Tagged: Why do I blog?

Eek.

I've been tagged.
Laura passed me this question: why do you blog?

My first answer, considering how little time I've spent at this blog lately, was sad and sheepish: ummm..lately? I don't.

But as always, Laura set my pen to scribbling, even at 2 AM. I'd climbed out of bed and booted up the laptop, a jetlagged stupor and legendarily bad eyesight conspiring to convince me it was 6:45 AM and time to start my day. Good time for a good question. Perfect time for this question, since I've been hankering to get here more often and more than hankering to give this blog a long overdue makeover.

Why do I blog? The tag asked for 5 reasons. I'll give you 6:

1. Blogging helps me pay attention.

I look at life like a writer when I blog. I notice what's around me, find myself catching things I would have missed in my bazillion mile per hour past. Just knowing I'll be heading here pricks the ears, opens the eyes...keeps me awake and scribbling.

Internally, the effect's just as dramatic. Posts, comments, the blogs I visit through the comment box...blogging stirs up things I doubt I'd run across any other way.


2. There are some truly cool people hanging out on the other side of this keyboard.

See them there? I can't count the fabulous people I've met through this blog, many in person. Can't count the pincho tours during Salamanca visits, the friends this blog has brought me, the cool things I've been asked to do. I just plain like the people who visit this blog.

I have a certain way of looking at the world; I've learned what I've learned navigating the waters of expat life in Spain. If any of that can spark something in somebody else, answer a question, forward a resource, or inspire a good hearty laugh, all the better. Sometimes I think blogging is the ultimate way to pay it forward.

3. Some days I surprise myself.

Amazing what an empty text box can coax out of me. Some days I blog just to see what I type.

4. The blog keeps track of the minutes.

You can't spend 5 weeks in the States and not notice what you don't have in your life: a house, bursting bank accounts, a car, a family and the SUV to cart it around in, you know, things you've built, stuff you've bought. When I moved to Spain, I bought myself a life of well-lived minutes. I don't earn what I used to; I may or may not get back to owning a house and collecting possessions. But I've got to tell you, I spend my time well. This blog lets me mark all those minutes and come back to celebrate them again.


5. I've got this funny thing about bridges.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live somewhere really different from the States. Then I talk to someone who's convinced all Americans are illiterate gun owners who eat nothing but McDonald's. Or open an email from an American who's not sure cell phones have reached Spain yet.

Every once in a while I watch this blog bridge - Spaniards to Americans, Spaniards to expats living in Spain, Americans to the world outside our borders, conservatives to liberals. Catalans to Castillians. People who speak Spanish to those who don't. I like when we disagree; I like when people who are absolutely convinced they know what Americans or Spaniards are like misunderstand me. I like being forced to question my own experience here. I love hosting the party where people who thought they had little in common find common ground.

And there is nothing I would rather do than encourage more of my paisanos to cross the Atlantic, or the Pacific or the border with Mexico or... Travel, people!

6. Writing about my wanders is the perfect excuse.

I must wander, I tell you! I must! I must turn this hard won vocational virtuality into solo travel and blog posts. You're all counting on me, aren't you?

Speaking of which: I'm booked for Tuscany in April. Recommendations, oh wise, well-travelled ones?

Anybody want to pick up this tag? I won't name names, but please, if you'd like to join the tag, leave a comment with a link to your post about why you blog. Here's a spin, nonbloggers - leave a comment about why you don't blog! I've just declared this an equal opportunity tag.

A Saturday morning at Barajas

I met ETA Saturday morning.

Just about 9 am, while I was carrying two trays to the screening machines at Terminal 4 in Madrid's Barajas Airport, an ETA car bomb blew up the parking structure across from the terminal. I heard the explosion, then watched the check-in area on the other side of a glass wall shake for what seemed like 2 or 3 minutes. Airport guards raced by while a Guardia Civil told us to keep calm. People looked blankly at him, seeking answers; we looked hard at each other. Some people shouted "¡Por dios!" or "¡Joder!"; others simply broke into tears.

A young couple trying to run past the guards into the terminal began to shout when he ordered them to stay where they were. The woman in front of me began to cry. Sobbing quietly, she turned to look in my eyes, not saying anything, just lingering with me for awhile as if to confirm that we were in this together and not nearly as "strange" to each other as we'd been 2 minutes earlier. Smoke began to fill up the check-in area on the other side of the wall.

