justplainspain

Adiós España

2010-04-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

We decided to return to the States by June, 1976. A number of factors led to this decision. We had no professional or economic futures in Spain and, since we were neither wealthy nor retired, we definitely needed those. Our daughter had already returned to California to live with her grandparents and go to high school. There were only the three of us and so long as we stayed in Spain, we were spinning our wheels. Ultimately, we were just tired of living overseas.

The decision to return presented its problems. We thought TWA really screwed us over when we flew to Spain. That was before we found out what they wanted for one-way air fare back.

We found that we could book a round trip tour from Málaga to London, stay in a hotel for overlooking the Serpentine for five days, jump the tour and not return to Málaga, take a another round trip tour from London to Los Angeles and jump that tour as well for hundreds of dollars less than three one-way tickets on TWA.

Someone introduced us to a British couple who wanted to retire to Spain, but were prevented by British law from bringing enough money to even start them out. This was way before Common Market days. They agreed to buy tickets for us on the Wily Coyote Tour Company when they returned to England using their British currency. We agreed to deposit the equivalent money in pesetas in an account in their names in Torremolinos. Does this sound like another version of the politician’s widow in Kenya?

When we were ready we shipped what we wanted and sold or gave away the rest, and got all of our money in cash from the bank in a wad of thousand peseta notes that would choke a camel. Then we set out for the airport with high hearts and open minds.

Before they would let us on the plane, a female customs agent pawed through Joanne’s purse and counted the money. Joanne forget every word of Spanish she ever knew, including some choice phrases learned on the grammar school playgrounds in East Los Angeles when she was a girl. Couldn’t even say, “mierde suave.”

Customs finally let us through because we apparently did not have too much money. We’ve never had that problem, by the way, and we didn’t even entertain the possibility before this aduanera began combing through Joanne’s purse.

We arrived in London and enjoyed our five-day stay, made all the sweeter by the knowledge that TWA wasn’t getting a dime of our money.

Our hotel had several interesting qualities. It sat on a five-sided block and I got lost the first time I tried to walk around it. You know, four right turns and you're back where you started?

In the past, I've usually been lost while Joanne almost always knew where we were. But not in London. This time our map was printed upside down and I knew where we were and she was lost.

The hotel didn’t have a safe with a lock but we were welcome to put our camel choking wad of pesetas in an envelope and they would be glad to keep them for us in their office. No thanks.

Nobody in the hotel drank water with their dinner. Until Joanne. Our waiter became huffy. “If Madame insists.” Madame insisted and the waiter went off in a royal snit.

We left London from Gatwick, not Heathrow. Gatwick lies to the south of London, twenty-eight miles to the south. Our driver, a man from some Southeast Asian nation, spoke English well enough to understand “Gatwick,” but not well enough to tell us it was twenty-eight miles away. The longer he drove, the more nervous we got. We thought he intended to drive us to Los Angeles.

We arrived at Gatwick safely enough and presented ourselves to the Wily Coyote reception desk where we were informed they had never heard of us. It was an emotional moment. Fortunately, we had some evidence that we had paid cash in advance and eventually they found our names somewhere.

They then checked our luggage in and told us to relax because our be departure would be temporarily delayed until they found an airplane. I began to think more kindly of TWA. They may have ripped us off in big jagged pieces, but at least they had airplanes. Then I realized that Coyote Air had thoughtfully provided me with entertainment for the morning. I could watch peoples’ faces when they were informed, after their luggage was checked in, that we would all leave as soon as someone found an empty plane.

Morning jollies came to an end when we were all herded into a bus and driven to a hotel lobby. “Cool,” I thought. “Maybe we’re going to stay in this hotel until they find a plane. Maybe tomorrow.”

No such luck. Coyote Air found a plane. But we had an interesting few hours in the lobby nonetheless. Joanne and I strolled about and came to the swimming pool where British Overseas Airlines (BOAC) happened to be holding an evacuation drill for a class of stewardesses. In these modern times “stewardess” is a political incorrect term. Everybody’s a steward now. But these stewards were all good looking young females in bikinis.

Joanne and I watched as the young women climbed up a ladder and slid down a slide into the water. When they reached the water they were to stand up and help the next person off the slide. They were practicing dry land evacuation and were just using the pool for comfort's sake. At the time England was in mid-drought condition (it hadn’t rained anywhere in two weeks) and it was in the mid-nineties that day.

All was proceeding well. The young women were having fun and Joanne and I enjoyed watching them. Then one of them broke a fingernail and fainted. Her mates had to fish her out of the water to keep her from drowning. We hoped we never got into trouble on that girl's flight.

It was hot and dry that day, totally unBritainlike. To the undoing of one young Brit, the hotel bar was open. Thinking that he might not have any alcohol before he got to Los Angeles, he partook liberally and then decided to remove his shirt and take a nap in the sun. His milky white torso turned fiery red. When he came to, he was too drunk to realize that he was going to fly from England to Los Angeles with moderate first degree burns over a major part of his body.

He’s undoubtedly middle-aged and arthritic by now but behaves better in public. If he has survived.

The plane was actually nice. Plenty of room. And that lasted all the way to Shannon Airport in Ireland. That’s when a second tour group got on. Large people they were, filling and overflowing the seats. Moving about became impossible. For all purposes, we were a flying cattle car.

Onward we proceeded to Los Angeles. Normally we would have gone by way of New York. But these were not normal times. The Canadian air controllers were on strike and we couldn’t fly over Canadian air space. So we had to land at Hartford, Connecticut. Huh?

My geography of anything east of the Mississippi will never win me big bucks on a quiz show, but if we could get to Hartford, why not New York?

No matter. We landed at Hartford and confronted customs. The B team. Either they were either trainees or had insulted somebody’s wife at the office Christmas party, but these guys were not top drawer. One agent was really suspicious of our cameras, lenses, some items we’d picked up elsewhere. He wasn’t reassured when Joanne presented receipts from Hong Kong, Morocco, Guam, etc. But having these items and receipts wasn’t illegal, and he had to let us through. But he didn’t have to like it.

We reboarded our plane finally landed at LAX, but at a freight depot a mile from where our family waited for us. As luck would have it, it was in the middle of the night and cell phones had not yet been invented. Our joints were swollen because we hadn’t been able to move, but we were so glad to be on the ground that even the smog smelled good. Great to be home, even if it’s LAX.

And off we went to whatever destination our own incompetence might lead us.

Canadian Flying Wedge

2010-03-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

Joanne went next door one morning with McConnell’s morning cup of coffee and found five young strangers asleep in his living room, two men, three women. He didn’t really know who they were. He’d only met them the night before in downtown Málaga. I got to know these young people a little, and they really had a great story. It would be a wonderful novel. If only I were a wonderful novelist.

The most serious minded of the young people seemed to be a young Canadian named Elmer. He called himself Rem. Why Rem? When he was in the 8th grade people began spelling and pronouncing their names backwards. Elmer became Remle and Remle became Rem. His mother hated it. All the more reason for keeping it. Rem was engaged to be married but his fiancé decided that it would be better to not go through with it. So Rem decided to treat himself, his sister, and a good friend, to a backpack trip through Europe using money he’d saved up for his honeymoon trip.

The three young Canadians found themselves in Málaga when a cruise ship docked. They went aboard for an evening of vino and dancing. There they met two young women, English and Irish, who had signed on with the cruise ship as dancers. Once aboard, their passports were taken from them for “safekeeping.” In the meantime, in addition to their regular dancing duties, “other services” were sometimes requested. Rem and his party were outraged and readily agreed to help the girls escape.

The ship’s purser returned the passports whenever the ship docked because the girls needed them for customs inspection. This time, however, things were going to be different. After the girls had their passports and had been cleared by customs, Rem, his sister and his friend formed a flying wedge of righteous Canadians, put the girls behind them, and barged their way onto shore through surprised passengers, crew and customs people.

Once away and fairly safe from pursuing pimps, who didn’t really want to catch them and find themselves explaining things to the guardia, our young band of refugees found themselves in the middle of the night in the dockside area of a strange Spanish city wondering what to do. Even if there had been someone to talk to, they spoke no Spanish. They didn’t know anyone in town. They didn’t know where the consulate was. Of if there was a consulate. It was a typical young person’s plan.

Fortunately for them, along came McConnell. On his motorcycle. He agreed to take them to his home. I have no idea how many trips this took.

They were really neat kids. I distinctly remember their story because when I heard it I felt old for the first time in my life. Look at it this way. I would have notified the authorities who would have assured me that things would be investigated and everything would be under control. On the whole, I think the Canadian flying wedge was the better answer.

Visitors from Ohio

2010-03-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

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.

Ventorilla La Perra

2010-02-17T10:08:00.000-08:00

As we wound down our time in Spain in the Spring of 1976, one of our last official acts was to throw an anniversary party for ourselves. It was our twentieth anniversary. In the States we had entertained by inviting other people into our homes. In Guam extended families either attended fiestas or gave them. But in Spain the custom was to invite each other out to restaurants.

For example, we knew of a fish place in The Calvario, a village sparated from Torremolinos by a protrusion of land that swept into the Med. The little fish place had no menu because they didn’t know what was going to be caught that day. Each time we ate there, we’d have to go through a little ritual.

“Hay calamari?” (Squid)

“No, no hay calamari?”

“Hay boquerones?” (Deep fat fried fingerling fish, eaten bones and all. Full of transfats. Yum.)

And so we would proceed through the same litany every time we went there. But we could always depend on fresh fish, salad, bread and wine for about $2.00 a head.

Our multlilingual neighbor, Claude deBretteville, always solved most of our problems, whether it came to procuring entry stamps for passports, finding a hotel room during Romería, or, in this case, finding a suitable restaurant for our party. She found a very small restaurant on the outskirts of town that had been used as a stage coach house in the early 17th century and had stayed in constant operation since. Ventorilla La Perra.

The restaurant was small but had an ambiance a Stateside business would kill for. It was actually built 300 years ago, not two years ago and made to look old. White stucco exterior, tile floors, wrought iron. Our 22 guests dined outdoors that evening on paella, salad, and bread. The paella contained shellfish, lobster, fresh asparagus. Gourmet magazine could have featured this dish. We also had an open bar. Our guests could have as much beer, wine or soft drinks as they wanted. I suppose tea and coffee as well.

It was a wonderful party. To employ the old cliché, a good time was had by all. I especially had a good time when I got the check. It was about $80 U.S., generous tip included. And we didn’t even have to clean up. We just went home. Now that’s the way to celebrate an anniversary.

University Tee Shirts

2010-02-10T09:55:00.000-08:00

In 1975-76 Spain was a cheap, cheap, cheap place to take a vacation. That made it attractive for college-age people to go walkabout in those days as part of their coming-of-age experience. Armed with backpacks and Eurail passes, you could find them in every town in Europe.

You could especially find them in Torremolinos, which had a cachet to it thanks to James Michener’s book The Drifters. First published in 1971, was a hugely influential book, translated into at least ten European languages. Five translations, Dutch, Finnish, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, featured the name “Torremolinos” in their titles. It would have been the answer to the Chamber of Commerce’s prayer, if only the Hippies brought more money with them.

Many of the young people traveling in Torremolinos on the cheap were university students during the fall, winter and spring months. They wore tee-shirts all over the street advertising this university or that. I suspect there were far more university tee-shirts than university students, but I’m of a suspicious nature. I think the expectation was that Ohio State people would see each other and hang out together. But why you would go all the way to Spain to hang out with someone from your own university? I never understood the thinking there.

Confounding the scheme, however, was the practice of exchanging tee-shirts. After a few brewskies there would be a round of tee-shirt exchanges and someone wearing an Oxford shirt might not even speak English. He might be a Heidelberg student and the person he exchanged with spoke no German.

We saw lots of Oxfords and Sorbonnes, lots of Georgetowns and Ohio States. Didn’t see too many Bob Jones Universities. The most popular tee-shirt of all was UCLA’s. You could probably get two Sorbonnes and a beer for a UCLA shirt in good repair. Free market economy, nothing like it.

The Guys with the Funny Hats

2010-02-03T09:11:00.000-08:00

The guardia civil are those Spanish cops who wear the silly little patent leather hats and carry the silly little Schmeisser machine pistols. One look at these guys and you know that there is not a gram of humor there.

They and their families live in their own community called a cuartel. Single men live in smaller, bachelor quarters. All the rooms face inward. Four massive walls and a few guarded gates present the outward face to the public. Why mince words? It’s a fort.

In those days members of the guardia never served in a part of Spain where they might have extended family. Police from Galicia service in Andalucia. Police from Andalucia served in Murcia. This reduced the strain of having a family member want a break when apprehended in a no-no.

Here’s a guardia story about a man who owned the bar where McConnell and I dazzled the Icelanders with our many repetitions of Battle Hymn of the Republic. He told me he was at home one afternoon when a loud knocking sounded at the door. Two guardia civiles stood there, silly hats, Schmeissers and all. They told him that the commandante requested the honor of his presence at headquarters at the cuartel immediately. He accompanied the policemen, of course, and upon arriving at police headquarters encountered--a plumber.

The bar owner had hired this particular plumber to do some work at the restaurant and paid him in advance in the form of two checks. The plumber did not complete the work. The owner asked his banker if he could cancel the checks. The banker said of course he could. But the banker say what would happen next. So much for don't-ask-don't-tell.

The commandante listened to both our hero's and the plumber’s stories. Then the commandante told the plumber that starting the next day he would work and complete his job in a satisfactory manner. The alternative was to be put out of business. This was not an idle threat.

Then to my friend he said, “You may not know this, being an American, but when you write a check in Spain, it is a contract. When you cancelled that check, you breached that contract. Now here’s what you are going to do, señor. You are going to write the plumber another check right now, and if it bounces, I will put you out of business.” That was not an idle threat, either.

The guardia civil never made idle threats. That’s why people didn’t mess with them.

Juan Wayne and the Bicycle Thief

2010-01-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

One of Sunnyview school's high school students lived with his parents and sister in one of the many high rise “tower” apartments of Torremolinos. I believe they lived on the fourth floor, but that’s only an approximation. One day he looked out the window and saw someone trying to steal his bicycle. He grabbed a bb gun and made a citizen’s arrest on the miscreant, marching him to local police headquarters. The police were not gratified to see a civilian taking such a pro-active crime fighting stance.

They weren’t very happy with the bb gun either. After Franco took over as undisputed dictator of Spain, he tried to ensure that civilians did not have guns. That way, his dictatorship could remain undisputed. In 1975, the last year of Franco’s life, rules had been relaxed a little and people with clean records could own small caliber rifles and air guns. But the police were not happy.

As the boy left the station, the police asked him, “Hey, Juan Wayne, do you mind if we make our own arrests next time?”

The Barbers of Torremolinos

2010-01-05T15:23:00.000-08:00

Shortly after we arrived in Spain our son Eric and his friend, Victor DeGroot, stormed into the maid’s quarters, a tiny room of our house where I had set up my writing shop. It was a good room in which to write. It was so small you couldn’t do anything else. You’d bark your knuckles shaking martinis.

The two boys were livid, enraged. They verbally fell over each other trying to tell me their sad story. It seems that they had been riding a motor scooter the wrong way up a one-way street. Something junior high school boys do all the time. Suddenly the cops stopped them. The boys expressed their indifference to receiving a ticket but were taken aback when the cops expressed their indifference in writing them one.

They said writing a ticket to the children of rich foreigners was pointless because their foolish fathers would simply pay it for them. Instead, the police said that if they caught Eric and Victor being bozos again, they would CUT THEIR HAIR! And no razor cut hair style, either. Buzz cut.

