juanzqui

Sunday, July 3, 2011

HOW DO YOU know if you’re thrown a successful brunch or dinner party? When your guests are still sitting around the table four hours after you’re started eating, that’s how.

We didn’t eat for four hours, but we probably did eat for two and a half hours. It was fun, and I’m proud to say that for the most part, the food was good. Some of it was damn good.

Here’s what we had:

• Cactus and shrimp soup
• Machengo cheese and roasted pecans in tomato/olive oil sauce
• Beef tacos with red cabbage
• Albondigas de camaron seco (dried, ground-up shrimp in a corn meal and egg batter, pan fried) and Mexican cheese with a cranberry pepper jelly)
• Steamed chayote and cucumber salad with onions and pears and roasted pine nuts with a hibiscus sauce.
• Chicken mole
• Zucchini blossoms stuffed with a mixture of Mexican chorizo, mushrooms and raisins, topped with a pecan sauce.
• Basil sorbet with a blackberry/lime sauce.

It was a feast. I’m only sorry that my friend Karen thought the brunch was tomorrow. She missed out on some good food and good conversation.

Tuesday, June 29, 2011

 I’M HOME AFTER a happy-hour session with some colleagues and former colleagues at a bar/restaurant near work.  I’m happy to say that, according to my calculations, I have managed to stay within my Weight Watchers point allowance. I went two points over my daily allowance but I still have plenty of my weekly points, so I’m not concerned about that.

I feel more than a bit of pride over that, but I’m also a bit concerned because I had planned to go on another bike ride after work today (I had forgotten about the get-together), and this means I’ll only have two long bike rides under my belt this week (tomorrow after work I go to the gym for a session with my trainer, and I plan to do some cardio work before and/or after, so that should ease the guilt a bit, but Friday night I’m going out with friends to celebrate a birthday, so no bike ride then either).

But I can’t obsess over the possible pitfalls and negatives. I need to celebrate today’s accomplishment. A huge one, because I know that events such as this are what have led to my failures in the past. I always tell myself that I’ll be able to do OK on Coke or club soda, or on just one or two glasses or wine, and that I won’t let one nibble of the happy-hour snacks lead to a gorging. It never works and I end up having drunk to much and eaten too much and then going home and eating some more because:

1)    Alcohol makes me want to eat more.

2)    I have failed once more so why not make it a full-blown failure? What in the world made me think I could do it in the first place when I know I don’t have the willpower?

3)    One night off the program won’t make that much of a difference and I can always start anew tomorrow.

4)    Man, I really blew it tonight and I do want to stay on program and I know I will do it – tomorrow – but tonight I want to blot out my sorrow over being a failure in more food and more alcohol.

5)    Or one of many, many other rationalizations.

It doesn’t really matter which one I pull off the shelf, or take out of my drawer; they all amount to the same thing: the end of the effort until, weeks or months later, I can’t fit into my clothes and I feel and look like shit and I drag my fat ass back to Weight Watchers.

But, somehow, tonight was different. Yes, I stayed for the full happy-hour session. Yes, I drank and yes I ate, but, as I have said, it was all within the WW program.

And it was possible because I planned ahead (I was actually planning ahead for Friday night because, as I said, I had forgotten about tonight’s commitment). I skipped the toast and jam for breakfast and I cut extra thin the slices of bread I used in my avocado sandwich, and instead of using half of the avocado (4 points), I used a third. I ate a bigger salad than I eat most days for lunch and in between meals I had veggies and fruits, all of which were zero points, so I still had a nice large number of points that I took with me to the happy-hour gathering.

I had two glasses of wine (you’d be surprised how long a glass of wine can last when you take small sips instead of gulping it down!) and a veggie, cheese and avocado sandwich. I also had a very nice gazpacho, which I almost sent back after it arrived looking like a tomato bisque. The waitress assured me, however, that it had no cream or milk and, sure enough, when I tasted it, it was pure tomato and cucumbers.

My friends had calamari, tacos, chicken wings and other enticing stuff, but I stuck with what I ordered.

And when I got home, instead of opening a bottle of wine or tapping into the bottle of Flor de Cana (Nicaraguan dark rum), I poured some iced tea into a tall glass and sliced up a peach and threw that into the glass, along with some blueberries, and that was my treat, my reward for being good.

And I sat down to write this, an added incentive to continue being good, because I knew that if I was writing about staying true to the program, I couldn’t very well go back to my old ways.

