J&T: A piece of our story

Besides a detailed account of our few weeks together, I haven’t written much about my relationship with J. It’s not because he has been pushed to the periphery of my life–he has been invading every nook and cranny! But I guess those were the nooks and crannies I once used to write on my blog.

Months ago, a reader asked me to tell our story. So here it is from my perspective…

We met at a wedding, our siblings’ wedding, to be exact. My older brother and J’s younger sister married each other in the summer of 2018.

You’d think that we both would have had romance on the brain in such a setting. Yet, he was based in China and I had just moved to Spain. Our minds were on our respective work, not romance. When I think hard enough, I remember things about him from that weekend–like when I tripped on my too-long skirt and he tried to blame my clumsiness on himself–but I can’t remember what he was wearing the first time I saw him or anything of the sort. He remembers even less than I do.

At the Sunday potluck, we chatted with each other. Our conversation was enthusiastic because, as overseas workers, we could connect in ways that we couldn’t connect with just anybody. He asked to be added to my newsletter mailing list.

I went back to Spain. He finished school and returned to China. I contacted him once about an article I was writing and he sent me some information. That was our only personal contact for five years.

His church became one of my supporting churches for two years. I was delighted because I already knew some of the congregation. I also knew his family. (When our siblings were dating back in 2017, I had made a point to travel to Ohio. Twice. And J was in China both of those times.)

In 2019, he returned to Ohio to finish his Master of Science with the intention of moving back to China. And then the pandemic happened, and he found himself planted Stateside indefinitely. Over the next several years, he made trips to Illinois to visit his sister, my brother, and our mutual nephews. I returned to Illinois as well, for a vacation or a home assignment, but our paths didn’t cross, and neither of us considered that they didn’t.

Then while I was on home assignment summer of 2023, I gave a talk at his church. J and I chatted a little that Wednesday evening, but I did a little chatting with a lot of people and nothing felt unusual. I was at the beginning of a long trip and was dealing with ongoing health symptoms I had become an expert at suppressing. Had I been a little more in tune with my surroundings that evening, perhaps I would have seen that quiet question mark above J’s head. But I continued my trip, clueless.

Still, he said nothing. Not that I was expecting him to have anything to say. In retrospect, it was as if, in my mind, he was married to China and therefore ineligible.

Toward the end of my time in the States that summer, he and his parents came to Illinois to visit his sister… the same day I left for Indiana.

It seemed that God was keeping us apart. And I think, in a sense, He was.

While in Indiana, I found a name for the symptoms I’d had for more than a dozen years, the symptoms that were getting progressively harder to suppress.

I started treatment after returning to Spain. Within a month, I recorded in my journal that I was beginning to feel better. I knew I wasn’t completely healed, but I was on my way. I had lots to be thankful for that Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was also the time that J, who had been praying for me in the meantime, sensed that the time was right. He emailed me that weekend.

I woke up at 5 a.m. to take the day’s first dose of treatment. As I crawled back into bed that Sunday morning, I saw I had an email from J. I immediately assumed that he was writing to say he was moving back to China and could I please take him off my newsletter list?

Or.

I didn’t stop to ponder; I just tapped the notification and opened the email that would change my life. Stunned, I lay in bed, lost in thought until my alarm went off.

He didn’t get an answer right away; I had a lot to think through. The truth is, as older singles, we both valued our respective single lives. Could this really be God’s next step for us? I knew I would need to mourn that first layer of loss before I responded to his email. Finally, with both trepidation and excitement, I wrote back, mostly with questions he had given me permission to ask: What about China? How did he feel about singleness?

Our initial emails were full of questions as we tried to sort out if forward were the best direction for us.

Deep down, I had a sense our relationship would work out, which was based on what I knew about him, his family, and his church. At its core, that inner sense was: “Of course. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

We wrote back and forth for a bit and then were ready to make our relationship more official around Christmas. Our families were shocked and excited. Our friends were shocked and excited. At last, these two “permanent singles” were dating!

Starting a relationship while 4,000 miles apart wasn’t for the faint of heart, but I’ll skip over those layers for now. One month after our first official phone date and just when I was admitting to myself how much I liked him, J was nominated to become a pastor in his home church. The next Sunday, one man would be chosen by lot and ordained.

