CategoryTravel

and I don’t know their names

  • As I sit on the deck of this hostel in Granada next to la Puerta de Elvira, in my peripheral vision are houses and churches and other buildings and trees on the hillsides, and I don’t know their names. It’s beautiful
  • This is the third morning sitting on this rooftop, enjoying the cool air, blue skies, the Greek yogurt mixed with apricot jam, bought from Mercadona on my first evening here
    • I first knew yogurt at a medical convention in the 1970s. Free range, my sisters and I wandered the exhibits, where a man gave us free samples of apricot yogurt in tiny pleated white paper cups. I can still taste the tart and sweet. I have been trying to recapture that madeleine
      • Yogi Bear; Yogi Berra; the yogi who met with the Beatles; yoga; Lilias, Yoga and You; yogurt. In my childhood they swirled together
      • French Madeleine is Spanish Magdalena. I didn’t know. Mary Magdalene, María José, José María, what names
      • Dannon yogurt used to come in waxed paper. They dropped apricot, albaricoque, a long time ago
  • In the US, we would say people in Spain eat slowly. In Spain, I suppose people simply say that they eat. Even in Burger King (I must admit that I’ve been twice on this trip). And when they finish eating, they sit and talk, la sobremesa. And then they walk out and sometimes stroll together, un paseo. Words for every day, the everyday
    • (They also smoke, a lot, outside. I don’t like it)
    • In the hostel at Cádiz, a German maths teacher outlined a downside to Spanish looseness with time. He said that he was tutoring a student and that it had gone well, so he asked the mother if they could set this as a regular time. She replied no, next week it would have to be an hour later. Then he asked if that would then be the regular time. She said, we’ll see, but then never responded and he lost that student
      • In his interpretation, the issue was that he was trying to confine her by establishing a regular time. She and her family needed flexibility
      • Punctuality is not the issue. The German fellow said that his student arrived on time too. And in my experience, intercity buses and planes run on time. Flexibility. Responding to others’ needs. Being more relaxed
        • Do you want to go out? A friend asked him later. No, I’m doing some work on the computer, he said. But then he realized he could just as well do the work later, when his friend wasn’t available. So he went out
      • But this was in Cádiz and maybe the sense of Gaditan time is different
        • I did feel more relaxed in Cádiz — children of all ages playing football in Plaza de Mina, maybe one or two adults nearby. The bartender giving me a friendly wink as I settled the bill for vermut, croqueta de bacalao, tortillita de camarones, patatas aliñadas
          • I hadn’t had any of those in Spain before this trip. Well, the tortillita de camarones resembles a Filipino dish, and the patatas aliñadas are similar to something I cooked up
        • I didn’t even know I was going to visit Cádiz until a couple of days earlier
          • In El Salvador last January I met people who traveled this way around Central America: deciding where their next destination spur of the moment, finding a flight or chicken bus there, arriving and landing in a hostel. It works. It’s about frame of mind more than anything
      • I visit hostels not only because they are cheaper, but because they are sociable. At least the best ones are. The staff, guests, gathering spaces, free breakfast at Casa Caracol in Cádiz were the best in this regard on this journey
    • I took BlaBlaCar on this trip for the first time — from Málaga to Cádiz, then from Cádiz to Granada — because it is faster, cheaper, and sociable. On the way to Cádiz I sat in the front and chatted with my driver in Spanish about parts of cars, classic rock from around the world. To Granada, we spoke a lot in English because the driver wanted to practice, and the other passenger was also from the US. I sat in the back with a friendly dog
      • BlaBlaCar means the train and bus infrastructure between two places isn’t as good as it ought to be
      • It also means trusting strangers to take you
      • You have to be flexible with BlaBlaCar. Both times the driver didn’t pick me up exactly when we planned. And because of atascos we arrived late in Granada. Pero después de todo, vale la pena. De hecho, aprendí mucho
      • The young woman from Mississippi who rode in the front as we drove to Granada arrives in a place and couch surfs
  • We were in Granada nearly seven years ago, staying just off Paseo de los Tristes, with a view of the Alhambra. I didn’t realize it was an iconic street
    • My BlaBlaCar driver mentioned it as a place to visit so I marked it on Google Maps
    • Then on my first full afternoon in Granada I arrived there. My mental maps of where I had wandered the previous day and of where I had visited in January 2020 suddenly snapped together like two jigsaw puzzle pieces
      • The place where we stayed. Where we had dinner. Where we watched flamenco. Where the children collected candy during the parade on the evening of Los Reyes Magos. The bus stop where we waited in vain after the parade to catch our bus to Barcelona, stopping only briefly in Valencia.
    • I arrived there by walking down from Albaicín and Mirador de San Miguel Alto, uphill and east of Puerta de Elvira, then heading south towards the river, on unpaved paths, passing modern dwellings carved into the hillside. We didn’t visit Albaicín on the previous trip so I wanted to go
      • We did see the Alhambra. So I didn’t need to see it on this trip. This trip is about finding a place to live in Spain
        • Living in a place is different than being a visitor
        • So I am staying several days in each places I’d earmarked as a potential place to live
        • I don’t need to see the Alhambra not only because I have relatively recently, but also because if I live in Spain I will be more easily to visit it again later
      • On our earlier trip we said it was like we were having tapas, a few days in Madrid and Barcelona, and in just a day each in Toledo, Baeza, Ronda, Seville, the outskirts of Málaga, Córdoba, and Granada. But now I think it was more like trying to sample from an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was too much, we were trying to stuff ourselves
        • I have a much better sense of how to enjoy tapas now
      • On this trip I’m in Palma de Mallorca, San Sebastián, Bilbao, Santander, Málaga, Cádiz, Granada, and Madrid. A large number of places, but this time for a month.
      • My second trip to Spain, two-and-a-half years ago, was devoted to the Camino de Santiago, plus Madrid, El Escorial, Lisbon, and Porto.
  • Last night I watched the Steelers-Browns game. I believe in continental Portuguese. Because I could understand about 10% of it, and because it sounded like an Eastern European language
  • I want to go visit the Re-Read used bookstore now, before they close in the afternoon. Because why not? A different rhythm. The archaeological museum closed early on Sunday and I missed going. But so what? I couldn’t find the entrance to El Palacio de Dar al-Horra at sunset, so I ended up instead at a park, Placeta Cristo de las Azucenas, where couples kissed and people played music and friends hung out as the sky darkened
    • In the US sometimes I feel like “I’m doing nothing” and I feel guilty. But here in Spain, even knowing I am here only for a month, I might be doing the same thing but and then I think “I’m living as I wish”
Posted on by William Alba 1