THIS DOESN’T MEAN that I’m not concerned about what the scale will show Saturday. I still have Friday night’s dinner party to deal with. I’m pretty sure I’ll do well there, but I guess I’m concerned because I’ve already used more of the weekly points than I normally do, and I may not have as many activity points as I do most weeks.

But if I don’t lose, and even if I stay the same or have a slight gain, I will know that it’s just one of the quirks of the program and the scale, that it will have little or nothing to do with my efforts. I have been true to the program and I have been true to myself. And for that, I thank all of you once more.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

IT’S A BIT past 7 in the evening and I am again sitting in the outdoor area of Java House. The weather is unbelievably mild. So mild, in fact, that I’m drinking regular hot coffee instead of my usual summer beverage, iced coffee. Shocked the hell out of the waitress.

Beautiful evening for a bike ride, but having done more than 11 miles earlier this afternoon, I think my legs would rebel mightily if I went any further than the distance between here and home.

I had to go on a bike ride today. I really had no choice because I needed to work off some of the extra points that I consumed yesterday, what with my stuffed and deep-fried zucchini blossoms. They were worth it though. Damn, were they good. I couldn’t remember what kind of sauce my mother made for hers, so I improvised and although it turned out good, it wasn’t like eating my mother’s. I stuffed them with chorizo, queso fresco, mushroom bits and crushed pecans. After I made them I thought that I should have included raisins. Too late, but I’ll do it next week. I bought two more cartons of blossoms at the farmers markets and I want to see if I can have some friends over to enjoy them. I’ll check with my sister about my mother’s sauce.

I had no way of judging the Weight Watchers points value of deep-fried blossoms, so I estimated: 6 points each. I had four, so that’s 24, more than half of the daily 40 points I’m allowed. What with breakfast and lunch, I easily surpassed my daily allotment and used up some of the weekly points we’re allowed for situations such as this. We get 49 points extra each week, and that’s a nice safety valve to have. However, one of the reasons I’ve been able to lose weight every week this time around is that I have for the most part not used any of those points. And I have not used any of the activity points – points you’re awarded depending on the length and intensity of physical activity you undertake. So, in order to not feel too bad about having used so many weekly points (I still have 37 left for the rest of the week), I decided to ride my bike, meaning that this coming week, unless something happens, I will do four bike rides, instead of two, and I will do my two gym sessions with the trainer – half hour of strength training and about 20-30 minutes of treadmill or elliptical trainer.

I am determined that I am going to lose weight when I weigh in on Saturday morning, even if it’s just a tenth of a pound. I will not gain and I will not stay the same. That simply will not happen.

And it won’t happen because of you, my FB support group, my village. You just don’t realize what a difference you have made this time around. Even those of you who have not commented or inquired have helped me, because I know that I have to be honest with you every Saturday morning and tell you the result at the scale, whether it’s good news or bad news. And because I want it to be good news, I have been able to stay on program.

You’ll notice that I said “this time around.” That’s because there have been many, many times around. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have joined and rejoined Weight Watchers or tried other diets or weight-loss programs. I cant’ tell you the number of times I’ve joined a gym only to drop out after a few weeks.

The first time I tried WW was the only time I have been successful at reaching goal. That was in the mid-70s. I was living in San Marcos and I had gotten heavier than I had ever been and I was desperate. (It just started to sprinkle so I had to move to a table under the canopy). I had heard about Weight Watchers and I knew there were meetings in San Marcos, but I was too embarrassed to show up there, so I looked up meeting times in Austin, about 30 miles to the north, and started going to a Thursday night group. Eventually my good friend Mary and Bobby, one of her co-workers, joined me and we formed a nice support group.) That was the old WW, before they went to the points program and when you had to eat liver at least once a week (good thing I like liver). They encouraged exercising but it wasn’t part of the regimen. It was hard, but I stuck to it and about nine months later I reached my goal: 184 pounds.  Mary and Bobby were also successful. Unfortunately, instead of sticking around for what was called “maintenance,” I quit going to meetings, and then I moved to Washington and little by little the pounds began to reattach themselves to me.

One of the problems was that even though I had lost all those pounds (more than 80), I still viewed myself as a fat person. I looked in the mirror and saw a different, thinner person, but that somehow didn’t seem to be me; it was someone else. And as soon as I was away from the mirror, I thought of myself as a fat person and all that goes with being a fat person: Unlikable. Not fitting in. A failure. A societal reject. The pounds may have not been there, but that was more than enough weight to make up for the lost pounds.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was that I lost all those pounds strictly through the eating program. Because WW didn’t require physical activity, I didn’t engage in any. And so, while much of the fat was gone, the flab wasn’t. If I had any muscles, they were well hidden behind the remaining flab.

