Que Será

All still is somewhat in ordnung, except for a profound disquiet way down at the base of everything. Maybe something like was felt in Tokyo, while the earth shifted hugely only a hundred or so miles north. Maybe the great city felt the earth moving, literally. Or maybe it was the great lifting upward of so many souls, so suddenly lifted together out of their ordinary lives and daily bodies. Tokyo had to feel something.

A disturbance in the Force, perhaps. A stirring in the Wine-Dark Sea, as Homer would have put it.

Here, all is quiet. I can almost hear the bulbs and peas and seeds in the earth, pushing softly up at the dung and dark to where warm and light are. The past week was quiet at its base, but the surface was whipped by the whirlwind that is Fred, Federico, the guitarrero. He swept in on Monday, bearing suitcases overpacked with Extra-Crunchy peanut butter, über-sharp cheddar cheese, and (glory be!) the makings for authentic Mexican tamales. He slept, then swept out again, northward to France.

I love me a good tamale. When in Madrid I try my best to find them, usually sating the urge at Mas Que Café, a Peruvian lunch counter at Mercado Anton Martin. (This is one of our favorite restaurants in that great city -- lovely staff, great food at great prices, and unbeatable atmosphere. It is formica among the hand-trucks and lettuces and fish-heads of the market stalls. But there´s all the whip-slender inmates of the Flamenco-dance school upstairs, and the smiling knife-grinder from the stall next door, and the Bearded Intellectual horndogs from the revolutionary bookstore... all of them mixing it up and knocking it back, smoking and laughing and oh so alive, here and now.)

Here at The Peaceable it rains. Tim has tossed himself into his dog bed like a furry salad. Patrick is online, peering hard at the Daily Racing Form statistics for the Dubai World Cup.

Me, I am making a half-size feast of tamales. It is an elaborate rite, filled with sidesteps and substitutions. The foodies say you must have lard for the cornmeal-and-lime dough, but the local lard is too intensely piggy for my taste. I use instead a part of my precious, hoarded Crisco vegetable shortening, a chemical concoction my caring American family sends to ensure my continuing arterial decay, and half "cuisine et pâtisserie," a posh block of pretty much the same stuff, supplied by my remaining friend in Paris. (This contributor is Miguel Angel, who is himself a native Mexican tamale-eater. So it is fitting.) (Fear not, I do still have a couple of friends in France...they just are not in the capitol. Thank God.) (And yes, it is true. I do not care for Paris, any more than Paris cares for me.)

Which makes me think, guiltily, I let my Parisian godson´s birthday go by without sending him an illustrated book of Greek myths, as I intended. Ingre DÁulaire, read as a child, gave me all the base in Classics I ever got, or ever needed: Greek, Roman, and Norse. DÁulaire, (with a generous salting of native bullshit) proved sufficient for my academic progress, even as a major in European history, even as a Master´s candidate in church history, even as a professional writer and journo in religion and art and culture. The Greek Myths are the tales that stand behind our fairy stories, our movie and novel and narrative plots. We keep repeating them, over and over. The Greek myths, and the Bible, and maybe Bach and Beethoven and Billie Holliday and David Bowie ... I made sure my children had these to hand, too. And so I will try to do with my godson, who I have not seen for a couple of years now, but who I still feel responsibility for.

Heavens, I am discursive today. It is Lent, so I am not even under any outside influence!

Maybe it is Demeter, or Persephone -- the mother-daugher spring-and-summer pair, who oversee this blog post. Maybe it is because the earth is coming alive, but nothing else is really happening yet. Yet. The expectation is so... there! Or maybe it is a warning to you, blogueros, that I am off, yet again, to the Camino de Invierno. This time in company.  A team of Dutch guide-writers is walking that way, doing a deluxe tourist-oriented guide, taking their time, taking a good GPS reading, taking notes... I asked if I could tag along, over the mountains from O Barco de Valdeorras to Monforte de Lemos, the part that sickness and weariness made me miss out on last year. And they said "sure!"

