Spanish views from a small town

I was not aware until today of how to go about getting a doctor to see you since things have changed. Until now, this year I last went, before the pandemic, for an ear infection one Saturday, at the end of January. Even that wasn't a proper appointment, because I went on a Saturday morning as a walk-in. Since the pandemic I went once to the night emergency side of the clinic for a UTI, and found we all had to wait outside. But that was it. I try to avoid doctor visits. The only doctor appointments I've made have been to renew prescriptions. For some years, I've been making them phone appointments, since it's simply a matter of having the doctor push a few buttons on the computer, and the prescriptions are renewed on my health card. I don't bother to go in to the clinic for those types of bureaucratic appointments. But this time, I noticed a small problem. Since it could easily lead to either something routine, or something big, I decided to make a regular appointmen...

It was cold last night. We slept with the window open, and I had to pull the covers well up. Sitting in my study, eating my breakfast, I was shivering. Using the mouse on the computer, my hand went cold. A small foretaste of the months to come. I should try to fix my little laptop, so I can sit more comfortably in the winter-warm kitchen. But the money I had thought to save up to do it never appeared. I should also do something to my desktop, but the same problem applies. As it is, new, more pressing repairs have taken priority, and now they have to be paid. The usual running in circles, biting tails, when incoming money is less than outgoing. Our daughter will soon be paid the three weeks she worked this month. Working in a cannery can be easy or it can be an inferno depending on where you're placed, who is your supervisor, and what companions are your lot. My daughter has had peaceful days, and she has had days when she was crying because she had to go to work. But she's stuc...

I am getting an invasion of wanderlust. I want to set out upon the road with my car and drive out to new horizons.  I suppose it's mostly because September is around the corner. It's my vacation month, and for years, I've always gone for a daytrip anywhere from two to three and a bit hour's drive from here. Last year, my husband and I went to Cantabria for a wonderful five days. This year, I get the feeling I'm going to spend most of September in my house. That doesn't mean I won't take my car and set out for a drive. I will, but not with the intention of parking the car and wandering around strange streets. I might make a trip to nearby Pontevedra, or even Vigo, but they would be self-conscious trips, as I would try to stay as far away from other people as possible. I wouldn't be concentrating as much on where my steps are taking me, but on trying to sidestep people who might get too close. That takes most of the fun out of any trip. It would also depen...

Again. It's happened again. And it will happen again, and again. Another man shot in the assumption that he was going to get a gun, or a knife, or anything to use as a weapon. Why did the police enter into that assumption? Because he was Black.  George Floyd's killing created a torment across the nation last May. But that killing and the following protests brought no changes, merely entrenchment from an openly racist federal government. This week, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, another Black man was killed at the hands of a police officer, an officer that swore to uphold the law and protect the citizens of his city.  It seems that the police were with Jacob Blake for about three minutes before following him to his car and shooting at him seven times, hitting him four. The man was leaning into his car as he was shot. In his car were his three sons. Later testimonies said there was also a knife under the front seat.  So, there was a knife under the seat. So, Jacob Blake apparently ...

Nowadays, television is boring. We don't subscribe to any television platform, so we can only see the open channels. Those channels now even have paying channels, where you can watch exclusive series and shows. So, what one can see is a rehash of the same movies of the past ten or fifteen years, and the same reruns of the same television shows ever since the year 2000.  That, and reality shows that have precious little reality. I miss the shows we used to have back when I was a teenager. Not that many of those were much more intelligent than the ones we can see now, but there were some gems among them. The funny ones were funny, and the drama was drama. Many gems were on the PBS channel, and were British productions. I remember among them, the documentary The World at War . I don't remember if I watched it because I was fascinated by World War II history, or if that particular time period fascinated me because I watched this documentary. Another document ary was The Story of En...

