Evenings (And Mornings and Afternoons) At the Bar Urba

15. July 2012 · Comments Off on Evenings (And Mornings and Afternoons) At the Bar Urba · Categories: Domestic, Uncategorized

“Mom? Is it OK if we stop by the bar on the way home from Vacation Bible School?” asked my daughter one morning in the summer of 1989 or so, and I confess that I had lived overseas for so long at that point,  that it took me at least five minutes to realize that to most Americans there would be something seriously out of whack about that sentence. Especially since I replied, “OK, sweetie, just call me when you get home.”

We were living then in a rental duplex home in an urbanization — a suburb, or development, on the outskirts of a pleasantly ordinary city in Spain. San Lamberto had once been the housing area dedicated to USAF families attached to Zaragoza AB. After a really unfortunate mishap involving a misplaced n*****r munition in the Med, the base was closed and the housing area sold off to individual local nationals at fire-sale rates. My present landlords’ father had snapped up several duplex units, one for each of his sons. Since at the time,  the units (four-unit duplexes, two up and two down, with either deck or balcony overlooking their own generous yard) were about the only housing stock in Zaragoza  resembling a garden apartment unit, they were favored by American families assigned to the base, when American operations returned to the area several years later. Most of the units which were not in the pot as rental units to Americans or to Spaniards as summer cottages during the hot summers, were purchased by well-to-do Spaniards who liked them as up-scale garden residences year round, conveniently located just off the main road to Logrono, the main surface road out of town towards the north. A very long apartment block went up, overlooking the road and shielding the duplexes from the traffic noise from the Logrono road, and the turn-off to the municipal airport and the Garapinillas gate which gave onto the Spanish side of the establishment. This intersection, while conveniently located for those Americans who had every-day business on the base, was also advertised in our base safety briefings as one of the most dangerous and unpredictable intersections in municipal Zaragoza, owing to a bizarre arrangement of traffic lights. Personal injury lawyers could have made an excellent living, merely by renting those apartments overlooking this intersection, and at the sound of screeching brakes and a certain metallic crunch, tossing down business cards from their balcony onto to the vehicular mayhem down below.

The other side of the apartment block, facing inwards onto the development, or urbanization, was rather more immediately important, because the ground floor,  opening onto a generous sidewalk and sheltered by the overhang of the apartment block above,  was given over to a variety of commercial establishments. There was a restaurant which opened in the last few months of my residence there, after many years of wrangling with the municipal authorities, a stationary store which retailed school supplies and a wonderful variety of candies, a bakery — only an outlet and drop-off point for a commercial establishment with ovens elsewhere, although they had a delivery service that offered freshly baked loaves of bread and croissants delivered to your house every morning. Oddly enough, there was an antique store with a lovely variety of odd bits of furniture (there was a little Art Nouveau ladies’ writing desk which I shall ever regret not buying, a steal at about 350$). Because of the high-income in the urbanization, it managed to stay in business, although the larger items of inventory stayed there, year in and year out.

But the two most essential businesses in San Lamberto — and the ones of longest duration — were neighborhood small grocery store with everything that we had forgotten to get on base, and where the owners were teaching me all the Spanish I needed to purchase this and that, and the Bar Urba. The Bar Urba was the clubhouse and chosen gathering space in San Lamberto, in the tiny storefront premise and on tables and benches set out on the sidewalk outside. In the summer, they had the concession at the community pool, set up under a canvas awning, with tables set under the trees. Year round, the Bar Urba was open most hours of the day and evening, offering coffee and snacks at all hours, and access to pay phones and video games. Of a summer evening, everyone was there, drinking the house sangria, at 100 pesetas a glass, while the children showed off their skill on skateboards and bicycles — the neighborhood played host to a flock of children, wheeling like seagulls on their bicycles, there in a moment and then off again — but in the evenings, the bicycles were flung in a tangled heap while the children begged a couple of hundred pesetas for a plate of pomme frites. A plate of fried potatoes, with a dollop of mayonnaise and a dash of hot sauce, a most popular tapa, a ‘little dish’.

