Medieval market
roasted chestnuts across sea
an old song in Spain
my mom sent me lights
Christmas beauty in Denver
only a moon here
I’m old. That is pretty much my realization at this point of my year in Spain. I was thinking about my horrific schedule, and reading about all the employees who had to work on Black Friday, and even Thanksgiving this year (GAG!!), and then I started chiming in about my movie theatre days, when I never knew my schedule from week to week, always had to work holidays, and had no benefits. Thinking about this brought my mind around to college in general, where my schedule obviously changed from one semester to the next, with classes on varying days and hours with irritating middle-of-the-day breaks.
Only then, those breaks weren’t irritating. I used them to catch up on homework, chat with friends, or go home to see Bruce on his days off.
I rode home today during my intermittently-interrupted “three-hour” break (with a tutoring session scheduled smack dab in the middle), and of course I had to work during my free time on my University of Phoenix class, part-time job number three.
But it occurred to me, when I was telling the students in Spain about Black Friday, when I was reminiscing those glorious movie theatre days when I got “promoted” to assistant manager and all the employees called in on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, leaving us three managers standing with lines out the door because everyone in America had to see The Green Mile rather than having a conversation with their family members on a sacred holiday, that I have done this before.
And I can do it again.
Sure, stack on the responsibility of caring for three children… but I can do this. I can piece together three part-time jobs to somewhat fill in the gaps of a severely minimal salary. I did it before, worked my way through college, not a penny of debt trailing behind me, and I can damn well do it again.
However, when I was trying to say to Bruce tonight, “That wasn’t that long ago… I mean, I just did that!” I realized that it was thirteen-fifteen years ago… man I’m old. This is why all the other auxiliares are twenty, why they don’t blink for a moment when they pile on extra tutoring sessions or weave their way between parties and bars. They are young, with raw desire for what the world can still offer them, the inconvenience of an erratic schedule just that… an inconvenience.
But as I sat at home this afternoon, thinking, Wow, if my school actually had functioning Internet, I could just stay there and do this Phoenix work, I cut myself short. I came home to Bruce who fixed tea for my aching throat, piled high scrambled eggs with sour cream and salsa, Spanish bread on the side, just exactly how I like them, and my legs were still burning from my quick uphill ride, a few extra miles of back-and-forth commuting tucked under my belt, and I knew, I just knew, I had reached a turning point.
I’ve done it before, and even if I am as old as a bat, I damn well know I can do it again!
I have this apple pie recipe. It is almost as good as my brownie recipe, perhaps a bit better, because it is so time-consumingly tedious to make that its appearance on our table occurs twice, perhaps three times (for extra-special people or occasions), a year. The recipe begins with a crust that is both sweet, flaky, and crispy. The bottom of the pie is lined with a pastry cream so thick and delicious you’d wish you had a bowl to scoop it out and eat it with a spoon. Of course there are apples, the apples of my youth, Granny Smiths grown on the Western Slope of Colorado.
I think about this recipe today as I lay out the refrigerated pie crust on my small Spanish counter. The recipe sits in the room in the basement of my house back in Colorado, the room that hovers like a ghost in the attic of my mind. Ten by ten. Green carpet. One tiny window. All the junk, from sleeping bags, toys, a television that’s not even ours, to cups, magnets, and recipes, that we couldn’t bring to Spain.
Here we are, three months later, living our lives without these things. Without the books I’ve collected for my girls in my ten years of being a parent. Without the tent we would never use. Without my favorite coffee mug, fifteen years back bought at Christmas from Starbucks, Van Gogh’s Starry Night a blur of beauty on my early mornings. Without my recipes.
We have had a functioning oven for two days. I was planning, until now, to let slide my favorite holiday, to give in to the holidays of Spain–the next saint’s day, school break, or puente, and forget that I look forward to Thanksgiving for the whole year. After all, how could I bake a pie without an oven? Without my recipe?
As all things seem to work out in 2012, life of Karen Vittetoe, the oven arrived in our lives just in time. I could make my pie, we could make our Thanksgiving dinner, but at what cost? Moving here, our kitchen contained many items, but not a pie pan, a roasting dish, or a 9×13 baking dish for brownies or candied yams. They don’t sell pure vanilla extract in stores; rather, aroma of vanilla and pure vanilla bean; the combination of buying cocoa, the varieties of vanilla, and chocolate chips, of buying two baking dishes and a pie pan? Our spending money for the week is demolished. Not one penny left for a rolling pin that, perhaps, will never be used again.
