Pueblo out of time?

Too often we forget humans can be part of Nature's song, can dance with the music as well as drown it out. I believe, as Lawrence Durrell once wrote of France, that if you were to wipe it bare of life and start over again, in due course, Nature there would give you, once again, essential Frenchmen, surely as she would a good Bordeaux. Just so Smith Island, where the spirits of place are strong indeed.

...The Bay never essayed truer, nor flowered more gloriously, than in its creation of Smith Island and Smith Islanders. . . places like the island are art--made all the more artful for contriving nothing, for simply being.

Tom Horton
from the book: Island out of time

This gem has been sitting in my draft folder for a couple of weeks. I've yet to read the book it's taken from; I chased down Tom Horton when I received an invitation to a writing workshop he was co-teaching on Smith Island in Maryland and soon snapped up this lovely excerpt.

Ortizzle's comment today on my Music of Time post has motivated me to finally post it. She muses in the comment box about what tales the walls of old houses in Galicia might tell.

The quote made me think of La Alberca when I read it, but it could just as well be lots of villages, couldn't it? In Europe, or elsewhere. Or neighborhoods in Chicago.

There are places that so eloquently remind me that we become part of the places we live. We bring them to life, perhaps literally, leaving our hopes and dreams and fears in the fabric of the place, stuck in the sidewalk with the cobblestones. People make places art.

As I prepared to title this post "Pueblo Out of Time" a couple of weeks back, it hit me that La Alberca is a pueblo very much in time: alive, prosperous, full of children, with an in-town school and construction and new businesses all through town. A pueblo famous for enthusiastically and faithfully continuing to practice its centuries old traditions, La Alberca has found a way (rural tourism) to prosper in the 21st century. Perhaps as a result, it is a warm and welcoming place to visit.

Somehow I suspect Nature would remake both town and townspeople just as they are - time and time again.

Hankering

han·ker (hngkr)
intr.v. han·kered, han·ker·ing, han·kers
To have a strong, often restless desire.

-American Heritage dictionary

It's August in Salamanca.

And I've got a hankering to be somewhere else, a coast maybe. Somewhere. Out celebrating August with the rest of Spain's population.

Lately, I've had a hankering to write in Spanish. A story, an article. A journal. Something. It's a stubborn hankering.

A fabulous pottery exhibit in Caja Duero's gallery off the Plaza de los Bandos has me hankering to play with clay again. Right here at the kitchen table, coiling, if that's how it has to be for now.

I haven't yet mentioned this to the fine clients who pay the rent, but I've got one hell of a hankering to do the Camino de Santiago this fall. Start to finish.

And a sail. A sail. Oh, am I hankering to head out for a sail.

I have a hankering to see three tiny Americans I've barely met since they showed up to live with friends of mine, their parents. That might just be a hankering to make up long, detailed monster stories and head out to the park to climb foot high boulders and howl like we've just conquered Everest.

I've got a hankering to see Asturias and Galicia's Costa de la Muerte. Today.

I'll be back to blog, I promise. Soon as I figure out what to do with all these hankerings.

Running into home: Oscar the cat

When I stopped in the Casa de las Conchas Saturday morning to search Friday's El Mundo for an interview with Kathleen, I found not my American friend from Madrid but my little-known American birthplace shouting at me from the top of the paper's front page.

RHODE ISLAND the headline spelled out, loud and clear, right across the top of the portada.

It was one of those expat moments. You know those moments: when you find yourself double checking that you are where you think you are, working in the language you think you're working in. Could that say Rhode Island?

My diminutive home state made headlines in Europe this week. Here's the story in El Pais, and El Mundo, and if you prefer English, the BBC.

Seems the New England Journal of Medicine recently published an article by a geriatric physician working at Steele House, a nursing home in Providence. The article profiles the intriguing behavior of the cat who lives on the center's 3rd floor, a floor reserved for patients with advanced senile dementia. Oscar the cat has an uncanny knack for knowing when a patient is close to death along with a compassionate way of reacting to that sixth sense. He climbs up on the bed and lays alongside the patient until he or she passes away a few hours later.

Oscar has accurately predicted a patient's death in more than 25 cases. No one dies on the third floor of Steele House without spending a few hours with Oscar, who doesn't visit the patients on any other occasion. When Oscar climbs up into a bed, the 3rd floor nurses start making phone calls. A few hours later, the patient inevitably dies, surrounded by family, friends, and often, a priest.

If the nurses try to take Oscar out of the room before the patient dies, he paces outside the closed door and meows in frustration.

Give the story the explanation you like. Maybe he smells something chemical, as the physician suggests, or maybe he simply senses ... whatever.

I like the story, and I like Oscar.
That's he's a Rhode Islander is just icing on the cake.

Update, thanks to Laura, I can offer you this link to the full article. It's a beautiful read, a look at a day in the life of compassionate Oscar the cat.

