Silvio vs. Margaret

February 27, 2011

One of my Spanish translation clients is a brash, egotistical wannabe named Carlos. Carlos publishes magazines for posh hotels like the Ritz and for companies selling luxury goods. Translating for him is remarkable easy because any time I Google the first few sentences of any of the articles he “writes”, I can find them readymade; he basically lifts all his content and, of course, never cites sources.

Carlos fancies himself a wealthy, urbane flâneur. Yet every time I send him a bill, I have to send him multiple reminders to pay it, something I hate having to do. And then, to add insult to injury, his emails always say, “Dearest Mary, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” Unbearable. Yet at the same time he always begs me to lower my fees or translate small texts for free. I don’t know: maybe he is rich and his stinginess is what got him there. But I suspect he’s really what we call in Spanish a fantasma – literally a ‘ghost’, but what it actually means is someone who pretends to be something they’re not. Carlos the ghost. Carlos el fantasma.

Carlos’ magazines always contain the same sections: watches, jewelry, beauty, travel, yachts, and cars (often copied verbatim in his different magazines for different clients), perfect topics for his worldly, well-heeled, well-travelled audience. One day I was translating an article about cars for the magazine of a jewelry and watch shop on Majorca, and it ended with a sentence that jolted me out of my boredom. The sentence translated as: “Inside it’s quite tight, but with a few minor contortions you can climb in, the perfect vantage point for admiring your companion's shapely legs.”

Hmm, now I’m no prude, but I might be a potential customer at this store, and if I read that I would be put off not only by its sexist content but also by the fact that the text was clearly not written with me in mind. After all, I personally can’t imagine admiring my boyfriend’s legs in that car, shapely as they may be. Now, sexism in all its guises is not exactly a touchy issue in Spain the way it is in our country. With a very incipient sense of women’s liberation coupled with the traditional machismo spiced up with the oh-so-French sense of “vive le différence”, comments that would be taken offensively in the United States and England are viewed as joyous celebrations of this “différence”. And there is something nice about this: in the United States we have become so hypersensitive to sexual harassment in all its guises that a simple “You look nice” from a male to a female colleague has become totally taboo, a situation certainly strips everyday life of a bit of zest.

But things being as they are, the problem was that by translating the magazine, the message would be read by those wealthy, and likely educated, American and British travelers. And therein lay my hesitation. Should I say something to Carlos about the inappropriateness of the parting comment or just leave it? After all, I’m just a translator. Still, I thought it could be interpreted so offensively by some potential guests that I donned my cultural interpreter hat and emailed Carlos about the matter.

“Dear Carlos,” I wrote in Spanish. “You’ll see that at the end of the text I inserted a comment. I wanted to give you my advice on a cultural issue here. Cultured English-speakers tend to be highly sensitive to sexism. It might be reasonable to assume that the readers of this article will be men, but they might be women, too. And your assumption that they will be men who appreciate a reference to the shapely legs of their companion… well, frankly that might be considered insulting not only to women today but also to some men, who might view this comment as disparaging to women, and even as an example of the worst of Mediterranean cultures, that is, the famous machismo. To preserve a positive image of your country (and your client’s company), you might want to get rid of this phrase not only in English but perhaps in Spanish as well. This kind of tone no longer works for a mixed audience. Perhaps for a men’s magazine you could get away with it, but it does sound bad – as out-of-date as caveman talk – and speaks poorly about your culture and country to people from abroad.”

As I tried to convey my alarm and strong recommendation to eliminate it, Carlos, being the fabulous Carlos, could only shake his head in dismay – as I imagine it – at my lack of joie de vivre and a healthy, earthy sense of humor. His response oozed it:

“Oh, Mary, Mary. What good is it for a woman to wear a skirt if no man looks at her legs? Nothing! Well, as the good American that you are, don’t worry. Let’s not get angry at each other. This is a magazine about watches, so 90% of the buyers are men (of course, men are the ones who buy watches and jewelry for their women). This audience is not going to be offended by the comment on legs. On the contrary, they will be delighted. Warm regards, and try to take things a bit more lightly. And I do appreciate your professionalism (despite your sex). A kiss, Carlos.”

My blood pressure went up at the advice to take things more lightly. Ugh! Sexist pig! It’s not about me; it’s about acceptable standards and practices. And the “despite your sex” comment was clearly just bait. But his reference to my anger? I felt no anger whatsoever (until I got this response!). This was not my issue; it was simply a cultural adjustment that I thought would make the text more acceptable for an international audience and save the company some embarrassment. And as for assuming that men buy watches for women: Wow! I’ve certainly known the wrong men in my life! So in my righteous desire to set matters straight, I felt compelled to respond:

“Dear Carlos, I mentioned this not in anger but because I feel that it’s really a cultural faux pas to include a phrase like this for an international audience. It’s not for a lack of humor; it’s a cultural reality that perhaps you don’t grasp. You are only reinforcing obsolete (and quite negative) stereotypes that I personally don’t like to spread. But as the good Spaniard that you are, as you say, it’s no big deal, and it’s your call. Kisses, Mary.”

The kisses part, by the way, has nothing to do with flirting; it’s just a friendly way to end emails in Spanish. Carlos wrote me back immediately, saying:

“Well, Mary, right now I have to go home to make sure that the house is clean, my dinner is made, my child is tucked into bed, my newspaper is waiting for me on the sofa … and obviously that my wife is smiling and ready for a night of fun. And if she isn’t, my mistress will be. Hugs to you, Mary. Carlos.”

I was now riled at his misinterpretation of my intentions and his assumption that I was a dour, humorless prude; how dare he? Me! So liberal and open-minded! Not to mention his chauvinism... Yet I couldn’t help but laugh at his obvious jest, a clear illustration of the cultural gulf between us. My only choice was to respond:

“Well, enjoy your evening, Silvio Berlusconi!”

To which Carlos replied:

“Ha, ha, ha, one more kiss for you, Margaret Thatcher! And try to enjoy yours!”

Perhaps never the twain shall meet, but at least we can joke about it. Carlos probably still thinks I’m a frigid Anglo-Saxon Iron Woman, like my adopted namesake, and I definitely still think he’s a primitive lout, like his adopted namesake. But the humor survives, and even now, years later, in every email we exchange, we still call each other Silvio and Margaret. Vive le (cultural) différence!

Mistrust

February 26, 2011

The other day my daughter turned 12. At her school, the kids are allowed to bring treats on their birthdays as long as they bring them for all the kids in their class. Cecilia likes to bake with me, and her favorite is pumpkin muffins, so I suggested that we make some mini pumpkin muffins to take. We always make pumpkin muffins with whole-wheat flour, and usually slip in a little quinoa for added texture (and nourishment, from my agenda), along with some raisins and walnuts if she lets me get away with it. But she told me she couldn’t bring pumpkin muffins. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’re not allowed to bring homemade food,” she replied. “Why not?” I repeated incredulously. “I don’t know.”

So I called the school and explained the situation. The secretary told me that there are so many food allergies that students are only allowed to bring foods where the ingredients are listed; hence, store-bought, pre-packaged food. So I offered to make an ingredient list for any classmates that might have allergies. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said, “children aren’t allowed to bring homemade food.” “Even with an ingredient list?” I asked. “Even with an ingredient list.”

Obviously there was something else going on here. If the only issue were the ingredients, the problem would be solved with a simple ingredient list, as each child could make sure the treat didn’t contain anything they were allergic to. We could certain eliminate the walnuts, for example. What was really going on here? Cecilia and I not only wanted to make a generous gesture by taking our time to make her favorite treat for her classmates; we also were offering to bring a wholesome, homemade snack, one that arguably no parent could object to.

Since the pumpkin muffin idea had been nixed, I asked Cecilia what her classmates typically bring in for their birthdays. “Oh, bags of potato chips, iced cookies from the supermarket, take-out pizza, mini-chocolate bars.” And that was considered acceptable? What we proposed bringing was infinitely healthier than that.

And then I made a mental connection back to the Halloweens of my youth, when we were warned never to accept anything homemade, and never to accept apples because of the urban legend of the razorblade slipped into the apple (last Halloween I read an article stating that no razorblade had ever been found in any apple, but still…). And those homemade treats made by the old lady up the street, well who knows what’s really in them? She could be a mad old hag stirring up witch’s brew in her pestilent cauldron. Instead, our parents preferred our plastic pumpkins to be filled with Tootsie Rolls, lollypops, and mini-bars, all infinitely worse for you than that apple or the old lady’s baked treats.