So this is why I’m crying now as I lay out the rectangular, store-bought pie crust, as I cut it into strips to make my lattice top, hopefully creating the appearance of beauty for my sub-par pie. The crust is malleable, easy to stretch, more perfect than I could ever have mixed together myself, and yet I despise it. It will not be mine, just as the holiday that has already past is not mine.
Yet, somehow, as my girls will in a moment burst in from their school day, see the piles of leftover crust and take them into their small hands, scrubbing the bottom of the apple-cinnamon-sugar bowl with delicious bits of crust, just as I did when I was a girl, I know that my pie will be fine. It may have an imperfect crust, but it will be just as beautiful, taste just as amazing with its lining of pastry cream, the Spanish apples brought down from the north, and the sweetness carried across the sea to Europe for a holiday that is the same in every language.
For the month of November, I have been watching as many of my Facebook friends have posted daily things in their life that they are grateful for (their family, their memories, their ability to communicate with people from all over the world), all leading up to my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. Why is this my favorite holiday? The most obvious reasons, of course: I love homemade meals, baked goods, and the idea of a celebration being based on gratitude. But most importantly, despite the dark ghost of Black Friday that hovers over this holiday like an evil villain of consumerism, I love the fact that Thanksgiving, in my opinion, is the only holiday in America that is NOT influenced by capitalism. Unlike Halloween (I learned this year, upon making a Halloween PowerPoint for my students in Spain, that the average American spends $72.50 on Halloween items, totaling $5 billion!), Fourth of July, or just about any other holiday where special decorations, clothing, or fireworks flood the stores, Thanksgiving is happily neglected by consumerism due to the impending need for stores to stock up on Christmas hopes (yes, if you thought Halloween was bad, we spend $704, or $50 billion, on Christmas!!!).
But I digress. I, like most of my friends, do see the true importance of Thanksgiving, the root of the word. Regardless of the shady, inaccurate history of this first American holiday, the ability to express the gratitude that we often forget in our day-to-day lives is not lost on me as Thanksgiving approaches.
This year, living abroad, I am more grateful than ever for what I have in my life. Coming to Spain meant sacrificing more than I ever imagined when, one year ago at about this time, I made the decision for us to take this journey. Giving up our home, the most perfect job I’d ever (and probably will ever) have, having to say goodbye to friends who we may not see much of ever again (as our return to the US will depend on where I find work), and being away from our family has been much more difficult than I could have fathomed as I dreamed of learning Spanish, traveling through Europe, and finally fulfilling a lifelong dream.
I woke early this morning, well before my alarm, before the busy street that runs along our apartment filled with the sounds of weekday traffic. I came into the hallway and started to work on the computer while I ate my breakfast, and soon I heard my two youngest daughters rise and quietly begin playing an imaginary game with the 6€ set of cars they bought with their Ratoncito Pérez (the Spanish version of the Tooth Fairy) money at the Chinese store. The sound of their voices creating characters, witnessing love and abandonment, Riona’s small chirps of laughter and Mythili’s authoritative recommendations about car placement and car-jargon dialogue, filled me with warmth.
Coming to Spain, for my girls, meant giving up nearly every toy they owned, nearly all of their books, and making do with what we could fit into their suitcases or afford to purchase upon arrival, which hasn’t been much. Just like I have learned a new perspective about everything related to culture, education, and language, they have learned a new perspective about how to play.
So this Thanksgiving, which is just a regular working day for me where I present my Thanksgiving PowerPoint to Spanish students who know little about the holiday, where I will spend my evening pedaling across town from house to house earning every euro I will need to buy food to put on our table, I am grateful for perspective. The perspective that would be the same had I stayed home, and which has changed exponentially with this experience. The perspective that allows me to be ever so grateful for what my country provides to its citizens while at the same time taking pleasure in the simplicity and family orientation of the Spanish culture. The perspective that gratitude, whether read in faraway posts or spread through heartstrings on a quiet Cartagenian morning, can follow me wherever I go, can be a part of who I am, and can make giving thanks on this day that much more meaningful.
canceled opening
rediscovering downtown
magic Roman port
paperwork finished
official Spain resident
now a paycheck please
¿quieres jugar?
words on wings float through playground
somehow lost on girls
It is no small irony who appears at our door for Mythili’s birthday party. We had warned her beforehand of the possibility of no-shows, and I want to gulp back my inadequacy as a mother. I am not there, I hear myself saying, to chat with the mothers on the sidewalk as they smoke cigarettes and hover near their cars after leaving you at school, to ask, “Can your daughter come to my daughter’s birthday celebration?”
