My Year of Living Dangerously

Contact from two old friends dropped me right back into the Medellin of decades ago, the Medellin of drug lords, of violence, and the great passion of life lived in the shadows of all that intensity. Thanks to Patricia and Harold for reminding me that it was real. I was there in all of my naiveté.


Years later, it’s still almost too delicate to touch. I have rarely written about it save for a few poems. And I’m reminded of Alexandra Fuller (wonderful writer and speaker) who said you have to write with honesty. I’m not quite ready for all the stories.

How did I not know? I’d done research and read all that I could yet I arrived to teach in a binational center and was picked up in a bulletproof station wagon. Many incidents- I’ll save them for later but what remains is innocence, with the world surrounding gone mad.

And connectedness with friends. There were poetry readings, long lunches with my girlfriends, and trips to the country- returning to the city with its sparkling lights on the mountains. Love and language, beauty surrounding, and enough passion to last a lifetime. That was Medellin.



A poem from then…



Santa Fe de Antioquia



The smell of decaying fruit hangs

in the hot sun,

A green as strong

I´d never seen

in years of temperate moderation.



Ceilings beyond reach

in a room very old,

matching the inhabitants

busily fashioning

caskets out of wood,

the family trade.



Neatly stacking them

just beyond the bedroom

where I sleep in coolness,

for babies, tiny and white,

for adults several wait.



This night double church bells

announce another loss.

Bats flutter, then

rest flat

blotting out

paradise in palm trees.

When did books become a burden?

When did books become a burden?




As I sit in my bedroom every surface (even the bed) is cluttered with books. There are the books I have promised to read for various reasons (the author is coming to town, a friend has passed it on) and the ones I couldn’t resist picking up in a world where hardcovers can cost as little as a dollar and paperbacks, a mere quarter. And did I mention my kindle, crammed with classics?

Such excess has led to disdain. I avoid looking at the volumes that just a short time ago I was dying to read. There are simply too many of them. This is modern overload.

Contrast this with my years in Spain. I waited impatiently for the January sales in the oddly named “Happy Books” when I could pick up popular fiction and classics IN ENGLISH for half price. I read everything from Wilke Collins to the latest  novels. It was such a pleasure to search the books for something I might want to read. I also sent myself boxes of books from the US for more serious reading (back in the pre-Amazon days).

There was the summer I spent in Capcanes in the Priorat, a town so small even newspapers in any language weren’t available. I blew through every piece of reading material I had with me in a week and I had several more weeks to go. My friend Linda came to visit and brought a suitcase full of books. I am still grateful!

Back in Barcelona I worked as a reader in two publishing houses, Ediciones B and Grijalbo Mondadori (thanks Jill for getting me started there). There was a time when I had read every popular fiction book (before they came out). In those days too, every work submitted by any author was read and reported on. I read anywhere from 2-4 books a week. I was introduced to two genres- crime, which probably led me to write crime fiction, and biography which was surprisingly engaging.

By the time I left Europe, FNAC ( the French chain) appeared and lots of fiction in English became available. When I left behind my library of hundreds of volumes I was hard pressed to give them away.

So what happened? Where does it end? Is it social media that sucks up our time or simple overload? Everyone has a voice and there is no discrimination of what’s good or not. It just keeps coming at you.

THe New Nemesis and a poem. "Snow Clues"

The New Nemesis


No more orange alerts (for the time being at least). Our new enemy is now the purple and blue weather maps showing swirling storms with names- the latest of which is Nemo. I sit mesmerized and frightened by the massive weather systems conjoining and wreaking havoc. What’s worse than the actual storm though is the hype, the constant barrage of updates and alerts. When it comes down to the real pictures of weathermen or women standing in the snow, reality sets in and here in Buffalo, at least, it’s just one more winter day.

The hype has its effects. The day before the storm I went to the supermarket around lunchtime where the few cashiers (not expecting this) were overwhelmed. What’s up? asked the customer ahead of me. “It’s the storm, man,” was the answer.

My first year back in Buffalo, the snow still a mystery after decades away, I actually showed up at work on a snow day. Nothing happened. Of course, I’m glad to have a warning but I don’t need the fear. Winter is turning into anxiety and that’s even though I was here for the 2 major blizzards- 77 and 86- no names just the year they happened to distinguish them.



SNOW CLUES

Were there no cars

We walk the winter white world

our prints merge

with tiny animal paws,

bird wings

to create

snow clues.

Sleighs cross

soundless

the horses shake

the bells of Robert Frost.



Sparkle white

blinds,

Snow sleep

the most alluring of all.

