Dear ones,

One last posting from the road. I'll try to send this from the Madrid airport, on my way to London to see Isabel for a few days. But first to backtrack a bit, to Granada where I expected to spend my final week.

Fortune-telling

There's a lovely old story about this city in which two people see a blind beggar on the street and one says to the other, "Give the man an extra coin, because there's nothing more tragic than to be blind in Granada." It's a city with all sorts of romantic associations like that. My guidebook says something about dogs in the city square wagging their tails in rhythm to the guitar music. And so I planned to spend a whole week here. I'm not quite sure what I expected exactly, but something exceptional and beautiful.

But frankly, as I arrived and walked in from the train station I found a city without special appeal. If there is surpassing charm here, then I'm blind to it. (Perhaps somebody should give me two coins.) Maybe it's not so much beauty as the laid-back atmosphere that gives Granada its reputation. It was the last stronghold of Islam in Andalucía before Ferdinand and Isabel came to an agreement with Boabdil in 1492 and sent him packing. (The rest of the Muslim population got evicted within decades.) So maybe it appropriately holds a sense of being on the downslope of history. (Much of Spain does, come to think of it.) I'm glad to have spent four days in Granada and did indeed discover some of its charm in the old Moorish Quarter and especially in the sublime Alhambra on the hilltop opposite. But I also decided to move along to Madrid a couple of days earlier than planned to spend some time in the art museums there, and even simply reading in a hotel room that's a bit more comfortable than the one I had here.

There's something in Granada that spurs reflection-at least in winter sunlight-and I get the feeling that my sabbatical is coming full circle or has completed a loop of the spiral. Once again I'm in a city with rooftop patios with views up toward famous buildings on the hill above, and shops selling some of the same stuff that they hawk in Istanbul bazaars--beaded shoes, camelskin lamps, even bellydancing outfits--especially in the Albaycín (Granada's Moorish Quarter), with its narrow, hilly, cobbled streets. Also reminiscent of Istanbul: I'm feeling the need to be on my guard again. This time it's not the carpet touts they warn you against, it's the pickpockets and, for some reason, the Roma (gypsy) women offering sprigs of rosemary. Actually they seem harmless. I'd refused several sprigs from several women until one literally forced one into my hand. "Un regalo," she insisted. A gift. And then she took my hand and read my palm, a generic reading with all the unrehearsed delivery of a telemarketer calling at dinnertime: long life, you are a sensitive person, a good lover, you will talk with a family member on the phone very soon... Basically what any tourist would want to hear. And then of course she held out her hand and rubbed thumb and fingertips together. I read later that they consider coins bad luck, so a 5 euro bill is "the minimum they'll accept" (whatever that means). When I reminded her in Spanish that she said it was a gift, she took the sprig of rosemary back, mumbled something about my head (perhaps I've now been cursed), and walked away.

Waiting for sunset

In some ways I'm ready for my travels to end. There's a stowaway weariness you keep finding when you open up your suitcase one more time. Not fatigue--I am getting a lot of sleep and with not a lot to do on a long stay in Granada or at least not the desire to seek it out, I'm enjoying reading a good book that's been on my get-to list since college. And Don Quixote now kneels in the on-deck circle, rusty lance in hand.

But it will be good to be back home, in my own bed, in my home neighborhood and community. I miss my dog. Besides, there are only so many old Spanish churches you can walk into. I hear that some of them here in Granada are beautiful, but I haven't seen for myself. With all the Baroque, Renaissance, and reworked Gothic churches I've been in in this past month the one that felt most right was Saint Merri near the Pompidou Center in Paris, a dirty old Gothic church nearly worn out from community use. Outside, someone was sleeping in a tent. Inside, the manger scene was also in a camping tent, Mary and Joseph traditional figures bent in adoration over a dime-store doll. Some of the old churches have been stunningly beautiful, and I head home even more convinced of the need for an awareness of beauty, but some of these church buildings have also been overwhelming. Or maybe better to say that the cumulative effect of them has been. I appreciate the simplicity of mosques more.

The Alhambra is a good case in point. It's not a mosque, rather a palace, but it illustrates the point, sort of. (How's that for a simple declarative sentence?) It's anything but simple, but all the details are small and they're repeated so rhythmically that they inspire without overwhelming. I was lucky to visit in January and not in high season when 8000 people a day go there. One thing I noticed since no one was forced forward by sheer numbers: the longer people spent there, the slower they walked. There's a calming effect to the place. Some have written of the perfect proportions in the Alhambra. Maybe that's true, I don't know how you'd judge, but it's a very quiet and restful place. Surely some of it has to do with the presence of water throughout, in reflecting pools and fountains and running channels. Like the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul (but much smaller), it doesn't fit the Western image of a palace designed to impress with its riches. Its elegance is enough. (I also realize that I don't know what it looked like in the sultans' days; so take what I say with a grain of salt. I always do.)