He wrote to me on Monday morning, and all I could do was fall on my knees.

We both had lots of feelings that week. We tried phone calls but found we didn’t have a lot of words. Tears came at unexpected moments. I wasn’t mourning; I was overwhelmed. How could I support him when I was feeling so weak myself? What exactly was the new girlfriend’s role?

The events of that week drew us together in ways neither of us could have anticipated. Our relationship deepened to a level we would have said we weren’t ready for. We learned to trust each other.

I watched the ordination over WhatsApp, tears flowing as J was chosen to serve as a pastor in his home church.

Then we picked up and kept going, in both praise and uncertainty.

He came to visit Spain in May. We had 19 whole days on the same continent. During that time, we finished falling in love and seriously talked about a future together.

Three months later, I spent three weeks Stateside, in my home community and his. Right in the middle of our time together, J asked me to marry him. Even though I had known it was coming soon, he managed to surprise me. (Well, he surprised both of us, but that’s another story. 😉 )

Then came the whirlwind of excited decision-making in the week before I returned to Spain. Spain is where I am now. The whirlwind hasn’t stopped and likely won’t as I close down my life here, move back to the States, and plan a wedding.

But I’m surprised to find how much joy is in the whirlwind too.

This message has been approved by J. 😉

I’m packing my bags

I’m packing my bags. Well, to be honest, I’ve been packing for a while now, trying to make every kilo count down to the last gram.

Mom told me the Amazon packages she’s piling on my desk in Illinois make her think of Mr. Grabbit. Toothbrushes, shoes, supplements, etc. Things I won’t have to bring with me.

I’m planning to wear multiple outfits to give myself several sets of clothes for the trip. “I might look homeless when you pick me up at the airport,” I tell J. The layers of clothing, the bulging pockets I stitched to the inside of my jacket, and the supermarket bag I’m planning to use as a carry-on might make me a key candidate for surveillance. Especially since I’m clambering into Chicago the weekend before the Democratic National Convention.

Time is winding down. Less than two more days now. My to-do list is moderate, all things considered. I put “mop the floor” at the top. The dirt on the bottoms of my feet comes off in rolls when I rub my feet together.

Below are a few snippets of summer life here that happen through the giddiness of preparing to see my family, friends, and J…

I love the extra wiggle room of a summer schedule. While most people choose not to cook or bake this time of year, I’ve tried North African bread, North African lentils, brownies with peanut butter and almond flour, and crackers with ground sunflower seeds. I’ve also attempted couscous twice and decided that “moderately close” is as good as it’s going to get for now. Puttering in my kitchen is delightful without the breath of a dozen other tasks at my neck.

I’ve been studying language at the local library. The walk across town in the afternoon sunshine is oppressive, but it doesn’t eclipse the joy of descending to the cool library basement. The summer crowd is sparse and the quiet is so thick it almost hurts until the ink chamber inside a pen rattles as someone write a note or careful feet tick down the stairs. I don’t use the library resources other than the air conditioning and the atmosphere, but it’s always worth it.

Summer has also been a good time to meet up with the friends who remain in Spain, to spend time in their worlds or let them be a part of mine. Maybe it’s English class or breakfast together. Or my little neighbor boys come up for a visit with their mommy to play with Legos, make the floor sticky with melon juice, and watch cookies bake with great anticipation.

While the cookies are still in the oven, I give them a drink of water which they drink with too-long straws. “Do you want one?” I ask the oldest boy, offering a container of dates I have on the counter.

“No,” he says. “I want chocolate cookies.” And he returns to watch them through the oven door, content to wait.

There have been meetings, appointments, and the like. This week is also my week to work ahead on office manager responsibilities in an attempt to keep my absence from being too obvious.

I guess you might say that I’m planning to be distracted for the next few weeks. 😉 Until another day, then…

A life of perpetual humiliation

I just finished reading Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome. Someone discarded it, and I picked it up, curious. This isn’t a book recommendation unless you happen to know that you like Anthony Doerr, but Doerr’s descriptions of life on the outside of a culture cut me wide open. I didn’t know there were words for these “in but not of” feelings.

