My mother sits beside me, meditating to the accompaniment of cars driving by on the road behind us. A moderate breeze rustles the leaves of the palm trees and threatens to close the book I’m writing in. A couple talks quietly to each other on the bench about 10 feet to our right. They are […]
I stand in the cathedral, listening to the service in a language I barely understand. But that’s not what gets my attention. My eyes follow my heart as it rises with the choir’s song toward the vaulted ceiling where stained glass windows tell stories from the Bible. I almost feel more than see the undulation […]
Memories are funny things. As I try to pull together all that happened during those three weeks in September, some of the memories are faded, while others are in sharp, three-dimensional Technicolor. Like the shock of recognition that jolted through me when I first saw Tio Pepe, my grandfather’s youngest brother. He looked so much […]
Our second night in Madrid, a street band played outside our window in the Puerto del Sol. The quartet featured Peruvian flutes and played classics such a “Dust in the Wind,” “The Sound of Silence” and Abba’s “Chiciquita.” I stepped out onto the balcony and, for a while, watched the people dancing and laughing to […]
“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.” –George Bernard Shaw Ask me about any place that I have visited or lived in, and I’m bound to tell you about the food. My strongest memories of Berkeley, Calif., was my introduction to Batura Chole, an East Indian fry bread served with curried garbanzo […]
I sit here in my small, messy office, piles of papers, magazines and other detritus littering the floor around me, remembering the first heady days of my trip to Spain and Romania last month. My mother, who made this trip possible in the first place, arrived the evening before we were to fly to Spain. […]
Whew! I’ve been home from my trip to Spain and Romania only a week and yet I still feel like I haven’t digested it all. Although that may, in part, be due to the nasty cold that flavored my jetlag upon coming home. I’ve strolled the paseo in Estepona, visited the Prado in Madrid and […]