The boys both sported shoulder length hair. Eric’s was straight and blond. Victor’s was dark and curly. Both boys were outraged. They were sure their civil rights were being violated. I wanted to point out that as foreigners living in Spain, we didn’t have very many of those, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

Finally they paused for breath. “Can they do that, Dad?” Eric asked.

“Do it?” I replied. “I’ll help them. I’ll sharpen their scissors.” The boys stormed out in anger and resentment. That was good. The cops got the boys’ attention. Let’s hear it for anger and resentment.

The Driving Test

2009-12-23T10:46:00.000-08:00

We didn’t really want to drive when we first moved to Spain. Spanish traffic was scary, even though we had driven the Los Angeles freeways. I mean, those guys are nuts. Someone coined a phrase for the Spanish driver’s attitude. Viva Yo!

But after a month of watching the traffic flow we realized that we weren’t going to see very much of Spain without a car. We bought a car, El Flojo, and set about getting international drivers’ licenses.

We made applications and appointments to take the test at the central complex in Málaga where all drivers written and driving tests were administered, We showed them our Guam licenses to demonstrate that we had some knowledge pertaining to automobiles. They regarded the licenses with a little suspicion. What’s a Guam? What planet is that on? But eventually they accepted the licenses and the examiners informed us that the written test would be waived. This was good because the test was in Spanish and I’m not sure we would have passed. We handed in our applications and waited for an examiner.

At that point we had a chance to examine the physical layout of the test center. There were obstacles all around us, artificial hills on which to stop and start up again, places to parallel park, slaloms to go through in forward and reverse gears. You name it, if it was an obstacle, they had it. And in the center, right next to the written test center, was a large bar. If you blew the driving test, you could knock back a couple of brandies and go out and try again when your confidence had been restored. In a way, it makes sense. You want your examinees to drive under realistic conditions, and many people drove over there with an alcoholic ballast in their bellies. But it did give me a whole new slant on the phrase “passing the bar.”

We finally drove out with our examiner. We each drove forward, stopped, backed up. That was enough! We passed. Surprise, surprise. Nobody really wanted to give money-bearing foreigners a hard time. Real Spaniards had a much more difficult time with the test, because the government was just as happy if they didn’t drive.

The Haircut

2009-11-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

At the time I placed myself in a situation to have our family’s passports stolen, we intended to take a holiday in England. At that same time the man of the hour, as far as France and all of Europe were concerned, was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos “the Jackal.” I looked a lot like his pictures that were being circulated.

Just my luck. Could I look like a famous, sexy movie star? Or a brilliant writer or noted politician? No-o-o-o-o. Were people going to ask me for an autograph? No, but they might ask me to put my hands up and then shoot me anyway.

So I got a haircut before I got my passport photo. That would show them. Unfortunately, Carlos “the Jackal” also got his hair cut before his latest photos were released. Now I really looked like Carlos.

I thought I might be safe because I didn’t speak English with a heavy Venezuelan accent. But the subject never came up as I went through various customs. And that worried me even more.

7-Up Commercial

2009-11-08T18:32:00.000-08:00

The 7-Up Commercial

In the fall of 1975 I published an article in Lookout, the Costa del Sol’s English language magazine. I discussed how to speak Spanish without knowing any words and to illustrate the article Joanne took pictures of me making faces and hand gestures. Thumb and little finger of right hand raised up, rest of fingers clenched, tilt hand towards mouth. “Let’s have a drink.” Hand held in front of you, fingers together and extended, wobble hand back and forth. “Maybe, maybe not.” Upraised -- well, never mind. They were universal gestures you could use anywhere in Europe.

At about that time a Chicago advertising agency showed up on the Costa del Sol with a contract to film some 7-Up commercials for use in theaters around the world. They hired a film production company owned by Eddy Vorkapich. Eddy had worked as an art director and cameraman in Hollywood but had moved to the Costa del Sol where he had a really cool villa complete with movie theater and a studio with wonderful northern light.

Eddy filmed during the day and the film was flown overnight to London to be developed. Later it was sent to New York for editing and music. After that, the commercials were sent to the intended country of use for voice-over. Spanish is different from country to country. Costa Rican “ticos” would not enjoy listening to a 7-Up commercial in Castilian Spanish. They would much prefer Tico Talk. A few years later I met people in California who had seen the commercials in Singapore. Spanish of any sort would have been ineffective for that audience.

The plots of the commerecials involved the 7-Up hero, a pair of hands dressed formally in white gloves who lived in a green box. On the basis of the published article, I got the job as a pair of hands. The hands would execute whatever deed of derring do was required, and then pour everyone a nice drink of 7-Up.

One of the scenarios involved outlaws in the Old West who tried a hold up but were handcuffed by the hands emerging from the green box. First, there was the matter of getting guns in for the outlaws. You can’t have them using wooden guns or pointing their fingers. However, even though the Spanish Civil War had been over for 36 years by the time we were actively promoting 7-Up, the authorities were still reluctant to allow handguns into the country. Spanish citizens were permitted to own small gauge rifles or shotguns if they had a clear police record, but no handguns. No no no no no. That was strictly a prerogative of the police. So when our earnest young production assistant picked up a load of six guns at the airport, she had some heavy explaining to do.

One of the outlaws, a Spaniard, wore a Mexican suit, complete with big sombrero, fancy jacket and conchos down the pants legs. He had a Kodak Instamatic® hung over the revolver in his holster and whenever there was a break in the shooting snapped pictures right and left. The bandido spoke no English and the other two outlaws, a Brit and a Belgian, translated for the director when Eddy’s desires exceeded his Spanish.

The other “plot” involved a beautiful girl and a beautiful boy running along the beach in beautiful bikinis, wanting a cool, refreshing drink. Green box to the rescue. He parachutes to the beach. The top of the box opens, the hands come out, drinks are poured, the day is saved. For the parachute drop the company hauled a tall crane to an inlet so they could film on a sandy beach with the Med and blue sky behind and not attract hundreds of tourists. They had just hauled the chute and green box up the crane and were set to make their first drop when a small Spaniard interrupted the works, loudly. He, it seemed, was the mayor of the small town where they were working, the alcalde, and no one had cleared this chute shoot with him. He wanted things stopped right now until the matter of permisos was cleared up.

The company went ahead with their work while the production assistant, a South African lady fluent in English, Spanish, Afrikaans and Swahili, the same one who picked up the guns at the airport, attempted to pacify the mayor. She succeeded in doing so and as the mayor was leaving the two shook hands. Unfortunately, she had been painting the green box in case there was a need for a second drop. She had green paint on her hand and, by the time she and the alcalde finished their demonstration of undying affection, so did he. He expected his palm to be crossed with something green, but I don’t think it was paint.

The first day of the actual beach shoot dawned. The beautiful Canadian girl model and the beautiful Belgian boy model showed up in their beautiful bikinis and looked at the cloudy, rain drenched beach. Did I mention that we were shooting in January? Couldn’t work that day. The company was dismissed with an early call for the next morning and the senior advertising rep from Chicago went to work on a bottle of vodka.

The next day was beautiful and sunny. People talk about Sunny Spain but not necessarily about Warm Spain. In January it’s cold. The poor bikini clad models had to run up and down the beach pretending they were having fun. I was tucked inside of a large box buried in the beach and covered over with sand. Someone placed the green box on top of my box through which my hands could appear to work their magic. I was the only warm person on the set. And the shoot took two days.

The commercials took up four weeks of my time for which they paid me 50,000 pesetas, about $1000 US. That money kept our family of three going in relative comfort for four months. And the work was easy. I was merely the talent. All the thought, the organizing, the networking, the bribing, had been done by others.

Smugglers’ Cheese

2009-10-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

Feeding our teenagers always presented difficulties whether we lived in California, Guam or Spain. Spain had government subsidized bread, milk and fish provided real help in filling teenage maws. Another boon to the Harris household was Smugglers’ Cheese.

Smugglers’ Cheese was processed cheese packaged in five-pound blocks and smuggled in from Holland. This cheese provided a tasty and nutritious morsel for our kids and the piranha pack who would periodically descend upon our kitchen.

The black marketer sold his cheese under the stairs of the front of the British Embassy. It was a great location because everyone knew where it was. (The embassy is actually in Madrid and Torremolinos has just a consular office.)

People probably put up with the black marketer because everyone liked the cheese including the embassy employees and the beat cop. However, I imagine he crossed a few palms with pesetas as well.

One day the embassy moved its consular office. A teacher at Sunnyview School complained, “Now where will we get our cheese?”

“Same place,” a Brit teacher replied. “The Embassy isn’t selling the cheese. It’s the black marketer.”

We were all reassured about our source of cheese and the solvency of Her Majesty’s government: they didn’t have to sell to smuggled cheese to pay their embassy office bills.

Satan's Cat

2009-10-22T10:37:00.000-07:00

It was outside of a bar in Torremolinos, near the beach, where Joanne and I met Satan’s cat. Just like that. Satan’s cat was neither small nor large, but he gave off an aura of a saber toothed tiger. Missing left ear. Right eye, gone. Several major scars adorned his face and front end, none on the back. Satan’s cat obviously faced his troubles squarely. And loved it. Even a casual inspection from ten yards away assured you of his gender. He swaggered down the middle of whatever path he chose, this gato del Diablo, this jefe of Andalucia. He was an El Máximo.

Neither Joanne nor I would have approached him with anything short of a .357.

Suddenly two Dalmatian pups bounded out of the bar and, sighting the cat, decided it would be fun to chase it up a tree or, even better, in front of a car. They charged, but the cat, rather than fleeing, sat down in the middle of the road and eyed the young dogs speculatively. I could almost hear him think, “Shall I blind the one on the right and castrate the one on the left, or vice versa?” The cat did not run, but waited calmly and with fell intent. I smelled brimstone. The cat smelled blood.

The pups realized that something wasn’t quite right and stopped bounding and prancing. They surreptitiously looked at each other. Neither would retreat first, but for damn sure neither would attack first either.

So there the three sat in the middle of the street. They would be there yet, but the pups’ owner came out of the bar and called them to follow him. The pup followed their master. Gladly. Quickly.

And Satan’s cat went on his way, his afternoon paseo undisturbed.

Saloon Singers

2009-10-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

Our neighbor, David McConnell, and I shared an interest in guitar playing and folk music. We soon agreed to sing and play together and maybe do something in public, should the occasion arise. To my surprise, thanks to McConnell, the occasion soon arose.

One of Sunnyview’s parents, Jeff Rich, ran a local Italian restaurant and bar. The restaurant and bar were on the main floor of a hotel and so, when approached by McConnell, Rich agreed to anything that might draw patrons into the bar.

I wasn’t so certain that all this was going to work out well because it had been at least four years, maybe longer, since I had taken guitar in hand and actually tried to entertain someone. But after the first few bars of music, everything was fine for me. I could remember the words, the chords, and manage to finish up at the same time as McConnell. What more could he ask?

Most of our audience were tourists for in those days you could put together six weeks in Spain cheaper than you could stay home. On Friday nights we rowed Michael ashore, sympathized with Tom Dooley, and cast longing looks at our empty tips jar.

Sometimes, to rest our voices, we would have a wine at the bar while one of Rich’s waiters put on a show. He was slim and dark haired, wore his shirt open to the navel and his pants were so tight I think he sprayed them on. He could have used his shoes as a mirror to pluck his eyebrows. He only knew the chord of E major, but he stomped his feet and wiggled his hips, shook his hair, spun the guitar like a top. And. My God, how the man got tips. The little old American ladies loved him.

One American lady, while admiring the waiter, chose to compliment me on my language. “You soitny speak good English. Wheredja loin?”

(I’m overstating her accent here. She definitely did not talk like one of the Three Stooges, but there were strong traces of New Jersey in her speech. She was fun to listen to.)

“Well, ma’am, I’m an American.”

“No, ya not. I’m from New Joisy, and I know an American when I hear one. Now where yah from?”

It hit me that this lady didn’t come all the way to Spain from New Jersey to meet Americans. She could have done that at her local McDonalds. So I confessed. “You got me, ma’am. I’m a Gallego. I come from Galicia.”

“Well, you soitny speak good English.” She was totally happy having met a native Spaniard, and such a talented one at that.

Robert the Bruce’s Heart and the Macho Bus Driver

2009-10-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

We were returning from Carratraca to Torremolinos by bus once. We had gone to Carratraca from Torremolinos on the same bus with the same driver the day before. A solemn group we were, many recovering from their exertions at a discothèque the night before. Livelier than porch furniture, but not much.

` Our driver stopped the bus on the berm of a hillside road and directed our attention to the plain below. Silhouetted on a hill on the other side of the plain rose the ruins of the castle of Teba. “Here,” our driver announced, “is where Robert the Bruce almost lost his heart to the Moorish army.”

Some of our group were familiar with the story, but for others, including myself, it was totally new information. What was Robert the Bruce doing in Spain?

Actually, he wasn’t in Spain, our driver went on to explain. Just his heart was in Spain. The rest of his body had remained behind, buried at Dumfermline. The Bruce had always wanted to go on a crusade or at least make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But, what with fighting the English, he just never had time to go. (Subsequent research informed me that Robert the Bruce changed allegiances five times in the course of his political career and spent some of his time fighting other Scotsmen as well. Politics was a murky business in those days and many Scottish nobles also held lands in England.)

When the Bruce died he begged his friend Sir James Douglas to carry his heart to Spain to fight the Muslims, or even to Jerusalem, if they got that far. The Good Sir James (also known as The Black Douglas in England where mothers used this name to scare their children to bed) set out with some soldiers and some other nobles set on adventure carrying the Bruce’s heart in a silver box. There Sir James joined forces with a Spanish army. The combined armies found themselves facing a sizable Moorish force on the plain below Castle Teba.

The Moors feinted a retreat and the Scots charged. The Spanish had seen this trick before, and so they didn’t charge. The Scots were soon surrounded, but the Douglas fought his way free. But looking back, he saw the Sinclair surrounded and fighting for his life. The Douglas rode back into the fray and soon found himself hopelessly surrounded.

He thereupon threw the silver box containing the Bruce’s heart among the enemy and charged. Both the Sinclair and the Douglas died in the battle. The box containing the Bruce’s heart was found under the Douglas’ body and returned to Scotland where it was buried at Melrose Abby, not Dumfermline.

I have gone a little overboard in telling this story, considering this is a memoir and I wasn’t there at the battle, and I’m really glad for that. It’s a fascinating story, a real story. If it were fiction, it would make more sense. I especially like the story because it demonstrates that other people besides Plains Indians can find a way to die gloriously but stupidly on the field of battle.

As the driver concluded his little story of Moorish mayhem and Scots vainglory, one of our female tourists loudly complimented him for giving such an interesting tour. “Besides,” she added, “you’re so macho.”

We burst out laughing because macho in Spain has a different meaning than it does in California or Arizona. In Spain the word refers more to endowment rather than behavior. Some less than generous people wanted to know how she knew and when she knew it. Our lady tourist, now vermillion, said, “Oops!” and sat down.

True story. Well, I don’t know about the Robert the Bruce part, but the macho bus driver, certainly.

Rabies in Spain

2009-10-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

A rabies epidemic broke out in Málaga Province in 1975 and the Spanish government responded in three ways. First, they issued an edict that all dogs would receive rabies vaccinations. Second, they required that all dogs wear muzzles, with a $250 penalty per violation. Third, an order came down that all stray dogs be shot.

The first edict produced curious results. But to keep veterinarians from profiteering on the free, government-issued vaccine, all the vaccine was concentrated at a government building in downtown Málaga. The result was a monumental traffic jam as everyone and his dog from all over the province converged on this one spot. It was our experience that Spaniards culturally resist lining up for anything, preferring a great seething mass instead. A milling mob at the plaza de toros creates quite an impact after the last bull has been slain. But ten times that many people, assisted by their dogs, can tie up traffic in all directions for miles. And so it happened. It even interfered with siesta.

