I woke in Caminha, at the Ambassador’s house, with the window opened to the misty cool air of the sea and hydrangeas and ginger crowding in the open window. I had a nightmare. A man with a long sword had chopped off my mother’s feet and I ran to attack him, and flung my mother over my shoulder and looked for her bloody feet. She had been dancing in the streets with the peasants, drinking…
Pilgrims everywhere with backpacks, having just arrived at their destination – Santiago de Campostela. I’m sitting in a store looking at the image of Saint James and thinking about how I’ve been flogging myself since I left New Orleans about how harsh a judge I’ve been to my mother. Always there with my arms folded when she misbehaved. I remember the Mercedes she bought and was so proud of just when Steve and I were…
No matter who I spoke with or met, they all asked about Obama. One woman in Spain said to me, “America is number one. This is my country, but what America does is always first. What do you think about Obama?” I asked her later in the conversation what year Franco had died. She didn’t know. But she really loved Obama. In a shop window of an antique store that makes Portuguese tiles, there were…
I remember when I was young, 20 years old, I was dating the first big love of my life, who was 36 years old. We went to eat with friends, his friends and their girlfriends, and I came out of the bathroom stall to see the other women in front of the bathroom mirror reapplying lipstick and I noticed the jiggle in their upper arms. Ha! Then when I was 30 and wanting to go…
I discovered Pessoa while in Portugal even though he has been around for ages. Eu sei que nao sou nada e que talvez nunca tenha tudo. Parte isso, eu tenho em mim todo os sonhes do mondo. “I know I am nothing and that perhaps I never had anything. Aside from that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.”
When I left for Spain two weeks ago, my mind was a jumble, my heart was heavy, my soul was saturated. I went to new places and explored place, food, port, wine, museum, streets, cafes, new beds, other people, two languages, trains, planes and automobiles. I came home yesterday with all of the stuff that was making me a nut replaced and refreshed with very pleasant memories. I saw on garden outside a lovely little…
The thing that has struck me the most about my mom being in the hospital is the inability to pick up the phone and call her which is my daily habit. I remember when my grandmother died my mother said she wanted to be able to call her. Americans can’t live in extended families the way other cultures do, but we are still tied to the umbilical chord via the telephone. Traveling all over, I…
I didn’t know that Onasis left Callas for Jackie O? But I watched the one night we turned on the TV in our room in Lisbon a documentary on Callas and I wondered how Onasis could have left this gorgeous, talented woman. She never recovered. Did he?
Living with an architect for sixteen years was like an ongoing adult education class in architecture. Part of our trip involved checking out some of the architecture of Siza, Koolas, Nouvel and Moneo as well as the old and antique. I don’t know if it is my sensibility or what I learned those 16 years but modern architecture is where my eye rests, but I do love it folded into the vocabulary of the old…
Sometimes one has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near. I read that somewhere so it’s not original. But it’s true. I woke this morning after 30 hours of traveling home and one quarter of a sleeping pill and walked Loca to the park. It is 80 degrees because we’re having a cool front. The park is amazingly the same – beautiful. The bayou was such a sight for…