And so I go. Maybe I will write.
Like the peas, and the Dubai Cup, the urge to write rises in the spring, toward the light.
Maybe.
Let´s not expect anything. Let us just be thankful for what is. Bulbs, peas, seeds. Que será, será.

Alles in Ordnung (kinda)

The sun is glorious.

I cannot seem to write anything comprehensively, so I default to sorting out things.

Patrick and I have an important commonality: Even though we live in a rambling and spread-out place that requires lots of upkeep, what we maintain is a great resistence to orderliness. This translates into many things. We can happily live with plenty of racket around us – over-loud music, yapping dogs, people shuffling in and out, the bread-man blasting his horn, tractors and occasional dirt-bikes revving outside the walls. I think it comes from working in newsrooms for years. Deadline pressure teaches one to focus on the task at hand, even when the archbishop is lap-dancing at the next desk.

Disorder is another commonality. Even though we stripped down our possessions to a minimum before moving here five years ago, and even though we continue to discuss minimalism and simplicity, we still manage a degree of environmental clutter. On the patio, even when things have been tucked away for winter, are scrub-brushes, dog-combs, rags, shutters, loose tiles, window-boxes, and dead jasmine. These things happen while you´re carrying out a bigger job. You set down that jug of glue, that water-glass, that turnip-seed packet or umbrella or dog-coat or bit of broken-off walking stick, just for a minute. The minute turns to a month.

Inside the house it´s pens, papers, magazines, paperbacks, maps, recipes, business cards, notebooks, salt-shakers, dog treats, and cables for cameras, computers, and mobile phones. I am not sure where all this stuff comes from. I certainly do not know where it all goes. We shift it all around now and then. We put the clutter into nice colorful boxes, and stow them on shelves. Things look nice for a little while, til a new layer of the same kind of stuff builds up again, or someone needs a camera cable or a compass or caraway seeds or muscle liniment. By then they have vanished, never to be seen again.

Right around the full moon of March 15 or 20, it hits critical mass. The sun reappears, and one morning a bright beam slices through the windows just so. I realize... This Place Is Out of Hand.

And this is why now the patio is home to a clematis plant, climbing up a new arbor, fertilized with homemade clematis food. The herb garden is weeded, seeded with cilantro and basil, with the parsley, oregano, rosemary, mint, and lavender looking bushy and bright – and three kinds of thyme tucked into their own little section. (Kim and Frank built the bed for me last year, when I was out camino-ing. It is one of the best gifts anyone´s given me.)

I told you last time about the random bottle from the bodega that turned into something lovely? So I went over to the bodega this week with a corkscrew and a flashlight and a glass and a big jug of water and had a good look. And taste.

I found we have some nice wine ready for this year or next. We have a few things that want a couple of more years. But most of all we had empty racks!

Now is a good time to buy some kinds of wine, so that is what we did: we went and spent 182 Euros on Rioja and Ribera del Duero crianzas and a few cosechas.. Sixty bottles or so. Cheap ones. Wine that is OK now, but likely only wants a couple of years in the dark to turn into drinkable perfume. (Or so we hope.) I racked them according to region and age: Toro, Ribero del Duero, Rioja, Navarra, Ribera Sacra, varietals, odd French things, 2007, 8, 10. (I don´t do “vintage.” Still too highbrow.) I will need to shop for white wine after a few weeks, when the new white wine comes out – the Rueda, Albariño, Bierzo... If Patrick goes to France for his holidays I hope he will bring back some of that beautiful green Gascon rosé, because my sisters are coming to visit, and they will never otherwise taste that wonderful taste.

It is an investment, wine, even though I never spend more than about 4 Euros for a bottle. The pilgrims surely do help us burn through the stuff. (The really good ones I keep aside for friends and family and supporters. Just so you know. Unless we have exceptional pilgrims!)

I very much enjoyed myself sorting out the vino, even though I don´t do well in caves generally. I thought about the earthquake that hit here on Monday, and I looked at the bits of earth that have fallen lately from the bodega ceiling. And then I stopped thinking.