It seems that this mistrust of each other has continued unabated and even spread. Instead of trusting my daughter and myself to make something that is at the very least edible – after all, my daughter is going to eat it, too – and most likely far healthier and more wholesome than any store-bought, pre-packaged treat, the school prefers to mistrust me and trust instead the industrial food-makers, who I would argue do not have our children’s health in mind when they market snacks. They have flavor, and some might say addiction – to salt and sugar – in mind, and they have mass consumption in mind, and judging from the lists of additives and preservatives they certainly have shelf life in mind – given the amazing expiration dates, sometimes a year down the road (I wouldn’t want to see our muffins even four days after coming out of the oven). But health and wholesomeness, let’s face it: they’re not really achieved by symbolically pumping in a few vitamins to assuage parents’ guilt as they serve their children this “food”.

So for my daughter’s birthday, we bought a 22-pack of chips. As I bemoaned this fact with a fellow mother, she consoled me with the dubious, “Well at least some of them are Sun Chips; they’re healthy.” Wow! That’s healthy? They may be less bad for you than Lay’s sour cream and onion, but the lesser evil doesn’t make it good. The food industry has truly brainwashed some of us.

I really like the school’s ever-so-reasonable policy, one that really keeps our kids in mind. Far better Jimmy John’s – the fat congealing on top of the copious layers of cheese – or Hostess – with a “cream” filling that’s never seen a dairy product in its life (although I guess that’s a boon for the lactose-intolerant…). At least that way we feed the system and sow that mistrust that our own neighbors don’t have our welfare in mind more than mindless, soulless yet ever-so-caring industrial giants, big brothers clearly watching out for our health and well-being.

In Praise of Sidewalks, Yards, Squares, Parks - OR - American Alienation

February 24, 2011

When I lived in small-town Spain, my daughter Cecilia and I would walk to school every day. Our walk would often take us past Buba, our favorite English bulldog tied up outside the café up the street while his owners had a coffee. We always looked forward to seeing Buba, and Cecilia carried dog treats in her backpack just in case he was there. Sometimes we offered to walk our downstairs neighbors’ dog, Bono, a beautiful golden lab, so our neighbors and their newborn baby could sleep in, and then Bono and Buba, neighborhood friends, could frolic a bit before we continued on.

We would go past the pine grove on the avenue where Cecilia’s school was. It was interspersed with mulberry trees where we would pick leaves every spring and early summer to feed her silkworms before they spun their cocoons. We would walk by the apartment building where her friend Cristina and her mother were usually waiting for us, playing on the swings outside. We walked with them until Cristina’s mother became heavily pregnant with her second child; then her mother stayed home and Cristina walked the rest of the way with us. We’d pass by our friend Roya’s house and check to see if we got a glimpse of her through the geraniums in her window boxes, and wave if we did. My daughter would always walk atop the brick wall on the edge of a hilly park, loving the fact that she was as tall as me; where the stairs interrupted the wall, she would pretend that she was flying as I carried her across… until she got too big for that. After it rained, the wall was always covered with slugs that had surfaced to avoid suffocating in the wet soil. We always stopped to examine them, tracing their slime paths back into the grass.

We would reach school, and all the parents and kids would be milling about in the yard behind school, grouping together in a sometimes cliquish, sometimes purposeful way – discussing after-school plans, lunchtime arrangements, soccer games coming up, the festival last weekend. The fence would open, the kids would pour in and the parents would then retire to the cafés nearby, each group in its favorite, to have a cup of coffee, a café con leche for some, a cortado for me, and for others a café solo strong enough to jumpstart any day. We’d talk about anything and everything –family, business, city politics, neighbors, job searches, health, money, kids, husband, wife, parents, siblings. The stuff of life. Around 15 minutes of catching up, and then we all dispersed to our homes or jobs, sometimes stopping at the vegetable stand, fishmonger’s or bakery on the way home to pick up the fresh food for the day.

After school, we’d all gather outside school again, and when the children were young, before they got involved in after-school activities, we would hang around the playground outside the school while the kids ran around, splashed in the fountain and ensuing mud, created secret worlds in the bushes, kicked around the soccer ball, played in the sand, and hurled themselves down the slide.

We were slowly weaving the fabric of a community, day by day, in 15-minute increments, learning about each other and becoming a unified group with shared interests: our children, our families, our school, and our town.

On the weekends, we would go to the park. We’d always bring some gear – roller skates, a scooter, or a bike, and sometimes some plastic horses or toys to play with in the grass. We went alone, but we never ended up alone. You never knew who you’d run into, but there was always someone at the park, a neighbor, maybe a classmate, or perhaps a new friend. As my daughter went off to play with them – after a certain age I didn’t even keep an eye on her because in Spain, kids are everyone’s responsibility, they’re a community treasure that everyone keeps watch over, at least in our town – I would talk to the parents. At first the talk was superficial, about the weather (mostly gorgeous), the school, the town, the park maintenance (always a disgrace), local elections (thieves!), or common acquaintances, but after a few meetings the topics went further; we talked about our history, backgrounds, opinions, and feelings. Soon we would agree to meet at the park again, and playing turned into picnics, and picnics turned into outings for a day, and all of this gradually turned into friendship. We were weaving community, slowly but surely, with no particular goal in mind, no agenda, just time spent together whenever we could.

I came back to the U.S. a year and a half ago with my then-10-year-old daughter. The first year she went to a small, private school. There were no buses. Before school, the parents brought the kids, got out of the car with them, and walked them into the school when the weather was bad and onto the playground in good weather. We greeted the playground monitors, most of them fellow parents, stopped and chatted a bit, maybe went inside to talk to the teacher or the principal, and then dispersed. In the afternoons, we would also get out of the car, find our kids indoors or out, and when the weather was nice many parents, myself included, would stay at the playground sitting at the picnic table watching our children running wild through the forest or soccer field, clambering up the jungle gym, building forts with stray boards, chatting with each other, finding common ground, and forging friendships. And weaving community. I still have lasting friends from that one year, and so does Cecilia.

She now goes to a big public school, much like her school in Spain. She loves it; she plays on the basketball team and is on the yearbook committee. She fits right in. She’s flourishing. Her grades are great. She started in August, so it’s been six months. Every morning, I drive her to school; she could take the bus, but since I can drive her I do. The other day, I saw a bus leave the school parking lot at 3:20, stop half a block away, and let off one of Cecilia’s friends. “Why does she take the bus?” I asked my daughter.  “No one is allowed to walk to school,” she answered me matter-of-factly. There are no sidewalks, so walking is dangerous, even for a child that lives a two-minute walk away. So there are no opportunities for chance encounters, no opportunities to discover slugs, dogs, and neighbors along the way, and no opportunities to take that ten or fifteen minutes, for those fortunate enough to live close to school or wherever they’re going, to just talk, to come together with no particular agenda, no computer, games, or cell phones in the way, to look up in the trees and sky or down to the ground and see what the world is revealing to us today.

Before living here my daughter, being a European kid, had never played softball, but now she wants to try. This past summer we would go to the park, a beautiful park in our town, spacious and green, with a lake and baseball diamonds. Most days, we were the only ones there. We looked around, trying to spot someone else, someone to sidle over to, to comment on the day with. You know, a bit of social intercourse. Yet we rarely saw anyone. Softball isn’t my thing, so after around 20 minutes we both got bored and left. Where was everyone? Why do we have these beautiful parks if not to inhabit them fully? And forge community, build togetherness. The only time I’ve seen the parks in this town occupied is for organized events: a Boy Scouts meet, a town-wide Easter egg hunt, but no one seems to hang out in the park, a major past-time in Spain. Where do people hang out? I guess in their spacious houses with spacious yards, yet I sense that something is lost with this lack of collective, public, unscheduled, spontaneous life.

As I drive my daughter to school in the mornings, I turn onto the access road, wait in line in the car, drop her off at the door and drive off. If I wanted to get out, there would be nowhere to go. In the six months she has attended this school, I have not met a single parent by chance, just by standing next to each other and starting a conversation. The few parents I do know, I already knew from elsewhere. Instead of being able to get out of the car, walk up, wait, make conversation as we mill about waiting for the kids to come out, there is a solemn, anonymous procession of cars coming to spirit the children away, while on the other side of school a battalion of yellow school buses whisks away the kids whose parents can’t pick them up, and those who could walk home but aren’t allowed to.

The only chances I have to meet someone at my daughter’s new school are PTA meetings, but I am a single parent, and getting away in the evening to leave my daughter by herself after a full day’s work is not particularly appealing, or often even feasible. All the chances to weave a community are formal and organized. I have to join something – a club, a church, a team. There is no chance for natural, spontaneous interaction, no public spaces of convergence, no informal day-to-day connection that helps weave community in the most natural of ways, no chance for kids to stay afterwards and play on the playground as parents mingle and gradually build ties, no chance to even walk to school and discover the world and discuss random topics. The sidewalks are set aside for ‘walks’, not for walking to run errands or accomplish daily routines, and if we go to the park it is empty, devoid of life, everyone hunkered down in their huge cars, well-appointed homes, and vast yards.