el cambio y la cultura

El verano ha llegado a su fin — pues, el horario de verano aquí en Europa. Ayer la diferencia entre la hora entre España y Nevada era de nueve horas, pero hoy es de ocho. Mis dispositivos electrónicos ya cambiaron esta mañana — el portatíl, el móvil, y mi reloj confiable (Oceanus OCW-S100-1AFJ).

En toda España hay oportunidades culturales gratuitas o con descuento respeto a los profesores, pero especialmente aquí. Hoy es el cumpleaños de Pablo Picasso Ruíz y me voy ahora por su casa natal para aprovechar la entrada gratis. Hay tantas entradas gratis — este museo hoy, otros lugares culturales todos los domingos en las tardes, la catedral (por las misas), y acabo de aprender de que hay una ópera esta tarde. La ciudad de Málaga es llena de cultura.

Posted on by William Alba 0

saber y ganar

Saber español abre puertas cuya existencia no había advertido antes de este año. Claro que me permite entender los anuncios en los aviones, leer los menús en los restaurantes y hablar con la gente en las calles o en los albergues. Pero, además, me brinda la posibilidad de aprovechar situaciones en las que, de otro modo, no tendría ninguna oportunidad de participar.

En abril cuando visataba Tokio, el tour del Palacio Imperio en inglés estaba bien aborratado. En vez de reunirme ese tour, fui con el en español. Este mes en unos museos en el País Vasco, los letreros fueron solo en español y en vasco. Además, esta semana pude entender los guías turisticos en las cuevas paleolíthicas en Cantabria cuando las excursiones privadas se realizaron solo en castellano. Y a lo mejor aprovecho viajes compartidos en la app BlaBlaCar que es en español.

¡Qué genial saber español!