Descending into Description

I picked up a novel by Spanish writer, Almudena Grandes, a writer perhaps best known for Las Edades de Lulu. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almudena_Grandes I was thrilled to discover page after page of descriptive writing! The first section starts with the details of the protagonist waking up, repeating in his mind- “I will not quit smoking”, and looking at himself in the mirror with all the details arriving to the conclusion, “I just turned 41.” It makes me think an American writer would be admonished to find just one verb to describe the pain and realism that Grandes does so effectively with her long sentences and adjectives, and God, forbid, adverbs.


I loved the description of the hidden ice skating rink in Bolano’s “ La pista de hielo”. I savored the book page after page. I haven’t found this beauty in writing in any recent (or not so recent) American novel I’ve read. Let me know if there is any out there, please.

So in this deep winter with cold and ice, and an injury (caused by some unknown force) I am, aided with tramadol, at home, reading and writing. I’m starting on my second crime novel, with the worry that I will keep accumulating works that never get published. I told myself that doesn’t matter. It’s the only way to keep on.

And thanks to a book I’ve been reading, Spanish again, I played around with the juxtaposition so wonderfully present in Spanish poetry.



City crows

the size of kittens

dance on my breakfast spoon.

I hide under a leaf,

wait for heavy rains

of spring to shake.

TV hype- Girls and Downton Abbey

TV hype- Girls and Downton Abbey




Well, yes, I succumbed. I now own a TV though no cable. Tv has certainly changed in the years I was away in Europe. WIth no cable there are endless channels devoted to religion, even one that throws in an occasional Spanish lesson. One channel has resuscitated gems like Maude and entire weekends dedicated to Sally Field’s series like the “Flying Nun”. PBS has been taken over for the geriatric set(lots of British series with older characters and concerts from 50’s and 60’s folk stars) so that doesn’t leave a whole lot out there.

That leads me to pay TV. I recently got season 1 of “Girls” on Netflix and was very disappointed. I missed the sense of fun; here there’s a desperation to it. I remember going through the end of my relationship and discovering “Sex and the City.” I spent hours in a comforting escape. Not much fun on Girls.

One positive thing is that the main character, Hannah, is not a victim despite the difficult scenarios she creates or falls into. I liked her in the way I liked Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo.” Hannah is, however, narcissistic. That’s part of the humor; she keeps right on going no matter what. There’s the damaged about her; you can’t imagine why she’d actually continue with the creepy boyfriend or even think of having sex with the sleezy boss. The line that summed it up best for me was the doctor who sees her for HPV and says she would not want to be 24 again. Nor would I! Though through the pink haze of memory, the time I spent in New York in my 20’s was fun.

Downton Abbey- I first watched the seasons online last winter when I had a flu. Entertaining enough but a blatant copy of “Upstairs, Downstairs”. Nothing new here. I am watching the new season because I like to immerse myself in that world on a Sunday night in preparation for the workweek. The series is pretty and just ok. It makes me wonder if imagination is lacking everywhere.

And back to Europe- more than 30 free digital stations in Barcelona. National channels have no commercials. There are excellent movies and good documentaries on. I think not even on pay TV in America.

Epiphany and some reflections

     I recently went to see the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall.  and was stunned by the violence of the previews for Django Unchained, Jack Reacher, Dabangg 2, and Texas Chainsaw 3D.  Obviously this was not my usual demographic.  My first thought was no wonder this country is so violent. 
    This morning I was listening to an interview with Tarentino.  My question to him would have been, "Do your movies contribute to the violence of this society or do you see them as a catharsis for violence?"  I would say they do both and there is a responsibility to one creating violence for public viewing. 

    On a different note, Los Reyes Magos, January 6th was a fun holiday in Spain and the end to a long string of feasts and parties.  I fondly remember Reyes in the small town in the Priorat where the Kings arrival was signalled by fireworks at the train station.  They made their way up the hill to town by tractor, pulling a wagon full of gifts for all the kids in town.
    This is a poem for the day I pull out at this time of year.  If you follow my blog, you've seen it before.


Epiphany



The Three Kings are lost

in whirling snows.

Camels sink unsure

in lands

past sands and tropics.

My door has no shoes

awaiting gifts or coal.

My favorite Balthazar,

for the name

and stately beard

shakes his head no.

Too cold, too far.

Here in white

crusted snow,

Each step ices,

my heart shivers.

2012 Story (from a prompt- found it in my files)

This was a story I dug up from a prompt- it has a certain 2012 end of the world feel to it.


“Dancing” 1,164 words


He was alone.

Last year he might have predicted things would work out this way. Someone who had been given such a gift-entrusted with it, really- would never simply continue life as it had been known before. He should have known.

