Pep Rally

 Birmingham, Alabama. A Friday afternoon in September. It is the end of my first week in my new American school, and I am at my locker, about to go home. The hallways are deserted, but it’s probably because everybody has already left for the weekend. A girl comes by. “You can’t go home now!” she says. “There’s a pep rally in the gym! Hurry up, you’ll be late!”

It’s been a week full of weirdness. The weirdness of something called “homeroom.” The weirdness of the Pledge of Allegiance (from which I, a citizen of Spain, am excused). The weirdness of diagramming sentences. And the unspeakable weirdness of boys in the class. 

And now this pep rally. What is “pep”? What is “rally”? 

I find my way to the gym, push open the door, and am blown back by a wall of sound so loud it nearly knocks me over. Never in my thirteen years, and certainly not in my previous schools (run by nuns, for future ladies) have I heard such a din. The entire school is here, even the priests, nuns, and lay teachers, all of them yelling at the top of their lungs. There are repeated “rah’s” and “go’s” and “yay’s,” but are these expressions of anger, alarm, or what? Why are they raising their fists in the air? Is this a political demonstration? 

The noise is so loud that I give up trying to understand and stand there dumbly, sure that everybody is wondering what is wrong with me. In the center of the commotion stands a line of girls dressed in flared knee-length green skirts and thick white sweaters with big green letters on them. Grinning maniacally and yelling “rah,” and “go” and “yay,” they shake what look like mop heads made of green and white strips of paper. Periodically they give an extra loud yell and jump in unison, pumping their arms, arching their backs, and making their skirts float up. 

Behind the girls is an even more bizarre sight: a group of what I assume are boys with helmets covering their heads and part of their faces, grotesquely swollen shoulders, and capri pants. They are dressed in white, with big green numbers on their shirts.

 Then Father H., the principal, steps to the microphone and the yelling subsides. He makes the sign of the cross and the girls drop their mops to the floor as their skirts settle around their calves. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” Father H. intones. I recognize the prayer, so I say to myself “Dios te salve, María…” But what are we praying for? 

When it’s over I walk home in the amazing Alabama heat, glad to be away from the noise and the alien excitement, but feeling strange and alone. I’m worried that I never figured out what the pep rally was about, and that I will perhaps be asked about it on a test. For the moment, though, my brain unclenches, and I bask in the temporary relief of not hearing, not speaking, not trying to understand English. 

At home, I kiss my mother, go into my room, and turn on the radio—very softly because my father is in the living room practicing. Buddy Holly is singing that it’s raining in his heart. I can understand that. It means that he is sad because the girl he loves has gone away. (Will an American boy ever be sad because of me?) 

Then comes the mournful refrain: “Oh misery, misery, what’s gonna become of me?” And my brain, ceaselessly working to make sense of the strange world in which I find myself, concludes that Buddy must be saying “Oh, Missouri, Missouri”-- which is a state somewhere in the middle of this big, confusing country where that cruel girl has gone and left him all alone, like me.

Homesick

 While my mother, immobilized by vertigo, lay stretched like a corpse on the bed in our Manhattan hotel room, my father and I went to the top of the Empire State building. It was the spring of 1954, and we were on a two-day layover on the week-long airplane trip from Barcelona to Quito.

“Why is she sick?” I asked my father as we walked down Fifth Avenue.

“It’s because she’s sad that we left Barcelona,” he said.

Sad! What was there to be sad about? Weren’t we going on a fabulous adventure to South America, one even more thrilling than those of Hernán Cortés, Ponce de León and Francisco Pizarro? And hadn’t my mother, driven to distraction by the monotony of her housewifely existence, been the principal force behind my father’s acceptance of the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to found the country’s first string quartet? There was no room for emotional ambivalence in my ten-year-old heart. I couldn’t understand that my mother, who had wanted to go on this escapade as much as I had, could also feel regret at leaving her family behind.

For the next three years, while we lived in Quito, my mother oscillated between breathless excitement at the exoticism of it all--snow-capped volcanoes! endless jungles! head-hunting tribes!—and elaborate bouts of homesickness.

I never quite understood what was going on with her, but I sensed that the homesick role was hers to play. By contrast, I sought to distinguish myself by adopting a mask of stoicism. Tears and complaints were not for me--I wasn’t a baby anymore, nor was I sentimental, like a woman. I preferred to mimic my father, and leave the tragic persona to my mother.

And yet, how could I not have been homesick? But nobody asked if I was, and when confronted with my mother’s articulate depictions of her nostalgia, I assumed that mine, if it existed, couldn’t hold a candle to hers.

True, I was sheltered by my parents’ reassuring presence. But once the excitement of being in a foreign place wore off and life settled into a routine, how could I not miss the rhythms of my existence in Catalonia, where each month was marked by some festival, its ritual, and its accompanying dessert?

January was the month when the Three Kings brought me presents and we ate the marzipan-stuffed tortell de reis. February 12^th was the feast of Saint Eulalia, and my mother bought ensaïmadas from the bakery in my honor. On March 19^th, the feast of Saint Joseph, my aunts made crema catalana in celebration of my grandfather.  In April, for Easter, my godmother gave me the mona de Pasqua, a cake topped with chocolate eggs. In May, the month of Our Lady, we ate strawberries. And all summer-long, at my grandparents’ farm, we feasted on melons, peaches, and pears so ripe that their juices ran down my chin and soaked the front of my cotton dress.

