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The tallest house on the lane—the tallest of the seven structures that are houses, not barns converted into garages or workshops—is three stories. It sits with its back to the lane, a small faded green house huddled against it on one side and on the other side a freestanding old brick garage, a parking spot, and access to the front of the house. The house is painted bright blue, only not altogether bright. Something dark, a sort of warning note, is in the splendid color, as if the house is a peacock, tail spread, a single-color fan of attention-getting feathers held stiff as the bird glares over its shoulder at you, just daring you. The house holds a hint of that dark flashing eye. No need to shake and shimmer—not this dwelling with its back on you, the color unbroken except for two small windows in the rear and two on the side. The front of the house, with its wooden balcony and inviting porch, is not in view from the lane.
Does this color have a name? Electric occurred to me, as did royal. Bright blue, called añil for the plant whose berries provided the color, is the shade of the lower half of the whitewashed houses in traditional villages in La Mancha. The whitewash served to keep the houses cool in summer and to sterilize the homes, and the blue disguised the dirt and dust kicked up by horse or cart. No terracotta tones for those homes as you find across much of Castile. But that blue is not quite so bright and deep, and those blue and white houses, a whole tribe of them, do not individually demand your attention, as this house does in its setting, faded green cottage on one side, dull red brick garage on the other, and mostly cream and yellow buildings, weathered wood, and tan and gray stone along the street.
The color is one you noticed even before the recent paint job after some roof work. Now, freshened up, the house doesn’t so much draw your attention as seize it. I feel a bit wary of it. Imagine a teenager, big for his age, invigorated after a can of coke or a chocolate bar, poised to make a move. That is this house. The color is not a mix of electric and royal but the most of both. It’s an eye opener.
When I took the shortcut and stepped through my window onto the lane the morning after the house was freshly painted—the shortcut to the street, a neighbor had wonderingly informed me, favored by all the previous tenants too—the birds were just starting their chirping. A breeze was rising. I looked down the lane. The house, like a sunrise, was just coming into its own. It seemed to occupy more than its allotted space in the lane, as if it had just inhaled. How firm, how strong it appeared. A big block of blue. Not threatening, exactly, but ready to give orders. How long would it remain the prince of the street? All that day the house held its own and then some. But it couldn’t last. After two months, the other houses on the street and the oddly placed garages that go with them have resumed their regular low-key communion. The peacock house, like a flashy bird, or a brazen youth, or even an aging adult determined to stay in the game, may still think it’s to be reckoned with, and it may still impress a newcomer, but we others on the street know that despite its preening, it’s just a house.
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The affix en was the subject of the lesson. Only one student had shown up, a young woman, 23, with a sturdy, athletic body, long dark hair, and a round face, who brings to mind my best friend in fourth grade, a skinny girl whose hair was blond, not dark, and who had her mother’s high cheekbones and a long, angular face, not a round one. But as a girl and later as a college student and then as a grown woman, my friend often had the same expectant expression as this student, equally confident and hesitant, as if she were waiting for the right moment to jump in with a joke or a funny story. It was a self-conscious look but without a trace of embarrassment or cunning. I remembered that about my friend, and here the exact same look was on this very different face. It was strange. I tried to forget my fourth-grade friend, but how could I when she kept reappearing with each subtle adjustment of my student’s expression? Here my friend was in different guise, across the room, waiting, alert but not wary, ready but not impatient. I almost expected the student’s shape and coloring to disintegrate and fall away and reveal my friend, laughing at how long it had taken me to recognize her in her getup. We might both be 10 again, playing hide-and-seek, and my friend hiding in plain sight. “I knew it was you!” I’d want to say when she shook off the disguise. “I guessed!” My friend would laugh merrily. No wonder I felt so inclined to like this student.
There comes a point when a student who has aroused my curiosity no longer fascinates me. It’s not that I discover I was wrong in my opinion and am now disappointed, but that I get used to the student. So far, however, this student has continued to intrigue me, even after five months of class. That evening, I watched her ponder the textbook’s questions designed to encourage (encourage) the use of words with the affix en. The first was whether a shortened work week with a longer workday was preferable to a lengthened work week with a shorter workday. I expected her to choose the shorter week of, say, four 10-hour days rather than the six-day week with shorter hours. She did. “By lengthening the workday and shortening the work week, you have more free time to enjoy yourself, even if it’s just sleeping,” she said, smiling.
I chuckled because I knew how much she likes sleeping. I had already learned that she sets five alarms to wake up, and still she often lingers in bed too long and has to pull on her clothes and run out the door, no breakfast, no shower, to avoid arriving late for work. I know her boyfriend is still slumbering in bed, having learned to sleep through the barrage of alarms, I know he doesn’t do housework, and I know that when she comes home at the end of a long day and gets into bed, the bed is unmade.
“I couldn’t do that,” I’d said when she’d shared this private detail earlier. “I couldn’t get into an unmade bed.”
My student had nodded. It seemed too silly, she’d explained, to make the bed before dinner only to mess it up again just an hour later. It was my turn to nod, showing that I understood the reasoning, though it didn’t seem silly to me at all. Making the bed isn’t only to have it neat all day, but to provide that precious moment of drawing back the covers, akin to removing the paper from a present. Or the lid from a Tupperware container where the leftovers are stored instead of on a plate shoved into the fridge. It’s about starting the night afresh, not just taking up where you were when you crawled out in the morning. It’s about having things right. She ought to understand—she likes her clothes folded just so and because her boyfriend doesn’t do it the way she likes, the laundry is her chore. So is the shopping, the washing up, and the housecleaning. “What does he do?” I’d asked when I learned this.
“The cooking,” she’d said, her face showing that wonderful combination of surprise and satisfaction. “He does the cooking. All the cooking. I hate cooking. And he does it all.”
Of course. The cooking done, the meal ready. You’d be grateful to come home to that and wouldn’t make a fuss about the unmade bed. “Besides,” she said, “I don’t care.”
