Paris

It is half past midnight on a Friday morning, and I am in Paris.

Paris is beautiful. It is true what they say about the sunlight here, it is unique, especially when rainclouds are hanging around.  It is the center of a great and liberal society, the flashpoint of revolutions, a cradle of history, etc. etc. Paris has every kind of store, restaurant, sex, music, and entertainment you might want, anytime, delivered to your door if you have ready cash.

But then so does New York and Tokyo and London and Berlin. And probably Moscow by now, if you are a plutocrat.

I am not a fan of cities. I understand the city is where all the great artworks and architecture and enginaeering and genius is gathered up. I appreciate that. Cities are nice places to visit, but I would never again want to live in one. I  have trouble, literally, breathing in cities -- the air is filthy. There are more people everywhere, which means there is more trouble, fashion, excrement, ugliness, bullshit, and amazing-ness everywhere too. The noise stresses me. It is never truly silent in a city, not even in a good hotel, in a single room that looks into a garden. And so I do not often come to cities, unless I am on my way from there to some other rural place.

I came to Paris to make peace with an old friend, and to bring some artwork to a new friend. I will only be here for four days. It is a fine and sunny mission that brings me here, and I am seeing Paris with new eyes. I am relaxed. I am not staying in anybody´s house, so I can make my own plans and go where I want to go, and stay as long as I want. I feel comfortable enough with the subways and money, museums and languages that I can get around and get fed and watered without undue stress. (I am staying at a Spanish hotel, after all.)

Today I did my morning visits, and headed out after lunch to see Notre Dame cathedral. I was there once before, so I changed my mind once I got on the train, and instead went to Pere Lachaise, a huge Victorian cemetery on the wild and woolly eastern end of the city. When it started to rain I went back to my hotel, where seeing it was Spanish, I took a siesta. It was total holiday vacation for me, a person whose whole life, by some peoples´ lights, is a holiday vacation. Because it was what I wanted to do, where I wanted to do it, and when I felt I wanted it done. No one else to worry about or fuss over or satisfy, nobody to be upset when I changed my mind and switched plans mid-stream. Amazing how relaxing it is, being in no one´s company but my own!  

Somehow I think women will understand this better than men will.

Still, nice as it is in Paris, if it were not for my friends, I would not come at all. If it were not for their knowledge of cheeseburger restaurants and Lebanese spinach crepes, the Leonardo DaVinci picture that´s only on loan at the Louvre through June, the sweetness and light of the smile on my godson´s little face... well. I would have to spend my life Paris-free. Paris would have to go on without me.

Alas, at least one of us would be the poorer for it! 

Hobo Road

He is at least 45 years old, but he is a homeless child. He´s walking without high-tech, ultralite backpacks or hiking staffs, or even shoes that fit. He´s got no money. He speaks only Portuguese. He asked for children´s books, and pored over the pictures. I had to put his name in the register for him, as he cannot write. He assembled the toy train and made choo-choo sounds along the floor. He is from Braga, Portugal, he said. He is walking the camino to Lourdes, alone.

He is José, pronounced "Cho-say," the Portuguese way. He was a high-maintenance pilgrim. He never stopped talking, and we only understood some of what he said. He needed things -- a razor, so he could  shave. A towel. He needed a t-shirt. When we offered to launder his things, he overloaded the machine with his sleeping bag, coat, flannel shirt, pajama bottoms. I split the laundry into two loads and he panicked, thinking I was taking away his belongings. 

He ate voraciously. He had eaten nothing but cookies for the past two days.

He is walking the camino backward, west to east. His shoulders sagged under the straps of his cheap sports bag, his hands weighed down by plastic shopping bags. He was small and feral. Most of his teeth were  gone. He needed a haircut.

He didn´t look like a pilgrim, but deep inside his bag he had a valid pilgrim credential. He can stay in pilgrim shelters, but most of them charge a nominal fee. If he does not have even that, he sleeps wherever he can find a space out of the rain.