Out in our back yard, otherwise known as “la huerta,” the garden beds are ready to roll. I´ve planted peas, butter lettuce, purple lettuce, endive, cabbages, carrots, turnips, spinach, and a few potatoes – in beds I can quickly cover up with plastic if and when the frost arrives.

I put in an Eden rose, a fragrant climber, on a trellis that lately was a barrier fence at Bruno´s albergue. It will make the back yard much more welcoming and pretty, I hope. The back yard still has a long way to go before it is civilized. But I rather like having a bit of Savage Nature around. Like T.S. Eliot (or was it ee cummings?) said, when you live on a farm you never can be bored – there is always something to do, some bit of wildness to bring back under the whip, always something to put off til next week.

But I digress.

In other orderliness I did up our taxes (well as I know how). We put the bread-baking cupboard back together after it collapsed. We finished up the woodpile, we hauled some old timbers into the huerta to make a new potato patch, I moved manure and sand and dirt by the barrow-load. We even hosted a goodly number of pilgrims in the middle of it all, and treated them well I think. They are bombing through here now, pilgrims. 

Paddy turned 70 years old. Which means maybe I should not be working him so hard. 

Today, in the bright sun, Patrick and I pulled out the patio table and chairs. We rubbed them down with teak oil, readying them for another year of merriment.

One note from outside our gates: Dear Bruno finally got all the pipes joined up and the permits stamped. The Hospital San Bruno pilgrim albergue is good to go, at long last, at vast expense... On Sunday he and his longsuffering and mostly invisible wife will host a great pasta feast at the New Italian Albergue, for all the townspeople of Moratinos.

And next week, everyone assumes, the albergue will open its doors. For the first time in history, Moratinos will offer pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela an official place to stop and stay. I sincerely wish them all the best. Moratinos was the last village on the camino with nothing to offer pilgrims. This had to happen.

But The Peaceable. What will become of us?

Maybe this is the question that is casting me down these days. Maybe we are now obsolete. Maybe now no one will find his way here, past a hostal, past an albergue... maybe now we will only get the homeless wanderers, the poor bodies who cannot or will not cough up the six Euros for a pilgrim bed at Bruno´s place.

We may have outlived our usefulness, Camino-wise.

What will we be now? What will we become?

Vamos a ver. We shall see.

Time will tell.

Treasures of the Deep

Rosie heading home, the Italian albergue in the background

I sat in my chair on the patio and ruminated.

March is a cruel month. It gets my hopes up, makes me think that yes, Spring really is here, I can plant the garden and pull out the patio furniture... and then it sends down a snowstorm to remind me, No. Not for a while yet, kiddo!

Even though we have good pilgrims, and we are healthy, and I have lots of interesting plans to look forward to, I still feel frighteningly depressed some days. In years past I´ve suffered from clinical depression -- a mental condition with physical causes linked to brain chemistry and heredity. I don´t need a reason to become depressed. Life can be dandy, but if my brain is not manufacturing enough seratonin, I feel as if I am living underwater. Everything, even activities and ideas and disciplines I usually love, becomes colorless, dull, boring... and ultimately, meaningless.

Depressed is a very self-absorbed, numb, and sad way to be. When the symptoms start showing up, I get scared. I know there is little I can do to forestall a depression. I can´t prevent it, any more than I can wash it off once it´s oozed over me. So this time I am letting it happen.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist teacher who I love, says to welcome it like any other guest. "Hello, depression. Come on in and take a seat. Have a cup of tea. Where have you been, all these years?"

This way, it keeps its distance. It is not me, it is not "my depression." It is just someone who is in the house today, and probably tomorrow. He will wear out his welcome, but he´ll eventually move on. 

Wise people say depression usually has something to teach you, if you stop whining long enough to listen to it. Me, I think depression is like nausea. If you fight it, it just lasts longer and makes you more miserable. Best to just puke and get it over with.

Or maybe it is more like plunging into the deep end of the swimming pool, without grabbing a lungful of breath first. Sound and light and your voice are all shut down and silenced. You feel a desperation inside, a struggle to re-surface, but the water only slows your efforts to move upward again, toward the living world.