Apartness and perpetual humiliation are part of daily life for those living overseas. Sometimes we talk about it too much. Often we don’t even acknowledge it but let our frustration become part of the existing barrier, like a thick moss growing over a wall we’re trying to ignore.

We are outsiders, always outsiders, chipping at the barrier that stands between us. And there are successes! Moments when a chunk of the wall falls away and we glimpse the other side…only to find razor wire.

“To be a nonfluent foreigner is to pass through one gate only to find yourself outside two more,” writes Doerr (p. 46). “We are humbled over and over–humility hangs over our heads like a sledgehammer… Oh, you think you’ve been here long enough to barter at the street markets? Guess what, you just spent €8 on three plastic clothes hangers” (p. 76).

After nine months in Rome, Doerr walks into a grocery store and makes an order without messing up a single syllable. “What happens?” he writes. “I get my groceries. No streamers drop from the ceiling, no strobe lights start flashing. The grocer doesn’t reach across the counter and take my face in her hands and kiss me on the forehead.” Instead, the grocer asks about his boys and speaks so quickly he can’t keep up. “…I miss 80 percent of it and sheepishly, stepping down from my throne of fluency, have to ask, ‘I’m sorry, more slowly, please?’” (p. 168)

For some, eventually the barriers do not loom so large or feel so insurmountable. But for many? “I know nothing… I never made it through the gates between myself and the Italians. I cannot claim to have become, in even the smallest manner, Roman” (p. 201).

True. Despite my efforts to integrate into the culture around me, my North American worldview remains mostly intact, placing me decidedly on the outside.

But if we let it, doesn’t living on the outside help us accept who we are? After all, like it or not, we cannot cease being a part of something. Not being a part of the culture we’re living in is because we’re part of another, or even several. Being on the outside can help us identify our own “inside.”

Apartness and perpetual humiliation are hard, but they are also opportunities to learn and grow.* And we need these opportunities to understand ourselves.

So I will try to be grateful. Even as my neighbor gives me a list of what is wrong with my couscous. Next time, it will be better. I can promise.

Doerr, Anthony. Four Seasons in Rome. Scribner, 2007.

*Thank you, J, for your positive spin on life to remind me to keep on growing!

Part four: Tanneries and street food

Click to read: Part one: A palace and a hostel, Part two: A stolen sandwich and art, and Part three: Relationship advice and edible puzzles

I had never used the BlaBlaCar app before. Surely a carpooling app couldn’t be as pain-free as it looked. But it was! J and I arrived at the Málaga Costa del Sol airport in plenty of time. We checked in and zipped through security and border control before parking ourselves just inside of the international gate area to people-watch.

We were some of the last passengers to board our flight. Why rush to constrain yourself to a seat that’s already reserved for you? Our 15 euro flight got us to North Africa safely. After we landed, J and I stayed in our seats rather than smashing ourselves against the other passengers in the aisle. We didn’t even stand up, necks bent at unnatural angles under the overhead bins. (Why do we do this?!)

A man who had been watching us announced to the other passengers: “These are the most intelligent people on here! They waited to get on the plane until the last and they are waiting to get off the plane too!”

As we waited in the customs line, I couldn’t wait and asked J, “What do you think of North Africa so far?” Wisely, he returned that he wasn’t sure if his first impressions were accurate and that he’d rather wait to give them.

We stepped out of the airport and were spat into North African culture where overly helpful taxi drivers swarmed. After hemming and hawing, we agreed to a ride for 150 dirham, 50 dirham less than the initial asking price.

Once we had been deposited in our friends’ neighborhood, I asked the neighborhood guard where the Americans lived. He pointed me to a black gate and told me how many stories up. Americans in that part of the world don’t have much anonymity, and that is what I had been counting on.

We joined the family, catching up on life, hanging out with the children, and feasting on a giant stir-fry for supper.

The next day was our day to tour the city. It was my chance to show J the world that had been mine for 16 months. We passed my old language school and I recalled the hours I had spent exhausting my sweat and tears while learning Arabic. We dropped by my old neighborhood too, even popping in at the little store around the corner to say hello and buy a Snicker bar just because. (We also forgot about that Snicker bar until it became a squished pile in the bottom of our warm and sweaty backpack.)