Girl Power

February 18, 2011

Last fall I went with my daughter, her friend, and my father, a die-hard sports fan who religiously attends all sporting events at our university, both male and female, to a women’s volleyball game. The games aren’t held in the huge new arena but a small, old-fashioned gym with wooden bleachers on the sidelines and a burnished old wood floor. There isn’t the hullabaloo that you find at men’s sports – bands, piped-in music blaring, cool pictures of each player executing their best moves on the scoreboard screen, mascots with their crazy antics, and pom-pom girls - but the crowd was nonetheless excited, and the players were right there, within reach, not far away on a court with rows and rows of bleachers between you.

We got there early, while the players were still warming up. They were tall, lithe, powerful women. Their moves were naturally athletic; they were jocks. Their legs were pure sinew, long and strong. They wore black shorts, long-sleeved white jerseys with the university logo, knee pads, and sneakers. Their hair was done up in long ponytails and braids. They were totally feminine and beautiful and exuded sheer badass strength.

During the game, they hit the ball, dove to the floor, leapt into the air, shouted out calls, jockeyed into position to set the ball, spiked it over the net, gave each other victorious high-fives. A perfectly synchronized dance done with utter abandon. They moved like guys, and I mean that in the best of ways, with natural athletic grace, totally at home in their bodies. These women are so cool. They won the first two sets.

In the first half of the match, the cheerleaders were on the other side of the court, but during the second half they came and sat in front of us. We got a firsthand look. They were tiny, girlish, heavily made up, with little flouncy skirts and big ribbons in their hair. They yelled out cheers in high-pitched voices, constantly looked at each other for reinforcement, and waved their pompoms in our eyes. We kind of wanted them gone so we could see the action.

Yet I couldn’t help but compare. The volleyball players were tall, muscular, elegant, confident, even cocky, moving with feline grace and in full command of their bodies; they were mighty and they filled their space uncompromisingly, unapologetically, forcefully, and purposefully. The cheerleaders were little, pert – good gymnasts, you gotta hand them that – but trying futilely to engage a crowd that was looking past them, exuding the nervous insecurity that stems from having to act in unison - as they executed their part-military, part-sexual, part-infantile moves - eager to fit the mold, to be chirpy and cheerful, to please.

When I was a girl, we all secretly wanted to be cheerleaders. The female jocks, well… they were just a little suspect, a little too boyish. Cheerleaders, on the other hand, were our model of femininity, silly, giggly, self-conscious, basking in the attention. Plus, let’s admit it: we all wanted to wear those flouncy skirts, to be in that exclusive clique. Something from my daughter's recent experiences tells me there’s been a sea change in schoolyard cool in the United States.
In Spain, where she grew up until the age of ten, not a single girl in her class played ball sports. They had no opportunity to. Their brothers did, and the boys in the class did. But the girls did dance – jazz, modern, ballet - and maybe gymnastics. And then on the weekends they watched their brothers play basketball and soccer. It’s not that dance isn't a fabulous sport and art in its own right, and it's not that girls can’t play ball sports in Spain; it’s just that you have to look long and hard to find a team. My daughter never even thought about playing these sports, because for her they simply weren’t an available option. She had never even tried them. There was a latent athlete inside her all this time, but how would we have ever known it? What chance would she have gotten to discover and express it?

We came to the U.S. a year and a half ago. She goes to a school where almost every girl plays a sport. On the playground there are the girly-girls who stand in circles and talk and giggle (sometimes she’s one of them), and there are the geeks who stay inside and study at recess (and sometimes she’s one of them), but most of the girls are outside, or in the gym, playing basketball, or softball, or volleyball, or soccer. It’s just what they do. These sports are everywhere, and playing them is cool. They play them with the boys, assembling ad-hoc teams for the day. They get in fights, accuse each other of cheating, get elbowed in the face (and later proudly show off their battle scars), but they also learn about teamwork and fun, plus they hone their coordination and release the pure joyous energy of childhood.

My daughter got on the school basketball team. It’s not that she’s a great asset to the team – after all, she’s only held a basketball in her hands and shot hoops for the past six months of her life – but she loves to practice, she loves running around dribbling and shooting baskets – often missing them, but she’s getting better. And more than anything else, she loves being on a team, being in a competition, putting on her uniform, going out on the court and running full speed, getting right in her opponent’s face, blocking those balls aggressively, and winning. She revels in being a jock, a role she didn’t have the chance to try on for size in Spain, and a role that was slightly off-key when I was her age.

My daughter loved the volleyball game. When she saw the cheerleaders, a relic from a past definition of girlhood as she intuitively seemed to know, her face scrunched in annoyance as she peered around them to see the real action. As she watched the volleyball players, her eyes lit up; she was energized and thrilled and inspired, cheering them on like mad. I couldn't help but notice that something has changed in women in the U.S. since my childhood, and it’s awe-inspiring. I thrill to it on my daughter’s behalf. These women are mighty, paragons of a new womanhood, models of what my daughter aspires to, and precisely what I wish for her to aspire to – commanding women that take no guff yet revel in their femininity. These women know that their femininity and power are one and the same, and they proudly wear that might on their sleeves.

I want to be one of them when I grow up! Oh, and our team won the game!

Trinxat

Feb. 16, 2011

It’s a cold, blustery autumn day. Your hair is being whipped into your eyes as you pick your way through the wet leaves and push aside the low-lying branches while the dogs bound ahead in a puddle-filled clearing. Every step in the loamy soil releases a whiff of decomposing plant matter, returning to feed the Earth when next spring dawns. Your ears hurt from the cold wind; you squint, but the microscopic droplets of rain enter sharp as knives. The air is brisk; the world is a multicolored whirl as wind shears the leaves from the branches.

Or maybe it’s brilliantly sunny day in mid-January. You’re in the mountains, skiing. It’s so bright you even have to squint with your sunglasses on. The sun is so warm that you take off your parka, roll up your sleeves and soak up those precious few rays of winter light, like nourishment for a starving, mid-winter soul. Everything is dazzling, all blinding blue sky and white snow. Skiers whiz by you, but you take your time inhaling the clean, biting, invigorating mountain air.

Either way, it’s a perfect day for trinxat.

Trinxat is a Catalonian dish from the Pyrenees, the mountains separating Catalonia from France. It’s a peasant dish, and like most peasant foods, the bulk of it is cheap, nonperishable or winter vegetables. Trinxat literally means “shredded”. A dish of shredded for lunch, anyone? The Spaniards and Catalans have a way of naming their dishes past participles: hervido, literally “boiled”, is a supper of boiled potatoes, green beans, and onions, more hearty peasant fare. Or escalivada, literally “roasted”, a delectable dish of roasted peppers, eggplants, onions and anything else you might have in your pantry. How about some roasted for lunch and some boiled for dinner?

If you asked a mountain-dweller for a recipe for trinxat, you might get a perplexed look. You don’t follow a recipe to make trinxat; you just put in whatever you have, whatever sounds good, in whatever quantities strike your fancy. You should definitely boil potatoes (as many as you like, depending on how many people you are feeding) and kale (ditto) in salted water. Meanwhile, sauté an onion (or two if you like oniony flavors), a few cloves of garlic (or none, or an entire head), and a few rashers of bacon until the onion is translucent. If you have no bacon, put some other savory meat – maybe blood sausage. Drain the potatoes and kale, mash everything together, then heat up some olive oil in a small, frittata-sized pan, press the mashed mixture to fit the pan and sauté it until it browns. Make sure it really browns before flipping: when you start to smell the garlic toasting, wait a few more minutes – don’t worry; it won’t burn, and if it does the crispy parts are the best – and then flip it. As you cook it, the aromas waft through the house, warm, nourishing, homey: the perfect winter meal.

Actually, real trinxat isn’t made with kale; it’s made with col d’hivern, or winter cabbage, a cold-resistant vegetable with tough leaves that are only edible after boiling. In fact, they say that col d’hivern is even better after it has survived a frost. Traditional peasant mountain food was made with whatever was available in the cold Pyrenees winters. Potatoes are perennial, kale reaches its peak in winter, and meat is used for seasoning, unlike like the Irish meals of my youth, where a huge chunk of meat was surrounded by some boiled vegetable matter. No, here the vegetables are what you’re eating, and eons of culinary ingenuity have found ways to make them unbelievably succulent, taking the earth’s humble onion and garlic and a few scraps of cured meat and turning them into a dish that fills the heart, belly and soul.