All this was gone. And so was the tutelary presence of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, who had revolved like planets around my sunny childhood, and whose affection, interest, and willingness to entertain me I had taken for granted, just as an infanta assumes the devotion of her courtiers. But that wasn’t all. In the constant hubbub of our extended family, the to-and-fro of visits and phone calls, the telling and retelling of stories, gossip, opinions, advice, and concerns, my relatives had absorbed some of my mother’s emotional energy and distracted her from her focus on me.

Now, without her sisters to argue and shop with, her parents to worry about, and her in-laws to visit, my mother’s attentive gaze, when she wasn’t soaking fruits in permanganate or boiling milk to kill the tropical parasites that threatened us daily, was directed at me. And what she saw was in need of improvement. My baby charms were fading fast, and I was morphing into an icon of preadolescent awkwardness. I was a work in progress, and my mother girded her loins for the challenges that lay ahead.

My mother and I in Quito, 1954

Boys in my Class

 For all my writing about the drama of starting high school without knowing English, you’d think that there would be some trace of that in the journal that I kept at the time. But if you read that journal, which I wrote in Spanish, you would never know that my English was anything less than perfect.

I did not write about my anguish when I had to diagram a sentence, or when the P.A.’s garbled announcements came on, or when I didn’t understand a test question. Nor did I write about my constant worry that my deficiencies would become apparent to my teachers, and I’d be cast into the outer darkness.

What did I write about in my journal? I wrote about boys.

Landing in Birmingham in late 1958, learning English, figuring out the school rules, trying to fit into a culture that was both alien and compelling—none of these challenges held a candle to the real shocker: there were boys in my class.

And not just in my class. The whole school was overrun with them--boys by the dozen, in the chapel, the stairwells, the gym. Boys in crew cuts, jostling each other in the halls, dropping books and slamming doors, stretching out their long legs under the desks. Boys with voices that switched unpredictably from bass to soprano. Boys who looked like men, and boys who looked like little kids.

Until 9^th grade, I‘d hardly ever spoken to a male my age. I was the only child on both sides of the family, and in my German nuns’ school the only man was an ancient Augustinian friar with a waist-long white beard who came once a week to hear our confessions. My school in Quito was also boy-free, with the exception of the ones from the Jesuit school who would follow our school bus on its rounds, shouting and gunning the engines of their motorcycles.

In my all-female schools, the smartest kid in the class was always a girl, as were the troublemaker, the shy one, and the mean one. When the teacher asked a question, whoever knew the answer raised her hand, without a second thought. If somebody made a mistake, no one hesitated before correcting her. The best mathematician, the fastest runner, and the daintiest embroiderer were all girls.

But now here I was in a class overflowing—they took up so much more space than girls—with boys. As with most aspects of life in America, I found them fascinating as well as terrifying. How was I supposed to behave around these odd beings? On the rare occasions when one of them addressed me my scant English would desert me, and I would stare and stammer until he turned and walked away.

I watched the other girls for hints of how to act. The more popular ones, the ones who got phone calls from boys and went out on real dates, seemed to smile and giggle a lot, and they didn’t speak up much in class.

The giggling and smiling disconcerted me. I hadn’t had any experience with boys, but I’d read a few 19^th century Spanish novels, in which the lady was always indifferent to the hero’s passion, which paradoxically made him desire her even more desperately. So imbued was I with this principle of female behavior, that whenever a boy showed the slightest interest in me--no matter that I would have given ten years of my life for a date or a mere phone call from him--I would instantly quash it with my severe looks.

My 19^th century tactics didn’t work with American boys, who were accustomed to positive, or at least intermittent, reinforcement from girls. My outmoded notions, combined with my general awkwardness, put them off, and they mostly ignored me except to make fun of my, to them, unpronounceable name.

But there was another factor behind my lack of success with the opposite sex that took me a long time to figure out. As a result of eight years of all-female education, I didn’t realize that certain ways of acting in class might repel my male classmates. Blithely unaware of the appropriate modes of feminine behavior, once my English improved, if I knew the answer to a question I never hesitated to raise my hand. Even worse, it didn’t occur to me to hold back from contradicting something a boy had just said. In those moments, I was more interested in impressing the teacher than in inspiring love.

So I spent those early years sitting at home by the silent phone, writing feverishly in my journal about which boy had said hi to me in the hallway, and which boy had kicked my desk in a meaningful way during Religion class. It is a wonder that I managed to learn anything—how to speak English, or how to write a term paper, or the five proofs of the existence of God—with boys all over the place.

Sadly, these days I periodically hear from former classmates that one or another of those boys has died. And when I learn of such a death, I mourn not the balding patriarch of a loving family, but the long-legged, mysteriously alluring teenager eternally barging through the school halls of my mind.

