More Granada

Skiing

The next day Joanne and Pat climbed into El Flojo and set out for the ski resort in the mountains. Eric and I, in a rare moment of sanity, realized that we might not have a very good time at the resort since we couldn’t ski. Pat and Joanne couldn’t ski, either, but it was all downhill, right? And there were people who gave lessons, right? What could be so hard about that?

Off they chugged into the mountains. It was a pale, sunny day with intermittent clouds in Granada. Winter sunlight. But in the mountains the weather worsened. Snow flurries showed up and slick roads. But, thanks to the magic of front wheel drive, El Flojo came through.

Joanne and Pat spent much of their morning and early afternoon on the bunny slope mastering certain techniques calculated to help them maintain verticality. Then they took the chair lift to the top of the slope, intending to enjoy the view and ride the same lift back down to the resort. But the wind came up to foil their plans. Management shut the chair lift down and they had to go down by the inelegant but aptly named “snow plow.”

There’s great truth to the old proverb: It’s all downhill from the top of the chair lift.

The Alhambra

Meanwhile, having no ski slope to confound us, Eric and I decided to visit the Alhambra, a combination palace-citadel and the residence of Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler in Spain, expelled in 1492. We found all kinds of stuff there, chambers, baths, a mosque. I’ve got to admit that much of what I saw was lost on me. I can take only so many arcades, fountains and reflecting pools before my architecturally uninformed psyche ODs.

But the gardens, now, they were something else. Immaculate. No twigs, no leaves. The hedges lined the walkways with angular symmetry, each leaf standing abreast with its neighbor with military precision. “Dad,” Eric said, “you can’t tell me those hedges weren’t trimmed with a machine.” At just that moment we turned a corner and discovered a Spanish gardener carefully snipping privet leaves with a pair of scissors.

We had not seen very many power tools at the Alhambra. Then we thought of how Rafa, the man of all work at Sunnyview School, mowed the lawn. With scissors. Fortunately, it was a small lawn, so it only took him two days. After that recollection, the gardener at the Alhambra didn’t seem quite so very strange. Just a little strange.

The Luthiers

The day after Eric and I visited the Alhambra and Joanne and Pat exerted themselves so valiantly on the ski slopes, we decided to return to Torremolinos. But first we decided to visit a few luthiers. I played a little guitar, mostly like a bass drum, but I could do a little finger picking. I thought I might like a flamenco guitar.

The flamenco guitar is expressly designed to play Flamenco music. Now there’s a news flash for you. It is lighter and a little smaller than a classical guitar and has a more percussive sound to it. It has a tap plate for the Flamenco guitarist to tap his fingers, a part of the playing technique.

I could get a very good handmade flamenco guitar, quite playable, for $200.00, quite a lot of money in 1974. But there would have been an eight-month waiting period. I didn’t buy one because I could never have been able to do justice to the instrument and certainly never match the standards of the players I had been listening to in Granada.

But as we left, I felt good about a city where luthiers were backordered eight months and could make a good living.