Posted on by William Alba 0

compañeros

Por el retraso de dos horas de mi vuelo a Mallorca, Ryanair me emitió un vale de 4 euros. Es lo menos que pueden hacer, pero la existencia simple de leyes europeas como esta todavía me agrada. Compré un sandwich de huevos y aguacate.

En mi recibo de Pret a Manger, hay dos frases, una justo después de la otra. La primera es típica: Gracias por su visita. Esta aparece en servilletas alrededor todo el país. Thank you for your visit.

La próxima dice: Danos tu opinión (sin acento sobre la última palabra). Es decir, Give us your opinion.

¿Qué pasa entre estas dos frases? Al principio, el recibo es formal: su visita. E inmediatamente después, en el próximo momento, va familiar conmigo y el resto de los clientes. tu opinión.

Una teoría es que los angloparlantes de la empresa Pret a Manger simplemente cortan y pegan las dos frases desde otros contextos. Pero prefiero pensar que ponen un poco más de pensamiento y esfuerzo en un documento que mucha gente lee.

A lo mejor refleja un cambio intencional. Primero la relación es entre una empresa y sus clientes. Y entonces la panadería nos invita que nos pensemos como amigos — como compañeros que comparten pan, no como una compañía y sus clientes.

¿Qué sé yo?

Posted on by William Alba 1

bookend

When they walked up Telegraph Avenue on their first or second date, a bird smeared white on the right side of her hair. He pointed it out, she reached up her hand, he intervened and unaffectedly removed it with his own fingers. A sign of good luck, her mother said later, though neither had heard that before.

When they walked through Rice Park forty years later and thirty-three years since last seeing each other, leaves tangled brown on the right side of her hair. He pointed it out, she couldn’t feel them, he hesitated then scrupulously removed them with his own fingers. A mirror, he said. As though such moments could be scripted.

Posted on by William Alba 0

Twin Cities, Twin Towers

While visiting the Twin Cities, last weekend I popped down to Northfield to visit my friend Baird, who teaches at Carleton College, along with his delightful family. It was difficult to believe that it had been over a quarter century since we had met in person. So many memories, even just reminiscing about Temagami: how I signed the guest book in ink and he chided me because it wasn’t archival as graphite, how Mookie and Kona feasted on the venison that Georgia’s boyfriend Keith had served at dinner, how shy I felt about singing around the fire in front of an opera singer, how Jesse shot the fireworks that I had brought by holding the tube in his hand like a wand. I’m remembering more that I didn’t even mention: jumping from a high deck into the water, showering with tepid water heated by sunlight, hanging onto a boogie board for dear life as Baird sped the motorboat over the waves.

At one point, I don’t remember why, we talked about the Twin Towers. It wasn’t in the context of 9/11 (the 25th anniversary being today), but simply a statement of fact that he introduced me to the TKTS location there. Yes, he said, it was so much closer to where he grew up in Brooklyn, and much less crowded. We smiled as we remembered going there.

When we remember the World Trade Center these days, we tend to do so on September 11, so we focus on the tragedy of its destruction, the loss of life, and the dissolution of the national assumption that our homeland is untouchable. I remember that too, but that’s not all I remember. I remember entering the vast lobby, the vertical white lines reaching for the sky, designed by the same architect of a Northwestern National Life Building I had seen in Minneapolis just two days prior. I remember visiting the observation deck as an adolescent, returning as a salmon spawn to the city of my birth. I remember as a child in Ohio watching on the TV as a man walked on a tightrope more than a hundred stories above the concrete sidewalk. I remember when I was a little boy growing up in the Bronx, craning my neck as we drove past the construction site, watching it go up, up, up. I remember the building — the building of it. To remember its presence, its life, the marvel, and smile.

Posted on by William Alba 0

purgatory

Today I awoke with a start, in utter darkness. Is it after noon? Did I miss the meeting with my scavenger hunt teammates? I reach for my phone — 09:10. Nine in the evening? No, I use ISO 8601 time. But it’s not really nine in the morning, not yet, not here where we are, wherever we are, in the middle of the ocean. I need to set back my clocks one hour, as I did yesterday morning, as I did the morning before that, as I did a couple of mornings before that, during this long transatlantic voyage.