And yet, I pointed out, she cared about how a T-shirt was folded. You’re going to wear the T-shirt, so let it be satisfactorily folded. You need to go to bed, so let it be inviting.
“But I don’t care,” she repeated, almost nervously but with that characteristic quick surprised laugh, adding that by that point, any bed, made or unmade, is inviting. Her smile was full of promise and quiet gaiety. If a smile were a footstep, hers would be a hop and a skip. Not a forceful stride, a leisurely stroll, a saunter or amble or march, just a happy, self-conscious hop, and then it’d be over. Until she did it again. Just like my friend.
In “Friend of My Youth,” Alice Munro’s narrator tells of seeing her mother in a dream. In real life, her mother had died after years of a debilitating disease, but in the dream she looks good—so much better than the narrator remembers that she is astonished. In the dream, her mother makes light of the signs already appearing of her coming infirmity. “It’s nothing much,” she assures her daughter, with her old liveliness and humor. How, the narrator wonders, could she have forgotten this? As I turn to my student to ask her opinion about one question or another in the book, I am not surprised by what I have forgotten but amazed by how well I remember a friend from my youth and by how strong her presence is. I am surprised by how real the past is and how tenuous everything else, how uncertain. How much fun my friend still is, slipping into a room quietly, drawing no attention to herself, hiding in plain view.
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John Prine wrote his song “Hello in There” at 22, when he was too young to have experienced the isolating effects of old age that he depicts with such sympathy.
You know that old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder every day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello.”
Children often wriggle like puppies, bursting out of their skins. As teens, they retreat into the edifices they build around themselves, the blinds come down, and it becomes harder to peak inside. The surface of those structures often has a high shine. No leaks or holes. Nothing gets in or out. But time wears you down. You rattle around within the confines of your own chosen habits. You are your own prison. As Roger Angell says in “This Old Man,” you become invisible though you sit in plain sight. Time strips much away but manages to leave remnants from your former life that knock about sadly. You are not a sponge soaking up everything and getting fuller and fuller but instead a hollow shell with bits of the past rubbing a raw spot. You further wither. Few people see you, much less show any interest. What to do?
A neighbor on my street, who, at 92, lives alone in the same house where she raised her children, is a fine example of keeping alert and interested despite old age. Her house faces south, as does mine, but being across the lane, her house gives onto a patch of meadow, not onto the comings and goings on the asphalt. Through her kitchen window or from her front patio, she sees flowers in the pots just outside her door and grass and trees in the land beyond the low stone wall, but no human activity. So what does she do? Gets her two canes and hobbles around the corner of her house, leaving her sanctuary to sit on a peeling plank fixed to the side of the building, under a bit of overhang. From there, propped against the wall, she sees every person who enters or leaves the dead-end lane, whether coming from the far end on foot or by car, or whether climbing the stairs behind the sports center to the lane that way. And because she’s there, you say hello. And she answers full of energy, “Hello, hello!”
One drizzly morning in early spring, I drove past the woman’s house on my way out of the lane. Nobody was about at that hour, nine a.m. on a Saturday. Strangely, smoke was seeping from a window in the back of her house. The friend I was with and I looked at each other. “What’s this?” we said. He was driving and stopped so I could hop out and check. The window was open, so I went to it, and now more smoke came drifting out. “Hello!” I called. “Hello! Anyone in there?” No answer. “Hello?”
I ran around the front of the car and headed past the bench where the old woman so often sat. I had never seen the other side of her house, the front side, but I barged right in to this inner sanctum. “Hello, hello?”
The front door was open and smoke wafted out. Beside the door a window was open too, into the kitchen. I peered into the smoky room. “Hello?” I said.
From the back the old woman answered. She leaned on the counter with one hand and with the other she fanned away the black smoke. “What’s happened? Are you okay?” I asked, and amid some coughs she answered that the coal in the old cook stove wouldn’t burn. “No tira,” she said. It won’t draw. She coughed again.
I urged her to come out. I asked if her son or daughter, who both checked on her daily, were around. Her son lived just three blocks away, and she had attempted to call, but hadn’t managed to. “You try,” she told me, shuffling to the window to hand me her phone. I found the number in the contact list and pressed to dial. Her son answered, and I passed the phone back. A jumbled account she gave him, but that was good enough—he was coming right over. By then my friend had parked the car and come around to the front of the house too. Speaking of the toxicity of coal smoke, he urged the old woman to come out of the kitchen, and she did, hobbling on her canes. She stood under the awning, out of the fine drizzle. The door was open behind her. She was fine, she said, and promised to wait for her son there. No, she wasn’t cold. No, she didn’t want a chair. She thanked us. And so, we left.
John Prine died in the spring of 2020, an early casualty of Covid. He had just finished a European tour. This woman survived the pandemic, fairly isolated in her home. Her birthday was a few weeks after the cook stove incident. “Can you eat sweets?” I asked when she told me about her upcoming birthday, the very next time I saw her. She was seated on her wooden plank, and I had stopped to say hello. “I’ll make you a cake,” I said, sitting down beside her. No, no, she said, as I had expected. Thank you, no. She patted my leg. She could eat sweets, she added, but had never been very fond of them. “Like my father!” I exclaimed. It was a nice connection to the old woman. But the tighter connection was me peering into the smoke and calling, and her appearing in answer.
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Palm Sunday behind us, Passover today, Good Friday coming up, Easter after that. A handful of special days, each with its designation, its tradition, its significance, bunched together as Holy Week, Semana Santa in Spanish. Easter might be the apex in Spain, with chocolate bunnies for children and solemn processions all over the country for the devout, the ardent, and the curious. Then the celebrations are over. Unless you live as I do in Pola de Siero and still have the fiesta of the painted eggs to look forward to, huevos pintos in Spanish and güevos pintos in Asturian. The festival is held the Tuesday after Easter. Not famous the world round, but on the lists of important cultural celebrations hereabouts and much attended. It’s a last, colorful burst of fun before the Easter celebrations are over.
