Epilogue

We returned to Madrid for a visit in the spring of 1997. Mike had made partner at Price Waterhouse, as he had hoped. The Scarritts had moved to a different house—their previous landlords had wanted their lovely garden back so their daughter could get married in it. But everyone else was pretty much the same, though Julie’s friends had moved on to middle school and were seeming very grown up. We took a trip to San Sebastián, the beautiful seaside town in Basque country, which we had been too scared to visit before because of the separatist terrorism that plagued the area. But we had a safe and relaxing time there.

That summer we had visits from the Liepmanns and Rosanne Kruger, and then people started to move. The Liepmanns went to Lake Forest, Illinois, just a few minutes from my mother’s house, so I knew we’d be able to see them regularly. The Scarritts moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and we went to see them soon after they got settled. The Krugers went home to Pretoria, and Julie went to visit them when she was a freshman in high school. And the Santaularias moved to Frankfurt, where Mike visited them while on a business trip.

We went to see the Douglases in Colorado Springs, and we saw the Gronningsaters often in New York. In fact, Eric eventually went to work for Price Waterhouse. Anna Gronningsater and Julie took a summer trip to Israel and Kenya, and the Scarritts came to Lisa’s bat mitzvah in 2000.

Finally, the Scarritts moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the Douglases to Leesburg, Virginia. “Everyone’s moving closer!” Lisa told me one day.

“Yep,” I said, “if we wait long enough, everybody will end up right on the block here.”

And then, in 2002, the Liepmanns left for Osaka, Japan, and we moved to Richmond, Virginia, bringing us closer to the Scarritts and the Douglases. It has been hard to start over again in Richmond, but having Clarice and Ana available—as long as I’m willing to get into the car—has been a tremendous help to me.

When I meet new people, as I often do now, I try to work our two years in Spain into the conversation. It seems to me that they make us special, memorable.

“Wow, two years in Spain!” they often say. “What was that like?”

“It was more fun than anyone should be allowed to have,” I say.

Going Back, part 3

We did have a wonderful trip through Eastern Europe, which eased our transition back to the U.S. Prague was as beautiful as we had always heard, with only a few bullet holes on buildings revealing the strife that had occurred there. Most of the ancient castles and forts were well preserved, supposedly due to the fact that whenever invaders threatened, the Czechs said, “Come on in!” We had a tense evening when we foolishly took a tram out to a suburban movie theater to see 12 Monkeys in English without thinking about how we would get back. We had a long, scary walk through dark streets toward a brightly lit “Hotel” sign. The counter man there called us a taxi and asked us to eat in his restaurant in return for his help.

Budapest was still more foreign, with few English speakers, but people were friendly and helpful anyway. The 1996 Olympics were on, and we sometimes watched it on the Eurosport channel in our hotel. Things looked very different without the bias of an American TV network—the view of the athletes and the sports was much more balanced than our usual jingoistic approach.

Vienna was exciting, with a great contrast between the classical and the modern. As the gateway to the east, it had the feeling of a jarring clash between times and cultures.

At last we flew home, where we quickly bought a car, received our furniture, and headed north to see the girls at camp. Life in the U.S. had started anew for us. But I was determined to do it differently this time. I had seen people in Spain who worked to live instead of living to work, people who took a walk after lunch, people who knew much more about enjoying life than I did. I knew it would be hard, but I wanted to live a less crazy life than most of my American friends did.

Going Back, part 2

The plan for returning was that the kids would fly by themselves from Madrid to Newark, where Mike’s parents would pick them up and, a few days later, meet up with my friend Charlotte, who would drive them to camp in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Mike and I would supervise the packing up of the house and then take a couple weeks to travel through Eastern Europe before flying home. The plan was to fly to Prague, take a train to Vienna and then to Budapest, and fly to New York from there.

As for getting the kids through the airport, there was the problem of the police checkpoint. When you approached the gates in Barajas airport, there was a booth you could go past only if you had a boarding pass. I knew someone who had sent a kid home, though, who had managed to talk her way to the gate by saying that the kid was a minor and needed her help, so I planned to do the same.

But when I got to the police booth, the cop shook his head. I was as forceful as I could be, but he wasn’t going to let me through that checkpoint. The kids were already on the other side. I looked at them in panic, and panic looked back at me. “Just find the gate number! The signs are up above!” I said. I watched in despair as they disappeared into the crowd.

Later I learned that Julie freaked out immediately and started crying. A kind English-speaking lady offered to help, and she took the girls to their gate, where they waited, shaken but safe. Their trip home was uneventful, and they found Mike’s parents outside of Customs in Newark.

There was more trauma in store for me. I had been numb with fear when the movers had come to my Stamford home two years before, to take away two of my three piles of belongings—those going to storage and those going in the air shipment to Spain. And even though I was now moving to a place that was known to me, unlike the unknown adventure Spain had been at that time, I was just as numb. This was not fear about the future, as I was going back to a familiar place. But I felt numb with sadness to be leaving Spain, which had been a place of tremendous fun, adventure and challenge for me. And I was numb with sadness at leaving some of the finest friends I could ever have met. Ana was gone already, and I would always be able to see the Gronningsaters easily, as they were returning to New York City. But I still had to take my leave of the Scarritts and the Krugers.