I am barely able to communicate with the outside world: obviously there are no cell phone towers, and I did not spring for satellite and anyhow it’s Starlink and I won’t give another penny (let alone hundreds of dollars) to Musk. So I sip on the 150 minutes of data included with my cruise, an average of fifteen minutes per day. I upload and download email and text in batches. If I have a factual question, it goes on a list to look up later, or I simply rely on memory: just like the old days, the “before” time.

Even when I do connect to the Internet, my MacBook Air (M1 2020) and iPhone (14 Pro) don’t update automatically to the time onboard the ship, so I adjust them manually. I, the human being, need to inform these machines of the hour, rather than vice-versa. However, for whatever “user-friendly” reason, the Apple UI does not allow the user to simply define timezone in terms of UTC offset. Instead, I enter the name of a city that happens to share the same timezone. Far from land, how are we to do this?

Fortunately I maintain a habit of making lists and spreadsheets, and fortunately I store most of my data locally rather than in the cloud. We have moved far enough longitudinally over the past twenty-four hours that ship time is now shared with Santiago, Chile rather than Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Before that, it was Fernando de Noronha, Brazil; Praia, Cape Verde; and of course where we began in Lisbon, Portugal.) 

Oh, wait, even that methodology does not work. I suppose because Santiago and Rio don’t share the same {Daylight Savings Time / Summer Time} convention? My spreadsheet is based on timezones as defined by my trusty Oceanus (OCW-S100-1AJF) watch, so another possibility is that the timezone convention for those places has changed since the watch was manufactured. Another question to look up after I return to shore. In the meantime, I find a way to change the hour directly on these devices.

With twenty-five hours in a day, I sleep in. I seem to recall a circadian rhythm study in which someone entered a cave and allowed their own body clock to flow completely independent of external influences such as sunlight, temperature changes, clocks, and mealtimes. That person settled on a twenty-five hour day. I think this was conducted in the 1960s, in order to understand the sleep patterns that astronauts might prefer. I wonder if this study has been replicated, and whether the results hold across age, gender, and other variables, such as whether a person is alone or in a group. It’s the sort of research that is low cost, relatively easy to perform, and should easily receive IRB approval. 

On this ship, the Norwegian Epic, I was assigned one of the least desirable cabins (inside stateroom, without any windows, and at the fore, where the rocking of the ship motion is stronger than in the middle). Fair enough — the $89 fare I paid after CruiseNext credits to travel east to west, from Lisbon to San Juan, is even more affordable than the $129 fare on Norse Airways to cross west to east, from JFK to Rome. And in addition to being conveyed thousands of miles, I’m receiving ten days of food, lodging, entertainment, amenities, and service.

Upon arranging my four pillows to block the glow of the phone and my chargers, I sleep in complete darkness. The twenty-five hour days allow me to enjoy late breakfasts.

…

Here is what I ate at breakfast today:

  • mushroom, onion, mozzarella omelet, seasoned with Tabasco
  • baked beans
  • hash-brown potatoes
  • roasted, seasoned tomato
  • toasted English muffin with butter
  • yogurt with dried cranberries, dried apricots, walnuts, canned peaches, honey
  • peach pastry
  • pain au chocolat
  • regular and decaf coffee blend with cream and sugar
  • two glasses of cold water

I sit in La Cucina, one deck down from the Garden Café, because it is quieter and I can always find a seat near the prow. I look out onto the water, more blue today than any other. The second morning of our crossing, just before it rained, I thought I saw some flying fish leaping in front of the boat. I also saw a bird, hundreds of miles from land, and wondered why it didn’t alight to rest. I’ve occasionally seen seaweed and rough waters, but not today. The white caps are infrequent, and I already tknewll we were in relatively smooth waters, from the rocking of the ship when I’m in my stateroom.

I bring back to the room a couple of cups of crushed ice, in order to scrub the walls of my high-walled 1400 ml Nalgene bottle, which has a couple of stickers from my Alaska cruise in September. Over the summer I discovered that black beans work well to clean the walls of the bottle, rather than trying to use a long-handled brush. It turns out that ice, some liquid body soap, a bunch of good rinsing work well too, to remove the musty smell.