The security folks closed down the security line, then immediately reopened it. They rushed us through, encouraging us to travel as quickly as possible to the underground train that would take us to our gates. As I passed through security I watched guards try to calm an older women who was shouting angrily. She was desperate for the guards to assure her she'd be all right and furious that someone had managed to get a bomb into the airport.

Walking toward the escalators I passed glass exit doors leading from the smoke-filled check-in area. I heard shouts and watched a group of young men force their way through the locked exit doors into the main terminal, panicked and eager to escape the smoke. On the landing between escalators I walked by one of the Barajas employees posted to help customers find their way through the new terminal. These Barajas guides are usually cheerful and multilingual. Saturday, the guide was standing up straight at her position, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was scared to death, but still on duty.

On the train to the U gates a young Frenchman headed back to Paris told us the bomb had exploded outside the airport building. People speculated that we could be caught up in payback for Saddam's hanging, then moved toward an ETA theory as we counted our fingers and toes and realized perhaps this had been a bomb meant to create chaos and fear without killing any of us.

I spent the rest of the day waiting. Terminal 4 was closed until 2 or 230, and the train I'd arrived in was taken out of service until engineers could check its structural stability. Slowly, those of us who had made it immediately through security were joined by passengers bussed from the other terminals.

My 12pm flight to Chicago left Madrid a little after 430. I arrived at O'Hare 18 hours after catching the airport shuttle at my hotel in Madrid.

The bombing broke a ceasefire which had made me quite hopeful when it was first announced 9 months ago. Last I heard, Madrid police were still searching for two Ecuadorian immigrants believed to be buried beneath the rubble of the parking garage. Each had stayed behind in his car to sleep while his companion went into the airport to meet an arriving visitor. If confirmed dead, they will be ETA's first mortal victims in the three years I have lived in Spain.

I have friends, people I respect, who routinely argue that desperate people will "understandedly" take desperate means to get what they want, be they members of Hamas, or Hezbollah, or ETA or as many of my friends would add, the Israeli government. I now know that the collections taken up in Boston Irish-American pubs when I was young likely wound up in the hands of the IRA.

I don't see any signs anyone in the Basque Country suffers as Palestinians do. That aside, seeing senseless violence as closely as I did Saturday has only strengthened my conviction that nothing justifies violence against civilians. What good can possibly come from the needless deaths of two sleeping immigrants? More importantly, I still can't see any way violence can ever work -- ever get anyone, oppressed or not, what they are after. The day made me think of this old post, about Jo Berry, who met and now speaks alongside the IRA man who killed her father.

I have to tell you. As pleased as I was to be rushed onto a train after the bomb exploded and as thrilled as I was when my flight finally took off 7 hours later, I am sorry I missed the demonstrations after the bombing.

I feel a bit more Spanish. I met ETA Saturday morning.

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?

A bus across Castilla

¿El cuatro?

He calls out the number with the confidence of a theatre usher. Boldly. Loudly. As if he's been waiting for me.

My gaze drops from the row of seat numbers overhead to meet dark, smiling eyes. He's an older man, elegantly dressed. An impeccable black leather briefcase rests on his feet. I glance at my ticket. Oddly enough, he's right.

Mmmmm, yes! Yes, four, that's me.

He shifts his case, his cane and his shiny black shoes and I climb into the window seat next to him.

We chat. A few paragraphs later he looks straight into my eyes again, head tilted aside like a curious puppy.

Are you Spanish?
I grin and offer my standard answer: I live in Salamanca but no, I'm not Spanish.

"¿América?", he asks? I sense the America he's guessed isn't North America. "Not México", he continues. "Ecuador...no...where?"

Blame the age of his ears or the roar of the engine; the man has made my day.

"América, sí. Estados Unidos", I answer.

He looks suprised. I watch him note my frustration with the soft Spanish r that continues to give me away.

You speak castellano, no doubt about that, but there is something...

(They call it an accent, I think to myself. And it tortures me. Still, I make a mental note to pick up something nice for my Spanish teacher. At least my accent has moved South, to the land of native speakers....)

We introduce ourselves and discover we are headed to the same pueblo: Madrigal de las Altas Torres, birthplace of Isabel I of Spain. Columbus' Isabel.