All this proved a formula for eventual failure, and by the time I moved to Houston in 1979, after a year in graduate school here, I was already well on my way to being fat again. And I’ve been fat ever since.

I can’t say that I will be completely successful this time around, but I’m going to give it my best. And I’m doing things differently. For one thing, I’m setting a realistic goal. I don’t care what the medical charts say my ideal weight is: I don’t want to reach that level. I am aiming for 210 or 205 – 200 if I get really ambitious. I see no need to get down to 180. I am relatively healthy with normal cholesterol levels and no signs of diabetes. I’ve had moderate high blood pressure but it’s been under control with medication, and I fully expect that when I go to my doctor next month he’ll tell me I will no longer need medication. My heart is good and so are my other organs, as far as I know. Knowing my family history, if I’m going to die anytime soon, it won’t be because of a few extra pounds.

I’m also exercising religiously. I mentioned my weekly regimen already so I won’t go into it, only to tell you that I intend to keep it up. I’ve been using a trainer for a number of years now and, despite my weight, I in relatively good shape. I started training because my massage therapist decided to switch careers, went to trainers school and scraped together enough money to open up a small training gym. I was his first customer.

When I first started going, I fully expected to fail, but Jon and the trainers he hired became addictive. I never imagined that I would be able to do the things they had me do, and I look forward to each session, even if each one is more demanding than the previous one. While I’m no Arnold Schwarzenegger, I have gained quite a bit of strength. One of my favorite pleasures is watching the face of new trainers when, on our first session, they set the weights at a level they imagine a man my age should be able to lift only to have me inform them that they need to add more.

I know that even though I get to my goal weight and even though I keep training religiously, my body will never resemble that of a normal person, but that doesn’t matter. It will be better than it is now and much better than it has been most of my life. And I will feel better and I will be able to wear the clothes I want to wear. And, I hope, that I will have worked on my mind enough so that I will no longer see myself as a fat man. Just a regular Juan.

(Next time I’ll tell you how I got to be fat.)

Sunday, June 26, 2011

IN AN OTHERWISE good column about how and why The Washington Post passed on the article by Jose Antonio Vargas detailing how he’d lived and worked in this country as an illegal alien, ombudsman Patrick Pexton included these lines:

“He left behind a reputation in The Post’s newsroom for being a tenacious and talented but also for being a relentless self-promote whom many colleagues didn’t trust. Editors said he needed direction, coaching and constant watching.”

I can’t remember the number of columns by Post ombudsmen/women decrying the use of unnamed sources in the paper. Paxton is relatively new at this gig, but I have no doubt that he shares his predecessors’ disdain for unnamed sources. Apparently, though, it’s OK for him to use unnamed sources. And it’s OK for him not to offer Vargas an opportunity to reply to the unreliable self-promoter charges.

I don’t know Vargas and he may well have been an unreliable self-promoter, but if you’re going to make those charges in print, it seems to me you should detail who is making those charges, and you should offer Vargas an opportunity to defend himself.

And since when has self-promotion been a sin at The Washington Post, home of the world’s most famous self-promoting reporter, Bob Woodward?

I have worked in newsrooms before and I know that there is a lot of professional jealousy in those places. Any time a reporter does an outstanding job that attracts the attention of readers and editors, there are the pats on the back but there is also the behind-the-scenes dissing of that reporter.

That, unfortunately, is even more so when it comes to minority reporters, particularly male reporters, thanks to Jason Blair and other idiots who decided to take shortcuts to glory and fame in the newsroom.

Somehow, the assumption is that black, Latino and Asian reporters aren’t that good and when they do good work, it’s because they cheated or they got help or breaks from editors that white reporters wouldn’t get. Somehow, there is the assumption that the only reason they were hired was so that the newspaper would be able to say it has a rainbow newsroom, not because they were competent reporters.

In some cases that was true, I’ll have to admit, but the overwhelming majority of minority reporters I have met and worked with have been as competent as their white colleagues.

When I got hired at The Houston Post, I assumed that I was hired on the basis of my resume and the writing I had done for the paper at its Washington bureau as an intern. I was no cub reporter. Yet, when I wrote my first big breaking-news front-page story, I heard an editor say to another, in amazement, “He can write!”

I suppose that was meant to be a compliment, but to me, it was an insult. I was already in my early 30s and I had been working in the field for years, albeit in weekly newspapers, and here all these weeks these editors were assuming I could not write!