His fellow pilgrims do not always find him worthy company. A week or so ago, José rolled into a town near Astorga with his sneakers and shopping bags, and stepped up to register at the pay-by-donation pilgrim shelter. A couple stopped him at the door. Where were his hiking boots, his proper backpack? they asked. Why was he walking the wrong way? He was a bum, a fake. This was a place for real pilgrims only. He´d have to move along.

And so he did. He slept in the churchyard. It was not so bad, he said. 

"He´s a bum," one of the neighbors said when José showed up at the after-Mass Vermut on Sunday, asking for a place to stay. "With a pilgrim hostel and an albergue here now, the pilgrims aren´t going to make it to your house. They´re going to send you the bums. Bums and freeloaders."

José was a bum, and so was Jan, a ragged Czech who stayed last week. They are homeless and jobless, wandering the road because there is no other place for them. Given an opportunity, they ask for what they need (Wily Antonio, another Portuguese drifter, shows up here every few months with a wish list!). If nobody gives them food and a bed for the night, they sleep outdoors and eat meals of cheap biscuits. They are poor in an honest, matter-of-fact way.

The Camino de Santiago has for centuries been a hobo road, full of drifters and hustlers. Today it´s no different. Alongside the bums are the freeloaders, pilgrims suffering a different kind of poverty -- a poverty of spirit.

Freeloaders have enough money to vacation for weeks at a time, but they gleefully consume resources designed for people who can´t afford anything else. Freeloaders take up the "donativo" bunks in the pilgrim shelter because their friends are staying there, because albergues are "integral to my camino experience." Paying little or nothing for their bed, they can spend the savings elsewhere. They sip beers at their café tables and discuss what makes an Authentic Pilgrim: Walking every step of the way. Prayers. Sacrificing personal comfort and hygiene by sleeping in scruffy pilgrim beds. 

Meantime, on the porch of the church, the bums bed down on the benches.

     

Holy Moley Week

Paddy, Harry, and Olaya

The party was just the beginning of my sister Beth´s elaborate plan.

Monday brought cards, letters, cards... cards from my Grandpa Scott (who is 94), Aunts Gloria, Esther, and Nancy, three women who went to high school with me, more than two dozen former pilgrims, both my sisters, and  several cousins (my cousin Barbara included a book about caring for donkeys and mules!). Sonomi sent another invitation to walk the Shikoku 88 Temples pilgrim trail in Japan. 

It was Holy Week in Spain, so mail delivery was spotty. When mail arrived, it came in plastic shopping bags! Cards, more cards, and gifts too: books, a Pittsburgh Steelers Toalla Terrible (in Spanish), a spectacular hand-knitted shawl, three kinds of curry from India, a cheddar cheese (!!!) from Australia, via England, delivered on Monday by Joe The Intern from Liverpool.

The birthday jongleurs

One other spectacle happened on April 4: Someone rang the doorbell just at dusk, and I ran down to answer it: Outside stood four grinning Spaniards. "We are here to sing Happy Birthday!" they said, and they filled up the entryway, accompanied by a shiny red accordion and a big orange sign, sort-of written in English. They sang it once in the entryway, in Galician, and again, in Castellano, in the house, so we could get a picture. I wish I had remembered my camera makes movies!

It was rather confusing to me. I only recognized two of them: One was our neighbor Milagros. Another was Luis, a restaurateur from Sahagún. The other pair I never saw before in my life, far as I know (and Paddy is not in the habit of admitting accordions into the house.) Everyone tried to explain at once. The accordion man is from Moratinos originally, his wife is somehow connected to the camino hospitalero program, and knows me from a FaceBook page. They live in A Coruña, way over in Galicia... and my sister Beth had sent an e-mail, and they were in town (with their accordion) and so why not?

Okay. I can dig this. I still don´t know how Luis got involved, but I will let that go.

