SNAPSHOTS FROM AN INTRODUCTORY VISIT TO SPAIN AND MOROCCO
Seville B&B rooftop
There’s something about rooftops, where you can look out over the city and see it anew. Currently I’m seeing actual new cities (wonderful old cities new to me) on a trip to Spain & Morocco. The above came with a view of the cathedral shining benevolently upon us all.
Inside Rabat’s Medina
Later, in the narrow alleyways of Rabat’s centuries-old Medina, people went about their days. To the visitor, life doesn’t seem easy here . . .
Atop Hotel Riad Dar El Kebira in Rabat
but from the rooftop of our hotel in the center of the Medina one could only see beauty.
Marrakech souks
Rooftop of Olala B&B, Marrakech
While the rooftop of our B&B, a few dozen steps above, was calm and lovely as the muezzin intoned the call to prayer.
Sunset from a Seville rooftop
Maybe rooftops are just their own call to peace and serenity.
Airline passengers fall into two groups: those who can handle turbulence, and those who cannot.
I cannot.
So when we started bouncing around somewhere over Kansas I went into full freak: teeth clenched, hands gripping arm rests, eyes squeezed shut, feet applying brakes via the seat in front of me.
A flight attendant voice came over the speaker: “Garblegarblegarble Emergency garblegarblegarble Emergency.” The seat-belt sign shone a desperate white. Again: “Garblegarble Emergency . . . garblegarblegarble Emergency. Garblegarble.”
I prepared to die. Mainly, I was running through the list of things I hadn’t finished, stuff I had planned to leave beautifully organized for my mourning children, the dead flowers and moldy coffee cup from my departure a week ago. Then I started thinking: my laptop will go down with me; how can posterity survive without my laptop?
The couple next to me kept right on scrolling through their devices. Eating pretzels, for heaven’s sake. Who eats pretzels on their way into the hereafter?
I stole glances at other passengers. You’d think they were relaxing in a stretch limo.
We bounced more vigorously. I opened a conversation with God, who definitively told me She had other things to worry about so that didn’t help much.
After about five minutes, which seemed a small eternity to me, we leveled off. Just like that, the airplane remained in the skies, with me safely buckled into seat 24F. My laptop still connected to wifi.internet.com.
When the seatbelt sign went off I made a trip to the restroom. Before returning to my seat I could not resist asking the flight attendant what she had been saying, in those announcements that were totally unintelligible other than the Emergency! Emergency! Business.
“Oh,” she said with a smile. “Someone had pushed their call button. We were just asking them to push it twice if it were a true emergency, as we were buckled in and could only respond if it were an emergency.”
I was happy when the non-garbled announcement came: “Welcome to San Francisco . . .”
The above postcard recently arrived from my world-traveler grandson with the opening line: “Continuing the tradition of sending you postcards from only the world’s finest microstates . . .” Microstates? Who knew?
Certainly not this grandmother. So I went straight to the internet.
What I learned led me to re-think the socio-political systems of my beloved U.S.A. Which systems, when you think about it, have invited a lot of re-thinking recently anyway.
In case you (also) didn’t know, San Marino is the world’s fifth-smallest country. Vatican City and Monaco are #1 and #2; at 23+ square miles, San Marino beats out 62-sq-mile Liechtenstein. It is officially the Most Serene Republic of San Marino — and for openers, what if we became the Most Serene United States?
As do we, San Marino has a constitution with which it has governed itself for centuries. But here’s the deal: their constitution specifies that San Marino’s democratically elected (goodbye, electoral college!) legislature must choose two heads of state every six months. These are known as captains regent. Clearly every red-blooded American would aspire to be Captain Regent so the issue of unqualified candidates would take care of itself once and for all.
Actually, the voters elect the legislature, from which the captains regent emerge. The Great and Central Council (doesn’t that beat ‘House’ and ‘Senate’?) is a unicameral legislature with 60 members. Elections are held once every five years — imagine 3 or 4 years of peace without campaigns.
There is proportional representation in all nine administrative dstricts. In other words, no district with teeny tiny population gets to tip the governmental scales. If you’re 18 in San Marino you get to vote, and your vote is precisely equal to that of every fellow citizen.