This is my second Easter in La Pola, but last year I was newly arrived and still buried under a pile of boxes, unable to squirm out to partake in the festivities. When I did wriggle free, it was to appear at the town’s notary office to sign the papers for the purchase of the house that I was already living in. I remember sitting in the notary’s office across a big table from the marquesa and her family’s consigliere, who was easing both of us through the process. I was surprised that she seemed nervous—half the town had belonged to her family once, my little house being just a crumb of the cake the family had feasted on for ages. The notary appeared, confirmed our identities, gave us the document of sale, and then disappeared, allowing us time to read what we would shortly sign.
As soon as he was out of the room, the agent commented that the notary’s absenting himself from the room was routine: it was an old habit of notaries to protect themselves from implication in any irregularities in the deal, such as partial payment under the table to save on taxes. The marquesa and I listened. Then the notary reappeared to read the document aloud, ask if we had any questions, verify the payment (which was the receipt for a bank transfer I had already made), explain that we’d get a copy eventually of the papers, and remind me of the costs still to be assessed—the taxes, the registration costs, and the notary fees, together amounting to about 10 percent of the sale price. And that was it. I owned a house, all my own, my first ever. I wanted to get back to it. I wasn’t even conscious of the town’s festivities.
This year is different. My world has expanded beyond the walls of my house. I will go down to the town’s main park in the late morning, wander through the line of stalls where artisans and merchants display their goods, principally the painted eggs. No reader of this post needs reminding what colored, dyed, or painted eggs are. But until you’ve seen dozens of them beautifully painted in scenes of astonishing detail, you can’t imagine the intricate care and great talent used to create such fragile artifacts. The tradition of painted eggs stems, I read, from the accumulation of eggs during Lent, when no meat or dairy was consumed. Afterward, one could both celebrate and eat, and so it was.
I first visited the painted eggs celebration about 10 years ago. A collection of beautifully decorated eggs I could imagine, but hundreds to admire? Originally the eggs were cooked in the old kitchens and colored with soot from the fire, and the first color they had was simply dark. Or they were boiled with chestnuts and acquired a reddish tone. Later, new dyes and tools came into use. India ink was used, paints and washes. Brushes and calligraphy pens replaced twigs dipped in wax. The eggs were decorated with traditional scenes on one side, often with pithy counsel on the other. Nowadays you can see tiny renditions of Las Meninas or Guernica, or characters from children’s cartoons.
I expect to see people thronging the market when I go. I will view all kinds of baked and fried pastries, many savory dishes, cider opened and poured, bars with tables set out serving wine, beer, and plates of one specialty or another. The day is a holiday in La Pola. Children will still be on their Easter break. I will watch the people, who will come and go all afternoon and into the evening, and I will join them for a while. Later, back at home, I will hear the happy sounds of the verbena, the big outdoor party with food and music, dance and drink, that will not conclude until the day, like so many good days, runs over into the next. And so life goes on, one day running into the next, one year into the following, one decade merging with another. Sometimes we stand midpoint, looking ahead and back. This year, last, next. With luck, something unexpected, a reprieve, joyous and bright, around the bend, before it’s all over.
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The new student in the advanced English class, a 16-year-old, was a large, soft-looking young man with a round face, barely defined jaw, and floppy brown hair almost to his shoulders. Plumped in his seat, he reminded me of an oversize stuffed animal, a peluche. I expected him to be slow and quiet, perhaps bumbling, but instead he was an interesting combination of assertiveness and diffidence, full of opinions given without embarrassment—The view from this corner into the street is very nice! The lights in the street are pretty!—though in answering a question, he often paused in search of the right word, then expressed doubt that he had found it. His voice was loud and clear, and I liked him as soon as he spoke, and the feeling increased steadily, notching up every time I looked his way or he gave his opinion. At the end of the first class, he stood up and turned to the other two students, who were pulling on their coats, and said, “You know, these chairs are really comfortable!”
The chairs were old and battered desk chairs, not chairs for desks but ones that incorporated a writing surface and substituted for a desk. They were surprisingly durable and had lasted many years, but the Formica surfaces were nicked, the plastic strips on the rims of the seats and backs were peeling, and the glint of metal showed through the chipped black paint on the legs. I laughed and said, “That’s the first nice thing anyone has said about these chairs in a long time.”
“Really very comfortable,” he repeated.
He did not make the remark in passing but as if he’d discovered something of interest to everyone. I found him disarming. “I don’t know if you understand me,” he had said several times during class, squinching up his face in worry. He couldn’t be only 16, I thought. No 16-year-old could be so free of self-consciousness, so open. His demeanor suggested someone who had advanced beyond fear of what others thought. “I don’t know!” It wasn’t a disavowal but an appeal. In another class of 16-year-olds, the students routinely shrugged when they didn’t have the answer, and had I asked those students to elaborate, I feel sure they would have said, “Who cares?” Not this student. He cared enough to ask for help—help in choosing his words and shaping his sentences, not as in I can’t do it, you do it but as in Does this work? Communication appeared to be a team task. I was captivated.
So when on the second day he said that he believed high school students often questioned their purpose in life, I didn’t blink, though I had just minutes earlier suggested the opposite—that high school students generally don’t think about a purpose to their lives or wonder why they are here. They don’t think in terms of the meaning or point of their existence. At best, I believe, they think about the meaning or the point of a particular action or particular moment, but the trajectory they don’t question. They seem on the whole to be fairly confident that enjoyment is the point of life. To have a comfortable life, have friends to socialize with, a family, a job with a good salary, time for hobbies—this is what the high school students usually tell me they want from life. However, when I had asked the new student to select a statement that he agreed with from among the 10 we’d been looking at in the class book, he’d chosen the statement that said it is normal to start questioning your purpose in life when you’re young. “You agree with that?” I asked, to make sure.
“Yes.”