When my actual birthday arrived the rain poured down. We haven´t had a decent rain here since December, so all the farmers smiled great smiles and the fields grew greener and more lush by the hour. We didn´t make it to Leon to see the great Holy Thursday processions, but me and Joe went to Mass here in Moratinos, and to Sahagun in the evening to see the penitentes parade in their pointed hoods. We went to church on Thursday and Friday, Saturday night and Sunday morning. It was glorious. We is righteous!

Serious penitentes in Sahagún

And all that churchness culminated in our little iglesia on Easter morning, where Don Santiago decided we should have our own re-enactment of "El Encuentro," a favorite Easter-day procession in towns all over Spain. The Blessed Virgin statue was bolted onto the palanquin and decked with rosemary branches. We don´t have another palanquin, or a detachable Jesus for that matter, so the priest put a sanctified host into the monstrance (a wonderfully-named silver-plated display case for holy wafers) and let it represent the Jesus image. And at the right moment, when the choir began to sing, four women took the corners of the palanquin and hoisted the BVM onto their shoulders and headed out the wide-open front gates. The virgin and all the women of the church made a left outside the door. The monstrance and the men went right.

We met in the alley by the dumpster. We set the palanquin on the ground and someone took away Mary´s black mantilla. Don Santiago turned around and led us all singing through the plaza and back into the church for the big Resurrection Mass.

The only unusual and wonderful thing about this was this year, I was one of the women who carried the Blessed Virgin. It was very heavy and unweildy. It filled my Protestant bones with fear, and set my Calvinist ancestors spinning in their graves at the sheer idolatry of it all. But my heart went pitty-pat with excitement. I felt like I had won the big prize, like I had achieved something truly worthwhile -- even thought I don´t have a purple hood, I was carrying a paso like a penitente! (Carrying a paso is something I have secretly hoped to do someday, but did not know how to achieve. I only had to wait six years!)

the penitentes of Moratinos meet Jesus in the alley

Felicidades

Palm Sunday. Palms don´t grow here, so we brought branches of rosemary and bay leaves and pine to church, the fragrant green stuff that grows all around us. We stood in a circle on the sunny steps while Don Santiago walked among us, sprinkling the greens with holy water. These will be tucked over doorways and rear-view mirrors, a sort of good luck charm, a sign that spring happens every year, year after year.

Mass was heavily scented, herbal even. Delicious. Lots of people were there, the ones who come for holidays are back again, like the swallows in the barn. They kissed our cheeks, admired the new crop of babies. It was a smiley morning, full of sunshine and good will.

In the afternoon we went for coffee to the Ayuntamiento. I knew something was up, and my suspicions were confirmed when I opened the door to the meeting room and Sopresa! A cloud of confetti fluttered down over my head. My former English students, my neighbors, and an assortment of their friends and relations were crowded into the small room, and they burst into a chorus of  "Appy bortay to joo!"

They had streamers, balloons, even a piñata loaded with candy and more confetti. There was a big bouquet, a bottle of nice cologne, a t-shirt with bugle-beads, a bottle of Valpolicella from the Italians, a bottle of Reisling from the Germans, all wrapped in jolly paper. They had six bottles of champagne and a huge cream cake with "Felicidades Rebeca" written in chocolate on top. Someone had even chalked a birthday greeting on the blackboard.

On Thursday I will be 50 years old. I don´t feel much more than about 23. Today, for an hour or so, was was 8 or 9. I was delighted! I never saw the meeting room so dressed-up for a birthday celebration, and I have been to plenty of those. Maybe it was because of the milestone birthday. Maybe because it was a surprise. Or perhaps because Paddy had Milagros do the planning -- and Milagros LOVES this sort of thing.

It made me feel very special and loved, and it made me miss my mom and sisters, who would have loved it. (I suspect my sister Beth is who told Patrick this might be a good idea. He would never, ever have thought of it himself, because he is not a birthday kind of guy.)

The best of all was seeing everybody there, even the factions of families that don´t usually mix. Everyone chatted and feasted and popped balloons and tickled the babies, and took home an extra bit of cake for breakfast tomorrow. The cleanup was monumental, but with so many hands at work we got that done in a trice. And so I can go ahead and be 50 on 5 April without disturbing the dignity reserved for Holy Thursday.