Vonnegut makes a career choice

Motto quotes this anecdote about Kurt Vonnegut, published as part of his obituary in Sports Illustrated:

In 1954, Vonnegut -- a talented young writer who confessed to knowing next to nothing about sports -- was hired to write for SI (Sports Illustrated), which had yet to begin publishing. One of his first assignments was to write a caption about a racehorse who had jumped the rail at Aqueduct and galloped across the infield. Vonnegut pondered the task, typed one sentence and then walked out of his office, never to return. His caption: "The horse jumped over the f---ing fence."

SI's loss was literature's gain. Cat's Cradle came out in 1963, and in '69 he published his most famous work, the semiautobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five.

The bravest thing I've ever done

In a Blog Carnival to be published today in honor of her birthday, Laura asks the question "What's the bravest thing you've ever done?"

Although I didn't plan to post a response, her question intrigued me. I decided to sit with it awhile.

Spanish friends routinely call me valiente. When I answer the "how'd you wind up in Spain?" question, their response is inevitably the same: "¡Qué valiente!" More than once, I've heard Nomadita explain my seeming inexplicable actions to puzzled Spaniards in 5 little words: "Es que es muy valiente".

I get emails in the wandering woman account calling me courageous.

Courageous? Really? I don't feel especially courageous. One of the things I ran across while thinking about Laura's question was the difference between English "courage" and Spanish "coraje", or "valor". The English definition, in a classic bow to the stiff upper lip I was born to, includes the notion of endurance - bravely enduring a difficult or uncomfortable challenge. By that definition, it would have taken a lot more courage to stay where I was 5 years ago. I wanted to stop enduring: quit my job, move to Spain, work for myself, play, create. I wanted to feel at home in my life. One day I just knew there could be no more enduring.

So if the bravest thing I've ever done wasn't quitting a secure job? Or selling the only house I've ever owned, and God forbid, that loaded (pun intended) American success symbol, the new blue Volvo?

Was it asking who I was without the CV? Letting myself be scared every single day? Learning to sit beside the fear and enjoy it, even smack it on the shoulder every once in a while, just for fun? Was it allowing myself not to know more than a few things? Looking hard at what was left of "me" after I'd shed the career, the native speaker communication skills and the perfectly developed 5 year plan?

There is something that scares me to death, and I face it every morning.

This morning, knees shaking, I realized I had answered Laura's question almost a year ago, in a post titled The Blank Page.

The bravest thing I've ever done is face the blank page. The blank page I've made of my life - no template, no contract, no assumptions, no concrete plan - and the blank notebook page that new life has led me to make a date with, daily.

The bravest thing I've ever done is to trust myself with a blank slate, with clean white pieces of paper, empty text boxes and freshly prepped balls of clay. The bravest thing I've ever done is make a new decision, every morning, to look at my day, my notebook and my life without considering the outcome. Without a clue as to what I am about to discover. Hmmmm....who might be back there, behind that pen, and what might she be capable of?

This hasn't been an easy year. Reading my old post today, I was struck by its optimism. I haven't heard myself sound that confident in a long time. I find it easy - soothing, in fact - to fall back into well worn templates and old assumptions. To miss my daily writing date. To let the work that's supposedly here only to finance my life become its sole proprietor.

The bravest thing I did today was take Laura's prompt and pick up a pen and paper. The bravest thing I ever do is throw out the plan book and the outline. And trust myself.

I hope you'll surf over and read my post from February. I'm happy with it. And I'm glad I reread it today!

So what's the bravest thing you've ever done?

Curveballs

Bear with me while I blatantly mix metaphors, ok? I figure this is a blog, an electronic notebook I invite you all to peek into, so I'm going to let the two images play together here as they are in my head.....

You just never what life is going to throw you.

Just that. This week I have seen life throw a cherished friend an incredible curve ball, the indescribably painful, never anticipated, life-changing kind. I've watched her courageously reach over to catch it - graceful is the best word I can find - stretched way beyond her usual reach, her face contorted in pain, her body leaping, gracefully. I don't know that I'd be strong enough to catch this ball. I suspect most of us would freeze, stand there, stunned, watching it hit the dirt in front of us. Or catch it bloody, full force, in the face and fall down flat.

And what has hit me is that despite all the bold choices I've made in the last few years - quitting a job, moving to Spain, leaving my job here to go off on my own - despite the life I've more or less designed for myself, today I see more clearly than ever that while I choose, daily, how I happen to the world around me, while I defiantly declare where and how I will live, I can't control what happens to me. Or the people I love. In the end, I only control what I do when the ball comes sailing over to my part of the field.

So back to my Bode quote, and Erin's favorite overused metaphor. When my sailing metaphor (for everything, she chuckles) came up on a friend's blog, someone commented that the image didn't work for him. It seemed to him that since you can never control the wind, you are simply stuck when it blows against you. His (brilliant) analytical mind told him, if you had zero friction and a sail that rotated in all directions, you probably could get somewhere despite the wind, as long as you didn't care where you were going.

Some day I'd love to take that brilliant young man out for a sail.

