Granada

Granada

Many of the parents and children of Sunnyview School, and the instructional staff as well, took their 1974 Christmas holiday to ski in the mountain resorts south of Granada. At that time we had only been in Torremolinos for a few months and really didn’t know anybody. So, why not go to Granada with the rest of the lemmings?

We packed up all our cares and clothes in our car, El Flojo, and headed north and east of Málaga, over the mountains To Granada. We made it in one piece without a breakdown, contrary to our expectations, and checked in to a no-star hotel in an older part of town recommended to us by our neighbor, David McConnell.

We had one room to be shared by all four of us, 7th-grade Eric, 9th-grade Pat, and we two parents who were beginning to have second thoughts. The room was clean enough, but dark, illuminated by lamps with 39-watt bulbs. Clearly, we were not meant to spend a lot of time in our rooms reading.

We left our hotel to procure a late lunch and soon came upon a tapa bar open to the street and an adjoining alley. We bellied up to the bar, for we found no little cast iron chairs and tables. Pretentious it was not. It was a stand up-eat up-drink up-pay up-go away bar.

We ordered chicken wings in a rich tomato sauce. By exercising great care we consumed the meat and left the bones sitting on the plate and did not decorate our clothes or persons with the sauce. Very much. We pushed the plate to the bartender’s side of the bar. He disgustedly picked up the plate and turned it upside down on our side of the bar, dumping bones and sauce on the floor. Soon a couple of dogs who had been lurking in the alley sidled up to crunch and lick the site clean.

And I thought I knew all about garbage disposal units.

The Toast

It was after dark, but early evening on my first night in Granada. David McConnell and I were drinking mediocre red wine in one of Granada’s no-name bars and listening to an elderly man play the hell out of his flamenco guitar. Cigarette smoke and the smell of wine provided a proper ambiance for the musician’s brilliance. I played a little guitar myself in those days and his technique dazzled me. His fingers were all over that neck like pigment on a Jackson Pollack canvas. The thing is, I didn’t recognize anything his fingers were doing. I couldn’t even figure out what key he was in. So I asked him. He didn’t know either. He had no clue. He just knew how to play his instrument like a champ.

It was at just this magic moment that one of the bar’s patrons approached us. Convivial. Jovial. Happy. Drunker than a whole herd of skunks. He wanted to tell us how much he liked the English. McConnell was from North Ireland and I from the States. Between my slow and his slurred Spanish, we had us quite a conversation.

At last he wanted to propose a toast to our eternal friendship. I agreed because he was drinking his own wine and I didn’t think it would cost me anything. We grabbed our wines and linked right arms at the elbow. But I was several inches taller than he and when we drank, finally, after a long and flowery toast, my new friend missed his mouth completely and poured his red wine all over his white shirt front. The mishap didn’t seem to bother him much. He brushed off the excess wine with his hand as best he could and returned to the bar for a refill. He then suggested we all meet together on the following night at the same time and bar so we could drink more toasts. I said it sounded like a fine idea.

As we left McConnell asked me why I had agreed to such an obviously dumb plan. I told him I wanted to know where our friend was going to be at that time tomorrow night so I could be somewhere else.

More next week.