…

Here are the sorts of things I have been thinking about at breakfast each day:

  • how swiftly and safely we are crossing the Atlantic, in comparison to centuries past
  • how deep the water is, what kind of life is present, and whether the ocean is more like rainforest or desert
  • the ocean is my heritage as a Filipino (my father’s habit of describing the Philippines as a country of a thousand islands)
    • the Filipinos who serve on this and every cruise ship
    • the Filipino-Americans in the Navy —  according to Romer, whom I met three nights ago at Noodle Bar and who served as a radio technician on a nuclear submarine, there are many Filipinos in the Navy

Yesterday morning I revisited my childhood thought that Filipinos would make ideal astronauts, crossing the vast ocean of outer space. Reducing payload is essential when overcoming the gravity well of the Earth, and Filipinos generally occupy less mass and volume. Similarly, we consume fewer calories and breathe less oxygen — our bodies and mind run efficiently, at least based on my limited observations as a scuba diver whose tank runs out more slowly than others’.

Maybe this is on my mind because Apollo 13 is on the TV at the moment. I think this is the fourth time I have seen it on the TV. It repeats, presumably on some cycle, along with movies such as Interstellar, a film where Carey Mulligan plays a singer of a folk duet, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and the most recent Captain America movie in which Falcon has become Cap and the President played by Harrison Ford nearly goes to war with Japan over adamantium (this same movie promoted at a pop-up Marvel store near Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo last January).

Yesterday the two movie channels started to put on rotation the one where Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks coaching the 1980 US Olympics team, maybe it’s called Miracle or Miracle on Ice. I also spotted part of Roman Holiday yesterday afternoon. In that movie you can see the Spanish Steps and the interior view of the Colosseum, but on this trip I didn’t see the former and in fact didn’t enter any of the usual tourist sites in Rome. I only visited outdoor spaces around the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, and my beloved Pantheon.

In fact, on this trip I dedicated about as much time awake in Rome as in New York City, having decided to explore Naples for the first time instead. I took only one day in Sintra, and just a couple of hours in Lisbon, because I had visited last year. I tell myself that these decisions are fine because I will have other opportunities to visit these places again. I tell myself that I will have other opportunities because I firmly believe this to be true.

…

During this trip I continue to make spreadsheets and lists, including of the places I visit, the activities that I do, how much things cost. And the day before yesterday I began to a spreadsheet to figure out how many days I am at home each year versus how many days I have been traveling, from 2019 onwards.

The other day I checked out some books from the ship’s library. I have been reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell while waiting for shows to begin, since sometimes the theater and smaller venues fill up. In the first chapter Odell describes how spreadsheets reflect a drive for mastery over time — the drive of capitalists to control the how laborers move their bodies, which perversely becomes the drive of ourselves to increase our own efficiency, so that we bind ourselves in servitude to time.

To build on Odell’s observation that time is not fungible: The bare reality is that a day in the life of a 17-year-old is not the same as that of a 60-year-old. The minutes on first awakening are not experienced in the same way as those before going to bed. The capitalist seeks to give equal weight to every unit of time, but they are manifestly different. We have created the idea of money, which is fungible and countable. But then when we say “time is money”, we enslave ourselves to the idea that our time is also fungible and subject to accounting.

Our society is in general obsessed with quantification. Imagine life before being railroaded. We used to perceive time through the movements in our heavens, the beating of our hearts, the rhythms of our songs. Imagine life before stickers were placed beside your name on the kindergarten door. We used to learn for the pleasure of knowing and sharing.

…

When I was a child, we would say bedtime prayers. We would ask God to bless family members. I wondered what it meant for the dead to be in purgatory. How did they experience the passage of time? How could we pray to them or for them, how could we communicate to God, if they were approaching or experiencing eternity, while I manifestly continued to grow older all the time?

Yesterday I awoke with a start, in utter darkness.

Posted on by William Alba 1

where life wants to be

When we drove to and from Reno this past week, we didn’t take the quickest route. Marissa had done this road trip twice before and preferred skirting the Sierras instead of going exclusively through Nevada. In fact, during our travels she remarked several times how you could tell we were in California because it was more beautiful. Well, there is a subtle beauty to the high flat desert, but it doesn’t compare to a greener alpine landscape, with vistas of snow-covered mountains.