My Mother and the Can of Crisco

During our years in Quito, my mother learned to shop in the open-air markets where Indian women, wearing long braids and black fedoras, layers of petticoats, and, usually, a baby on their back, squatted on the sidewalk. On the ground in front of them lay the produce of the high Andes: mounds of potatoes, piles of onions and corn, and slabs of meat. It was all very real and natural, and crawling with flies.

Her first encounter with an American supermarket was, therefore, a shock.  Everything she could want—from food to cleaning products--was in one pristine, air-conditioned place, all of it canned or neatly wrapped in plastic or cellophane.

One aisle had a surprising array of toilet papers--some strong, some soft, and all in gentle pastels. This was not what my mother was used to: in Spain, the only brand had been a no-nonsense brown, with a picture of an elephant uprooting a tree on the wrapping, while in Ecuador public bathrooms were invariably stocked with squares of newspaper. She was especially taken with the selection of paper napkins, also in many colors. “So hygienic!” she said. “You can have a fresh one at each meal.”

After four years in Quito, where she had to buy her chickens on the hoof and boil every drop of the water and milk we drank, my mother was understandably fascinated with the prospect of ready-to-eat meals. And she wasn’t alone. In that innocent and trusting age, American women cheerfully filled their grocery carts with canned vegetables, meats, and desserts. Here were convenience, nutrition, and endless freshness, and all you needed was a can opener. What was not to like?

The problem for us was figuring out what was inside the cans. The pictures on the labels weren’t always helpful. What, for instance, was that pink cube called Spam? What were those squishy cylinders called marshmallows? The tuna cans had pictures of fish on the label, but as a good Mediterranean my mother wouldn’t think of buying fish that wasn’t practically still wiggling.

We wandered the aisles, feeling increasingly frustrated, when I spotted something that might do. “Look,” I said, “it says Chili Con Carne! Whatever chili is, it has meat. It’s probably o.k.” My mother put the can in her cart and we walked on.

Then, when we were about to give up and leave with an almost empty cart, my mother held up an enormous blue and white can. It had pictures of delicious foods on the label—chicken legs coated in crisp batter, and biscuits, cookies, and slices of pie. Surely, my mother thought, this was the ultimate expression of American practicality: an entire meal in a single can. We bought a can opener and headed home for our first American dinner.

In the kitchen, my mother emptied the chili into a frying pan. “What are all these beans doing mixed with the meat? Your father won’t be too happy,” she said. My father and his family had starved during the Spanish Civil War, and one day he and his brother had managed to steal a huge sack of dried beans, which the family ate for months. Beans were one of the few foods that my father objected to.

As the chili heated, my mother took a taste. “Mare de Déu!” she exclaimed. “This is awful. Here,try it.” I did, and spat it into the sink. The harsh flavor of chili, spicy and bitter, stuck to the back of my tongue.

“Maybe if we eat it with bread,” my mother said, opening a loaf of Wonder Bread and handing my father and me each a slice. But that soft, pliable, crustless square was unlike any bread we’d ever seen. My father took a bite and closed his eyes, chewing. “I feel like I’m eating a piece of towel,” he said.

Our first American meal wasn’t turning into a success. “Well, we can’t eat this. Let’s try the other can,” my mother said, guiltily scraping the chili into the trash.

It took her a while to work the opener all the way around the top, and when she lifted it she said “What is this? Come look!” My father and I ran into the kitchen. The can was filled to the rim with a solid white mass.

“Maybe the food is hidden underneath” my father suggested.

My mother got a wooden spoon and carefully, not wishing to disturb the fried chicken and biscuits and desserts, dug out a bit of the white goo. But there was more goo under that, so she kept digging and digging until finally it became clear that the chicken, etc. on the label had been a lie designed to entice people to buy a six-pound can of that weird white substance.

“It’s some kind of grease,” she said, rubbing a bit of the stuff between index and thumb. “What can Americans possibly do with it?”

My mother dined out on the Crisco story for years. I found it embarrassing and humiliating, and would leave the room whenever she told it. In a way, the Crisco episode mimicked my experience of the American dream: promises of abundant delights as shown in the movies and TV that, upon closer examination, revealed a strange and impenetrable mystery.

The Lipstick Wars

In the late 1950s, in my Catholic school in Birmingham, Alabama, girls wore their hair short, their skirts long and tight, and their lips coated with dark red lipstick.

I was o.k. on the hair and skirt fronts, and I even had a little orange scarf that tied around my neck, like everybody else. But none of this meant anything if my lips were bare. Lipstick was the magic wand that would camouflage my all-too-obvious foreigness, catapult me into American teenagerhood, and give me a chance of becoming at least slightly popular.

“I’m the only one in the entire school who doesn’t wear lipstick, besides the boys,” I complained to my mother.

“What about the nuns? Do they wear lipstick too?” she said, trying for irony.

 “Is that what you want me to become, a nun?” I answered. “Because that’s what will happen, if you force me to be different from everybody.”

“That’s enough!”my mother said.

I stomped off to my bedroom and sat biting my nails, dreaming of the boys I’d date and the dances I’d dance if only I were allowed to wear lipstick.