But if you let the momentum of your dive carry you downward first, you eventually feel yourself touch the tiles of the pool-bottom. And once you hit bottom, well. You can fold your arms alongside your body, hunker down, and then blast yourself like a torpedo upward and out again into the light! No struggling needed. Just momentum. Just flowing, downward, bottomward... At the bottom, there is something to push against.

I thought all these thoughts out on my patio, with my feet up on the edge of the well. The sun shone, the pavement was littered with dog bodies of several sizes, worn-out from a long morning´s mouse-hunt out in the fields. Paddy opened a bottle of wine, brought up at random from the depths of the bodega earlier that day. I recognized the label: Bodegas de Abalos makes red Tempranillo wine in La Rioja, Spain´s popular wine region. The label said "Crianza 2005," which means it was aged a couple of years before I bought it, and was already judged table-ready at that time. It was nothing to write home about, but it wasn´t bad... and it was remarkably cheap: 2 Euros a bottle. I bought three cases.

I put them in the bodega. I forgot they were there.

I took my glass, had a sniff, then a taste... After three years in the cool darkness, that average table wine has ripened into the full-bodied, wide-open, crisp and delicious Reserva that made Rioja famous. Wow!

Anti-depressants

Playing on the little outdoor boom-box Bebo y Cigala, a wizened Cuban pianist and a Spanish flemenco singer, howling through a bossa-nova heartbreak. From his cage little Bob sang along. And in the hand not holding the wine glass I had a paperback book called "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne" -- an excellent, fascinating book (even if it is a little highbrow).

Books, birdsong, bossa-nova, good dogs, and an agreeable mate bearing Rioja Reserva. What more could I want?

If depression must hang out here he can stay for tea. But he´s not getting any of the wine.


 

Jesterday: A Lesson

It was only 10:30 a.m., but out of the snow came three pilgrims. They were hungry, as all the pilgrim-feeding  places in the last 14 kilometers are closed.

Still, after 13 kilometers they were smiling, happy, full of life.  Ruben, a Basque from Barakaldo, was a big man, 40-ish, a chef at a summer resort up on the coast -- the kind of pilgrim who drinks lots of red wine and laughs loud and then  snores like a sawmill all night. The other two were slim and fashionable and in love: Alan from Argentina, a young Sinatra in a black fedora, and Sylvia, a pierced and tattooed nymph from Portugal.

We sat them down in the kitchen. I made some bread last night, and they tucked into that while Paddy made them each a two-egg omelette. We talked about Hugo Chavez and George Bush and the California maharishi that Alan and Sylvia hope to meet up with later this year in India. I had trouble understanding Alan´s Argentine accent, I admitted.  So everyone then shifted into perfectly OK English. Accented, but fine -- probably about equal to my Spanish. 

After the last of the egg was mopped-up with the last of the bread, Alan spotted the guitar... "Ah! I long to touch the guitar!" he said. "May I please?"

So Fred´s guitar was put to its intended use, and the gray morning round the kitchen table turned to a skilled bossa nova, then a tango. Ruben has a monster baritone voice, which he applied with fulsome emotion to the Beatles: "Jesterday," he sang. Me and Alan harmonized (more or less) on "Wish You Were Here," and then Ruben then made a blockbuster attempt at "What a Wonderful World."Alan suddenly decided the guitar needed a tuning. (sing that song with a Spanish accent. Just try it. It is an absolute scream.) Bob the canary loved every minute, and sang along at maximum volume. Tim and Rosie and Murph did not budge from their usual 10-to-noon posture, best described as "carelessly flung across the furniture."

And so by 11:15 the smiling trio put their coats and backpacks on again, and disappeared back into the winter. 

We made more coffee.
"Nice people," I said. "Fun, hearing live music in the place."
"They have a lot to answer for, the Beatles," Paddy said.

 * * * * * * * * *


I blogged about the eventful morning, a verson of what you see above. I posted it. After lunch the doorbell rang again. Out on the steps, in the rain, was Antonio. This is the third or fourth time the leathery little Portuguese has turned up here. He travels back and forth across the camino, fully credentialed but obviously not your usual pilgrim. Antonio is a traveling man, a homeless person. A hobo. "Hola, Rebekah!" he said, kissing my cheeks. "I am back!" We are on first-name terms, us and Antonio. 