My daughter and I loved tapas, the bar food of Spain, but as far above the usual American conception of bar food as haute cuisine is above a supermarket frozen entree. Tiny toasted cheese sandwiches, just a couple of bites, perfect for a kid’s finicky appetite; slices of cantaloupe melon wrapped in a paper-thin slice of jamon Serrano, the salty dark pink cured ham of Spain— every bar worth mention maintained a whole jamon with slivers of it carved off as needed, and the supermarket Alcampo sold them in a special section that smelled like moldy gym socks. Whole roasted tiny birds, bubbling in fat, a slice of tortilla— a sturdy frittata of potatoes and eggs, crisp slices of chorizo sausage, or whole anchovies— as different from the leathery strips of salted fish jerky as you can imagine, all served  with a slice of crusty bread, battered and deep-fried shrimps, and my favorite, ensalata de pulpo — a chilled salad of minced tomatoes, green peppers and onions with cooked octopus, marinated in lemon juice and olive oil. So much better than a restaurant, which was expensive, and fussy, and time-consuming; a place with good tapas already had the small plates made up, and under glass on a section of the bar; perfect for that middle-of-the-day, don’t want-to-fill-up, just-a-little-something-to-tide-you-over nibbling. Just a little plate or two, of whatever took your fancy.

A proper neighborhood bar, like Bar Urba wasn’t a nasty x-rated place, either, although there were those, downtown around the old narrow streets in what they called the Tubes. One of the low, vulgar places in the Tubes featured a stripper who had allegedly been plying her trade since before Franco.  A kind of institution by the 1980ies, I always imagined her performances being met with raucous cries of “Put it on, put it on!” Male friends assured me, though, even the bars in the Tubes were fairly couth, and in most other places— there were even bars at highway gas stations! — astonishingly family friendly places. There was even a bar in Zaragoza’s amusement park, with a terrace overlooking one of the popular rides for little children. I couldn’t help thinking that was an eminently sensible way to arrange things; the children could pursue their interests on the little bumper cars and the miniature trains and merry-go-round, while their parents relaxed with something cold and alcohol-based, or coffee, if preferred.

Everyone had their interests catered to, at the same time, and in the same place, and yet they could enjoy that time together. It also had the side benefit of making alcohol rather prosaic, not glamorous and forbidden, although I had to do a lot of explaining on the day we came back to the United States, to the JFK international arrivals hall, and I decided that I wanted to celebrate with a stiff gin and tonic. “Sweetie, you’ll have to wait outside the bar for me.”  “Why?” She said, reasonably enough. “Because children aren’t allowed into bars in this country!”

The look of outrage on her face said two things: What?!!!!! And for two cents, I’d get back on the plane and go back to a place where bars are sensible places.

“Custom of the country, sweetie, ” I said helplessly. “They just do things differently here.”

Turning Point

09. July 2012 · Comments Off on Turning Point · Categories: Uncategorized

My daughter and I are watching and very much enjoying the period splendors of Downton Abbey, showing on the local PBS channel here over the last couple of weeks – just as much as my parents and I enjoyed Upstairs, Downstairs – the original version, yea these decades ago. Of course, the thrust of this season is the effects of WWI on the grand edifice of Edwardian society in general. The changes were shattering … they seemed so at the time, and even more in retrospect, to people who lived through the early 20th century in Western Europe, in Russia, the US and Canada. In reading 20th century genre novels, I noted once that one really didn’t see much changing in book set before and after WWII, save for the occasional mention of a war having been fought: people went to the movies, listened to the radio, drove cars, wore pretty much the same style of clothes … but in novels set before and after WWI, the small changes in details were legion.

England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia – they were the epicenter, seemingly – the place where it hit hardest, and afterwards nothing was ever the same. Of course, in Russia with the Red Revolution and all, things were quite definitely never the same, and Austria lost the last bits of empire … and the other nations were gutted of a whole generation of young men. In the American experience, the only thing which came close was the Civil War, where a single battle in Pennsylvania, or Virginia or Tennessee could be the means of casually extinguishing the lives of all the young men in a certain township or county… just gone, in a few days or hours of hot combat around a wheat field, a peach orchard, a sunken bend in a country road. The Western front (not to negate the war in the Italian Alps, at Gallipoli or the Germans and Russians) went on more or less at that horrendous rate, week in, week out – for years.

The marks of it are still horrifyingly visible, even though the numbers of living veterans of it can be about counted on the fingers of a pair of hands. Because it’s not only the survivors’ trauma – it’s the mark and void left by the fallen. So many that I remember a college textbook of mine – I think that it was a required sociology or statistics course – had the population breakdowns by age of various European countries. In all cases, there was a pronounced dip in the numbers of males who would have been of early adult age in 1914-1918. This is reflected again in the acres and acres of white crosses in Flanders, on the tight-packed lists of names carved on memorials large and small; not too much marked in the United States, but in the Commonwealth nations, and especially in Britain itself, that sense of loss must have seemed suffocating. Even low and middle-brow genre novels showed the scars that WWI left, especially if they were written by contemporaries to the conflict. Memoirs, histories, memorials and all… there was loss written large, by people who looked at the ‘before’ and then at the present ‘after’ with an aching sense of the void between, a muddy void into which friends, schoolmates, lovers, husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers and certain illusions had all vanished.