After a walk on that blustery fall day, or a ski run on that radiant winter day, when your hair is a moist, matted mess and your nose is bright red and running, or your face is glowing with a winter sunburn and your lungs are filled with fresh air, sit down around a large wooden table with lots of family and friends, pour a hearty glass of red wine all around, make a toast to friendship, fellowship, family, or the cozy delights of winter, and tuck into the delicious wedge of trinxat on your plate. And don’t forget to grab a piece of baguette to sucar the bacony, oniony, garlicky oil that the trinxat leaves on your plate. It's better than dessert.

How Ahmed’s Opened Eyes Opened My Eyes

Feb. 13, 2011

Ahmed is from Iraq. He came to Illinois last August to study computer engineering, took an English test the night he arrived, did poorly and was placed into my advanced ESL class. His English should have been good enough to go straight to grad school, but jet lag had clouded his mind. He could have been upset, like some other students, about having to study English before starting the university, he might have viewed it as a waste of time but instead he tells me, “Well, it will be a good way to get accustomed to the United States and the school.” Like that attitude!

Ahmed is fresh off the plane, so to speak. He has never been outside of Iraq. He is brilliant, self-confident, aware of his intellect, cocky. He’s a mama’s boy who’s been told his whole life he’s exceptional. Mama was right. He is also the hardest worker I’ve ever met. He has earned his cockiness.  Ahmed tells me he has never actually spoken English before. He’s been studying it for years, but as a formal, abstract subject so he can read technical books, not as something to actually use to communicate. I don’t know how a mouth molding sounds for the first time can do it so well. Ahmed is talented. He’s also thrilled, he’s alive and energized: all he wants to do is speak, speak, speak, pour out everything that has been kept inside him. He smiles as he speaks; he emanates life. Yet he is also a sponge, thrilled to be on this adventure, literally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to learn. He is ready to embrace and conquer.

Ahmed is from Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. His native tongue is Turkish. He also speaks Arabic, a bit of Kurdish, and of course English. Ahmed has seen war and destruction, even within his own family. He prefers not to dwell on it, and quickly erases the cloud that comes over his face as he changes the subject. Ahmed is more than a survivor; he flourishes, he thrives.

Ahmed comes to class every day wearing t-shirts with the university logo, jeans and sneakers. He is in his American university student disguise. Many of my Middle Eastern students adopt this disguise. I believe he has two of these t-shirts. I wonder what he wears at home in Iraq. I know it’s not this getup; there, he tells me, students must dress formally to show respect for their professors. When fall arrives, he rotates two sweaters, these clearly from Iraq, judging from the style, until he delightedly reveals to me that he has discovered Kohl’s, and then his repertoire widens.

The other students – mainly Saudis, but also some Chinese and a Libyan – admire Ahmed. He should get paid as my assistant teacher. He is so diligent, so intelligent; they trust his expertise. Perhaps more than mine. After all, it’s a content-based English class and the topic is… astronomy. As a hard-core liberal arts person, this is hard for me. It’s not about the moon and seasons, constellations and orbits; I can handle that. It’s about cosmology, chemical elements, physics equations: a foreign language for me, one I’ve happily, avidly avoided. I flounder. Ahmed doesn’t. He’s fascinated. He’s intrigued. I skip the formulas; he explains them. I simplify Newton’s three laws; he relishes explaining them in all their detail.

Cosmology: part-science, part-philosophy, part-religion. Where do we come from? How did it all come about? Is the universe finite or infinite? Does it have boundaries; if not, or if so, where does God live? If the universe is everything and God is part of it, who or what created God? Is there a God? Is our vast universe just a tiny molecule inside a larger universe, which in turn is a tiny molecule inside another vaster universe? Where does it all start and end? Is it forever oscillating, expanding and contracting ad infinitum, or was it created one day just to come to an end at some point in the future? And then… nothingness, for eternity. Are we really, literally stardust, just bits of cosmic chemical elements that happened to float and coalesce here and now, or are we unique creatures breathed into being through divine creation?

Astronomy challenges our very existence, our very conception of ourselves and our place in the world, and it certainly challenges our faith, or reinforces it, depending on how you look at it. None of my Muslim students have studied this before. Astronomy doesn’t exist as a discipline in their countries, they tell me. They never knew there was a science of the universe. One of my Saudi students says that his country has no space program because returned astronauts go mad – space makes humans crazy.

How do I work with that?

But Ahmed gets it. His mind is expansive. He’s fascinated. He lifts his eyes heavenward. He goes stargazing. He lowers his eyes earthward. He digs for articles, information. His mind stretches with the thought of the ever-expanding and contracting universe. He is alive. He tells me he is going to change his degree to satellite communications or, in honor of the movie Contact which we watch in class – in which Jodie Foster establishes contact with alien beings – perhaps he wants to work on harnessing communications to establish contact with other galaxies, explore worm holes, discover time warps. His paradigms have shifted; his outlook is larger; his neurons are firing. SETI is his future.

The next term I am fortunate enough to have Ahmed in class again. This class is more up my alley: cross-cultural communication, my mission in life, my gospel, my calling. This model brought happiness and understanding to my life, helped me make sense of the Spaniards as I lived among them for 17 years. It made me grasp different vantage points, different values, different senses of good and bad, right and wrong. It helped me understand, not react viscerally, when something didn’t go as I expected it to.

I work my students through dimensions of cultural difference, continua of cultural variation, the ways we are different. Light bulbs go on, as they always do. Motley assortments of experiences shuffle into place and make sense. Others aren’t crazy; they just live by different rules. Our culture isn’t right; it’s just one way out of many, many valid ways humans have tried to resolve the problems life throws at them.

Ahmed is invited to Washington to speak to representatives of Iraqi universities, to talk to them about studying in the United States. He is deeply honored by the invitation. The other students are jealous, admiring, awestruck. Me, too! He comes back a week later. He tells me, “I told them all about individual versus collective cultures; I told them all about plagiarism and ownership of knowledge here. I told them how achievement counts here more than who you know. I told them about the egalitarianism here compared to the hierarchy in my culture, about how you want us to call you Mary. They were very impressed. They asked me to talk again next meeting because I know so much.”

He is proud. I am moved. Ahmed has taken all of this knowledge and made it his own. Instead of random bits of confounding experience, he has a coherent model for understanding who he is and who we are; why he acts as he does and why we do. He has grown from it, shared it and now has helped others grow from it, just as I grew from it, shared it and helped him grow from it. The endless chain of understanding. He is adding on more links of wisdom and understanding. He is embracing his new home and culture, making sense of it, letting it fill him and change him. Now Ahmed wants to be a cross-cultural trainer when he goes back to Iraq. I couldn’t imagine a better one.

Ahmed has left his country for the first time, a war-torn country thanks to us. He tells me that he was afraid Americans wouldn’t like or trust him since he’s Iraqi, but he has found nothing but openness and warmth. How shameful – shouldn’t we be the ones worried that he won’t like or trust us? We have destroyed his country on false pretexts. And yet, he embraces us, honored to be accepted by us, eager to learn from us. And now Ahmed’s world has changed, expanded. From computer engineering he wants to contact new galaxies, he wants to spread the word about cultural harmony around his land. Ahmed’s eyes have opened, and he has opened my eyes to the beauty of an open mind, an absorbent mind, one that comes into a new world with humility and the capacity to be filled, expanded, stretched, connected, and one with a desire to share that treasure.

Cava, Passion, Life

Feb. 11 2011

Cava.

Liquid joy.

All the sun’s warmth and light in a glass.

Fleeting little bubble sprites jostling in spirals up to the top of the flute to merrily announce themselves to the world with a tiny ping before expiring! The ping? Have you never heard it? Pour a glass, put your ear up real close, and you’ll hear the music of the bubble sprites. My beloved friends. My steadfast companions through joy and sadness.

Cava saturates and satiates all the senses.

Cava is the Catalonian version of champagne. The name ‘champagne’ may only be used for sparkling wine crafted using the méthode Champenoise in the region of Champagne, France. Cava is made using the méthode Champenoise, but in Catalonia. On the dry, rugged, arid, sun-drenched terraced hills of Catalonia, my second, much-missed home on the Mediterranean.

To me, cava is joy, delight, companionship, hedonism, love, passion. What would my life be like without it?

My first cava accomplice was my ex-mother-in-law, Montse. Poor woman, from a household of men who didn’t share her love of this ambrosia. Along I came, and we both agreed: we loved her son, we loved cava. Sunday afternoon meals always called for a bottle, semi-sweet, with dessert. But soon we turned to the time-honored way to honor the Catalan Sunday meal: very dry cava with the entire meal, and then… perhaps… if the mood carried us, another bottle with dessert. But forget the semi-sweet; real connoisseurs only drink the dry. It’s the good stuff, after all. Asti Spumante and its callow siblings? Kool-Aid with bubbles. An insult to cava. Perish the thought! May it be banned from Earth! Give me dry or give me… well just give me dry, extra dry, brut nature!

