Security Measures in Spain

The Future: The bicycle path in Seville extended into a traffic circle. I was impressed by the exclamation mark serving, I assumed, as a warning to cyclists along this route which I walked several times a day. Another point which caught my attention was that, in fact, I never saw any cyclists. Several times a day for less than a week – that is not enough to argue that there were no cyclists, so I imagine that there were, or will be in the future. I asked locals who frequented the shops and cafés whether the punctuation was meant to assist a multi-ethnic and or illiterate population of cyclists, but I did not manage to find anyone who felt qualified to respond.

The Recent Past: seguretat in the sign is meant to reassure rabbits and inform hunters that they are not allowed to shoot anyone or -thing beyond this tree. I entered this ‘no hunting’ zone in Catalan country feeling only mildly reassured. The old hunting rifle as depicted on the sign is evidently still in use here and there. The sign itself has become redundant, however, left over from an era when hunters stealthily slipped past this tree on the edge of a small but famous settlement to track down animals in the fields beyond. The fields have since given way to a highway and railroad line, so that the tree is now wedged between a car park and the modern traffic circuit, uniting metropolitan Barcelona on the East with suburbia on the West. The sign has so far survived all transitions.

Timeless Legend, Present Practice: April 27th is the Feast Day of the Black Madonna of Monserrat, not far from Barcelona in Catalonia. While still said to work miracles, the Black Madonna has a disputed history. Described sometimes as a 12th-century sculpture and in other contexts as a work carved with Joseph’s very tools in Jerusalem two-thousand years ago, the statue was said to have been transferred across the Mediterranean to Monserrat by Saint Peter in 50 A.D., amazingly hidden away from the invading Saracens and miraculously found first by shepherds and later by monks, to be fully reinstated at the time of the reconquista, when power was recovered from the Muslims by the Catholic monarchy. Those who believe that the Madonna is a 12th-century sculpture suggest that its inertness led monks to build a sanctuary around it and eventually a church. The Black Madonna is of interest to others because she is black (African), while other sources claim that x-rays prove that her skin color was originally white, turning gradually darker because of lead in the paint. Clicking on the picture will enlarge text offering still another explanation. Whatever the origins, the Black Madonna and Baby Jesus attract Catholic Pilgrims from all over the world. They believe that it is beneficial to file past the Madonna and touch or kiss the glass separating her from the crowds. Distance is not a problem; she will heal and protect.

Colonial Origins of the Non-Acquisitive Lifestyle - Global Local Pt.2

The first time I met a Zimbabwean was so long ago that he was in fact still a Rhodesian, the chief tenant in an apartment nestled, not far from my new job, into one of colonial Hong Kong’s residential neighbourhoods on the mainland, extending between dense, coastal commerce and farmland running north to the People’s Republic of China. The Rhodesian was a short, slight figure, a young white man with dark blonde hair and fierce eyes. He never set out to kill me, but his actions could have done just that.

The three-bedroom apartment in question included a shared living room and kitchen, which was almost never in use. If I ever met or even saw the third tenant, I don’t recall the event. There are two aspects of that home which I do remember well: the view out of the window from a horizontal position on my bed (the image was that of huge wing-tips of jets landing at the nearby airport - the audio was equally unforgettable), and the Rhodesian’s many Chinese girlfriends. One of those women provided the image recalled in greatest detail, a scene which confirmed my doubts about the wisdom of prolonging this living arrangement. The sights that day were followed by my final departure from the apartment the next morning.

When I went to view the apartment, I flashed my employment contract and spoke with just the slightest bit of exaggeration of my extensive connections in the local business community. In fact in those early days I knew only two people, but I referred to them and their community as my own secure circle, where people were watching. The chief tenant mentioned working at a bank - but the deal-clincher for me was the proximity to work. I moved in and began a hectic routine which included a bit of time (almost every day) at the apartment, where I rarely met another living soul. It didn’t last long.

After a weekend away, I returned home one Sunday afternoon to an apartment filled not with people, but with gas fumes. The purple curtains in the living room were drawn shut, and green candles were lit on the coffee table. While staring at the bizarre scene I became aware of the hiss, which I traced to the kitchen, where I found the gas on full force. At some point between that moment and my final departure I stood looking at the Rhodesian, seated on the sofa nursing a beer, explaining that while ‘all Chinese are dogs,’ he had never expected this particular Chinese girlfriend to be so vindictive as to set a death trap for him in his own home, only because he left her waiting for him all night long.

I also remember that packing was a simple affair: clothes and books into the backpack, one garbage bag for the overflow and another bag for the items going into the garbage. I left so quickly that by mistake I moved the rubbish with me and threw out the overflow, thus reinforcing an early adherence to the non-acquisitive lifestyle.

For the story of this globe, please see LBN post on November 26, 2007.

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a guy-thing

Where were you?

I needed to relax, so I went for a drive.

I grew up in car-culture, where there was space to coast gently or even speed up without experiencing stress.

Really? That’s so funny. It’s such a guy-thing.

She was genuinely surprised, even though she had known me for a long time. But she had grown up in a city built for boats, surrounded by countryside originally designed for tractors and cows. Automobiles have extended their influence at an alarming rate over the past half-a-century, but this has happened with a competitive core feeling, and many drivers lurch at top speed from one red light to the next, not associating cars with calm.

I had never specifically thought about life in cars that way, although it’s true that driving a car was definitely a guy-thing while I was growing up. My mother drove if Dad was off at work, but when both parents were in the car; my father was always at the wheel. We sometimes drove to a favourite nature site in the Watchung Hills for a Sunday afternoon walk with the dogs. Vacation expeditions usually meant packing a picnic for a full day’s drive: parents in front, four daughters in the back. We sang songs together, practiced tongue-twisters, clung to long series of numbers to deliver a final sum and we answered riddles. All of this was administered by my father, who must also have felt that driving was a guy-thing, if only because he was doing it and there were no other males present. The arithmetic and riddle litany became familiar enough so that we were eventually able to recite the full answer as the question was being posed. When stories wore out, they were shelved, repeated no more. New and challenging riddles were introduced to keep the bar high.

Just around the time when I decided to start relaxing by going for drives, I was revisited by one of the archived riddles, in an otherwise inconspicuous article about long place names, naming Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg as the fifth longest word in the world (Guinness Book of Records) and the longest name for any lake anywhere.

My father would ask:

What’s the meaning of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg?

We learned to answer:

You fish on your side, I fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle.

The riddle was one of Dad’s favourites, and having never heard it again since the childhood car-drive days, I felt as though his story-telling powers had somehow willed the Lake into existence, as a real place. I do accept the version which says that as a young man his imagination was piqued by this word of Algonquin origin, which he stored and passed on to his children as few others had done – I never had friends who were familiar with the sounds. But it felt, it feels, like a tribute to him that the lake is there, albeit officially known as Webster Lake, in the town of Webster MA, named after Daniel Webster (who left us a dictionary). The riddle was something of an oratorical exercise, and from a contemporary perspective, it was a lesson in Native American culture and New England geography. The competitive origins of this story would bear out years later as a girl-thing.