I wonder though, in all honesty, if my schedule didn’t bear down on me, if I had all the time in the world, if I’d even dare for a moment to participate in conversations whose language I barely understand.
So let me put it frankly. The only child who rang our bell appeared with her mother and younger sister, head wrapped in a scarf. No, not the mother, the this-must-be-a-Moor mother. The baby sister.
It wasn’t until hours later, when she stood in the quickly-darkening hallway, the same small girl in tow, that I remembered: this is the girl and the mother I saw disembarking the ambulance in the rain the other day, my frenzied walk home interrupted by the sudden heartbreak of a scarf-wrapped head on a child too young to know this kind of pain.
“Fatima’s sister doesn’t go to school, we don’t know why,” the girls tell me when I inquire about the girl’s age, whether the girl is in Riona’s class, selfishly thinking of my youngest who has the greatest difficulty making friends.
Of course she doesn’t go to school. Her mother, from Morocco, the one who doesn’t speak Spanish? The one who, upon a singular invitation by Isabella has sent her daughter daily to our door for my barely-speaks-Spanish daughter to help this poor girl with her Spanish science, religion, and art homework?
It is no small irony that she is the singular invitee who appears at our door for Mythili’s birthday party. An outcast, a Moor, a Muslim. The epitome of the pitiful look I encounter when I mention the name of the school my daughters attend. Never mind that the Moors settled this land hundreds of years before the Christians, that the glamorous palace people travel thousands of miles to see in Granada is actually of Muslim architecture, that the very name of this city I live in is a blend of Moroccan “Carto” and Latin “Nova.”
When her mother buzzes our bell to collect her child more than an hour after I suggested the ‘party’ would end, I want to speak to her. I want to pull the small child standing next to her into our apartment, to spew out a slur of welcoming words, to let her know that her daughters could appear here any day of the week, that we would welcome them faster than the public healthcare system they traveled across the sea to access, that we are not Christians, but have the heart of Christians.
But, as usual, as the hallway light, on its perfect timer of impatience, flashes from brighter-than-we-can-handle to complete darkness, all I can say is, “Pasa, pasa,” gesturing to our small hallway crammed with our grocery cart, a table, and my American, Chinese-made bicycle, as her daughter gathers her coat, puts on her shoes, and takes in hand the three balloons on Chinese-store sticks that my girls have portioned out for her.
They leave without a proper exchange of words. Without me thanking them to the fullest extent, without their ability to tell me what they wanted to say. A perfect summary of the past three months of my life.
breakfast tray in bed
craves the words more than the dolls
can’t believe she’s eight
wash, treat, cut, and style
nine euros, Spanish freedom
tangle-free curls bounce
café con leche
warm enough to sit outside
a gift of a date
Hello Kitty wrap
princess receives surprise gift
art set opens warmth
one hour together
my time with them so precious
color in our dreams
pedal click in, out
first forget purse, then helmet
next will lose my mind
home to hot shower
never mind the broken door
day is wrapped in love
a short video
silly to record leaves falling
Spain, you bring me home
how have i missed
this steeple my dreamscape?
like a favored film
elevator mirrors
inconspicuous hall lights
up and down all day
the clouds move in
on our long walk across town,
the bike ride’s end
tagging along my subconscious
their cacophony emanates
through slick crosswalks
and cart-pulling passersby
as we make our way into
the theatre where they will become
the stage presences
they’ve only seen in pictures
after the show my colleague announces,
heavy accent and all,
It’s raining men,
and his prim-and-proper appearance,
his paisley umbrella,
fit in a warm spot
at the bottom of my heart
i teach one class (solo today),
the chart comparing schools
in Spain to America
too dense to ever fit
within the bounds of
a chalk-dust ridden
minuscule version of education
the rides home, back out,
home, back out, cause waves
of daily inconsistency that
pour out of the sky,
bearing down on the heaviness
of my home across the sea
my country sits divided
on a fence i cannot fathom,
these moments of
familiarity and love
bursting through
the clouds of a crisis
none of my countrymen can understand
in darkness,
on rain-slick tiled side streets,
i make my final pedal,
capture your words on the screen,
and wonder when we can
relinquish the rain
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