A couple of years later, it was revealed that one of our assistant city editors had written a letter (on company time using company equipment) to a friend bragging about his role in disciplining “a young Latino reporter” who had fabricated parts of some of his stories. This was after the Washington Post Janet Cooke affair.

Being that I was the only young Latino reporter on the city desk, I was particularly offended, because I knew that the all the letter’s recipient had to do was look up a roster of the Post’s city desk reporters and assume that I was that young fabricating Latino reporter.

The editor lost his job over that incident and I felt bad for him, but I also was far from pleased that he had felt perfectly OK with promoting himself by denigrating minority journalists.

That was some 30 years ago. You’d think that things would be different by now. Sadly, they aren’t. Successful minority reporters are still seen as overly ambitious or dishonest, if not both.

So much for the nation’s liberal newsrooms.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

AFTER WORK I went on another long bike ride and came come just in time to watch my new favorite show, “Made in Spain” with chef Jose Andres (or Made in Espain, as he says it). Then I took a shower and had dinner. Leftovers: calavacita con puerco. I was getting ready to settle into my usual routine of sitting in front of my computer to fool around with my photographs or catch up on the news or Facebook when I remembered that today is the longest day of the year. I simply could not stay indoors, so I got in my car and drove to Java House, where I’m having iced coffee and a Weight Watchers candy bar as I watch the daylight slowly and grudgingly give way to darkness. It might have put up a better fight except that a thunderstorm is approaching from the west, blocking the sun’s remaining rays.

The storm appears to be getting closer, and it has lightning with it. I can see its flashing and hear its grumbling. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to stay here. I’m under a canopy but if the storm is accompanied by wind, I may have to decamp and head home. Luckily, I was smart enough to drive here so I won’t have to worry about riding home in a thunderstorm.

As July approaches, I’ve been thinking about anniversaries. Our country’s. Mine. My condo. Next month I will have lived there seven years, and that will make it the place where I have lived the longest since leaving home. My parents’ home, that is – in September 1967 when I got in my blue 63 Ford Fairlane and drove to San Marcos to begin my final two years of college (I went to a junior college near my home the first two years). The Fairlane had belonged to my sister Mariana. She bought it after she got her teaching degree and began teaching. It was the first brand-new car our family had ever had. A beauty. When she got married, she left it for the family, and since by that time I was the only driver left, it became my car.

(My sister Maria Luisa, who turned 82 today, just called me from California to tell me she had made stuffed zucchini blossoms. She had forgotten to tell me when I called her this morning to wish her a happy birthday.)

So, anyway, back to anniversaries and length of residencies. Obviously, I’m not a nester. I move around. Since I moved to Washington almost 13 years ago, I’ve lived in three different places. From the time the Houston Post closed and I moved here, I lived in five places: two in Houston, two in San Marcos and one in Austin.

At Texas State University (then known as Southwest Texas State College) I lived in four different dorms and one apartment. In San Marcos, after graduating, I lived in five places, including a mobile home. Since leaving San Marcos in 1978, I lived in Washington, Arlington, Alexandria, near Southwest Houston and far Southwest Houston, Washington, near Southwest Houston, far-far Southwest Houston, far Southwest Houston, Barbados, Washington’s Woodley Park section and Capitol Hill, Southwest Houston, Montrose, Austin, Houston’s Heights, an apartment in San Marcos and at the home of friends in San Marcos. And then I moved here.

Even the years before I went off to college weren’t spent in one place. I lived in two different homes in Crystal City, the one my grandfather built for us and the one Urban Renewal forced us to build after it tore down the one my grandfather built. And every summer but one our family traveled to homes in North Dakota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Utah or California for the summer to work in the fields. Most summers we’d go to at least two states as we followed the crops. In California alone, we lived in five different homes during one summer.

When I was a kid, I had a game I played every night after I went to bed. I’d close my eyes and try to imagine that I was in one of the many beds I’d slept in. In my mind, I’d spin my bed around so that it was lying north to south and I’d be in North Dakota. East to west and I’d be in Wisconsin, at Ernie Kwiatkowski’s farm. Clothes would be hanging from a rod above me and through the screen door I could hear the roar of the traffic on U.S. 73, which brought vacationers from Milwaukee and Chicago to nearby Green Lake. I’d move from place to place until I fell asleep.

Back in 1979, when I got out of graduate school, I was desperate for a Washington job so I replied to a CIA recruitment ad. They sent me an application but when I realized they wanted to know the addresses of every place I’d called home for the previous 10 or 15 years, I gave up on becoming a spook. I don’t think I’d have been a very good one anyway.