Yeah, I´ll be 50. And my neighbors like me! And I got presents! 

 

Holy Week Shriek

Splendid in bright red or deep black uniforms, banners embroidered and shoes shined, each bearing up under yards of braid and tassel, they are the Confraternity Bands. They played in the name of the Sweet Name of Jesus the Nazarene, the Most Precious Blood of Our Savior Jesus Christ, the Seven Words of Jesus on the Cross, and the Concord of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

Floorboards and flags vibrated, children screamed, ladies and men alike wept into their handkerchiefs. It was Sunday night in the heart of Castilla, and the drum-and-brass corps were in town, from Valladolid, and Bilbao, and all over Leon. I have seen many typical things in my years here, but I think I have never heard anything more Spanish. It´s the start of Holy Week in Sahagún -- the VII Certamen Nacional de Musica Procesional marched up Calle Constitucion and packed out the auditorium. I went with Julia and Paco and Fran to hear the street music of Holy Week.

There were five bands, each part of a confraternity, a Catholic devotional group. Sahagun has at least four that I know of, a couple of them dating back to the 16th century. 

But these bands were Big Time, from big cities. Their confraternities have hundreds of members, and date back 500 years or more. It´s the confraternities that put on the massive, solemn Holy Week parades, with their life-size statues of weeping Virgins and beaten Christs, snarling Jews and creeping Moors. It´s the confraternities that put on creepy robes and pointy hats for their Holy Week penitential marches through the streets, carrying the massive statues on their shoulders from church to church.

By watching which holy image is marching past, you can mark out the events of Jesus´ final days: Palm Sunday has Jesus on a donkey. The Last Supper and Agony in the Garden appear on Thursday, and Good Friday brings them all out, in chronological order:  Christ Tied to a Post and Beaten, Christ Carrying the Cross, Veronica Wiping Jesus´ Face, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, (featuring a gruesome dead Jesus with articulated shoulders). Each has its accompanying Blessed Virgin, dressed in splendid, ever-changing array. And in bigger cities, each statue combination has its sponsoring Confraternity.   

Way back when, the confraternities marched in deep and awe-ful silence. A few still do.
But Spaniards love passion and guilt, blood and tears, uniforms, crowds and parties and group activity. Mix these all up and you get a Good Friday procession (Or maybe a bullfight). It is hard to have all these melodramatic portrayals without some suitably dramatic music.

And so was born the Confraternity band: dry, deep drumbeats, swirling, shrieking trumpets. Pour on some militaristic costumes, shining with epaulettes and fringe, and a surplus of talented amateur musicians, in a country where every town has a music school and community chorus, band, and orchestra. The 40 or so members of each group are not professionals, but three of the four bands were obviously very disciplined, precise musicians, well-led and dedicated to their craft. They are men and women of all ages and sizes, electricians and beauticians, Moms, doctors, and farmers. I marvelled at the practicing they must do, and the patience that must demand of their neighbors. I wondered how they could play this stuff while marching. In the rain. With hoods on their heads. Penance indeed.  

Patience. The Spaniards are patient. Each of the bands played four selections, while a videotape of a Sahagun Semana Santa played on the giant screen behind them. Over and over, five times at least, the pasos passed through the streets, while the Sweetest Name of Jesus guys from Leon shook the dust from the rafters with their drumming, and the Most Precious Blood boys from Valladolid blew bugles, trumpets, and cornets into a climactic blast that stopped dead -- and left a single silver horn note screaming off a single dry drumbeat. It takes guts to play this music. It´s music for crucifixions, garrottes, autos de fe.
   
The Seven Words had the fat, lush sound of saxes and trombones and clarinets, a big band I almost expected to shift into "Sing Sing Sing." A class act all around.   

