childhood

Trigo

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wheat.
it’s my favorite Spanish word
learned in studies
to present the idea of hay
for Halloween

for me?
wheat beer,
an entire liter.
we walked across town
in search of the path
that would lead our girls
to a view of 2000 years of history

we were interrupted
by clients who thought
1.5 liters of beer
could never be enough

we walked across town,
our children in tow
and this is my Spain
as pure as anything,
the real beer,
the Pilsner to top it off,
and the warmth we swam an ocean for–
our kids’ words intermingled
like love in a basket

Trigo
wheat
it’s what makes us
who we are

Unpredictability

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You can’t predict this. That your day will begin before dawn and end later than most people in America would consider working. Hell, in Spain, too, though they sure as hell don’t mind hiring me to work that late!

There was no way of knowing, before I came here, how much homework my daughters would have. How intimidating and complex it could be, while I sit with my translate app ready to look up the English version of words like slither, spinal, and homonym. How much time this would take out of the exceedingly brief time I have with them each day. How I could lose sleep over how early I need to set the alarm, because what if Mythili fails her science test or Riona doesn’t have a chance to read aloud to me or Isabella can’t retell the story of Jesus saving all and bringing his followers to the kingdom of heaven when she’s never heard these stories in English to compare them to??

This isn’t my singular problem. I have come up with a new theory (yet again) about Spain. Since I spend most of my day not with my family but with Spaniards, I hear all kinds of stories and details about their culture. Students commonly spend 4-5 hours a night completing homework, and parents often take classes themselves, for professional development, French, English, you name it. Not because they’re looking forward to a salary increase, mind you. Because they want to learn. Week nights are essential to their incremental increase of knowledge.

Studying and working so intensely, especially between the days of Monday through Thursday, are as much a part of this culture as sacred meal times, siesta, and family-only weekends. Yes, they may live for vacations, but they work their asses off in between times so that they can enjoy them!

So when I had a few clients tonight mention to me that next Thursday is (yet another) fiesta, and “will you be working?” I almost answered no. But I’m just too damn American. I want to say, “You do realize that if I don’t work, I don’t get paid, right? And that I have a family?” But I just tell them, “Yes, I’m working,” to which they respond with, “OK… well it is a holiday, so we’ll call you next Wednesday to let you know if we’re taking a trip or not.”

It’s almost laughable! I can’t imagine planning a trip the day before I take it! Just like I can’t imagine allowing Isabella to put off her religion homework till Sunday night, or letting Mythili get by with just a 7 on her lengua exam (that will never happen again!), or allowing Riona to skip out on circling all the letters her teacher wants her to focus on enunciating this week (though this is not required).

I couldn’t have predicted how complicated our lives would be here. The impossibility of presumptions that I could have made, most of which would have been untrue, would have made a long tail that followed me across the sea and would have been chopped slowly away with each new day. Fortunately, I was too busy giving up my previous life one heartbreak at a time before boarding that plane, so I didn’t have any time to predict anything at all. And that is why I am still able to set my alarm for the exact right minute and suck the marrow out of every brief moment of life that does not involve a frenzied cycle across town, trying to explain an overly-litigate society to Spaniards whose schools don’t have proper fire alarms, or translating food wheels for a seven-year-old. Instead, I can look forward to next week’s fiesta in Benidorm, a trip I planned weeks ago, have already booked and paid for, and beats out all predictions–impossible to make–about how intensely I would love my vacations!!

Drooping Blue Tents

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we have a car
but are now so accustomed
to walking
that it sits in front of our building

we move across town,
the streets as familiar
as the smiles on their faces.
we order beer, wine,
and a baklava-like mirengue-topped
pastry that tastes like s’mores
and is gobbled up in two minutes

they stand in front of the circus sign
and we make our way across the bridge,
Reina Victoria in our back pocket,
coupons ready

for the first time we witness
the financial crisis
that weighs heavily on
the drooping blue tents,
kids as young as five performing,
throwing in camels, pythons,
and even Monster High,
holding up a sign at the end,
¡Viva El Circo!
while two-thirds of the seats
are vacuous reminders
of where people are
on a Saturday night

best. circus. ever.
is what my girls say,
never complaining once
about the long walk home

but all i can hear,
all i can see
as we move along rain-washed sidewalks,
their tiles as slippery as death,
is the American song,
“Unbreak My Heart”
whose Spanish rendition
and brightly-lit acrobatic act
brought tears to my eyes

the words
though they didn’t belong
the seats
though mostly empty
trampled out the desperation
that sits unspotlighted
in the back of every
slightly drooping circus tent

Costs

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“Why must you work every night?” Mythili asks, her ever-proper English bleeding through, even in Spain. “So we have money to buy food and go to fun places on the weekends,” I reply as quickly and brightly as I can manage, wondering the same thing, her words tugging my heart in every direction. “Oh yes, because we wasted 55€ on gas that one weekend?”