From there, we snagged a taxi to the old city. I could already feel myself shriveling into a prune. The weather was hotter than I had expected and much drier than either of us were used to. We couldn’t keep up with our water intake.

We descended into the heart of the old city to the renowned tanneries, avoiding anyone who was too helpful. In fact, over the course of the day we managed to disappoint a lot of hopeful shopkeepers, browsing rather than buying. At the tanneries, we stood at the lookout and peered down on all of the action. There was so much to watch at once. J shooed away an over-eager tour guide, preferring to figure things out on his own.

We hunted for a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but the only one I remembered wasn’t serving lunch yet. So we bought street food instead: neems (fried spring rolls), briouats (a triangular, chicken filled pastry), kalinte (chickpea flan) sprinkled with cumin and red pepper, and olives with lemon and parsley.

We looked for a place to eat our collection, and finally found a sunny spot along the ledge of a fence. But first on our menu was activated charcoal. Three pills before and three after a meal. With street food on a warm day, I got pretty bossy about following the instructions. We took our time, munching and tossing olive pits at the trunk of a scrawny tree in the sidewalk. Even there in that scorching African sunbeam, our repast was delicious.

From my time of living in the city, I had fond memories of climbing up the side of a hill to a set of ancient tombs that overlooked the city. But how to get there? We stopped to ask directions. The shopkeeper gave us some of his life story for free as well as detailed directions, which I promptly forgot by trying to retain everything he said. No matter. We still had Google maps and what was left of my memory. We wound our way up the hill, admired the tombs and the view and then parked ourselves in the shade until my fantasy about a tall glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice overpowered the lure of a shady spot.

We spent a chunk of the afternoon perched on a restaurant’s third story, sipping orange juice, eating tagine, and watching people swirling in and out of the city gate below. Once we had cooled off, we meandered back to our friends’ house, with one last stop to buy an ear of roasted street corn.

The next morning, we envisioned ourselves arriving at the international church on time. Instead, with all of the careful packing that went into the morning–the gifts for a friend’s family, the trusty charcoal, and the Imodium, just in case–I managed to forget my wallet. My wallet which held our only local currency.

“I’m sorry. We don’t have money,” I told the taxi driver. “Take us back to the house.” Obligingly, he made a loop at the next roundabout and waited outside while I dashed up the flights of stairs to retrieve my wallet. Any dreams of arriving at church on time were crushed.

Although the fellowship had changed since I had been there last, it was still charged with a buzzing energy of brothers and sisters in Christ uniting after a long week. After the service, I was able to reconnect with a few acquaintances before we were on our way to visit Chaimae and her family.

I was surprised by how Chaimae’s family remained unchanged. Throughout the day, most of the family dropped by, delighted to meet J and practice their English. They fed us breakfast and then fed us several courses of lunch a few hours later. That afternoon, J got a very long look into North African culture.

Our time in the city was drawing to a close. The next morning we breakfasted on eggs and khlea, a cured beef that tastes like a barn. I hung out in the egg section, but J preferred the barny beef. The guy has an inexcusably tolerant palate.

As we left the city, I looked out the bus window, wondering if I was saying goodbye forever. I felt nostalgic but realized I no longer had a lingering sense of belonging.

Part three: Relationship advice and edible puzzles

Click to read: Part one: A palace and a hostel and Part two: A stolen sandwich and art

J and I spent almost a week in Mytown. He stepped into my life and met my people. Yes, I continued to feel the emotional dissonance of my meshing worlds, but assigning a name to the feeling seemed to rob it of its power.

“Does he have money to take care of you?”

My friends and neighbors invited themselves into the particulars of our relationship. They all had advice about where we should live, how soon we should get married and start a family, etc.– but they always expressed their approval of J in the end.

We found park benches to sit on and people-watch. We discussed things we hadn’t thought to discuss on the phone or through emails and messages. Sometimes we didn’t bother to do anything except “be” with each other.

But that’s not all we did. We had British breakfast at the port. And on the beach, I collected broken shells while he went for a jog along the shoreline. A teammate borrowed J for morning bike rides, giving him the chance to burn off some of his morning energy before I even rolled out of bed.