In a few years (or less), I’ll retire and because I won’t be able to pay my mortgage on my retirement income, I’ll sell my condo and move, either to Houston, San Marcos, my hometown, Mexico or New Mexico. Or somewhere else. I hear houses are very cheap in Detroit and Cleveland. Maybe I’ll buy a camper and spend the rest of my life on the road, sleeping in campgrounds or Wal-Mart parking lots, constantly in search of pleasant weather.

I DON’T KNOW how all this moving around has affected me. I don’t know if it’s made me a different person. One good thing is that it has allowed me to acquire new friends wherever I go, and allowed me to get to know and observe a lot of people. From them I’ve learned a lot: how to live life, how not to live life; how to treat people, how not to treat people; how to value things that matter. This is not to say that I knew none of this before I met all these people: my values come first and foremost from my family, my mother in particular. But we do learn a lot by watching how other people live their lives, and the more exposure we get to more people in more settings, the better off we are. So, in that sense, my life has truly been a moveable feast.

SO MUCH FOR good intentions.

The plan was to get up early, as usual, have a quick breakfast and then, to go out for a bike ride before the heat started setting in. I had gone on a bike ride every day this week except the two days when I went to the gym (yesterday I went for a 10-mile bike ride and went to the gym), and I wanted to keep the momentum going.

However, before I went to bed last night, I saw a friend’s FaceBook post extolling the cool night and talking about sleeping with the windows open. I had been prepared to go to sleep with my AC going but I started feeling guilty so I opened my windows and turned on my bedside fan. That worked quite well, until about 3:30 in the morning, when I woke up, sweating. It wasn’t that hot, actually, but the humidity was horrendous, and I found it hard to go back to sleep. I didn’t, until almost five, and then I didn’t wake up until after 7:30. To most people that would seem like a relatively early hour, but to me it’s way too late.  The sun was up and the heat was on, and I had two newspapers waiting to be read and a crossword puzzle begging to be completed, so I skipped the bike ride.

The only exercise I got today was about a mile’s walk to and from the farmers market and the bike ride here (Java House) from home. Except for the trip to the farmers market, I stayed in. I had thought about going to the Pride festival near the Mall, but I just didn’t feel like walking around in the sun.

That doesn’t mean that I was idle all day. I did take a nice long (30 minutes) nap, but otherwise I spend most of the day in the kitchen, making a potato salad and a basil-buttermilk sorbet, a Weight Watchers recipe. And cleaning up the mess I made as I cooked.

It wasn’t until about 5 that I sat down and turned on the TV and watched the last part of HBO’s “Too Big To Fail.” It felt good to sit down, but once that – and the news – were over, I started to feel antsy about being indoors, so I got on my bike and came here. I really should have gone for a long bike ride, but I’ve taken two showers today already and I don’t feel like taking another one.

I’M NERVOUS ABOUT the weight loss thing. So far, the first three weeks have gone great. I’ve lost 11 pounds and I have been very faithful to the Weight Watchers program. I have written down (or rather, entered into my iPhone WW app) and not exceeded my daily point allotment (except for yesterday, when I went over by 1 point). I have entered exercise bonus points almost daily but have not used a single one of them, and I haven’t used any of the extra weekly bonus points that the program allows.

What makes me nervous is that it is at about this point in the program, when my clothes start fitting better and when I start feeling better, that it starts getting difficult because I no longer have a sense of urgency about losing weight, and so I start cheating. A little at first, but enough to make a difference. And once that cheating starts showing up at the scale, I get into a what’s-the-use-now?-I’ve-blown-it-already mode. And at the beginning of each week, I make a silent vow to myself that I will get back on the program and break the cycle, to begin losing weight again. But by the middle of the week, the battle has been lost, and by the end of the week, the war is over and I am the vanquished.

One of the things that adds to my nervousness is that today, in addition to not exercising, I was unable to accurately record everything I ate. I did my best and I believe that I have not exceeded my daily points quota, but I don’t know for certain, because I failed to keep track of everything I put in the potato salad. Again, I believe I was legal (that’s an old WW term, meaning to stay within the allotted points), but because I can’t prove it, there’s a nagging sense – illogical, I know – that perhaps I may have cheated. And that is beginning to trigger the defeatist mindset.