Eventually the traffic cleared, the dust settled, and the whimpering, barking, whining, shouting, honking, fist shaking all became things of the past. Muzzles were another story.

For one thing, there was no legal definition of a muzzle that anyone would admit to knowing about. One woman shopper in a bakery, seeing a policeman standing right outside, borrowed a white ribbon and bow, tied it around her dog’s nose, and walked right by him. Actually, she didn’t walk, she marched. She paraded. Even her dog pranced. In Spain, you get points for style. I think her short skirt helped also.

Another lady took clippers and clipped where a muzzle would go. She got away with it. In those days in Spain women expected to “get away with things” as their natural right.

Most of the Málaga dogs were unenthused about the muzzles. There was nothing in the new law that said anything about fit and sometimes small dogs tangled their feet in the contraptions hanging from their noses, while large dogs tried to wear muzzles that would barely fit over their noses.

One previously well-mannered German shepherd, Hilda, didn’t want to go for walks, something she had loved to do in pre-muzzle days. After a week of enforced promenades with the hated muzzle, she rebelled. As her owner stood at the doorway calling sweetly and holding out the leash and muzzle, Hilda ran into the dining room, leaped on the dinner table, scattering dishes everywhere, stole a whole roasted chicken, and retired defiantly to the bathroom. “I don’t understand,” the woman complained later. “Hilda’s always had perfect manners. She’s never done anything like that before.”

Toby, an Irish setter by trade, lived with an English journalist and his family on the third floor of an apartment building. He was naturally exuberant, gregarious, and loved parties. He wanted to be near to every guest and he never met a canapé he didn't adore. He was sometimes a pest, but his great charm overcame his other negative qualities.

Toby saw little use in a muzzle which interfered with his smile, the angle of his tongue droop and his ability to scoop up stray pieces of food from the street. After his first walk, he grabbed the muzzle, took it to the balcony and dropped it into the swimming pool four stories below. (This was Spain. The first story was on the second floor.)

It was the third edict condemning stray dogs to execution that I found most unusual. In the States dog catchers would be mobilized, dogs scooped up, their owners given the chance to reclaim them and pay their fines, and only as a last resort would the animals be “euthanized.” Spain had roaming firing squads.

We lived at the foot of a hill and walked to the top to our work at Sunnyview School every day. We grew to know and appreciate a saggy, mangy bitch who lived in the fields and whelped litter after litter of puppies, most of whom were eaten by predators or fell victim to passing automobiles. But though her pups died with regularity, Old Bitch, for so we called her, always survived.

But one morning as we walked to work we saw a team of government dog shooters, their official status proclaimed by their same color coveralls, creeping through the fields, hiding behind some old walls and vegetation and slowly surrounding Old Bitch. She lay in the weak winter sunlight, asleep after a hard night of raiding garbage cans, oblivious to her danger.

“It’s all over for Old Bitch,” I whispered to Joanne. “I’ll miss her.” I had grown to respect her as a survivor.

But that afternoon, as we walked home we saw Old Bitch snoozing by a thornbush. There was no sign of the dog shooters. They had her surrounded. Maybe they shot each other.

Passports and Taxes

2009-09-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

In early 1975 someone stole our passports, not just mine but Joanne’s and the kids’ as well. Joanne’s and mine would have fetched more from the fence because adult terrorists are more common than child terrorists. (At least, that's the way it was back then.)

Mine was more valuable than Joanne’s because there are more brunette, male terrorists than blond, female terrorists with freckles. But all of our passports had histories, visa stamps, exit and entry stamps, from a variety of countries, really fine platforms for artful forgers.

It was all my fault, really. I was very taken with the straw bolsos that I saw men and women carrying around town. Large bags they were, with straps so you could carry your purchases over your shoulder rather than dangling them in a hand held bag.

Bolsos also made life easier for thieves. They could just dip in and take what they wanted without fiddling around with confederates or pocket slitting. And dainty dipping had so much more finesse about it than the standard snatch and run street crime.

On this particular day I was going to the American chargé d’affaires to do something with the passports. I think they were up for renewal. In any event, I had them all with me in my trusty bolso, and they were all stolen.

I continued on to the chargé d’affaires office, but with a slightly modified mission. I wanted to report stolen passports and request their replacement. As I entered the phone rang. A pretty young lady at the receptionist’s desk did not pick up the receiver. Instead, she called into the chargé d’affaires’ office, “Señor, el teléfono.” Except when she said it, it came out, “sehn.YOR, ehl tehl.uh.FO.no.” I thought, “Dear God, I’ve lost our passports and now I’m dealing with someone’s niece who’s spending her summer vacation in Spain. Someone’s niece who flunked Spanish.”

In spite of this dubious beginning, my report was accepted and they furnished me with forms needed for replacement. Joanne took passport photos, which she then developed and printed in the family dark room. We returned the forms and sat back to wait.

Within a few weeks our children had their new passports, but ours did not arrive. So we waited and we waited some more.

After a while it became apparent that we weren’t going to get new passports, and so I wrote a letter to the chargé d’affaires stating that we didn’t mind being persona non grata, but being permanent persona non exceeded even bureaucratic bounds. What was the problem?

It turns out the feds had a question about our income taxes. They wondered why we hadn’t paid any since 1970, five years before. We hadn’t even filed. But God forefend they should actually ask. Instead, they just moved our applications from the bottom of one pile to the bottom of another.

The answer was simple enough. On Guam we became voting citizens. We filed our 1040s with GovGuam and paid our taxes accordingly. In Spain we didn’t have to pay taxes on the first $50,000 of our annual income, and we were profoundly below that level.

I realize now that even if you don’t own Uncle Sugar any money, you need to file. It simplifies matters so much. How’s Big Brother going to keep his spotting scope on you if you don’t show your bushy tail once in a while?

Eventually our new passports arrived and I only had one problem. In my passport photo I looked like Carlos, the terrorist who was running wild all over Europe at the time. Ah, well, no solution is perfect.

Our Second Car (El Coche Segundo)

2009-09-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

After we got rid of our first car, El Flojo, we still needed a car and one day we met an Australian photojournalist who sold us his Canon® camera, lenses and bag as well as his green Volkswagen station wagon. He was gathering up some funds to finance a foray into the United Kingdom before he returned to Australia. This particular car had Dutch plates and was registered to a Brazilian.

In Spain a foreigner bought a used car for cash and didn’t bother to reregister it. So, who knows how long ago some Brazilian imported that car and registered with the government. Who knows when he sold that car for cash and left the country. Or to whom he sold the car. Or why he left the country. Maybe he wasn’t even a Brazilian, but just some guy with a stolen passport. You could write a novel about this guy. But what the hay, I had a bill of sale in case anyone asked me how I got the car. But no one ever did.

The car had a white oval decal, ringed in black, with a black “NL” on the left rear. That identified me as a Netherlander. Many, many cars sported these decals announcing their country of origin. Great Britain was fairly straightforward with their GB. But D for Germany? Well, yes, Deutschland. My favorite was CH for Switzerland. Congress of Helvetia.

It suited me to have Spaniards think I was a Netherlander. I spoke a reasonably good Spanish at the time and people would believe I was from the Netherlands. Spaniards believed that all Americans were tall, blond, blue eyed, and spoke only English. When the American Club, which Joanne and I had joined some time earlier, asked us if we would like to put an American flag decal on the car, we replied no, no, a thousand times no. I could just imagine how much the prices of things would go up if the Spanish vendor thought I was American. It was also common knowledge that Americans were all rich and dumb. So I thanked the American Club member as graciously as I could and declined her kind offer.

About the time we bought the VW we also received our international drivers licenses. Not easily come by. Required the services of our friendly gestor. We had to fill out forms and furnish our California drivers licenses as evidence of something or other.

We didn’t have to take a written test. Good thing, too. The test would have been in Spanish. In those days the Spanish government made no attempt to deal with foreigners. If you wanted to do something that involved the government, you did it in Spanish. My spoken Spanish was reasonable, but I’m not sure how well we would have done on a written drivers test.

Then we had to demonstrate our competence at the official testing area. It was a large compound involving short roads with curves, S curves, places for parallel parking, slalom courses and precision braking. And right smack in the middle was a bar. Just in case you needed a good, stiff brandy before strutting your stuff.

They really made the test difficult for their own citizens, almost as if they didn’t want them to have drivers licenses. But us, ridiculously easy. Drive forward a little ways, Stop. Back up a few feet. Congratulations, señor, you have passed the test. Vaya con Dios.

We drove until June, 1976, without mishap and when we left Spain we sold the car to Gino Hollander, a local painter with galleries in many different cities. He paid for the car with two paintings, a deal we found more than satisfactory. We just parked the car at the airport when we left and put the key under the doormat along with a bill of sale. I believe Gino’s older son used it to take some paintings to Israel. I wonder if the Brazilian was as well traveled as his car?

Our First Spanish Rain Storm

2009-09-07T14:21:00.001-07:00

Our house, Villa Medellín, was within walking distance of Sunnyview School to the north. Uphill, but within walking distance. We set out to walk to the school just to try things out, see if we were up to the task. It was a beautiful, sunny day without a cloud in the sky. How Spanish. After all, this was the Costa del Sol, Coast of the Sun.

To the north of the school lay some hills, and within the hills lay an active rock quarry. As we walked we heard a dynamite explosion from the quarry and watched as a cloud of dust rose into the air. Within minutes the dust reached a proper altitude and clouds began to gather round. Within an hour clouds covered the sky and it began to rain. It rained for several hours.

I recalled stories of the rainmaker going from town to town and setting off explosions, but I always thought it was fiction, something the Wizard of Oz would try. But no, it really works.

Burro Safari

2009-09-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

One day Jane Barbadillo, Sunnyview elementary school principal then and school director now, invited us to visit the hamlet of Tolox (tō.LŌS, more or less). You’ve never heard of the village? If you Google it, you still won’t know much because it sits in isolation, off the beaten path, surrounded by other villages you’ve never heard of. We left Torremolinos and drove and drove, and then drove some more, until we came to a turn in the road that took us off the main “highway.” Then we drove and drove some more.

We finally found Tolox in the foothills. Like many old villages, Tolox looks in on itself. Central buildings face the plaza mayor from which little streets designed for burro traffic spread out. You couldn’t drive comfortably on those streets, not even in the small European cars, because they’re too narrow. You couldn’t skateboard comfortably because the streets were cobbled. Walking had its perils.

We parked in a lot outside of town and walked to the plaza mayor where we met Señor Sanchez, bar-restaurant-burro safari entrepreneur. For 200 pesetas he offered to furnish a light breakfast of chocolate and churros (or brandy and churros if you preferred), a burro trek into the surrounding hillsides ending at a waterfall, a paella luncheon cooked over an open fire by the waterfall accompanied by beer, wine or soft drinks, a return to his stables and a sangria party. At the time 200 pesetas equaled $3.00 and change.

We enjoyed ourselves so much that we set up a field trip for a few 6th-, 7th- and 8th-graders. My part in this scheme, besides being a chauffeur, was to make arrangements for the safari with Sr. Sanchez by telephone. I don’t like talking on the telephone even in English and I really disliked doing so in Spanish. For one thing, they always answered my questions. Then what to do? My Spanish is usually good enough to say anything I wish, but I fall short at understanding rapid replies. And Spanish seems to be spoken at automatic weapon speed everywhere but Madrid. Madrileños pride themselves on clarity, but this concept has not caught on anywhere else.

I phoned Sr. Sanchez. To do so, I had to use the operator and ask for “Señor Sanches, Tolox 50.”

“Tolox cincuenta?” the operator asked unbelievingly. She was obviously used to putting phone calls through to the United Nations Headquarters or Buckingham Palace and now I show up with an obviously bogus number. I was probably some kid or a drunk tourist up to a prank.

After some hesitation, she put the call through and Sr. Sanchez sounded like he was next door.

Once we were all mounted and headed into the hills, things quieted down, at least from my point of view. The kids proceeded nose to tail on their burros and presented no difficulties. Once we got to the waterfall, they went swimming, clothes and all. Again, no problem. I wasn’t going to be the one wearing blisters in sensitive places by riding home in damp clothes.

The paella was almost ready when Sr. Sanchez broke out the beer and soft drinks. Guess which ones the kids wanted. Now we had a teeny bit of a problem that I solved by sitting on the cooler.

In due course we returned to Tolox where the children led their burros to their stalls. Sr. Sanchez had arranged for a sangria party for us all. Fortunately, one of the jennies had just foaled and the kids all wanted to be in the barn with the newborn.

It was really a great field trip, saving for the fact that Sr. Sanchez kept trying to pour booze down our kids’ throats. I later saw Sr. Sanchez burro safari as a regular offering by the Wiley Coyote Tour Company in Torremolinos. They wanted 2000 pesetas. I hoped Sr. Sanchez was getting more than 200 of that.

My Stamp Collection

2009-08-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

Foreigners who stayed in Spain for any length of time were required to leave the country every six months and re-enter, acquiring an entry stamp on their passport at that time. We had spent some time in England in the summer of 1975 and Joanne had spent the previous Christmas in Morocco. I, however, needed to add a stamp to my collection.

A passenger ferry regularly connected Málaga and Genoa. However, a second option presented herself in the form of our neighbor, Claude deBretteville. Claude led tour groups for one of the largest tourist companies in Europe. She regularly took groups to Morocco and offered me the opportunity to tag along. I leaped on the opportunity. Morocco would cost far less than Genoa and would be a lot more fun in the company of someone I knew who could explain things to me.

Claude was a striking looking woman, around six feet tall with raven black hair and the brown complexion of a pied noir, a French-Algerian. But she was Danish. She attributed her appearance to a Gypsy not too many generations back, but some of her tour clients insisted that she must be American Indian. She spoke Danish, of course, because she was born in Denmark. But she married a Norwegian and carried a Norwegian passport. She spoke English and Spanish idiomatically, and Arabic as well. However, she claimed that her best language was French.

I looked forward to the trip because Claude possessed one of the most equable natures I had ever met. A month or so earlier she had come home from a trip to somewhere or other when she found our son, Eric, and jumping up and down on her car while her two sons, Suki and Mino, watched. She screamed at them and they scampered off.

She soon came to our house, not to complain about our son’s behavior but to apologize for screaming at him. Once I understood the situation I told her that she shouldn’t have screamed at him: she should have thrown a rock.

But just because she didn’t throw rocks at my son didn’t mean I wouldn’t go to Morocco with her.

On this trip Claude was conducting a group of Norwegian salesmen to Morocco. They worked for Philips Electronics and had won some sort of sales contest, a week on the Costa del Sol, courtesy of their company. We picked them up at their ocean front hotel at 8:00 o’clock in the morning. There they were, a dozen of them, ready, willing, and drinking brandy.

We motored down the Málaga-Cadiz highway on our way to Algeciras (ahl.hay.SEE.rus) where we caught the ferry to Ceuta (say.YOU.tuh). We had to stop halfway there for a brandy break, but eventually boarded the ferry. The salesmen disappeared in search of a bar. During this interlude Claude told me what I might expect to find in Morocco.

Joanne had spent the previous Christmas there and she advised me that if I bought from a street vendor to never take the first offered price but to make a 10% counter offer. This would give both of us plenty of wiggle room. Claude thought that was an entirely reasonable approach since street prices were notoriously elevated.

We had lunch in Ceuta with Moroccan red wine. Surprisingly, it was not all that bad. Perfectly acceptable at a formal dinner with hot dogs and sauerkraut.