Late one morning, we bussed to a neighboring town’s restaurant where my friend cooks. She gave me a tour of the kitchen, lifting kettle lids and describing everything inside. She heaped our table full of food we hardly made a dent in: chicken with rice, lentils, beef and prune tagine, salads, fries, bread, vegetables, and tall glasses of orange juice. “I was so happy when you said you were coming that I cried,” she told me later. She expressed her appreciation for our visit by making sure that we were taken care of… right down to ordering our pirated taxi ride home.

Restaurant kitchen filled with prepared food

We delivered birthday gifts to my neighbor boys. We went to the market and bought a buffet of olives and other pickled delights. And J chatted with the various Chinese store owners around town. His Mandarin was typically met with surprise and guarded curiosity… or even an expletive.

We spent a warm afternoon volunteering with the Red Cross, entertaining a group of children while the village women studied basic Spanish. The director had brought puzzles for the children, but the puzzles were too advanced for their ages. One little boy leaned into an open puzzle box and scooped the pieces to his mouth, pretending to eat them: “Om! Om!” he said over and over again. The other children weren’t too concerned as long as his appetite didn’t extend to their puzzle. There were some wild moments, some tattle-tale stories, and a mini lesson on forgiveness. A volunteer from another district had brought virtual reality glasses which entertained a few adults and children at a time.

Over the course of the week, we spent a lot of time at the center where J was staying, learning how to bump around in the same kitchen together while on task. J faithfully washed the dishes after our meals; I could probably count on one hand the number of dishes I washed when he was around. Our team met on Sunday and for a few other activities scattered throughout the week.

In the evenings, J would walk me home. And in the mornings, he would usually meet me on my way to the center. In fact, there was rarely a time that I walked that three-minute walk entirely alone. A delighted smile to greet me on the street was one of those small things that made me miss him terribly when he was gone.

And then, on Thursday evening, we finished our laundry, packed our backpacks, and attempted an early bedtime. The next morning, we left for North Africa.

Some of what’s been happening recently

Trying to have a day of rest

I would sleep all day tomorrow, I decided. After a filled-to-the-brim month, my body was worn out.

Then the instructor from a nearby language school responded to an email that evening, asking to meet at 9 a.m. the next morning. I tried not to panic–“Nine o’clock on my day off!?”–and kept reading the email. “Or 12:00.” I supposed I could drag myself out of bed by then and agreed. But I must have been a little too agreeable because I ended up agreeing to start Spanish class the following Monday, although I hadn’t meant to.

My agreeable mood would be tested yet again. Early in the afternoon, my landlady messaged me. “The grandpa upstairs died. His funeral mass is at 6:30.” The “grandpa upstairs” had always been kind. I hadn’t seen him often, but when I’d stop by to visit, he’d invite me in to sit and chat. I knew his three daughters by sight, but attend his funeral? Why oh why had my landlady told me about it? I could no longer feign ignorance.

I pictured myself tromping into the Spanish funeral mass, outrageously uncatholic. What kind of rituals would they perform? Would I be required to take part? Goodness, what in the world would I wear? My only pair of dress shoes had long since passed their prime. I meticulously de-pilled my black sweater.

“It would be good to go, wouldn’t it? I don’t know your culture very well…” I tried, hoping that my landlady would say that it wasn’t a big deal. I wanted a loophole so I could conveniently lose my nerve.

“Yes, clearly.”

All righty then.

As it turned out, several of the pallbearers wore hoodies and sneakers, and I don’t think people bothered to notice my scruffy dress shoes at all.

Ramadan

All year long, we can pretend that we aren’t so different after all. Then Ramadan starts and suddenly we’re at a fork in the road. I choose one way and my friends choose the other. I catch myself lingering there at the fork, wondering how many want to go that way and how many go because that’s how it’s done.

Yes, Ramadan has a way of waking me up again.

A creep at my elbow

I was meandering to a local shop on a sunny afternoon when a presence at my elbow startled me. The presence wasn’t inclined to pass me. Oh brother. A creep. Adrenaline shot through my veins as decided what to do.

Then he greeted me. And grinned, like the twerp he can be sometimes, when he realized that he had successfully disconcerted me.