Here, though, is the icing on this political cake: The Great and Central Council chooses those two captains regent. They get to serve as heads of state for exactly six months. How much trouble can you cause in six months? Meanwhile, they share power equally, so they have to get along. Think Shumer and McCarthy — or maybe don’t.
Admittedly, this might work more easily in a country of 33 thousand than one of almost 33 million. Still, it has promise. I’m considering sending a suggestion to my own representative, who’s taken on impossible tasks before. Her name is Pelosi.
You’ve gotta love Scenic-Route trains. Or maybe you don’t, if you’re some sort of a lumpy impassive immovable home-bound sedentary stick-in-the-mud grump and bless your heart. But I simply love trains.
Salt ponds with coastal mountains & the City receding at the start of the journey south
It began, therefore, as a bucket-list trip on the Amtrak Coast Starlight from San Francisco to San Diego. Fourteen hours’ worth of California the beautiful: Bay marshes, salt ponds, golden hills, picture-perfect rows of vegetables and vineyards, tunnels through rugged mountains and finally the indigo grandeur of the Pacific Ocean, right there where it’s always been — albeit still on the wrong side of the street for this East Coast native.
Vineyards near Paso Robles
Late fall colors, the passing scene
All that should, truthfully, have been enough. Get on the train, restore the soul, fly home — and that was the original Plan. But it grew exponentially, transportationally-speaking, into a couple of addenda that are worth mentioning.
For starters, the ferry. Maybe there’s one near you. If not, just come on to San Francisco. From Gate G at the Ferry Building, catch the 4:30 eastbound to Jack London Square in Oakland. On a late autumn afternoon, this features a receding view of the sun setting behind the cityscape. Whew.
Ferry view of San Francisco
After the ferry, after the train, it’s likely you will add in a taxi ride or two or (in my case, because something was interrupting the train tracks between Los Angeles and San Diego) a FlixBus, a few cars driven by friends, a couple of hotel rooms and a good bit of old-fashioned walking. I was also treated to a trolley cart of some sort that careened us for what seemed at least a half a mile from train stop to actual station in L.A. — but that was a vehicle not worth a photo.
At the end, fully restored, there’s no place like home.
An end-of-trip Pacific sunset, this one from above San Francisco
My baby daughter likes scooters. That would be okay if this were on the playground in 1967 when she was three. But now she is 58 and scooting around in the whizzing traffic of downtown Washington, DC. This is not easy on a mom.
When they were still quite young my children and I adopted a fine system called “Tell me about it afterward. So by the time I learned someone had spent the night alone in the Gare de Lyon because she didn’t have money for a Paris hotel room — well, at least I knew she had survived. This may not be a parenting style appropriate for everyone, but it worked for me. It’s probably still helpful that my children and I live on separate coasts, so our parental notification system continues to be effective.
Now that they’re older, my children’s risk tolerance has receded somewhat anyway. My son flies airplanes, but he’s a careful, confirmed Type A and you will want him to fly your airplane. The fact that he’s nearing retirement and insists on playing pick-up soccer with his buddies — well, that’s for his wife to worry about. (She does. She’s a mom.)
My older daughter, retired and living the good life, is into calmer, low-risk adventures like snow-shoeing and fly fishing. Plus, what she retired from was running her own spin studio so her fitness and safety are not that much of a thing for anybody to worry about.
The baby girl, Pam, though — she may be 58, but she’s still my baby girl — is in a category apart. I have been known to say I raised two yuppies and a free spirit. I made it through a decade or so of Pam’s rock climbing period by diligently not thinking about it. But one memorable time, on a weekend holiday, I found myself at the foot of a sheer mountainside she had recently scaled. (Long’s Peak, 14,259′) Across my brain suddenly flashed an image of my daughter — who is about 5’ tall and 100 pounds wringing wet — a mere speck in the middle of a wall of sheer granite. Sheer terror. But I did at least know she had quit rock climbing after that.
Currently, Pam, a nurse, is living and working in DC. For a while, she had two floors of covid patients. But she survived, along with most of her patients, and on a recent visit, we had the loveliest of times enjoying gentle pursuits like strolling around historic rose gardens and visiting museums. Walking home from the National Gallery, one day when she was working and I was roaming around on my own, I managed to get caught in a sudden rainstorm. (Living in bone dry California one forgets about rainstorms.) I waited it out in a building overhang — having cleverly left my raincoat in the hotel room — until Pam, just getting off work, rescued me with her ever-present umbrella. By the time we got back to where I was staying the rain had somewhat abated and darkness was quickly falling.