Because he's nailed my metaphor while trying to dispute it.

Long days on the water taught me, without my even knowing it, that there is always a way to get to where I want to, even if it is almost never in a straight line. And I get there with the wind I have, never despite it. I get there by collaborating with it, I get there by changing my angle to this thing I can't control, by welcoming the wind the day brings me - a pleasant breeze or a 35 knot let's just sit this one out and get a pint blow. I tack my zig-zag anything-but-direct-way to where I want to go.

Some of my tacks in life have been pretty darn long, now that I think about it. But could I have gotten to where I am fiercely battling to travel in a straight line? I don't know.

Anyway, here's where my thoughts get me mixing metaphors. Watching my friend has left me wanting to believe that there isn't any wind I can't handle, as long as I remember that I'll never have zero friction or a 360 degree rotating sail.

As long as I remember to let myself go, just a little, toward the ball flying at me, scrunching up my face just as much as I want to, glove ready for the catch.

Because you just never know what life is going to throw you.

Dogs, Kids and Other People's Husbands

I've still got it.

A charm best appreciated by dogs, small children, and the beings I like to call Other People's Husbands.

When I was a kid, I used to say (and know, really) that I absolutely preferred canine companionship to the human flavor. I suspect I was addicted to unconditional love, and silence.

The most surprising thing about my adult life is not that I live in Spain, not that I never married, and not that I never had children. The truly shocking thing is that I've never had a dog (as an adult). The travel - for work when I lived in the States, and for travel's sake now - has always stopped me. An apartment rented from a landlady who doesn't accept pets is also an issue at the moment.

So where do I wind up? In dog withdrawal. I've found myself battling an acute bout of that debilitating illness now that my life has slowed. And I swear to you, the furry darlings are picking up on it. The Salmantino dogs who cross my path are extra careful to eye me, I tell you. And they grin as only dogs can. Many even dance across the plaza to greet me, despite the persistent whistles and calls of their owners.

I went to my first Salamanca yard party and soon found myelf hanging out at cocker spaniel and toddler level. Til the Husbands wandered over to check on the new business, that is. Were there single men at the party, you ask? Why, I don't know. I didn't talk to any. (Note to self: don't let your mother read this.)

I had a wonderful dose of canine affection in Ireland. Big, shaggy, slobbering farm dogs, outdoor dogs, thrilled to find a B&B client happy to sit in the field and talk to them. Or stand perfectly still on her one good foot and let them collapse, leaning all of their weight on mine, eyes closed in chin scratch ecstasy. Or in the case of my favorite Irish dog, just collapse, spontaneously and land on top of me.

Why dogs and kids and Other People's Husbands, you ask? I don't know. I feel no particular addiction to kids and happily married men. I suspect the 9 year old in me is mildly familar to children, and as for the husbands, well, I don't whine, I drink Guiness, I know my baseball and music, and have an uncanny ability to see both sides of the spats I inevitably hear about.

My mother wrote me an e-mail the other day to send me a message from a long lost friend. Seems the ex-husband of one of my closest friends, with whom I spent years double dating then tagging along as a more than welcome wheel number three, walked unexpectedly into the office where my mother works. He asked her to send a warm hello to his favorite "friend of a wife" - either of his wives, it seems.

Dogs, kids and Other People's Husbands.

Not a bad tribe, really.

Happy Father's Day

It's Father's Day in the US, isn't it? I lose my American-only holidays if no one e-mails a reminder.

But today is a Sunday, mid-June, and somehow I've reminded myself. It must be Father's Day.

That's my father, in the tux.
Yes, I was the lucky child whose musician father picked her up after school events in a tuxedo. A perfectly pressed, perfectly fitted black tux, tie loose and tux shirt open, usually, by the time he came round for me. I was invariably mortified.

My father was a pianist. When I told him I wanted to study piano with the septegenarian nun at my grade school, he refused, then convinced the best professional teacher in the state to take on a 5 year old with hands too small to reach 5 notes apart.

My father invented play-by-plays to symphonic music as he drove me to my Saturday piano lessons: Ah, the villagers are all dancing happily in the meadow, and look, (enter a chorus of clarinets) now the sheep have joined them. But wait (bassoon) who is that dark masked stranger waiting in the woods?
Do it yourself Peter and the Wolf, every Saturday drive.

My father pointed out the obvious like the old man I met in Cabezuela. He made both the worst and the best puns I've ever heard.

He and his musician cronies had an infinite collection of "if this one married that one" jokes:
If Ella Fitzgerald married Darth Vader she's be Ella Vader. And of course if she married, Allen Funt, she'd be Ella Funt.
You get the idea.

My father wrote me a clever, rhyming poem for every occasion in my life. Every birthday, every graduation, all the holidays I couldn't travel home to celebrate once I'd moved away to college. He gave me the most beautiful letter I've ever received, sealed tight in an envelope, and told me to read it on the solo plane ride to college. Then he talked the stewardess into letting my high school friends onto the plane for a last goodbye.