Interns.

Breaking the fast with pre-packaged cakes

The call to prayer sounded. Allahu Akbar! Time to break the fast.

Noura, the lady beside me, closed her eyes and whispered a prayer. I sat in my bus seat, still and alert, curious what the Muslims around me would do to break the fast. Or if the cantankerous bus driver would allow them to do anything at all.

“I don’t have anything halal!” The guys in the seat behind me frantically rustled through the plastic bags at their feet.

Ashhadu alla ilaha illallah!

Then they broke the fast with pre-packaged cakes, half dipped in chocolate. Hayya ‘alas-Salah!

After rustling up their own ftur, they began offering cakes to the Muslims around them. A sub-Saharan man declined politely. They threw a package to one of their buddies in the front and he caught it with a crackle. Then across the aisle to another buddy. Last, they peeked through the gap of the seat in front of them.

“Is she North African or Romanian?” they asked each other. My ethnicity was in question. Noura turned to me with a smirk. I smirked back.

“Sister, do you want one?” one asked at last.

I smiled. “No, thank you.”

“She’s a Christian,” said Noura.

And I’d been eating all day.

Rewarded loyalty

“I would like five carrots,” I told the market vendor as he weighed the other produce I had collected from his stall.

A moment later, he breezed back with a bag bulging with considerably more than five carrots.

“No.” His coworker pointed to the bag and looked at me. “That’s too much, isn’t it?” He had overheard my tiny order.

I remembered the first time I had bought produce at this stall. It was the coworker who had pretended to forget to give me my change and then came back, minutes later, surprised that I was still standing there–neither oblivious nor angry. He quickly handed over the correct change without my reminding him of the amount.

Now I found it refreshingly ironic that he was the one looking out for me.

Long ago, I wrote about how I tend to be a loyal shopper, shopping in the same places, even when I know other places have better prices. I still do that today. On market morning, I make sure to stop at my normal vendor stalls first before picking up what I couldn’t find at other stalls.

You may think my loyalty is blind, but that’s not fair. And this is why…

One day I was meticulously selecting the brightest pomegranates from a pile. My produce vendor noticed what I was doing and slipped over to show me how to tell when pomegranates are ready–and it has nothing to do with how rosy they were!

Sometimes I’m offered samples of special fruits. And when I ask if new apricots are sweet, they answer honestly because they know I’ll be back even if they’re not.

The first time I made puchero, I ordered my bones and cuts of meat. The shopkeeper happily filled me with advice on preparing the dish. “Boil these bones for 15 minutes before putting them in your soup or they will make the soup too salty.”

One day I bought semolina flour for harcha. “You like harcha?” the shopkeeper asked. At my happy sigh, she disappeared to the back of the store and came back with harcha, still warm from breakfast. More than once, she has given me handfuls of mint leaves from her personal stash when there wasn’t any to sell.

Another shopkeeper refused to sell me a lone chicken breast. He quietly shook his head until I understood that it probably wasn’t the freshest chicken breast north of the Mediterranean.

Sometimes when the fabric vendor sees me coming, he pulls out the bolts he’s pretty sure I’ll like. And if I stroll into his stall wearing something homemade, he spots his fabrics with delight.

Just the other week, my shower curtain rod was repeatedly falling down. Finally, after several days of clattering, banging, readjusting, and scratching my head, I decided a new rod was in order. But the store down the street didn’t have any. “Come back this afternoon,” he said. But that afternoon, he still didn’t have any. So he opted to get to the root of my problem–what was the problem exactly?

As I was still making feeble attempts to explain without the proper vocabulary–”The thing in the middle of the stick…”–he began to work on something he had dug out of the dusty depths of his under-counter. Then–pop!–out came a yellowed suction cup and he told me precisely how to position it to keep the shower rod up. “You can even trim around the edges if you don’t like how it looks.” And my curtain rod has stayed up ever since. The yellowed lip of the suction cup is a happy reminder of the resourceful people who are looking out for me.

My meager loyalty has been rewarded so many times over that it has been crowded out by their generosity. In fact, I’m not even sure that my loyalty has much to do with it at all!