After lunch a street vendor soon offered me a wallet, hand tooled, made of genuine camel leather, for only 1000 pesetas, about $20.00 U.S. Remembering Joanne’s advice in time, I smelled the wallet as carefully as a dog on a fire hydrant. Camel leather, if not properly cured and tanned, will smell like a camel, a smell only another camel could love. And it will smell that way forever. Leaving the wallet out in the weather or perfuming it with sheep dip does no good. It just enhances the camel smell. And if the wallet gets wet, it smells like three camels.

I sniffed and snurffed. Nope. No camel smell. So I made my counter offer. “I’ll give you a hundred.”

“Pesetas?” he asked.

“No. Diram.”

“No way. This wallet cost me more than that.”

We discussed the matter further and he came down to 800 pesetas, but I bargained from a position of strength. I didn’t want his stupid wallet. I already had a perfectly good wallet, one that wasn’t even coming apart at the seams. I walked away and, as I walked, the price of the wallet came down and down rapidly until it reached one I could live with. I believe I paid 100 pesetas, about $2.00 U.S.. Friend Claude said that was about right.

I’m not really sure where we were in Morocco after lunch. I believe it was Tétouan (TEH.twahn), far enough inland so the Norwegian salesmen couldn’t see the ocean. We weren’t in anything as formal as a soukh (sook), but more like a field with lots of people selling things. Including snake oil.

I kid you not, this Arab type gentleman stood with a 3-foot boa constrictor draped over his shoulders. He had a few cans of salve on hand and I could hear him chanting, “You say you’re not convinced, you say you’re not satisfied, you say you want more. Tell you what I’m gonna do.” But in Arabic. Probably a dozen men surrounded him, paying him undivided attention. Probably most of them were shills.

His presentation would have gone well if his boa hadn’t peed on him. Perhaps snake oil is good for stiff, arthritic joints. But snake pee?

I moved on to Omar’s Camel Rides. Joanne rode a camel the previous Christmas and had her picture taken. I could do no less.

I’ve always been fascinated by camels, liked watching them at the zoo, admired the way their feet spread out so they can walk on sand. Omar brought me a camel, a creature of such gentle refinement that they had to use ten yards of jute to muzzle him. In the picture I have, neither one of us looks very happy.

But all good tours must come to an end and as the sun slowly sank in the west our Norwegians drank their way back to Algecires. Aboard the bus they passed the brandy bottles back and forth with the dexterity of professional jugglers. A Norwegian setting next to me explained that they don’t drink that way all the time. In fact, in Norway liquor costs so much they hardly drink at all. So when they get to a place like Spain where “plonk” is cheap and abundant, they do a year’s drinking all at once.

And Spain is certainly a place of cheap booze. Claude later informed me that Scandinavian countries have alcohol tours to Spain. Tourists start drinking when they get on the charter plane and don’t stop until they’re poured off a week later, safe and cirrhotic, back where they started from.

I got my stamp for my collection and I learned something on that trip. I learned that I didn’t ever want to be a tour guide, herding a bunch of drunks through customs and trying to not lose any of them.

Mierde Suave

2009-08-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

One day a major sewer backup occurred on one of the streets leading into Torremolinos. The resultant spill covered the roadway with effluent. But Spanish drivers are bold souls and were not to be deterred by a slippery roadway. They splashed through anyway, covering the sidewalks and buildings with a rich, aromatic and colorful spray.

Finally, one store owner could stand it no longer. He posted a large sign in front of his shop for the motorists to read and heed. Despacio. Mierde Suave.

I shouldn’t have to translate beyond despacio means “slow” and suave means “soft.” When I left Spain “Despacio, mierde suave” became one of my favorite expressions. It's a motto to live by.

Joanne at the Post Office

2009-08-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Freelance writing in Spain had both advantages and disadvantages. It was easy to get my query letters read. The envelopes would arrive in an editorial office adorned, festooned even, with Spanish postage stamps. These envelopes always got opened and the contents read.

Mailing manuscripts was another story. For me, at least, a mailed manuscript meant a trip downtown to the post office, walking of course since there was never a place to park, and they never had stamps in the exact denomination I needed. Also, a Spaniard has a built in aversion to standing in line for anything. Instead a post office crowd consists of many unruly people, a seething cluster, a scrum, as each person tries to be served first. It’s fun to watch, but not to participate in.

On this particular overcast day, gray with precipitation, a cross between a fog and a drizzle, Joanne was taking a manuscript to the post office for me, and then going to pick up something at the office of Lookout, the English language magazine for the Costa del Sol. She made her way to the window and the clerk calculated the postage. Joanne always likes to pay to the last penny, pence, centavo, sous, dirham, whatever, so she fished out a handful of coins and began to carefully count them into the clerk’s outstretched hand. She was very pleased to have the exact change and pressed the last coin into his hand in triumph. Then she thought to herself, “Oh, oh, that was suggestive.” In Spain, everything a female does is suggestive.

“Oh, well,” she thought, and then left the post office for home. Several minutes into her journey she remembered the Lookout mission. With a mental, “Oh, darn,” she wheeled and found herself face to face with a little man who looked vaguely familiar. The little man was not short by Spanish standards, but he was several inches shy of Joanne’s six feet. He smiled shyly as she walked by him on her way to the magazine.

But halfway there she realized it was too wet. She had no car with her and it was beginning to rain. She wheeled again to go home after all, and there stood the same little man, same shy smile. Just a little wetter.

Joanne brushed by him again and returned home. It wasn’t until after she got home and was telling me the story that she realized that the little man was the post office clerk. Apparently Joanne’s pressing the coin into his hand drove him mad with passion and he just closed up his window and followed her out the door.

Such behavior would be bizarre here, but perfectly understandable in Spain.

House Warming

2009-08-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

Our house had rubble walls covered with stucco and a clay tile roof. This is standard Spanish construction. For all I know, it may be standard European construction. The house didn’t even have a mud sill or any sign of a vapor barrier anywhere. As a result, during the winter months when it was cold and rainy, the house walls wicked up moisture the same way that a cloth strip wicks up kerosene in a lamp. It got colder than a teacher’s wit in our house.

Our only source of heat was a fireplace and we used it a lot. Most people who had fire places bought their firewood. The favored fuel was olive, dense, oily, wonderfully scented, expensive olive wood. We never felt good about burning olive wood. The expense bothered us a little bit, but the knowledge that we might be burning wood from a tree that was planted before Jesus was born bothered us a lot. We decided that we would burn trash wood that we could find in our neighborhood.

The neighbors thought we were crazy, but we persisted and over a year-and-a-half period we cleaned up our entire neighborhood. We couldn’t find a stick of junk wood anywhere. No broken chairs or picture frames or anything. So. Principles be darned, we bought a load of olive wood to see us through our final spring.

Some of the junk wood we harvested was very dirty, but we burned it anyway. Also we never cleaned the chimney, nor did we hire a chimney sweep.

One afternoon we were surprised to hear the sound of a rumbling freight train running through our back yard even though we had no tracks there. Joanne thought it was more like a jet engine, but we had no airport in the back yard either. What we had was a chimney fire.

There was very little about our house that was made of wood. Some of the doors and the dining room table just about exhausted the inventory. Our clay tile roof had wooden supports. Everything else was relatively fireproof.

The chimney was covered with brick and stucco with holes for the smoke to escape from four different directions. This time it was flame escaping, leaping out at least three feet, so we had a pyrotechnic display to go with our rumble and roar.

There was no way we could get close enough to the fire to deal with it. We did the only thing we could. We stood by and watched and felt thankful that our house was relatively fireproof.

Ham Wine

2009-07-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

After I completed my article on Málaga wine, I was still left with the nagging question, was there really a vino de jamón, a ham wine? Other possibilities presented themselves. Could ham wine be an urban myth? How about a practical joke on a guileless foreigner, or maybe even the combined product of murmured Spanish and waxy ears? Who knew? Only one way to find out.

Into the field, to the campo, on our quest. It wasn’t the Holy Grail, but we didn’t have to go all the way to Jerusalem, either and we could drink some wine instead of fighting Saracens.

With Claud deBretteville as our trusty guide we drove into the hinterlands, hilly land that farmers worked with rototillers to grow sweet grapes for Málaga wine. Our road was paved, but that was its sole virtue. Curving. Not banked very well, you needed both hands on the wheel here.

We stopped finally at a small ventorilla, a little restaurant where Claud thought they might sell some ham wine. A small building with a whitewashed exterior (of course) isolated from any nearby village, it sported the old Coca Cola® sign on the wall. You know the one, red with a big, fancy C. And directly underneath the Coca Cola® sign, embedded into the wall, was a manger and hitching place for a burro. I tell you, this was a full-service ventorilla.

Claud, Joanne and I seated ourselves at an outdoor table in a shady spot and soon a woman came out to ask us what we wanted to eat. We chose a homemade paella and I then asked her if they had any ham wine.

“O sí, señor, of course we have vino de jamón. Why, that is our specialty. How could you ask?” Soon we were sipping on a glass of dark, sweetish liquid that tasted vaguely like some wheat beers.

Shortly after our wine was served the same lady returned to our table holding a large grey hen. She extended the bird to Joanne. She asked that la señora approve the day’s entrée.

While we no longer bougtht our meat pre-packaged in a Styrofoam® box and sealed with Saranwrap®, we were used to at least having the animal dead and hanging from a hook in the carnecería. It was quite out of the ordinary to inspect our own dinner while it still clucked. Still, after Joanne realized what was being requested, she made a great show of touching the legs and breast before signifying her approval.

The woman nodded agreeably and went about twenty feet away where she wrung the bird’s neck, whirling her arm round and round several times like a berserk windmill. It looked spectacular, but it did a quick and apparently merciful job on our chicken dinner.

Soon the woman set herself to plucking the bird and gutting the bird and dismembering the bird. Four or five admiring dogs surrounded her and snagged various pieces and scraps of unspeakable and probably unidentifiable stuff as they flew through the air. Claud, Joanne and I concentrated grimly on our wine.

In an hour or so, she presented us with a fine paella that we enjoyed greatly. With more wine. But as we drove away, I reflected on the country sense of humor. It is possible the woman could have gone to the kitchen and yelled out, “Hey, Carlos, we’ve got another one asking for ham wine. Third one this week. Three glasses of dishwater, please. Thanks.”

Lookout published my article and a British lady wrote me afterwards to say that, yes, indeed, it was really true, there was a ham wine actually, and it tasted very much as I’d described. But I still wonder, could she have been another part of a vast Spanish conspiracy?

Malaga Wine

2009-07-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

Lookout Magazine, the English language magazine for the Costa del Sol, assigned me an article on Málaga wine. To be frank, I didn’t think much of Málaga wine. Or Spanish wine of any type, including their famous dry sherry. Come to think of it, I don’t much care for wine even today.

So, why me? Why did I get the assignment? Simply put, the editor needed the article and I needed the income. Freelancers can’t be choosers.

Armed with the assignment, I began to visit the bodegas (wine bars) around Torremolinos. There were some good points. The drinks were cheap. The bodegas had ambiance. The bartender filled your glass directly from one of the barrels behind the bar. Neatest of the neat, you could take your own jug to the bodega and they filled it for you.

But one day I saw a tanker parked outside a bodega. Huge hoses connected the tanker to the barrels. I wondered if the wine had ever seen a grape, or was it the liquid product of some chemical plant in Asturias or Extremadura.

We visited several local wineries. Our first was a combination bottling plant and retail sales outlet. The owner showed me barrels of wine, the oldest holding 20-year-old batch he called la madre, the mother. As new wine came in, it would be decanted into barrels with a little la madre mixed in. After it sat and mellowed for a while, it would then be mixed with more new wine. After four or five years, you had a wine with a little, a very little, madre.

All Málaga wines came from the Pero Ximen (Pedro Ximénes) grape. It was processed in different ways and came in several different flavors. Their chief virtue is a high alcohol content. Málaga Dulce, Lagrima del Cristo, and, most impressive of all, Vino Quino, a special mixture of Málaga wine and quinine, all come from this grape. Vino Quino is supposed to be a curative, but if you aren’t ill, it was a sure fire sickative.

When for sheer nastiness, Vino Quino was right up there with Cynar®, a wine I first sampled at an American Club meeting. They make it from artichokes. I can’t think why.

On another occasion Joanne, our daughter Pat and I were doing some firewater experiments in downtown Málaga. (We let Pat have some wine with lots and lots of water in it.) Pat and Joanne were both coming down with the flu and Pat returned home on the bus while Joanne and I remained behind and killed the bottle. The next day Pat was so sick with the flu that she was bedridden for a week. Her self-winding watch stopped. It’s kind of like if your votive candle goes out. You wonder how much time you have left. Joanne, on the other hand, felt fine. Here’s another cure for the flu. Perhaps we need a government study.

On another occasion we visited a bottling plant that actually had vats of frothing must. “Must.” That’s what they call squeezed grapes, with the seeds and skins not removed with a nasty looking froth floating on top. The plant was surrounded by high walls, the tops of which were lined with broken glass. That kept thieves and tax assessors out unless they wanted to give themselves appendectomies.

The plant manager spoke English with a heavy German accent. I asked him which wine he favored. “I only drink Scotch,” he replied austerely. There we go, folks. Suspicions Confirmed.

Somewhere in my peregrinations trying to nail down this story, one purveyor of fine Málaga bubbly used the phrase “ham wine,” vino del jamón. That’s funny, I thought to myself. I thought my Spanish was getting pretty good, but I would have sworn he said “ham wine.” But that’s exactly what he said.

Sometimes a farmer will have a batch of wine that isn’t quite up to snuff, and also have a Serrano ham that doesn’t quite make the grade either. A Serrano ham is cured on the snowy slopes in the mountains near Madrid. When it is cured, it is purple. I’ve seen these hams hanging in bars and when you ask for a tapa they slice it microchip thin. It’s very expensive and people put them on layaway for Christmas. Another thing, when they hang in the bars they didn’t draw flies. Curiouser and curiouser..

Anyway, you make ham wine by throwing a sub par Serrano ham into your vat of not very good wine and, after about six months, you withdraw the bone, all that is left of the ham, and enjoy the fruits of your curious chemistry project.

But I didn’t know if I really believed the story. It could have been an urban myth or a national put on. I resolved to make a field trip into the campo and see for myself. And thereby hangs the next tale.

More Granada

2009-07-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Granada

2009-06-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Eric and Chile

2009-06-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

We have always risen reasonably early by most peoples’ standards. Sometimes on Sunday mornings we might sleep in, but usually we rise and shine by seven. And we almost always managed to get up before our son, Eric.

With some surprise, then, I woke up around 5:30 one Sunday morning to find Eric dressed and leaving the house. He said he was going to church. And that was probably true, I thought, because there’s not much a teenage boy can do at 5:30 Sunday morning besides go to church. At the same time, since we never participated ourselves, I couldn’t help but wonder what motivated the boy.

Later investigation revealed it all had to do with Chile, a bartender at Tres Barriles (Three Barrels). There was absolutely nothing for young foreigners to do in Spain except study or hang out with each other. No youth clubs, no soccer leagues, nada. And, being foreigners, they couldn’t get jobs.

Eric and several friends got to know Chile as he was setting out tables for the evening trade. They called him “Chile” because that’s where he came from, Chile.

Chile let the boys help him set out tables and bought them a soft drink in exchange. But he had a proviso. They couldn’t help unless they went to church with him. “He even gave me a hundred pesetas for the collection box, Dad,” Eric said as he ran out the door.

“My God,” I thought as I rolled over and went back to sleep. “My son’s bartender is a better influence on him than I am.”

Eric’s newly discovered piety didn’t last very long, though. Six o’clock mass is early for anybody, let alone a teenager.