My father visited me everywhere I ever lived, West Lafayette, IN, State College, PA, and later Saint Louis, often under the pretense of having a gig nearby, even if the job was several hundred miles away.

He was most proud of having played at the Inaugural Ball for George H W Bush, the first George Bush. He invited me along as his date, and savored every minute of my liberal discomfort.

My father tried an office job once, before my brother and I were born. He worked in insurance and dreamed of getting a business degree on the GI bill, until the day the boss ordered him to choose between his respectable insurance job and playing piano in bars. He spent the rest of his life playing the piano.

He made toast by putting bread right on the burner and letting it blacken.

He could watch any episode of World at War a hundred times and then watch it again, til I begged, begged, to watch a movie.

He took me to every Father Daughter dance in high school, and broke every promise he ever made not to go wild on the dance floor.

He lamented he was too busy playing piano to practice. In his last few years, he left a friend running his music contracting business while he wandered the Caribbean playing cocktail piano on cruise ships, finally savoring his time to practice and to play what he wanted.

Never, that I remember, did my father call me by my given name.

My father was the most "human" being I've ever known. He was gloriously human.

Human in the fling that ended my parents' marriage and human in his need to own up to it, despite knowing what that would mean. Human as he showed up for the aftermath of his confession, including the daughter who for a long time couldn't forgive him.

Human in his lifelong need to act 9 years old, often, and in his boylike fascination with boats and ships and everything nautical.

Human as he pondered a thousand what if's in the journals he wrote during the last years of his life.

And he was human, gloriously human, as he died. When my father wouldn't, his doctor finally let my mother, brother and aunts know that the cancer had already won the war, a week after his diagnosis. He died a few hours before my flight landed, never having admitted he was seriously ill.

I aim only to be as gloriously human as my father.

He'd like where I am today. No doubt he'd book a gig in Madrid, and stop by.

Cleaning crew

Fat little birds are cleaning my terraza as I sit working at my laptop.

Nice of them, really, considering the ankle.

Somewhere, up on the roof across the yard, perhaps, I sense a nest in need of Spring repair. I can't see it, but I can watch my cleaning crew disappear into the gutter and the galley between the terracotta roof tiles. Later they reappear to play a while on the edge of the roof on their side of the courtyard before getting back to work on mine.

From my desk, I look out a huge, high window onto the terraza. For two days, I have enjoyed a nonstop typing-hours stage show. A steady parade of chubby birds has paused to pose on the railing facing me, sometimes for as long as 5 or 6 minutes. They stand, they bounce, they twist and strut, each holding high a freshly snatched branch or a delicate white feather. They've even carried off some of the annoying white fuzz that floats in from some tree or another along the river bank this time of year and coats everything in sight, including my laundry, my door and my unsuspecting plants. Well, and me, if I linger on the terraza.

I'm curious about the obligatory stop on the rail in front of my window. Are my sweet, feathered neighbors asking permission to carry away my debris? Could they be gloating, cruelly showing off their spoils? Or are they celebrating and resting in their glory just a minute, a bit like me when I like something I've finished?

I worry if I get close enough I'll recognize the silent longing I've spotted in the eyes of more than one nonfeathered neighbor this week. An unspoken but perfectly delivered Spring question, eyes roaming round the all-but-bare terraza, pausing momentarily at the stacks of upturned terracotta pots still wintering in the far corner before coming back, slowly, to rest in mine:

"And the garden? When?"

Perspective

You may have to be my side of 40 to appreciate this, but it made my day:

Chatting on the phone with a fellow 43 year old about yet another 43 year old who checks in for heart surgery to correct a leaky valve today, I found myself confused when she told me that our mutual friend, the patient, was just a little concerned about her doctor. She's been told he's the best in Chicago, and one of the best in the States, but she's a little shaken after meeting him face to face.

Less than confident that he's had the requisite experience.

After all, she confided, "he's only our age."

43.

I knew there was a reason she was my friend.

High Stepping

My name is Erin C.

And I was a band nerd.

There I've said it. If you all choose to surf away to cooler climes, I'll understand. I just thought it was time I came clean.

Last week's Semana Santa bands left me nostalgic for my trusty white band cap, and the thousand bobby pins I'd commission to hold it just so, perfectly stiff, so that from a distance, no one, but no one, would know I was a girl. Girlishness was reserved for flag bearers and baton twirlers. I was a manly piccolo player.

You must know I did not march in just any old marching band. I was 1 of more than 300 (I kid you not) members of Purdue's All American Marching Band, proud owners of the world's largest bass drum. Four drum-men pulled the drum and a 5th jumped into the air to swing out a note. (Still not kidding.) In fact, the year I marched we unveiled the world's largest cymbals, both of them, veering at each other across the field until they crashed in the center.

An All American Marching Band with a sense of the ridiculous.

I marched one season before my parent's divorce sent me out in search of a job. I feel rhythm everywhere and from everything. What could possibly compare to marching down a street or dancing wildly around a football field to the beat of 30 drummers pounding their hearts out?