And here it was again, this holiday time of year. The calendar told him it was 2012, and his life was different.

The change went much deeper than a season or being a year older. It went under his skin, as deep as his soul-if he permitted himself to believe in such a thing.

Life was like that, he thought. It could strip everything away from you in the blink of any eye. And then it could restore everything you had lost-give you even more, in fact, than you had ever had- with the same lightning speed.

He knew that now. Daniel closed his eyes and gave silent thanks. He was still here, still alive. One year ago he had been on vacation, his first time away with his girlfriend, Amy. The days were hot; the tropics lived up to their promise of endless sunshine. The most taxing decision they had to make was which seaside restaurant they would have dinner in.

In this realm of paradise, where it was easiest to do so, Daniel decided he loved Amy more than anyone on earth, more than anyone before or since would love another human being. Amy seemed comfortable enough with the goddess stature he’d imposed on her so the days passed in a mixture of suntan lotion under beach umbrellas, drawn out declarations of love, and the tangle of sheets.

The hotel activities which they had heretofore ignored included an evening of dancing to an orchestra. Amy pleaded, “Come on. When will we have a 50’s moment again?”

“I can’t dance.”

“You don’t have to. You just glide around the floor.”

Daniel put on the only long pants and shirt he’d brought; Amy looked gorgeous in a long silk dress and her blond hair piled up in a twist.

“Where did you pull that out of?” Daniel eyed her dress.

“It travels well and you never know.”

They started on the rum cocktails and like Amy had promised, they glided around the floor. The punch went down so easily, spinning around the room, Daniel just stopped short of dropping Amy on the floor. She couldn’t stop laughing. She protested when Daniel tried to get her back to her room. He got as far as the mezzanine. Amy sank into one of the sofas and immediately closed her eyes. Daniel fought off the woozy headspinning sleep as long as he could.

He woke to silence. It was light so he knew it had to be morning. Amy was sprawled out on the leather sofa with drool coming out of the corner of her mouth. Daniel tested his arms and legs to determine what part of his body was stiffest. “I haven’t fallen asleep on a chair since I was twenty.” He said to nobody as if excusing himself.

Amy was still asleep so he decided to bring her a coffee to ease her into the morning. His head throbbed as he stood up. There was a railing on the mezzanine that overlooked the hotel lobby. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.

It was as if all the humans below had been frozen in a moment of time. There were receptionists slumped over the hotel desks, a bellboy sprawled out next to a luggage cart. Daniel took a deep breath. What happened? He felt suspended in time, like he’d entered some weird movie set or fantasy world by stepping through the wrong door. As he stood paralized, an older gentleman came up to him and hugged him. “Thank God, I was beginning to think I was the only one left.”

Daniel took a moment to process this, “What happened?”

“Gas, a gas leak. I think.”

Daniel clutched his head. That explained the headache, but not why he hadn’t succumbed. He ran immediately to Amy and shook her awake. She was barely responsive. He and the stranger dragged her outside where she started to cough. “What’s wrong?” She looked at Daniel. “Who’s he?”

Daniel didn’t want her to see. “Something terrible has happened. We have to stay outside.” He looked at the stranger as if to give him a warning not to say more.

“It’s so quiet out here.” The man said looking around.

“It’s early yet.” Daniel said hopefully. “Should we call the police?”

“I have. No answer.”

Dan felt his entire body shake. The three walked down to the harbor where there would ordinarily be a hub of activity with fishermen coming back from a night at sea. “Radio? Do you have a radio?” Dan asked the man.

They walked until they heard sound coming from a café on the beach. The proprietor waved them in and served them coffee as if it we a normal day. He spoke a Pidgin English they had a hard time deciphering. An explosion of a transport ship had released huge amounts of carbon dioxide. “Dry ice,” Daniel couldn’t believe dry ice was a danger. He tried to ask the café owner, “Will they wake up?”

The man understood and shook his head. They left the café and went to the shipping office where an agent was stationed. “What the hell happened?” Daniel asked.

“They got the ship out to sea.” The man had tears in his eyes. “Everyone is staying indoors. You should be too.”

“That can’t be safer. Everyone is...” Daniel was still trying to protect Amy. “Can we get out of here?”

“There might be a fishing boat that can take you as far as San Jose.”

The stranger who was with them broke down and starting crying. Amy took his hand trying to comfort him.

Daniel went back to the room to collect their things and by late afternoon they were on a plane headed for New York. As the plane took off, he spotted the glow of a ship burning in the distance. On the flight they spoke little; Daniel couldn’t begin to comprehend what had occurred.

