This time last year I was in Madrid, Spain, the guest of my daughter and the man she would soon marry. It was the first time I’d traveled outside of the U.S. for personal reasons, not college business, for more than 30 years.
I didn’t pack my camera.
Photography can be a way into the lives of other people and places. But a camera can also be a shield, a way to distance oneself or play a role. I once took my professional camera to a family reunion, walking through the “crowd” of relatives as if I were covering a college event. I got some great images for the scrapbook, but interactions shifted to something cold and unfamiliar. I can’t remember a thing anyone said.
It wasn’t my idea to go to Spain; the trip was Lydia’s gift to us. Our daughter, who had left home as a high schooler, flew us to her adopted country. I wanted to see her there, and to meet Carlos, the man she loved. I wanted to know them through her eyes, not my lens. And this was the first time my wife, C.J.—a lovely and gregarious southern Indiana farm girl—would be traveling in a foreign country. I wanted to be present to the people I loved. So I left the camera at home.
And I had no idea what to do with myself.
On the eight-hour trip from Chicago to Zurich, I assigned myself C.J.’s flight attendant, asking every minute or so, “How you doing?” or “Can I get you anything?” When she started to get a headache, I freaked and ran for extra airsick bags.
At Lydia’s apartment I “interviewed” Carlos, exhausting him with my endless questions in English. Mercifully for him I was jet-lagged and soon fell asleep.
The next morning I realized I’d need something of my old habits to keep myself sane and everyone else from ditching me. So each night I would scribble in my journal, which I’m looking at now.
A few entries under the heading, Things Not to Forget About Our Trip to Spain:
?The Basque tapas bar in Madrid, the sweet and potent sagardoa cider. We’re eating pintxos from each other’s fingers—
octopus, squid, carmelized onions over cheese, jamon serrano y queso, bacalao; words punctuated by laughter; the flamenco of conversation.
?Running through a sudden rain shower to the monastery at El Escorial, seeing it all in wet shoes through fogged-up glasses, the basilica at the foot of the mountains and the altar beneath the dome in the basilica like a 3-D 16th-century movie of heaven, the communion box is jasper and blood-red granite.
?C.J.’s latest fearless attempt at Spanish: Breaking the ice with Lydie’s new in-laws she means to say “the weather is hot,” but it translates, “I am hot for you.”
?Lydia puts C.J.’s money in her own purse to keep it safe at the El Rastro gypsy market, then leads her by the hand to bar-
gain for her and keep her from talking with anyone.
?Waiting for the high-speed train (the “Ave,” which means bird), Lydie stands between Carlos and me, switching from
English to Spanish with the turn of her head. I’m amazed at her agility. She brushes off my compliment: “They say I
speak like a Mexican.”
?We’re walking along the sea wall to the fortress in Cadiz, two pairs of lovers hand in hand. We watch the thunderstorm
across the Mediterranean, lightning flickering over Africa. The trash man is picking up paper at midnight, tossing
it into his two-wheeled cart, wonderfully inefficient as he sings his way between the bodegas and vendors on the
centuries-old streets and stops at a storefront to talk, offer a kiss on both cheeks and a hug for a friend, or maybe a brother, while the old men drink and chatter in a kitchen-sized corner bar behind him in the Barrio de la Nueva Vida.
?We buy sherry and a small penitente figurine in the same shop, whose owner tells us this is one of the oldest continu-
ously inhabited cities on the continent. Just after 2 a.m, a young man tunes a battered guitar beneath the open window of our pensione. The rain patters on the stone street, then showers down like maracas. They shake to the man’s rhythmic tapping on the cedar soundboard. In tune now, he walks, soaking wet, into the bodega and plays. I fall asleep to a passionate melody and ancient rhythms.
Even after our flight back over the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, I kept scribbling. This from our three-hour wait for the Amtrak in Union Station for the train to Crawfordsville: “A Mennonite girl, maybe 18 or 20, tall, in the plainest blue dress imaginable, turns her white bonnet on its face and onto the top of her brown-haired head so it looks like a bleached saucepan without a handle. Full of mischief. Her mouth relaxes into a natural smile. She leans forward on her knees like a basketball player on the bench and gazes out at a t-shirt clad man with earphones who’s chomping on chips while a woman yells at him just to get his attention.
“Our girl turns to her mother, who was pretending to ignore the scene. They share the same dolphin grin, then turn their faces and giggle behind surprisingly slender hands. Loudspeaker bellows ‘Train 50, the Cardinal, to New York City and stations between, has been delayed,’ then repeats it. The Mennonite father in his hat and vest gently strokes his wife’s shoulder with the back of his curved fingers. The mother turns to her knitting. The girl picks up the only reading material she has, the Amtrak ticket and ticket envelope. She stares at it long enough to have read it over and over, but that smile says she’s somewhere else.”
As I write this I’m listening to tunes by Berroguetto, a Galician Celtic band Carlos introduced me to. I don’t know what to do with these notes. The last one seems to have absolutely nothing at all to do with the trip.
When people ask about it, we show the few snapshots we took with C.J.’s point-and-shoot and talk about how fast the Ave travels (186 mph).
I’ve kept these fragments, and a few others that I share only with C.J., Carlos, and Lydie. But the view they offer is about as clear as those mist-shrouded mountains and buildings at El Escorial. Like the Buddhist prayer wheel Carlos bought me at his favorite Tibetan store in Madrid.
“I am making a gift of this to you,” he said. And I couldn’t refuse.
But I don’t know how to use it. I spin it like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker, keep it going a little longer each time. I think of Lydie and Carlos, the country they opened up to us. I recall the way the woman I love moved through that new old world. I remember how I never really wanted to go to Spain in the first place, and how I long to return.
You can travel miles and not be moved.
You can write or read and sail through time and space.
In this edition we’ve collected words and images from alumni, students, faculty, and friends who have been moved in body, mind, or spirit by travels far and near, by the exotic and the mundane. Writers and photographers attempting, as Professor Eric Freeze says, “to refigure the world.”
Hope you enjoy the trip.
Thanks for reading.
Steve Charles | Editor