As the bus crosses Castilla, I travel the world from seat 4. I am rapt. Seventeenth century México, Madrigal at the time of Isabel's birth, Fray Luis de León in Salamanca, Spain's California missions.... Spain's history swirls around me. My companion is a history professor, retired from Salamanca's Universidad Pontífica. An expert on the history of the church, he is travelling to Madrigal to talk with local families about one of the town's famous sons: Vasco de Quiroga, a 17th century Spanish bishop revered in Mexico as a defender of the indigenous people of Michoacan. My travelling companion has written a book on Vasco de Quiroga, which he proudly pulls from the impeccable briefcase.

We talk about my one-woman company, my solo move to Spain and the US elections. He asks if Chicago is nothing but smokestacks and I assure him it is not. We talk about architecture and the Great Chicago fire.

By the time the bus pulls off the road along Madrigal's city walls, he's declared me courageous for marching off alone to a strange land. Never mind this wandering pueblos alone on weekends.

"But you could see the pueblos with travel groups," he tells me. He laughs as I recite the advantages of travelling solo, with spontaneity at the top of the list. His voice slows while he quietly reminisces about his own solo travels across Spain as a young professor. "I'd stop wherever I wanted, pull off the road at a wall, or a castle or pueblo. "I guess you love to go your own way, too...."

Hmmm, yes. And if I didn't travel alone, I think to myself, I wouldn't have met you, would I?

The fishermen and the immigrants

The six gorgeous human faces you see above belong to the crew of the Spanish trawler Francisco y Catalina.

They are shrimp fishermen. For years, most of them have spent more time on the water than they have at home with their families. One crew member is 21. He signed on for a year, just enough time to earn the cash to repair his car.

On Friday, June 14, those faces spotted an open, broken-down boat full of immigrants in the middle of the Mediterranean. 51 people, mostly Eritreans and Moroccans, sat baking, shelterless, in the sun, while their engineless boat drifted out to sea. Among the exhausted crowd packed onto the boat, the fishermen spied a 2 year girl and 2 visibly pregnant women.

For hours, the fishermen called authorities, pleading for someone to pick up the immigrants. Pleading for someone to tell them what to do.

No one did either. Two Maltese fishing vessels approached only to rapidly motor away.

Eventually, having failed to find any help, anywhere, the Spanish fishermen took a vote. A unanimous vote. They'd snatch this boatful of dehydrated, doomed immigrants from the sea and face the consequences.

They made for the closest port, a town in Malta, with their unexpected catch. Twenty miles offshore, a Maltese patrol boat ordered the Francisco y Catalina to stop. Access to the port was denied.

I'll condense the next chapter into one mind blowing sentence: When Malta refused to allow the fishermen to drop off the immigrants in Malta, claiming they were picked up in Libyan waters, and regardless, were now standing on Spanish ground (the boat), Spain, the EU and a handful of Mediterranean countries began what El País aptly named "The Auction of Immigrants".

For eight days, the fishermen lay at anchor 20 miles off Malta, feeding their guests, getting to know them as best they could in a strange exchange of Gallego, Valenciana, and what little English they could piece together. They cranked up the DVD players they use to pass long hours at sea and played The Little Mermaid in English for the 2 year old. They lost heart when she wouldn't eat and offered her every food on the boat till she took something. They covered the part of the boat where the immigrants waited in the heat with a tarp.

Water and food were brought out from shore. The boat's cook adjusted to cooking for 60. After a few days, when one of the crew members went to clean the bathroom they'd set aside for the immigrants, the immigrants stopped him, and cleaned it themselves.

On Tuesday, the 2 year old, her mother, and the most seriously ill immigrant were allowed to be airlifted to Malta for medical treatment.

Meanwhile, Europe argued over who would take the immigrants. Italy offered to take 10 if Spain would take 40 Moroccans already in Italy. Libya agreed to take 10, then reneged. More than once, the fishermen followed the order to hoist the anchor and start the engines, only to be told negotiations had broken down. They would not be allowed to enter the Maltese port after all.

In the end, Spain flew more than half of the shipwrecked Africans to Madrid, where the Red Cross and a Catholic relief agency will house and feed them while they apply for asylum. Malta accepted 5, Andorra 5 and Italy 12.

The fishermen lost their catch and 8 days of fishing.

Early in the week the boat's captain, José Dura, asked a journalist what would happen the next time a working fishing boat ran across a boatful of immigrants drifting off to sea and certain death. Would the fishing boat stop to save them, knowing the consequences?

"What were we supposed to do?", he asked in an interview. "Let them drown?"