Nothing was the same, afterwards.

Although perhaps the war wasn’t directly the change agent, it pushed some developments already in the works farther along than they would have been. The war served as a handy delineating point for those who lived through it … electricity everywhere, motor cars ditto, airplanes as something more than a toy for enthusiasts, women voting and wearing short shirts and routinely forgoing corsets, half a dozen live-in servants in a big house which once had been staffed by three times that many … all that. The worst loss was something a little less concrete – and that was, I think, a certain sense of confidence and optimism. I like writing about the 19th century because of that very thing: generally people believed with their whole hearts and without a speck of cynicism, that the conditions of their lives were steadily improving, that conditions which had plagued mankind for centuries were fixable, and that their leaders were able and well-intentioned. All those beliefs were deeply shaken or utterly destroyed during those four years – and that is why that war still casts a long shadow. And makes for an interesting and evocative television show – like Downton Abby and Upstairs, Downstairs.

D-I-Y

02. July 2012 · Comments Off on D-I-Y · Categories: Uncategorized

Right off the top, about the first thing we learned – and learned it the hard way – about making your own cheese is that ultra-pasteurized milk is no good for cheese-making, even if it is the high-end and expansive organic milk. The ‘ultra-pasteurized’ notation was in such small print on the cartons that we overlooked it entirely. Ah, well – chalk that up to experience. The good-enough HEB standard whole milk works well enough.

So, when did we get off on this whole do-it-yourself kick, regarding things? Partly, we’ve always been on it: I grew up sewing my own clothes, following Mom’s example. I made just about every garment my daughter wore, between the time she outgrew the baby-shower bounty and when she began to shop for and purchase her own. Owning a sewing-machine, and possessing a modicum of skill means never having to settle for what ready-made offers. So – the mind-set is already there, encouraged along by the subtle realization that a lot of the staple foods that we like are expensive.

It’s the natural outcome of having champagne tastes and a beer budget, for which there are three solutions: learn to like beer, drink water six nights and champagne on the seventh, or learn to make champagne. The first two are unappealing – hence, learning to make good stuff yourself. We have experimented with brewing beer, by the way. This is not hard – just follow the recipe.

After clothes – we progressed to bread, although my daughter is keener on that than I am. I just throw the ingredients in the bread-maker, and rejoice that I am not paying $3 and up for the all-grain seeded loaves. The homemade version is much more substantial than the mass-market version, too. But we are still lamenting the fact that Sam’s Club doesn’t stock the 25-lb sacks of high-gluten flour any more – that made good bread.

When we lived in Utah, I went through a round of canning jams and jellies; either it was something in the water, or I couldn’t stand letting the fruit go to waste, with a back-yard full of apricots. Had fun with it, but for the life of me, I couldn’t taste much difference one way or the other between what I did, and jams and jelly off the supermarket shelf. Well, the Concord grape jelly was a cut above the supermarket brand; three or four bunches, picked at once and into the kettle before the dew was off them – that made sublime grape jelly, even if I didn’t really like grape jelly. (Overdose of PB&J in school lunches as a child.) And I came away from Utah with a stand-alone freezer and a food dehydrator, items which have proved intermittently useful.

So – on to cheeses: two cheese molds, a stock of industrial-strength rennet tablets and a length of butter muslin. We got good at mozzarella, and it looks like the farmhouse cheddar will shape up nicely, even though my current cheese-press is a chunk of limestone and four exercise weights. The cheese presses from the supply houses cost a bomb, and it’s kind of an esoteric hobby, so we probably won’t see one at a yard-sale soon. I think I can whip one together, though – from two pieces of wood or two or three long threaded bolts and wing-nuts. Two gallons of milk make two pounds of cheese . . . and if I can line up a source for fresh goat milk, we can really branch out.