Author photo from the third floor window
Not to worry, she assured me. “I’ll hop a bus right here.” The bus stop was across the street and directly below my third-floor window. “And if a bus doesn’t come along soon I’ll just grab a scooter.” Nurses in DC get a lot of appreciation and free scooters.
The photo above was taken at dusk in the rain from my window. If you squint you can spot a small person in nursing scrubs (no helmet) scanning a scooter lock, or whatever one does in preparation for scootering. It was taken a moment or two before she hopped on, wove her way across three lanes of moving traffic, and turned left toward home. Throwing her mother briefly into cardiac arrest.
Some things, I explained the next day, seeing her still alive and in the bloom of health, are much better left un-witnessed by moms.
After more than six months of near-total drought in Northern California, one cross-country flight to JFK and a side trip to Ithaca provided a reminder of wet stuff from the skies. It’s been easy to forget: by last May, 2022 was the driest year ever recorded in California. We’ve tried everything but the rain dance; and probably there are rain dances going on somewhere. Can we spell Climate Change? California looks as if someone might drop a match and the whole state will go up in flames.
Setting out from Ithaca to Manhattan one August morning, though, things looked promising. Cloudy skies! And we’re not talking fog here! (No offense, Karl the fog.)
Intermittently the skies brightened – enough for glimpses of leaves just starting to turn. Another east coast specialty. (The orange markers were filling in for full fall colors to come.)
Some of parched California’s favorite things? Raindrops on windshields! Especially, as in this case, when someone else is driving. It was possible to watch the raindrops ahead, and to look toward the west where the cloudy skies could be seen breaking up.
And then— rounding another mountain or two, blue skies again. For someone totally, thoroughly heart-transplanted to San Francisco, sunny skies to glorious rains in a six-hour drive across New York is still a gift worth sharing.
Author photos from the passenger seat; driving courtesy of granddaughter Connery O’Brien
The author contemplating a Grecian mountaintop (Prophet Elias Monastery, founded 1711, Santorini)
The sky is falling! Breaking news! Our fragile democracy in peril!!
Life still feels shaky. Even without those constant, frenetic tweets threatening to alter the course of world events in moments, truth competes with fake news. Long-established rights and laws are questioned – or disappear before our eyes. American democracy, firm in its 1787 roots & long cherished, now teeters.
Theater of Dionysus, 6th century BC, restored a few times since then. (Author photo)
Maybe what goes around comes around.
Maybe there’s nothing — or at least not that much — new under the sun.
I recently had the great good fortune to spend some time with family and an archaeologist friend in ancient Italy and Greece: Cefalu, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Athens — proud metropolitan centers of a few centuries back, where the elite and the downtrodden went about their daily lives without any futuristic dream of upstart cities like New York or San Francisco. Confronted with visions of that future they might have been awed, but I suspect they might also have sniffed. Oh, really? You think you’re so clever?
Euripides was wowing audiences in the theater above in 400 BC, and nobody had even heard of Shakespeare or Arthur Miller.
Backyards of Pompeii (Author photo)
Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean the good people of Pompeii were enjoying themselves at their own amphitheaters, or entertaining at their own dinners, albeit languidly reclining rather than sitting upright in uncomfortable chairs, which, when you think about it, might not be such a bad idea. Those dining rooms often featured gorgeous artworks, and outside the open windows were beautiful vistas. The ladies of the time were adorned with gold and silver and precious gemstones.
Wine flowed. Not from the storied cellars of Napa and Sonoma where someone’s daughter had just completed a destination wedding, but from the nearby vineyards of people who likely knew their grapes and their land very well thank you.
