OMG! Estoy Aqui!!!

Hola, virtual co-travelers! I wrote this on Saturday just after arriving but am posting it Monday because it took me a couple of days to work out getting online.

Well, it’s a good thing I opted for the longer layovers between flights rather than the dangerously short ones I’d considered or I might still be in Atlanta. They suspended all take-offs and landings in the Atlanta airport for two hours last (Friday) night because of a giant thunder storm. If I’d taken the later flight from Albuquerque that I’d considered, I might have missed the connecting flight to Madrid, and since we were two hours late taking off from Atlanta I’d DEFINITELY have missed the earlier flight I’d considered booking between Madrid and Granada. So the several hours I thought I had to burn in Madrid shrunk to just an hour or so. I arrived relatively refreshed, having slept a lot on the plane over the ocean (thanks to homeopathic No Jet Lag and some over-the-counter sleeping meds). I got through customs quickly but then had to take a long bus ride from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4, with suitcase and carry-on, and find my way around Terminal 4. My strategy so far: Use Spanish as much as possible when I have time to make up for mistakes! If I had needed to rush to a plane I’d have used English, but as it is I’m using Spanish and allowing a little extra time to get where I’m supposed to go if I don’t understand as much as I like to pretend I do!

But here’s the thing: I’m here!! In this beautiful, modern airport with wavy ceilings and green glass tiled floors. Where they don’t announce flight departures on the the PA or play bizarre pre-recorded messages that the security level is Orange so keep your eyeyour bags and don’t let anyone hand you a mysterious package and run away with their fingers in their ears. It’s quiet and beautiful. I stopped to recharge at a cafeteria with some café con leche and tortilla Espanola - the very meal I had on my first morning in Granada with Charles and Ariel in December. It’s  some kind of magic. I don’t know how a food and drink can make me feel so comforted and welcomed, but it does.

It’s not quiet in this cafeteria like out in the terminal, but it’s the noise of conversations and laughter. Looking around the room I see hardly another table with just one person. All around me are couples, families and groups of friends, talking, gesturing, laughing loudly, hugging hello and goodbye. I think of all those Americans in airport food courts, sitting side-by-side alone, looking at iPods or laptops. Here I am, alone, looking at my laptop. OK. In two hours or so I’ll be picked up at the Granada airport by the woman whose house I’ll be staying in for a month. What will she be like?? It dawns on me that I’ve approached this arrangement (a room in a house I found on Craig’s List Granada) as I approach a new movie or book, asking just enough questions to determine if I’ll like it and then letting myself be surprised. I hope that’s not a fool’s strategy here. I suspect not.

At the gate for the plane to Granada I find myself among a family from England – a mother, father and their two sons in their twenties. The dad has a strong British accent but he used an expression (saha!)  that I used to hear my grandparents say. I inquire; he’s British, from Egypt, but I don’t have time to dig out more. On the plane I doze again, opening my eyes just as we start dropping down into Granada, over what look to be olive orchards. In the airport, passengers and the people meeting them are separated by two automatic doors marked: “Punto de No Retorno.” As I wait for my bag to come around the luggage carousel, I kep peeking through the automatic doors, wondering which of those faces might be the woman whose house I’ll be staying in.  At last my suitcase comes out, one of the last, and it’s wet! Left outside in the storm at the Atlanta airport?? Must have been. No time to worry about it. I grab the handle, wheel it around, ask one of the Brits to snap my picture, and walk through the Point of No Return.

My Culture Shock

I haven’t left the country and I’m already in another universe. In the Albuquerque airport this morning there was a straw basket on the floor of one of the gift kiosks, filled to overflowing with rainbow-colored mini-Teddy bears embroidered with teeny hot air balloons and red chiles. You could drop the entire Albuquerque International Sunport in the middle of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and lose it somewhere between Concourses D and E. 

Charles drove me to the airport from Santa Fe this morning for my 8:30 a.m. flight to Atlanta, where I have a five-hour layover before my connecting flight to Madrid. I left the sweet bubble of Santa Fe this morning and woke up in the giant maw of corporate America. I could buy anything, eat anything, send a package anywhere, watch a movie, get my shoes shined or get a mani-pedi ($76 on special) without leaving this terminal. A man beside me in the food court is shouting into his cell phone: I expect him to hold practice all summer and if he doesn’t play my daughter enough I’ll move her to a team where she’ll be appreciated! Charles would joke about this with me if he were here. I miss him. I called him on my cell phone and whimpered. He put our cat Misty up to the phone and poked her belly to make her squeal. Just guessing here, but I think I’ll feel more at home in a crowded cafe in the Albaicin where I don’t know anyone, immersed that lisping, lilting language I don’t yet understand, than I do here at this jumping-off point of my own culture.

Ducky!

What’s the Spanish way to say you’re excited, the counterpart to “Ducky!” or “Awesome!” or “OMG!!” Ya no se – don’t know yet – but I’m feeling it!