Dining Out in Torremolinos

2009-06-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

As we walked into Torremolinos from our home on a more or less daily basis, we passed by a Danish restaurant. I noticed they offered a five-course meal free to anyone who could eat the whole thing. “The whole thing” was the key. If you passed out halfway through the meal, you still had to pay for the whole dinner, even though you had only eaten half. No doggie bags. Joanne and I let this temptation go for a year, but eventually succumbed.

We ordered the meal with some wine and prepared ourselves for the inevitable food fest. Salad first, right? Wrong. Salad did not appear on the menu. A little bread, but no salad.

The first course was a fish course. Pickled herring in sour cream, fish fillets served with rich sauces, bacalao, lobster, salmon, shrimp, eat, you fools, eat.

` The second course was a hot meat course. Hot roast beef, hot roast pork, ham, meat loaves, enjoy, enjoy.

The third course was a cold meat course, more beef, more ham, meat rolls stuffed with pimientos. Having a little difficulty? There are two more courses to come.

I wonder what Circle of Hell we’re in?

The fourth course was the cheese course. If there is one thing the Danes do well, it is cheese. And the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the British. And all the countries had representatives in the cheese course. It was a regular cheesy United Nations.

There was no way we could make any serious indentures into the cheese course. To this day, we have no idea what the fifth course might have been. Nuts? Peanuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, cocoanuts? As it was, we walked home and didn’t have to eat again for a long time.

If the Danish dinner was an experiment in applied misery, my favorite fish restaurant was a joy forever. Torremolinos extends to the beach as does it’s neighboring area, the Calvario. The two places are separated by a finger of land jutting into the sea that happens to be devoid of vegetation. Hence the name “Calvario”, which means something like “finger of land devoid of vegetation” or “bald place.” The Calvario had no beach to speak of, but hundreds of little stores and restaurants stacked on top of each other.

I don’t even know if my favorite fish restaurant had a name. Certainly it did not blazon into the night with the aid of neon. Nor did I ever see a menu, for there were none. They didn’t know what was going to be caught that day, and therefore didn’t know what they would have to sell that night. You had to learn the names of the fish.

We could take our friends there and each order a fish dish in which we could all share. They served deep fat fried elver eels by the basket. Their little eyeballs looked like flakes of black pepper. Most of our guests ate them without asking. They may have suspected, but they didn’t ask. They served deep fat fried herrings that we ate bones and all. Don’t ask, don’t tell dining. Instead of onion rings we had squid tentacles fried a la Romana.

We also had individual salads, bread and wine. Usually people ate and enjoyed. They especially enjoyed when it was time to pay up because the cost was around $2.00 per head.

Claud's finca

2009-06-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

Claud deBretteville, our neighbor in Urbanización Colombia, owned a small finca in rural Málaga province. What sort of pet or applicance is a finca you are probably asking yourself. It’s a small farm. At least, it was in 1975.

Now, thanks to Google, I learn that they are villas with indoor plumbing and everything. You can pay everything from 250,000 euros to over two million. The current exchange rate today (January 24, 2008) is $1.27 to the euro. Indoor plumbing costs a lot.

But in Claud’s day, a finca was a farm house. We had to drive through a tiny village to reach Claud’s finca. As we chugged up the main street leading through the village, we met what must have been the entire population walking the other way. They were on their way to the fútbol field to support their local team’s efforts against a neighboring village. Our progress was slowed. Impeded. Stopped. Everyone was good-natured about it. We couldn’t run over all of them, so why run over any?

Eventually traffic cleared and we drove a short distance out of town, probably a half mile, and parked under an olive tree by the side of the road. We could easily see the village sitting uphill of us. Her finca itself laid downhill of us, perhaps two hundred feet down a ridge, a small, whitewashed house with a thatched roof. Claud invited us in.

The first thing I noticed about Claud’s house was the floor to ceiling bookcase just inside the front door. I don’t remember any windows, but there must have been. I don’t remember any indoor plumbing, either. In the States, Claud’s finca would have been a “cabin.”

Her stone floor was unsealed so that she could use “Spanish air conditioning.” This involves wetting the floor with buckets of water and opening the doors and windows so the wind can blow through. The house is cooled by evaporation. It works great and doesn’t use any electricity.

The house had two doors, a front and back door which gave out onto a walled enclosure with walls four feet high. There was no way in or out of the enclosure save through the house. Smaller harder stones than those that paved the rest of the house led from front to back doors providing a path for the finca burro to take because it lived in the enclosure behind the house. The small stones had to be harder than the others so the burro’s hooves wouldn’t wear them out too soon.

Burros were very valuable and had to be registered in town. You even needed a pink slip for your burro. When he was in his enclosure, there was no way a thief was going to get him out unless he lifted him over the wall. If the thief was strong enough to lift a full grown burro over a wall, you probably didn’t want to interfere anyway. “Si, señor. Go ahead and take my burro. Bon apetít.”

Joanne has always had the gift to “witch” water, at least ever since I’ve known her. Don’t ask me how it works or why. I have no idea. But Claud persuaded Joanne to try to find her a well. If water could have been found, that finca would have increased in value tenfold.

It didn’t happen. Así es la vida. But even without water, it was a nice little finca.

An Unnamed Cave

2009-05-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

Several caves in the Málaga vicinity (if you define “vicinity” broadly) are noted tourist attractions, or should be, with natural wonders or prehistoric paintings. But other caves have no claim to fame. They have no prehistoric paintings. They are not remarked in tourist guides. Fodors has nothing to say about them. They are tubes in the ground, unlit, unmarked, and fit only for teenagers to explore. Those are the good ones.

Our son, Eric, and his friend, Victor deGroot, decided to camp overnight in one such hole in the ground near Torremolinos. The boys hitchhiked to their chosen cave with cans of food and bedrolls, prepared for a great adventure. It was cloudy and threatening rain. All the better. More adventure.

Night fell darkly. Rain fell heavily. The cave leaked wetly. The boys decided that their adventure was uncomfortable and they would be better off home. But it was harder to hitchhike on a dark, rainy night and the boys met with no success. Finally some policemen pulled up in a car and made the boys stand in the rain while they played Twenty Questions. At last the police told the boys to go home. The boys asked for a ride but met with a resounding, “Nope.”

Teenage years are hard. And sometimes wet.

Carratraca

2009-05-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

We made an overnight weekend trip to Carratraca with the American Club in the spring of 1975. Who or what is a Carratraca? For that matter, what was the American Club?

Carratraca is a village of fewer than 1000 permanent residents and the site of a sulfur springs. For millennia people have believed that sitting neck deep in stinky water is healthful and restorative. For extra money, I understood, someone would pack your entire body with mud. It would probably make you feel healthy and restored just to get that nasty stuff off your body. Apparently people have wallowed in Carratracas’ sulfur baths since the Romans.

The American Club was founded by Americans who moved to Spain and decided that the thing they most wanted to do was to associate with other Americans. We had joined the American Club because someone invited us to, attended a meeting because we had nothing else to do that evening, and joined the group because we couldn’t think of a graceful way out of it.

And that is how we found ourselves on a bus loaded with American tourists headed into the hills, bound for the sulfur springs. We weren’t all old. Our daughter, Patricia, a high school sophomore, went with us. Another young woman, a college undergraduate, gave her someone to bond with. There was at least one young man who probably hadn’t seen 21 summers yet. As I write this I’m looking at a group photo and I must admit they look much younger to me now than they did 32 years ago.

Carratraca itself looked like a typical Spanish village with it whitewashed buildings, rough streets and dark interiors. We had arrived at our hotel at lunch time, pre-siesta time, The village seemed to have gone into a nothing-much-happening-right-now-folks mode.

Our room was on the first floor, which is really the second floor in genuinely civilized countries, at the back side of the hotel. But when we reached our room and looked out the window, we saw not a drop not a ten-foot drop but another street. Our hotel was dug into a steep hillside, hence our hotel front facing a road and the back facing another road one story up. People familiar with San Francisco architecture will have no trouble with this concept.

Disco was the big thing in those days. There was even a song about a disco duck. Our hotel clerk informed our daughter and her friend that yes, indeed, Carratraca boasted a very fine discoteca, one in which they took great pride. The two girls set off to find this emporium of music but Pat returned an hour later to report that though they had looked high and low and in between, they could discover no discothèque.

Apparently the girls had not gone on their quest unaccompanied, but were joined by the young male I mentioned earlier. That evening before dinner he bought me a glass of wine, which I thought very amiable of him. Then he asked, “Do you mind if I marry your daughter?”

I thought the matter over for a few seconds, swished the wine around in my mouth savoring its taste, then replied, “That depends on your health, your morals, and whether you can fix Volkswagens.” I don’t think he really wanted to marry my daughter. I think he wanted to see if I’d spit up my wine. In any event, he didn’t look like a Volkswagen mechanic.

We learned at dinner that Carratraca’s famous discothèque was located inside our very own hotel. This suited me since I didn’t want my nubile daughter cruising the streets of Carratraca, a village inhabited by a hell hound bent on (he said) matrimony. (Hell hounds might have changed since my day – but they couldn’t have changed that much.)

Some of the older members of the American Club said that they would go to the discothèque just to “keep an eye on the youngsters.” Who, I wondered, was going to keep an eye on them?

Joanne and I went to bed and Pat went out to disco. At the witching hour, I believe 9:00 but it may have been 10:00, the band struck up and the party was ON! Joanne and I were out of bed like someone had hotwired it, for the famous discothèque was located in the room directly under ours. Our room had become an echo chamber. I said to Joanne, “I can’t handle this. I’m going down there. It can’t be any worse.”

But it was worse. It was far, far worse. For one thing, the band was far, far louder. Few people danced. Instead they shouted at each other and still couldn’t hear, drank cheap wine and pretended they were having fun. So I returned to our room, buried my head under my pillow regretted not having drunk more at dinner.

But eventually, mercifully, the “music” ended, Pat returned, and I settled in for some well deserved sleep. But not to be, for some lusty lad had parked his motorcycle on the street directly outside our window some time during the day. He had danced his little toes raw and now it was time to crank up his Bultaco motocicleta.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned Bultaco only had two cylinders and it didn’t always use both of them. Vroom vroom cough vroom fart spit vroom splutter. But after five minutes of vrooming the machine ran to our young dude’s satisfaction and he drove off. Thank God it was downhill or he’d probably still be there.

At last. After two in the morning, but it was as quiet in Carratraca as it had been when we arrived at noon the day before. To sleep, perchance to dream. Who cares if I dream. To sleep. Bring it on.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Ben the Baker on Spanish Taxes

2009-05-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

Although it was difficult if not impossible for a foreigner to work legally in Spain, they were encouraged to go into businesses that would provide employment for Spaniards. One could own a book store, a restaurant-bar, a souvenir shop. Ben, a burned out Philadelphia attorney, owned a bakery outside of Torremolinos. He specialized in gourmet breads that he sold to various hotels.

Oddly enough, he could do this because he had purchased a centuries old house with an attached centuries old bakery equipped with a centuries old oven. It looked like don Quixote’s breakfast rolls might have come out of that oven.

Bread was baked on a huge stone wheel inside the oven that rotated by means of a hand crank. The wheel was around four inches thick and at least ten feet across, perhaps twelve. Ben’s bakers loaded the loaves that needed the longest time to bake on the inside of the wheel, gradually turning it as they loaded more loaves. When the wheel was fully loaded, then with a few more turns baked loaves were unloaded on a first-in-first-out basis. The heat came from an olive wood fire that had been started early in the morning. Set scientifically, the fire gradually burned itself out and no refueling was necessary. And the whole thing happened without computers.

It happened without the use of fuel oil, either. And that’s where the gourmet bread comes in. We lived in Spain during the last year of Francisco Franco’s life and the first year of Juan Carlos’ reign. During that time, food was available to everyone by means of subsidized bread, milk, and fish. People of very limited means could still put food on the table and didn’t have to watch their families starve. It kept them from slipping across the border to France to work as illegal aliens. Also, wine was cheap and everyone seemed to have a television set. There were only two or three channels, but it was something. I’ve always felt that Franco kept the lid on things and there were no revolutions because everybody had something to lose. The subsidized bread had to be baked by bakers who used government subsidized fuel oil to heat their ovens. They baked the bread and sold it at a loss or at best broke even. Since Ben didn’t use the fuel oil, he didn’t have to bake the cheap bread.

But Ben still paid the price. Olive wood was very expensive fuel. He thought it was a trade off.

And Ben had to pay his taxes. Spanish taxes and American taxes have a curious difference. In the U.S. everyone knows who’s going to pay. We just don’t know how much, and the government couldn’t say within billions of dollars just how much money they’re going to get. In Spain, the government knew to the peseta, but they didn’t know who was going to pay. But, then, they didn’t care, either.

Here’s how it worked. Each year the government would tell the bakers’ of Torremolinos sindicato how much they were going to cough up for taxes. The sindicato would then meet to determine how the tax would be paid and who would pay it. Ben said he always attended that meeting. Otherwise his colleagues might vote that he pay it all. It was the same way with all the other sindicatos in Spain. "Here's the revenue service hat, amigos. Fill 'er up."

He baked great bread, by the way.

Amphitheater of Italica and 8th-grade (Male) Students

2009-05-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

Scipio Africanus founded Italica, north of present day Seville, as a place to retire soldiers wounded in Africa. It became a reasonably important settlement with 8000 people in its heyday. It was the birthplace of Emperor Trajan, the town’s most famous son.

Although Italica only had a population of 8000, their amphitheater seated 25,000, third largest in the Roman Empire. (Little strange, that. I didn't question those figures in 1976, but they don't seem quite right now.)

Moving right along, we saw the remains of the mini-coliseum on a trip in the spring of '76. I thought it was a pretty dinky amphitheater when I saw it, but I was thinking chariot races, naval battles, Cecil B. DeMille.

As we watched, a bus load of 8th-grade boys with their harassed teacher pulled up. Close to 40 boys crammed into the bus, 40 eighth-grade boys. In the center of the amphitheater’s arena lay a pit, maybe for lions or Christians, who knows. Maybe it was a green room for the gladiators.

The teacher shouted to his students, “Don’t go near the pit!” He must have been a new teacher who didn’t realize what happens when you tell eighth-graders not to do something. As soon as the words left the teacher’s mouth everyone of the boys ran to the pit and hung ten. They all jostled for position in the front row and it’s a wonder they didn’t all fall in.

Maybe I misread the situation. Maybe the teacher was a burn out case who was hoping the kids would all fall in and he could go out for a glass of wine.

Calle San Miguel

2009-05-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

Like many cities and towns in Europe, Torremolinos had a walking street, Calle San Miguel. No cars or any other wheeled vehicles allowed, no cell phoning drivers, no bicyclists wired into I-pods, no skateboarders or in-line skaters. You can walk in any direction you want any time you want providing no one is blocking your way. Just pedestrians. Sweet. As a maraschino cherry topping, Calle San Miguel was paved with yellow bricks.

The people on Calle San Miguel were cosmopolitan and raffish all at once. Torremolinos was no longer the Hippie Haven it was when James Michener wrote The Drifters, but many young people sported longer hair than Spanish custom dictated, and some played guitars as though they held a species of bass drum. Many of them, it seemed to me, were either passing through or not, but either way waiting for something to happen. Anything. Many wore tee-shirts with the names of American universities. UCLA’s shirt was the most popular in Europe. However, the shirt didn’t mean they attended that school. Some young people didn’t even speak English and somewhere else was a young Southern Californian wearing a Heidelberg tee-shirt who spoke no German.

People kept Spanish hours, surprise, surprise. During siesta time you could have gone bowling except Calle San Miguel had a very definite tilt downhill toward the Mediterranean. The street ended in a steep stairwell to the beach named Calle del Peligro, Street of danger. The danger was if you fell on the stairwell, you’d go a long way.