Antonio is walking eastward, to Rome this time, he said. He needed wine to warm himself, maybe a raincoat for tomorrow, and especially a winter-weight sleeping bag. We didn´t have the last two, but he helped to empty out the bottle of Rueda left over from lunch. I told him I´d drive him over to Ledigos, to the next open pilgrim shelter. Paddy gave him 10 Euro for the night´s stay. (Paddy and I are finally communicating between ourselves, when one of us doesn´t really want to host a pilgrim that night.) I remembered an old LL Bean sleeping bag out in the barn, a dusty, overly-heavy model abandoned here a couple of years ago. Antonio was glad to have it.

Antonio never leaves here empty-handed, which nettles me somewhat. I feel like a sucker when he goes. But when I think about why, I have to respect the man. He is in need. He asks for what he wants, he never demands. And if I have extra, there is no good reason for me not to share it with him. We both understand that. That is why he keeps coming back here, and that is why I keep giving him things. (That, and my mothers´oft-stated suspicion that bums are often "angels in disguise.")

On the way over to Ledigos the snow turned to heavy rain. I remembered Kim had left a poncho in the back of the car, for whomever. I dug it out and gave it to Antonio, so he can walk tomorrow.  

At the bar in Ledigos sat Don Gaspar, one of our two parish priests, in whose capable hands I left our friend Antonio. I am not sure either was happy about the exchange, but both told me I am a nice person. Both thanked me, and wished me godspeed.

They blessed me in Castellano and in Portuguese, respectively. And during the drive home that made me think, too, about the blog above, and the fun I´d had, laughing at the Argentine and the Basque singing English tunes for us in our kitchen -- how funny it was, hearing "Yesterday" sounding so silly...

And I was struck by my own ingratitude, maybe even my cruelty. Sure, England and America provide the world with a fabulous musical repertoire. But English, the lyric language, is not my personal possession. Here were these tired, damp strangers, taking a chance in a second tongue, paying for their breakfast with songs and smiles. And there I was, mocking them behind their backs for their funny accents.

Me, the person who twists Spanish into bizarre shapes on a daily basis... a foreigner who, after five years in Moratinos, still cannot make some of her neighbors understand more than half the things she says. Hold up right here girly, I told myself. I took a look in the mirror.

We´ve had plenty of pilgrims in the days since I came home: a French Canadian, two Catalan ladies, as well as today´s arrivals. None of them left any money, but what they did bring, apparently, were lessons I need to learn.  (Just incidentally, this afternoon, even while I was driving Antonio east, a blog reader from Australia hit the donation button, and paid into our account enough to cover everybody´s expenses.)

* * * * * * * * * *

We live in a magnificent place, people. Not just us at The Peaceable in Moratinos.
You live here, too, wherever you are.  We all are parts of the same world, we all inhabit our own Peaceables. We create our own kingdoms. And we are charged, by Christ himself, to be peace, to bring justice and kindness to whomever shows up at our doorstep, or at our elbow, or at our desk.

Patrick and I are not called to be any more heroic than you are called to be.
After today, I hope you are kind to the needy people all around you. And I hope it does not take you so long as it does me, to see the lessons they have for you.

And the music.

Long long road

I am on my seventh day in the United States of America, land of my birth.  It is an exciting and exhilarating and very very exhausting place, America.

I think it is not only the ambitious pace, the odd eating habits, and the harrowing winter weather -- and my habit of lumping some of life´s more unpleasant duties into each of my visits. (this one included a professional conference, as well as visits to the dentist and the Department of Motor Vehicles). I think the main factor, for me, is genetic.

My family lives here. 
Families are messy, emotional, demanding things. You don´t know how much you love them until they are threatened. And as you know if you´ve read this blog recently, my mother´s health took a bad turn in the past month. I flew back to the old stomping grounds to stand by while she recovered from an abdominal surgery, and the lab results that came after.