(Author photo)
Maybe, on less formal evenings, they went out for pizza. Our newfangled microwaves are unquestionably handy, but back in downtown Herculaneum they were baking good things in serious ovens seven days a week. In all probability the bakers and assorted other workers did not enjoy the high life of the rich and famous, but what else is new? They caroused on city squares and sang songs by firesides, and while those outdoor venues may not all have been as grand as Athens’ Acropolis there were amphitheaters aplenty. Improv and/or a little lute music kept everybody happy. Performers performed without microphones or electronics, and presumably they could be heard in the cheap seats of the top rows. Given the fact that contemporary movie theaters set their sound levels at ear-splitting decibel levels, and viruses proliferate in crowds, those outdoor venues seem not without merit.
Commerce? Plenty of that too. In the ancient cities they bargained in the marketplaces, without benefit of the Dow. Many centuries after the glory days of Athens and Pompeii the merchants of Santorini watched from their mountaintops (top photo) as sailing ships came and went, just as forecasters and harbormasters in centuries past had watched, waited and done business. Ships were loaded and unloaded just as they are in New York, Houston and Oakland. On-time deliveries were made.
Mt Etna doing its gentle Mt Etna thing, as seen from downtown Catania, May 2022 (Author photo)
We know all this, of course, partly from preserved writings, and partly because many of those earlier urbanites were settled beneath the shadow of Mt Etna (above,) or its more ferocious volcanic neighbor Mt Vesuvius.
Vesuvius stopped the good folks of Pompeii in their tracks some 22 centuries ago, preserving details of daily life under layers of volcanic ash. Nearby Herculaneum succumbed to a flood of lava. Neither seems a good way to die, but we can be grateful for their gifts to posterity.
This reporter is decidedly too far removed from her high school Latin and college Greek to submit any of the above as the whole truth. But I was blessed with the 21st century company of an archaeologist who teaches Italian middle schoolers — about my level — and a grandson who speaks the languages. The takeaway? #IStillLoveSanFrancisco, but our forebears across the seas would likely have thought #PompeiiTheGreatest. And the night before flying home I was awestruck once again by the beauty of Metropolitan Athens — presided over by the brightly shining Acropolis on its eternal hill.
There’s looking back — — and then there’s looking wayyyy back.
Interesting factoid picked up in Pompeii, which this reporter was lucky to stroll with an archaeologist friend recently: Mt. Vesuvius’ giant eruption really shouldn’t have been such a surprise. Those early Romans, ever eager to escape the wrath of the gods, regularly predicted the future, were aware of the past (not infrequent earth tremors), and attuned to the present (a column of smoke “like an umbrella pine,” according to Pliny the younger.) But like countless others going about the business of life on that fateful day in 79 AD, uncle Pliny the Elder was caught unaware.
Before visiting Pompeii we spent another fascinating day in nearby Herculaneum. More is known of Pompeii, a much larger city that was discovered in the 16th century, than of Herculaneum, excavations of which began in 1738. Pompeii was buried under debris and volcanic ash but everyone knew there’d been a city there; Herculaneum succumbed to a landslide of lava while nobody noticed. Pliny the Elder and his friends (we know, thanks to writings left by his nephew) died of intense heat before the tsunami. None of these seem like great ways to leave the known world.
The above is offered partly as a confessional regret about how much history I never really learned, but also as a gentle reference to my own currently beloved City of San Francisco. Which happens to be built atop three seismic faults.
The eruption that sent burning ash, landslides of lava and, from the sea around, a tsunami didn’t just come out of the planetary blue. Zeus, or the gods and goddesses of old, or whoever you perceive as in charge of the universe, sent indications of events to come. Somewhat like little prayer flags embossed with messages like, “Hey folks! Bigger stuff ahead!” But the decision-makers of Herculaneum (for instance) just picked up the giant boulders whose weight had created sturdy walls for a time, and rebuilt sturdier walls with mortar. An early engineering genius move – but the lava didn’t notice.
In California we are clearing brush around homes and converting (slowly) to drought- and fire-resistant plants. Building codes are increasingly aimed at earthquake resistance. Higher seawalls and engineering measures incomprehensible to right-brained writers are daily being strengthened to protect civilization’s development from rising seas. So surely Whoever’s in charge of the planet should not think we’re a bunch of non-god-fearing sluggards. But still.
It’s hard not to imagine the day, some centuries hence, when future creatures inhabiting planet earth are digging around what we think of as San Francisco, and wondering what in the world kind of life existed in 21st century AD.
Which motivates me to go clean out the kitchen cabinets.
