Part of my daily routine since school started online in August is to take opportunities in the 1-2 hour breaks between classes to walk the dog in the park near our house.
Our house is surrounded by a large patio. It's great for patio gardening, short sprints with the dog, even low water costs. It's not great when the dog needs an exercise or potty break.
So a walk to the park it is. It's only 200 meters from the house (roughly 220 yards)--I know this because during the most severe period of Spanish lockdown in April, we were not supposed to walk him more than 50 m from the house. We would clandestinely sneak the dog around the corner, looking all around while darting between parked cars, and feeling the eyes of at least one neighbor on a balcony staring.
I felt like I was going to a drug deal instead of walking the dog.
Spanish people stare---a lot. It's not unusual to be sitting in a café, patiently waiting for your café con leche, always served in a hot glass instead of a mug, to cool, minding your own business, and realizing that the person at the table next to you is staring directly at your face. Instead of flinching and looking away when caught, Spaniards will catch your gaze and continue to stare. They don't even pretend to disguise their fascination with your face, your clothes, your mannerisms.
It's not rude. They are just sizing you up, trying to figure you out.
I find myself looking the person right in the eyes, a sort of a staring contest where the first person to look away loses.
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Months after the lockdown ended, we don't have to be secretive at all about our ventures to the park. With its wide sidewalks in the middle, surrounded by a canopy of trees, a colorful playground dotted with benches, and smaller sidewalks on each side with perfectly spaced out rectangles of grass full of olive trees, it resembles a large, green, geometric quilt.
I walk down one side and up the other with the dog. It's our morning routine. While I try to close the circles on my fitness tracking watch, he tries to sniff every tree and some mornings, every blade of grass, and after about 15-20 minutes, we turn and walk home by the strip of stores including a fruit stand, dress store, and the tobacco shop.
One day this week, I can see an older couple with a stepladder under one of the olive trees. He is grey haired, a little stooped, holding a cloth shopping bag. On the top of the ladder is who I presume to be his wife. She has that blonde/grey hybrid hair many women of an older generation have. I think it's called Ash Blonde. Is it grey? Is it blonde? Who knows. She is plucking olives off the tree and tossing them into his outstretched bag.
Are they Spanish? Their usual presence piques my interest. I have never seen anyone picking olives in our park before. Maybe they are seasonal renters in one of the surrounding apartment and condo buildings. Maybe they are Brits. Or maybe they are Americans.
They are talking softly--not a Spanish characteristic-and my curiosity gets the best of me. I steer the dog closer so I can eavesdrop on their conversation.
She says something to him that is undoubtedly Spanish, and with the rapid fire, cut-the-ends-off-words Andalusian accent. I realize I'm doing the walking version of staring. I'm sizing them up, figuring them out. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't immediately know they were Spanish.
Usually the shoes give it away, or hand gestures. Spanish women dress very well, even for a walk to the park, so it's also nice clothes that give it away.
The older couple in very generic shoes and clothes has stumped me. Sometimes I feel like I haven't been here for a little over three years. Sometimes I feel like I just got here.
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I was in the same park today, zig zagging between quilt panels, when I heard laughter behind the tall wall of the nursery school that borders the park. Another couple, this time much younger, were picking pomegranates. I picture them hastily climbing over the wall to do so. They were very loud, boisterous, happy.
Most definitely Spanish.
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We are going back to face-to-face instruction at school in a little over a week.
I have safety concerns and health concerns. I'm trying to wrap my head around the new normal and what all it will entail for new hygiene and cleaning standards.
I'm also--probably selfishly--ready to be around many humans, more than just my small circle of friends and neighbors. I'm ready to meet students face to face. I have had teacher anxiety dreams recently. It's not the usual (I show up to work really, really late and unprepared). It's a recurring dream that students are wandering campus, calling my name, and don't know who I am. I introduce myself and they look at me blankly. I corral students into my room and start to call roll, and realize I don't know who any of them are. Students won't tell me their names. I'm stumped by the roll. We are at a standstill. Then I wake up.
Five weeks into school and I wouldn't recognize most of my students in person, because they rarely turn on their cameras for online learning, and when they do, it's such poor quality that I couldn't pick students out of a line-up.
I am ready to finally get to know my students. It's almost October, and it's a new year all over again.
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With lockdown and then staying at home for work, I haven't been able to read. I cannot concentrate. I've tried several genres and even pulled favorites off the shelves, all to no avail.
I recently read a really depressing memoir about a woman's journey into widowhood and grief. The author's description of her grief, her passages about telling their young daughter that her father was dying, her new dealing with young widowhood--it was all a bit much. It was heart-wrenching, stomach churning, having-to-take-a-break-from-the-book kind of read. I would put it down, compose myself, and delve in again.
Why does such sadness appeal to me, when trying to read happy books, even my favorite books, couldn't engage me?
I just finished another memoir, this one about a boy soldier. It was also depressing and very disturbing in its accounts of brutal violence at the hands of drugged, abused, children soldiers.
Again, I couldn't put it down. I have literally been trying to get through this book since my college senior was an eighth grader and read it for school. I was going to read along with him and just couldn't get into it.
I have felt an anxiety and sadness since COVID really started. The lockdown. Not being able to visit family. Not being able to travel. So many restrictions. So much isolation. Having to remember to always wear a mask.
It's mentally exhausting.
Yet through tough memoirs of rising above, dealing with tragedies and loss, I have finally found my love of reading again.
Funny how that works.
Hugs, Lori. I get it... weird things right now - and thanks for the recommendations.
ReplyDeleteThanks--that means a lot. :) I will take all the hugs I can get right now. Weird times, indeed!
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