“Do you know many people your age who do that? Or do you?”
“Yes,” he said and began to talk about what he wanted to do, and where he’d like to be, and what choices he might make. He often wondered, he said, about all of this. It occurred to me, looking at his very earnest, open face, that he was talking about what track to follow to reach his goals, but not about whether his goal was good, or whether any goal might exist beyond satisfying his own desires.
“Are you sure it’s purpose you’re talking about?” I asked. “I think it’s something a bit different.”
“Okay,” he said, cocking his head. He waited with an air of willing expectancy.
“Maybe it’s not a purpose you’re describing but a path.”
“Yes!” he said. He raised his fist as if in exaltation. “That’s exactly right. That’s the right word.” He smiled at me. “You got it!”
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The Río Manzanares passes through Madrid on its way from its headwaters in the Sierra de Guadarrama to the end of its course, where after 92 kilometers it meets and merges into the Tajo. Francisco de Goya, who lived for five years on a farm on the banks of the Manzanares, depicts the river in some of his best-known paintings. Poets too make mention of it. But who tells the stories of the Río Nora, which passes by my town of Pola de Siero on its 62 kilometer course from its headwaters to where it joins the Nalón? No songs I know of, no stories or famous paintings commemorate life along its banks, though here, as in rivers all over the country, water was fetched, the washing was done, and in the shade of trees along its banks, people picnicked and bathed. Some must have paused too just to admire the vistas. Near its mouth, the Nora cuts back and forth in large loops and bends, called meanders in English and practically the same in Spanish, meandros. The meanders on the Nora are especially beautiful and are designated a national natural monument, protected since 2012.
Not protected and presumably not as remarkable are the bends in the Nora where it runs past La Pola, in the bottomland below the town. An asphalted river path winds beside the river. Five times in two kilometers, bridges span the water, and the path passes from one bank of the river to the opposite, as if to gain a better foothold on the far side. Rather than one following the other, the two paths seem intertwined, the path of the river and the man-made path beside it. One cold January morning, after two days of storms across Asturias, with rain near the coast, snow in the mountains, and hail mixed with sleet in La Pola, the rain ceased, and I left my house to walk down to the river to see what was happening.
The access road down from the town was streaming with water, practically a river itself, and the river beyond was swollen and muddy. When I reached the river path near the old Roman bridge, I was amazed to see that the river seemed on the point of overflowing its banks on both sides, swirling close to the river path on the near side and inundating a field on the far one.
I followed the river from the open meadows into a wooded stretch where trees grow so close to the water that they stick out from the steep banks and lean over the river, practically part of it. That day was different. The chocolate-colored water filled the narrow channel, sweeping along, bouncing off the banks where the river course curved, hurrying on, under the bridges, around the bends, past the trees stretching toward it with splayed, finger-like twigs.
The wet black trunks, the chocolate water, the bony grasping fingers. Despite the rushing river, there was a stillness to the day.
The rain was holding off but seemed likely to start again at any moment. Ahead, at a bend, the trees were even thicker. They clustered on the bank, and a few stood knee-deep in eddies just below. They gave the impression they were bracing not against the river’s push but against the call of something they might not resist: the tumbling water, the gray sky. One or two seemed to have waded halfway in. I looked up and then down the river. All around me, I could see the trees in congregation, some dipping their toes, some deep in the water, some watching. A whole arboreal landscape had come to life, and the community stood in the balance between the steadying tug of their roots as they leaned toward the water and the tug of the water itself. The trees along the bank were easing into the current, the trees on the hillside above the path shifting ever so slightly nearer. The river surged and rolled. Trees, I wondered, what do you feel? What do you hear in the voice of the river? Foolish questions on a cold, wet morning. But not one bit foolish the words of Victoria Chang in her poem “In a Clearing”: “My whole life, I thought to / mourn leaves falling. Now I / marvel at all the splitting.”
How marvelous to be among the trees at riverside on that wet cold morning, drops still falling from dark lifted branches, the scene splitting into its components of gray asphalt, wet bark, spindly bare branches, churning chocolatey water, and whole trees on the verge of parting to join the river.
Just a day later, when I returned, I saw toppled trees split and broken at the river’s edge. They lay as they had fallen, half in and half out of the water. Others had retreated from the verge. The river too had withdrawn and was again but another element of the unified picture of the landscape after a storm.
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Down to the playground in the park I went on the first Saturday in February, in search of my friend and his granddaughter. The day was a cold but sunny one after a spate of winter storms, and people were out. Did they seem particularly friendly? I thought they did; they looked open, happy. I wandered among the glad children and their minders—the caretakers, I noticed, seemed mostly to be men—but I did not find my friend and his young charge. On I went to run an errand, passing a group of protesters in the corner of the park, in front of the city hall. I stopped to watch. Ten people held two large banners among them. Besides a reporter taking pictures, I was the only onlooker, and I had paused for just a moment, wondering what the protest was for.
“Siero es contra les violencias machistas” was handprinted in white marker on a sheer purple cloth banner. Siero is against gender-based violence. A similar message was on another, dark purple banner. Both were in Asturian, a language practically signaling protest. I see it employed on the often-defaced road signs announcing a town, the Spanish name scratched out and the Asturian painted in. These 10 people, however, despite their solemn message, looked cheery, like everyone else I saw. The lightweight banners, the two shades of purple, the clean printing—it made a pretty sight. But why protest gender-based violence today? Because the first month of the new year had ended with a shocking toll—seven women murdered at the hands of men they loved or had loved, men who presumably had felt the same. But there it seemed the sameness ended, the men feeling and giving into rage, the women feeling fear. Rage and fear—who doesn’t feel both, at some time? An even greater number of men and women made the news in December—11 deaths from gender-based violence.
