Blog Posts

“God walks among the pots and pans.”    St. Teresa of Avila

Copenhagen

Early Sunday morning. Skies the color of slate, and slate-colored rain pouring down. Late August in Denmark, but as wet and cold as late November in California. Except for a woman in red tennis shoes walking a tiny black dog, there’s not another soul on the streets in Vesterbro while I wait, shivering, for the number 14 bus. Then I’m the only passenger, still shivering, as the bus splashes through the streets to the foggy green and deserted Østre Anlæg Park. Where in the world is everyone this morning? In church?  Certainly not in the Hirschprung Museum. Only an elderly couple shares with me the empty galleries. The man and woman appear to be in their late seventies, if not older. They act tenderly toward each other. She is taller, but that’s perhaps because his shoulders are so stooped. Water drips from their gray coats, like water from my black one. Rain pounding on the roof makes it sound like we’re inside a drum.

Gradually a glow of sunlight illuminates us. It’s not a burst of light on the road to Damascus, but still, it’s a revelation. The clouds of Copenhagen have not evaporated, raindrops still rattle down. But here inside the  museum light radiates from a small painting; its gravitational field pulls me and the two strangers into its orbit.

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Although I have visited Spain dozens of times during the past 35 years and have often lived there for months at a time, Spain still remains a mystery to me. I have often wondered, Why is this so?  One would think that if you speak Spanish reasonably well, have several close Spanish friends — who have also been your teachers — and have traveled throughout the country, then Spain would become familiar to you, no? like a friend. But it hasn’t. Resolutely, it resists familiarity. This resistance fascinates my imagination.

Why both resistance and fascination? I don’t know; I don’t understand either one. But Spain, that ancient, enigmatic peninsula, bordered between the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas and the Pyrenees mountains, conquered by the Romans, Christianized by Barbarian Goths, occupied by Muslims for nearly 800 years, Spain will tell you stories about itself — and about you, too. You have to open your eyes and ears and your heart and be patient and listen carefully.

And yet, in spite of all that, you still may not get answers.
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In last week’s post, I wrote about an extraordinary Mediterranean house in Paterna, a small town on the outskirts of Valencia. I also posted a photograph of an oil on canvas I had painted in a corner of the garden. The work was a gift for Toti Romero and her husband, Manolo Blasco, who, over the years, had generously allowed me to stay in the house during the summers of some of my visits to Spain. The house was not simply a house. Toti had grown up in it; it had been the center of her life throughout her childhood and adolescence, so it still remained very much her home, even though, for most of the year, she and Manolo and their daughter Elena lived in a spacious flat in Valencia.

The offering of her childhood home to me as a place to live was a gift of generosity and trust that still leaves me, who loves words, without words. I can write about her home and paint images of it, but words of gratitude are inadequate. So are paintings. Even so, in this post I’d like to share with you two images of one of the rooms in the home that became my home. Read More