Spanish views from a small town

When I visited Astorga and León last month I had the great good luck of being directed to one of the spots I could find more information on my grandfather. Yesterday , the photocopies of his prison record arrived by mail. How strange to see that old-fa shioned hand writing that wrote down all the in cidences bold ly stated; his arrival, the re ason for his incarceration, his sentence, statements he was made to swear to. I had thought all of it would be typewritten. But no , in those days, desp ite the amount of pris oners rou nded up by the Frente Nacional in their rebel lion against the established go vernment, the prison books were still books and still handwritten. On the 27th of July, 1937, h e was sentenced to twenty years by the military tribu nal set up in Santiago de Compostela soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. The official crime was "rebelión militar," "military rebe llion." It is completely ironi c th at a milit ary tribu nal set up b...

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...