Later, at home, I looked up both statistics on the internet, finding sites that include detailed reports of every case of a woman murdered by a man, keeping count of how many women were victims of current or former partners. Lawmakers are considering how to protect women by allowing them access to any record of accusations of gender-based violence made against their partners. Other help is ever more accessible, such as hotlines and other numbers to report abuse or seek urgent help. Plus public awareness campaigns. But in the confusion of terminology—femincidios, violencia de género, violencia machista—one thing was clear to me: no one wins these fights, and men’s groups ought to be looking into hotlines to report feelings of overwhelming ire, boiling rage. Men and women are not both guilty when one attacks the other, but both may be victims.
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“If one could run without getting tired,” writes C. S. Lewis in The Last Battle, “I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.” Yes, C. S. Lewis, curmudgeonly mathematician, extols running. He’s right—nothing else is like it. So when my physical therapist told me running was out for me, I recoiled. “Wait,” I thought. “What? No more running?”
It was my spine, the therapist explained.
I had gone to him after two months of persistent back pain. Curiously, almost as soon as I made the appointment, I found that the pain began to let up, and so I went with a sense of optimism. I expected the physical therapist would suggest some back exercises, advise me to buy new running shoes, and tell me to beware of bending to pick up a box, but basically congratulate me on a good start to full recovery. Then I would resume running just like before, because nothing was really wrong, or I wouldn’t already be seeing improvement. A little scoliosis, okay, I know that’s true. Some bone spurs, revealed by an x-ray. Discs that are not exactly what or where they should be. All of that I could understand. Even that, because of my makeup, I absorb the impact of running unequally, aggravating my spine with each foot strike. So I’d run a little slower, I’d stay off mountainsides. But give up running? Altogether? That was impossible. I told the therapist I was signed up for a race in three days.
The therapist said he understood how I was feeling. But I couldn’t run the race. I didn’t want to risk a fracture and find myself in a wheelchair, did I?
I had no words. Running was everything. I felt as if he’d told me I needed to quit breathing to not die.
“Look,” he told me, as he stepped away a few feet, turned sideways, then hunched his back and slumped one shoulder while twisting and raising the other at the same time. He seemed to have shrunk six inches. His neck stuck forward, his back curved, his pelvis protruded. The transformation was from an upright 45-year-old into an ageless little gnome. He turned to face me. “I’m exaggerating a little,” he said, “but this is you.” I gulped. “Running,” he repeated, “is out.”
Did he really mean that? Not only that I was risking a spinal injury, but that I was misshapen? The shame. Had he said, “This will be you,” I’d have been more likely to listen to his advice. But his message was that it was already too late to save myself. Why sacrifice to save instead that twisted shrunken being? I could see no sense in that. I’m sure I blushed, sitting in my underclothes.
Worse than the shame, though, was the thought of telling my running partner that he would be on his own from now on. Running can be done alone, but it’s a great deal easier in company.
The good news, my therapist went on, was that there was something to replace running. La marcha nórdica, Nordic walking. It was a new sport, lots of people were doing it. It would be ideal for me.
That good news didn’t seem so good to me. It seemed irrelevant. But when I relayed my therapist’s suggestion to my running partner, he was enraged. Twenty years ago, he reminded me, he had gone to the doctor because of a back injury at work. The doctor confirmed that his back was a mess. Three herniated discs. No more running. Gardening, too, was out. Nothing more strenuous than slow walking. “I can’t run, I can’t work in the garden,” he echoed to his doctor. “That’s right,” the doctor said. “Can I work?” asked my friend. A doctor forbidding work for a work-related injury would mean sick leave. If he couldn’t return, it would mean early retirement at full salary, plus compensation. The doctor looked up. “Oh yes, you can work.” My friend repeated to me what he hadn’t bothered to tell the doctor: if he could work, he could run. Had he instead followed the doctor’s advice, he added, he would by now be in a wheelchair. Then he named a friend of ours who had been a great runner, winning countless races and setting regional records. “Twenty-five years ago, doctors told her to quit or she’d end up paraplegic. Instead, she’s still running.”
“Well,” I said.
My partner and I had scheduled a run for after my appointment that afternoon. I hated to disappoint. I put on my running clothes and then ran as slowly as I ever have, barely faster than a walk. It was laughable, though neither of us was laughing.
If you want to change your habits, change your friends. I couldn’t do that—to either of us. I ran the race three days later and finished second in my category, ran another two the following weekend. I am still running. The physical therapist had told me not to tell him if I continued to run, so didn’t: I canceled the follow-up appointment because I hate to disappoint. Plus, I would be too busy, running. Trying to outrun my bad back.
The post The Last Battle appeared first on The American Scholar.
If you walk past a child napping on a sofa, you’ll smile indulgently, step more lightly, and lower your voice to a whisper, even though you know that eventually someone or something will disturb the child’s slumber. That will hardly matter, and, as you know, your care is unnecessary because nothing can trouble the child’s progress, not even waking.
The sleeping child I gazed at was not on a sofa in my living room but in a hospital bed, and I wasn’t present but looking at a photo in an article. He was a boy, not simply sleeping but unconscious, according to the article about the war in Ukraine. A year ago, when it was new, the war was on everyone’s tongue. It is now a few days shy of a year old, a babe in human years, and as warfare goes, young. But I hardly speak of it, and my students report that they also rarely talk about the war, either at home or at school or with friends. Except for a scare when a stray missile hit Poland, no one I know has raised the subject of the war in months. I was reading about it not out of duty or interest but because the article, which was published last March, before the war was even a month old, was next up in my reading. I’m that far behind.
According to the article, experts predicted that Ukraine would not long withstand Russia’s attack and would have to negotiate an end to the conflict. That hasn’t happened, and even while reading the year-old report, I wondered how, even back then, before so much loss of life and so much destruction, anyone could have pictured it: Would not hundreds and thousands, thinking of all that had already been lost, moan that it was too late? Too late to save this battalion, this town, this family. Two days in, and it was already too late for the boy in the bed: before turning a page and first seeing the photo, I had learned his name, what had befallen him, and that he had died. No disturbing him.