I endured ninth grade without lipstick or dates. Then, on my fifteenth birthday, a savior appeared in the form of Miss Harrington. Tall, thin, gray-haired and bespectacled, she was the very image of the spinster school teacher. She even lived with her mother. Miss Harrington taught Spanish at a public school, and she adored my parents, who were the only native Spanish speakers she had ever known.

Miss Harrington knew teenagers, and she understood the drive for affiliation that at that age rivals the sexual urge in intensity. So on October 3^rd, 1959 Miss Harrington showed up at our house, made a little speech in front of my parents about what a grown-up young lady I was becoming, and presented me with a tube of Tangee lipstick.

It was a deep red bordering on purple, a color that would make even a fifteen-year-old face look middle-aged. But hey, it was a lipstick, and I could always tame it by blotting. I thanked Miss Harrington, barely restraining myself from kissing her feet in gratitude, and, with a triumphant glance at my mother, ran to the bathroom to try it on.

When Miss Harrington left, my mother pointed at my purplish mouth and said, “Take it off.”

“But Miss Harrington gave it to me. She’s a teacher! She knows Americans, and she doesn’t think I should be different from everybody.”

“And why shouldn’t you be different from everybody? We are not Americans. We are Spaniards, and in Spain little girls don’t wear lipstick.”

Why, you ask, didn’t I simply pretend to throw away the purple lipstick, hide it in my book bag, and put it on the minute I got to school? Because I was a good girl, that’s why, and I believed that obedience to my parents was second only to obedience to God.

But nothing said that I had to obey gladly, and as I fumed and ground my teeth, I had an idea. My mother’s sister was a teacher in the German nuns’ school I’d attended in Barcelona. She would know what Spanish teenagers were wearing, and, as my aunt, she would have my moral welfare at heart. My mother would, I reasoned, have to abide by her verdict.

So I wrote my aunt a letter begging her to intercede on the lipstick question, and sent it off by airmail. It took a week to get there, and her response another week to arrive, but when it did it contained these magic words: “a bit of pink on the lips would not be unbecoming…”

My mother was sautéing garlic for a sofregit when I ran into the kitchen waving the letter in the air. “A bit of pink’s o.k., she says! She says the girls in her school are wearing it! So now I can too!” But my mother tightened her lips, shook her head, and went back to stirring her sauce.

I was in my forties before I became aware of the deep rivalry that existed between my mother and the elder of her two younger sisters, and to realize that my aunt was the last person on the planet whose advice my mother would have taken on matters concerning me.

That summer, we went to Spain. My mother’s sisters, seeing me shapeless, pimply, and awkward, took me in hand. One bought me a bottle of Depurativo Richilet, a potion designed to purify the blood and get rid of acne. The other sewed me a sleeveless dress, full-skirted and cinched at the waist,that made me feel almost beautiful.

One night, as I was leaving for a party wearing the new dress, my aunts beckoned me into their bedroom and put a tiny smear of pink on my lips. I could barely see it, but I knew it was there by its weird, sticky feel, and I felt glamorous as well as guilty. I was almost out the door when my mother saw me, turned me around, and pointed to the bathroom.

She finally gave in on the lipstick issue when I turned sixteen at the start of eleventh grade. She was forty-two years old and nine months pregnant with her second child, and I suspect that she was too tired to keep up the fight. But my lipstick adventures were not over.

My religion teacher that year was an older Irish priest, Father MacCauley, who taught a cerebral approach based on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. This made us feel grown-up and intellectual, and we would argue in the cafeteria about which was the most convincing of the five proofs of the existence of God, and whether birth control really was a sin against human nature.

In one of his more bizarre lectures, Father Mac announced that, whereas it was man’s essence to be rational, women were by nature incapable of rational action. (How he got away with such pronouncements when the majority of his colleagues were Benedictine nuns I have never understood.) The boys in the class hooted with delight when they heard this, but at the end of the hour we girls got together and formed a compact: we would come to school the next day without wearing lipstick! That would show them!

I don’t remember what effect our bare lips had on Father Mac’s theories, but when we walked into English class, Sister Mary Rose took one look at us and exclaimed “Is something wrong? Y’all look so pale!” A few minutes later, I was called to the office. It was my father on the phone, telling me that the baby had arrived, and it was a girl.

In retrospect, I don’t hold it against my mother for taking a stand on the lipstick question. Who among us parents hasn’t on occasion put our foot down unnecessarily?

What I do object to is her holding me hostage to her own issues as an immigrant. It was very well for her, at forty, to emphasize her Spanish identity, which, among other things, made her an exceedingly entertaining dinner guest. At fourteen and fifteen, however, my identity was as fluid as a bowl of unset Jello.

Yes, I was proud of being Spanish, and I enjoyed the attention that being the only foreign student in the school occasionally got me. But I also intuited, in a nebulous way, that clinging to my foreignness would never get me invitations to sleepovers, or that holy grail of adolescence, a date to the prom. The exotic—unless it’s carried by someone far bolder and more self-assured than I was—doesn’t hold much fascination for teenagers, who generally prefer conformity.