No one ever lost a bowling ball, but once a soccer ball got loose. Before it was recovered by the boy who owned it every foot on the street had touched it at least once including a nun in her habit. Caught the ball beautifully in the sweet spot on her foot. Nice shot, sister. Europeans play that game well.

In the evening the tourists came out to play. That’s when Calle San Miguel revealed itself in its true colors, a glorious tourist trap. You could buy post cards, sleazy little ash trays with “recuerdo de Torremolinos,” written on it, oil paintings of Spanish villages mass produced in Morocco. Every third door opened onto a bar. We stopped in one once to listen to some music and absent mindedly ordered a sangria. The bartender slopped in heavy dollops of vodka and gin before he even reached for fruit and wine. We stopped him in his tracks. We wanted a drink and he was mixing a prescription.

Life went on like a Old West gold mining boom town until 3:00 or so. Then the store owners aimed their guests out the door, cleaned up after them, weighed their day’s money, and got ready for the next day’s business. We didn't have to watch television. There was more entertainment on Calle San Miguel.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Spanish Coffee

2009-04-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

One Saturday morning Gail Meredith-Smyth, one of Sunnyview School’s two office staff members, arrived at our house. It was early Saturday morning, in fact. Joanne and I were still in bed.

Gail did not come to our house on a whim. It had been pre-arranged that we would all go to the village of Antequera together by bus. The bus left early. Gail knew that. We had not internalized that information.

To go to Antequera by bus we first had to go from Torremolinos to Málaga by bus, and that bus was leaving soon. She brightly announced that she would “put the kettle on,” and she did. I don’t know why she put the kettle on. We certainly didn’t have time for a pot of tea before we caught the bus for Málaga. Maybe it’s something in the British DNA.

We dressed in a hurry, turned the kettle off, and left. We arrived two buses later in Antequera shortly after 9:00 a.m., too late for breakfast. Spaniards are not big on breakfasts anyway. A slice of bread dipped in olive oil and freshly minced garlic (delicious) and a shot of brandy, and they’re good to go. Or if not brandy, aguardiente, “toothwater”, a really disgusting licorice flavored booze. Joanne and I were not raised that way, and we wanted some real food for our breakfast. Too bad. So sad.

We did promote some coffee. You could tan leather with Spanish coffee. For a demitasse of coffee you run steam through a demitasse of grounds. The result is mixed with milk and a generous helping of turbinado. Turbinado is the brown, lumpy sugar you find in some health food stores. It’s about all we used in Spain. The resulting beverage was almost as effective as mainlining caffeine and it kept us on our feet and going all morning.

And go we did. We climbed up the tallest hill to visit the Moorish castle ruins. Then we walked over to the local palace to visit the museum. Then we walked out of town to see the dolmens, burial chambers dating back to the Bronze Age. No bodies in the burial chambers. No bronze, either.

We walked everywhere until 1:00 p.m. when we could wrap ourselves around some pork chops and wine. I had drunk Spanish coffee before, but this was the first time I had ever put it to a real test. It’s amazing stuff. Jet fuel.

A Boy (Spanish) and a Girl (Canadian)

2009-04-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

We met our boss, David McConnell, in downtown Torremolinos for wine one night. When we arrived we found him ensconced at a table with a nubile Canadian girl celebrating her 18th birthday. Our friend Ina Robinson once said that all women either had bosoms or bazooms. This bazoomy girl from Canada wasn’t sure what was going to happen on her 18th birthday, but she was sure it was going to be wonderful.

Our own children were not much younger than this girl and Joanne was heard to call McConnell “cradle robber” under her breath. He retorted, “Easy, ‘Mom.’” And to be perfectly honest, we didn’t know what plans McConnell may have had for the evening, but they were complicated by the presence of a third party, a young Spanish male dressed most stylishly. He wore his shirt open to the navel. A gold colored medallion dangled from his neck by a gold colored chain. We knew he was no spy because there was no room in his pants for even a microdot let alone a secret message or stolen state paper.

Joanne took exception to the boy’s style, or lack thereof. If you’re going to be a sophisticated seducer, you should have more than two squiggly little chest hairs. She decided that if he was going to run with the big dogs then he should learn to drink like them as well.

She bought him a wine. And another. And another. We spelled each other so we didn’t have to match him drink for drink. He soon began to make trips to the men’s room, from which he returned with water dripping from his face, hoping a cold splash would reduce dizziness. It doesn’t. I speak from experience here. He frantically suggested we adjourn to a discoteca magnifica where we could dance. We wouldn’t hear of it. By Jove, this wine is splendid. Let’s have some more, shall we?

The young Spaniard was game but eventually lurched home. He probably had a head as big as a soccer field the next morning, but maybe he learned something. I hope he learned that if intended to run with the big dogs he should button up his shirt. Or at least paste on some phony chest hairs.

We went home shortly after the Spaniard’s departure. Never did find out what happened with McConnell and the girl. None of our business.

The Haircut

2009-04-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

The Haircut

The time was late 1974 or early 1975. Our son, Eric, and his good buddy, Victor Degroote, together ruffled far more feathers than either could have hoped to have done individually. Wherever they went, the boys brought with them a whole
new level of meaning to the word “synergy.”

The biggest problem I had with Eric and Victor was keeping a straight face. Once the two boys invaded (they never quietly entered anywhere) my “office” where I was working on some travel articles. They were outraged.

It seems they had been riding double on a motor scooter. Nothing wrong with that, actually. It's done all the time wherever I've lived. But they had been going the wrong way on a one-way street. They might have thought they could see traffic better that way. But I suspect they just didn't think.

Surprise, surprise, the Spanish traffic cops picked them up. The boys were fearless and defiant. “Go ahead, issue your tickets.”

I don't remember which boy issued the challenge. Maybe I never knew. But the cop's response was great, I thought. “No, we're not going to write you tickets. Your rich American fathers will just pay them. Instead, we'll cut your hair.”

That got their attention. At that time long hair was “in,” and every teenage boy with any idea of style wore his hair as long as or longer than the girls did. Tickets? No problem. Daddy fix. But the loss of their hair would have been an unsustainable outrage. “Dad, can they do that, just cut your hair like that?” demanded Eric.

“Do it? I'll help 'em. I'll sharpen their scissors.”

Well, no nurturing parent there. They left muttering to each other about life's basic unfairness and Eric's bad luck in having a father who actually sided with the law. Actually, I would have liked to see him wearing short hair. I used to tell him that the reason he did such strange things was because his hair sucked all the blood away from his brains.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Grog

2009-04-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

When we lived in Spain we met a huge, black, vile-tempered cat named Grog. Grog had a family, the Hickeys, a man, a woman, a teen-age boy, a pre-teen girl, each one of them the soul of sweet reason and amiability. Grog took it upon himself to be ill-natured for all of them. What a guy.

The first time I met Grog I discovered that he permitted his person to be touched only by members of his immediate family and such others individuals as he had personally inspected. I failed the inspection.

Grog’s mama apologized, but I told her not to worry. It was my fault entirely for attempting to pet an animal without a formal introduction. Anyone that rude deserved to bleed a little.

The next time I visited, I decided to leave Grog alone. I studiously ignored him for almost an hour. But Grog, disagreeable creature that he was, decided that we were going to be bosom friends. He plonked himself on my bosom and demanded to be petted.

Grog was, in a word, difficult.

The family decided to return to the States, but before Grog could go with them he had to receive a battery of shots. Somehow he was enticed into his kitty cage and, accompanied by his mama and his pet girl, off he went to the vet. Unfortunately for everyone, Grog’s family spoke little Spanish, the vet spoke less English. After several hectic minutes of a curious mixture of Spanish, English, French and German words liberally laced with hand gestures, the vet understood that he was to stick needles into Grog. The family warned the vet that the cat would probably object to being pierced and offered to help. The vet, however, declined all offers of assistance and told them to come back at five o’clock to recover their pet.

When they returned they found a disturbed cat and a disturbed vet having a stare down. Grog was still in his carrying case, well toward the back so he couldn’t be scooped out by surprise. The vet’s arms were decorated with iodine and Band Aids. Grog wore a defiant look, tinged with contempt, while the vet’s eyes expressed a combination of anguish, frustration and loathing.

Grog’s girl reached into the carrying case and gathered Grog in her arms. The vet grabbed his needles and quickly gave the cat his shots. “There’s the Grog monster, all shot,” murmured the girl.

“Ojalá” muttered the vet under his breath. That’s Spanish for “so mote it be.”

Mrs. Hickey informed me recently that Grog lived for several years in the States but eventually succumbed to coyotes. As big and assertive as Grog was, I'm sure there was more than one coyote involved, and I'm dead certain that he did not go gently into that good night.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Wrestling with Spanish

2009-03-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

The French have a wide reputation for being rude to people who do not speak their language perfectly. If you did not have the forethought to be born French, you probably speak the language imperfectly, perhaps to a stunning degree.

The Spanish, on the other hand, have the reputation of being cordial to anyone who even tries to use their language. But cordiality is not guaranteed. The Spanish have their “French” moments.

I had driven to Madrid in the summer of 1975 to take our daughter, Patricia, to the airport to catch a flight to the States. Besides Pat and me, we had our son, Eric, and his friend, Mino deBretteville, along for ballast. Pat’s plane left Madrid early, so we arrived the day before and set up in a hotel. When we sat down to dinner, and Eric ordered for us in Spanish.

Eric had a wide circle of acquaintances from all over Europe, and their only common language was Spanish. He and his friends had been jabbering Spanish at each other since the fall of the year before. However, Eric’s Spanish was that which he had heard on the streets, Andalucian, the Spanish version of Terminal Hillbilly. So that’s basically what it was, jabber, at least to everyone else in Spain. They called it “andalú” and it was spoken by leaving off the beginnings and endings of all the words and shouting the middles.

The waiter listed to him order for us and answered, “Cómo?” Eric tried again, this time trying the time-honored strategy of speaking louder. “Cómo?” the waiter repeated, looking at me and shrugging.

The dirty rat. He understood Eric. He was just tugging on my son’s chain. I then ordered for all of us in my slow, measured Spanish and he smiled and said, “Claró,” a Spanish word for “But of course, how could it be otherwise.” He understood me perfectly because I was the guy leaving the tip.

On another occasion we were in a village, somewhere, somehow, and needed to use a telephone. Joanne asked a local traffic cop where there might be a telephone. She spoke in English and the cop pretended not to understand the word “telephone.” She tried a Spanish pronunciation. Several of them in fact. “Teléfono, telefóno, telefonó.” He wasn’t even a very good actor. He just wasn’t to tell her. I asked him and, since I was a man instead of a woman, I could have asked in Swahili and gotten results. He told us where the phone was and we went on our way. I was sorry I didn’t have any nails that needed bending, because Joanne was angry enough to bend them with her teeth.

I’ll tell about one final occasion, I promise it’s the last. I was in downtown Málaga doing some shopping and I needed some iodine. I whipped out my trusty English-Spanish dictionary and identified the word “yodo.” Into the apothecary’s shop I went and asked for yodo. The druggist made me repeat my request and then came back with some sanitary napkins.

“No, no, no, no, no,” said I. I whipped out my dictionary and pointed to the word. “Oh, yodo. Of course we have yodo. All apothecary shops have yodo.” Well, he had his fun, but the only tip I gave him was to floss daily.

Polyglots

2009-03-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

I had a small sixth grade at Sunnyview with a couple of daily incursions from a very small seventh grade. One day, on a whim, I polled the classes as to how many languages they spoke amongst them. The results astonished me.

Most of the students spoke English and Spanish as a matter of course. Some also spoke French. But there was also an albino girl from Peru who spoke Quechuan, she and a few million Incas. Then there was the girl who grew up in Hong Kong but whose family was moving their assets to Europe. She claimed to speak a passable Mandarin. I believed her. Another spoke Swahili, the lengua franca of Africa.

Seventh-grader Dorica de la Fuente was raised in the Philippines and spoke Tagalog. She and her brother, Tony, were chauffeured to school every day in a bullet proof Cadillac. The Cadillac shed bullets like Wonder Woman’s bracelet, but it leaked water through the windshield whenever it rained. I guess bullets are bigger than rain drops.

The star linguist in the sixth grade, hands down and thumbs up, was Thanos Sioris, a Greek and Finnish boy. He spoke English and Spanish, of course, as well as Greek (his father was Minister of Education for Greece) and Finnish (his mother was with the Finnish diplomatic corps). Later, when his mother was sent to the Philippines, he added Tagalog to his arsenal of languages, and German when they were stationed in Vienna.

All told we came up with almost a dozen languages spoken in that select group of sixth- and seventh-graders. And I came up with that amount without even counting English, American and Canadian as separate languages.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Softball, Sunnyview Style

2009-03-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

It Aint Cricket

I was no longer teaching at Sunnyview School in the spring of 1976, the time of the Great Faculty-Student Softball Game. There were only three adult males connected with the staff who had any expertise in the game, and the rest of the positions had to be filled by sincere people who meant well. One such well meaning person was a visiting Brit who had never played baseball. But he had played cricket. That’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?

Well, no, as a matter of fact, it isn’t.

We explained to him that in softball the pitcher does not come running up from somewhere in the next county and bounce the ball towards him. Instead, he stands on a mound of earth whirling his pitching arm around like he was wringing a chicken’s neck and then he tries to fog the ball past the batter as fast as he can. And, this was the critical part, when he hits the ball, if he hits the ball, he is not to charge the pitcher’s mound with bat in hand, but run to first base instead. Putting the bat down. Putting the bat down was critical, although I’ve often thought it would be a far more interesting game if base runners could carry their bats with them.

Then we had some practice and I batted fungoes for 45 minutes. Fungo, that’s a fly ball, and according to the dictionary the word is an “Americanism, origin obscure.” I’m desperately right handed and so batted fungo after fungo that way, swinging my bat from low right to high left and torquing my back each time.

The next morning I couldn’t move. I had a really bad sciatic pain and could only alter my orientation in the bed 90 degrees and try to get up without bending my back. Bedtime was a similar move in reverse. Fall over backward like a tree and change my orientation in bed 90 degrees.

But the Brit did learn to catch fly balls, and he did quite well, even if he forgot and charge the pitcher’s mound after his first hit. Waving his bat. Scared the bejazus out of the pitcher. But that's good. Adults should terrify teenagers every now and then. Makes them polite.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Around the World in 80 Days

2009-03-07T14:08:00.000-08:00

Huguette Pettis owned Sunnyview School. Even though Sunnyview was advertised as an “American School.” Honey (she despaired of any non-French person ever pronouncing “Huguette” correctly) imparted a distinctly European atmosphere. She was French, raised in Algeria, and educated in the European style, the only style suitable for educating young people in her opinion.

I possessed none of those advantages. Although the school year started out well enough, it soon became apparent that she did not think much of my American ways or style of teaching. We had saved money during our profitable years on Guam and had planned originally to not work for the two years we spent in Spain. Given this financial situation, I made plans to work as a self-employed full-time free-lance writer for a year. Honey quite liked Joanne since her style of teaching was more “French,” and so our economic plan involved her continued employment. I recommend this situation to any young married man. This is a great plan for a free-lance writer.

It was in the spring of 1975 and I wanted to go out with a last hurrah, so I volunteered to supervise the end-of-the-year program for the kindergarten through eighth-grade. I was interested in total student involvement and in having interested and talented children working with each other no matter what their grade or who their teacher. Very unFrench. Kindergarten and first grade were the exceptions. Their teachers felt that their kids weren’t quite ready for a free-wheeling activity like this and would rather participate as a group. I wasn’t sure I was quite ready for this activity either. But I was obligated, and so away we went
.
First we had a brainstorming session. There were lots of interesting students and I mixed and matched them so that at least three grade levels were involved in every group, more often four grade levels. The groups were charged with generating ideas no matter how silly, impossible or expensive. The only thing worse than a bad idea, I told them, is no idea at all.

