant, in my oldening age, to leave the house. Almost every morning that I have nothing scheduled, I feel the yearning to see different sights. But once I start thinking about which sights, I don't feel like abandoning the house. It's not that I have foregone my love of travel, or that I hate to step foot outside. I still love to dream about going far from here, about getting in the car and just driving. Some days I decide to go an hour's drive from here, and do so. But the action of closing the door behind me and getting in the car is becoming more difficult. I almost feel as if I don't want to go. I feel almost guilty for leaving the house.  Oh, I do have a very nice time wandering around, and seeing old and new places. It's that the inertia is becoming more difficult to overcome. I begin to understand my mother when she would refuse to go out, saying that she was very happy to stay home.   There is one good reason to limit unn

My gardening pet peeve is the branchy, bothersome, beastly bramble. I hate to be pruning something and come upon its thorny stem. Then, I have to follow it down to its base, which is almost always hidden in the middle of a scratchy bush. I cut it, knowing that it will grow back unless I uproot it and the bush I want to save at the same time. I pull it out and destroy half the bush as the bramble drags its thorns along the crying green leaves of the bush, defying me to pull it out. I get half a dozen thorns imbedded in my hands and arms in my attempt to unseat the beastly little suckers. (I can't work with gloves; most are too big and then I have no idea what I'm doing with my hands.) The thorns seem to trigger an allergy because then I am half the day scratching at the itchy hills that are the spots where they scratched me and left a calling card. The problem then is disposal. Generally, I leave them with the branches I've pruned to dry in the sun. Then, they'll eith

Picaresca . An old Spanish word to describe a type of novel that was developed in Spain. Picaresque. It is a word all Spaniards are familiar with. Most have indulged in it in some form. Perhaps they avoided paying taxes on something. Others might have reformed their house on the sly, without city permits. Still others might have risked their necks by undoing safety buttons on some machinery. Always behind the act is the idea of " no pasa nada ." Nothing's going to happen. Everything is under control. Until it isn't. Yesterday,  everything went out of control in a village outside Tui. At around four thirty, an explosion ripped apart a village. Over thirty kilometers away, in Vigo, and even in Cangas, across the estuary from Vigo, people heard the boom. My husband, working these days in Mos, near Porriño and closer to the site, heard it very clearly and thought it was close by. The distance, however, is bigger. Two people have died, around thirty were injured, with s

Last Friday there was yet another school shooting in the United States, this time in a town next to Houston. Again, access to automatic weapons and a culture of fixing problems with a bullet led to the death of ten people. On Friday there was an airplane crash in Havanna. It was the largest crash in number of victims since the late eighties. Over a hundred dead showed up the aging fleet of the Cuban airlines; the plane was forty years old. Yesterday the biggest news story was neither of these. Rather, an American actress marrying a British prince made all the reporters swoon.  There is, always has been, and seemingly always will be, a fascination with royalty. Everyone dreams of being a prince or princess when they're young. Movies go wild on the theme of a commoner meeting generally the prince of their dreams. But the fascination is with an idea of royalty, an idea of perfection that doesn't exist. In The Prince and the Pauper , Tom Canty realized that Prince Edward's li

When one travels to a Spanish city, one will discover a bipolarity. Walking into the ebullient old section, one expects to find life as it has always been there. One expects the continuity of life in the stone walls and (sometimes) cobblestone streets, where descendants of the original dwellers still go about their lives as they have always done. But that continuity is not there. If one enters the old section of a city like Santiago, expecting to see the heart of living in this city, one will be disappointed. It is a beautiful city, with history stretching back over a thousand years. But it is only filled with people during the day. At night the only people in the streets are those who visit the bars and restaurants, and students on their way to their dorms. It is no longer a part of the city that is vibrant with ordinary life; its soul is gone. As the neighbors died out, their houses were bought and reconverted into hotels and hostels, tourist apartments and offices. Those who still