With one foot on either side of the Atlantic, trying to interpret America to my parents while striving to please them in all things, I didn’t have an easy time of it. But I don’t envy my mother her task, either, and I’m certainly glad that I didn’t have to rear my adolescent daughters in a foreign culture. Which is why I can confer on my now-deceased mother the absolution that compassionate adults sooner or later bestow on their parents: “She did the best she could.”

No More Spanish, por favor!

I was in a state of dread watching the second Democratic debate last night, fearing that the candidates would feel obliged to follow in the steps of Beto O'Rourke and Cory Booker the night before, and break into Spanish.

On the first night, when those two stammered their few ungrammatical, mostly incomprehensible sentences in the language of Cervantes, I cringed. And then I got angry. Did Booker and O'Rourke really think that the Hispanic population would be so swept away by hearing them mumble a couple of sentences in Spanish that they would forget to examine the candidates' records and their policies? How much more patronizing can you get?

Julián Castro also said a few things in Spanish, but they came more naturally to him, by reason of his heritage. Nevertheless, I find the habit of larding speeches with foreign sentences in order to manipulate the emotions of a certain population silly at best--sort of like a male candidate attempting to capture the women's vote by dressing in drag.

Language is a powerful thing. When I hear on the news the voices of captive immigrant children crying mamá! papá! it brings tears to my eyes, because those are the names I called my parents as a child. I remember myself newly arrived in the U.S., and I imagine being separated from them. But when I hear Spanish badly used for political effect, I don't feel flattered or included. I feel insulted.

Still, this is a crucial moment in politics, and I am pragmatic enough to recognize that a candidate may have to resort to less than pristine tactics in order to win. So I suggest that, with the use of Spanish, brevity is best, as when Julián Castro wrapped up his remarks by promising that, on January 20, 2021, we will say adiós to Donald Trump.

Of Birds And Lilies

"Look at the birds of the air," Father Molloy intoned in his Irish brogue. "They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet the Lord God feeds them." Then he then went on about lilies and King Solomon, and when he had finished reciting he twinkled his blue eyes and said "Class, I want you to memorize this passage by tomorrow." The blood froze in my veins.

At home that evening I got out the New Testament and my paperback Spanish-English dictionary and went to work. I had no idea what the passage was about. I didn't know the meaning of sow, reap, gather, or barns. Then came the part about the lilies, which neither toil nor spin, whatever that was, but even Solomon was not arrayed like one of them. Arrayed--was it a good or a bad thing not to be arrayed like a lily?

And then a few lines further down Jesus said, "Therefore, do not worry..." (Matthew 6:26-34)

How could I not worry, when I had to memorize that long passage by tomorrow and I didn't know most of the words in it? I looked up sow, and reap, and gather. But by the time I got to barns I was confused. I had seen plenty of sowing and reaping in my grandparents' farm in Catalonia, but as far as I knew, the birds of the air were a menace around harvest time. They did not wait for the Lord God to feed them, but helped themselves boldly to the grain.

I ground my teeth and soldiered on, looking up word after word, but when I put them all together, the passage still didn't make sense. And here it was, almost bedtime, and I hadn't even begun to memorize.

"Therefore, do not worry..."

At fourteen, newly arrived in the U.S. and possessed only of the few crumbs of English I'd acquired from a German teacher during my three years in Quito, I worried all the time. I was the first-ever foreign student in a Catholic high school in Birmingham, Alabama, long before the days when English as a second language became an academic subject. I suspect that nobody knew what to do with me.

For my part, my all-consuming goal was to blend in so I could catch my breath and figure out, without letting anyone notice my ignorance, things I'd never encountered before, like homerooms and assemblies and rallies and football games, and to acquire enough English to survive.

My efforts at camouflage must have worked, because from day one my teachers seemed to assume that I was no different from my classmates. I'm sure that if I'd asked for help it would have been given gladly, but I never asked. I believed, given the stern regimes of my schools in Barcelona and later in Quito, that any sign of weakness or ignorance would be pounced upon by the school authorities and I would be cast into the outer darkness, to spend the rest of my days cleaning bathrooms for a living.

If I had only known how comparatively lenient and indulgent American educators were, I would have relaxed, but I didn't know, so I anxiously continued to mask my deficiencies. Arriving home in the afternoon, after a day of straining with every fiber to understand what was going on in class, I would retire to bed with a headache. Later I would get up and, dictionary in hand, try to do my homework.

But on the night of my encounter with the birds and the lilies, I finally realized that the dictionary was in fact hampering my efforts to understand. It was slowing me down, interrupting the flow of ideas so that I was missing the gist of the passage. Besides, there were just too many words I didn't know. It was impossible to look them all up, let alone remember them. I would simply have to figure out the meanings from the context.

With a sigh, I put the dictionary away and never opened it again. Somehow I winged it, lexicon-less, through the rest of school. At college graduation, my husband-to-be presented me with a hardcover Merriam-Webster Collegiate, but by then I hardly needed it.

It's been a late spring in Vermont, and the birds of the air and the lilies of the field are busy making up for lost time. The words in the Matthew passage are no longer a mystery to me. But, having learned to fret early on, it's those other words of Jesus that I still struggle with, "Therefore, do not worry...."