But I was plenty disturbed. First, to think of what had happened to him while riding in the family car with his two sisters and his parents one frigid day in late February of last year, two days after Russia invaded Ukraine. A shell exploded near them, and shrapnel destroyed the car. The parents and one of the sisters were killed instantly. The fate of the other sister I do not know because it wasn’t reported, so I presume the reporter didn’t know it either. I do not wish to know it. Nor whether his grandmother arrived at the boy’s bedside before he died. Nor if such a visit could assuage any pain. Nor if she herself has survived.
I was also disturbed to look at his photo. Just seeing him in the bed seemed invasive. Even knowing his name seemed so. His face and name, like a severed finger found in the road, belong to the cadaver and should be left with it to be buried. We shouldn’t possess these any more than we should any other body part retrieved from the debris. He is not a relic.
I’m not even sure his story should be used, though of course a reporter must tell stories. Generic stories will do, though, or stories where identities are protected by pseudonyms, as is often done, especially for children. Baby Doe and Baby Jane Doe are two unnamed children whose legal cases were reported on in the 1980s. The author of the Ukraine article used a pseudonym for a Ukrainian who wished not to be identified, perhaps out of concern about reprisal. Even for the boy in the bed who cannot be harmed and has nothing to fear, respectful circumspection is wanted, both for the name and for the body. To report his death, the journalist might well have adopted the original identifier that was used in the hospital: Patient Unknown No. 1.
When a woman disappeared in Asturias in early November, her name and photo were publicized for two months in the hope that someone had seen her. But after DNA testing confirmed that a body found two days before Christmas at the bottom of a cliff at Cabo Peñas was hers, there was no longer any need to show her photo or repeat her name. In its article about the end of the search, the newspaper did not include the last picture of her. But it did provide two earlier photos showing the woman smiling and beautiful, in contrast to the reported deteriorated state of the body.
To pass over the particulars of a tragedy and neglect to remind readers that the victims have a name and face and all the particulars of a real person, might simply turn a person into a statistic. In one sense, that’s okay. Statistics help, and to obtain the compelling ones for their tales is why some people might risk their lives, as the reporter of the article I read must have risked his in shell-shaken Ukraine.
But to mourn the missing and the dead, do we need names? Standing with your back to the lighthouse at Cabo Peñas, you look out onto a vast sea. You’re not likely to see even distant boats. Just gray and blue, some white, except on cloudy overcast days when it’s only gray. A sea of human misery lies to the south in Africa, and the waters people routinely drown in trying to cross from there to Europe. Another distant sea of suffering is in Latin America, where fear or need drives people from their homes. Behind me to the northeast is Ukraine. All around me I see the broadest landscape where lives unfold and grow thin, then dissolve, and untold tragedies occur and fade and cease to exist. “All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life.” Karl Marx. A boy lay on a bed while a photographer aimed a camera, no permission asked. A woman ended up at the bottom of a cliff, her image on dozens of webpages. I picture victims not as a number nor as a spectacle to gawk at, as if they were forever on a stretcher, being carried past us, but instead as wafting clouds, floating, forming, dissipating. “Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages: / Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” Shakespeare. To mourn a boy in a bed or a woman on a cliff, who suffered such different circumstances and causes, no need for their names, but for the poets’ names, yes, to pass on their hard truths that must do for comfort. Walter de la Mare: “Life with death / Brings all to an issue; / None will long mourn for you, / Pray for you, miss you, / Your place left vacant, / You not there.” The news is not new, but it is never old news either, as long as people are swept away in the winds of time.
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T. S. Eliot writes that a cat should have three names, but I am having trouble finding just one for the new black cat, the latest addition to my household. He came meowing to the window one evening in late October when the food bowl there was empty, clearly asking to be fed, like the others. But I was reluctant. “You should go home,” I scolded him. He appeared to be from next door, one of two kittens brought there in June by their mother from her secret lair once they were big enough to be out in the world. I had seen it happen—the small tabby, carrying her litter of three black kittens, one by one, from the empty buildings across the lane to quarters closer to her food source at my neighbors’ house. She had carried them through the bars of the gate and up the stairs onto the lawn. She trod on them a number of times, but, undaunted, simply got a better grip, held her head higher, and went on, stashing them among the miscellaneous items in my neighbors’ garage. One of the kittens, my neighbor told me, had since disappeared. This young cat must be one of the other two, I thought.
But my neighbor said no, this black cat wasn’t one of hers. He came around to her house at dinnertime, but was skittish, and waited until the others had finished. If he came too close, the others cuffed him. She shrugged, as if asking, “What can you do?”
Homeless he was then, not welcomed at the big house and trying his luck now with me. I filled the bowl on the window ledge when he came around again. “But that’s it,” I said. “That’s all I’m doing for you.” He meowed raucously, his voice as harsh as a crow’s. A warning? A lament? “Raven?” I asked. Is that your name? I decided it wasn’t.
He got along fine with the other young cat at my house, the one my dogs had picked up on a walk. I liked to watch the two play, one orange, one black. One Charlie, the other … Stanley? Spencer? Larry? Lucky? Radar? It wasn’t just that I couldn’t decide, it was that I couldn’t even narrow in. My guesses were all so scattershot. Maybe, I thought, I wasn’t meant to know. But I kept guessing. Jake? Freddy? I turned to my visiting son. “Jake or Freddy?”
He vetoed both. “Give the cat a cat name,” he said. But I couldn’t think of any. A horse might be Blaze or Star or Misty, but a black cat? I couldn’t even call him Mittens. Bagheera? Pluto? My son shook his head. I googled cat names and discovered that Charlie is near the top of favorite cat names, according to several lists. But I already had a Charlie. “So give me a Spanish name,” I said to my son, but he couldn’t come up with any. I googled that too: Leo, Apollo, Rayo. Luigi. Luigi? I already had a Louie.