That is why I am writing this. That is why three weeks ago I asked you all to monitor my progress (or lack of progress) as I attempt once again to shed those nasty pounds: because I knew a day like today would arrive, and if I had kept my WW journey private, there’d be nobody else to answer to. I could fail once again and nobody would be around to ask, “What the hell happened.”

So, tomorrow morning, as I begin my week, the vow that I will make about sticking to the program will not be a silent vow to myself – it will be a vow made to each of you who has been kind enough to pay attention and offer encouragement.

I know: it’s kind of a perverted way of going about it, a cowardly way of doing something that I should be able to do on my own. But I’ve tried it that way for most of my adult life, and it never worked. So now I’m asking my village to help me.

Sunday, May 15, 2011 | Washington

YESTERDAY, ON MY way home from running a bunch of errands, I saw a sign that advertised an estate sale nearby. I had never been to an estate sale and, as I recalled tales of amazing finds aired on the Antique Roadshow and stories from friends about great discoveries at such sales, I decided to stop.

The sale was in the Kalorama area of Washington, not exactly a slum. The house itself didn’t seem that enticing, but I went in nonetheless. Big mistake.

Not only did I find no valuable treasures, I left there feeling depressed as shit at what I saw. Room after room packed – really, truly packed – with nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. A better word would be crap. What was sad was that this crap was what was left of the lives of two unknown people who, it appeared, had occupied this house for decades.

I suppose that a kinder reviewer would assign a less benign word to this crap. Tchotchkes, perhaps. Doo-dads. Collections. I’m not saying that what I saw was worthless. There was some silver, for instance, that some guy with a Middle-Eastern accent was trying to bargain for. There were lots of books and record albums, some of which I’m sure would be of value to someone, maybe even to me if I’d taken the time to look through them.

But mostly it was just crap. Shit. A collection of cowbells, for instance. Cowbells. I’m sure at one point in the lives of this couple it seemed like a good idea to start a collection of cowbells. Or maybe, they bought one or two cowbells and then friends started noticing that they liked cowbells and started giving them cowbells for Christmas, or for birthdays. Or picking up cowbells on their travels to other places. I know that happens because it’s happened to me.

And I’m sure that somewhere in this vast universe there are thousands of people who would be very interested in acquiring that collection of cowbells, but on that dreary, rainy day, I found a shelf filled with cowbells terribly, terribly depressing. As I did the hundreds of ties hanging from a tie rack in one of the bedroom closets, and the collection of old and mostly damaged music instruments in what appeared to be the den.

I didn’t buy anything, obviously, but I left the house with an overwhelming cloud of doom and depression hovering over me.

I wasn’t depressed about the two people who lived in that house. They appeared to have lived a full life, to have traveled all over the world and to have enjoyed an eclectic array of music and literature. I kind of wish I had known them.

No, I realized later, it wasn’t these dearly departed who were the cause of my blues. It was the realization that when my life is over and those charged with taking care of my “estate” (ha!) will likely stage a similar sale and people like me will wander through and wander out and wonder what the fuck I could have been thinking collecting all that wonderfully worthless junk.

What could he have possibly been thinking, they will ask themselves, collecting those bowls and vases, buying those ugly paintings and prints?  What moved him to collect all those corkscrew wine bottle openers?  Did he really spend money to buy that stupid book? Why did he want so many …, well … THINGS?!

That’s what’s depressing. We spend most of our lives collecting things because, sooner or later, we come to believe that things define who we are. Without things we are nothing, we believe. We’re all that way. We can look down our noses at the Imelda Marcoses and Lynne Wyatts and other collectors of seemingly frivolous things such as shoes gowns and earrings and boots and cars and yachts and fame and recognition and — yes – people, but we are all, to some degree or another, guilty of letting things define who we are.

Please understand, I am not being critical. I am as guilty as anyone, if not guiltier. An even harsher reality is that I don’t know what the alternative is. I don’t think there is one.

And maybe that’s what brought on that depression. If, indeed, our lives are defined by the things we accumulate, will we, in the end, be judged by the quality and worth of the things we accumulated? Dominique de Menil collected art. So do I. She had millions to spend on all kinds of great art in every corner of the world.  When she died, people looked at her collection of Picassos and other great works of art and declared, here we had a genius. When I die, people will look at my modest art collection and … laugh?

I know that. I’ve known that for a long time. Yet I can’t help myself. I accumulate more laughable art all the time. Why am I – why are we? – so attached to things?