Yes, Mythili, my maker of details, my memorizer of moments filled with groaning parents and frantic disappointment, where a simple trip to the beach cost more than I earn in a day (gas, tolls, parking, ice cream… we didn’t even buy real food!).

I am making this work, is what I want to say. I have to work every night because I am determined to make this work. I want to see this country, I want you to experience it, and we cannot stay if I don’t work, we cannot take a weekend in Barcelona, drive to Portugal at Christmas, or go to the Spanish circus if I don’t work.

Instead I gather her up in my arms and hold back the tears that have been absent for weeks (a miracle! After months of ever-present pain and ever-ready tears, it’s been weeks since I have felt them on my cheeks). One day you will understand, I almost say, but I know she won’t. She will be like me, thinking back on my childhood, wishing I had more time with my always-working parents. And she’ll remember these long evenings without her mother and wonder why I brought us here.

Just like me, cycling across town, entering one Spanish home after another where children scream at me, where people cancel on me whenever they see fit, cutting my paycheck for the week but leaving me with random gaps of time that I can’t quite fill, I will look back, I just might look back, and wonder why I brought us here.

But she can’t hear these doubts that sit like acrid lemon juice on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I breathe in the smell of her hair, whisper, “I love you,” and ask her to make an amazing plan for our weekend, no matter what it might cost. After all, it has already cost us enough.

Beach Love

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three girls on the beach
a small photo for camera
forever in heart

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Home

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It’s been six weeks. They’ve had some bitter arguments, teary-eyed, face-slapping, pinching arguments. They’ve fought over toys, bread, milk. They’ve had fleeting comments about one place, friend, family member, or taste that they miss from back home.

But they have not once said, “I wish we didn’t come.”

Instead they have filled their time with: week one–decorating their rooms with paper torn from one of the notebooks we brought, colored pencils from Wal-mart, drawing pictures of flowers, pretty little girls, rainbows, and taping them up all over the white walls. Week two–preparing for school and getting their feet ready to walk miles in a day, gushing about the beauty of the harbor, trying out different kinds of foods, commenting on all the similarities and differences between this country and theirs. Week three–adjusting to school, crying a bit, laughing a bit, bragging over short hours, casual clothes, a variety of subjects that they’ve never experienced before. Week four–perfecting their hideouts in the park, being chased after by boys and girls, loving the festival’s parade, carnival, and ginormous cotton candies. Week five–wanting only uniforms to conform, they asked for nothing else, not more money, a desire to own a car, be free, to speak better Spanish. Week six–curling in their rooms with books in the iPad, playing games with Zoobles and the cars they spent six euros on today, blowing bubbles and living in a world that is completely different from home, a world in which they are completely at home.

How I love my girls. How amazing they are, to come here, to do this with me, and never for one moment think this is not where we should be. They are my strength, my dream, my hope for wherever we go in this life.

Peppered

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For Jana Clark

you are still in your same house
(i have the address memorized)
my favorite neighborhood,
across the sea from me now.
you lived there then,
the Septembers of my youth,
peppered with your words
that ask me now to write a memory

i could write about the time when
in one weekend warm weather withered
into a bitterly cold fall,
my first year of college
one heartbreak crashing into another,
the Labor Day break just a reminder
that warmth no longer existed

or back in the day,
my naivete governing all thoughts,
i believed i was becoming a woman,
my ache for belonging too great a need
as i gave myself to him
(thinking the whole time
i need to tell my best friend,
the sharing of the news
more meaningful than the milestone)

but none of these match up,
they can’t quite compare
to the memories i make today,
four weeks after you stood beside me in the bar
and begged me to cast my ballot

i am in a new dimension of reality
where Romans and Carthagenians
march across town in handmade
togas, swords, and shields,
peppered with brightly lit rides
and rebuilt Rome, chock full
of every marisco you never quite knew

my September to remember,
no falling leaves,
no fall festival,
just skinned rabbits in the grocer,
fresh bread on every corner,
and your words peppered
in the background of all i do,
of all i am, all these years
and miles later.