I know immigration is a tough issue and I know that small island nations and small island provinces, like Spain's Canary Islands, don't have the resources to house the thousands who wash ashore every year.

Still, today, I'm proud of my adopted home, as I watch her burst in pride at this story of 10 fishermen. Spain can't handle more illegal immigrants, either, but she took them.

Two crew members did the boat's grocery shopping in Malta this weekend, and the Francisco y Catalina headed back to sea, to pick up where she left off: fishing for shrimp.

Somehow all the news I read today left me with the same feeling: if only more governments could look beyond their difficulties and their principles enough to see the 2 year olds behind them. And the pregnant women. And, in the words of one of our fishermen, "the brave men".

Said José Dura, interviewed as the immigrants hugged him, thanked him for saving their lives and headed for the buses that would take them to a pair of Spanish planes:

"We'd do it again."

Today, here's to people for whom a human being is always a human being.

Expat Interviews - Come on over and meet me

We interrupt my ever so disciplined work-at-home day (oh, when, oh when will I develop an ever so disciplined work-at-home day?) with a new flash.

Melizza from ExpatInterviews is collecting interviews from all kinds of people from all kinds of places, all of whom now live somewhere else. This site is terrific if you're wondering what it's like to live in a particular country, or even if just like reading other people's stories.

So, if you're looking for a little more of the Wandering Woman back story (and ok, I admit it, a photo) I invite you to wander over and check out my interview.

Now, back to that ever so disciplined life of mine. Ahem.

Go away now. Work to do.

A headhunter, a blip and a whim

I opened Outlook this morning to find an e-mail from a headhunter in Florida. A headhunter who I genuinely respect, actually, which isn't a common occurrence for me and heavy hitter headhunters.

The poor woman had called every phone number she ever had for me, all to no avail, obviously, since I've moved to Spain since last we spoke, in 2003. In desperation she dug up a US-based e-mail address I still maintain, and sent out one last desperate plea: With the title "How are you?", she asked where she could call me "to catch up."

And I faced that blip I sometimes face, when I help a former colleague update his resume, or serve as a reference for someone who once worked for me...or make a business phone call in English and hear my slick "corporate voice" slide out.

It's a somebody pinch me blip. A wait am I really here now?...and dear lord, did I use to be there? blip. You know, there. In "the mode". Running 100 miles an hour, talking on my cell phone until the stewardess orders me to stop, then picking it up again the moment we land. Planning social engagements a month in advance with a quick "Hmm, How's the 25th for you? Around 3? I have a 5, but we'll be fine."

I'm even laughing aloud as I write this. I use to appear in annual reports, all dressed up in my newest Anne Klein suit and power scarf. I mean read this blog and tell me you even believe that. I'm not sure I believe it, til someone from that world calls me and pulls me back.

What makes me smile most every time I enter that Twilight Zone is the sheer incredulity I hear on the other end of the line. The headhunter's e-mail reponse today, for example: What brought you to Spain?

I have this image of her sitting at her desk, shaking her head, thinking, "Darn, I knew there was a commission in that chick. How good of an offer did she get that took her to Spain??"

As though anything else would be treason to the tribe.

How could I tell her what brought me was a whim, then a head-over-heels romance with a language, and finally a dream? Shall I tell her all of that, this woman who wants to tempt me with a Senior Sales Executive you'll-only-go-after-the- largest-of-the-largest-accounts "hunter" job? I don't mean to fault the corporate world; I have friends who thrive there, who do ethical business and manage to thrive as human beings, too.

It's just no place for me. (I'm laughing out loud again.) And it took me a lot of seemingly successful years to figure that out.

Shall I tell her I now have time to walk by the lavender growing along the old city wall on Calle San Pablo, sniff deeply and snap a photo for my blog?

Anyway, my perplexed headhunter, who by now is undoubtedly convinced I am CEO of something or other in Spain (well, I moved, didn't I?), quickly wished me well in my new life.

And asked if I knew anybody for the super sales gig.

The 7 Wonders of Fore, Part 1

I read it in a book.

Dangerous words, those. At least if you ask the few and stalwart souls who now and again find themselves travelling with me.

I like to chase down things I read in books. Or on CD covers. Things I hear drop, casually, from the eager mouths of natives.

Maybe just to see if what I've read is real, maybe to suck in a bit of rare air, maybe to feel the familiarity of a place I've never been, I've developed a hard-to-cure book chasing habit. Of course, the reward is never in the being there - in this place I've picked out a photo or a poem or a life story. The reward's all in the trail on which I wend my way. And more often than not, the reward's the people I meet during the hunt.

