Thursday, March 4, 2010

Visitors from Ohio

In early 1975 our daughter Pat went downtown on some errand of her own and returned with four people from Ohio, three men and a woman in their sixties or seventies and one man in his early nineties who tried to keep it a secret because he didn’t want people treating him like an old man. They had arrived in Torremolinos on an AARP tour and were gee whizzing around town when Pat found them. She decided they were lonely and brought them home to meet us

We invited them in, “put the kettle on,” and talked a bit about their visit and agreed to meet later on in the week for lunch. We enjoyed their company, went to a few places, played some bridge with them. We even had a bridge party at our house one night. Besides our visitors from Ohio, our neighbor McConnell brought over some Irish friends, and we had a lady from South Africa, an English man and a woman from Texas. (I’ve always looked at Texas as it’s own country, possibly its own world.)

One afternoon our Ohio acquaintances gave us a letter that had been put into their mail box at the hotel where their apartment was. They returned it to the desk and explained in their best Spanglish that the letter was not meant for them. The clerk accepted the letter but the next day it was in their mail box again. When it appeared in their mail box for a third day, they wondered if we were the intended recipients. They then reasoned that if the letter was ever going to stop appearing in their mail box, they would have to deliver it themselves.

They thought that the whole affair was simply a little strange. However, we took it to be a message from someone in the government, perhaps the guardia, to let us know that they were keeping an eye on us. It made sense in its own strange way. We were living in Spain during the last year of Francisco Franco’s reign and the first year of Juan Carlos’. Franco took over reins of government after the Spanish Civil War and, since he was a fascist, running a strong Theory X organization seemed an imminently reasonable thing to do. Heavy handed government from the top down. With laws to enable such a government.

It was, for instance, illegal to have more than five people who were not members of your immediate family in your house at any one time. This was his way of nipping insurrection in the bud. Technically, our bridge party was illegal. We had broken the law. They weren’t going to do anything about it, but they wanted us to know that they were “on” to us. We weren’t Spaniards.

That was life in Spain for the foreign resident. There was no way a person could live in Spain and obey every law. They could always get you for something. But so long as you kept the money coming in regularly, they were willing to overlook any minor illegalities.

Of course, that’s only our theory. Maybe the post office was just confused.

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