Today my nostalgia carried me over to the Purdue band site for a march down memory lane.

We played this as we made the Block P, a football field sized P of white-capped musicians.

And we played this every halftime to a thundering chorus of Midwesterners, hats and hands clasped over their midAmerican hearts.

So, there I was a few minutes ago, high stepping my way through my brief marching career, when it surfaced. A wisely repressed band memory. THE memory. Right up there with the graceful if fatally-timed fall overboard that earned me my Chicago sailing nickname: Splash.

Purduf.

As an oversized, "all-American" marching band, we would spell out words on the field, you see. We could spell anything.

The music holder attached to my wrist held my marching instructions -- coded letters and numbers that told me in what direction to march, when and for how many steps. On the fateful, memorable day in question, I, unfortunately, was the designated "end" man, leading my little squad of 4 around the field. Yep, Splash. In the lead.

I don't remember how it happened. Patriotic euphoria over the day's rendering of "I Am An American"? A strong prairie wind in my marching instructions? Well placed worry about Monday's chemistry exam? Whatever the cause, I lost myself, and marched my squad straight out behind the squad next to us. I went left when I should have gone right, 3 loyal piccolo players in tow.

And on that sunny October day in West Lafayette, Indiana, before 40,000 spectators in Ross Ade Stadium and who knows how many Hoosiers watching back at home....

the proud Purdue marching band blasted away at the Hail Purdue fight song

and marched to the end zone

boldly

spelling out


PURDUF

That unexpectedly long tail on the F was 3 gullible piccolo players, and their fearless leader.

Rumor has it the amazing marching PURDUF morphed as it travelled down the field. Four white hats bobbed in panic then dashed into place.....

as PURDUF became PURDUE.

When I left the band to take a job at the local cinema, the band director never said a word. He always seemed so happy to see me behind the candy counter.

Wishing Verbs

Moving back and forth between languages sometimes produces the most delicious images.

Today as I edited the Spanish lesson that forms the heart of one of the newsletters my marketing team sends out every week, I stumbled across a little word changeling I just can't get enough of.

In a lesson on the subjunctive, the Spanish teacher who prepares our lessons translated verbos de deseo as "wishing verbs".

Wishing verbs.

How absolutely delicious!

I need to use more "wishing verbs".

Airtight

I lost my favorite uncle today.

I always called him my favorite uncle. Married to one of my father's sisters, a child of Portuguese immigrants. My dad told me he'd had a tough time of it when he first starting dating my Irish American aunt. Back then you lived on a block where every neighbor had a last name just like yours, til you grew up and married one of them. His siblings built houses on his parents' land when they married, not an uncommon occurrence in my home state. My uncle moved 5 towns away with my aunt.

My uncle was handsome. Dark and swarthy, where my other uncles were red-faced and blue eyed. He didn't do the Irish jig at parties or tell jokes. He painted delicate landscapes on empty madeira wine bottles, the short stocky ones. He did odd jobs, painted and landscaped. Best cook in the family. Linguica and peppers, mostly, and the best meat sauce for hot weiners (spicy little hot dogs) you ever tasted.

I was a fixture at his kitchen table for a couple of years in high school. I can't hear Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight without thinking of the drive home from his house the night before I left for college, drumming the steering wheel, singing at the top of my lungs. As if saying goodbye at that house settled it: I was going.

Somewhere along the line we picked each other out. Maybe we both felt a little like outsiders, who knows. Maybe there was a wandering soul hidden in my uncle. I'd fly home for a holiday, seek him out at the family gathering and recap all my latest adventures. I sent a few letters and postcards after I moved to Spain, and my aunt always wrote back. He was ill, she'd say, but I'd made his day.

Not 10 days ago, my Salmantina travelling companions chuckled watching me leap for joy as we chose Lisbon for our next destination. What might I find to send to my Uncle Tony, I wondered? Wouldn't he love to picture me in Lisbon?

So I'm left thinking about an email I read a few weeks ago: an email from a blog reader who longs to live abroad. I grinned reading his passionate description of everything driving him to explore the world outside the States. Yet something compelled me to respond directly to one of his comments: He told me he felt a call to just put his "old life in a ziplock bag" and take off.

Careful, I told him. Explore! Oh, explore. But I'm not so sure how successfully you'll keep your old life wrapped up. Crispy. Airtight.

I love living in Spain. I love my life here, and I work hard, if not always hard enough, to nurture ties with the people I love.

But today, I feel the sharp downside of a life lived far from "home." Because I hadn't seen my uncle in 3 years, and I won't be at his funeral.

And no, home won't be waiting in a ziplock bag.

True Story

Oh God, she's musing with the pen again.....


There was a time I barely remembered that space.

That meditative, out of myself space where wordless images and impulses and waves of emotion flow freely. Brain switched off, notes floating around me like a charmed snake summoned out of her basket….rising, swaying, levitating round the room. Sometimes I suspect that charmed snake is actually me, a part of me I’ve only just gotten to know. Could be.