August is winding down. It's hot this week, but mostly because it's humid. Rain is forecast for tonight or tomorrow, and then the temperatures are going down. We're headed for fall. Our daughter is worried. There are three cases of Covid at a factory where a friend in her circle works. There are rumors that at least one person at her own job is infected, too. Rules are being re-introduced, maintaining people in areas without wandering to other spots. And the contagions keep growing. There's more of the same in the United States. Another Black man was shot, this time in the back while walking to a car where his children were. More riots, more dead. More property set on fire, and more hatred against the police, which doesn't seem to be able to get rid of its bad seeds. A 17 year old was arrested and charged with intentional homicide after shooting and killing two people during the riots. A 17 year old. The Republican National Convention is a sham. The President is usi...

A piece of my childhood died yesterday. Anthony Martignetti, of West Roxbury, died at age 63. I didn't know him personally, but I, and everyone from a certain age up, knew him as the boy running home on Wednesday because Wednesday was Prince Spaghetti day.  The commercial was filmed in 1969, in a North End that was still redolent of working class immigrants, and close-knit families. A North End where Italian was more common than English, and small squares reminded one of quiet corners in a European city. The  commercial shows a boy running home through the streets of Boston's North End, past the Haymarket vendors, past what seems to be the John Eliot School, through probably the Paul Revere Mall, and up a dead end street to his apartment in an old tenement. As he runs, the scene sometimes cuts to his mother's kitchen, where she and others are preparing vegetables and a large pot of spaghetti. Meanwhile, the voiceover talks about Boston traditions, and ends, as Anthony ente...

This morning, I had some time, so, I went to do an errand, and then I went for a drive out to the coast, all the way to the lighthouse at Corrubedo. We've been out there many times. It's one of the most westerly lighthouses in Spain, and there is nothing beyond but the enormous expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. On a clear night, you can see the beacon from the lighthouse at Fisterra to the north, and from the Cíes Islands to the south, and the blackness that stretches west to the Americas. In the summer, like this morning, the waves break with foam at the foot of the cliff the lighthouse is on, and run onto the beaches nearby with white rollers. The wind is gentle but firmly continuous. But, in the winter, especially after a storm, the spray from the waves smashing and thundering below reaches the lighthouse, and there is a perpetual dampness of the sea. The wind howls and threatens to knock you down and send you rolling along, like tumbleweed. The shape of the lighthouse, square ...

This morning at a local bakery where I went to get our Sunday loaf (our baker doesn't deliver on Sundays), someone was talking that on the 18th of September, we would have to quarantine again. Someone else replied that that was simply fake news, a bulo . Rumors are flying all over the place.  Truth is, infection rates are back up at April levels, when we were all esconced in our homes. Yet, quarantine is only being imposed locally. And even then, a judge can easily overrule such impositions, as in a a city in Ciudad Real, which imposed a semi-quarantine, prohibited smoking in public, and closed night venues. While deaths are far down, it seems we're getting complacent because most of those infected now are either asymptomatic, or don't seem to have serious complications.  And, except for Madrid, which is finally thinking it over, most regions are going ahead with the September opening of schools. Another region, Murcia, is going to have rotating classes. Primary and first a...

The U.S. is no longer paradise on earth. Americans who live abroad, around nine million, have had to send to the IRS details of their financial movements ever since 2010, when the FATCA law was enacted. This stands for Foreign Account Tax Compliant Act. The purpose of this law was to make sure that the rich paid their fair share of taxes. But, the ones caught up in all the bureaucracy are simple Americans living abroad for a myriad of different reasons, and most of them simply middle class, or even lower.  Aside from having to send details to the IRS, the banks dealing with American citizens also have to send documentation to the American tax man. Rather than deal with the paperwork (banks may be banned from doing business with American companies otherwise), banks simply tell American customers to move their money elsewhere. So, aside from having to send the details, and pay U.S. taxes on earnings abroad, many Americans also have to look for banks willing to take them on as clients...