They saved the best for last. The Sacred Heart Band of Cornets and Drums drove down from Bilbao in their severe black uniforms, and waited for hours while the others did their nut. They stepped onto the stage and kicked into a flashy modern arrangement called "Silencio," and just kept at it, turning up the volume, the pitch, til the poor peregrinos sleeping in the albergue upstairs shouted for mercy. Not even the cornets hit a flat note. They played without music-sheets, from memory -- two small men bent at the knees, backward from their waists, and threw all their breath into their fussy little horns as the big drums bashed behind them. Bilbao brought down the house. Three hours later we escaped, wrung-out and red-eyed.

And Palm Sunday´s not for another week.

The Glory that is Torre

We were still in our road clothes, under-dressed.  Three concrete Graces stood in the geraniums, simpering across the patio. James Dean leered back in black and white from the facing wall. All four of them glowed pink, lit from below by hidden lights. We went inside.

This might have been a villa once, but now it´s "Los Años 50," a cushy hotel bar in the hilly El Pinar neighborhood on the edge of Torremolinos, a town not noted for taste. "The 50´s Bar," I thought -- sock hops, poodle skirts, Whisky Sours -- this would be a weird Spanish take on American pop culture. But I was wrong. The 50s this bar refers to is a mix of flocked foil wallpaper and chrome-and-crystal trim, with Brigitte Bardot posters and overstuffed chairs in the bathrooms. We tucked ourselves into a corner of a 7-foot velvet-striped sofa, ordered G & Ts from the sparkling Swarovski-studded bar, and watched the evening unfold.

It was splendid, deluxe, absolutely fabulous. We were just in time for the music, a little electronic combo set up in a corner by the bar. A big woman dressed for a wedding wailed love songs while a gray little man tapped out bongo beats on a drum machine. From across the room a sun-tanned, double-breasted wise guy watched from deep in his chair, his fancy watch poised just so beneath his starched cuffs, his ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He was, obviously, the boss, and he was lovin´ those sentimental boom-chaka ballads.

The women clattered in, teetering dangerously on their high heels, every one spectacularly plucked, powdered, sprayed-down and patted into place. Not all were pretty, but each was utterly groomed. The men, too, wore suits cut sharp and shiny, their hair coifed, nails and shoes buffed. Some were tall and cool. Others were toad-like in tight Armani, their fingers too fat for their many rings. Two black men shimmered into the place in white Adidas tracksuits, Gabbana sunshades perched on the brims of their ballcaps. They sipped Martel and jangled their ice cubes, chillin.´ Everyone seemed to know one another. Everyone had something fascinating to say to someone else. All of them chattered excitedly and laughed out loud, hoping to be heard above the bongos, hoping to be noticed. A couple of people danced a complicated merengue. The bartender shook a cocktail shaker, and poured out something pink from a great height.  

Then She sashayed in the door, a 40-something blonde bombshell, a sloe-eyed woman straight out of a Mickey Spillane potboiler. She wore a tiny knit dress and high-heel sparkly sandals, she smiled a porcelain smile, she worked the room. Everybody greeted her with joy and kisses. Her figure was amazingly impossible, her bottom and bosom round as fruit and perfectly cantilevered over a tiny waist. She was an exotic bird in a chromium cage, sparkling in the pink lights. We were dazzled.

It had been a long day´s drive. We decided against a second drink and took ourselves next door to our own villa-turned-hostel, and went to bed. It was only the next day we realized the Años 50 might be a fancy brothel. (I was glad we did not reserve our weekend rooms there -- it was an option on the booking website, but I shy away from places with jacuzzis in the bedrooms.) The Años 50 is too hot not to cool down. I don´t expect that place to be open when I go back again to Torre. 

The following day we went down the hill to join the big O´Gara clan gathering, a 70th birthday party starring many of Patrick´s family members and old friends. Drink was taken, the 5-year-old grandson was chased round the garden by a succession of volunteer monsters. We picked lemons and oranges from the trees out back, cooked up meals, dreamed dreams and reminisced. Paddy and I had driven all the way down to the Meditteranean coast. Two of his sons had flown from England, along with a cousins and aunties and friends. None of us saw the beach.