The first Bed & Breakfast I booked for my recent trip to Ireland was Mrs. Healy's Hounslow House, where we would spend our last night in Ireland. Mrs. Healy's farmhouse was the only B&B listed in Fore, Castlepollard, Westmeath, and I was determined to chase down the 7 wonders of Fore.

The guilty book that sent me on this chase is a paperback I picked up in an airport shop on my way back from Dublin in November. In A Secret Map of Ireland, Rosita Boland, a staff writer for the Irish Times, wanders a country she thought she knew well - her own - and offers up a secret map. "Discovering new stories about old places", as she puts it, she chases down something new, or unexpected, or intriguing in each of Ireland's 32 counties.

From her introduction:
I wanted to write a book that attempted to show that you can be surprised by your own place.

Yes! Yes!

And later:
"Anyone could write a book like this one, and each one would be competely different because everyone would focus on different subjects, chart their own indiviual map."

Wouldn't it be fun if everyone did write that book? Their own secret map of the place they know best?

Anyway, I dug back into Boland's book before planning our trip, and knew I wanted to track down the Seven Wonders of Fore for myself.

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?"

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.

A poem for two wandering women

That's me

nose pressed hard against the window glass
breath mist on the window as the train whirs by you

That's me

our heads turn, our eyes meet and I follow you out of sight

That's me

clutching a tattered phrasebook
stashing consonants in unexpected places
a strange new colloquy in words and hands

That's me

harbouring all the places I've walked,
every story I've met pressed flat against my heart

------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not sure I haven't met a kindred spirit today! Another wandering woman, A Wandering Woman Writes about Her World, a Kiwi in Antwerp. Check out her first post, written last July.

It's the title of her blog that blew me away:

"People become stories and stories become understanding."

I can't know how you read your title, fellow w-w, but it gave me the courage to post the poem above, a poem about my first wanderings, the solo trips that made a wanderer out of me. I am eager to read more of your blog!

A proud Salmantina responds

Don Valcárcel, a "Spaniard, a proud Castilian" read an old post of mine today, about my discomfort returning late books to my local library. I'd like to post his comment.

And respond. His comment:

Good Afternoon:

Although you wrote this a while ago, I have some issues. First, I should state that I am a Spaniard, a proud Castilian, and though not from Salamanca but rather from Madrid, I know Salamanca very well...as I do all of Spain, my great country.

I don't know where you get this idea that "Salmantinos are not punctual." I deal with many North American foreigners (especially students), and I have only had problems with punctuality from them (and this is not to mention, since it is not very relevant here), their highly disrespectful behaviour in the city centre.

I also find it interesting that you find yourself in Salamanca (I do not know this moment but when you wrote this blog), and yet, you do not write in Spanish. Is it fair to think that you have not learned one meaningful sentence in Castilian Spanish? Why did you come to Spain then? Are you like 90% of all the other foreigners who just come here to "soak in" what you like and not learn the real culture?

Again, I know this comment is "overdue"...and I will end with this:

If you had a problem returning the books due to time issues, then you should be more responsible and write down the hours when they are supposed to be returned to the person in charge (la encargada)...because this way you wouldn't need to complain about the way hours work.

Good Afternoon

By Don Valcárcel

First, I do want to thank you for your comment, Don Valcárcel. I'd hate for you to have thought all that and not told me!

I hope you will come back and read a bit more. If you do, you'll find that I love your "great country", spend my life in castellano, and spend much of my time and virtually all of this blog exploring and celebrating the delicious daily differences I find between my own culture, and the "real" Salamanca culture I have very deliberately chosen to immerse myself in.

What I try not to do, in this blog and in my life in Spain, is make assumptions. Draw on stereotypes. Judge people by who I think they are, by what I expect them to do, and not by what they do. How they live.

Let me respond to your concerns.

Punctuality? Well, I speak from my own experience. Friends arrive 5 minutes late, meetings start at least 20 minutes late, coworkers arrive 10 minutes late, concerts start late, and my boss runs several hours late, every day.

And I, for one, love every less than punctual minute of it.

Funny thing is, Don Valcárcel, I am not an impressively punctual person, myself. I arrived late to meet a friend during my first few months here, breathless, stiff with stress, frustrated, and sputtering out apologies. Only to be greeted by warm Spanish patience, and 5 of the sweetest words I've ever heard: It's OK. You're in Spain.