It started out exciting and star-studded, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. While there I spent quality time with my great friend Kathy, my daughter Libby and her Intended, and several old friends sent my way by the Camino. I also met an awesome Franz Klein painting, la Infanta Christina de España (a princess), and a Hollywood movie star (Martin Sheen)... all of them up close. I met an ambassador, an importer of Spanish jamones, and some fascinating college professors, too. I invited them all over to visit, and some of them may well show up in Moratinos in coming months, part of a new intercollegiate pilgrimage study program. (probably not the painting, nor the princess. Nor the star. But you just never know.)

Maybe the best part of the whole trip, though, was driving a little rental car from Washington DC up to Pittsburgh, over the Allegheny mountains on an ancient highway on a Tuesday morning. I turned up the radio, and enjoyed it more than I have enjoyed the radio in a very long time -- starting out with National Public Radio´s deep and wide coverage of revolutions in the Middle East, then fading into the rural stretches of Maryland with country boys singing of fishin´ buddies and pickup trucks and Mama´s Hungry Eyes, then Eminem snarling "Mama, I Didn´t Mean to Hurt You," shifting into preachers calling me to a life of "the joy of holiness," hair-bands howling out how they Sold their Soul for Rock and Roll. Finally, up over Breezewood and onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike I found the jazz station from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, playing old Ella Fitzgerald "Got You Under My Skin" with a weird rhumba tom-tom syncopation. George Benson. Cedar Walton... then a shift up the dial for some Decemberists, Death Cab, and finally Train and Lady Gaga and the Top 40. By the time I rolled up at Mom´s house the NPR news cycle started up again.

The snow in mom´s yard is almost knee-deep. The house was fragrant, my sister Beth had brought over a big pot of beef vegetable soup.

Mom was her funny old self, walking slow, thinner and smaller than I ever remember seeing her, terribly pale. But smiling radiantly. Her hug felt the same, that beautiful Same that is Mom. I did not cry, at least not on the outside.

And so I stayed with her. I cleaned the bathroom, swept the floors, folded laundry, filled up the bird-feeders out in the snow. I learned about the sickness she´s up against, but I didn´t look at the big cut down her belly. I learned that my sister Beth is not only handling all of mom´s paperwork, she is now taking care of that horrific surgical wound, too -- arriving after 8 each morning to change the dressing. (I have known Beth my entire life, and the older I get, the more I have to admire her. I could never ever do that kind of heavy-duty nursing. No way. Not even for mom.) 

I visited my grandfather, who at 94 years old looks more spry and healthy than my mom does at 72. I visited my sister Beth, my nephew Joey, my Aunt Esther and cousin Barbara and cousin Pete ... all the people who make this place my home town.
   
And this morning, me and Beth took mom to the big cancer hospital in Pittsburgh for the Last Word.

The tumors are not invasive, not even really cancer, the handsome young oncologist said. Someday Mom  may need more surgery, or some chemotherapy, but not anytime soon. Her bloodstream and vital organs are not compromised. They will check her every six months for signs of cancer, but so far, so good. She is going to be alright.

Mom and Beth smiled politely and thanked him.
I went out into the hallway and sobbed til my nose bled.

The snow is melting, rain is coming down hard, the rivers are rising. It´s almost March.
It´s time to get the heck outta here. Time to go to my own Home.
I drive back down to Washington Saturday morning with the radio blasting, and I will fly out over the Atlantic overnight. God willing, I will be back home at The Peaceable on Sunday afternoon.  (I know you come here to read about Moratinos, not Pittsburgh.)

Once there I will scratch my dogs and pass around the goodies I bought for everyone. And I will go to bed and sleep. I will sleep for days and days, because I will finally be able to rest again.

My mom is alive still. The earth is tipping back onto its axis. Life can go on, at least for a while.

Thank God thank God thank God.

Vermut

The little brick church was very cold inside, as Spanish churches tend to be. And while Don Santiago sang out the Mass, the weak winter sun coming in the windows darkened down. The scanty lightbulbs above the altar shone more and more yellow. The candles brightened and shivered -- the wind roared down the bell tower. 

