Seville farewell

I stepped out the door of the Hotel Imperial onto the same ragged lane I had found almost depressing on my arrival two weeks earlier. But now the scene glowed with warm memories, friendship, and the imprint of Spanish two-cheek kisses and American hugs. The previous days and nights had been a feast of tasty tapas and Semana Santa processions of giant Jesus floats led by towering clanlike coneheads. It was increasingly difficult to be leaving with Easter approaching.

As the taxi driver stored luggage and opened doors, high heels clicked along the polished stones of the passage. I stepped aside, briefly catching sight of eyes gleaming beneath the black lace of a mantilla, and then couldn't stop staring. The young woman paused in her conversation with her partner and we did the two-step required to share the narrow passage.

"Oh my God," I breathed, my Spanish fleeing with the sight. "You are beautiful!"

We switched back to their language, and I learned that starting Thursday afternoon, this was how most of the women of Seville would be dressing until Easter, as my taxi drive to the airport was to confirm. I touched her arms, unable to decide if it was tattoos or lace, then asked if I could take her picture. As she posed, the taxi driver came around and insisted we should both be in it.

We chatted away until the taxi driver tapped his watch and pointed helplessly at the cars lined up behind him.

"The streets might be full of women in black," I said, "but you are my first. What a gift. Thank you, thank you."

And then she practiced her English. "You made my day," she called, her smile widening.

We hugged in farewell and I realized I had been ignoring her partner, a handsome young man made inconspicuous by normal street attire. I apologized for ignoring him, but told him he just couldn't compete. He laughed and hugged me and I dashed into the taxi

Flamenco

In many parts of the world, you can find souvenirs of the national costumes in tourist shops. You can go to folklore presentations and watch people dance as they once did. My week in Seville has taught me that flamenco is front and center in the present here, and not just a relic of the past. My new friend Sara started flamenco school at age 6, and only gave it up at 18 because she left to go to college.

For the celebration of Feria here, which occurs three weeks after Easter, every woman in Seville buys the traditional flamenco dress with its broad flounces, sexy neckline, and body-hugging shape. Store windows compete for the most elaborate dresses, shawls and jewelry for the event.

For one week, music from over 1000 casetas, private pavilions, fills the streets. By invitation only, these parties continue virtually round-the-clock, music fills the airs, and shoes click on stones in rapid, noisy rhythm.

But the shopping goes on for months. It is important to pick just the right dress, or if you are more traditional, to pick just the right fabric and accessories, and of course, the right seamstress. Your outfit can be varied by the specific flower you wear on the top of your head each day, and by the shawl that you drape over your shoulders.

Little did we know when we went in to look at the shawl Sara had been considering that it was I who would emerge with one. The elaborate process of pinning it on to me was undertaken only after detailed explanations. Sara invented a pre-Feria party for me, and apologized for my lack of taste. I was American, she explained, and the black pants would replace the traditional dress, but just for tonight. By the time the entire process was finished, it was so late that I did in fact head directly to our farewell dinner.

My friends loved the shawl, completely unaware of the inappropriateness of my attire!

My San Francisco

I head out into a blustery wind; rain is forecast, but then rain has been forecast for months. It has come only sporadically, most of the storms turning away before they reach our thirsty shores. 

Walking up the hill on Hyde I catch one side of an enigmatic phone conversation before the wiry young speaker literally bounces out of my view: "I want cheetahs, man I want cheetahs. I want one cheetah on each side of my sofa. Just the way I imagined it." His voice trails off, "I tell you man, cheetahs, I want cheetahs…"

A boldly blond elderly lady follows her cane down her crumbly steps, gingerly crosses a sharp slant then heads up the next set of steps. From her window she can see an open skylight in her neighbor's roof. Serious rain is forecast in the next hour, she explains. It is now starting to dribble. She's very worried and has brought a note with masking tape to leave on their front door if they are not home.

At the center intersection of the Vallejo steps, another guy atypically aged for young San Francisco is stripping the wrapping off of his motorbike.

"Going out in this weather?" I ask, as the wind howls uphill from both directions and clouds block the expansive views of Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge, and Nob Hill.

He looks around, nods, "I just need to get the battery charged."

"Supposed to be pouring by 4 o'clock. Don't stay out too long."

He looks startled, smiles, then cracks up. As I walk away I hear drops on the steps and his bike stuttering. It doesn't start. But the rain does, seriously. Fortunately I am approaching Stockton, the pea shoots I have come to buy, and the bus.

In Chinatown they also haven't heard that no one over 27 is allowed in the city. From infants to hundred-year-olds it's dueling umbrellas crowding the street as people rush around grabbing the best produce. I join the rush, nab my treasured greens and jump on the 30 Stockton to be deposited at my front door.

The Price of Admission

A neatly folded $20 bill lay on the ground at my feet as Martine and I walked up to Fort Mason. In front of us six foreign young men were just starting to jog up the hill. I showed her the bill, pocketed it, and we nodded to each other.

"Did any of you lose some money?"

They looked at each other, looked at us, frowned suspiciously.