Amor de Madre by Lydia Mendoza

Saturday, May 7, 2011 | Washington

Martina Lopez Palomo

WHEN I WAS about 11 or 12 years old, I bought my mother a glass for Mothers Day. That’s right, a drinking glass. I got it at El Cres, the five-and-dime store. I went with my cousin Javier, who went there to buy something for his mother. That was the first time I ever heard of people buying presents for their mothers.

Our family was not a gift-giving family. Birthdays, Christmases and other holidays went by year after year without a single gift being exchanged. I can count on one hand the number of non-underwear, non-socks presents I got in my childhood, and have two fingers left over. One Christmas, before my two older sisters got married, they used some of their earnings from their jobs at the local cannery to buy all of us presents. I got a beautiful toy fire truck and a cap pistol and holster. The pistol worked for less than 24 hours. Fina, one of the sisters who had bought it for me, borrowed it for a few minutes and broke it. The truck, though, gave me many months of pleasure.

Years later, when we were working in the sugar beet fields and my birthday was coming up, my sister Mariana sent a song request to the KROX, the AM radio station in nearby Crookston, Minnesota. The song was to be played early in the morning, before we headed out to the fields, and when the day arrived, we all listened to the radio as the announcer dedicated the song to me. The song was “Unchained Melody,” my favorite tune at the time.

For Mothers Day, the tradition was to pay a local band to bring a serenata, a set of two or three Mothers Day songs, to your mother, right outside her window. If you were lucky enough to have a member of the family who could play accordion or guitar, or sing, then you could get free mañanitas; that family member would get together with other musicians to serenade their mothers, as well as their girlfriends’ or wives’ mothers. We never could afford that, and none of us had any musical ability, so my mother had to settle for listening to Las Mañanitas or other songs that were being sung down the street to other mothers in the neighborhood.

So, the suggestion, by Javier, that I buy a present on that particular Mothers Day came as a shock, but it did seem like a good idea and I agreed to it, spending about a third of my weekly $1 allowance for the glass. Buying it was easy. The difficult part was the actual act of giving it to my mother. I had never given her a gift and I didn’t know how to do it. I don’t remember how I went about it, or what I said. Probably something simple like, Esto es pa’ usted. (We always used the formal usted, when addressing our parents, or any adult.) And I don’t remember her reaction.

Neither do I remember if gift-giving on Mothers Day became a tradition through the rest of my childhood. Probably not.

ONE TRADITION THAT does continue is the Mothers Day serenatas, and I’m glad to say that my mother enjoyed many of them, thanks to her children or her sons-in-law (or son-in-law wanna-bes). And of course, if we were home, we too got to enjoy the pre-dawn songs, not just those near my mother’s window, but also those sung to mothers up and down the street. If you were to go to Crystal City tonight, you too would enjoy this Mothers Day songfest and the soulful strains of the accompanying accordions and guitars. There is nothing more beautiful.

I wish I could be there to hear it. But since I can’t, I’ll make certain that my iPod is next to my bed, and when I wake up at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning (as invariably I will, being that my body is still partly on European time, I’ll turn on the music and listen to Las Mañanitas. And I’ll listen to Lydia Mendoza replace the stillness of the night with her Amor de Madre, beseeching her mother in heaven to send down a maternal sigh to fill her heart.

You know that ring that I lost? Yeah, the silver ring with the tiny green stone I found at a friend’s friend’s shop in San Miguel.
It’s not lost. It was. Until I found it in one of my bags. Apparently it slipped off my finger as I was rearranging stuff in my bags at the Geneva airport. Gotta be more careful with that damn thing.

AND SO, THIS great adventure comes to an end. It is about 3:30 Washington time (8:30 England time; 9:30 Spanish and Swiss time) and in less than four hours, I will land at Dulles Airport, and – I hope – very soon after that I will be home. I am listening to Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu play some Mozart violin sonatas. The BA music programming is crap, so I decided to listen to my own music. I picked Mozart because I want to demonstrate to my friends, Isabelle and Jean-Maurice, that I am not anti-Mozart. I love a lot of his work. I just happen to love the work of other composers better. I think they have been disappointed each time they ask me who my favorite composers are and Mozart is not on my list.

Dinner (scallops, beef filet, a couple of cheeses) has been served and consumed, as has dessert. I have had a few more glasses than I probably should have of the excellent Chono Reserva syrah from Chile’s Elqui Valley, so for the rest of the trip I shall consume nothing but water. Sigh.

THIS IS A strange flight. I have never flown back to the United States from Europe in the late afternoon. It has always been a morning flight, arriving around noon. They’ve turned down the lights, and I think the crew would prefer that we all fell asleep so they can get some rest, but I am not sleepy yet. I don’t know if I will be.