Sister Squirrel

As with most people who feed the birds, my relationship with the gray squirrel oscillates between grudging tolerance and rodenticidal rage. There is no lack of stories about the squirrel's diabolical cleverness in getting at food intended for the birds, so I won't bore you with mine. I'll simply say that when one of these plump uninvited guests goes anywhere near my bird feeders, I grit my teeth in aggravation.

Yet it wasn't always like this. When I first lived in an American suburb, I found the squirrels adorable, with their slanted eyes, monkey-like hands, and those cloud-colored tails that morphed into a question mark the minute they sat still. I thought they were charming and exotic, and I couldn't understand why so many people disliked them.

Now I do. I've been feeding birds and fighting squirrels for longer than we've been at war with Afghanistan, with mixed results. I've been wondering lately if it might not be time to change my attitude. Life's too short for hatred and strife.

The story of Saint Francis and the wolf of Gubbio comes to mind. There lived in the forests around Gubbio a fierce wolf who killed sheep, shepherds, and any citizen who ventured outside the city walls. One day Francis went in search of the wolf. He found him gnawing on a thigh bone and said, "Brother Wolf, why so much killing?"

"Winter is hard in the forest, Brother Francis," the wolf responded, "and I was hungry."

Francis made a deal with the wolf: if he promised never to harm livestock or people again, he would get the townspeople to feed him so that he would not go hungry. The wolf gave Francis his paw in agreement, and the people of Gubbio and their wolf lived in harmony ever after.

Like the wolf, my squirrels are hungry. Why should I begrudge them a few pounds of sunflower seeds, some measly suet cakes? Why not let them share the banquet that I so prodigally set out for the birds?

Maybe I'm afraid that, if I let the squirrels come to my feeders, more and more of them will arrive--huge invading caravans of squirrels that will drive the birds away and me into bankruptcy. Maybe I should build a wall around my feeders, a really high wall topped with barbed wire. Maybe, just to make sure, my husband and I should take turns standing guard with a pellet gun....

Or maybe I could go and stand beside the feeders and make a speech to the squirrels.

"Little gray Sisters," I would say, "welcome to my backyard. Here are my bird feeders. Here is my birdbath. You are welcome to all the water you can drink, and to the seeds that fall on the ground.

"I would prefer it if you didn't climb onto the feeders and dig out wasteful amounts of seed and suet, but I understand that some of you may not be able to resist the temptation. Whatever. The world is wide enough for your kind and mine and the titmice and chickadees, finches and woodpeckers.

"I will now go inside, take a deep breath, and try to see the beauty and innocence in your agility and determination. Pay no attention to the gray cat batting at you on the other side of the glass. He's never allowed outdoors."

Sister D

My high school math teacher, Sister D, died last week.  She entered the Benedictine order in her late teens, and must have been in her thirties when I knew her.  Like all but the very ancient nuns, she seemed ageless.  How can you tell someone's age when all you see is the triangle described by the span of the forehead and the chin, especially if you yourself are fifteen and even the 12th graders look fully adult in your eyes?

Those were my years of terror, when I was the only foreign student in a Catholic high school in the deep, deep South.  When I didn't know English and there was nobody but myself to teach it to me.  I am not inclined to find fault with those who were in charge of me in my past, but sometimes I think about those teachers--the young lay men and women, the smiling nuns, the Irish priests with their incomprehensible accents--and wonder, did they have an inkling of how lost I was?

Maybe they did.  Maybe they conferred on how best to handle me.  But nobody ever said anything to me about my language difficulties.  Maybe it is because I did my best to mask them--fear of ridicule is a potent learning aid in one's teens.  I remember clearly missing a question on a biology test about organisms in shallow streams because I didn't know what "shallow" meant.  Did I ask the teacher? The way I saw it, if I had asked every question I had, the entire school would have ground to a halt.

The principal did once during my freshman year stop me in the hallway and ask if I was doing o.k.  I had to make him repeat the question a couple of times, but once I understood it I said yes, yes, and fled down the hall.  And after that casual check, that was it.  As far as I could tell, the approach of my teachers during those high school years was to treat me exactly as they treated everybody else.  They probably had no idea what to do.  Bilingual ed was decades in the future.

There was one exception. Sister R, the junior-year English teacher, thought that I should give my speech on Communism (this being the early 60s) at the state-wide Civitan oratorical contest.  But she thought that first I needed to work on my accent.  So she kept me after school a couple of days and tape recorded my readings of the speech and tried her best to show me where the pronunciation was wrong...but I couldn't even hear what she was talking about.  I did nevertheless go to Selma, Alabama (just a couple of years before the march), and give the speech and somehow came in third.  That was the extent of my English language instruction.

But back to Sister D.  She taught college-prep algebra and trigonometry and physics.  Her classes were full of boys with bright futures involving slide rules hanging from their belts.  They were her favorites.  She treated them with a rough good humor, and stole their hearts with talk about football and baseball.  The girls did their homework and hoped that their math grades would not hinder them in their pursuit of majors in nursing and elementary education.

I worked harder for her class than I did for all the other subjects put together.  Of my three years with her I remember that I did learn about quadratic equations and logarithms and such--nothing I could ever begin to put to the slightest practical use except the habit of working hard at difficult things.  What I remember most clearly about Sister D was that she taught me an expression I had never heard before.