"Do you speak English?"

At this point one of them said, with a slight accent, "Yes of course we do." 

I repeated my original question and one of them finally started fumbling in his pants pocket, to pull out an empty hand.

"Yes. I did!"

They must've decided we were not just looking to shake them up.

"What did you lose?"

When he confirmed it was a $20 bill, I gave it to him. We learned they were running to the bridge and he had their taxi fare home. They were extremely relieved and grateful.

Martine and I proceeded to walk to the bridge and of course the world returned the gift many-fold. The day grew more beautiful by the minute. The bridge was reflected in the calm bay; flower petal clouds danced overhead; the low, low tide invited our footprints onto the sand; and crabs looked for a lift to the water.

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A pelican waited for us on the fishing dock as we approached the warming hut. It sat patiently as we posed with it, as if it had been paid for the session. Overhead, the California Brown Pelican seems like just a large brown bird. Up close he had a red chin, pale gold head, eyes inset in pink diamonds, and his gently striated beak ended with a small yellow hook. We worried that he might be injured, but the fisherman assured us he had shown up just before we did.

As we wrapped up our iPhone photo shoot, he flew off in front of us and joined the sea lions and grebes who were fishing nearby.

Really, entry to that walk was the best ticket in town yesterday. 

 

My Oldest Friend

I had dinner with my childhood friend Alek the other day. At one point he said, "You know Tania, other than your brother I may be the first person you ever saw and still know. For sure, you guys are my oldest friends."

Neither of us remembers that first time when our families crossed paths briefly in a refugee camp in Trieste in 1950. Alek and his family left for Venezuela long before any memories formed in my infant mind. My memory of Alek coming to America when I was around 10, however, couldn't be stronger.

"Oh, I bet you had a crush on him," said his friend Jane as we waited to be served, smiling fondly at us, as if imagining that possibility.

I glanced blankly at Alek, and then we both laughed. By the time we reached young adulthood, Alek was a handsome Olympic-quality swimmer with a PhD in math from Berkeley. But the 10-year-old child my Mama took in the summer that his own mother was still trapped in Venezuela would have been on my hit list for torture or worse. Certainly a crush was not in the range of possibilities.

"Why can't you be more like Alek?" is all I can remember Mama preaching to me that summer at Stanislavka, our name for the converted chicken coops we summered at on the Stanislaus River near Knight's Ferry. You would've thought the sun rose and set on this detested suck-up who was always polite and obedient—behavior unimaginable to me.

Alek's mother Olga eventually made it to America, and tried to teach me to play piano for several years before giving up in despair. Alek and my brother became best friends. By high school I learned to tolerate him, and we were friends in college. Years later I became the nominal godmother to his son Adrian, in a Russian Orthodox ceremony at our home that had to be kept secret from his wife Janet's Jewish parents. Cancer took our spouses within months of each other a few years ago. Now our most regular contact is his annual question about where to send his Christmas letter. And yet we know each other's deepest histories.

This summer we might walk across Slovenia together, with a remote relative of a distant young cousin of Alek's whom I helped find a job in America when he was fleeing the conflict that decimated Yugoslavia. Last summer when Sasha and I were traveling in Serbia, visiting our own distant relatives, we ran into this young man—now living and working in Silicon Valley—by completely insane happenstance in the town of Novi Sad, and set off the train of events leading to this walk. 

As I try to write this story in as few words as possible and still come up with anything that makes the slightest bit of sense, I see why my book about Mama's life gets longer and longer until I punch it back into obedience. Alek will probably not make it in, but perhaps there's another book here…

Endings and Beginnings

Yesterday I was working on the finishing touches of the book about my mother, Mother Tongue. The final words are in her language. They are: 

Ljubim te, Mama. Uvek. 

They mean - I love you, Mama. Always.

I launched into that book when I imagined a conversation between my maternal grandparents as they were being forced to leave their homeland around 1920. This scene had to do with grapes on hillsides, roughhewn stone houses, Turkish coffee. A man who loved his daughters. A woman about to give birth to my mother.

This morning, with little forethought, I launched into a book about my father. It has no title yet. It will be a long time before I figure out what it is about. The first scene was triggered by something I wrote about recently, having to do with Greek islands, refugees, and the coincidence of my father's family fleeing 100 years ago to the same islands being populated in similar circumstances today. 

The book begins with the family fleeing their homeland in 1920, as my father is three years old. Here's the first scene as it emerged from the fog of my mind this morning.

"God damn your mother. God damn all mothers in law. God damn the world. She can go back to Russia if she wants, she can go to hell if she wants," said Daria Pavlovna Romanova Amochaeva as her family stepped onto the bleak shore of Lemnos, an island in the Aegean Sea, a waypoint to an unknown destination, an end to a life as it had been lived for a thousand years. And her husband's mother still refused to get off the ship.

They say to write well you have to get in the minds of your character and just go for it. I doubt many people would get into their grandmother's mind and come up with that opening. But then, they didn't know my grandmother.

And I promise I did not orchestrate the weather pattern over San Francisco Bay for the last two days.

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