I sat in my tiny, dark TV room near the front door of the house, with the movers and packers swarming all over. It was just a little move, no furniture involved, but the change was so big and so wrenching for me that I was immobilized. By the end of the day the house was picked clean, my Alfa had been sold, Mike’s Mercedes had been turned in. I sadly left the house for the last time and took a taxi to the Hotel Inter-Continental, near Mike’s office.

We had planned to have a farewell dinner that night with our closest friends. It was a scorching Madrid summer day, with temperatures over 100 degrees. But in the evening, as the sun started to set well after 9, it began to cool down.

We met the Scarritts, Krugers, Liepmanns and Gronningsaters for dinner on the outside patio of a restaurant. The gentle breeze of the evening cooled us, well turned out for our evening, the women in long sleeveless dresses, the men in polo shirts. It was one of those great Spanish evenings out of time—no rush, no reason to go anywhere or do anything but just be there, enjoying the people, the food, the wine. One of the omnipresent street signs blinked the time and temperature from the sidewalk, but only the temperature got my notice as the air cooled—30 degrees Celsius, 29, 28. We had our favorite dishes—lomo and chorizo, Manchego cheese and jamón, piquillos rellenos, boquerones. I relaxed and soaked up those last few hours with my dear friends, sometimes working to banish the thought of leaving in the morning. The night stretched on and on, full of the joy of being there.

Going Back

Time was running short by now. Though Mike and I would happily have extended our stay in Spain, and though Price Waterhouse would have let us do it, we knew we should go back to the U.S. For one thing, the kids felt they were missing stuff they didn’t want to miss—American culture, movies and TV shows and the like. For another, Mike was pretty sure that in order to make partner at PW he would need to be in New York, or else he would be easily overlooked. So we prepared to go home.

I made a couple of excursions with my women friends—a trip with Clarice and Amy to the town of Sigüenza, where we saw storks nesting in chimneys on a sunny day, and a ride up a mountain with Sandra, Clarice and Christiane to the “weavers’ town”. This was a place Sandra knew where some German women had come to teach the local Spanish women the trade of weaving. It was an economic development effort, to help the women achieve financial independence, and it was also an effort to preserve the fine craft. We toured the workshop, saw work in progress, and bought some beautiful scarves and shawls.

The Douglas family was getting ready to return to the U.S., too. Troy was set to start college at the University of Richmond, and Phil was retiring from the Air Force. He, Ana and Carmen had decided to live in Colorado Springs, where many of their retired Air Force friends were.

Their lease was finished before the end of June, but they wouldn’t be leaving for another week, so they came across the street to stay with us in the interim. We didn’t see much of them—they had a lot of Ana’s family to say goodbye to—but we did spend a couple of lazy evenings together, sitting by the pool, enjoying our wine and olives and chorizo.

One morning Troy was sleeping late in the basement guestroom, but Lisa was up early as usual. “You have to say happy birthday to Troy when he gets up,” I told her. “He’s eighteen!”

“Really?” she said. “How old is he?”

I looked at her, puzzled. “I just told you—he’s eighteen!”

“But how old is he?” She stopped herself for a moment. “Oh, I get it!” she said. “I thought you said ‘He’s a teen’!” We laughed for ten minutes over that one.

Old Hands, part 23

I had told my pregnant friend Christiane Santaularia to think of me if she needed any help when the baby came. “I’ll take you to the hospital, I’ll come and pick up Laura—anything you need, any time of the day or night,” I said. So I was not surprised when I got a call around 11 one evening that the time had come. “Would you take Laura?” Ramón asked.

“Of course!” I said.

“We’ll drop her off on the way to the hospital,” he said in a rush, and before we knew it, she was on our doorstep.

We found out the next morning that Christiane had had a little girl, now named Iris. Mother and baby were doing fine.

“What a great name for your sister!” we told Laura. “Named after a flower!”

She stayed with us for the day or two till the baby came home. We were all thrilled to see the tiny infant. The days were already warm enough to sit out in the backyard with her, at Christiane’s house or wherever the gang gathered for the kids to swim.

Old Hands, part 22

The next suggestion from Mike’s Price Waterhouse colleagues was to take a bodega (winery) tour. They had even gone so far as to book one for us, at La Rioja Alta, one of several major wineries lined up on a road south of the town of Haro. It had been founded in 1890, and it made some very good wines.

Our tour was not very different from winery tours in New York State or California, except for being in Spanish. The guide was knowledgeable and personable, and the group was small—just twelve people. Our Spanish was adequate to the task of understanding him as he showed us the barrel workshop, the smelly fermentation room, the chilly storage areas and the bottling machine. Afterward the tour the guide poured two different wines for us to taste in the bar of the bodega, and we bought several bottles.

The third recommendation was for a restaurant in Haro, so we drove into the town from the bodega. After lunch there we drove to see several sights in the area, including a walled town, a church and a monastery, and then we made it back to the parador in time to watch a special bullfight on TV. Cristina Sánchez fought in the Roman amphitheater in Nîmes, France, which we’d visited the month before. Her success in the fight resulted in her elevation to full-fledged matador status—the first woman ever to achieve that. She received an ear from the bull and was carried out of the ring on the shoulders of the aficionados (fans).