The pop of the cork – the sound of joy! The search for the cork – my daughter’s first game, crawling around her grandparents’ floor. A smile of joy as she finds it! You see? Cava even brings joy to an infant. Am I corrupting her? No, I’m teaching her how to live life and how to love life!

Glasses all around, fill them up – oops! Not full for my ex-father-in-law, just a bit. Sourpuss. But that’s great! More for us, the look Montse and I dart to each other in furtive delight acknowledges. A splash spills on the table from over-eagerness? No problem – laugh and dab it on everyone’s forehead for good luck, and then the toast. To what? To whatever! To everything! To nothing in particular! To us, to the world, to love, to family, to togetherness, to the cava itself! The first sip. Ahhhh… eyes closed, savoring the moment, the flavor, the scent, the tingling, the conviviality, the sheer pleasure.

My husband didn’t last, but I still share a bottle of cava with my ex-mother-in-law from time to time. And with the ex-aunts-in-law, too, joyful women all of them, Montse, Pili, Paquita. After all, we may no longer agree on loving the son, but we still share our love of cava. It’s a woman thing, in that family at least.

Years of mourning for a lost marriage, a dismembered future. Weekend nights alone, missing my daughter when she was with Daddy. A friend lends me the entire Sex and the City series. I begin watching, mid-winter, mid-depressed, Saturday night entertainment being a benjamín, a small, personal-sized bottle of cava (OK, some nights maybe two of them…), a bowl of popcorn and Laughing Cow cheese. A makeshift meal for a sad woman. But as I watch and eat and drink, Carrie and the girls inspire me to get my moxie back. That’s what’s wrong with me! I’m missing men!

I’m back…!!!

As I’m trying my awkward hand at post-divorce dating, we run out of the cava we’re drinking at a dinner with friends to celebrate their new house. Yes, we drink the restaurant dry, although in our defense there are 12 of us. The only cava left is a somewhat unknown brand: Privat Evolució. Never heard of it. It comes in a tall, lean, elongated bottle. Hmm. We sniff around the bottle, looking for where it’s from – cava is judged by its region in Catalonia. Just up the coast. OK, what the heck, pour it out. The waiters pour, we toast, we drink…

Time stops. It’s thin as a blade, sharp, goes down so smoothly it’s gone before you can barely grasp a fugitive taste of it. It’s exquisite. It’s beyond exquisite. It’s what life’s about. I’m home. I’ve found my cava.

Next day I go shopping. All the wine cellars and gourmet shops I know. No one sells it. I despair for weeks, then finally think “online”, still a relatively new concept at the time. So I Google it and find an online-only gourmet shop in Barcelona that will deliver it to my house by the case. I order a case.  It comes in a large wooden crate that I open with the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning. Inside, each compartment is a bottle lovingly wrapped in some strange paper-cardboard bubble concoction. I unwrap and unwrap and unwrap – my environmental conscience weighing heavily – and behold! A tube! The Privat comes in a sleek, elaborately printed, glossy cardboard tube with metallic stoppers on either end to protect the bottles. I feel gleeful – my cava is elegant, classy. I open the tube and carefully slide out that long, beautiful bottle. My cava! I believe I might have even cradled it, embraced it, although there are no witnesses to corroborate that. Now all I need is someone to drink it with.

Cava becomes the bellwether in my dating life as I venture back onto the scene. I meet a man: if he likes cava, I like him, he likes me; if he doesn’t like cava, I don’t like him, no spark, no chemistry, and it’s mutual. It’s not intentional; it just happens that way.

Narcis was the first. Narcis: handsome, outrageously masculine, sexy, oozing pheromones, brilliant, piercing. Later, I find out, also nutty, paranoid, obsessive. But the first impression on the first date was captivating, sitting outdoors in a charming square, mid-July, the sun hot as blazes, a mediaeval church peering down over us, lively chatter, the caprice of ordering a glass of cava midday in the heat – having discovered intriguingly that the other loves cava, too. The first sip: our eyes close, we unwittingly sigh in unison, we look across the table at each other, recognizing a kindred spirit, our eyes lock, voluble Narcis is rendered speechless, stuttering, he grabs my hand, I stroke his arm, suddenly we’re kissing passionately. But wait! My daughter is coming home from her weekend away in half an hour! I have to be there! The passion is severed, it’s postponed, it hurts, it kills, it’s fabulously excruciating, and it has to wait until next week.

That week comes. Narcis takes me to a famous, classic Catalan restaurant in the old quarter of Barcelona, but first we stop into his favorite wine cellar and examine the cavas, sharing knowledge, sniffing out each other’s credentials, impressing each other in a cava-tinged mating dance. In short: making sure the other really is legit in their professed cava passion. This is important. As Narcis has declared, “Anyone who loves cava is a good person.” I couldn’t agree more. Then a romantic dinner, a bottle of cava… and the rest is history. Unforgettable! Another night, he has earned it: we split an ice-cold bottle of my Privat. Sheer ecstasy. I have waited my whole life for this.

Narcis didn’t last long, as the nuttiness soon revealed itself, but he and our mutual cava crush were without a doubt the ideal way to usher me back into life and love. And we’re still friends and still discuss – and occasionally share – a bottle of cava, but only the cava now.

Then came Joan. Poor Joan. Joan is a man’s name in Catalan, by the way. Like Juan in Spanish. Tall, almost stooped Joan. Molt català, en Joan. Damaged goods. Weighted down by the sorrows of his life, half-real, half-imagined. Heart of gold, sharp mind, serious, political, opinionated. Also chronically depressed. And he brings down everyone around him, unawares because he’d never hurt a flea. A cava lover, of course. I’m never passionate about Joan, but it works for a while. He comes to my house, cooks dinner to court me with his tender loving care, treats me like a princess on her pedestal, slaves in the kitchen as I work, bringing me up a glass of cava to take the edge off my toil, and refills – with kisses – when necessary. Joan wasn’t what I was looking for, and I did let him go, but I like to think that we shared some fond moments – and some good bottles of cava.

And then came Enrique. Ah, Enrique! Charming, witty, outrageous, passionate, adventurous, lying Enrique. Of course, I didn’t learn about the lying part until it would break my heart. But first the good part. Our first date. Enrique takes me to an out-of-the-way tapas joint in his city. Delicious, showing me off to his friends, the owners (or probably getting the thumbs up or thumbs down, since I was likely not the first… or last, he brought there), a wonderful bottle of cava to help things slide down, to grease the wheels of conversation between virtual strangers. Enrique knows his cava and lets me know that. He likes the fact that I love cava – both his ex-wives did, too. Is that a good thing?

Dinner is over, but we’re not and the night is certainly not. It’s a weeknight, though, and most places are closed at this hour. So we go to an Irish pub and share a beer. That’s fine but… it isn’t quite hitting the festive note we’re both wanting to match the very intense buzz of sparks flying between us. So we get into our cars, drive up Tibidabo, the mountain at the back of Barcelona opposite the sea, and go to Mirablau, required for a first date, a bar with a wall of windows perched over Barcelona at night, the ships out at sea lit up in the distance. After years, it’s still breathtaking. I had first been here with my ex-husband as another courting ploy… but that was a lifetime ago. Enrique orders us another bottle of cava. We sit across from each other at a tiny table. The mating signs are palpable: we are charming, witty, full of laughter, flirty… eye contact galore, I toss my hair, smile, glow, pupils dilated, no doubt, and when the cava is uncorked and poured we express mutual delight. Enrique cups my face in his hands in a tender gesture, and I reach out and kiss him, not tenderly. And we kiss, and we kiss, and we kiss… And we actually abandon that bottle of cava to consummate the passion. A first, that, but oh-so-worth it. It was clear there would be many more bottles of cava strewn along our pathway.

I fall head over heels with Enrique. We travel, we eat in exquisite restaurants, we stay up all night long. He comes to my house once a week after work. That means 10 pm. I have prepared a salad of mesclun, candied onions, goat cheese broiled with bubbling brown sugar, honey vinaigrette, or perhaps tuna tataki with sesame seeds and ginger sauce on a bed of frisé lettuce, or perhaps wild mushroom risotto with a balsamic vinegar reduction, and sometimes just smoked salmon with capers, onions, and dill, and, of course, a bottle of Privat which goes from fridge to freezer as soon as he texts me he’s on his way. Summer or winter, we’re on my balcony to have dinner – Enrique’s a smoker, and I love him, but not his smoke. In the summer, we may be unclothed or in dishabille, bottle of cava sweating in the ice bucket. In the winter, we wrap a blanket around ourselves and talk, talk, talk, revealing all our innermost experiences, thoughts, and feelings. And always, the glass of cava nearby. Bond, merge, repeat.