One day in class she came to my desk and said with a smile, "I have a bone to pick with you."  I instantly assumed my deer-in-the-headlights, language-impaired expression.  My classmates, who had seen it a million times before, tittered.  Why would my math teacher want to do something to a bone in my company?  Was this picking a good thing or a bad?  It turned out that she was joking about something having nothing to do with math, and I finally understood dimly that bone picking had something to do with fighting, but not, thank God, in this case.

And ever since, every time I hear that phrase, I think of Sister D and of the deeply scary days of my youth.

December 4, 2008 "Buddy Holly, My English Teacher"

The first thing my father bought upon arriving in Birmingham, Alabama, was a radio. A classical musician, he was a passionate jazz aficionado, and assumed that, since Birmingham was in the heart of Dixie, there would be non-stop fabulous jazz programming on the radio. Instead, all he found was gospel music, and rock'n roll.

“I can't stand these boy singers with their adenoidal voices. And those eternal triplets in the accompaniment--da, da, da...da, da, da--drive me crazy. Take the radio,” he said to me, “but turn it down low and keep your bedroom door closed.”

So the radio came to live in my room, and with it Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Brenda Lee, and Elvis Presley. I didn't understand their songs, but I loved the mysterious world they alluded to.

One of the first songs I remember is Buddy Holly's “Raining In My Heart.” (In the versions below, “blah” designates the parts I didn't understand.)

Blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah,

he doesn't know

you've gone away

and it's raining, raining in my heart.

Oh, misery, misery...

This is where things began to deteriorate. When Buddy sang “misery,” I thought he was saying “Missouri.” He was sad because his beloved had gone away to Missouri, which I knew was a state named after an important river of North America. The rest of the song made no sense, as there were no further allusions to the state, plans for the singer to go there, etc.

There was also “Donna,” by Ritchie Valens. His voice was so nasal, and he was so often flat, that he could have been any of the boys in my school, singing on the way to the cafeteria. I had come to the US after a few years in Latin America, where popular songs were sung by grown men with mustaches, who sang lines like ”Woman, if you can speak with God, ask Him if I've ever stopped adoring you...”

But in my bedroom in Birmingham, Alabama, Ritchie stated with adorable simplicity,

I had a girl

Donna was her name

blah, blah, blah

blah, blah, blah

Oh, Donna, Oh, Donna...

What kind of a name was Donna, I wondered? Was there a Saint Donna, and when was her feast day? It must be an exotic, wonderful name, since it inspired such longing in Ritchie Valens.

From the first time I heard him, I found Elvis irresistible. He didn't sound at all like the boys in my class, but he said weird things all the same, as in the song “Stuck On You”:

Blah, blah, blah,

Hide in the kitchen! Hide in the hall!

Ain't gonna do you no good at all [what was this girl doing alone in the house with Elvis? Where was her mother?]

Cause when I catch you and the kissin' starts

Blah, blah, blah [WHAT is going to happen when the kissin' starts?]

blah, blah, blah

I'm gonna stick like glue [what is glue?]

Stick! Because I'm stuck on you!

In this case, I learned, “stick” was not a piece of wood, but a verb, which appeared again in the form “stuck.” From Elvis's tone and panting breaths, I deduced that being “stuck” on someone meant liking him or her very much.

By my sophomore year I had made some progress, and could understand most of the first stanza when Brenda Lee shrieked:

My baby whispers in my ear

Mmmm, sweet nothings...

He knows the things I like to hear

Mmmm, sweet nothings...

Thanks to Brenda, I realized that in English, unlike Spanish, the noun “nothing” could be pluralized. I liked Brenda's unsentimental, assertive take on the things she liked and felt entitled to, a rare thing in those days.

Finally, there was Johnny Mathis's maddening “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” I couldn't make any sense of it. Were the lovers at a barbecue? Were they caught in a forest fire? It didn't help that every time the song came on the car radio my father would make me turn it off. “Listen to that vibrato. That man,” he would say, “sounds like a goat in heat.”

The bleatings of Johnny Mathis, the pantings of Elvis, the adenoidal laments of Ritchie, the shrieks of Brenda--they were all pure magic to me. It wasn't so much the music that was magical, as the words that I didn't understand, because I didn't understand them. They pointed towards a world that was utterly foreign and desirable to me, a world I was making my way into step by clumsy step. Rock'n roll was poetic in the way that only the unknown can be poetic, and I poured into the “blah blah”places, the spots I didn't understand, all the contents of my fevered teenage imagination.

These days, entire “oldies” stations are devoted to these songs, and my American husband loves to listen to them. But now that I can understand the words, the songs are a disappointment. They are shallow, repetitious (arms/charms, hand/understand) and unimaginative. They were so much better when I didn't understand them, when they were just a vessel for my passion.

I have a CD of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert's “Travels in Winter” in German. The CD comes with a complete translation of the poems on which the songs are based. I have only a smattering of German, but I refuse to look at the translation. It's much better if I don't quite know what Dietrich is saying. It makes the snow, and the sadness, more real.