Sometime between the Sanctus and the Padre Nuestro, winter swaggered back in from the west.

After church we scuttled across the plaza and into the little meeting room in the ayuntamiento and gathered  close around the butane heater. Esteban slid open the lid on the bar cooler. Out came the grape juice and refrescos for the ladies, and the  white wine, the red, and the eponymous Vermut for the men. Sunday, after noon, after Mass...Vermouth. It is what is done here.

It is what we did. Around the table we sat. José took a calendar down from the wall, and on it -- month by month, with remembrances called out from everyone present -- he scrawled everyone´s name, on everyone´s respective birthday. In January we celebrated Raquel´s birthday, and this month, Patrick´s. Today it was Milagro´s turn. In March there´s only one, in April, several. We´ll be in the depths of Lent, but what the hell. We´re gonna have a good old party then, when spring is here, when the rye in the fields is ankle-deep.

En Mayo hay pocos cumpleaños. En Junio? Ningunio.

The wind tossed rain like gravel against the windows. Inside we marched through the calendar, through the year, remembering birthdays and births. Which inevitably led us to aging, and funerals, and deaths -- a primary topic of Vermut conversation. Which of us was born on the day of whose funeral, whose Abuela lived to be 93, whose Tio is still is alive at 96, still sharp. A "mere youth" from Sahagun, aged 78, died last week when a wall collapsed and buried him under tons of roof tiles. In Terradillos, the town next door, another man is ailing unto death -- the brother of Eutichio (or some wonderful name like that -- here we have Agapitas, Hilarios, Heliodoros, even!)  

Fascinating.  

But it wasn´t all death and dying. There´s news, too: Pepe, "the dueño of Terradillos," this week cut down the little forest out along the carretera and sold the timber to an outfit in Segovia. We´ll hear no cuckoos there this spring.

Paddy told about Harry, our sweet new galgo dog, adopted from the giant dog-pound in Medina del Campo -- part of a great wave of refugee hunting dogs dumped recently outside a shelter in Seville. (He howls with an elegant southern accent, I think. When the neighborhood dog chorus tunes up at 2 a.m. He yodels bulerias, saetas like a Flamenco star at a Holy Week procession.

The nascent character of Roque, a puppy sired by Esteban´s randy mutt Toby, out of Florín´s lapdog Amora and destined for Eduardo´s yard, was analyzed. Eduardo lives alone in a big house across from the church door. His last dog, also called Roque, (known by us as "Pants Dog,") was a vicious brute who attacked Tim one morning out in the plaza. Tim won, but Roque bit Eduardo in the melee. And when later on the dog bit Eduardo again, well... no more Roque. This new pup will be sweeter, calmer, and much smaller. So it was decreed.

The Vermut is becoming a Sunday routine, a healthy, friendly hour out of the week. Everyone is invited, but not everyone attends. Not everyone approves, I think -- but those absent are not discussed. Still, among the people gathered in the ayuntamiento, Moratinos life is recounted, celebrated, cemented. 

The rain fell, the wind howled, the pilgrims stomped past outside, hunched inside their ponchos. Inside we were toasty-warm, from the stove, the merry company, and the Vermut.

It´s Christmas After All

photo Laura Collins: The Metropolitan, Madrid

 Madrid was knockout. Our hotel room was right across the street from an architectural landmark, the Metropolitan building. To the left is a photo of the Metropolitan. Yes, even in February, the sky is really that blue! The thermometer on the bus stop outside our balcony read 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit) on Saturday afternoon. The rest of the world is buried in snow. I am grateful.

We had a nice weekend, stayed at a fine hotel at a very reasonable price. We hiked around a good bit, had a visit with Candy, an old expat friend from New Orleans and Detroit  (author of a Madrid guidebook!) and Paddy befriended a galgo at a restaurant terrazo in the Plaza Cervantes. We  discussed our restaurant options at great length, but ended up eating forgettable Indian and Mexican meals... we were staying in a neighborhood unfamiliar to us. Had we been in our usual Madrid digs (Lavapies/Anton Martin) we´d have done much better, but hey. As Paddy likes to say, year-round, when we overspend: "It is Christmas, after all." (This may be the title of my autobiography.)
 