It took him months of internet searches on toxic gas and doctor’s visits to try to make sense of the explosion. In the process he lost Amy. At first they tried to find that happiness again, but it was always tinged with death, a sadness that wasn’t spoken about but present in every moment they spent together. Nothing specific marked the end; their calls became less frequent. They made excuses for not getting together.

Still, Daniel was alive while so many weren’t. Sometimes when he walked to work in the city, he stopped and looked around him. Every single person he saw would die. Yes, they would all be dead at some unknown point in the future, but for the moment, he was still breathing and that gave him great happiness.

On the future, death, and technology

     For about a week now, the news is all about Mayan predictions  and the horrific slaughter of children (not only at Sandy Hook Elementary but ongoing in many places in the world).  In the US, let's hope these deaths were not in vain and finally we can change gun ownership laws.
     On to the Mayans- it's obviously not the end of the world, but the world has been changing so rapidly over the last decade as to be almost unrecognizable.  When I was writing a novel set in the 1940's and 50's there was not much difference with the world decades later in terms of technology.  There were cars and phones and until the TV became ever present, the radio.
     All of that has changed.  I was at a party the other night and the first concern of one mother was to get the child's ipad connected to wireless.  That required the daughter of the host since she is the one who deals with technology in the household.  It makes me wish I had someone for that very purpose.   I feel like if one more electronic object enters my flat, I'll scream. 
     However, my life is probably not much different than many people's.  What I do when I get up (as soon as the coffeemaker is on) is check my computer.  My iphone is usually in my pocket or within reach.  And what does this mean?
     This means these days I'm afraid of not keeping up.  I'm a Uranian type (in astrology this is a clear archetype of sudden electric bolts of energy) and have always dealt with change but now I find I'm struggling.  I've spent hours on fixing computer glitches, installing and re-installing programs to coax the machine to do what I want it to do. 
     Technology has made the division of those who have and those who have not almost unbridgable.  There's almost no child from a poorer family who can catch up to a well off one and in France, that equalizer, homework for schoolchildren, may soon be banned.

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/02/166193594/pencils-down-french-plan-would-end-homework

   I'm afraid of aging in a society where compassion is lacking.  We're surrounded by crude rude media, a glorification of the military, and the surprising amount of religion that is dogmatic and rigid and far from caring for those who most need it.    

     I found a poem I'd written ages ago:


         Elegy

Insidious fingertips
tug on the shoulder
at the most hushed hour,
not even a sudden rap
or a sharp scream
could bring us back.

Overhead arms entwined
reach and flow
in bloodless unison.
Visages from the cracked photos
begin their march
through the brain
each with its own tale
long forgotten.

Where are the hags
with snake hair,
the men of steel impulse,
the wheel's harvest of panic?
These night shadows
are not as we imagined.
All's so quiet here.

America- the economic puzzle and a poem

     With Black Friday behind us and the frenzy of Christmas shopping all around us ( in some shops, already starting after Halloween), I confess that I understand nothing of American retail, or the American economy, for that matter.
      In retail the same item can cost $200 or $20 depending on when and where you buy it.  A NY Times article recently compared prices on various internet sites where prices were changing hourly-
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/business/online-retailers-rush-to-adjust-prices-in-real-time.html  Who can make sense of any of it?  What it means is that a price can be set at anything without regard to production, labor, or marketing.  This is the market economy. 
      I find this most shocking in the pricing of books.  $27.99 is the hardcover price of "A Widow's Story" by Joyce Carol Oates.  Guess how much I paid for it in my local library (they sell donated books upstairs)?  25cents.  The library I painstakingly put together over years in Spain I could barely give away.  Sadly no one was interested.  Well, one person was- a librarian.  They are probably keeping the culture alive while everyone else is discarding their barely touched books.
      So how is value determined?  An object has to be desired.  I've been watching Antique Roadshow on PBS and am amazed at the ugly objects that have value for some particular arbitrary reason.  My first criteria for any object would be beauty but that is apparently not a consideration, or perhaps I would choose a first edition of a favorite writer.  Apparently the objects I'd choose in my life have a low value.
    The American economy itself is indecipherable.  The right's concern for lowering the national debt (an abstract concept for most of us) pales when compared to the disregard of all the signs leading to ecological disaster (and the human and financial consequences).  Which would you tackle first?
      And then, there's health care.  If you're on public assistance you have access.  If you're one of the millions of working poor, you don't.  Why would anyone work in those circumstances?  What about a living wage and a single payer health care system? 
     If you have health insurance you may feel safe.  Think again.  Longterm health care which encompasses hospice and end of life care is not necessarily covered, no matter how many years you've paid into the system. 