Ideas emerged from movies to monsters to kung fu. One girl didn’t care what we did so long as she got to do a ballet number. The one idea that struck most everyone’s fancy was the story line from Around the World in Eighty Days.

So now we needed to adapt Jules Verne’s novel to our needs and we formed a writing group. I really didn’t want a script with blocking and memorized lines because I thought they would interfere with these kids’ strongest points, imagination, spontaneity, creativity, enthusiasm. In other words, I didn’t want to do a lot of directing.

The group roughed out a story and we selected the countries we would visit for a variety of reasons. We chose Russia so our ballerina could dance. We chose the United States so the kindergarteners and first graders could stage an Indian raid. We chose Spain because we had a Spanish dancing class, England because that’s where Verne started and ended his story, and Africa for no reason at all.

Because we had no theater, we built our sets in different classrooms. That way they could be put up permanently and the audience could go from set to set under the direction of student “tour guides.” About twenty students threw themselves into set building projects. They built Africa and Russia on the second floor, the USA, Spain and England on the first floor, and a portable Indian teepee for the playground outside. They acquired their own materials and designed and built their own sets. Good thing. I’m terrible at designing and building sets. It turned out they weren’t very good either and sometimes the sets wouldn’t nail together or tumbled down as fast as they put them up. But they kept at it and found solutions. Where they found them, I don’t know, because they didn’t ask me.

The acting group had to first get used to improvising. We did some of the beginning drills, pretending we were flowers opening, apples falling from trees, bacon frying in a pan. I gave a few hints on movement and voice projection, but not all that much. Then we started on our play, the story for which had by now been written.

We began daily rehearsals. Everyone involved acted several different parts each day for two weeks before I cast anyone. There was so much interest in the show among the parents that we decided on four different performances. I cast the show in four different ways so everyone got to do four different parts. In one show Passapartout, the valet, was played by three small second graders who had worked out a comedy routine. In another the valet was played by a French boy who had enrolled the previous October speaking only French and Spanish. By June his English was acceptable but heavily accented. He said all of his lines in French. I think I was the only one who didn’t understand what he was saying.

The kindergarteners and first graders were making their costumes and weapons and practicing a dance. They were going to tie their captive to a pole and dance around him. The only difficulty we had with them was persuading them to release their captive so he could be in the next scene.

An eighth grade boy assumed the role of stage manager and took it upon himself to be sure that the set was ready and the actors in place on time. Some of our props had to be hand made and weren’t always successful. We had a hand lens for the detective, but it always bent in the middle so we never used it.

The students interested in music had dwindled to a precious few. Our orchestra consisted of a clarinetist, a guitarist and a bongo player who massaged Moroccan drums, tin cans and other bangables. They furnished most of the music to start the scenes, although the dance music was provided by record player or tape recorder.

As opening neared, the remaining students were pressed into service as furniture movers, tour guides and “expediters” whose job it was to get the parents away from the punch bowl and into the correct room so they could see the play.

Here is as much script as we ever had.

Scene One—London, a pub. Orchestra: Around the World in Eighty Days. A newspaper reader recounts a story of the robbery of the Bank of England to other patrons. This leads into a story about whether it is possible to circumnavigate the world in 80 days. There is a heated argument. Phileas Phogg bets 20,000 pounds he can do it. He and Passapartout, his valet, leave with a bag of money, their traveling expenses.

Scene Two—Spain, a café. Guitarist: Pasodoble. Phogg and Passapartout are on stage admiring the dances from the Spanish dancing class and eating oranges, the peels of which they put into a bag which is an exact duplicate of their money bag. Enter detective, Hemlock Bones, who explains that Phogg and Passapartout were seen leaving England with a bag of money which he thinks is the loot from the Bank of England robbery. Bones steals the wrong bag and exits vowing to dump the contents on the bank manager’s desk.

Scene 3:--Africa, outdoor bazaar. Drummer: solo. Bones enters muttering something about soreheaded bank managers and is about to make his arrest when he is fed a native delicacy and collapses. A witchdoctor performs an emergency laporotomy in his clinic and removes all manner of items from the detective’s abdominal cavity including cans, bottles, lengths of hose. The doctor’s clinic was made of branches and leaves in the center of the room. The front of the clinic was covered with a sheer and a light set up at the rear of the room so we could project this high drama in silhouette form.

Scene 4:--Russia, indoors. Bones enters clutching his abdomen and is about to arrest Phogg and Passapartout when a smuggler asks him to hold a mysterious package. Police then drag the protesting detective off to jail. Afterwards the ballet was performed as well as a Russian folk dance created by four girls in the Spanish dancing class. One of the girls had a hissy fit and dropped out, so the dance for four was done by three. One of the remaining three girls could actually do kazotskies, which amazed us all. That helped make up for the missing dancer. Sometimes one of the dancers also acted in the same scene. Then they would improvise a way to change from policeman, or smuggler to dancer.

Scene 5:--USA, outdoors. Clarinet: Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Actors enter on a train. Just as Bones is about to make his arrest, the first graders and kindergarteners, who have been hiding in rooms all around the set, stage a raid and kidnap him. To attack they had to work their way through the legs of the parents who were standing between them and the USA set. The train collapsed before it’s final performance, so the actors formed a conga line and shook cans of gravel for sound effect.

Scene 6:--London, pub. Orchestra: Around the World in Eighty Days. Phogg wins the bet by arriving just as the clock strikes 12. (Sometimes we had someone off-stage strike the chimes. Once we had someone dressed in a clock suit hit himself in the head with a mallet. It was up to the clock in each performance.) Bones enters and is about to finally make his triumphant arrest when the newspaper reader announces that the thief was caught. It was the bank manager. Bones faints and all of the Indians and other participants enter over his (or her) recumbent form. All bow and exit.

I had forgotten all about this play until I reviewed my Spain notes from over thirty years ago. I really liked this show. For one thing, I didn’t have to do much work. Whenever some kid asked me if something was good, I’d reply, “Let’s try it and see.” Also, I never knew what was going to happen. Each performance was brand new.

As I think about it, this was a good unit. I’m sure the kids learned something. I had no lesson plan with goals, objectives, evaluative criteria, none of that. But I’m sure they learned something. I just don’t know what.

The parents loved the show. Some of them saw all four performances. There were lots of compliments on how creative the children were. Honey Pettis was pleased. How French.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

A Very Short Story

2009-03-02T08:51:00.000-08:00

Susan Lemke told us once about trying to lead her first grade student Julius to the conclusion that 1 + 2 = 3. Somehow drawings, fingers, hash marks and arrangements of painted sticks weren't quite enough.
“Now, Julius, 1 + 1 is 2, right?”
“Yes.”
“So 1 + 2 is 3, right?”
“Doesn't have to be.”
If he had just said “no” that would have been one thing. But to suppose that 1 + 2 is sometimes 3 and sometimes not 3, what is a teacher going to do with that?
Sometimes when the weather permitted, some staff and students would play volley ball. When Julius played, he was fierce about defending his territory. If a ball came his way, he would handle it thank you and would the adults please butt out.
Julius commanded a lot of respect around the school yard because he willed it to be that way. An object lesson for us all.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

David Taff

2009-02-20T11:56:00.000-08:00

David Taff
© Ken Harris 2009

Although I taught sixth and seventh grades at Sunnyview School, a first grader, David Taff, a seven-year-old with all the confidence of a winning politician, used to drop by my room in his free time to have a chat. We talked of many things and his vocabulary was so sophisticated and his observations so acute that I sometimes forgot that I was conversing with a seven-year-old boy.

David's visits dropped off a bit in the spring because a marble craze hit Sunnyview. Everyone played. Boys, and some girls, walked around with their bags of marbles dangling from their belts. At recess about half the students all you could see of them was their rear ends as they knelt in the dirt and flicked glass balls at other people's glass balls. Every now and then someone would show up with a ball bearing for a shooter, a “steelie,” and great would be the outcry of indignation.

But one lunch period David showed up at my desk without his bag of marbles. I asked him, “David, have you lost your marbles?” (Pretty clever joke, huh?)

David replied, “No, but I thought the interest in marbles would soon peak, maybe next week, so I thought I'd sell out while the market is up.”

I thought David was an American until his sister showed up for kindergarten. She didn't speak English at all. She only spoke Swedish and Spanish, the two languages in her home.

I imagine we all work for David now. We just don't know it.

Thanos Sioris

2009-02-12T21:15:00.001-08:00

Thanos Sioris
©Ken Harris, 2008

Sunnyview School had many creative, intelligent students. Unfortunately, they seldom displayed both qualities at the same time. Thanos Sioris was one of the most interesting boys in my sixth grade class. Of moderate height for a twelve-year-old, he was neither the tallest nor the shortest boyi n the class. His complexion was not notably pale, even though his mother was Finnish. Neither was his complexion a Mediterranean walnut though his father was Greek. He was a little on the rotund side and not at all athletically gifted. He possessed none of the attributes that would make him a middle school idol.

Normally such a child would be scorned and teased by his classmates and older students. But such was not the case with Thanos, for the other students recognized in him qualities that made him an original. For one thing, he was always in the adult ego state. You may recall Dr. Eric Bern’s book, I’m O.K., You’re O.K., in which he identified three ego states, Parent, Adult and Child. These ego states were beautifully personified in the original Star Trek. Captain Kirk was almost always the Parent, Mr. Spock was the Adult, and Dr. McCoy was the Child. My sixth grade at Sunnyview School was blessed with a short, slightly rotund Mr. Spock.

Thanos engaged life as a series of problems to be met and solved. So, when some other students asked him to make some itching powder, Thanos regarded the problem as a scientific conundrum. “All right, how do you make itching powder?” Thanos didn’t get into as much trouble as he could have because the staff knew that for him it was an intellectual problem. It probably didn’t even occur to him to ask what the others were going to do with the itching powder. That wasn’t part of the problem.

Once he came up to me with a chemistry problem. “Mr. Harris, I know that you need saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur to make gunpowder. But I can’t find out how much or what the right proportions are. Do you know?”

“No, Thanos, I don’t know,” I replied. “But even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you because you’d blow us all up with your experiments.” He didn’t take my response personally but wandered off instead to seek an answer from another source.

Thanos also had focus. He absolutely knew he was going to be a doctor when he grew up and spent long hours preparing himself. He worked in an apothecary’s shop after school. He had a better, larger, more fully equipped first aid kit at home than we did at school.

That first winter in Spain, in cold, drizzly, wind blown Spain, I developed a head cold with all the uncomfortable symptoms possible. I didn’t miss a one. One day at the height of my misery Thanos handed me the names of two over-the-counter remedies that would address my symptoms., one for my sinuses and runny nose, and the other for my coughing.

He failed to understand the humor when anonymous students posted an ad for “Dr. Sioris” on the school bulletin board that even gave his office hours. If it came down to it, which it never did, I would rather have gone to “Dr. Sioris” than a Spanish doctor. Thanos had a good command of spoken English and a comprehensive knowledge of readily available medicines.

One day in the spring of 1975 a seventh grade boy, Steve Ogden, did something to render himself unconscious on the playground. Even the people with him were unsure of what had happened and, therefore, had no useful opinions about what he might have injured or how badly.

Joanne had him moved into a lounge, out of public view, and laid upon a cushioned surface normally used as a settee. And there he lay, inert but breathing, Joanne observing closely. Thanos entered the room and observed dispassionately, “Mrs. Harris, if his neck is injured he would be better off on a hard surface, the floor, for instance, than the soft one.”

Joanne realized that Thanos was absolutely correct, but replied with perhaps a little more vehemence than necessary, “Thanos, we’re not moving him until we know how badly he’s injured.”

Thanos then launched into an apparently inexhaustible supply of dreadful, dismal and disastrous tales about injuries to the cranium and cervical spine. Just as he was really warming to his subject, the object of concern groaned and then murmured, “Oh, my head.”

At that point the bell rang and Dr. Sioris returned to his regular duties in the sixth grade classroom. Nowadays when Dr. Sioris returns to his regular duties, they are in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland. But I knew him when he treated common colds and offered friendly advice and cautionary tales to concerned teachers.

Our Spanish Villa

2009-01-26T11:29:00.000-08:00

Our Spanish Villa
©Ken Harris 2008

I was surprised when we moved to Spain because I thought they spoke Spanish there. You know. Spain? Spanish?

Not in Torremolinos. Torremolinos is in Andalucía (ahn.dah.loo.SEE.yah) where they speak Andalú (ahn.dah.LOO), a Spanish version of Hillbilly. To properly speak Andalú you must drop the first and last syllables of all the longer words and shout out the remainder. Adiós becomes “JO!!!” Part of the Andalú accent is volume, the louder the better. Earplugs help.

We were certainly in no way qualified to go out and rent our own house and so Honey Pettis enlisted the aid of her Spanish teacher, Carmen Wooten-Reyes. Carmen spoke English well, but rapidly and with a heavy Spanish accent. If she was emotional about something, I could hardly understand a word she said. Just what we needed. Someone we couldn’t understand in two languages.

The situation was not quite so dismal, though, because in short order we understood her well enough to go house hunting. We found a place north of town, Urbanización (oor.bah.nee.sah.see.ON) Colómbia (ko.LOM.bee.yah). The urbanización consisted of four homes, each one named for a city in Colombia. Our house was named Villa Medellín (VEE.yah may.day.YEEN). If our mail had been delivered to the house, that would have been the address. No street names or numbers.

I promise you, by the way, that I will only offend you with spelling for pronunciation the first time you encounter the word.

Our urbanización fronted the highway connecting Málaga and Cádiz (KAH.dees). Built by the Phoenicians to connect their two sea ports, it was the busiest road on the Iberian Peninsula in Phoenician times. In 1974, our time, it was still the busiest road on the Iberian Peninsula, and what with a nationwide epidemic of poor ignition and faulty mufflers, it was also the noisiest and smelliest.

When you see the Spanish word urbanización you think of the English word “urbanization.” Nothing of the sort. Our urbanización lay next to our noisy, smelly, loud highway to the south and vacant fields to the north, west and east. They were nice vacant fields, though, with wild asparagus in season and chamomile.

The houses themselves had rubble walls plastered over and built right on to the ground without benefit of even a mud sill. This method of construction had some curious consequences for us in winter. When the ground was wet, the walls acted as a wick with the result that the inside of the house was colder than a teacher’s wit.

Also in the winter it never got completely dry in the house. Clothes tended to mildew and we had to procure some hot rods for the closet, heating rods you could plug in to at least keep your closet dry. We had the same kind of rods on Guam, but the weather was much warmer.

We had heavy wooden shutters controlled by pulleys and cranks from indoors. It kept out intruders and also noise from the highway. Since in the two years we lived there we were never bothered by either, it must have done a good job. A tile roof completed our architectural ensemble.

We had one green feature to the house that we really liked, a passive solar water heating system. Coils of copper pipe lay in a shallow box, glassed on the side facing the sun most of the day, and with a black interior. The low end of the coil connected to the domestic water supply. The high end fed into a 60-gallon water tank on the roof that fed scalding water by gravity. And the whole thing operated without computers. Just the laws of science and nature. What a concept.

However, the water functioned through another force, this one national rather than natural. The mordida (mor.DEEdah). The “little bite.” And we weren’t fond of that at all. Mordida is a Spanish custom that predates the Romans. In America we call it bribery and we do it secretly. In Spain, and maybe the rest of the world for all I know, it is done without secrecy or compunction. Grease for the wheels of commerce.