Snippets of life

Below are a few things I’ve seen or experienced recently. They’re not written in any particular order or of any particular importance (or of any particular grammatical observance, truth be told). Just some snippets of life.

Speakers wound up in trees and fastened to light posts play “Joy to the World” as I walk down the street, in step with the music. Then I notice others in step with the music–a Muslim family, several Spanish businessmen, and others. “Let eevery heeeart prepaare hiim rooom…”
Russian classmate #1 is disgruntled that she cannot absorb a complex Spanish grammar structure. Russian classmate #2 says: “You’ve only been here 7 years and you want to understand everything. Calm down. We’ve been here for 20 and we still confuse this.” Bulgarian classmate begins to giggle. “Yes, calm down! You still have 13 years of confusion ahead of you!”
After a rain, crushed snails in crushed shells dot the walking/biking trail like flattened M&M buttons.
An elderly man I meet on my morning walk that tells me that his mornings are better on the days we cross paths.
Little boys at the Kings’ Day parade, squeeze around me to get to the front, chattering in hopeful Arabic and clutching rumpled plastic grocery bags to fill with candy.
A winter evening curled up with a book and a cup of lemon balm tea…and Christmas lights I hesitate to take down.
A shopkeeper tells me how long I should spend with the friend I am planning to visit in another town. “Are you going to spend the night at her place? No? Then you need to go before lunch and eat with her and spend a lot of time with her before you leave in the evening.” Oh, how I love to hear the North African perspective on relationships!
As I walk by, an elderly man comes out of a café to speak to me. “How tall are you?” he asks and all five feet of him steps back in surprise when I tell him. He says that the other day he was breakfasting with another man in the café. When I walked by, the other man said he would not like to take me out for breakfast. Because I was so tall, surely I would eat a lot! That makes me self-conscious as I walk home, realizing that my oblivion doesn’t exempt me from being a topic of discussion.
On my way to catch a bus, I notice a lady with her head in the dumpster. She doesn’t have that look of someone who usually sifts through others’ garbage. (And I’m not judging because I have rescued a few garbage items in my life.) But I pause, curious as she bats her broom handle around. “Can I help you?” She mutters something about losing an item. She doesn’t know if it could possibly be in the garbage she took out. I peer in and see a lavender bag of trash on the very bottom of a very empty dumpster. She doesn’t relinquish the broom when I reach for it, but I hold open the dumpster lid while she fishes around. Finally, success! She snags the handles and pulls it out little by little (still muttering). I manage to avoid the linty end of the broom that is headed my way and still make it to my bus on time.
I am at the counter of a North African store when a little boy comes in, not even big enough to see over the counter. He sets a hand-written list on the counter. The shopkeeper grins at him, “Peace be upon you, Arkan. How are you? At peace?” He looks down at Arkan’s mother’s list, reading aloud the first item before Arkan interrupts him. “I want a sucker.” Ahh, that’s how it’s done. And I wonder if suckers are free because he is so stinkin’ cute or if his mother ever notices that the grocery bill is always a little more than she anticipated.

Ireland- part 2

I awoke from a deep sleep to a hand grabbing my shoulder and someone gasping, “It’s you!” It was the middle of night. It was also the middle of my friend’s disturbing dream. She was comforted to know that I was not a mustached stranger and promptly fell back asleep. But the interaction left me staring at the dark ceiling, my heart pumping.

Morning came soon enough. We made ourselves tea with the electric kettle in our room and took our time getting out the door. Why rush? While planning our trip, we had both decided we’d rather see less at a leisurely pace than see everything and fully experience nothing.

We gathered a few recommendations from our host and then made our way downtown, where we dropped off our luggage (we had rented a different airbnb for the following nights) and crossed the scenic Ha’Penny Bridge.

Our host had recommended Keoghs for an Irish breakfast. We gladly took his suggestion. I am not a bread person, but I spent the rest of the trip trying to track down more of this bread to eat with those thick slabs of creamy Irish butter. And the greens that garnished the breakfast? Peas!

We walked through St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin’s former execution site, which is now a lovely park full of Dubliners out for a bit of green during their lunch break. We paused before a gruesome monument commemorating the Great Famine of the mid-1800s. A North African family stopped us to ask directions. “¿Habláis español?” they asked and were shocked when we ended up speaking in Arabic instead.