So one day it’s Raphael, like our previous black cat, the next, Livingston, the black cat before Rafi. Could this cat be another Rasputin, the black cat I had as a child? No matter how many names I tried, I didn’t seem to hit on the right one.
Well, he wasn’t my cat, just a hapless neighbor, like the man who sat on a piece of cardboard day after day in front of the grocery store, but luckier than the man because the cat invariably found a patch of sun, and then moved across the patio with the rays, whereas no sun falls anywhere near the store entrance.
I don’t presume to call that man by his name, so why this cat? Besides, according to Eliot, a cat’s real name is one only the cat knows. And the black cat’s not saying. Not even opening my door to him and offering him a seat by the fire, which I did back in November, within a week of promising him he’d never gain entrance, will get his secret from him. I don’t even try anymore.
The post The Naming of Cats appeared first on The American Scholar.
The second conditional, used to talk about unreal situations, has two clauses, in either order, one with if and the past simple tense, the other with would plus the infinitive. Clear, right? My students, nevertheless, often use would in both clauses, which seems downright obtuse. My own difficulties with the conditional in Spanish, however, make me sympathetic. So when reviewing this grammar point for my upper-intermediate high schoolers, I followed the suggestion in the teacher’s book on how to introduce the structure: ask what they would do if they won the lottery. Starter was the word used for this preliminary activity, suggesting the beginning of a feast. Other books use the term warm up, as if learning a language is like doing sport. For me, welcoming students and then circulating among pairs of them engaged in talk, it seems a cocktail party metaphor might be the most apt, and I neither the chef of a meal nor the coach training athletes but the host, checking on my guests, keeping them from getting bored. I had high hopes for the lesson. Who could be bored while talking about money?
The idea was for the students to quickly decide on their first act. Then we could talk about what they could do. A whole range of possibilities! Their eyes would light up. Finally we would list the things they might do, realizing that the items on this list made a select subset of the could list, more likely than the other possibilities on that list but less likely than on the would list.
Had the textbook authors envisioned a classroom of considerate teens, remembering the items their parents lacked, or the vacation their grandparents had always wanted? Their sister’s crooked teeth and the expensive procedure for straightening them that was beyond the family’s means? A big new apartment with a baby grand for an aunt who had no room in her home for a piano? That was what I was waiting for. Instead, the first student said he’d buy a car. “Ah,” I said. Buy a car I wrote on the whiteboard. “How old are you?” He was 16, he said, so he’d keep the car in a garage, he supposed, until he got his license at 18. “You could let a friend or family member use it in the meantime,” I suggested.
“No,” he said, “it’s mine.”
The next student I called on raised his brows and said he’d buy a house. I wrote that too. For your parents or for yourself? For me, he said, but he admitted he didn’t want to live alone. He was 15. The third said he’d buy a boat. Buy a boat went on the board. This boy was 14. “Do you like the ocean? Do you know how to sail?” I asked. Not particularly, and no. Do you know about renting a berth in a harbor or insuring the boat? No. About boat maintenance? He shook his head. Well, it’s a lot of work, I said. He could pay someone, another student suggested. True. We continued around the room, and I was pleased when a student said she’d go to New York. For how long? I asked. A week. Visit New York. The final student said she couldn’t think of anything. “Well, you could put it in the bank,” I said, ready to transition into the modals could and might. “What else could you do with a lot of money that you don’t need?”
For exactly 60 seconds, the class sat in silence. I was determined to wait them out, but I broke before they did. “You could throw it out the window,” I suggested, “and then watch what happens in the street when bundles of money come raining down.” The students didn’t react as I started a new list under the heading Could.
“You could bury it, like a pirate.” They snickered.
“You could give it away.” The students shook their heads. “Well, part of it,” I suggested. They shook their heads again. “You wouldn’t give it away? Not to charity? Not to save starving children?” The incredulous no became an abashed no. “Would anyone give any of the money away?”
Despite noting their earlier avowal to keep all the money, I was surprised that not one student would give away any portion. “You could share it with your brother,” I said to one. He laughed. “No, no!”
“Maybe you wouldn’t, but you could,” I said, and added Give away to the list.
“You could burn it,” said a student. It was the student who’d said she’d go to New York. She was pretty and very quiet, always knew the answer but almost never volunteered to give it. Yes, I said, you could, and wrote that on the whiteboard. I looked at the list, satisfied. We’d gobbled the starter, then chewed it thoroughly, but now we were almost ready to move on. One last bite though: I asked them all to choose one option from the could list of actions that they might do.
That was hard. Buying a house they had no need for and no desire to live in had come easily to mind, but the choices in the second list were unappealing. I specifically asked again if they might give it away. Was that a remote possibility? No, was the answer from all six students. They might as well burn it, I thought. Given the options, they thought so too.
The post Burning Money appeared first on The American Scholar.
My gorgeous, thin, dark-eyed student with the olive skin was in her usual place, against the far wall. A window behind her showed the apartment building across the street, its windows now lit. On early evenings, someone pulling aside a curtain in one of them and gazing into the lit windows of my classroom might catch me gazing out. But that day, at that moment, while I was waiting for the students in the pre-intermediate class to finish an exercise, I was puzzling over this beautiful young woman bent over her book. Something was different. She looked up and caught me contemplating her. “Did you cut your hair?” I asked as she put down her pencil.
“Yes,” she said, with her slow smile. “Thirty centimeters.”
Thirty centimeters is about 12 inches. Her hair was still longer than shoulder-length, still straight, but 30 centimeters! That’s a lot of hair to lose. How had I not known instantly what the difference was? I asked her how long her hair had been. She swiveled in her seat and held her hand against her lower back. “About here,” she said.
My next question was how she knew exactly how much they’d taken off.
She explained that 30 centimeters is the minimum length for a donation. She’d been letting her hair grow so she’d have enough to donate and enough left to not feel shorn. I nodded.