And, we're nearing the end of August. Already, the summer is coming to a close, when my head is telling me summer is just beginning. There have been no festivities, no concerts, no large get-togethers, no celebrations, no outings. We had a First Communion last month, but immediate family, only. I had my trip in June, but that was it. And next month, there are no festivals, especially the week-long festival of Guadelupe. There's nothing to say we're in the middle of summer except the weather. And, even that wanted to warn us what fall will be like this week. From this afternoon on, the weather will begin to open up and summer will return. But it's been rainy, foggy, grey and yucky most of the week. I've gone back to wearing lightweight pants again. Lightweight, but pants, nevertheless, and not shorts. Pleasant temperatures, but not August temperatures. I am entering the last week of summer classes. Next month I don't give classes. I begin the school year in O...

Sometimes, the correction of history arrives too late. Other times, it arrives just before it's too late, and one wonders why it took so long. This coming Saturday, one of the Spanish vice presidents is going to Ay, in France, to give in hand a declaration of personal reparation to the last Spanish survivor of Mauthausen, Juan Romero, who is only 101.  Shipped out to Mauthausen with the complicity of Franco, when the war was over, he couldn't return to his native Córdoba, and found a home in Ay, along with around twenty other Spanish survivors. With the change to a democratic state, however, Spain turned its back on those who landed in concentration camps in occupied Germany. The reason they ended up in France is that they couldn't come back, and any homage would have meant admitting that Franco's state would have had them killed. That jibed with the blanket forgiveness of Franco's regime adopted by the new, democratic government. So, one by one, the survivors died ...

It's around eight in the evening, but the light and the closeness of the waning day make it seem like it's ten. I have been harping on the weather, but it truly is depressing. Winter will be a killer. This past day was the hundredth anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States. In Spain, women were given the right to vote in the Constitution of 1931, in the Second Republic.  Franco took away our right to vote, but also the men's because there simply weren't any elections for some time. When they returned, though one party only, both "heads of households and married women" could vote. Women were badly treated as a whole by the dictatorship, wiping away all progress made during the first years of the twentieth century.  Divorce and civil marriage had been permitted during the Republic; afterwards, women had to marry by the Church and could never leave the marriage. They became virtual slaves. But their slavery started during the Civil War.  I came ac...

Thinking over the protest this past Sunday, I remembered that the singer, Miguel Bosé, who had urged people to attend, lost his mother this past spring to Covid. He is the antithesis of Sharon Stone. She denounced that her grandmother and godmother died of Covid, and that her sister, a sufferer of lupus, is in grave condition in the hospital with the virus. She harangued against how Trump and the federal government have abandoned the population to the ravages of the virus, leaving state governors to do whatever they could against it, with fewer resources. This difference in these two public personas kind of makes you wonder a bit about the first. Oh, the numbers in Spain keep rising. Over two thousand new cases just yesterday. If you look at the total population of forty-eight million, it seems paltry. But we are all connected. A friend of my daughter's, with whom she had been on Saturday, got ill yesterday, with a headache, dizziness, nausea. Immediately, she started worrying on W...

We've met the Caribbean, and it's wet. Today, the rain has been with us all day, replaced by fog late this afternoon. It's a result of the jet stream bringing us an air mass straight from the Caribbean, wet and humid. All day, the southwest wind has dumped water on us. An ugly day, it is. It's a strange day, when your mind latches onto a thought, and it stays with you all day. The weather is supposed to be similar all week, with maybe a break or two in the middle days. Still, we shouldn't complain. We needed the rain, and it's just one week out of the summer. What we should complain about is how some people seem to have only one working neuron. The protest yesterday afternoon in Madrid is a taste of things to come, I fear. The far right here seems to have learned from Trump's America. Pit one Spaniard against the other. Claim your freedoms are being taken away. Call out all the conspiracies to control the population. One protestor had a sign saying, "La...

Summer has abandoned us, and left us to the low pressure systems wandering in off the Atlantic. Yesterday, a holiday, it rained mostly in the morning, with breaks in the afternoon. But today, except for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, it's been raining continuously.  And it's going to rain for most of next week. The Azores high pressure has moved, and is now letting in all the low pressure systems. So far, I can't complain much about the summer. Except for the month of June, which was mostly grey, July and the first half of August have been beautiful. There were some hot days, but along our stretch of coast, the sea breeze held off the asphyxiating heat felt inland. This is the first stretch of rain we've had since June. I just hope any storm system we have doesn't get too strong. This year, the hurricane season is supposed to be quite active. As of this month, the hurricanes have reached the letter I, Isaias being the last one so far. At the moment, the...