And a poem to a friend who died in October


The Greatest Sin

Another love lost,
one who lived this
Latvian life,
the bottle poised
over each glass,
Sunday morning
slow death.

Live free or die,
my licence plate motto
seen on the BQE.

I escaped,
my poems then,
heavy like the
bodies stretched
across the grates
at Grand Central, 4 AM
home from another night.

Loves dropped
till the only one left,
was the clear
amber of bourbon.

Raise a glass to you,
or not,
my own demons of excess
emerge.

You believed Blake,
drank with Daumal
and died alone,
never finding
the purity
under this animal skin.
     

The Power of Naming

   I had the pleasure recently of translating a film title, Myuzeigais-Kalinders into Perpetual Calendar for my friend, Janis Ozolins-Ozols's documentary about Latgale, a region in Latvia.  Names are so important.  I went over the possibilities in my mind.  Which name captured the meaning and rolled off the tongue best?
    Nuruddin Farah, the Somalian writer, gave a talk in Buffalo last week and said unlike people in Islamic cultures, Europeans (those of European descent)don't know what our names mean.  Do you?
    My name, Teresa, has never quite fit.  It comes from the Greek and means "to harvest".  Teresa conjures up images of saints, maiden aunts, and Mother Teresa in her tiny form huddled over the sick and dying.  The name never quite fit because at home I was Tereze, my Latvian name, which my father rhymed with potatos and mice. Tereze, peles, kartupeļes.Over time I was also T, Miss T, T-bird, Tree, and Tere. 
    What's your name and what's its evolution?  Now that I'm back in the US, I've returned to my name duality- Teresa and Terez.  Thanks to the US Hispanic culture, Teresa according to the Urban Dictionary is now "A bodacious beauty with full lips, luscious locks and dark mysterious eyes.
Most Teresas are sensitive, caring listeners, but they also have their mischievous, fun-loving sides."  Hey, thanks! 
    And a bit of advice from Nuruddin about naming your characters.  Start their names with different letters.  He says people read so quickly that names blur into one another.  I have a novel with an Ilga and an Olga, whose names I will certainly change.  And I have a Donots ( a common name in Latvian).  We can all imagine the problems with that one.
     Tread carefully!  Learn your names. 

Info about the film-
 http://www.diena.lv/kd/kino/sodien-dokumentalas-filmas-myuzeigais-kalinders-pirmizrade-13975362

     

Boy scouts, priests, and the powerlessness of the child

     I thought the Catholic Church had the monopoly on sexual abuse of young boys but I was wrong.  The Boy Scouts of America  recently published information (14000 pages of files posted on the Internet of cases from 1959-1985)of  young boys abused by Sout leaders and other figures in the movement.  The website got so many hits it crashed. Of course, there were many posts describing positive experiences as scouts but the amount  of abuse is astonsishing. 
    What's alarming to me is how this went on for decades and what it tells us about the place of children in society.   Alice Miller in her writings on childhood "For Your Own Good" and "Thou Shalt Not be Aware" describes the position of children as totally dependent on those who take care of them.  She talks about the triad of concealment- shielding the parents (or abusers), blaming the child, and concealing the trauma.   This is evidently what has happened here and with the church's abuse cases.  There is hope though. Miller states- "I can see the possibility of substantial improvement for patients in simply being able to articulate their feelings, formulate their resentments, and experience their rage toward their parents (or abusers) providing they are taken seriously. She describes Klaus Thomas's method of patients writing directly in letters telling about the abuse to a therpist. He successfully treated adolescents who had attempted suicide. 
     So there is an opportunity for healing these terrible traumas and perhaps putting a stop to them in the future ( the abused can become the abuser).   Much has come into the open in the last decades but  I'm waiting to hear of cases of young girls in these situations (even more powerless than boys in our culture). 
    When I was doing research for a crime novel ting I encountered so much information on abuse cases, I was almost unable to continue reading the devastating stories.  But we can take heart- childhood is past and one will never be just that powerless again. 

"Girls Just Want to Have Fun"

