A Mother and Daughter

It Takes A Wedding To Make Us Say, Let's Live Another Day

June 25, 2022, Dílar, Spain. (One year ago)

I called up the spiral staircase: “May I come up?” I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to see Paula yet. When I came upstairs, I was met with a scene out of what seemed like somebody else’s life.

But no, it was my life. It was my soon to be daughter in law, having a moment with her mother, Carmen. I snapped the photo, but it was only later that I realized what I had captured. It seemed in a sense my whole life had been a vast journey across a tundra, to finally see this scene, and to know it was my life, though I was observing it, through my camera.

I’ve looked at it so many times, painfully separated from them all, since last August.

Last summer, I made a print of it, at a small photo shop in Granada, put it in a frame, and gave it to Carmen’s husband Antonio on the day of our last lunch together. When he opened it, Carmen burst into tears. There are actually two versions of it—one of them cropped. They are different photos, and for the past year, so many times, I thought about how, or whether, to post it, and if so, which one? I decided to post both, today, on the one year anniversary of my son and daughter in law’s wedding.

I have wondered if we can’t experience what we always wanted, partly through images, a shared dream, witnessing. I saw a harmony in the photo, that dissolved and displaced thousands of images I’d prefer to discard from my own life, and it healed me, from simply knowing that my son had been placed on safe ground. It replaced all the endless times and ways that harmony eluded us, because we were under the illusion of strife. All the times we got it wrong, still, suddenly, resulted in “right.” In the middle of Covid, in another country, at the top of a spiral staircase.

Notice the fan (“abanico”) on Carmen’s wrist. Some of you may recall how she trained me, one year ago, to flare it, and how fascinated I became with the “whole thing” about Spanish women and the native technique around the abanico. Imagine a people and a culture, allowed to love themselves.

We’re allowed too, but we are frozen in trauma.

America loved its President, and probably itself, that day, Nov 22, 1963. Now we have a second chance, not merely through a person, but through a collective reclaiming. They tricked us into believing we weren’t allowed hope. And that if we summoned joy, they would shoot it down in front of us. We were, from that day, orphans, with no family, whether we were born or not. And Covid was the finale.

Why did I give them my life? Why did we? I want it back. We want it back. I can’t give them another day, or another hour, of joylessness.

I came back to the US on the very last day of my visa, knowing full well I would be returning to the repressed frequency of a land where some kind of force conspired against our joy. Knowing full well I didn’t know how to overcome it. But we weren’t done fighting. America was still taken hostage by the joy killers.

Now I feel we have them on the run. I was defeated one year ago, but today, I feel a growing sense of hope spreading in the land, across the fields and plains, in the cities, taverns and churches.

We made it.

Now we have to put our joy back in our exhausted bodies, and stop identifying as Americans who have things taken from us.

So many days and nights of waiting, in the bleak waiting room, for some kind of break in the case, some authority who might unlock the door and let us out. We could go about our business, but that wasn’t what I was after. Like Robert Frost in the poem “Come In.”

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

I did what was asked of me. But my heart and soul always snuck off to Andalucía, to these happy days in the broiling sun, the preparations, the dashing about to get our hair and makeup done, our dresses adjusted, the wedding grounds decorated. The nightmare receded, and just for a few precious weeks back there in Spain— I was a woman like any other, whose son was getting married. It was as though we carved out a portal—mid Covid—and simply did not allow “it” in. Inside this portal, we were all still people, and nothing had been taken from us.

Covid wanted us to stop being people, and surrender to fear, gloom and deranged pettiness, a chronic obsession with “staying safe.” But Covid did not succeed. I mean: It did, until it didn't.

I was afraid I would fail, somehow—fail to retrieve myself as a “person,” not somebody whose very soul was in the dark pawn shop of the pharmaceutical cabal, unable to pay my way out, because of how angry they were.

The first time I saw Paula, on a video link months earlier, when they called to share their news, I also burst into tears. She seemed to exude a light, a tenderness one rarely finds here. I started to think about what was done to us (Americans) and how, and by whom.

It wasn’t our fault. It was as though a very powerful vacuum cleaner had sucked the very life out of the air, leaving us alive but not human. Fighting lies, day in day out, just to break even.

If the kids hadn’t fallen in love and planned a wedding, I wonder if my soul would have “made it” or if it would have forgotten how to be human altogether. It felt like we were all going to be arrested, for breaking the cardinal American rule of Covid: The cardinal rule of Covid was not merely to mask up, live in terror, receive multiple toxic injections, and despise our fellow man. It was somehow implicit that one was supposed to constrict. Move slow, and expect nothing, like a turtle. Go shopping, and come home. Every day the same as the last. Why couldn’t something happen? Here.

Why could it happen there?

My son told me how the kids handled Covid, in Granada: They traveled like a swarm to one apartment or the other, and kept the music, jam sessions, and all night dancing going. The Covid rulers did not manage to stop the river of life, for them. Paula’s grandparents, (Carmen’s parents) who lived through the Franco era, and who are fabulous dancers (I’ll post videos, pending everybody’s permission)—this is what they did: During the lockdown months, they pushed the tables and chairs to the walls, put on music, and danced. That’s one of my all time favorite take that Covid stories.

And even I doubted this (finding joy) would all be allowed—not literally, but spiritually.

When I got on the Iberia flight to Madrid, last summer, the flight attendant, a dashing Spanish man, said to me with a smile: “You’re here now, and all you have to do is relax and enjoy.”

Relax and enjoy? This must be some kind of Spanish thing, I thought. I wondered, silently, why an American flight attendant wouldn’t say such a thing. Or would he?

I wondered when somebody, on this flight, would show up to let me know they were angry. At me, at the world—at something. That’s what Covid was after all: Anger codified.

But not here, not on this flight, not on this voyage. I was free.

So many of you have asked me to write about Spain again. “Remember how happy you were?” friends and readers said.

I wanted to airlift all of us to Spain, and I still do. But today I felt that maybe, just maybe, Americans too have a chance, to regain what they took from us, to return to our customs, parties, friends, traditions, weddings, baptisms, funerals, birthdays, visits to our loved ones.

It’s “over.”

Yes, it’s over. Put a full stop on that, and don’t argue for the next attack, however inevitable it may seem.

The rest is up to us. To shake off the layers and layers of sadness, the decades—to stop living in anticipation of the next boot kick to our rightful, joyful lives. That’s the part none of us talk about. It’s ephemeral. We don’t even think about it as something we are owed. We’re not slaves, or paupers—we’re people. Why is joy so out of the question, since 2020, in America? How do we break out of this misery trance? This tightly wound cat’s cradle of accusations and cynicisms?

I don’t share these two photos to say something about my life, but about life itself.

I didn’t know how to admit I’d stopped living. Or how sick and tired I was of “fighting.”

Or how empty it felt, to be somebody who understood all this evil long ago. That wasn't what I wanted—to be right.

What I wanted was a family. The very thing the Covid reich could not tolerate, and sought to bring to ruin.

What’s a family?

I see it in these photos. It’s a secret alloy, passed down, a whisper of God’s divine plan for us all. A mother and a daughter, moments before a wedding—a mother stopping to embrace her daughter, amidst the bustle of the last minutes before the ceremony. An ancient energy and promise.

As the Jews say: “L”Chaim!”

(“To life.”)

The second version of the photo, not cropped:

PS. I have obtained permission from Paula and Carmen, to publish these photos. I have dozens more, and I may publish more, over time. Because I believe that this is part of breaking free of the trauma trance—reclaiming wonder.