Turns out Enrique’s house was off-limits not because his son lived there and it was a messy bachelor’s pad, but because his steady partner lived there. She was the wifey; I was the ‘other woman’. She ironed his clothes and washed his dishes; I gave him passion, fun, thrills, cava. I was devastated, broken-hearted. The man of my life, my soul mate, my fellow cava lover was a cad, a heel, a bounder, a scoundrel. To me and to her.

My love life went underground temporarily, but to compensate my friends and I started having cava tastings. It was some consolation; cava to mend my heart a second time. Cava, I had learned, cannot be drunk alone, the way I did in my Sex-and-the-City-recovering-from-a-divorce phase. No, it must be drunk in company with convivial fellowship, goodwill, and pure, hedonistic pleasure. And it must be drunk in a proper cava glass with people who know how to appreciate it. I have beautiful, thick, cut-crystal Waterford champagne flutes that my mother gave me. Won’t work; they’re too thick. It must be a thin, thin glass, always a flute, so the bubbles have a nice, long, winding journey on their way up to the annunciatory ping. And the cava must be ice-cold. If you really want your cava to chill, the bucket should contain half-ice and half-water, my Catalan friends taught me. And they know. It’s in their blood.

Now in the U.S., I long for my cava. I ache for my balcony. I yearn for fellow cava travelling companions, those true soul mates whose eyes just light up at the thought – not to mention the cork pop (to this day, pop a cork and I gasp with delight, while my daughter’s eyes go searching) – of cava, and I mean proper cava, the good stuff, my beloved Privat, which goes down sharp as a knife and whets my very soul.

The Wheel of Debt

Feb. 11, 2011

I graduate from college, get bombarded with offers for credit cards, greedily accept them, charge them up the wazoo with clothes, shoes, dinners, travel. The good life! The American Dream! For free! Yay!

Well, until bills start coming in. I begin grad school thousands in the hole, paying off what I can, although mostly paying back the almost 20% interest.

I earn my Master’s at age 25 and go abroad with around $14,000 in student loans, $5,000 in credit card debt, and a job teaching English in Japan. My housing is paid for, the salary isn’t bad, so I start paying off my loans and credit cards. Within a year, the credit cards are paid off and cut to pieces. Don’t want to go there anymore. I’ve learned my lesson about the slippery temptations of debt, and thenceforth make a concerted effort to avoid it.

Two years later I go to Spain to teach English. Not such a great salary, but I keep paying off my student loans and manage to do so in less than five years. I am 29 and debt-free.

But life happens. I want a car, so I take out a loan. And pay it off on time. Now married, pregnant and ready for a house for our budding family, we ask for and get a mortgage. Now divorced, I still have it, still pay it every month, by myself, have never defaulted. All of this in Spain.

Fast-forward to age 44. Debt-free except a mortgage for a home worth far more than the loan. In other words, financially responsible, in good shape. Along the way I’ve picked up a few credit cards, but now, later in life, I manage to use them wisely. I’m also a single mother ready to be back home in the U.S., wanting to be near my family and loved ones, needing some comfort and support, hankering to be a native again.

I move back to the U.S., temporarily (or that was the plan at least), so I spend five thousand in cash for a used car. Decent, not really my style, big American tanker, although Americans would laugh at that – it’s really mid-sized, but from my European perspective it’s huge and definitely a gas-guzzler. But it will do for a year – drive it, resell it, be done with it.

But my daughter and I decide to stay on. We like the U.S., the people, the family. I am saddled with this car that I don’t particularly like but am in no position to buy another one. Besides, I don’t identify with my car; I just want it to get me around. All I have is liability coverage for the old thing.  

And then it happens: my first accident ever (caused by me, that is). I hydroplane into the back of a car stopped on the highway for a school bus on an icy winter road. I go around the curve, press on the brakes… and keep going… and going… and going. Nothing I can do. I see it coming, grip the wheel, and CRASSSSSHHHHH!

Shaken, I get out. I’m fine, but my car isn’t. The hood is crumpled, steam is pouring out, the car is making strange noises. The other woman gets out. There’s only a dent on her back bumper, and she’s fine. We call 911. We call the insurance agency. We have the same insurer, so things are easily settled. Her car dent is paid for… and I am left with no car and no compensation. On the positive side, no debt either, since I’d paid in cash, but no money, not even for a paltry down payment. I need a car. You can’t possibly live without a car here in rural America. And I need one quick. I can’t spend down my measly savings on it, so I go to my bank and ask for a loan.

I’m asked about my loan history. Well, I explain, I paid off my student loans decades ago. That doesn’t count; more recent. The only credit cards I have are linked to my bank accounts in Spain. That definitely doesn’t count. The ones I paid off decades ago… ancient history, don’t count. The car loan paid off in Spain? Nope. The mortgage… in Spain? I already know the answer: irrelevant, literally off the map. Oh! I do have a Macy’s charge card. I’ve had it for a year, paid it faithfully every month. Good… but not enough.

The bank officer, friendly, efficient, and polite, runs a credit check on me. 567: a high-risk score. Why? Says here five years ago there was a $150 bill for a hospital visit. Yes, I remember, it was Christmas, I had a sinus infection. I submitted the bills to my Spanish insurance; didn’t they pay it? I thought they had. I never got notice that they hadn’t. Oh yes, it’s paid. But late. Of course late – trans-Atlantic transactions take time. But it got paid, right? And that was years ago. But that tardiness jacked my already delicate – meaning nonexistent – credit rating up to high-risk. We’re sorry, we are unable to grant you a loan at this time.

I’m stunned. I’ve always paid my bills; never defaulted on anything, even in this country, although it’s been awhile. So, my bank denies me a car loan. We’re not talking a mortgage, tens of thousands of dollars; we’re talking a used car. So… presuming we stay in the United States, besides my immediate need for a loan to buy a car, my alarms go off: How will I ever be able to boost my credit rating so I can get a mortgage when the time comes to buy?

Well, the helpful bank lady tells me, you can get a secured credit card. Hmm, never heard of it. What’s that? Well, I can pay the bank $300, get a card, a debit card really, spend it down, deposit more money, spend that down, keep doing this for a year and then maybe they’ll make it a credit card with, you know, a $500 limit. If I pay that off maybe they’ll raise that a year later to $1,000. And so on. So by the time I’m 60, I should be able to prove my credit-worthiness.

Hey! Didn’t I do this 25 years ago? Didn’t I get my start as a credit user (and then wisely step out of that game)? Actually, I didn’t even have to do this 25 years ago! I had credit card offers filling the mailbox. I know times have changed, but… that really doesn’t count?

I’m now 46. I have only ever paid all my bills and debts, often early if I can swing it. Do I really have to start at ground zero? Yes, I do. Basically in this country, you can’t get credit if you don’t have credit. If you’re a mid-lifer with a good credit record but a dormant one, one from the ancient past, forget it. If you haven’t had credit, that means you shouldn’t have credit. It doesn’t mean: Wow! Someone without credit! How praiseworthy! How financially responsible! To the bank it means: What’s wrong here? Bad customer. Alarm bells sound. Why isn’t this person in debt? There must be an insidious reason. She must not be trustworthy. So she must not be credit-worthy. A person with $20,000 in credit card bills, a $15,000 car loan and a $100,000 mortgage is a better risk than I am. Numbers are not my thing, but I’m not that dumb either. I just don’t get it.

Until I realize it’s another hamster wheel in corporate American life. It’s hard to get on the wheel – especially midstream – but once you’re on there’s no getting off. Credit begets credit. Get one loan, get more. But for God’s sake, don’t ever pay them all off. Don’t ever actually save for something before buying it. Don’t you dare get out from under credit’s yoke and leave the system, because it’s a closed club. Those who leave are black-balled and have to pay serious – and humiliating – dues to get back in.

Welcome home.

What's Wrong with this Picture?

Feb. 9, 2011

When I was 27, I went to Spain to teach English. I thought, two years in Spain, enough to learn Spanish, a marketable skill back home. Then I’ll come back, possibly to Boston, a city I love. Life, however, intervened in my plans. I met a man, married him, had a child, bought a house, started a business, got divorced … and so in my late thirties I found myself still living in Spain, a single mother with a business to run, exhausted from trying to keep everything together, depressed at being alone on holidays when all my friends were with their families (nuclear families, which for me was my daughter and myself, which seemed lonely, or extended families, of which I had none… in Spain). Sad, feeling isolated and out of place after so many years, which only further saddened me, I went to talk to Silvia, a fabulously wise and insightful therapist I’d turned to several times in the past at difficult moments.