That never happened to me in Chicago.

(Your North American students likely arrive very late. That doesn't necessarily tell us Spaniards, or Germans, or Swedes arrive on time, does it? )

I have never run into the legendary Spanish "mañana". I'd argue my Spanish friends put nothing off, even things I wish they'd put off. But I have had clients refuse to see me when I arrived 5 minutes late for a sales meeting in the States, and a successful young Spanish CEO counsel me never to arrive right on time.

One woman's blog. One woman's experience. And not one ounce of complaint.

Language? Castilian. I work for a Spanish company. In Spanish. I run meetings in Spanish. Give seminars in Spanish. Eat my lunch in Spanish. Answer my phone. In Spanish. Send all my e-mails in Spanish.

I live my life in Spanish.

Although I will admit I have little choice in Salamanca, I have exactly, well, NO extranjero friends in Spain. I do work with a nice British chap, Rob, although we don't socialize often. And we speak Spanish.

I am one of those extranjeros who lives in Spain to live in Spain, Don Valcárcel. Maybe that's rare. Or maybe you've met too many temporary visitors, and not enough proud residents. Salamanca is hardly the top choice of the Costa del Sol set.

So, with all that castellano, you ask, why the blog in English? Well, if you read a bit more, you'll discover that I originally started this blog to connect to family and friends back home. Who don't speak Castilian. OK, and I write a lot better in English. A lot.

Still, something spectacular happened after I started this blog in English. Spaniards came to read it. And they came back. And commented. I soon found myself following their blogs, where I read and comment in Spanish. Meanwhile, they follow mine, reading and commenting in English.

I have watched, delighted, while this blog has become a very tiny part of something I am desperate to see -- a bridge, a gradual, grass roots conversation that gets my countrymen to see the world outside their borders, and my beloved Spanish hosts to see extranjeros - particularly North Americans - from the inside.

And sometimes I just make them all laugh.

I do have a secret wish to start a second blog in Spanish, strangely enough. My Spanish writing teacher sells me the idea every week. What I don't have is time. Or stellar, quick writing skills. Yet.

I guess what I want to tell you, Don Valcárcel, is that I am not "90% of the foreigners who come to Spain". I am one person. One person intensely in love with your culture, with a life lived in your native language and with everything both of those experiences are teaching me. One person who is, as far as I know, not responsible for the admittedly obnoxious behavior of other people's children, whether they are 19 year old Dutch hordes in the streets of Salamanca or packs of 23 year old Americans in Madrid.

Please read on, Don Valcárcel. Read Overdue again. Imagine if you can, an extranjera who chooses to live her life in Spanish, who chooses to live in Spain to open and expand her mind, to see the world through another lens, to explore how much we all really have in common, obnoxious college kids and all.

Read my reaction to a Spanish blogger who travelled through my country and wrote about his experiences. From his Spanish point of view. A lot of what he found didn't please me, but I don't doubt that those were his experiences. Nor do I doubt there's truth in how other people see me --- or my native country.

Read on. Because before you know it, you may meet me. As so many of your paisanos do every day. Don't worry, you won't recognize me. You'll never guess I am North American. No one ever does. Truth is I probably won't tell you unless you ask.

But here's the rub: I am.

I am also a proud resident of Spain. And a damn proud Salmantina.

I hope you'll read more, and I hope you'll keep an eye out for foreigners who surprise you.


I'd be happy to correspond in Spanish, by the way. E-mail's on the profile page.

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.

On watching fireworks with an española

I'll never see fireworks the same way again.

I've been cackling nonstop about my experience watching the Virgen de la Vega fireworks with my landlady, Teresa. Since my coworkers have tired of hearing my española impressions, I'll tell all of you.

There was water coming in from next door. An ugly, blotch on my otherwise pristine bedroom wall. Teresa had stopped by to continue the ongoing negotiations with plumbers, painters and the entire population of Plaza S--, Door 2. Seems it absolutely, positively, without doubt wasn't anyone's fault.

I was enjoying the dance, which ended with the owner of the apartment from which the water entered mine declaring to a unanimous chorus of Pues, bueno's, Entonces and vigorously nodding heads that the water must have come through some secret passageway for water pipes - from the apartment above his, which would make all repairs the sole responsibility of the only property owner not present.

Ingenious.

Business concluded, an air kiss on either cheek and Teresa was out the door... until it hit her.

