Skip to main content

The Glass of Milk and the Lobster, 1972, El Puerto de Santa Maria

It's 1972 and I'm sharing an apartment in El Puerto de Santa Maria with two teachers from the bilingual school where the three of us teach.

It's always hot here.  You can't escape the sun, for it reaches even to the back of your knees. I become redder and redder, and the freckles on my arms blossom forth like the morse code tapping fiercely some important message.

The teacher with the lovely complexion and quizzical stare gazes upon me.

"Do you know you're red?"

"Emm." I'm not sure if this is a rhetorical question. Doesn't everyone go red in the sun?

"And what are these things on your arms?" She touches my skin lightly as if afraid she'll catch this red disease she sees before her.

"Freckles."  I make a mental note to look up 'freckles' in the small red dictionary I carry around with me.

"You don't go brown?  Why not? Everyone goes brown."  She looks appalled.

I almost want to apologise for being so red, for not going brown, for not looking so gorgeous and beautiful as all the other senoritas who swagger about with the confidence of a bullfighter before the bull.

"You look like a lobster." She adds, reaching her finger out to touch my skin again.

"It's due to the sun. You see..."

"You didn't look much better when you first arrived."

"I didn't?" Gosh, how could that be? I hadn't been in the sun before coming to Spain.

"When you first arrived, you looked like a glass of milk!"




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Strutting About, 1973, El Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain

It's late afternoon, 1973, in El Puerto de Santa Maria. I look out the window of the apartment at  the horses being trained for the Feria. A man has one tethered and he holds the strap loosely as the horse walks round and round in circles. It tries to get away, but the man pulls it back and soon the horse settles down. It starts to strut, lifting its hooves high off the ground. The Feria is one of the most important events of the whole year. It's a time for not just the horses to strut around, but for the people as well. The women wear brightly coloured dresses that flair out each time they move a leg, and the men are dressed in tight-fitting trousers and short jackets that make them look as if they're wearing their big brothers' hand-me-downs. I've been practising the Sevillanas dances with one of the teachers from the school. We attend a local church where they offer free dance classes. Pretty good, if you want my opinion. The instructor is this really skinn...
2 comments
Read more

Learning and Forgetting Spanish

When I first moved to Spain I taught English privately. Since most of my students were complete beginners I had to translate into Spanish many of the concepts and grammatical rules I was endeavouring to teach. Now, this was a grand way for me to learn Spanish, especially when I pronounced the words incorrectly. My students would invariably repeat what I had just said, only with the superb, crisp diction that only a native speaker can possess. I hadn't intended to learn Spanish when I was teaching English. It's just the way things worked out. I had my trusted teeny tiny English/Spanish dictionary snuggled deeply inside a pocket and I'd pull it out any time a student didn't understand an English vocabulary word. I learned an awful lot of new words this way! Fast forward to when I moved away from Spain to live in the United States. I still wanted to maintain my Spanish. All that work and energy I had expended in order to memorise vocabulary words and those pesky irr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ole to the ban on bullfighting

The following is one of several of my articles published at Powder Room Graffiti, an online magazine. This has since been taken over by different people and the name has changed to In the Powder Room.  They seem to have done away with the original articles, unfortunately. The articles were to be short, around 500 words, which was a challenge, as well as a good learning experience. Ole to Banning Bullfighting What honor? What choice? by Sandra Staas (Mon Aug 02, 2010) The recent ban on bullfighting in Catalonia was based on animal welfare grounds. However, those against the ban state that the reasons are actually political. They believe that the ban on bullfighting is simply a means for Catalonia to show Spain how different it is, and how one day they may actually acquire full independence from Spain. Catalonia does indeed consider itself separate from the rest of Spain as can be witnessed from the tendency of the people to insist on speaking in Catalan to Spaniards from ...
Post a Comment
Read more