Technology and Tears

 

Technology and Tears

 

As someone who has worked online for a number of years, I don’t picture myself as the person who struggles (at least not too much) with technology. 

            Enter Europe.  Despite covid and given that I am triple vaccinated, I made the trip in December to Spain.  Omicron had not yet extended its presence and things were reasonably normal.  As a gift, my partner planned a trip to Florence.  What better time to visit when hoards of tourists weren’t making museum visits impossible without hours waiting.

            The flight from Barcelona to Florence left on a Sunday so I paid a premium price for a weekend covid test. Both of us downloaded out Italian entry documents as well as vaccination information.  No one checked anything as we walked through the airport on arrival.

            Problems began at the hotel.  My paper US vaccine document was accepted without question.  My partner’s Spanish digital vaccine code didn’t work.  After hours of stress and worry he finally got it downloaded and shown to the hotel staff.

            This meant any museum or restaurant entered needed a working wifi connection and not to much of a firewall for his code to work.  I was never so grateful for a paper document.

            We managed until the airport for our return flight to Spain.  I had downloaded the Spanish government QR code but it didn’t show up on my phone.  My partner along with a group of Spanish students didn’t even know they needed one.  The Italian staff were rude.  I was almost in tears of frustration.  After endless tries of re-entering the information and under pressure of missing the flight, we somehow managed to get the codes and show them to the airline staff. 

            QR code chaos hit me again on my return from Spain to the US.  Digital dlownloads strike again! 

            The US is far behind Europe not only in technology (which may not be a bad thing) but in public transportation, health care, and taking care of the environment. 

            I was surprised when I entered a bank in Spain.  It looked more like a café with tables, machines, and no tellers.  When I was shopping in one store, a machine automatically read my merchandise while it was still in a basket. 

            The future will be this -machines and codes so we better get used to them. 

A Lament- Why I Can’t Get a Decent Gazpacho

 

A Lament- Why I Can’t Get a Decent Gazpacho

 

Gazpacho is the simplest of soups made of very ripe tomatos, cucumber, onion, garlic, green pepper, olive oil and vinegar (preferably sherry vinegar but red wine vinegar will do).  Blend these ingredients to the consistency you like by adding water.  In the very classic cookbook, 1080 Recetas de Cocina, Simone Ortega uses too much olive oil but that’s a question of taste.Toppings called tropezones include crutons and chopped vegetables which are served with the soup.  Gazpacho is everywhere in Spain, even bus stations in Andalucia serve a tasty gazpacho and every supermarket carries brands made with natural (really) ingredients.  Every household has its own variation. 

            So what goes wrong here in the US?  Every gazpacho I’ve tried is like a liquid Mexican salsa, some so spicey as to be almost undrinkable.  Spicy is not the flavor profile of a classic gazpacho.  If that’s what you enjoy, go for it, but realize this is not the authentic gaspacho.

            Why then isn’t it possible to make my own?  For one, I’ve never had enough really ripe delicious tomatos to do so.  Even tomatos from the farmer’s market lack flavor.  Here the tastiest tomatos are cherry or grape and they have been bred for sweetness and aren’t suitable.  On a ferry from Venice,  I watched a woman pull a tomato from her shopping bag and offer it to her companion, saying “il perfumo.”  I have yet to see that happen here. 

            One of these day I may have a garden plot and I’ll fill it with tomato plants.  

 

Love in Another Time

     While I was going through my papers looking for query letters I'd sent I found this:

The cigar smoking owner of the florist shop convinced me.  "I've got them in the case.  I'll give you a good deal."  That was how I ended up with a dozen long stem roses, far more flamboyant than the usual wild flowers or irises that sometimes grace my apartment. 
    These red roses on my dining room table carry a weight.  There’s something deathlike about them, in all that velvet darkness.  I visualize them directly entering my heart like so many thorny arrows.  Oddly enough, over the years I never received roses from any of the males I’d been involved with.  It could have been the era I came to age in, the late 70’s and early 80’s with feminism playing a role in what I considered acceptable or not. 

Then, in the twenty plus years I lived in Barcelona, on the day of San Jordi (Saint George, the patron saint of the region) I received a single red rose with a single sheaf of wheat, the traditional gift for a woman with its symbols of blood and fertility.  The man received a book which always struck me as the better deal.  But carrying the rose as I walked home from work, I felt loved no matter if I got if from my partner or the owner of a restaurant, or even at my gym where one of the trainers handed them out.  I collected them in a vase and watched them droop down and dry up, but they never had quite the presence of the ones on my table now. 

There were other less rosy moments in my Barcelona flat where I sat in the wreckage of an 18 year relationship, a wounded elephant it was resistant to the end.  Tired of listening to my woes, my sister asked what I needed to come back home and I answered, though I was no longer sure where home might be, two things, a computer and a cell phone, and promptly forgot the conversation.  Miraculously, they were waiting for me as I made my way through European airports crowded and chaotic with threats of shoe bombers and finally arrived to Atlanta.

In the suburbs I was inhabiting a modern day Angor Wat, an abandoned landscape full of structure but no people around.  After the crowds and activity of Barcelona streets, I was shipwrecked, uncertain how to maneuver this new landscape, unlike any I’d ever known.  The suburb was new territory.  I grew up on a farm and after I left at 17, I spent most of my life in big cities.  With the help of my sister I ventured out of the house, learning how to get to Target and the drugstore and later, the bus to the train to the downtown that shimmered in new buildings but held little that was desirable to me after the history of Europe or the architectural treasures of New York or Chicago.

I moved back north to rework the patterns of my life, facing the ghosts of my family and my immigrant past.  And I found a peacefulness in Buffalo where I teach refugees in a program that once helped my parents in the 50’s after their escape from Latvia after the war.  In my own way I found a different kind of love than the all too familiar twosome of a couple. 

Love became the gift of a strawberry wrapped in tinfoil from a Burmese student in the middle of an interminable winter.  I simply stare at the simplicity and wonder of such a gift. 

Love is the birthday party a friend throws for me, preparing a table for gifts as if it were the wedding or bridal shower I never had.  The same weekend after the party, a dinner out, and tickets to Cirque du Soleil, I confess to my friend, “Maybe it’s too much to celebrate like this.”  She answers that in your 50’s you never know what will happen or who will be missing next year.

Love is cranking up Sylvester’s “You make me feel” to dance to by myself.