     I know what constitutes fun in my daily life- writing, reading, watching a movie, or a walk in the park.  But what's fun in a social context?  In my 20's and 30's fun meant going out to bars and drinking and possibly dancing. A friend of mine described her 20's as a decade lost to booze. 
     Awash in alcohol- yet, there was an innocence to it.  There weren't date rape drugs slipped into unsuspecting sorority girls's drinks.  Bars closed at 2AM or 4 unlike these days in Spain where the night extends past noon the following day with after hour clubs and morning clubs.  When I was teaching university students, a young woman was upset because her parents expected her home at 6AM.  I couldn't imagine what the problem could be but she explained it was a time limit set.  Her parents wanted her home for breakfast.
   Fun, well in my 30's bars were replaced with dinners at friends' houses.  There was still drinking but a different enviornment.  At some point in my 40's I tried the test to prove I wasn't an alcoholic- never more than 3 drinks at any one event.  I did this for a year, carefully weighing maximum effect per drink for New Year's or other celebrations.  I rarely surpass this quantity and despite growing up in a heavy drinking culture (Latvian) I've managed to escape the terrible effects of alcohol or alcoholism. 
   These days I'm trying to figure out what fun is.  Novelty holds a key.  A new place (travel), new restaurants, in a never ending search for sensation.  Shopping works in American for this reason but it's not what I'm looking for.  I can try to figure it out in a process of elimination.  Dates at this point are rarely fun, meals out with friends can be.  I've discovered my job can be fun.  In the end, I'm with Sheryl Crow and Cyndi Lauper.
   Or in my poem, "Another Look at Happiness."

The Cold is here-when do I just give in to it?

The cold is here- when do I just give in to it?

The cold is arriving here in a chilly city famous for its winters, Buffalo.  There’s a macho sensibility with putting up with the cold.  When do you turn your furnace on? Apparently never in September, even if your’re freezing.  That’s part of the Buffalo character and it’s our conversations these days. 

“I turned the heat on ,”  I confessed to  a woman waiting for the bus.  She’s from Florida so her heat is already on.  At the dentist’s office, the assistant tells me her tenant asked if she’d turn on the heat.  Her response, “Bundle up.”  And that’s what I’ve been told more than once. Yes, this is Buffalo and even those who can afford to, wait until it’s way too cold before they succumb.  There was one October when I ran into a friend shopping who said she was avoiding going home because she didn’t want to put on the heat.  That’s how far it goes.  Another friend simply didn’t put on heat until it snowed.

Night time temps here dropped to 43 last night.  That’s about as cold as it got in Barcelona.  There we had a different dilemma.  I never had central heat so I moved through chilly spaces in my flat to get to the warm rooms- bedroom and living room.  One acquaintance from Iceland said she was colder in Barcelona than in her country.  The indoors was chilly but the outdoors never got to the point it does here.

Thankfully since the years I lived abroad, fleece and down have entered our lives.  My last foray into a Buffalo winter was spent in a secondhand Swiss army coat that reached my ankles and weighed a ton.  Before that I don’t remember feeling the cold.  My sister though said I spent winters in our big farmhouse wearing a GAA (girl’s athletic association) jacket and a wool hat. My hair was tucked up under the hat.  I remember the prickly feel of the hat on my forehead and the deep solitude of snow surrounding us, inch upon inch piling up.  The snow was the icy cover I needed to survive those years of my mother’s long slow slide into her illness and death.

3 activities where the after is better than the during

What I like best about these activities is that no matter how much I suffer while doing them, how I feel afterwards more than compensates. The first is going to the gym or exercise in general. It’s hard to get started. As I lie on the sofa, I see the obstacles to going for a bike ride. First is a steeply pitched overpass I have to cross that takes me over a highway and back to the neighborhood where I used to live. Just visualizing it makes me reconsider getting on my bike. And that same ride is what gets me to the gym. But once I do, the endorphins fly and I feel marvelous no matter how hard I have to pedal to get up the slopes (on a bike you notice any incline more than you ever would walking). Another activity that falls into the same category is meditation. Again there’s a resistance to just sitting down and while I’m meditating, I can’t believe what passes through my head. There is the struggle to find the right position, then there’s hunger, then the barrage of thoughts that range from the utterly mundane to the actual problem solving solutions. But that’s not where my mind is supposed to be. But regardless of where I’ve been, the after effects stay with me. I’m calmer and more likely to find pleasure in the smallest details. And of course, there is giving poetry readings. Margaret Atwood has a great short story, “Lives of the Poets” in her collection “Dancing Girls.” The character in this story finds herself lying on the floor of the bathroom with a nosebleed before every reading. Well, it hasn’t gone that far with me, but there are reasons public speaking ranks high in lists of fears. It does get better with practice and preparation. Mostly I’m happy when I finish a reading and find people have listened to my work (and perhaps even applauded).