Some people are calling this year the year of the woman, because we have decided to raise our voices to call out every abuse we suffer for being women. But women have always been calling out those abuses. Whether by pen and paper or by actions, women have long shown they have a dignity of their own that no one can take away. Back in nineteenth century Galicia, times were bad for many, but especially for the rural poor. Between the battles with Napoleon's forces, and the disappearance of the monasteries that could be counted on to help feed the poor, the people in the villages must have felt that they were the last of the chain. Some faced injustices in their own, special way, especially one woman. Bandoleros , highwaymen, had always existed in Spain, especially in the mountainous areas of Catalunya, Madrid, and Andalucía, but also in Galicia. The band my great-grandfather belonged to, that of Xan Quinto, has had its name spread far and wide by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, a writer o

Illegal immigration is a spiny problem. So many people want to live a good life, far from misery, war, and hunger. The human thing to do is receive those people with open arms. The economically logical thing to do is make sure they can be accepted without worsening conditions for everyone already here. But when one is confronted with desperate people in desperate conditions, the best thing one should do, is help. After seeing the photos of Aylan Kurdi lying on a beach in Turkey (Remember that little 3 year-old who drowned escaping Syria's civil war? I'm sure many have forgotten.), three firefighters from Sevilla joined an NGO, PROEM-AID, and spent their vacation days at the beginning of 2016 on Lesbos, helping rescue people from the gelid waters of the eastern Mediterranean. One night, they were apprised of an inflatable raft approaching the island that was taking on water. They set out on a boat with two crew members to try to rescue the people travelling on it from certai

Okay, I've watched videos on YouTube. I have watched cat videos (of course), protest videos, song videos. I've watched documentaries, and snippets of shows. I don't say there aren't interesting things; there are, and many. It's just that it's not all there is.  Sometimes one of my English students will ask what YouTuber I follow. I don't. Then they start rushing names past me. Names that could be taken out of a Málaga phone book for all I recognize them. I shake my head and the student looks incredulous. If I ask what they use internet for besides watching YouTubers and playing games, they will say, to use Google Translate and sometimes the Wikipedia to copy and paste for a school project. Period. Everything else on the net for them might be reachable only through a specialized network of passwords and smoke signals.  And there is so much out there! Almost all information on earth is available on the internet. Yes, some of it only after paying a subscrip

This past week the terrorist organization ETA has announced it is dissolving. One of the last holdovers of the radical movements of the sixties and seventies in Europe, it has finally stopped killing. People tend to forget that Europe was not free of terrorist killings before ISIS appeared. But there were already many shootings and bombs going off thirty years ago. ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Euskadi and Freedom) is a relic of the dime-a-dozen radical organizations within Europe that decided to get their utopian message across with weapons and death. Some have European origins, others Middle Eastern, such as Abu-Nidal. There was Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction, RAF) in Germany, Action Directe in France,  November 17th in Greece, Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octuber (GRAPO, First of October Antifascist Resistance Groups) in Spain, Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) in Italy, the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, and many others, some lasting only

Yesterday, my husband and I went for a drive all around the peninsula of the Morrazo, from Marín, to Bueu, Beluso, Cangas, and Moaña. It's a peninsula on the south coast of Galicia that stretches into the sea between the inlets Ría de Pontevedra and Ría de Vigo. Parts of the areas we stopped at were, not deserted, but manageable, without great crowds of people. Yesterday was a holiday, and the lucky ones didn't go to work on Monday, so they went on a mini four day vacation. Some, too many, came to Galicia. At Cabo do Home, a finger jutting down at the edge of the peninsula against the open Atlantic, it was a foretaste of summer crowds. I drove into the parking area and immediately searched for a spot to turn around. Whatever beauty could be seen was banalized by so many people. As I headed back to the road, someone from another part of Spain by his accent, warned us that we had a piece of plant stuck in our license plate. Outside these villages, atavistic memory is being lost