My last evening in Granada I went to the San Nicolas lookout point in the Albaycín. It's a popular spot at the end of the day and probably overcrowded in the summer. But in January it attracts a moderate-sized crowd. Not many kids, but adults of all ages, some with a throwback hippie look. Some were drinking beer, some wine, many smoking cigarettes, some smoking pot, some intent on catching the goldening sunlight in their cameras, kids capturing lightning bugs in a jar. A pierced young woman bounced her baby on her hip. A Roma man playing flamenco looked like he was trying to shred his guitar strings, ripping every note out as fast as he could; a red-haired woman beside him accompanied him with clapping and sang, matching his blazing intensity by holding out her notes as long as she could. Afterward, all around, people applauded. An older woman was selling castanets and giving lessons. (I partook of both.) And just as the sun sank under the mountain ridge to the west, she got up and danced to the guitar, in her heavy coat and house slippers, hiking up her skirt when it started to slip but for the most part with hands held high, rotating at the wrist, fingers placed just so. It was a lovely moment to say goodbye on.

The Tourist heads home

I won't be home till the 19th because of my visit with Isabel, but I'm ending my sabbatical in Madrid, where people walk slow and talk fast and one eatery is called the Museo de Jamón-the Museum of Ham. (Not even in the American South do people eat so much ham! Some say it became he practice here after Ferdinand and Isabel evicted the Muslims and Jews. Eating pork became a way of giving the outward sign that you were indeed Christian.) My hotel is just off the Puerta del Sol, in the heart of the city. When I first arrived and came up from the Metro stop, the plaza was full of people, but all of them were simply strolling. And this wasn't the late-afternoon paseo; it was noon. Late morning, late afternoon, late at night, whenever I went out, people were always strolling.

One of my favorite spots, to which I kept returning, is the Plaza Mayor, which as to be one of the world's great public spaces, a great cobbled square near the heart of downtown, with arcades under the old buildings that enclose it. On the sunny side of the square, couples sit in open-air cafes and old men cluster on folding chairs, swapping stamps and stories. All around the plaza's perimeter, people sell coins and stamps and old silver crosses, seated artists draw lifelike portraits or grotesque caricatures while others stand and trowel paint onto canvases. The mud lady sits motionless until someone puts a coin in her shoebox, and the copper cowboy walks past, pulling his podium on a luggage caddy, looking for a place to stop, set up, stand stockstill, and earn his daily bread. I returned one last time this morning and came upon a film shoot, Ewan McGregor walking into the square, pausing to take it all in, and then walking on up to the camera. Afterward people had their photos taken with him. He seemed a nice enough man, but no, I didn't approach him. I hear Hugh Jackman is here, too, but not in this scene. (The working title of the film? The Tourist, appropriately enough.)

I did spend a few hours in Madrid's great art museums this weekend. No need to give you much of a review except to say how powerful Picasso's Guernica is in person, especially after reading about the story behind it (Franco having offered the Nazis a chance to try out their saturation bombing on a rebellious little Basque village) and seeing many other sketches and drawings Picasso did at the time, trying to convey the grief of a Basque mother holding her dead child, and his own grief over what was happening in his country... And to see Goya's public paintings and then the ghastly ghostly murals (called "the Black Paintings") he painted on the walls of the rooms in his own house. And the consummate, compassionate paintings of Velásquez. And, sticking out amongst all this Spanish art like a madman crashing high tea, Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, which is weird and fresh and intriguing. I walked by at least a dozen paintings for every one I stopped to see (I can take in only so much), but it's been a rich visual feast to end my time on. As a Southern friend was taught to say when she'd had her fill at the table as a girl, "I've had a delicate sufficiency, thank you. Anything more would be superfluous."

Maybe that's as good a note as any to end these reflections on, though the mass of words I've sent your way could hardly be called delicate. For any who have found some of this enlightening, thank you. It's been good to have a reason to keep some discipline about writing down my reflections. Some I've sent your way, others I've kept, food for my own thought in days to come.

Looking forward to seeing you again, whether soon or farther down the road.

Blessings,