I’d seen my pianist father enter that space. And my piano teacher, Mr. Fransosi, once told me he’d never tire of watching me “leave him” as I started into a piece I loved.

But he worried about my tongue.

It seems that whenever I dove headfirst into a piece I loved and felt and knew, my tongue emerged, peeking tip first out of the left corner of my mouth. And it stayed there.

I suppose my socially questionable creative habit really shouldn’t have surprised us. Creativity had always been a solitary activity for me and my piano playing was no exception. I’d pound out my pieces for at least an hour a day, always alone, my brother barricaded in the basement with the doors shut fast, struggling to follow Captain Kirk’s dialogue while he prayed for a sister who’d be filled with a passion for knitting. Or reading quietly. My father, who ran a music contracting business, would still be at his office, and my mother out on errands.

One day, with high school looming in my immediate future, Mr. Fransosi decided I might someday want to play in public, and he gently coaxed me to break the habit. In high school it got even easier to keep the tongue in line. I played in ensembles and orchestras. I learned to stay conscious enough to anticipate the singer’s next move, and catch the musical softballs tossed by my fellow musicians. Playing became less about my own cathartic physical release - less about that instant dissipation of tension and isolation as I touched the first key—and more about the sound I made.

And of course, academia called. I’d find myself worrying about algebra in the middle of a sonata. Daydreaming about how Tess of the Dubervilles might end as my friends and I recreated Billy Joel. I earned good grades and signed up to study science in college. Creative tasks gave way to analytical thinking, to a brief career in chemistry and a gradual move into corporate sales and marketing. Before long I was always aware of what I was doing and exactly how I looked. And I seldom played the piano.

In Spain, I have finally relaunched my daily piano outings. It’s been a slow, hard climb. I am certainly not the pianist I was at 18, nor have I yet been able to leave my sheet music behind. I see little sign of the fierce musical talent that drove my father’s life and career.

But, oh! I do know how to find that space he loved.

The other day I glanced away from a Piazzola tango just long enough to catch a glimpse of myself in the woodframed mirror on my living room wall. And there she was, tucked into a dimple at the left side of my mouth, a bold pink flag, announcing absolute and joyous surrender.

My tongue.

Pardon me while I compose myself

So, yesterday I had a long luxurious read of the Sunday El País. So long and so luxurious that I finally dove into the growing pile of articles I'd snipped from previous editions......hoping I'd find the time to read and absorb them, someday.

I'd saved a book review titled Musicalidad de la Persona. A review of a book by a Spanish philosopher I hadn't heard of. His metaphor intrigued me.

In essence, he says, every one of us is a musical composition.

Hmmm. I like that. So today I got to thinking. If I were a musical composition, ...what would I be? If I arrive at the Pearly Gates only to meet a chance for a second go-round, this time as a piece of music, which style of music would I choose to be?

Easy. Me?

I'd dip right into the Tango line.

Yep. I'd be a tango. Think about it.

As a tango, it would be my job to surprise people. And whip them into an emotional frenzy. And sometimes, but only sometimes, shatter their hearts. I could change meters whenever I wanted. And keys, and rhythms. I could stop


when I felt like it, then pick up again.

I'd be heartbreakingly sad, then suddenly defiant. Alluring, then aloof. Downright kitschy some days. That would be fun.

Strange percussion instruments would be more than welcome to join the party, and there'd be lots of banging of things and kicking of legs offbeat. I'd generally BE offbeat, I think, as a tango, which reading this entry has likely convinced you would be a good fit for me.

Best of all, as a tango, I'd be long, melodic phrases, heartbreakingly beautiful, but always with a lot going on behind the scenes. Rumbling piano in the lower register, a subtle driving beat, that sort of thing. I know I'd be deceivingly complex and harmonically interesting. I'd be a tango! Discord? Dissonance? Come on in.

People could dress if they wanted. And lock eyes.

C'mon. Slow slow slow quick quick slow. Doesn't that just sound like me? Caught any sense of straightforward rhythm in this blog?

Nope, tango. Comfortable on a street corner, in a smokey bar. In a concert hall, I suppose, if we could please avoid big budget Riverdance-style Tango extravaganzas. Very comfortable alone at a piano. Maybe just one tapping foot? Or a ring on a wine glass?

Of course, as a Tango, I'd be all about love.
(Ok, ok, give me a break, it's Valentine's.)

I like this idea.


So how about you? If you were a musical composition what would you be?

Blank Page

Turns out I'm deathly afraid of a blank page.

Weird, really, considering I'm well known for them.

I always knew that one of the most powerful parts of my moving-on and moving-somewhere-else rush - and I promise you it is always a rush - was the lure of a blank page. A new start. A place where nobody had seen me doing anything less than perfect. Yet.

I like to think that I stretch for different reasons now. I like to think I've sent my father the "Yeh, you told me so" I've long owed him for his last, wise words as the first of many moving vans pulled up to move me 2000 miles away:

-Wherever you go, there you are. You know that, right?