Our Latest Spain Adventure

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With handlebars barely within her reach, a bike seat that doesn’t allow her feet to touch the ground like she’s used to, and hand brakes only (also new), it is a bumpy one-mile ride to the beginning of our latest Spain adventure. Isabella, nine, is anxious to be a part of something here, both with me and the people of this city. She lives to belong.

This is the cheap bicycle we bought for Bruce at Carrefour, the one with crooked handlebars and a pedal that already fell off and is now on somewhat crookedly as well, its bearings stripped after a single repair. We move along side streets until we reach the bike lane, having to stop only a few times for hazard-lit cars whose drivers are greeting friends, delivering fruit, or just not in a hurry.

No one here is ever in a hurry. After a fall and a few precarious turns by Isabella, we are ten minutes late to the park. However, as cyclists of all ages continue to stream in, it becomes clear to me, once again, that this is not America. There is no liability form to sign, no registration fee, no separate event for kids and adults. And there is certainly no reason we should begin on time!

After another twenty-five minutes of waiting, we begin, five hundred or more, to stream out of the park. We fill the street with trailers, tagalongs, training wheels, baby bike seats, and a speed slow enough to walk. North to the first roundabout, over to the main Alameda, where we move along the palm trees toward the harbor, our safety enforced by neon-green uniformed policemen who stand at each corner. “It’s like being in a parade, just like the one last night!” Isabella announces, reminiscing the 11:00 p.m. march across town of people dressed in B.C.E. Roman and Carthagenian robes, kilts, skins, helmets, and furs. (Yes, I said 11 PM, where every age from little Roman toga-bearing babies and seventy-year-old crowned queens lit up the streets with their drums and song).

I am a cyclist. I have ridden three thousand miles in eight months, regularly ride my bike twenty-five miles to and from work each day, and have participated in a cycling event that took me over two mountain passes in the depths of the San Juans. But I certainly have never seen anything like this.

Like a slow-motion mob, we “ride” across town, weaving in and out of kids ranging in age from two to seventy (kind of like the parade!). There is no finish line, no lineup of booths promoting muscle milk or the latest carbon bike, no giant banners bragging about sponsorship. There are freestyle cyclists showing off, juegos tadicionales like hopskotch and jump rope, and all the families in Cartagena, gathered here at the city center to cycle their way to a sacred Saturday of family time.

I watch my daughter, who has mastered control of her handlebars, who leads me along what she calls “the Italian street” into and out of narrow “alleys”, who rides in circles with the other kids on the concrete at the center of a park, who asks to ride the long way home. We weave in and out of pedestrians, meander along the bike path past all the now-dispersed cyclists, and make our way back.

She has completed her first cycling event. I have completed my first cycling event in Spain. In our latest Spain adventure, where nothing is the same and everything is the same, we arrive home, unscathed, barely sweating, eight miles behind us, and all the miles ahead of us paved in love, in beauty, in the connectedness of belonging to a culture that cherishes their children far more than riding a bike over two mountain passes.

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My Grandmother’s Stories

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My daughter, Mythili, has come home from school for two days with tears streaming down her face. She has locked herself in her room, needing a while to adjust to what the afternoon, and its homely comforts, could offer her. Yesterday she cried because she wasn’t returning the homework due, and her teacher stood outside of the school and told me that she needed to bring it, and that she didn’t seem particularly happy at the school, though he’d seen her sisters adjusting quite well. Today, it was his insistence on her using cursive for writing out her numbers, a form of writing that is foreign to her. Kind of like the language that is foreign to her.

We are in Spain. I have picked up my family and moved in the opposite direction of progress, to a country with a 20% unemployment rate and a government that can’t decide what to do with itself. Mythili, like me, is struggling with understanding all that is asked of her, and just like I couldn’t get the phone line installed when I wanted, she didn’t know when to turn in her homework.

These moments that I have omitted from my Facebook posts, that I have mostly kept quiet, these are the moments that I think about my grandmother’s story. She told it to me more than once, a bright line from Heaven shining down on her faith, her childhood, her way of looking at this world.

There are so many things that I could write about my grandmother. It could begin with the two weeks we used to spend with her every summer, where she’d take us to the beach (we all had to carry a chair and a towel, to take turns holding handles of the cooler), to the bargain shops to pick out new outfits for school, to church where she would pray and introduce us to her priest, to the small pond in Bethany where we swam and played on the playground. Those visits were the highlight of my childhood summers, and as an adult, when I planned visits, she still did everything in her power to make it special, calling me a week in advance to ask what meal she should prepare, asking me what show in New York we should go see, driving across states to visit Bob or Willow.

