Parting panties
We left Zahara de los Atunes on Thursday and dragging the baggage to the car, I lost my Wonder Woman panties. About time.
Main
Month: August 2012
Main
Every fourth thought is death
I find myself thinking about death frequently, or more frequently than in the past, not in any specific terms. I ask myself is that person dead or did I dream it? I think about the dead ones, often enough. I think about my death and other’s. I no longer am shocked about celebrity deaths. On and on. I read that after 50 thoughts of death come much more often. A friend who is a nurse…
Main
Our shadowy selves
I sit in the back of the car, my dear friend in front in the driver’s seat, waiting for Tatjana to come out of the apartment. It is dark, the shadows of the linden trees make the street lights twinkle inside the parked car. He is speaking … It’s like the passion has gone out of me, for exercise, for my new job, for many things. I’m not sure where I am supposed to be…
Main
Morning comes again
In Zagreb, early morning has come again, men sporting man purses hurry to the tram, women bearing heavy purses, buses, taxis, cars and pedestrians scuttling. A city that wakes up on a Monday morning – the rhythm of the world (except Spain). Here an octogenarian with a full head of hair tells me that when they took out his thyroid, he applied a garlic paste to his head every night for two months. Another octogenarian…
Main
Drama takes a pause
Between the three year old and the 82 year old it is hard to tell the difference – they live for play and for drama. “We’re going out for a bit,” we say and suddenly, the old woman falls back on the sofa feeling faint, the little boy, naked, throws himself on the same sofa and demands cartoons while he pulls his pudding. Drama takes a hiatus in the middle years of getting and spending…
Main
The ancients
We go to meet the old man and his sister in the beer garden that was once a splendor filled with people on Sundays during the socialist period. Now we are one of two tables there, but the beer is creamy and cold from the tap and the service is fine. We talk about thyroids, hair, glaucoma, macro degenerative disease, heart failure, and mosquito bites. Everyone leaves happy.
Main
The old woman
There is an old woman who I met in 2008 in her underwear during a heat wave in Zagreb, four years later, and the woman walked slowly down the stairs in her underwear, another heat wave, excited to greet not her daughter, not me, but her grandson. In the tiny room in the tiny apartment, the old woman and the young boy make trains out of pillows that go from one end of the room…
Main
The gypsy in me
We’ve been to Spain. Yes, that’s what the tickets say but it seems as if we have been living parallel lives from our regular one. There’s the getting used to each new place, there’s the schlepping baggage filled with god knows what – diapers, incense, books, computer, clothes, make-up, pills and such. There’s been different food, different routines, different people, different modes of being and at the end of it all – there we are.…
Main
Boys and Girls
Tin regrouped with his summer friends and spent joyous days on the beach and hanging out with them. But at the end, he cried Gibraltar-size tears when he was parting from Pablo on the last day. Who could blame him – Pablo is simply irresitable. So on this last night in Zahara when tears were gushing out of Tin’s eyes, I took him to bed and comforted him that Pablo would come visit us in…