But I went, and I went again, and in no time I'd won a name as the queen of new pages.

Then a few weeks ago I tried to play a game.

Cool game, really. Poetry Slam, Laura calls it. You tell somebody what word you want out of a magazine - blindly naming the page, paragraph, line, etc. til you lead them to your surprise word, then you track down their chosen word. Back and forth til everybody gets a word, then you all start writing. Anything. With your word. It's a blast, really. People are funny and creative and this game lets them be. I like the addition of Beat Poet clicking after each read, personally, but any way you play it, it makes for a cool evening. And an even cooler collection of stunning 5 or 10 minute creations. Silly, some. And poignant.

So why could I absolutely, positively not write anything on my shiny new Poetry Slam legal pad? The blogger box coaxes something out of me every time I show up, for God's sake, and I am one of those annoying coworkers who just keeps running back at you all day with one more idea for whatever we're working on. I email people at midnight with stuff. Honest.

But Poetry Slam? With people in the room? People who are done, ready, and waiting for me to finish so we can all read our creations? Nothing. Frozen solid.

Then came the realization that I was coming back here to Spain, alone, about to leave the job that brought me here so nicely and neatly and legally. About to leave behind all the tempting "but, wait, if you come back here" offers I met in the States, and the stubborn last minute tries by the old and new owners of the company I work for here in Spain. About to leave what little security I have.

I visited a web I never visit the day I landed in Madrid and read this:

-Your life is up to you. Life provides the canvas; you do the painting.

And it hit me. I've never really just wholeheartedly all-out DIVED into a blank canvas. I always started with a sketch provided by work. Or something. Or someone. My move to Spain was magic. I said I wanted to move, and a job hit me on the head on its way down from a bright blue sky.

So I came to Salamanca, with that visa, for that job. Nice little template, eh? Not quite a blank page.

So, Nomadita, because I think this is me still trying to explain to both of us why I am so sure I am headed good places with this new page, this time, this time the canvas is blank. Nobody else's idea, like my corporate moves. Nothing all set up and ready for my signature, like this job in Salamanca. This time I am starting with a blank page.

And all of sudden I don't care who else is in the room.

Starting from Scratch

Es que no sé dónde empezar.

I say that a lot, don't I? Even here in the blog. I don't know where to start.

I have a lot I'd love to write about my trip back to the States, because I can't possibly tell you what a brutally accurate mirror a trip back home is. Ouch. And I have lots I'd love to write about my landing back in Spain, and, well, my now long ago stay in Cazalla de la Sierra at Christmas - because you all just never know when you might need a night or a week in a restored monastery with wonderful art and fabulous food, and a singing Mexican sculptor who'd be happy to teach you to throw a pot, or share a bowl of cocido.

But tonight let me try to dive back in here with a turbo answer to the (very nice) emails landing in the wandering-woman account asking me what's up.

Yes, I am staying in Spain!

My trip back to the States was a work trip, a project for a friend and client who I worked with when she launched her now very successful business in 2002, before I headed back to Chicago, and then here to Salamanca. I snuck in two absolutely spectacular, no really, no doubt about it, absolutely spectacular visits in Chicago where I caught up, finally really caught up, with three of my favorite humans and my favorite intersection, Wacker and Michigan. But the trip was work. Work that worked out well: I'm back with ongoing consulting work for the company in California, and a small retainer that covers my Salamanca rent and basic expenses.

Whew. So, on to the hard part. When I booked my trip to California, I agreed to work one final month - February - before leaving my company here in Salamanca. I've survived all the counteroffers and midnight legs-quivering doubts - and dodged them all successfully, if not gracefully.

So, much to the shock and utter disdain of my fellow Salamantinos, who assure me nobody in Spain would ever quit a job AND turn down a supposedly fatter counteroffer in Madrid, I am leaping into midair to see what I might find there. Personally, I expect a few white storks carrying brilliant business ideas, but we'll see.

The strange part is that while I can tell you how I plan to start - with the California work, marketing and PR freelance work for the company I am leaving, and whatever other freelance work turns up from the seeds I'm planting, long term I haven't got a clue where I'm headed, professionally. What I do have is a notebook full of good ideas, a houseful of people dying to help me, work with me or cheer me on and an unresolvable problem. The problem? I'm out of patience. I want to work when I want, I want to live to the values I claim, I want to put purpose back into what I do with my time, and I want to make space for my many, shall we say, less profitable? passions. The piano's tired of being ignored. Never mind the dusty new camera. A writing course has left me spouting poetry, and while I join you in your scepticism about my writing financing anybody's retirement, I just need to keep at it. I just need to. Blame beautiful Salamanca. Finally, I travelled here to live -well, partly because I love to travel. And I intend to.

The shocking part, of course, is that I write a killer business plan. For other people. For me, I'm just going to start walking and see what happens.

See, it's another one of those little voices, like the one that told me I wanted to move to Spain. I have long said I want to see what would happen if I just tried to build the life I see in my head (ok, it's a foggy scene, admittedly, but it's there!) and just do something I love to do, and do it my way.