It doesn't matter where you are, politics will always bring out an argument. In this, our year of angst, 2020, it creates enemies as embittered as Leonidas and Xerxes, Napoleon and Admiral Nelson, Caesar and Vercingetorix, or Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. Mention Trump, or Biden, or Pence, or Obama (or, heaven forbid, Clinton), and you have a rabid believer (of either side) pulling aside his mask (assuming he's wearing one) and spewing in your face, calling you either a fascist or a communist. For the record, I lean left. Farther left than merely left of center, but I don't reach the outer edges. On Facebook most of my befriended people have similar views to mine. A few, are on the opposite extreme. One of those is a person I follow for other reasons. From time to time, they publish posts declaring their admiration for Trump. Those posts attract comments from here to tomorrow. Some agree with her, others, like me, disagree. Most are respectful, a few are borderline rude with e...

I'm posting quite late tonight. Tomorrow is a holiday, so I can't do my weekly Saturday shopping. This evening, right after my husband got home, I took his car and went to take care of helping empty the supermarkets. Like I said yesterday, the times we're living in are more dystopian than normal. One proof of this is that today the central government decreed the closure of all night clubs and discos. Bars and cafés must close at 1:00AM, and cannot allow new customers to enter after midnight. There is no smoking allowed in the streets nor the terraces, and there are special restriction in place with elderly residences. No, this isn't normal.  What also isn't normal is the number of national tourists there are in our townships. This evening in Boiro, where I tend to do my shopping, it was chock-a-bloc. Yes, practically everyone had their mask on, and I only saw one man sitting at a terrace with a cigarette in his hand who wasn't sure whether to light it or not. Bu...

The number of infected haven't stopped rising all month. To combat them, our regional government of Galicia has, as of today, banned smoking and vaping in the open air if two meters from other people can't be kept. In other, words, no smoking on café terraces.  Hmm. I'm glad smoking has been prohibited. One would sit outside on a terrace and get smoke in the face. If one sat inside the café, the wind coming in through the door would bring smoke inside. Now, no smoke. But that it will help keep infections down is another story. Will they prohibit sighing in delight after downing a cool beer? Because the science is the same; droplets are expelled at a greater distance both by blowing out smoke and by blowing out a sigh. Or by breathing out in relief when one sits after getting sore feet from walking. Will shallow breathing be the only breathing allowed, with or without mask, at less than two meters from other people? In the province of Sevilla, as if what we have weren't ...

This morning, and earlier, during the wee hours, it rained. I believe it's the first rain we've had in almost two months. Our well appreciated it, but the forecast for the coming week is no longer one of summer weather. It seems like fall is sticking its nose in before anyone asked it in.  In one of my classes we've been talking about learning languages. The student wants to check out which other language, besides English, might help further his curriculum vitae. He's looking a lot at Asian languages, but isn't sure. Once upon a time, knowing English was enough to open doors all over the place. Now, a new world is opening up in which knowledge of another language is welcome. English is still the world's lingua franca. It became that from the end of the nineteenth century, onward. First, the British Empire spread it around the globe, and English became the language of administration and education in every British colony. Then, after World War I, the United States...

Our daughter started work yesterday. She's worked before, though for short periods. One summer she worked a month as a door-to-door salesman for a mobile phone company. Needless to say, she never sold a phone plan, but she wasn't let go because she actually went to the apartments and rang the doorbells. Other young co-workers of hers sometimes sat at a café, instead. She left because it was a soulless job, convincing someone to buy something when she is against modern day publicity and battering to buy. Last summer, she worked a few weeks in August picking blueberries, and met people from different places of the world, some of whom she is still friends with. During the fall and early winter, she studied for the entrance exams to the Spanish Correos (Post Office), which she failed to pass by very little. Then, came the lockdown. At the beginning of summer she was between looking for a job or studying this coming school year. She decided to work and save up money to study someth...