November 26, 2008 "First Thanksgiving"

The time: the late 1950s

The place: Birmingham, Alabama

My mother, my father and I are driving home after Thanksgiving dinner with an American family.

“What a meal!” my mother says. “Do you suppose it was typical?”

“I don't know,” my father answers, “but I have just eaten a dinner composed entirely of desserts. First, there was that red gelatin with grapes, on a leaf of lettuce. Why do Americans put a dessert on lettuce, and serve it at the beginning?”

“I've also seen them put pears from a can on lettuce,” my mother says.

“Tonight they put, all in one plate, sweet potatoes with those things like cotton balls on top—another dessert—and green beans. I cannot eat green beans on the same plate with dessert!”

“But they also gave you turkey, and that wasn't dessert. The turkey was the size of a pig! Mrs. Hillman had cooked it all alone. These American women, I don't know how they do it, without a maid to help them. But they don't get upset about anything, and their hair is always combed. Did you see?” my mother says, growing animated, “At the end of the meal Mr. Hillman and the boy took all the dirty dishes to the kitchen.”

“It is a strange country,” my father nods. “For instance, those round red slices they served with the turkey...”

“Ay! For a moment it reminded me of membrillo, quince paste...”

“But membrillo is never that sweet! No, no, this was too sweet, and it was followed by the final dessert: a pie with nuts. Even the cold tea they gave us to drink had sugar. My tongue is stuck to my teeth. In Spain this would never have happened.” My parents fall silent for a moment.

“But these Americans are so kind,” my mother says. “They don't understand anything we say, I can see their eyes open wide whenever I start to speak. Still, they invite us. They like a lot of butter, though. Maybe they don't have enough olive oil. In the store they only sell it in little bottles, very expensive.”

“Today they put butter on everything—on the turkey, on the green beans, on the bread, in the crust of the pie. How can we digest all that butter without wine? We may be a little sick tonight.”

My mother is laughing now. “You should have seen your face when they offered you a glass of milk with the pie!”

“That is the first time I have been offered a glass of milk since I was in short pants.”

“But they have so much good will, these Americans. They tried so much to explain the tradition to us. I think they said it was about eating with the Indians.”

“Impossible,” says my father. “The Indians were all killed...”

The conversation continues as we drive through the darkened streets. In the back seat, I barely hear it. I have fallen in love with the boy who helped clear the dishes, and a whole new continent is opening up before me.

October 12, 2008 "Coming Clean About My Name"

Through no fault of my own (well, almost), I have ended up with several versions of my name, to the point that people who have known me for years get confused when they get an e-mail from me, look at my website, or read my blog. To clear some of this confusion I will detail here, as briefly as possible, the tortured history of my many names. After that, feel free to choose whichever one you like. I answer to all of them.

1. I am born and christened Maria Eulalia Teresita Magina Francina Benejam Boque. My main name, Eulalia, places me under the protection of Saint Eulalia, the patron saint of Barcelona, my birthplace. Teresita designates Saint Theresa of Lisieux, who starved herself to death for Jesus. Magina and Francina are the relatively baggage-free names of my maternal grandmother and my mother. Like everybody else in Spain, I have two last names: Benejam, my father's name, and Boque, my mother's maiden name.

2. I come to the U.S. as a high-school freshman, and start shedding names. Boque is the first to go. Maria goes next, since Americans understandably take the easy way out and call me Mary, which I feel isn't my “real” name. Teresita, Francina and Magina also go, and I become just plain Eulalia Benejam. This leads to much pain and angst through my high school and college years, as nobody can say my name and I grow utterly weary of teaching people how to pronounce it (eh-oo-lah-lee-ah) and explaining how I got it.

3. I meet my husband-to-be who, magically, on the first date, learns to pronounce my name perfectly, thus proving that incentive has a lot to do with linguistic performance. I notice that he comes equipped with an attractively problem-free last name: Cobb.





4. I become Eulalia Benejam Cobb and use this name during my academic and freelance writing years. It's still a mouthful, but in situations that require quick action I delete all but Cobb. Eventually my husband persuades me to give up the Spanish pronunciation of Eulalia in favor of the English-speaker-friendly yu-lah-lee-ah. My friends breathe a sigh of relief.





5. For complicated reasons, I take a decade-long detour through the visual arts. I take my paintings and sculptures to stores, shows and art fairs, and realize that Eulalia Benejam Cobb is a business liability. Reasoning that people should be able to say the name of the person whose art they are thinking of buying, I declare that my name shall, henceforth and forever, be simply Lali—no last name.





6. Though my friends and family are confused, Lali works pretty well. Some people, however, spell it “Lolly,” which makes me grit my teeth.





7. I buy a nice laptop computer and return to writing. It dawns on me that no publication that accepted my work before will know who Lali is...so I embrace my writing name again, Eulalia Benejam Cobb.

To my old friends who struggled through two versions of Eulalia only to have it changed to Lali, I apologize for changing my mind again. To my newer friends who know me only as Lali, and to those of you whom I am meeting through this blog, I'm sorry to present you with this complicated name. But you can call me anything you like, and I'll answer every time.