So here's to small city Spain's work to live lifestyle, and my beloved Salamanca's sweet cost of living.....and the growing Spanish economy. All those lovely little Spanish firms wanting to promote themselves in English....May they all combine to get me started walking.

And here's to little voices.
chin-chin!

Things I've collected

Things I've Collected

Marriages I'd seen by the age of 25 that I told myself I'd actually take, 4

Women I'd like to have coffee with,
Maya Angelou, Maria del Mar Bonet, Grace O'Malley the Irish pirate queen...

Spanish words it takes my whole mouth to say

Jokes my father told me

Guidebooks to places I've never visited

Little pieces of places I've hiked,
Homemade coal from the Pinsapo forest, an arrow shaped flint from Mallorca...

Moments when I was just where I was supposed to be

Times I've tried to take up yoga

Times I've seen Gone With the Wind, 13

Earth moving jazz solos

Passport-sized photos of myself, just in case

Christmas`cards I never sent

Whales I've watched leap

Single surviving earrings

Broken umbrellas

Unread copies of Don Quijote, 4

Job titles I accepted

Marriage proposals I (wisely) didn't

Black shoes, 14

Foods I've tried and hated, 1

Cookbooks I've never used

Never opened tubes of lipstick

Little strips of paper with spot-on fortunes

Laughlines




So tell me, what have you collected, anything cool?

Reflective this morning

Fast post, as I think through a long list of friends and family dealing with something HARD at the moment. A marriage that's clearly ended, an older woman paralyzed by regret and who knows what else, a mother's stroke, heart surgery, the death of a young foreign student who was at my company's school here in Salamanca for a Spanish course, killed in a road trip car wreck with new "vacation" friends. HARD.

I just got this down to earth, "yeh, we had some terrorist bombings" note from a friend in Jordan who was out, with her children at home in Amman with a babysitter, when she heard about the attacks (a feeling I can't imagine). Her note made me feel better:

Last week was a tough and scary week with the bombings here. My husband and I were out on a "date night", having dinner at a really nice Italian resturant and had just finished our main course when we heard about the bombings. At first we weren't sure if it was true, but when the waiter asked us if we'd like anything else, he very visibly sighed a sign of relief at our "no thanks, just the check please." Then he answered, "good, there were just three bombs in Amman." We had to ask him to repeat what he said. It seemed like it took forever to get our bill and then to pay it as John immediately got on his phone and I paced waiting to sign the bill. We had missed 10 calls on our cell phones, and with circuit busy, we had a tough time getting through to our house and others. The one thing I remember as we walked to our car, waiting for the screaming ambulances to go by so we could cross the road was the smell in the air. I can't really describe it, but knew it was a different smell, sort of sulphurish, gun powder, burning.

The outrage here from the Jordanians has been incredible. Many people are extremely sad, many scared and not willing to go too far from home. But, life does go on. There is a bigger police and security presence everywhere. People are cautious and wary, but the drivers are still agressive, the shops open, the friendliness of the Jordanians still warm and infectious.

It means a lot to know people are out there who care, even some whom I've never met face to face. It is what makes the world still a wonderful place, full of love, peace and hope.

Her email sent November 17th's Erin, who seems to lean toward the philosophical, running to a favorite Rumi poem, so here it is. We'll return to Spain tomorrow.

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Faking Midgets?

Just checked out my stats. I'm avoiding finishing an assignment for a writing class, truth be told, so checking out stats seemed as worthwhile and urgent an endeavour as cleaning out the fridge, which I finished about an hour ago.

Where, I asked myself, do these lovely Google-led visitors of mine come from? What literary phrase, what lofty ideals, what hefty hunk of Spanish or English vocabulary carries them to my humble web abode?

With some keywords, I was delighted:

"the road not taken", for example, through Google in Korea.
Yeh! Come on over, happy to stand for that anyday.

"grace o'malley a woman pirate of west ireland"
Hell yes, I did mention Grace one time, and I'm thrilled to be tossed into a search for feisty Irish sailing women.

I feel a bit bad about this:

"be careful with spaniards"
Not sure if that advice is for your own good, or the good of the delicate Spaniards, but I can assure you I never meant to say it. Maybe it's some strange hidden message repeated at 78 rpm when you record my posts and play them backwards, but whatever it is, it was accidental, I swear.

But the real puzzler? It's this:

Someone arrived at wandering-woman after searching aol for

"faking midgets"
Actually the amazing thing is that anyone was searching for "faking midgets" at all, not that they landed here, but still, while I am a relatively short woman, I consider myself quite authentic, and my short stature, for one thing, is absolutely true to life.

So here's a shameless plug for the post that landed this one-of-a-kind, false midget-hunting fish, and a boast.

With the title of today's post, I know I now own the search results for faking midgets. Please, if you've arrived fresh from a new search for artificial short people, leave a comment. We'd all love to get to know you.