But it is the childhood stories, the ones she told me on long road trips or train rides, that I will remember most distinctly. To this day, I cannot allow my children to carry a spoon, a stick, a straw, or anything in their mouths as they walk around, for pure fear of what might happen to them as my grandmother reiterated many times the tragic loss of her twenty-one-month-old baby sister, who died from an infection in her throat after tripping with a lollipop stick in her mouth. The time when she went with her father, at age nine, to go look for an apartment across town because her mother was so heartbroken over losing her baby that she couldn’t live there any more. I can still hear my grandmother’s voice: “I looked out the window of the apartment down below. There was an empty lot. And a little boy was taking his car and making tracks in the dirt. He looked up for just a moment and waved at me… that was the first time I saw your grandfather.”

The story that stands out the most for me I have replayed in my mind many times over the past five months. In a period of two days, I found out that I was accepted into a teaching program in Spain, that my grandmother was entering hospice care, and that I would have to quit the job that I loved so much rather than taking a leave of absence.

I kept thinking about my grandmother’s childhood journey, and the one of her mother before her, coming to a country she’d never seen. My grandmother told me that when she came back to the United States at age eight, even though she’d been born in America, she only spoke Italian. She had much difficulty understanding English in school. All the kids at school picked on her and called her a guinea. She talked about how her father, “in his broken English,” went down to the school and told the teachers that they needed to help her, but that no one would help her.

At her wit’s end, she went to church. She knelt on a pew and prayed to God to help her, to help her learn English so that she could be a part of her new country, so that she could be educated. She prayed and cried, and soon a nice Irish woman came over to her and asked her what was wrong. She tried to explain, and the woman took her in, helped her learn English, introduced her to the man that she would one day marry. “And I knew,” she told me, “I knew that God had heard me, and that God was looking out for me.”

I will never forget those words and what the story meant to my grandmother. Her experiences, her stories, have trickled down four generations, and I feel my family living a life very similar to hers now. All along this arduous journey of sacrifice I have made to bring my family to Spain and fulfill a lifelong dream, I have thought about what my grandmother would have told me to do. And what my grandmother’s parents did; the risks they took.

So when I see my daughter step into her room and cry because she is so frustrated, because she doesn’t quite fit in, because everyone in her class knows her name though she knows none of theirs (“Why do they know your name?” “Because they talk about me all the time since I’m American,” she replies), I think about my grandmother. I think about her story, about her struggles growing up in the Depression, and then moving on to a better life, raising the four children she loved so much, doting on the seven grandchildren whose visits she cherished.

I will always remember our visits. The memories will dance like a filmstrip through my mind, sweet and melodic. But it is her words, her stories, that will trickle down and make me, and all the generations her soul has touched, the people that we were meant to be.

Just Another Day in Spain

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The first day of first, third, and fourth grade! In SPAIN!

It begins at dawn, though the remainder of the world would not consider 7:30 a.m. dawn. Perhaps the sun setting at 21:00 in mid-September and not rising till 7:30 is just one of the reasons Spaniards wander the streets till the middle of the night, why they sleep in the middle of the afternoon.

I rise and get myself ready, everything about my movements pins and needles. The first day of school is always nerve-wreaking to mothers, but for my girls to start school (and not the one I wanted) that will be wholly in a new language, in a foreign country, where none of us know a soul? It’s no wonder I didn’t sleep.

They don’t particularly want to go, either, but are happy to put on regular clothes rather than the silly uniforms required by their charter school in the States. Before I know it, dawn has passed, dishes are washed, and we’re walking down the six flights of stairs to the street, where we see other mothers and children walking. This brings instant relief to my girls, who love pointing out all the children, noticing their backpack types, their shoes, their clothing.

We stand outside the gates of the school with the other parents, taking pictures like we always do on the first day… until we realize that we are the only ones taking pictures. Of course, let’s put a spotlight on our Americanism. Soon a nice mother comes up and speaks in English (albeit broken), telling us what to do as they open the doors and letting us stand on the patio. In a few moments, a siren-like bell rings, and all the kids shuffle in the school, parents left outside. Bruce and I exchange looks of panic. We don’t even know what classes the girls are in. How will they? But before we know it, the secretary comes out and allows us in, only for us to discover the school is so tiny that there is only one section per grade! (And I thought we were lucky at their class size limitation of twenty-three!)