MY FRIENDS BRENDA and Jeremy drove me to the airport. I spent the night at their beautiful home in Henley-on-Thames, outside of London. They took me to a couple of pubs last night, and we had a wonderful dinner at one, in Turville, the town where they filmed one of my favorite British TV comedies, “The Vicar of Dibley.” It’s all there, the church and the vicar’s home and other quaint buildings. The only thing missing was the vicar and the other crazy guests. Dinner was great. I had bangers, not the mini-burgers we refer to by that name, but delicious English sausage.

This morning they took me for a walk along the Thames. Absolutely beautiful. I kept expecting to see Hyacinth (“Keeping Up Appearances,” another of my favorite British comedies) and her hapless husband coming down the river in one of her hopeless attempts to impress friends and neighbors with a riparian feast.

I had a great time visiting with Jeremy and Brenda, whom I hadn’t really visited with in decades. I’ve seen them on occasion, when they came to Washington to deal with one family death/illness or another, but I’d never really had a chance to sit down and chat with them. I first met them back in 1979 when Jeremy and I were attending the American University master’s program in journalism and public affairs. So it was great to just sit down with both of them and chat about what is happening around the world, in our respective worlds. Jeremy is British (his father worked for the British embassy in Washington) and he met and fell in love with Brenda, an American from Pennsylvania, soon after the moved to Washington. Of the more than 30 students in that AU class, Jeremy is one of two who are still in journalism; he works for Reuters news service in its London bureau, but he was been bureau chief in Greece and he has worked in the Belgium bureau.

Among the highlights was breakfast this morning, which consisted of a nameless dish perfected by Brenda. She puts slices of mango and raisins in orange juice and places it on the stove until it boils. She lets it cool and then puts it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, she serves it over plain yogurt. Oh my!

And for lunch we had a tomato-lentil soup based on a recipe they picked up during their time in Athens. Oh my, doubled!

Jeremy and Brenda were excellent hosts and they have encouraged me to come back often. I will take them up on it.

IT’S HARD TO believe that the three weeks have already gone buy. For weeks, after I decided on my destination and itinerary, I kept thinking that the departure day would never arrive. And once the journey had begun, I kept thinking that three weeks was way too long, and I wondered whether I had made a mistake, that I would grow tired of moving around and poking around. But even though I did get tired at times, and even though there were a few moments when I questioned my sanity for planning such a long vacation, in the end, it all ended way too soon.

I think what made it seem that way was that I scheduled my visit with friends – Isabelle and Jean-Maurice in Switzerland and Brenda and Jeremy – at the end of my venture, and being with them, enjoying their conversation and company, made me realize how being with friends is never too long; it’s always too short.

BEFORE I FORGET: On my last day in Switzerland, my friends took me to Bern to see the relatively new Paul Klee museum, designed by Renzo Piano, the same Italian architect who designed the Menil Collection building in Houston. A beautiful, graceful building, designed to appear as if it were rising out of the ground and about ready to soar into the heavens. It houses an extensive collection of the artist’s work, from his very early days. I have been aware of Klee for years, and have seen his work in various museums, but I came away with a greater appreciation of his art.

THIS HAS BEEN a good trip. A very good one. Definitely my best European vacation. I thoroughly, thoroughly loved Spain. It was everything I wanted it to be, and more. The Spaniards were not, as I had been led to believe by some recent visitors, an unfriendly lot. They were helpful, eager to please and eager to engage in conversations.

I have to go back there, because there is so much more of that country to explore, and I have to go back to Madrid to the see the Alhambra. When I’ll get back, I don’t know, for I’m determined that my next destination will be somewhere in South America.

I am sure there are many things I could have done better. I could have been more adventurous in my culinary quests. I could have chosen better hotels. I could have seen more art museums and historical sights. I could have stayed up later to enjoy some of the late-night entertaining. But I did what felt right, and I think that, in the end, that served me well. I am not the typical tourist, eager to set foot on every recommended tourist sight, and I never will be one. I like to roam around and I like to poke around here and there. Sometimes that leads to nothing, but often enough it leads to great surprises, and I value those surprises

WE ARE NOW approaching Newfoundland, which means that we are almost in North America. It means that the plain has cleared that vast area of nothing-but-deep-deep-dark-sea, and if it had to make an emergency landing, it could easily reach St. John’s or Gander. And it means that I have left Europe behind. It saddens me a bit, but that sadness is tampered by the fact that I had an amazingly good time. Thanks for coming along.