Our urbanización owners, Mr. and Mrs. Boli, lived in Algiers. Once each month they would cross the puddle to Torremolinos to collect the rent and pay the mordida to the sanjero (sahn.HAIR.o), aka the water guy, to make sure we received the water that had already been paid for by conventional means. But just to make sure, we paid another small mordida to the man who lived with his family in the tool shed-sized building behind the four houses. (Come to think of it, they may have lived in the tool shed.) He was the Boli’s “full time” maintenance man. Although the Bolis didn’t pay him much, he didn’t do much either. If we really wanted something done, we had better come up with 100 pesetas (about $1.34).

You couldn’t run a household without mordida. I remember the garbage men coming by on Christmas day to collect their gift. There were two of them and I gave them 1000 pesetas (about $13.40) to split between them because I didn’t want them to suddenly start making deliveries.

I’ve been off topic here with my rant about mordidas, but I’ve always disliked them, primarily because no one ever saw fit to give me any.

To finish off our house description, we had three bed rooms, a maid’s room where I set up for writing, a living room and a kitchen with built in scrubbing board riffles so you can wash your socks with the dishes. Actually, the riffles were great for draining the dishes before you put them away. There was no garage, but we were thinking about trying life without a car since we were within walking distance of the school.

And so we began our lives as temporary ex-pats.

Sunnyview School

2009-01-22T13:01:00.000-08:00

Sunnyview School
© Ken Harris 2009

In September, 1974, Sunnyview School had around 115 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. For the elementary grades we followed Calvert School’s curriculum. Calvert School, an accredited day school in Baltimore, Maryland, also furnished materials for home study students, and this decades before the concept became fashionable. High school was done by correspondence through the University of Nebraska. In this way a certain continuity of curriculum was established since the instructional staff itself hailed from Finland, Spain, Scotland, England, France, Canada, Northern Ireland and the U.S. Some of us had teacher training while others had only their availability to recommend them.

The main two-story building at Sunnyview School housed classrooms for first- through eighth-grades. The school office sat on the ground floor where director Honey Pettis and two clerks kept things going. Two principals also kept offices in the building, elementary school principal Jane Barbadillo and high school principal David McConnell. However since Barbadillo and McConnell both had full-time teaching duties, those offices were seldom occupied. Otherwise the building had classrooms for first-through eighth-graders.

Kindergarteners had their own small magic kingdom to the south, separated from the main building by a field of monkey bars, rings and slides. West of the main building lay the swimming pool and the high school class rooms.

The buildings themselves were made of el cheapo hollow clay bricks, made so light you could carry eight at a time. You could probably drop one on your foot with no more than an “oh, damn.” Nothing like the humungous bricks we’re used to in the States. And it wasn’t just the school buying the cheapest commodity they could. This was how bricks were made in Spain. Once in place, workmen covered the bricks with a rough, stucco.

The same el cheapo bricks that formed the buildings also formed the walls surrounding the school, but without the stucco. The bricks were set with wide air spaces between each one. In such a way about fifty percent of the wall was pure hole in the wall so that air could freely flow through without blowing over the barricade. It was just the sort of barrier an enthusiastic kid could ram his motorcycle right through. In fact, that is what one student did the year before we arrived. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, since that would have been unmanly, with the result that he significantly lowered his own I.Q. He didn’t help the wall any, either.

We had no central air or heating. Joanne and I never found the heat oppressive, but, man, it got cold. You always hear about Sunny Spain. Nobody talks much about Warm Spain, especially in winter. We would have all frozen if it hadn’t been for Maguire. Maguire was the school cat, black except for a few white markings. He was in charge of maintaining a mouse-free environment in the kitchen and pantry. In winter he doubled in brass as a hand warmer. Kids smuggled him into class rooms and passed him from lap to lap during the long, boring lectures of which teachers are so fond. Whenever a kid looked directly into a teacher’s eyes, expression bland and inscrutable, you knew he or she had Maguire in hand.

It was totally illegal for us to work at Sunnyview School. We didn’t have green cards. None of us on the educational staff did. I don’t think the Spanish government even had any green cardstock on which they could print any. But we had our cover stories. If the authorities were to raid the school one day, we were to sit in the back of the room and claim that we were only parents, there to observe, while the real teacher had just stepped out. Since we had two children at the school, our cover story might have worked. But how impressed were the authorities going to be if they found six rooms, six observant parents and zero teachers?

The situation was silly. But I trace it to the fact that the Spanish government didn’t like foreigners with their foreign ideas and values. They didn’t trust their influence. We were there during the last year Franco was alive and the first year of Juan Carlos’ rule. But if the government didn’t really like foreigners, it really liked foreign money. Lots of it.. So long as we brought in yankee dollars, pounds, deutschmarks, Swiss francs, we weren’t in much danger of deportation. All the same time, they made it almost impossible to live in the country legally. You were always breaking some law, even if it was having three friends over for brewskis. They were setting it up so that it would be easy to get rid of you if they wanted to.

So even though we sensed that the government didn’t really care, Honey Pettis wanted us to go through the pretext of applying for work permits. This led us to one of Spain’s most noble type of citizens, the gestor (hess.TOR, not jester). Although it seems like a joke, the gestor is a fixer. He fixes things between people and their government. Even when they’re not broken, he fixes them.

We went to the gestor and presented him with our teaching credentials. He was very impressed with Joanne’s. He admired the quality of the paper, the impressive seal and signatures. After much praise, he put both certificates in a folder and kept them. I thought Joanne was going to swallow her tongue.

We never got green cards, and maybe that’s why I can sympathize a bit with the plight of the illegal alien here in Arizona, working without a green card and hoping he can lie or run fast if he gets caught. Oddly enough, the gestor got us Spanish social security, which qualified us for government funded medical treatment in Spain. Since the United Kingdom had a reciprocal agreement with Spain, we were also entitled to government health care when vacationing in England as well. We got our credentials back from the gestor when we were about to leave Spain, almost two years later.

In Spain it’s not so much what you achieve as the motions you go through.

The Paseo

2009-01-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

The Paseo
Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Torremolinos opened my eyes to an entirely new lifestyle. Nothing in our past lives had prepared us for this raffish and entertaining tourist town. It reminded me of Venice Beach in California. When the sun went down, people just turned on the lights and partied on. Amazing. Remember, though, that we were staying at a beach front apartment. It was a lot like renting digs on a carnival midway.

A word on why Joanne and I could be in our early 40s and still have a “Golly Gee” reaction to the nightlife we saw. We were and are basically country people. Up until we moved to Guam, we had always kept horses, chickens, cows, and other livestock. The horses didn’t care if we had partied until 3:00 a.m.. They wanted their breakfast on time and were not above being vocal about it. This makes for an unpleasant dawn on New Year’s Day. Trust me on this one.

And Guam was not a frenetic experience, even though we lived in the heart of the capital city. We lived near the cathedral. Cathedral areas the world over are never noted for their swinging night life.
So if you could have seen us on our first night, you would have thought we had just come into town by burro cart and were trying to figure out how to work the light switches.

Torremolinos was a swinging town. Somehow in the 1960s it had become a Hippie Haven for disaffected youth on their Grand Tour, so much so that James Michener wrote a book about the place, The Drifters. Other Americans and Europeans of any age looking for vacations with most fun and least expenditure found their way to Torremolinos.

We had recovered from our previous day’s flight to where we could go walking in the evening and observe the paseo. The paseo is a justifiably world famous custom where in the evenings girls dress up in their finest and walk up and down the streets with their friends, never alone, while the boys, also dress in their finery which consisted of skin tight trousers and shirts with the top four buttons undone, scope each other out. The girls pass in review while the boys review them, audibly and appreciatively.

Besides the paseo, we also observed the singularly civilized habit of tapa hopping. This activity was for men and women, not boys and girls. A tapa is a small snack one has with his glass of wine, for it is not civilized to drink on an empty stomach. As I understand the matter, the abundance of flies in Spain made it undesirable to leave your glass of wine untended for very long, so some inspired bartender put a small dish on top of the wine glass, a tapón. But the empty dish looked inhospitable just sitting there, and so the custom developed of putting something in the dish, an olive perhaps, or minced garlic and olive oil into which one could dip a slice of bread.

Some bars began to develop their own tapa specialties and now, well, maybe not now but thirty years ago, Madrid was famous for their tapas. Some bars specialized in lobster, others in shrimp, and it became quite the thing to go tapa hopping, going from bar to bar for a glass of wine and a chat with friends. Sometime a tapa hopping expedition might take three hours and was done instead of supper.

Torremolinos bars did not aspire to Madrid standards, and some of the beach front bars just offered commercial pretzels. My favorite tapa was calamari a la romana, deep fat fried squid rings. I can hear some of you in my imagination saying, “E-e-e-w-w-w-w!” But with a squeeze of lemon, calamari was delicious. Fried in lard really helps the taste of sea food. Lard helps the taste of everything but ice cream.

But enough thoughts of cuisine. Joanne, Pat and I were still very tired and so we returned to our apartment while Eric went off with John Pettis and other newfound 13-year-old live wires. But he soon came running into our apartment, took off his clothes and began to put on mine. He got on the pants and suit coat, although they were a little big for him. Give him a cane, a mustache and a derby and he could have been Charlie Chaplin. Eric was half way through tying my necktie when it occurred to him that he didn’t know how to do that. That’s when he sought my advice.

I, in turn, was curious about what could have wrought such galvanic activity in my son, the one who didn’t want to come to Spain at all. It seems he had met two Canadian girls, probably in their early twenties and of a mind to toy with a puppy, who told him that if he would dress up he could go tapa hopping with them. I depressed his ambitions first by denying him any money for the expedition and second by demanding my clothes back.

I knew that this was going to be an interesting time in my life.

First Night in Torremolinos

2008-12-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

First Night in Torremolinos
©Ken Harris, 2008

Welcome to Spain. Bienvenidos a España. Give us $400, por favor. It was the overage from Los Angeles come to haunt us all the way across the Atlantic. Joanne got steamed all over again. She’s still steamed, come to think of it. But it’s early days yet. This happened in 1974 and it’s only 2008. Anyway, we showed the kindly TWA representative our receipts and he released us just in time to make our flight to Málaga.

All my benighted life I had been mispronouncing the name of this city, putting the accent on the second syllable rather than the first. Perhaps it’s because I had never seen it spelled properly before, with an accent over the first “a.” In the States we aren’t given to tildes, umlauts, or other accents. Anyway, I had misgivings. I wondered how many other words I was going to have to learn to pronounce over again.

Our future boss, Honey Pettis, met us at the Málaga airport, piled us into the Sunnyview School van and drove us to our new home, Torremolinos (tor.ray.mo.LEE.nos). Honey was French and her first name was Huguette, but she despaired of her American husband, or any other American for that matter, learning to pronounce her name properly, and she said she preferred “Honey.” Since she was running an American school and many of her parents were Americans, the nickname just made things easier all round.

Honey took us to an apartment on the first floor of a beachfront apartment building. We rested for a bit and then walked to the Pettis residence, also beach front, where we met the entire Pettis family, Chuck Sr., Mike, Chuck Jr., John and Sultan, the German Shepherd who liked to carry large rocks in his mouth.

On returning to our apartment we were briefly confounded by the buttons on the elevator. If we were on the first floor, why did we need an elevator? Because in Spain, and in all of Europe from what I understand, the first floor is on the second floor. The ground floor is the piso bajo (pee.so BÄH.ho) and is clearly marked on the elevator button with a PB. The floor above the piso bajo has to be the first floor, doesn’t it? You could start numbering with the second floor, but that wouldn’t be very logical now, would it?

We unpacked enough stuff to get to bed and I don’t think it took anyone longer than thirty seconds to get to sleep. It had been a long day. We slept soundly until around 2:00 in the morning when a drunk began serenading the neighborhood with music from Jesus Christ, Superstar. Well, not the duet and chorus numbers, but the solos. And the man had a magnificent voice. Badly as we needed our sleep, Joanne and I were glad that nobody interrupted him until he was through with his concert.

Old habits die hard, and Joanne and I were awake as the sun rose. Somehow coffee, bread and butter had materialized in our apartment and, as the sun came up behind our building, we sat on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean taking our breakfast and thinking, “You know, this could work out.”

Flight to Spain

2008-12-25T08:32:00.000-08:00

Flight to Spain
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

My wife, Joanne, and I taught on Guam from 1970 to 1974. Our contracts expired in June, 1974 and we decided to live somewhere else for a couple of years. We applied for teaching positions in various countries, but received no offers. So we decided to move to Spain for a year without jobs since we understood prices were reasonable and a year’s stay would not make serious indentures into our savings. (We had saved a lot of money on Guam.)

Before we left Guam we visited a travel agent and presented a specific itinerary. We bought tickets ahead of time from Agana to Los Angeles, and then Los Angeles to New York to Madrid. Our plans extended no further than that. We had everything worked out except what kind of sandwiches we would eat at Kennedy.

By then we were seasoned travelers. Our daughter, Patricia wanted to leave ahead of us, visit a friend in Connecticut, and meet us in New York on the appointed day at the appointed time. Somewhere in Kennedy. (If you’ve never been to that airport, it’s about the size of Rhode Island.) We saw nothing wrong with her plan because she was, after all, almost a 10th-grader and as long as she didn’t go to Spain without us, what could go wrong?
Over the summer two job offers at Sunnyview School in Torremolinos came up, high school for Joanne and a 6th-7th combination for me. We accepted because, while the financial rewards were dismal, it would give us something to do while we enjoyed the culture of Spain. We adjusted our plans to include a leg from Madrid to Málaga (MAH.lah.gah), only twenty kilometers (about 12 miles) from Torremolinos.

We spent an indolent summer with Joanne’s parents and visiting friends. Our daughter was in Connecticut, but our son, Eric, who at that time was enjoying an extreme case of 8th-grade-it is, stayed with us. He aggravated his grandfather Heyser almost beyond endurance, but we kept them on opposite sides of the house most of the time and thus got through the summer without homicide, mayhem, or even a 911 call.

Eric did not want to go to Spain, and so he drew up this elaborate “rap sheet” that he attributed to the FBI. His plan was to be intercepted at Madrid airport and put on a return flight to New York. He would work out the further details from Kennedy. He had done the entire document in blue ink from a Bic pen in his finest printing, but I doubt if the Spanish customs would have been impressed. In any event, he had lost the folder by the time it came for us to leave for Spain.

Joanne, Eric and I checked into Los Angeles for our first flight. We were flabbergasted to learn that we owned another $400, right now, on the spot. Not even a kiss. The clerk contended we hadn’t paid enough on Guam. And there we stood at the head of a long line of people waiting to buy their tickets and Pat was already on her way from Connecticut to meet us in New York. There really wasn’t much time to think. So we paid the $400, vowing to write a letter of complaint and seek a refund later.

If I had thought things through, I would have bought an extra ticket for one of our suitcases, Los Angeles to New York only. It would have cost less than $400 although a boarding pass for S. Harris might have raised some eyebrows.

We met Pat and caught our flight to Madrid. It was a huge plane with humanity packed in as tightly as could be. Once underway, Joanne, still steaming about the $400, began to regale all of the passengers around her with our sad story. Others began to contribute their tales of woe. We had paid more than anybody else, but everyone had paid a different fare to be on that flight.

A flight steward appeared and asked what the problem was. I think it says somewhere in the Steward’s Handbook that you don’t ever let customers compare prices with each other. He quickly bought us a round of drinks. Doubles. Then he gave us the address of a senior vice president to whom we could complain and said something definitely would be done. It was a magic address. We wrote the letter and sent it after we arrived in Spain, but never heard any more about it. Like most magic, it didn’t work.

I suspect the steward may have given us his own home address. And I suspect something was done with our letter. In my imagination I can hear the toilet flushing now.