“Why don’t you go back to the U.S. for a year and live near your family?” she suggested. I blanched. To me, going back was an all-or-nothing business. I had spent 17 years in Spain, struggled for 6 years as a single mother determined to keep my daughter near her father, even though her upbringing was 99% my job, proud of having grown a successful business, in love with Barcelona and its vibrant cultural life, although, yes, feeling disconnected, disjointed, out of place, dejected. Going back was like surrendering, admitting defeat. But I’d never considered going back for one year, just as a brief respite to recharge my batteries in the glow of the love and care of my family and friends. It sounded just like what the doctor ordered.

I started thinking about it logistically: My business was translating; it operates entirely on the Internet, so that could move with me. My daughter was in 4^th grade and would be going into 5^th,, so basically I still entirely made decisions for her. Still, I asked her what she thought. She loved the idea, although as it drew closer she started to have some – very natural – misgivings. Nonetheless, she was in favor of it. Her father put up no real objections, much to everyone’s surprise. As for my home, at first some friends were going to stay in it for me, but when they backed down I decided not to rent it since rental laws in Spain totally favor the tenant and I would risk not being able to get my home back when I wanted it. Plus, we were going to visit in mid-winter and wanted to go home then, not to a hotel or friend’s house. I asked my father and he agreed to let us stay at his house for the year, not the ideal situation as he had gotten used to his solitude after my mother’s death and I had been independent for so many decades, but workable for a year. So… with no real impediments I informed my friends and clients, threw a huge farewell party and set out for what was to be a year-long adventure. Knowing the healthcare situation in the U.S., I bought travelers’ health insurance in Spain which would basically cover us for any emergency. And we were off…

As soon as we got here, I registered my daughter in school, set her up at a stable where she could ride horses (her passion) and then a pony, Fancy, sort of fell into my lap, so I bought her Fancy. Her own horse! Finally! Her school was almost a one-room schoolhouse affair, a tiny, alternative private school where she positively flourished. Being an essentially rural child, she loved her life here – full of nature, horses, a huge, grass-covered, forested playground at school, a pony of her own – everything her heart desired. As for me, I was near my boyfriend (long story, no longer long-distance!), my sister and her family, my father, and my best friend in the world, and I soon reconnected with a very important friend from my college years, a resumed friendship that is extremely meaningful for him, me, and my daughter. Then, I got word that the local university needed ESL teachers, and since that was where I originally got my start teaching, I applied and got hired as a part-time adjunct. Plus, one of my goals when in Illinois was to bring Mediterranean, specifically Catalan, cooking there, so I started teaching Catalan cooking classes at the local co-op, a dream come true.

Things were falling into place. One day, my daughter looked at me and said, “Mommy, I’d like to stay here.” She was echoing my own thoughts. “Really?” I asked her. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.” We started to talk about how she wouldn’t see Daddy very often, how she might miss her friends Maria, Carlota, and Andrea in Spain, how she would miss the big “Nit d’Estels”, a special all-night affair for the graduating sixth-graders in her elementary school in Spain that kids there dream about for years and prepare for months. I also told her that we would have to find a home of our own, and that meant I couldn’t afford her private school anymore so she’d have to go to a public school. Much to my surprise, Cecilia was willing to accept all of this to stay in America. Wow. I was a little more ambivalent. I missed the city. I missed the sea. I missed the opera. I missed the amazing food and champagne. I missed my home and its halls echoing with the laughter of Cecilia and her friends. I wasn’t sure how I could make things work here – surviving off a business in distant Spain and having travelers’ insurance was good as a temporary measure, but it wouldn’t work out forever so I’d have to figure out a way to earn a decent living and get us healthcare in the U.S. Still, we weighed it all and decided to stay on.

So, after the summer in Spain I rented a little duplex, furnished it (and got into debt doing it), renewed my travelers’ health insurance from Spain one more year since after looking into health insurance in the States I realized I couldn’t afford it, registered Cecilia in the public schools and got all her immunizations up to date, and embarked on life in the U.S. with an intention to stay. I kept working as an adjunct at the university, since I had missed a big hiring campaign the previous year, before I knew we were staying, and there was now a hiring freeze. My adjunct position came with no insurance. Well, actually, my boss said I could get health insurance, but it would be $800 per month… out of the $1,000-1,500 I was earning. Somehow, um, earning $200-700 a month for half-time work didn’t seem like a good deal. The health insurance I had from Spain worked on reimbursements. I had to pay the bills, then submit them and get reimbursed. I had used it once last year for a minor sinus infection and gotten promptly reimbursed, so I felt good with that. But still, if we were staying I did need insurance here.

Then my first health issue arose. For years I’d had a tiny cyst on my back. My dermatologist in Spain said he could remove it, although there was no real need to unless it got infected, so I had always ignored it. Well, it got infected. It turned into a large, red, throbbing golf ball on my back. Sleeping was difficult; swimming was out of the question. I called a dermatologist’s office and the first question I got was: “What insurance do you have?” Not, how serious is it? Does it hurt? Is it oozing? Nothing like that. Just, “What insurance company do you have?” When they heard I had none (because saying I have travelers’ insurance from Spain just doesn’t register here) the next sentence was, “An office visit costs $150, payable in cash the same day, plus any additional expenses for further treatments.” Okay, still no questions about my health, although I’m talking to a doctor’s office. When I assured them I’d pay it, they then scheduled for me an appointment in ten days. Ten days?!?! I had a huge, angry infection on my back! Wasn’t there anything sooner? “Sorry, ma’am, ten days is the soonest opening the doctor has.” What could I do? And this doctor had come recommended by a friend. The emergency room would be too expensive, plus, was it a real emergency? I didn’t want to be one of those people crowding up the emergency room unnecessarily. So I waited ten days, my back oozing, sore, smelly. What was this? I had a condition – minor in the grand scheme of things, but still, needing attention – and couldn’t get the care I needed. Finally, ten days went by and the doctor confirmed, yes, that my cyst was infected. He gave me two treatment options and then I hit him with the fact that I had no insurance. He paused, then said that he would just do the simpler treatment there, on the spot, without charging me. I was flabbergasted, in the best of ways, utterly grateful, ready to fall on my knees to express my relief and appreciation. He treated it, my daughter had to care for the wound for ten days, and it mostly went away, although next summer, when I’m back in Spain, I’ll have the whole thing removed. Of course, I can’t afford to here. And there it won’t cost me a cent. And I don’t even live there anymore.

In the meantime, I had called my health insurance company in Spain. They said that if I needed further treatment they would set me up with a doctor, but in the meantime that I should send the bills for reimbursement. I did, although the bills were far smaller than they would have been if the doctor had actually charged me. One week later I got a phone call at around 10 pm. It was the insurance company in Spain. I had a gut-wrenching feeling. Uh-oh. What’s wrong? The woman on the phone said, “I was just calling to see how you’re feeling, how your back is healing, if you need anything. If you need anything, any further treatment, please call us and we’ll arrange it for you.” What the heck? I think “insurance” and fear strikes my gut; here’s an insurance company calling me to see if I’m all right? I was blown away. Then I was blown away by the fact that I was blown away. Imagine that! An insurance company that follows up not to pursue payment, deny coverage and issue warnings, but to see if I’m ok, offering me more treatment if I need it. How sad that not only is this not a regular occurrence here, but that I’d already been conditioned to fear a call from my insurance company.

Fast forward to winter. I get the flu. Not wanting to spend the $113 on the doctor’s visit plus medicine, I tough it out. Not wanting to be absent from work because I want to get hired fulltime (not because I really want the job, but because I want the healthcare), and because I don’t want to burden my fellow teachers with subbing my classes, I go to work despite a low-grade fever. Mistake. The next weekend I’m flat on my back, feverish, lungs burbling. I bite the bullet, wait three hours, spend $113 to see a doctor. Conclusion: he thinks it is pneumonia and informs me that I need a chest X-ray. When I tell him that I have no health insurance and ask him how much an X-ray will cost, he said between $200 and $300. So he offered to medicate me for pneumonia with a strong antibiotic and steroid that would reduce the inflammation, and told me to come back the next week if I’m not better. Again, I think: in Spain if I needed an X-ray I would just get one. My co-pay would be around $2. My doctor would insist. I realize that the doctor here didn’t insist and instead medicated me for an illness I may or may not have without the right diagnostics in order to save me money, a favor, I guess. But that once again spotlights how healthcare works in this country: money considerations come first, health comes second.