There is another reason for DIY foodstuffs – that being the actual experience of making it pays off when I write about the 19th century. Practically the whole of a frontier farm woman’s life was spent (between doing laundry and raising children) in processing food for the daily meals or to be put away for the winter – vegetables from the garden, fruit from an orchard or gathered in the wild, from the milk of the cows, from corn and wheat flour grown in her family’s fields and ground in a local mill . . . pickled, dried, preserved with sugar, smoked over a smoldering fire – that work never ended for a frontier woman. Pottering around with making cheese, bread, sausage and beer and the like brings me something of a sense of what it was like for them, although I’m certainly not hard-core enough o do it all over a wood fire.

Still, though . . . I’d like to learn more about the process of parting out a pig, for hams and sausages and all that. I found some accounts on line, but nothing is like actually watching it being done . . .

The Grand Adventure – Patrick Leigh Fermor

29. June 2012 · Comments Off on The Grand Adventure – Patrick Leigh Fermor · Categories: Domestic, Uncategorized · Tags: ,

“You’ll simply have to read his books, if you want to understand about Greece,” my next-door neighbor told me, very shortly after my then-three year old daughter and I settled into Kyrie Panayotis’ first floor flat (which is Brit-speak for second-floor apartment) at the corner of Knossou and Delphon streets in the Athens suburb of Ano Glyphada, early in the spring of 1983. Kyrie Panayoti did not speak any English; neither did his wife, or his wife’s sister, Kyria Yiota, who lived upstairs with her husband. The only inhabitants of the three-story apartment house who did were Kyrie Panayoti’s middle-school aged sons, who were learning English at school. And I – dullard that I am with languages aside from my native one – only retained a few scraps of high-school and college German. Given the modern history of Greece, and the long memories of older Greeks, a German vocabulary was neither tactful nor useful.

I can’t recall exactly when we hit the first linguistic snag, but it must have been within days of me moving in, lock, stock, barrel, toddler-aged child and household goods. In mild frustration, Kyrie Panayoti leaned out the kitchen door of his apartment, and shouted in the general direction of the apartment block next door, a distance of about twelve or fifteen feet away.
“Kyria Penny!”
Almost immediately, a woman’s head with an old-fashioned kerchief tied around it, appeared out from one of the first floor (or second floor windows) – and that was my first introduction to Penny. She was English, married to a genial Greek accountant named George. She was slightly older than my own mother, her two sons were teenagers. Penny had been the British equivalent of a State Department employee, and in that capacity she had been assigned to various British consulates in Europe until she came to Athens, met and married George, and settled down into tidy domesticity in the three-floor, three-flat apartment building next to Kyrie Panayoti’s. Penny’s mother-in-law lived on the ground floor, Penny and George lived on the first – or second floor, exactly opposite mine – and George’s widowed brother and his two children lived in the top-floor flat.

I rather think Penny missed speaking English regularly, anyway – and we became excellent friends because of a mutual love of books and mad passion for Greece, ancient and modern. A love for Greece in general, on the part of us English and American eccentrics is one of those inexplicable things – rather like enduring affection for an exasperatingly self-centered boyfriend with one or two bad habits. He’s devastatingly handsome, georgously scenic in all the right ways, erratically but theatrically devoted – but just when you have given up all hope and resolved to cut him off – he does something so heartbreakingly gallant, at something of a cost to him and with no thought of personal gain – that all is . . . well, not forgotten or overlooked (until next time). Anyway, I loved Greece, being a history wonk, and cheerfully overlooked all kinds of disincentives . . . a very real terrorism problem, chronic anti-Americanism, and a certain slap-dash approach to everything from driving habits to telephone company service. No exaggerating there: getting a land-line telephone in Greece in those days was . . . interesting, and supposedly took years, well above the time that any Americans serving at Hellenikon AB were prepared to wait. Kyrie Panayoti’s flat and Kyria Yiota’s each had a single telephone jack. Mine might have had one also; I never cared enough to look for it. But there was only one actual telephone unit between the two families. They passed it between themselves, I guess according to need. Many was the time that I heard someone calling between apartments, and observed the telephone being hoisted or lowered past my kitchen window, in a plastic market bag at the end of a long length of rope.

Among the first books that Penny advised me to read – was Gerald Durrell, who wrote about his childhood in Corfu in the 1930s. He was Lawrence Durrell’s little brother; I rather think that Dad must have been a child like Gerald Durrell; entranced by wild animals of whatever sort, to the mystification and horror of his parents – eventually being a zoologist and all, and as the four of us grew up, giving the very best nature-walks ever!