Los fuegos! Erin! La hora!

Time for the fireworks. And here she was inside an apartment with a front row view. We made for the double-width window in the salon.

And I learned something. I come from reserved stock, New England Irish Catholic, to be exact. My mother has just enough Scot in her to be tighter than tight and internationally famous (well, I live in Spain) for shhhhing any sound that might possibly reach the neighbors.

But I love fireworks. I haven't missed a single show in Salamanca, and we have plenty, although up to this point I had watched all of them alone.

No more.

Teresa ooohed. She aaaahhed. She grabbed my arm and gave little leaps in the air, and Teresa's at least 4 inches taller than me, and downright statuesque.

¡Los azules! Los azules, ¡miralos Erin! ¡Los azules!

And with every sonic boom:
¡Vaya bombazos! ¡Vaya!

Miralos, ¡cómo caen! Ay, ¡son estrellas desde el cielo, Erin! ¡O los corazones! ¡Los corazones! Ves, Erin, ¿ves?

Better than Dick Vitale, if anyone else out there spent the 80's watching Big 10 basketball. She couldn't keep quiet, and why should she? She was at that moment watching a damn good fireworks show. And all the excitement I get out of fireworks (well, I must like them, or I wouldn't scramble for the camera and race to the window every time) came tumbling out of Teresa.

She announced every color.

Oh Erin! Blue! Do you see the blue!! And oh! The greens! See the greens, how they hang?

Just look how they fall!

She squealed at every shape.

The hearts! The hearts! Oh, I love the hearts!! Erin, Erin, look at them, look at them! They're hearts!

(Yes, we have hearts in our fireworks, which strike me as little too 5th grade Friends 4ever for my taste, but they pleased the crowd. And it wasn't hard to tell.)

Twenty minutes later, I felt like I'd shared an intimate experience with Teresa.

Fiesta fireworks.

In short, I've found another piece of española I think I'll take inside and keep. When watching fireworks, watch fireworks.

And if the mood hits, squeal.

The In-Between

I love the in-between.

I love the excitement of change, of being on a journey, somewhere between here and gone.

Once again, I find myself in transition and loving every uncertain minute of it. I'm in a work transition, exploring how I might combine 2 passions - living in Spain and working for myself. I'm just coming out of a few uncertain months of bureaucratic limbo, waiting for Spain's stamp-wielding funcionarios to renew my residency. And now I'm soaking up my favorite time of year - a slow, warm Indian summer with chilly fall mornings and the just-installed blue plastic pool cover outside my door reminding me every day that winter's on its way.

Something is over, I think, and something else is about to begin. That's it.

I don't know that I'll be leaving Salamanca, but, still, I walk la Rua slowly these days, drinking in every sound, every smell, every familiar scene, waving at the usual faces. I wonder, am I leaving?

And OK, it shouldn't have taken 42 years to figure this out, but I suddenly understand my passion for travel. And sailboats. I simply love the in-between. I love the train trip more than the arrival, the wandering lost more than the finally being found. I love the sail enough to feel my heart sink as the next dock crawls into sight. I remember my disappointment the first time I sailed in a small lake, somewhere in Texas, with a college almost-boyfriend who desperately wanted to impress me. I was mortified, spoiled coastal child that I was. I could see the other side! I hate seeing shore. There's something about the water in between , the journey in between, the not quite knowing where I am headed or when I will get there that turns me on.

And feels like home.
Somewhere between here and gone.

The road not taken

I left my VP job 4 years ago in February.

When I was struggling with that decision I kept reminding myself:

But I worked so hard to get here!

Funny thing is I knew I'd worked hard, and, yeh, I'd gotten there, but I also knew the truth: I'd never worked hard to get there.

Hired to sell in a tiny St. Louis office (after another spontaneous career change - I'm what I like to call a chapter book:)), I found myself behind a mahogany desk in Southern California 4 years later, with 40 people and 65 million dollars in business looking up at me. Without ever having wanted to get there. I just worked hard.

I can still hear my proud response to every wide-eyed newbee who took me aside and or scheduled an appointment just to ask me how she could get "where I was":

"Oh, I never tried to get here. I just grew my business and here I am."

Four years later that famous line prompts a belly laugh. That I never wanted to get there might explain why I felt like a mismatched shoe once I arrived.