We look through the doorways at all our girls’ apprehensive faces, wave goodbye, and head onto our day of adventure.

All I need to do is make copies, pick up my debit card at the bank (26€!!—must everything cost an arm and a leg??), and spread out flyers advertising my English tutoring. We are interrupted in front of the copy shop by a huge strike moving along in front of the Ayuntamiento, men in blue uniforms holding signs about the government robbing them, all plugging their ears at optimal moments before letting loose cannon-like firecrackers in the streets, their voices and faces a mixture of jubilation and angst. The fluorescent-green uniformed police stand on the outskirts of their demonstration, their raucous and cannons just a part of their day.

We move on into the busy morning of Cartagena, taping up flyers and stopping at the grocery store where everyone in Spain is shopping before school gets out. We tear off giant pieces of French-style bread on our way back to the apartment, and before we know it, the arduous four hours of school are over, and we stand again with the rest of the parents outside of the gate.

The same siren releases our girls, who come out with giant smiles and tales of their day so similar to the tales from home, relief washes over all of us. Mythili made four friends, has multiplication homework with four numbers on top, and is adamant about us buying her books and supplies by morning. Riona admits that she understood only some of what her teacher said, but she made a friend who shared crayons with her. Isabella, sentence by sentence, tells me all the grammatical errors and vocabulary she fixed for her English teacher, pointing out that she could teach that class (I have no idea where a daughter of mine would get an idea like that!!).

I then set out on an adventure of my own: shopping for the infamous libros de texto I’d been told would cost a fortune. I ride the bike across town, Mythili’s school supply list in tow, to Carrefour, Spain’s Wal-mart. It is only when I enter the store and begin looking at her school supply list that I realize, again, that I don’t speak Spanish. Libreta? Carpeta? Caseras? As if school supply shopping isn’t difficult enough, I am searching for items that I have no clue what they are! Can Mexico and Spain make an agreement and share the same language, puuhh–leeez!!

Then the books. NONE are on the shelf. Lined up behind the counter are all the organized-people-in-the-world’s preordered, boxed-beautifully libros de texto. I start to panic, and take out my iPhone, quickly typing in the ISBN numbers the school provided, hoping Amazon will save me as always. After four entries of “No disponible,” I begin to realize the truth behind what my Spaniards had warned me was a huge publishing scam. No one can buy these books on discount or order them online. We are victims to overpriced bullshit!!

I send a Skype chat to Bruce that just repeats FUCK four times, then finally have my place in line fulfilled. Giving the sales associate my iPhone and Mythili’s list, he disappears into the back to retrieve my books. Well… two-thirds of my books. The remainder he doesn’t have, and as usual, I don’t know the right words to ask him if they’ll order more, and I’m running late anyway, so I book it out of there, penniless in my pursuit (ummm. 5€ for a NOTEBOOK??)

I fill my backpack and two saddlebags with all the supplies, patting myself on the back for at least having the adamancy to bring my bike! What a relief! I rush up the six flights of stairs with all that in tow, thinking, I sure as hell don’t need a gym this year. Then shower, dress, off to my first appointment with potential clients, who meet me in front of the giant JCPenney (AKA Corte Inglés, twelve stories in the making), and of COURSE we go to a café. Ironically, I order my Spain-usual café con leche, and they each order a Coke.

We talk for more than an hour, and somehow manage, with my broken Spanish, to arrange tutoring with their three- and six-year-old sons for four hours a week! (No need to mention I have no idea what I’ll be doing, and I think it’s just glorified babysitting in English, but whatever!)

Then Bruce and I make our first Spanish tortilla, for the most part successfully interpreting the Spanish directions on the baking powder package, and it’s a hit with all the girls, who BEG to go to the park after dinner as those are the hours that kids will actually BE there. And they’re right. It’s party time at the park, and Isabella makes a friend who comes up to her parents on the adjacent bench bragging about her American friend, with her parents’ response being, “Que suerte.”

We are lucky. While in the park I receive four emails inquiring about tutoring!! On the walk home at eight-thirty, Mythili has switched her ever-imaginary talk with dolls to Spanish, and we put the kids to bed so I can head to Corte Inglés for one more attempt at books… to no avail.

But it’s just another day in Spain. There’s always tomorrow between nine and two, where I can witness a strike, have a café, and make the most of every moment.