On the way back approaching Beatty, there is one place in the desert unnaturally blanketed by acres of grass, irrigated in circles. There are no crops, the lawn didn’t seem for pasture, and the boundary between the lush sections and the dry dust is stark. Immediately I realized that someone had water rights and was using them, only so as not to lose them. The place is called Oasis Ranch and according to this article from last January the property is for sale at $9.37 million dollars, with an annual water allotment of 3.27 million gallons. As of today it is still listed at that price on Zillow. That water usage is about 25 times more than the average house in the Las Vegas Valley. And for what? To have an enormous lawn. It’s outrageous. With that money, just buy a house in a part of the country where the grass grows.

In Pittsburgh during the summer, I’m continually mowing the lawn, cutting down trees volunteering along the fences, pulling ivy from the walls of the garage and house. Life wants to be there.

It’s similar to when I was leaving Santa Fe twenty-two years ago. As I walked the edge of Central Park the first evening I was there temporarily for a few weeks, I laughed as the rain misted my face. Santa Fe is beautiful in its own way (The New York Times has a strange obsession with the place), and the first summer I visited it thirty-three years ago I was stuck in a pounding thunderstorm that turned to hail as my friends and I descended Atalaya. But usually it’s so dry there. When I was walking through water in New York it was like a dream, a dream come to life again. And then when we moved there cross-country and reached Pennsylvania, Marissa saw the rolling green hills and she, who had lived in flat Illinois her whole life before we moved to New Mexico, she said it was like paradise.

…

When we lived in Manhattan, I walked around the city a lot, which of course is what New Yorkers do. This transformed my mental map. I thought I knew the city fairly well: I was born in Belmont near Arthur Avenue, and also lived as a child in Bensonhurst and the South Bronx; I visited Midtown and the Village frequently even after we moved to rural Ohio; my college girlfriend grew up in Bay Ridge; and I had plenty more personal and professional opportunities to visit over the years.

But walking around the city made me see it differently. I previously would take the subway to get around, popping down in one place and then back up again, as though Scotty were beaming me via transporter. I knew the lines well enough to get myself from Coliseum Books to Book Scientific to the Strand. I knew the Compleat Strategist was next to the Empire State Building, but that FAO Schwartz was closer to MoMA and Radio City, and the Met and the Guggenheim were on the Upper East Side.

Yet in my head these were distinct destinations. When the electricity went out across the entire Northeast the month we moved there, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and up Broadway until reaching our apartment off Columbus Circle, and even in the dark I began to stitch together what once was separate. As I became more of a pedestrian, I realized how Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Union Square, and other neighborhoods connect to each other. 

The same sort of thing happened on this trip. Fifteen years ago I took Green Tortoise on my first and only trip to Yosemite, and afterwards we saw the tufa at Mono Lake, stopped at a Chevron station where I emailed the family, swam in the fresh water of June Lake. Seven years ago I visited Reno for my first conference with the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology, although I saw only the section near the Truckee, up along Virginia to UNR. At various stages in my life I considered studying or applying to teach at Deep Springs College. These places were separate in my head, but on this trip they began to come together.

…

A necklace of episodes. A highway of memory.

Posted on by William Alba 0

three score

On my birthday, my sister Joyce wrote

So you’re 16, right?? Hope it’s a good one!

I immediately replied

Jajaja, estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años!

…

When I was younger, birthdays felt more significant. Even half-birthdays, even though we didn’t celebrate them — I used to tell adults my age in half-years. I remember telling my mother before a party at the bowling alley that 10 felt important because I was going into double digits, and that was also around the age where I stopped declaring half-years. But then at 15-1/2 I got my learner’s permit, and at 16 my driver’s license. At 18 I could vote but had to register for the draft, at 19 I was legal to drink, but then they changed the age and I had to wait again until 21.

Many of the rest sort of blur together, in part because they don’t mark legal transitions. I do remember celebrating 29 together with friends, although I don’t have a strong recollection of celebrating the 30th. 35 was Dante’s age midway through life (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”), as well as my age when I first read Dante. I married that year. I was aware that I was old enough to be President.

40 was filled with changes, moving from Manhattan to Pittsburgh, saying goodbye to Mookie, buying our first house. However, like 35 before and 50 after, while the year was eventful, the actual birthday, not so much. The years became more important than their passage. The sweeping of the hands on a clock, not the marks where they pause.

