Nov. 16 marked the anniversary of our arrival in Spain, and we passed the day in the same style as a year ago: sick with colds. Had I not been feeling so crummy that I failed to even notice the date, I might have at least appreciated the full-circleness of it.
We're on the mend now, however, and have been reflecting on our time here. David's been marveling over the fact that we kinda just picked up and moved without much in the way of a definitive plan—and how well things turned out, despite jobs and apartments falling through at the outset. I've been especially pleased to have made friends and established connections here, an achievement that became particularly apparent during the past couple of weeks.
Two weeks ago our old Seville roommate Adam came to Granada for an overnight visit. I was expecting only to spend the evening with him after his visit to the Alhambra, then see him off in the morning, but we wound up spending Friday together roaming around Granada and having a quite a grand time. We visited the Capilla Real to see where Ferdinand and Isabel were entombed, a museum of random Granada-related odds and ends in a Renaissance palace, the old Arab baths, and one of my favorite tapas places. It was a gorgeous sunny day despite the cold, and taking on the role of tour guide, I felt very much a resident of the city, very much like I've grown roots at last.
That evening we went to a memorial service marking the year anniversary of the death of "Cousin" Teresa Curiel's father. She'd stopped by the previous weekend to drop off an invitation to her upcoming wedding, and mentioned we might like to come to the memorial as there would be a concert after the mass. The service was held in the 16th century church of the Monastério de San Jerónimo, the first monastery to be founded after the Reconquest. The mass was in Latin, with accompanying Gregorian chants, and in that 500-year-old church with its gilded glowing interior, the whole thing was quite impressive—a pinch-me-I-live-in-Spain moment.
When the mass was over, a few nuns floated in and cleared away the communion accessories, and a small orchestra set up and performed some marches—namely horse marches—and other pieces that the grandfather liked. At the end of it all, we were introduced to a million other Curiel cousins and invited out to dinner with Teresa, her fiance Gregorio, her aunt Esperanza and cousin Elisa.
During the walk to the restaurant, we learned from Aunt Esperanza (aka daughter of the deceased grandfather) that he had been a cavalry officer in Franco's Nationalist Army during the Civil War. Suddenly, it was clear: the Latin mass, the horse marches; this man was all about God, country and the military. But in a sweet juxtaposition, Esperanza, who's not much older than Teresa, also reminisced about Sunday afternoons when they were kids, going out with a big group of family after mass, and how her dad would pour a bit of sweet wine into their sodas and her mom would always yell at him for it ("Salvador! Are you giving the kids wine again?!") I'd actually met Esperanza some months back, on a Sunday afternoon when I ran into her and Teresa by chance at a museum. When I reminded her of our previous meeting, she told me that she and Teresa often went out together on Sunday afternoons because they missed those family outings.
The following day, the pinch-me-I-live-in-Spain experience—not to mention the hey-look-I'm-growing-roots-after-all experience—continued when we went to a going-away party cum flamenco jam session for our friends and ex-neighbors Juan and Anna, who have had to move to Italy for a while to care for Anna's sick father. We met at a bar by the university, called El Churrasco, that features 1.50 eur beers or sodas with an incredibly generous tapa, which you can choose from a menu of maybe 15 options rather than just getting whatever they hand you. Our favorites were the fried eggplant with honey, shrimp fritters, and spinach with garbanzos.
So we ate, drank, chatted, hung out, and after an hour or two, some tables in the back were shoved against the walls, chairs put in place, guitar (and flute!) cases opened and things got hopping. It was really something, the atmosphere in that tiny packed bar—thick smoke, glasses clinking, Juan belting out songs of ill-fated love, an inspired guy or gal jumping up to dance in the small circle of space in front of the musicians. It was just ... so ... Spanish. And the thing that felt really special to me was that I knew the singer, that I was invited to be there.
That sense of belonging is the hardest thing to acquire in a new place, especially one far from home, and it's so satisfying to feel like I've achieved it at last. It's also bittersweet, though, since we're heading back to the States in March. Still, I feel good knowing that when we leave, we'll have friends to say goodbye to.
I shared these thoughts about growing roots with my longtime friend Charles, and his response was, "I don't think all roots are complex systems tying us to a single place. Some, like beets or rutabagas, were meant to stay in the ground only a few months and to be relished while they are tender."
I'm looking forward to the next three months of relishing those tender roots.
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