Politicking

Politicking. Can it be true? The election is only 2 months away. Can I bear any more advertising and insanity? I don’t have a TV but political ads crop up every time I open any page on the Internet. You’d think I was President Obama’s best buddy considering all the e-mails I get from him and his team. I could scream “uncle” enough already but there’s one more convention to go. This one I can bear to listen to, parts of it at least, though it may prove to be less shocking or amusing (Clint Eastwood) than the Republican one. That leads me (as so many topics do) to politicking in Spain. Political campaigns are publically financed so all the ads for the parties (once they gain a certain percentage of votes they are eligible for public financing) are grouped together at the end of a regular TV program with a warning before and after that this is political advertising. This made them very easy to avoid and since most often it was the same ad repeated, millions weren’t spent on drumming a message into our heads. Here I did hear a person interviewed on the radio about her choice of candidate for president, say she’d decide once she saw all the ads. I never heard anyone say that in Spain. This campaigning goes on right up to the bitter end. On election day I have been handed ads, pamphlets, and flyers as I was walking into the polling place. “Isn’t this a bit late?” I asked, surprised and annoyed as these were shoved into my hand. In Spain there was the “dia de reflecion”. That meant there were no ads in any form of the media. Voting took place on Sundays which gives more time to vote. There’s no scrambling to vote before going to work or worrying about long lines afterwards. So when corporations are people and money can determine the result of an election, wouldn’t it be great to have public financing and less circus?

Turnaround- the old and the new

When I returned from a trip to Spain (my second home where I spent 20 years) I was struck by how modern Europe is compared to the US. Usually the image we have of Europe is of living history but Spain manages to combine the very old with innovations I never see in Buffalo. First of all there’s public transport. In Barcelona there are trams, buses, subways, and commuter train lines. Trams could be speeding right out of the Jetsons. All of these post wait times on a screen at the stop. My theory is that if you have to wait more than 20 minutes, it’s not going to be public transport and that rarely happens. And this is at a bargain price of less than 10 euros per ten rides. Even the city beaches have screens with water and wind conditions posted for all the different beaches. I pay $2 per trip on the bus here for a relatively limited service though I must be grateful it even exists. After all, the US doesn’t invest in public transport and it’s a battle to keep it running as was demonstrated in Buffalo with the battle when the NFTA (transport authority) tried to radically cut service. My bus rides in Buffalo couldn’t be more different than in Europe. Two men greet each other at the stop with knuckle touches, one woman says into her cell phone, “You’re in my shit.” I love listening to the conversations which have little to do with the language I teach daily. The bus has a curious mix of riders who I see on a regular basis, having become one of them: a Hassidic man with his religious book, lots of closed workshop attendees, a smattering of downtown workers, and the refugee students who greet me as they get on. In Barcelona, public transport isn’t just for the poor. Recycling- in Barcelona there are 5 containers for trash. We have two here and some communities don’t even have that. Public buildings in the city have solar panels and there is the sense of growth and prosperity despite the economic crisis. In Buffalo there are people who live in neighborhoods where there is no high speed internet. TV in Barcelona is free with at least 30-40 stations and the state run channels have no advertising. In the US, without cable, TV is extremely limited. I still haven’t succumbed to buying a TV and perhaps never will. There is new architecture and all kinds of innovations in Barcelona- it seems the old quarter is pretty much sacrificed for tourists but working class and middle class neighborhoods have new public spaces. The neighborhood of Sant Marti has a green area that helps cover up a noisy highway that runs through it. One section has a water wall so instead of the noise of traffic, there’s the sound of falling water. And in Barcelona bike sharing has really taken off. I saw people of all ages and dress on bicycles. Some cities here are finally getting a system set up but it’s hard to convince a car driving population that this really works for commuting. In a country where infrastructure is old and rarely replaced I feel like I am living in a far older place than Europe.

Mediterranean

     After 4 years of swimming in lakes, I've returned to the beaches of the Mediterranean.  I feel the slippery salt on my skin and its taste on my lips.  I'm not bounced about in the waves or flung under, scraping my knees on the bottom like in the Atlantic.  And let's not even talk about the Pacific with its fierce waves and chilly waters.  For the most part, the Mediterranean is gentle. 
    When I step out of the water here I feel light.  When I get out of a lake something soggy stays with me, like from the mud bottom of a pond.  The salt of the sea is a great purifier, a healer in its way.  So I have one more day to enjoy if not the water, then the pastel colors of the sunsets.

   The classic song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNkcAUAv1kw

I have a poem from my first chapbook too.