…

Increasingly the birthdays, even the half-birthdays, have started to take legal import again. At 50 my health insurance would pay for the shingles vaccine and for a colonoscopy. At 59-1/2 I could withdraw penalty-free from my retirement accounts. At 62 I could begin Social Security as well as purchase a lifetime pass to the US National Parks. 65 is my full retirement age for Social Security and when I become eligible for Medicare. If I wait until 70 for Social Security I could receive maximum payments. At 72 I must start taking required minimum distributions from my retirement accounts.

60 is not a subject of the law, it is pure, important for its own sake. 60 is a beautiful round number, plenty of divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, .., just naming them is like counting the passage of time. And 60 is intimate with time: seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, now years in a lifetime. It is an age when I do not take for granted that I can travel to other countries and walk pilgrimages, decide on a whim to go parasailing or scuba diving, sleep a good night’s sleep on a thin pad when I go camping. It is an age where I have learned so much, forgotten so much, can continue to build and learn too.

Sí estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años.

Posted on by William Alba 1

soñar con lo que aprendo

When I was fifteen, sixteen years old I would wake up remembering dreams about things I was learning at that age. There were dreams of organic chemistry mechanisms floating through space, of driving the streets of my hometown, of speaking French. I don’t recall now if I dreamt at the time about karate, but that would surely fit the pattern.

…

This morning I woke up with a phrase in my head: respeta naturaleza. I was with a group of hikers, including some younger ones who were stomping on some mushrooms on a log, no reason, just to smash them into the rotting wood.

I thought: that’s not quite right. I should have dreamt, I should have said in my dream, respeta la naturaleza. Or if Nature is personified, perhaps respeta a Naturaleza. If I’m addressing one person formally, like the safety instruction cards on an airplane, the imperative would instead have been respete. But hold on, this was a group of hikers, so respeten. Unless I’m in Spain, and then I had to look up whether it was respetad (which is correct) or respeted — my knowledge of vosotros conjugation is lousy, I need to work on that.

…

But at least I dreamt in Spanish! It was wonderful to dream once more about something I’m learning. I’ve been wondering for a long while if this could ever happen again, whether I would ever dream in Spanish. For some months now I’ve reached other milestones. Sometimes these are delightful: during the last year when I had conversations with people around Spain and Mexico, I’ve sometimes been unable to remember later that day which language I was speaking. Other times, not so much: there have been a few occasions when I’ve wanted to say something to an English speaker and had only the words in Spanish. To lose my abilities in French while learning Spanish, whether out of disuse or the Spanish “crowding out” the French in my head, that’s one thing. But to lose my ability in English!

I asked my parents a year or so ago whether they dreams in Tagalog, Visayan, or English. (It’s strange how often we know so little about the inner lives of the people close to us.) My father said he barely remembers any of his dreams, so he couldn’t say. My mother said her childhood dreams are in Tagalog and her adult dreams are in English, even though she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t know both languages. I asked the same question of a couple of other fluent multilingual speakers I met last summer, and they both said it depends on the situation, on the people they’re meeting in their dreams.

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Over the past month I have been inviting dreams about a particular Spanish word: patria. This is a key word in Filipino hero José Rizal’s last poem, which he wrote in the hours before he was executed. Sometimes he capitalizes the word, at other times no. It makes its presence felt as the second word, embedded throughout the poem, and then its stark literal absence from the last stanza. But what does it mean to him in each of these instances, and what word or words would be most fitting to use in an English translation?

My friend and former student, Daniel Davis, who is an accomplished multilingual translator of technical works, suggested one resolution is to leave patria unchanged in my translation. I had already considered that for the word salud elsewhere in the poem, which I believe is acceptable because as an interjection it is already on the edge of being a loanword in English. But if I were to take this route with patria, it would be because I see it as a shifting, nebulous concept in Rizal’s own thinking, both historically and within the poem. I’m not sure if I want to leave both of these words, salud and patria, in their original forms when the causes for doing this would be such different reasons.

There is so much more I would want to write about this one word, what it seems to mean throughout the poem and how different English words don’t quite fit, but I want to finish our taxes today.

And so I find myself still hoping to dream of patria.

Posted on by William Alba 0