Spanish views from a small town

Monday morning. Light prods at my eyes. I open one eye and lo ok at the bedside radio clock. Past nine o'clock. Why am I so tired? Why a m I not hungry for breakfast? Oh, that 's right . On Saturday night the clocks went forward an hour. I hate the world. So I get up feeling listless and absent. I have things to do this morning. I can't just crawl onto my chair in the study and let the hou rs go by. I have to get up. So I get up, eat a break fast I don't feel like eating, and go do errands. In town, people have longer faces than usual. In the sup ermarket at the checkou t counter, the woman in front of me is kidded by the cashier , who know s her . He tells her s he looks like she's asleep on her feet. She retorts that that is exactly what she feels like .  Since the en ergy crisis of the 1970' s, S pain has installed Daylight Savings Time in the summer. It was supposed to save money, allowing people to turn on the lights later. Perha ps along the Mediterr...

I suppose it's because I went to bed late last night. Even though I slept like a rock and didn't get up very early this morning, I. Am. Sleepy.  My eyes have a warm feeling behind them, like they want to cozy down with the eyelids. When my eyelids kiss my eyes, there is a languorous feeling of wonderfulness. Everything is right with the world and things are the way they are meant to be. But then I open my eyes and that feeling disappears, leaving a yearning behind.  This sleepiness has a warm, fuzzy feeling, but it's also exasperating. I can't give in to it until many hours from now. And then I might be doing something I like and have waited to do, and so I go to bed late again. And repeat this whole cycle again tomorrow.  The weather doesn't help. It's a grey, cool day, with little natural light. It's not as dark as when it's raining, but there is an absence of light that would have woken up my eyes and my brain, reminding them that it's day a...

Sunday mornings. Those two words bring to mind lounging in bed, reading the paper, sipping coffee, and brushing crumbs from the sheets. They bring to mind moments that I wish existed, but don't. Not any more. When I was a child in Boston I remember watching the cartoons on channel WLVI 56 on Sunday mornings. That was after I had exhausted my favorite ones on other channels. I had a television in my room then, and on Sunday mornings I remember the sun passing by the window and me playing in and on the bed while the television was on. I would reluctantly get up and get dressed when the first movie came on, around twelve. My mother could tell me to get up all she wanted, I was staying there until midday. Then, I got older and I got up earlier, but never before nine. After a week of getting up at seven while in primary school, and at six while in high school, nine seemed a more decent hour to me. Not eight thirty, not eight fifty, but nine o'clock on the dot. And if nine fifteen,...

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...