The Senora is alive and well

     I'm pleased to report that modern life in the 21st century hasn't erased the figure of the Spanish senora.  The senora is the woman who wears housedresses and a special housecoat over them to do the daily chores.  I see her leaning out of the balcony window to wipe down the endless dust settling from Barcelona traffic.  She's the one in the market shouting out, "Qui es el ultim?" so as not to be deprived of one second of attention.  She's the fighter with mala leche who won't hesitate to run over your toes with her shopping cart in an attempt to get to the fruit stand first.
     It's been ages since I've been stared at.  Here it's the senoras who have settled in for their midmorning cafe.  They look me up and down, and of course I'm the stranger here and despite the saying to the contrary "Paris, Londres, Reus", this city, Reus is not a capital of the world.  I'm not the only one they dismiss.  The elderly gentleman who approaches their table is waved away.  There's no time for him.
     The senoras have their own world- the hairdresser does their special styles and there are even glasses for them as I found out when I was trying on a pair and the shop assistant pointed at them and said, "No, no.  Those are for senoras." Yet the senoras have their dignity, something that seems to be lost in the American world where at 8 or eighty, women are all wearing the same styles.  One thing to be grateful for is the fashion of very short shorts hasn't reached the US with  60% of its population being overweight.

Change and a poem for Father's Day

              Change and a poem on the occasion of Father’s Day

What triggers the major changes in our lives?  At what point does the marriage become untenable, the roommate impossible, the job intolerable?  We go on day after day until something snaps.  Case in point-  I was never planning on moving now.  I have a trip to Spain which falls smack in the middle of summer and which means a big expense.  So what happened?  One day my landlady told me her three grandchildren (they are a bit wild- one put a hole in the wall) were spending 6 weeks with her downstairs from me.  My apartment suddenly became a place I had to escape from.  I could have coped with the visit; after all, I’ll be gone some of those weeks but this was the crisis point.  All along I’ve been aware that I need more space- that I can’t spend any more time looking at the walls of this flat but I’ve resisted.  I easily could have been stuck here for years.

   We all resist change but it’s better to adapt and play a part in it than face a possible earth shattering event that really shakes up our lives.  I remind myself as I sit in the chaos of bags and books.

    Years ago a Peruvian shaman told me I had a “genetic muy poco vista” and that I had more genetic material from my father than my mother.  When I told my sister- she said she knew that.  I think I inherited the physical, the wanderlust, but fortunately not the character.

Father’s Day a la Sylvia Plath

Winter black and white

weighs down

until green spring erupts,

he searches the barn for the kittens,

his touch tames.

He shells peas,

lines them up in equal piles

for me and my sister.

The storms lash out.

There is no peace in this house

Wind whips through

tightly closed windows.

He’s the one I search for

in shapely dark madness. 

Moving and exile

Moving

I  am sitting in a room that’s in the process of being dismantled, bit by bit, box by box.  Where does moving fit on the scale of life’s most stressful events?  Somewhere up there, after death and divorce.  My many moves are bookended by long periods spent in the same place.  17 years in the farmhouse in Varysburg, the small town where I grew up, and then 15 years in the atico flat in Barcelona with its terraces and views of the sea as a distant blue line and Montjuic, the city’s hill off the port. 

Since my American adventure, I’ve lived in three places- my sister’s home in Atlanta, a sublet in Buffalo, and my present apartment where I’ve been for, hard to believe but four years now.  Four years of living alone.  Surprisingly except for one brief stint here when I was in college, I have never lived alone.  Now that I’ve done it, it seems easy.  Solitude doesn’t weigh but there is that occasional need to find a witness for the daily details of life. 

So now, encumbered by a lot more stuff, I’m preparing for move 4.  I left Barcelona after twenty years with three suitcases and a few boxes of my papers which I sent.  How is it possible that I have amassed more stuff in four years here than in all that time abroad? 

My first trip away from home to Paris for my junior year abroad only required one suitcase and a small carry on.  With every subsequent voyage I’ve been weighted down with more stuff.  I have my books (heavy, aren’t they?), DVD’s, papers (way too many), CD’s, and more clothes than I could ever wear.  What do I really need?  Comfort is a way of life in America and every object is designed for that finality.  How much can I shed?  As I look around the chaos that is now my pre-move life, I’m going to find that out.

                                                                        “You can’t go home again.”  Thomas Wolfe   

                              

Exile

Cross the yard

to open the gate,

my mother stands

at the door.

Inside, the grey carpet

with faded roses,

consumes my breath.

The mismatched couches

 are covered over again,

a paint by numbers seascape

hangs on the wall.

I reclaim these rooms,

the medicine stained floor,

my father metes out drops

so he can breathe.

His voice, the backdrop

to my dreams,

as he reads aloud to my mother,

their secret night life.

Stripped naked

I try again to enter,

13 steps to my bedroom,

Petal pink, a girl long buried,

still wants the Barbie dress up world.

My mother’s closet holds two suits

from her past life,

strappy heels, red leather,

thick ankle straps,

I touch and identify,

She never wanted to be here,

in this farmhouse in America.

Yet she greets me,

we share for a moment

this white house,

this undersurface dream space.