How, I still wondered, had I missed the change? Well, it turns out that though hair is a woman’s crowning glory, it is not the only glory or even the most striking. This student with her slightly gravelly voice, her slow awkward huh huh huh laugh, her perfect teeth and hawkish nose, is sporting a dozen crowns. There she sits, gleaming. The bony shoulder, the snuggly sweater, the hair that glistens, the eyes that sparkle, the shining wit. At least a dozen crowns. Samson was diminished when his hair was cut. This woman was not. What’s the loss of one crown when you possess so many?
How long, I asked, before it grows back? She figured it would take a year. Then she’d go again to donate it. Cancer patients, she believed, were the main recipients of the wigs manufactured from the donations. Starting right then, at the moment of cutting, the surplus was just that—surplus. I wondered but did not ask if a donation was easier that way—going way beyond what was the ideal length for her and cutting back rather than cutting and slowly returning to her preferred length. All that extra hair, all that weight of all those months of accumulation. Well, I thought, the difference would be that she would never be lacking. “How wonderful of you giving up your lovely long hair,” someone might comment. With her slow huh huh huh, she’d let them know that the loss was no loss to her. She had never given up what she wanted to keep. That too is part of her demeanor, to downplay her gift. She’d be different when she left the haircutter, but she’d be exactly the same—kind and beautiful, another gift to her credit, another crown.
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The Pola de Siero Theater Auditorium is the biggest of the three big boxy buildings that make up the cultural complex in the town of La Pola. They stand together in a well-spaced jumble on a rise at the end of the principal road through town. An old people’s home run by the Little Sisters Congregation occupies an entire block behind it, and facing the complex on the other side are the typical modern apartment buildings, crowding a crumbling old mansion that survives alongside them. What an assortment! Like so many similar towns that grew rapidly in the boom years after the late ’60s, this one is nothing if not a miscellany. It includes my small neighborhood of a few ancient farmsteads reconditioned and added onto over the years, the old town and its beautifully restored traditional houses from the 19th century interspersed with even older-looking buildings in a state of dilapidation, a neoclassical church from the mid-1800s, several monumental buildings that date back centuries, and the six-story apartment buildings that line most of the town’s streets. Thrown in with this hodgepodge, the Auditorium, along with the other two buildings of the cultural complex, should hardly stand out. Yet it was one of the first buildings I noticed when I came to live in this town, 10 months ago. It stood out not only for the airy, open feel of the high ground where it sits but also for its style. The buildings of the complex are made of green glass and steel and are tipped and turned at different angles. Are they hideous? Beautiful? Presumptuous? Loud? Original? My mother on her fall visit took pictures of the streets near my house to give an idea of her surroundings to friends back home. Some of these people are my friends too. What do you think of these buildings? I asked one of them in an email, referring to the cultural complex.
This person is well spoken and well informed. He doesn’t beat about the bush. Still, I didn’t expect his refreshingly direct reply. “They’re way more interesting than dreary upright rectangular ones,” he wrote. No jargon, no theories of architecture or urban planning. Instead, something I could understand. Way more interesting. That’s worth aspiring to. I opened my eyes, no longer on the lookout only for the old and beautiful and circumspect.
The Auditorium, inaugurated in 2011, was designed by the municipality’s Technical Office, headed for 42 years by the architect José Benito Díaz, a native of La Pola. This past November, Díaz retired, his whole career spent in Siero, the municipality of which La Pola is the capital. You must have a strong vocation for public service to spend your entire career heading a municipal planning office, a reporter commented in a newspaper interview from 2021. Díaz agreed. He had found his while still an architecture student, studying under a teacher with a social vision of the profession more than an artistic one.
In the same interview, when asked how many projects he had worked on over the years, he replied that he couldn’t say exactly. Some years, though, more than a hundred. In addition to the cultural complex, his notable projects in La Pola include the rehabilitation of the town hall and of the Palacio del Marqués de Santa Cruz, both in the city park; the rehabilitation of the Plaza Les Campes, in the old center of town; and the renovation of the Plaza del Paraguas and of the Plaza Cubierta, both designed by the architect and engineer Ildefonso Sanchéz del Río, renowned for his use of reinforced concrete. The Plaza Cubierta, where farmers still sell their goods on Tuesday, market day, was finished in 1931. When the building was inaugurated, people were afraid to enter because not a single column supported the vaulted ceiling.
Up the hill from the covered plaza is the Plaza del Paraguas. The structure there, an octagonal inverted umbrella from 1973 with a single pillar, was originally commissioned for the livestock market. Under Díaz, a team of specialists rehabilitated the monument and redesigned the plaza.
Both the Plaza Cubierta and the Plaza del Paraguas are included in the Asturias Cultural Heritage catalogue. An early project of Díaz’s, the rehabilitation of the town hall in 1984, won an award for architecture; the rehabilitation of the Plaza de Paraguas earned another award in 2021. According to a co-worker, his most emblematic project is the new National Livestock Market. New buildings made, old saved, needs met, awards won, 42 years. Not the whole picture, but pieces of a puzzle if you’re a newcomer wandering around, taking stock.
One chilly winter afternoon, I caught the sunset in the Auditorium glass. Down the hill, I skirted the Plaza Cubierta. Then onward, up the slope to the Plaza del Paraguas. Although Díaz did not design the structure in the Plaza del Paraguas, it is among those he is fondest of. “People are not aware of the work of art this structure is,” he explained to the same reporter. “For me, it has the standing that a Gothic or Roman cathedral can have. It is comparable to any unique building in Spain.”
So—a cathedral for cows, I thought, remembering its origin in the livestock market. It had been a dismal failure due to air currents, which tended to funnel through the animals sheltering under the eaves of the structure, making them restless. Now the umbrella dignifies a bus station. So, these days it’s people who gather here rather than livestock. Either way, animals passing through, bound for other places. A chill breeze blew past me. Homeward I turned, to my cozy abode. Not more interesting, but more welcoming than modern cathedrals, floating roofs, or topsy-turvy cantilevered buildings. Way more.
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