I’m getting my ducks in a row for next Friday’s departure. Two days ago I (that is, Kay, our computer wizard) fixed whatever glitch was keeping my laptop from getting online. Excelente!

Yesterday morning I got an email confirming my place in a Spanish-language school walking-distance from where I’ll be staying in Granada’s Albaicin district.  Impresionante!

Yesterday evening I did a preliminary pack to make sure I can fit what I want in my suitcase (definitely yes; packing for a summer trip so much easier than winter. Que bueno!).

And this morning I got an email from the woman whose house I’ll be staying in. I found the place a few weeks ago on Craig’s List – a room in a house with a woman and her six-year-old daughter and their cat. I’d written to ask which bus to take from the airport and she wrote back: “Don’t worry about taking the bus; I’ll be there at 5 with my little daughter. OK?” OK??? Fabuloso!!

Yep, my lil’ ducks are swimming into a row for this trip. Thank you, ducks; thank you, universe. My middle of the night freakouts about flying sola have been gradually ebbing. Got a few intense workdays before Tumbleweeds prints (4 days), then a few more days before I get on the plane. Way cool!!! (Sorry, my roots are showing….)

Nutters

I’m coming to realize how crazy it was scheduling a major trip right after a major deadline; I leave for Spain just three days after my publication, Tumbleweeds, goes to the printer. By all accounts this is nutters. I remember my thought process when I booked my flight, wanting to take advantage of the limited time I have between busy seasons, and knowing the pressure of getting ready to go would fade once I got on (and especially off) the airplane. But in the meantime my to-do lists are pretty daunting.

This morning I finished editing an unwieldy article that had boggled me, balanced the checkbooks, paid bills and sent some ad invoices. Then my day hit the mud bogs. My credit union has a new online banking system, which after two phone calls I still haven’t been able to get to work, and for some reason I’m not able to get online at all on my laptop (which I’m planning to take with me to Spain). Some days I just have no margin for this stuff.

But when I finally unchained myself from my desk, I went into the kitchen and made a Spanish lentil soup, a dish I make fairly often because it’s so simple and gratifying. I use little brown lentils (the package calls them “crimson”) instead of the more common green ones – they’re a little firmer and richer-flavored. I didn’t have chorizo today (though it’s delicious if you’ve got it) but I added chopped carrots, and hot sauce to make up some of the spicy chorizo flavor. That was our dinner, with some sliced cukes with vinegar and oil. (Oh, use more water than this recipe calls for, and cook it longer.)

I think the wisest thing to add to a to-do list may be the word “Less.” I need to work on that. But in the meantime I’m grateful for these times of sensory sustenance, working in the garden or in the kitchen. Even if I come right back to the computer and blog about it!

Hasta la proxima.

Tending My Gardens

Weekend at last! End of a long week, way too many computer hours. At this point in my production-cycle  of Tumbleweeds, the quarterly parenting newspaper that I publish, I’m usually counting down how many days until we go to press (9). This time, I’ve got another countdown going on: days to departure for my trip to Spain (13), though this week I was almost too busy even to think about the trip.

So this morning I woke up excited to have a morning ahead of me in the garden, spreading the pick-up load of mulch I got from the soil yard Thursday afternoon. Mulching is curiously rewarding - almost literally putting the icing on the cake of a garden. That thick layer of reddish-brown bark under the trees and around the plants fills in the spaces and brings the pieces of the yard together in a soothing visual whole. Yum.

And the labor of filling wheelbarrow load after load with mulch and shoveling it around the yard gives my mind just the wandering time it needs. This morning, that wandering took me to (you guessed it!) my trip, and in particular to the conversation Charles and I had last night about what I hope to get from this trip. Charles just returned a week ago from a solo road trip so his goals for that trip were still fresh in his mind – in his case, to revisit places, people and memories from his past, to better understand the forces that shaped him. 

This is a wonderful goal for a trip, and I’m so impressed with Charles for embracing it as he did. Yet my goals for my own sola journey are different. 

This particular trip, flying sola, isn’t about exploring my past or family heritage. I used to think my family of Middle Eastern Jews, from Syria and Egypt, came from Spain, though I’ve since learned this isn’t the case. I still feel a spiritual affinity to the Sephardic Jews, who lived Spain for centuries the Inquisition in 1492, and there may be traces of them in my gene pool. But this trip isn’t about roots. At this point in my life my eyes aren’t on the metaphorical soil-line; they’re on the horizon.

What will I find there? I don’t know. I’ve spent a lot of my life figuring out who I am; this trip is about who I am not yet. I have a few general goals – to study Spanish, take cooking classes, eat a lot of tapas, drink café con leche and vino tinto. I don’t want to know any more than that. Until I go, I’ll tend my various gardens, spreading mulch and pulling weeds and having my heart-to-hearts with Charles, because I know I’ll be coming back to them, whoever I am when I come back.

Fine-Motor Emotions

Days to departure: 18.