We booked a tour to see the Book of Kells at Trinity College. The Book of Kells is a stunning copy of the four Gospels in Latin, supposed to have been copied by monks around 800 A.D. We only saw one open page, highly protected. Apparently, how long each page is exposed to light is carefully monitored. In the Long Room, a room of one of the world’s most stunning libraries, my friend and I pulled out our audio tour earbuds and sat on the wooden benches to drink in the odor of old books and to feel the smallness of us in a great big world of knowledge.

spiral staircase in Trinity College library

Then we remembered our luggage and began to consider what would happen if the 5:30 closing happened before we were able to retrieve it. So we meandered through downtown, with only a pitstop at Butlers Chocolate Café, another of our host’s recommendations. We carefully selected our hot chocolate and the little chocolate that came with it, wrapped in a small paper baggie. I have never had such amazing hot chocolate. Never. We moaned our way through our creamy cups, enough-rich and not-too-sweet but just-sweet-enough. We lingered long enough that we had to rush to retrieve our luggage before the storage center closed for the evening.

From there we went to our new airbnb, the “Country Cottage Oasis,” which will require a blog post all of its own…

Until next time. 🙂

A time to weep, and a time to laugh: Residency renewal

It’s that time again.

A friend told me it seems like I’m always renewing my residency. I agree.

But this time was supposed to be easy. I waited for my appointment, full of confidence. Of course, my confidence may have been due in part to the fact that the immigrants in front of me had their dubious paperwork shoved into crumpled plastic page protectors. I, on the other hand, had my blue passport carefully tucked behind a stack of crisp, typed forms, neat photos still in their protective sleeve, and an appropriate receipt matched with a tax form. Bring it on.

But it was I who slinked defeated from the office, ready to throw my hands in the air and tell Spain, “FINE! I’m DONE being legal! So there!”

I was able to stifle that impulse. And I’m not done being legal, of course. But it did take several hours of rigorous cleaning and a listening ear or two before I was inclined to persevere.

Which, in turn, led me to a management office. And then a second management office. And finally, per directions, to a right hand turn by a children’s shoe store and down an alley to a hole-in-the-wall lawyer’s office which mercifully listed “immigration” on the plaque beside the front door.

I stepped into the dim office to find the waiting wall lined with sub-Saharans, North Africans, and Asians. Congratulating myself on finally being in the right place, I took a seat.

The man at the front desk didn’t acknowledge me as he gave slow, clear instructions to a client. So I had time to look around. The attempt at decor was shuffled aside for the sake of productivity. Stacks of paperwork in wild piles. Artwork lost behind taped up notices or a whiteboard. A bookcase filled with untouched manuals and a silent essential oils diffuser.

It was a bit messy, but not dirty, I decided. And it held a slight odor of the people who were crushed inside.

Five minutes later, when the clerk had finished, he turned to me. I explained my situation, finishing with: “Can you help me?”

He took my card. “Maria, we have an American here!” he chirped. I must have been the first. Actually, I almost assuredly was. North Americans are an endangered species in Mytown. And how many of the seven or eight of us would have stepped foot in this office?

Only the desperate ones.

The lawyer peered down at me from her desk. I shuffled my neat stacks of paperwork, aware of the dozens of eyes now trained on me from the waiting wall.

The clerk made a copy of my card and asked some questions. But could they help me?

It turns out, they could, but it would take several more trips to the office. Several more surprised stares from the other clients as I joined their ranks. Several more long stretches of leaning against the waiting wall and studying the half-hidden artwork.

Then on one visit, the clerk removed the whiteboard to let me study more than just the fringe of the painting. On another visit, I was witness to a fight that the clerk helped diffuse before it escalated to the point of no return. On another visit, I bumped into a family I knew which helped to pass the time. That same visit, I took advantage of the clerk’s warm, North African culture to negotiate the fee. And on that last visit, he handed me a neat stack of stamped papers tucked in a plastic page protector. Success.

That was only step one. I will have to return. Being a legal immigrant is not for the faint of heart, no matter where you are in the world. But I’m full of confidence again. Bring it on.