It was a worrisome weekend, what with my home football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, being in the Superbowl on Sunday night, and Patrick turning 70 years old on Monday, and my mother in the hospital with an unknown prognosis. Only time would work us through these mortal coils, so that is why we decided to pursue the plans already in motion.  

It was the right thing to do. My sister Beth, always the one to Get Things Done, kept me updated on Mom. And in the fullness of time we learned Mom has a strange and rare condition called pseudomyxoma, which isn´t quite cancer, but isn´t such a great thing to have... but Mom is not on the Fast Track to Heaven, at least not anytime really soon. And I will admit, when I got the news (in the Starbucks on Calle Atocha at 9 a.m. Monday) I found the nearest church and I got right down on my knees right up front and cried like a baby saying Thank You God Almighty. (In Spain, in the cities, the churches are open for this kind of business. How cool is that? The guy cleaning the windows came over and handed me a tissue and patted me on the back.)

And thank you friends, who pray so almighty strong. You already in December proved you can turn gray Galician winter into soft blue-sky April, just by saying "please." So please, don´t stop.

My mother went home from hospital on Monday. Once she mends from the big surgery the doctors will start a round of chemotherapy, to kill whatever might still be inside there. She has good health insurance. She is in Pittsburgh, an excellent place to be if you need a doctor. And she is on first-name terms with God Himself. She is a lot more cool about all this than I am. She makes me look like the weenie I am, all my Buddhism and faith and pilgrim-ism notwithstanding. I am eternally grateful for her. (I am well aware that someday, something will take her out. She is in her 70´s. Death happens to everybody. I just want a chance to get used to the idea, before it happens to her. )

Paddy and I came back yesterday on the morning train. Christina the nun had gone, and another pilg had arrived -- Oliver, a hospitalero from Germany. Like many pilgs, Oliver loves to talk, mostly about Oliver. He speaks many languages, he cooks very well (he made us a lovely simple dinner), when I went to bed at 8:30 or so he was still going at it. I slept for 12 hours straight. We had been up til 4 a.m. the night before, watching the Steelers crash and burn in the big game... Oh well. It is not always easy or cheap, keeping the faith -- especially from a time zone six hours ahead. But we watched the game, with a lively group of Steelers fans around us, and with Adam and Marta, too -- two Madrid-based musicians who´ve been part of the guitar scene here for the past two years. Another nice visit. We are not alone out here.

And so back we are in Moratinos. We have not seen a lot of local action yet -- only Esteban the Mayor, stopping his car to ask us how Mom is, how Madrid was (he is a blog reader too).  The weather continues beautiful. The garlic is sprouting, the saffron, the struggling grass seeds in the Somme out back... it cannot last, but it is a beautiful break. I am very grateful. I dried the laundry outside today, on the clothesline. I turned the compost, and turned over the earth in the new garden beds.

Tomorrow we go to Palencia, to see about replacing Paddy´s stolen Resident Alien card. Then we will head southwest to Medina del Campo, to a place called Scooby. Where we will, hopefully, meet the next member of the Peaceable Crew... Scooby is a dog pound that specializes in abandoned greyhounds. They sent us an email on Friday, begging for help. Hare-hunting season is just ending, and Evil People all over the country are dumping their less-than-stellar hunting dogs at Scooby´s doorstep. 160 dogs in the past two weeks... can we take at least one?   (there are other ways to contribute!)

And this evening, after sundown, Lulu stood in the patio and cried with loneliness. Maybe we can find a  galgo who is more people-friendly, energetic enough to give Lulu a good run every morning, and maybe give her a bit more confidence around humans, a creature of her own kind to help keep the barn warm at night. (Lulu, our greyhound, is neurotically shy, an outcome of an abusive background.)


Four dogs is a lot of dogs. But somehow this seems right. It is downright exciting, really... A galgo, a gift from the campo, for people of the campo.
 
I will let you know soon how grateful I feel.