Charles came back from his road trip last night, just in time for dinner: leftovers from various recent sprees while I was cooking per usual but eating alone. He came in the house with tons of stories, dried pasta and orzo from Pike’s Market in Seattle, and three pieces of driftwood from the Washington coast. Charles had reached the Olympic Peninsula via a loop through the northwest United States. And the driftwood? Who knows; it may have come from Japan, Russia, the Aleutian Islands…only imagination could say.

With Charles home, my own trip to Spain in less than three weeks feels more complicated emotionally. This is the same thing I go through when our son comes home from college or his various travels; before he arrives, I’ve got trepidations about having him back in the nest whose “emptiness” his dad and I have grown used to. Then, maybe even before we get him home from the airport, I wonder how I’ll be able to say goodbye to him again. Now seeing Charles around the house again, puffed up with adventures and anecdotes and lessons gleaned, I have twinges of the sadness I’ll feel saying goodbye at the end of the month for five weeks away from him.

Maybe my feelings weren’t the only ones “up.” Before the night was over I’d hurt Charles’s. After going through details of his itinerary, with a road atlas open on the kitchen table, we got to talking about what made him take this long trip by himself, and then about the feelings that germinated my trip by myself to Spain. I thought back, remembering aloud the long winter, the tough times Charles and I gone through together and –

“You mean you wanted the trip as a way to get away from me?” Charles asked.

“No, no, no…” I said, scrambling to do damage control, but not particularly well. After three weeks alone, I realized, my fine-motor emotional skills were stiff. For three weeks my feelings flowed to what I wanted to do first when I woke up in the morning, what to make for dinner, when to stop work for the day, what DVD to watch and when. Large-motor feelings. Now Charles was back, his feelings were bruised, and I was having trouble regaining dexterity with the fine muscles we use for untangling delicate emotions with loved ones.

But then, isn’t that one of the reasons for flying sola?

Mamacita Sola

It’s Mother’s Day, which El Niño observed in the way I love about him, which is to say he forgot. He emailed this morning (which is to say, late afternoon in Spain) and made no mention of Mother’s Day, and I’m not just saying this: I like that. This weekend I’ve gotten some Mother’s Day greetings from fellow-mom friends, and my mother-in-law, and I called my own mama, and that seems to be what Mother’s Day is at this point in my life - a day when moms acknowledge each other. As for El Niño, the day may come when I say “Why don’t you call your poor ol’ mom??” (I’m a Jewish mamacita, after all), but at this point in our lives I’m happy that he wrote because he felt like it and not because a reminder popped up on his iPod or a guilt alarm went off in his head. Very happy.

As for my hubby and father of our child, he’s returning today from a three-week road trip slash journey of self-exploration and monster slaying - think Odysseus with a laptop. So for the first half or so of this Mother’s Day I am a Mamacita Sola, drinking cafe con leche on the patio, enjoying the last stages of the flaming red tulips and yellow daffs around our garden, and sipping the last drops of the solitude that recharges me.

To you and the mothers in your life: Happy happy.

Wishes: Uncensored

I had some friends over for dinner Saturday night - all women since Charles was out of town. I called this a Chick Fling. I brought out the muscle-man drink charms I bought a couple years ago for an occasion like this. I asked everyone to bring a food or drink to share, if they wanted, and one wish for spring or summer - anything from the universal good to the purely selfish, no judgments. These would be shared aloud, if we chose, or just put down on paper and put in a bowl.

As it turned out, everyone chose to share their wish aloud. I thought these might be simple statements, but what emerged was introspective and heartfelt. There were wishes for family health and safety, financial stability and a new home, good health for a sister, an ability at last to take care of oneself as that wisher did for her children and aging mother, and a strenghtening of ties with family out of the country and adopted family here. The last one was the simplest (in number of words at least): to act from love and not fear.

I’m a firm believer in the power of wishes - robust and uncensored. Unlike kids blowing out birthday candles, I like to say them aloud, to discover how words give them shape. And I roundly hate the maxim, “Be careful what you wish for,” as if a wish were something to fear, not embrace. (Maybe I’ll settle for “Be mindful;” wishes have power you can’t predict, so pick a good one.)

My wish, claro, was for this trip to Spain to be a good one – for me, launching myself across the ocean like a baby bird; for Charles, who will be home, minding the fort and exploring home life without me by his side; and for our son, El Nino, who will see his mother peek around the mom mask.  Balance is a solid old habit for me: balanced meals, budgets -  now even finding the right balance of greens and browns in our new compost bin! Time to shake it up.

Here’s a recipe for a dish I made Saturday, called Escalivada Catalana (roasted eggplant, pepper, onion and tomatoes, Catalan style). I found it in a cookbook called “Tapas, A Taste of Spain,” by Spanish chef José Andrés. Believe me when I say this isn’t just a recipe, it’s therapy for all your senses. Stand near the stove while the vegetables are roasting and let the sound of skins popping and juices  oozing contribute to your conversation. Strip the veggies with your fingers as Andrés advises; don’t relinquish that pleasure to a knife.  Take a bite somewhere between fresh from the oven and fully cool. Take another. Como se dice “died and gone to heaven”?

Besos!