In the meantime, my daughter is still riding horses. In fact, she’s training to participate in eventing, a dangerous sport which involves jumping over obstacles while galloping full-speed through open fields. Before she gets started when the warm weather came around, I decided that we absolutely had to have health insurance for her here, if for nothing else than because I was ashamed of having to sign her up for everything and having to leave the spaces for “primary physician” and “health insurance information” blank because we didn’t have either a primary physician or health insurance. I had to do that when I signed her up for school, for U.S. Pony Club, for Girl Scouts, basically for everything. But here, how do I get a primary physician without health insurance? Who wants us? How can I pay out of pocket for intakes for a doctor I later may not be able to afford, or may not want to see us, because we have no insurance? I felt like a neglectful mother, yet I had always given my daughter the best care. We have always been prosperous, educated, aware. That’s how I perceive myself. Here it has to change; here I’m unable to care for us because I can’t afford monthly payments of upwards of $500, the minimum to have any sort of decent coverage (of course, after deductibles and copayments it’s much more, if the policy covers the care you need, that is…).

A friend told me about a state program that provides health insurance for needy children. Wow, here in my own country I’m the head of a needy household. But Cecilia needs (no, we both need) healthcare, so I went and applied for both of us. I felt ashamed, humiliated. Because of this country’s lack of universal healthcare we had been brought down to the level of welfare care. Not all clinics take this insurance because it pays doctors little. I just hoped it would be enough; we’re still waiting to see if we get covered. I feel reduced, humiliated, vulnerable. How had this happened to me? In my own country? Wasn’t going back to your own country like going back into the fold? Being where you’ll be cared for and valued? Didn’t I come back to my country for some care, for some ease? I did, but apparently in this country care and ease are elusive.

All of this has made me think about this country. What’s wrong with this picture? Let’s rewind and compare from my own personal experience:

When I was travelling through Thailand with my father soon after his retirement, while I was in my mid-twenties, I mistakenly (I should have known better!) ate pineapple from a street vendor. After 12 hours of vomiting and diarrhea, my father asked at the hotel desk and found a nearby hospital. There, a polite, American-trained young Thai female doctor put me in my own room, gave me two or three I.V. drips and left me there 24 hours. The bill upon release? $75.

Fast forward two years. I had just moved to Spain, and my travel-happy father and I were now meeting in London for ten days of sightseeing. The first night he fell down the steep, narrow staircase in the cheap hotel we were staying at near Paddington Station. He seemed fine, with just a bit of pain, until the last night. A stoic former Marine, he rarely complains, but that night he woke me up asking me to get him to a hospital; the pain had become unbearable. I asked at the hotel desk and we called an ambulance to pick up my father. It took him to a nearby hospital, where the nurses treated him with great care, got him muscle relaxants and painkillers for the trip home and took him back to the hotel. The bill upon release? Nothing – although donations were welcome. And of course once home my father sent them a generous donation, amazed that they would truly not charge him a nickel.

Now fast-forward quite a few years. My parents are visiting us in Spain, about to travel to Paris for their 45^th wedding anniversary trip, a gift from my sister, brother, and myself. My father and I walk to a nearby takeout restaurant to get a quick lunch before we drive them to the airport, my father falls near a construction site, and in a freak accident a gas canister nearby falls, glancing off his head to land on his hand, severing the tips of two of his fingers. The ambulance comes and takes him to the nearest hospital, part of the public healthcare system. The doctor comes out to tell us he needs complicated surgery. They wheel him in and operate on him for five hours, reconstructing the one finger they can salvage and neatening up the tip of the severed finger. He stays in the hospital for three days. Obviously, the trip was off. The bill upon release? $3,000. And if he had been a resident of Spain it would have been free. What would that bill have been here? At least $30,000. When he gets home, his doctor checks out the surgery performed by a public health doctor in Spain, and says he couldn’t have done a better job himself.

What is the moral of this story? Don’t travel with my father, you might say. Well, we have cut down on trips lately… But the moral is, in any other country, if you need healthcare you’ve got it. No questions asked. It’s a fundamental human right, like education, like drinking water. And when you need healthcare, certainly the first question is not “How are you going to pay?” The first questions are “What do you need? How can we help you?”

What is wrong with this picture is that in any other developed (or not so developed, if you include Thailand) country, the healthcare system is there to care for people’s health – whence the name. In this country, I’m not sure what it’s here for – to enrich the system itself, I suspect, a huge entity steamrolling over all us, or at least my daughter and me. But caring for health, for everyone’s health, does not seem to be high on the agenda.

What’s wrong with this picture is that there seems to be a myth about public (or – perish the thought! – socialized!) healthcare systems, about the horrible waits, the stringent quotas, the government control. But are there worse waits than here? Ten days with an infection? Does anyone mete out care more stingily than insurance companies in the U.S.? Is any doctor in a socialized system told by the government what to treat? (None that I know of… and I’ve asked.) All of these myths come from people with absolutely no experience in a country with a public health system, people who gather “horror stories” from God knows what source. Words are cheap; anyone can invent horror stories about unknown lands perhaps ridden with that scourge: socialists (akin to fascists, they believe). I’m the horse’s mouth; I’ve experienced socialized health. Ask me. It works. For everyone.

What’s wrong with this picture is that here doctors and healthcare managers make decisions based on saving money for the insurance companies, not based on their patients’ health. Could there be any worse pressure on a person who has sworn to protect and save people’s health than that? Don’t medical professionals in the U.S. have uneasy consciences knowing this? Or do they assume that things work that way everywhere? I was fortunate to meet one doctor, the dermatologist, whose humanity came before his kowtowing to the system, but I was lucky. Now, Spain is an extraordinarily corrupt country – if you can fool the system, you do. Yet there, healthcare is universal, and the costs are far cheaper than here. My thyroid medicine there costs me $4 for 40 days; here it costs $20. It’s the same medicine. I’m not paying for a better drug; I’m paying for a corrupt system that makes a business of out people’s health, and a profit off their illness. Am I the only person who thinks it’s a scandal that medicines are advertised in big-budget, melodramatic, beautifully scored TV commercials? We’re paying for that, you know, all of us. In Spain, you can also get private health insurance if you’re prosperous and want more choices. I always did – at a total cost of $200 a month for my daughter and myself. When I had my daughter, I stayed in the hospital (the refurbished Hilton Hotel – not bad digs!) for five days, with a bed for my husband, and menus we could both choose from every day. The bill upon release? $2 for a phone call we made (this was pre-cell phone).

What’s wrong with this picture is that as an active, positive, contributing member of society I have to suffer from constant low-grade stress, which turns into acute stress when I get sick, because I feel that my daughter and I are vulnerable.

I am trying to figure things out so my daughter and I can stay here. I have two solutions. One is to work fulltime at the university. The work is killer – I’ve never seen people work more hours for less pay than at this school, nights and weekends included (not mandatory, but hey, you can’t let your students down… and you can’t, it’s true!). But at least I would have healthcare coverage for my daughter and myself. It’s not what I want at this stage in my career, not at all, but it’s a way to take care of us. In Spain, a much less wealthy country than the U.S., I was able to be an entrepreneur, to follow my heart and my brain, and to earn far more than I would earn working at the university here (and thus contribute more taxes to society) because I knew healthcare was not an issue. We were cared for. Here I don’t have that freedom. I’m forced into the system, a system that strips me of my freedom to live life as I choose. The other alternative is going back to school. That way at least I’ll have healthcare for myself and I’ll only have to purchase it for my daughter. I’ve applied to and been accepted to the PhD program at the university. I’ve even been put up as a candidate for a doctoral fellowship. How wonderful! If I get it, I’ll earn $1,500 per month (minus taxes). From that I’ll have to pay rent, utilities, oh, and healthcare for my daughter.  I’m 46 years old. Is that an attractive option? That’s sliding back 20 years in my life. But at least one of us will be covered, and I’ll learn something in the process.

The point is: all my decisions since I’ve been strategizing about how to stay in this country revolve around how to get healthcare for my daughter and myself. This is not freedom; this is slavery to a hostile system. In Spain, I made decisions based on my dreams, hopes and desires; they turned out well and I was successful. As a result, I was a fruitful member of society, contributing plenty of taxes and a healthy future citizen. Just to live here with any measure of safety, I have to give up dreaming, hoping, and desiring and instead cling to any option that will ensure nothing less than our survival.

That’s what is wrong with this picture. We think we’re free here; it’s our national myth. America is the bastion of freedom! The model of freedom! Everyone wants to emulate us, live here! I speak to my students – from countries like Haiti, Colombia, Libya and Saudi Arabia – and they are shocked that some people in this vastly wealthy country have no healthcare, that society does not take care of each other. No, we are not free. Actually, it’s the opposite: we’re enslaved to the system; the system rules our lives, and we are prostrate before it.

That’s what is wrong with this picture. Welcome home.