Again on a Price Waterhouse recommendation, we drove back to Ezcaray for dinner at a hotel restaurant. The place was low on ambience—just cold, Band-Aid-colored walls—but the food was good. And on the way out we ran into someone Mike knew—a consulting client. I was amazed that by now Mike had such a wide acquaintance in Spain that he could bump into people he knew when he was away from home.

The last day we visited the monasteries of Suso and Yuso. Suso, on a hillside, was a Romanesque ruin under renovation. Yuso, by contrast, was a perfectly preserved 16th-century building. Nestled in a gorgeous little green valley with hills all around, viewed in the early morning mist, it was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen.

The monastery’s claim to fame was that it was the place where both Castellano (Spanish) and Euskadi (the unique Basque language) were first codified. Monks at the monastery made notes in their Latin prayerbooks to help translate the Latin into the local dialects of the day. This was done not in the existing 16th-century building, but in an earlier Romanesque monastery on the site. We toured the place with an excellent guide whose Spanish was easy for us to understand.

On the way home we decided to take some back roads southward. After spending a couple hours doing this, we realized we weren’t making much progress. “These roads are a little smaller and twistier than they seem from the map,” I told Mike.

“Yeah, I think we’ve been through this town before,” he said. “I know I went around that dog sleeping in the middle of the street a half an hour ago.”

Eventually we found our way through the Sierra de la Demanda, a mountain range with a river running through its canyon, sometimes narrow and rocky, sometimes wide and placid. We stopped for lunch, got to the nearest major highway, and sped home in time for dinner.

Old Hands, part 21

As the time for us to return to the U.S. got nearer, I figured I’d better cash in my gift certificate. A year earlier Mike had given me a birthday present that was a homemade certificate good for a weekend at the parador of my choice. Since we hadn’t been to the wine-making region of La Rioja, I thought it would be good to use my parador certificate for that. There was only one parador in the province of La Rioja, and that was in the village of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, so I booked our weekend. Dolores, the school’s gym teacher, stayed with the kids, and Mike and I headed out of Madrid on a Friday night.

The drive up was pleasant and sunny. As we drove north we left the dry plains of Castilla y León and moved into greener country. A patchwork of different crops was laid out over gently rolling hills. We reached Santo Domingo at 9 p.m., and the sun was still up, giving a golden light to the old stone buildings.

The parador was built around what was left of an old hospital for pilgrims on the route of St. James, and it was next door to the town’s cathedral, so that was our first stop on Saturday. Its distinguishing feature was the live, caged rooster kept inside as a reminder of a legend. Centuries ago a German family had traveled the pilgrimage route, and they stayed overnight with a family in the town. The daughter of the house fell in love with the son of the pilgrim family, and she told him so. He rejected her, and in revenge she hid a silver cup in his backpack, then told the authorities that he had stolen it. He was hanged, and his parents sadly traveled on to Santiago.

But the boy didn’t die on the gallows, because Santo Domingo protected him. When the parents returned from Santiago they found him alive, and they went to tell the local judge. The judge was just having his lunch—a roasted hen and a roasted rooster. Hearing the story, he declared, “That story is no more true than if I said these chickens could get up and crow,” which they promptly did. Descendants of the pair have been kept in the cathedral ever since.

Mike’s Price Waterhouse colleagues, hearing that we were going to La Rioja, had been generous with suggestions for shopping, dining, and wine tasting. The first suggestion we followed was to go to Ezcaray, a small town where there was a store that sold locally made mohair blankets. We got there before the shops opened, so we drove to a park to get a view of the area—and what a view it was. It was a clear, sunny day, and the hill was covered with tiny wildflowers. We could see a narrow river in a wide riverbed below. Crickets chirped everywhere, and we heard the sound of cowbells from a nearby hill. It was so peaceful and so lovely, we lingered there for half an hour.

Back down in the town we realized that we didn’t know the name or address of the blanket store. “What should we do?” I asked Mike.

“Let’s park and ask somebody,” he said. He left the car at the curb and walked right up to an old lady who was heading toward the shops. “Estamos buscando la tienda de mantas,” he said—We’re looking for the blanket store.

“Bueno, sígame,” she said without hesitation—Well, follow me. She took us right to the shop, which had no sign in the window. We would never have found it without help.

Inside the proprietor proudly showed us what he had. There were beautiful plaid mohair blankets in every color combination, and the prices were great—about $65 for a generous-sized throw, and not much more for a king-sized blanket that we bought as a wedding gift for Mike’s sister, who was going to be married in a few months. The dueño (owner) showed us a loom he had on display, and he explained that the goats that provided the wool were kept in the area, near the river we had seen. The actual weaving was done there, too, near the raw materials.

We decided that we needed a lot of blankets—they’d make great gifts for lots of people over the next few years, and we could ship them back with our household goods. So we bought about a dozen. Some were blue and white, some were red and white, and the most colorful were gold, blue and red. “These will keep us warm in Connecticut,” I told Mike.