But we saw one another, something that doesn´t happen so often. We saw a Tottenham Hotspur football game in a pub called Auld Dublin. We shopped for Marmite and Heinz Baked Beans, Basmati rice and Branston Pickle. We had a barbecue out in the yard, with grilled fresh sardines and bream, roast pork loin and watercress salad. It may have been the best barbecue food I ever had.

No hamburgers or hotdogs. I brought the things to make S´Mores, but after the meal no one was much interested in gooey sweet things.

It was three generations of a working-class English family, at play in a down-at-the-heels Spanish beach resort. Someone or other of Paddy´s family has lived there since the 1960´s, and I joined the story only 10 years ago -- and in that time I have witnessed the courtships and weddings and births, jobs worked, quit, lost, won; retirement, illness, death. The family in Torremolinos reminds me of how temporary we are. Health is so fragile, jobs and property so easily lost. Each time we meet there could be the last time. It is precious that way.

Paddy, Sam, Dan, Matt, & Tom -- O´Garas all

I don´t want to liken a hoochie bar to Paddy´s fine family, but there are a couple of things to learn from them both. We have to enjoy the show while it´s going on, marvel at the marvellous wonders, taste the tang of the gin in the glass. We can go back over and over, but we can never hope for things to stay the same.    
   

An Orientation Upward

I am thinking about prayers. Not because I am particularly devout, but just because people keep bringing them up, sending them out, asking me for prayers.

It is hard to write about your own prayer habits without appearing sanctimonious. That is not my intent, OK? I live on a pilgrimage path. Prayer is part of the scene.  

I am not uncomfortable with praying. I grew up in a family that´s on first-name terms with the Almighty, and I still say "grace" before dinner a lot of the time. But as I have grown older, my definition of prayer has gotten a lot wider. It does not occupy a discrete portion of the day. I don´t keep a "sweet hour of prayer." It  happens, in and around the daily doings. It is not hard. It is utterly simple. It is a habit.

I walked out alone this morning to catch up to Patrick and the dogs. I prayed my mindless rosary-type morning prayers, Scriptures worn smooth by years of use, they fit sweetly into the rhythm of a human stride. I walked through town, and thought about the people who live in the houses. I imagined them all out in the plaza in August, playing cards and laughing under the trees. It made me smile. It blessed me. It blessed the town, too, I think.

(Pilgrims pray, and we see many pilgrims passing, more every day. Faraway friends call me up when they´re suffering. They don´t ask for my prayers. They ask me to have a pilgrim pray for them, out there while they walk. No pilgrim, even a total stranger, has ever refused to carry their prayers when I asked. I think this is wonderful.)

Out among the fields and I prayed for rain. The fields are like talcum powder, drought-stricken. They ought to be very green by now, but they are far from it. It is worrying. "Please make it rain," is all I said. "If my lettuces and onions can´t be as nice as Edu´s, at least let them not die overnight."

the "salad patch," spinach planted in November!

Today I prayed for Bob the Canary, too. He is a silent puff of feathers, obviously not feeling well, and heaven only knows what might be wrong with him. He is too young for his battery to expire. I hope it is only Spring Fever, that he will soon again deafen us with his jazz stylings. I love that little guy. "Please let Bob get better," I said. "Fix whatever´s wrong."

When Patrick is out of sorts I tell God to fix him, but I don´t tell Patrick I´m doing it. And when I am out of sorts I grumble at God to fix that, too. I suppose that is a dark kind of prayer. 

Perhaps praying is a healthy inner dialog, a way of ordering the voices in my head.  Maybe it is a coping mechanism in a life that still feels isolated, unstable, and lonesome, even though I chose it myself.  Maybe it´s my inner child, keeping to what she was brought up on, slipping into the comfortable old shoe called "Our Father Who Art in Heaven." Often I am sure it´s a selfish plea for a magic solution to whatever is not going my way. 

It is good for me. I like it. It may even be helpful. It certainly cannot hurt.

Yes, I believe I am heard. And I don´t often forget to say "thank you."

That´s the fun part.