The other day I opened an email from one of my former colleagues, let's call her Lori, the only friend who was still with the company at a senior management level, and I found myself flooded by memories. Lori worked for me, very briefly, then she and I led the same division. Lori handled the Eastern US while I tackled the West and Canada. Her unexpected reaction to my unexpected resignation - "How could you leave me?" - sent me running to the CEO with an offer to rescind my letter, an offer he very wisely declined.

Lori finally left the company a few months ago, after earning a Sr VP title and a company-paid MBA only to become uncomfortable as a new leadership team took the reins. Her e-mail confirmed what I had already heard: She's moved her family from Southern California to Pennsylvania to take on a new Senior VP Sales and Marketing post.

And for a moment - a brief moment - I put my old life in fast forward - as if I'd never handed in that fateful letter - and saw myself in 2005, a lot wealthier :), still in corporate mode, walking into a new company to lead eager young troops to new sales records. Executive MBA in hand.

And I cringed.

Because as much as Lori is one of the corporate good guys, a talented leader who truly does thrive in the big business world, I am not.

I miss my salary and the easy peace of mind it gave me, I miss being an icon - Erin, no last name required, I miss the adulation of eager little sales bucks, I miss speaking in public (in English!) about a company I believe in, I miss the absolute clarity of purpose a company-woman job gave me, and the seductive "Success" label my business card provided. In some ways it was an easy life.

It just wasn't mine! As I closed her e-mail it hit me: I can't for one moment imagine going back.

My job here in Spain is creative and fun, and it's been my way to get here and get started. I'm still wandering around, wondering what I might like to do, professionally, in my next chapter, now that the where has worked out so well, but my quick fast-forward nightmare made one thing clear: Arriving sure is a lot sweeter when you are the one behind the wheel.

Here's to getting to the places you really are working toward.

The Spanish Meeting Bus

I hate meetings.

Hate.

Despise.

Loathe meetings.

Can't say why, really. I suspect it has to do with a calculation I rattled off one afternoon during my corporate years, putting a number to how many hours of my adult life I had already spent sitting in meetings. Several weeks, as I recall. Appalling.

For the record, I do love wild, unexpectedly contentious - or creative - meetings. It's weekly round-the-table check-ins and world-touring agendas that make my skin crawl.

Off my back, under the table and out the door.

Til there I sit, irritable. Skinless.

Here's where I should explain something: I was raised by business wolves. I cut my corporate teeth working in a savagely entrepreneurial company where time really was money. The CEO told me so. And if we'd been able to get our hands on a marble statue of a nymph-like goddess called Results, we would happily have rubbed her head and kissed her toes on the way in and out every day.

The millionaire CEO of that highly profitable wolves' den was a German immigrant who, as he told it, arrived in the US at the tender age of 19 with 3 dollars in his pocket. (I've always wondered how German arrived with dollars, but we'll assume he changed them at the airport.) He started meetings by his own satellite-calibrated watch and balanced a metal garbage pail just inside the conference room door to surprise anyone who dared crawl in late - or dispute the satellite-guaranteed hour.

I tell you all this to illustrate the depth of my dislike for the senseless human act of meeting just to meet. Here's what my wolf parents taught me about meetings and memos: Avoid them. When that doesn't work, start them on time, get to the point and get everybody back to what makes money.

Ah, but I live in Spain now.

It's not the sheer volume of Spanish meetings-just-to-meet that has my skin missing in action for weeks at a time. Although the volume is impressive.

Nor is it the epic journey taken by each and every agenda, though a Dutch colleague and I have enthusiastically pointed out the striking resemblance between many of our meetings and, well, the EU, for example.

It's not all that.

It's the darn Spanish Meeting Bus.

Ever call a meeting and nobody came? Well, in Spain, nobody EVER comes. Til the bus goes out to get them.

Allow me to illustrate my point:
Scene: 10 o'clock meeting called by who knows who.
10:01: Cut to the conference room, where our fearless wandering American sits alone.

10:15: Alone she sits.

10:20: Wandering American begins to make the rounds, in what I have affectionately named the Spanish Meeting Bus.

- Knock knock!! Diez y veinte!
- Hola, everybody still working happily at your desks! Don't we have a meeting at 10:00?

Until the bus physically rounds up each and every participants, nothing. This isn't late. This isn't even the legendary (and fictional, if you ask me) Spanish mañana.

This is nunca. Bordering on nunca jamás. Never.

I have an idea. If we start the darn things I bet we'll finish earlier.

Anybody want to buy an imaginary bus?