And the second of Penny’s recommended authors – Patrick Leigh-Fermor, especially his books about Greece: Mani and Roumeli, respectively southern Greece and Northern. Penny’s redoubtable mother-in-law was from the Southern Peloponnesus – the Mani. I read them both, traveled down into that part of the country when I could, and read the first of his books – A Time of Gifts – about the journey on foot that he had made at the age of 18; as the title goes, “On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube” in the fateful year of 1933. He took a little more than a year to make that journey, but writing about it took up the rest of his life. I bought a copy of the second installment, Between the Woods and Water as soon as it came out, the year after I had left Greece. At the time of his death a couple of years ago, the last installment of that journey was unfinished.

Of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s greatest adventure? He never really wrote about that himself, although in certain circles his exploits as a British SOE agent during Crete in WWII became legend. He and another SOE officer, in a daring strike by Leigh-Fermor’s band of Cretan guerillas, kidnapped the German officer commanding the whole island, spirited him across the Cretan hills and mountains, and had him evacuated from Crete to North Africa. His co-conspirator, W. Stanley Moss wrote about that in his own book, Ill Met by Moonlight – which was made into a movie, in the days when movie-makers appreciated such real-life exploits. One of the grace notes to this adventure is that Moss and Leigh-Fermor left documents behind; clearly explaining that it was British commandos who had taken the general-commanding, so no point in going all reprisal-ish on the local Cretans.

About thirty years later, a Greek television version of This is Your Life reunited many of those participants. And Patrick Leigh Fermor lived for most of the rest of his life in Greece, regarded with awe and wonder, almost as a local saint.

Fire Country

27. June 2012 · Comments Off on Fire Country · Categories: Uncategorized


(This is a picture that my father took, of the 2003 Paradise Mountain fire coming towards their house)

Reading the news about the fires burning near Colorado Springs revive memories of what it was like, when I was growing up in the hill country – the hill country of Southern California. Then it would be hot and dry all summer long, the green grass of spring would turn gold, the chaparral – the native brush – would dry out . . . and then . . .

The winds would blow, the hot dry devil winds from off the high desert, which some called the Santa Ana. And then the hills would burn. A spark from a string of broken Christmas lights, the sun shining relentlessly through a piece of bottle grass, a bulldozer blade striking a buried flint rock . . . or even some fool throwing a lit cigarette out of a car window, or messing around with fireworks. Within seconds the sparks turn into flames, and the hills would burn, with the hot desert wind fanning it to a greedy blow-torch roar.

A well-lit brush fire does make that horrible, deep roaring noise as it burns, a noise to make everyone hearing it feel cold and afraid down to the toes of their boots. Once fire is well along, and a stiff wind pushing, there is very little to be done – only see that it is deflected from structures. At a distance, the clouds of smoke pile up in the sky like thunderheads. There’s no mistaking the smell of a distant fire, the pale beige smoke of it hanging in the sky . . . or mistake the fall of fine ash, drifting in eddies along the ground for miles distant and days afterwards.

It is an unforgettable sight, seeing a runaway fire, especially at night. In the fall of 1975, from the hilltop above my parents’ home, I watched such a fire, advancing over the mountaintop crests of the Angeles National Forest, a line of fire across the horizon as far as one could see. We escaped that particular conflagration, thanks to being across a well-built up valley from the closest point that fire came to us, but nearly three decades later, my parents were not so lucky. They had retired to Valley Center in northern San Diego County – and in the Paradise Mountain fire, theirs was one of the houses lost. They had twenty minutes to pack their vehicles and go, losing nothing but things – things which can be replaced, although some of them – pictures, books, certain items of china and relics – were sorely missed.

A couple of summers ago, my daughter went outside to water the plants, she came back, exclaiming excitedly that she smelled smoke. There was something burning, something to the north and east of us, borne on the wind. We know that smell, that hazy look in the sky. My daughter called the local non-emergency number, stressing over and over again, that there was something on fire close to us. Given the summertime drought and the strong winds blowing, plus our own experiences … that was enough to make both of us jumpy. Eventually, the operator told her that yes, there was a fire in a house over on Judson, which we agreed was probably what we had smelled. My daughter was so shaken that she went out and watered down all our yard within reach, aiming the spray up into the trees and over the fence into the green belt – now the brown belt. A few weeks later, we spotted the smoke of another fire away up north, towards Bulverde. She went and watered everything again, just to be sure.

Hearing the sound of sirens at this time of year, my mother used to tell us to run up to the top of the hill, and see what on fire, and on our report – a house down in town someplace: “Oh, only a house, then. Not the hills.” But that’s what you always think, in fire country.

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