In many ways, Saturdays and Sundays feel interchangeable in the United States. A person might have different routines and rituals on Saturdays than they do on Sundays, but beyond that, the outside world just keeps on doing what it does best. The relentless engine of commerce never stops firing; things never really slow down.

Whether it means being able to go to Target or not wearing a mask, we Americans have the freedom to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it whether it’s Sunday or any other day of the week — damn the torpedos and/or our neighbors!

Though Spain’s no Germany, where, when we lived there in the 1990s, it was frowned upon (if not actually illegal) not just to shop on Sunday but also to hang out laundry to dry, Sunday in Madrid contains a celebratory pause that makes it different from any other day of the week.

It’s not necessarily religion that gives Sunday this festive nature: only 22 percent of the population of Spain goes to church regularly (41 percent of Americans are regulars at services). Nor is it completely due to shop closures. Grocery stores, large chains, bakeries and convenience stores are all open on Sundays, although smaller, independently-run shops tend to be closed. (Fruterías, which tend to have better produce, also tend to close from 2 p.m. Saturday until Monday morning, so I try to do the shopping on Saturday rather than Sunday).

The center of the day around which Sunday orbits is lunch, whether it’s with family or friends, in a private home (these days with five other people) or gathered at a sidewalk terraza with glasses of vermut the color of Coca Cola.

Around noon, our neighborhood starts its preparations. People head home from the bakeries carrying neatly-packaged boxes of pastries or cakes tied with lengths of blue or red string. (Yesterday, I saw two well-dressed middle-aged women carrying advent wreaths.)

The flower sellers set up on the corners, so bouquets of carnations or roses or this time of year gaudy poinsettias can be bought. Caregivers, whether they’re paid or daughters pressed into service, accompany impeccably-dressed older women down the sidewalk. These elderly women, with their heels and sunglasses and big brooch-like earrings and hair shellacked into what can only be called a hair-do, mingle with well-dressed families on their way to the grandparents’: mom and dad in Sunday best, the kids two or three meters ahead on their scooters, dressed exactly alike if they’re the same gender.

Or, there’s Sunday’s less traditional version: walking, in one form or another: to window shop around the neighborhood, to and through a park, or on one of the hiking trails half an hour or so north of us in the Guadarrama mountains.

We don’t quite have the Sunday routine down yet; it’s hard for Americans to eat lunch at 3 p.m., for one thing, and drinking vermouth mid-afternoon would give me a headache, for another. But whenever I see someone carrying their cake down the street on a Sunday, my heart swells a little. When have I ever seen such a thing back home? The answer is of course never, because we’re always in our cars when we run errands.

But it seems so very sane and civilized, this celebratory pause before the plunge into the work week, no matter whether it’s urban life or Spanish life that causes it. Once you’ve seen them carry a cake down the street, you have to love your neighbor.

The morning’s news contained this tidbit: our innocuous little health zone, still in pretend-confinement, now has the highest number of daily Covid cases in Madrid. This is unsurprising, given that our confinement is, after all, pretend. Plus, the neighborhood is full of students, that least Covid limitation-compliant of demographics. If the students who moved in downstairs are any indication, the parties have just moved home from the bars, and they start earlier now, so people can get home before curfew starts at midnight. And of course it’s not a Spanish party without singing. We’d find this charming, except that sometimes the singing goes on until 5 a.m., which means, I guess, that they’ve just decided to keep the party going until 6, when curfew ends.

To put all this in perspective, though, our number of cases is less than half the number of daily cases in Lorain County, OH, and about the same as in Athens, GA.

Meanwhile, the national government proposed Christmas guidelines yesterday: no gatherings of more than six people, a curfew on Christmas Eve of 1a.m. Madrid immediately countered that it thinks people should be allowed to meet in groups of 10; the curfew should be 1:30 a.m. rather than 1 a.m. That the game of political hair-splitting continues is as unsurprising as our case numbers.

But in the face of all this, Madrid, like The Dude, abides. The Christmas lights will be turned on on Friday; December 7-8 are holidays (though we won’t be allowed to leave Madrid. We can still take walks.

So walk I do. Since the spring lockdown I’ve walked all the spring out of my tennis shoes.

Madrid is full of quirks. One’s the fact that the bottoms of balconies of buildings of a certain age are often faced with beautifully-patterned tiles, a glimpse you can only catch if you crane your neck back and look up — not where you’re going.

This morning I stopped to do just that.

Anyone who loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books knows by now that like so much else from our childhood, those books, and that liking, have suffered a sea change.

Propaganda for an America that never actually existed in the first place, it’s hard now to read the Little House books in the spirit in which they were intended. (In what spirit were they intended?). It feels a little suspect to admit liking them, and probably will feel more so as time passes, but here’s the thing, or a thing: Wilder was really good at talking about food.

Thursday, Thanksgiving, is just a regular day here in Madrid, but I was able to snag canned pumpkin and cranberries at the American-food chain store last week (everything else on its shelves is either candy, cereal, or bbq sauce, which speaks volumes about America). Because the girls are still in the U.S. having their own peculiar versions of the holiday, our Thursday will just be the two of us. Maybe I’ll use that canned pumpkin — maybe I just won’t bother.

The plot of The Long Winter, the Laura Ingalls Wilder book that was always my favorite, basically boils down to this: it snows a whole lot, the trains with their carloads of supplies can’t get through, and for most of the book, Laura and her family grind flour in their coffee grinder and twist hay into kindling in order to survive.

Survive they do, of course, because The Long Winter is a kid’s book after all. By May the snow that blocked the train has melted, and Pa arrives home from the train station with the Christmas barrel sent from back east six months before.

“Now I wonder what this can be?” Pa said, as he lifted from the very bottom of the barrel something bulky and lumpy that was wrapped around and around with thick brown paper.

“Je-ru-salem crickets!” he exclaimed. “If it isn’t our Christmas turkey, still frozen solid.”

He held the great turkey up where all could see. “And fat! Fifteen pounds or I miss my guess.” And as he let the mass of brown paper fall, it thumped on the floor and out of it rolled several cranberries.

Carrie shrieked with delight. Mary clasped her hands and said “Oh, my!” But Ma asked, “Did the groceries come for the stores?”

“Yes, sugar and flour and dried fruit and meat — oh, everything anyone needs,” Pa answered.

“Well then, Mr. Boast, you bring Mrs. Boast day after tomorrow,” Ma said. “Come as early as you can and we will celebrate the springtime with a Christmas dinner.”

In a few hours, the Madrid government decides whether to keep our health zone, already pretend locked-down since mid-October, locked down for two more weeks. Every morning I wake to ominous shared FB posts from health care workers in the States, the sorts of posts that thankfully dwindled during the summer.

The idea of a raincheck becomes more and more attractive, particularly the way Laura Ingalls Wilder describes it:

And as they sang, the fear and the suffering of the long winter seemed to rise like a dark cloud and float away on the music. Spring had come. The sun was shining warm, the winds were soft, and the green grass growing.

At ten in the morning, when I walk to Spanish class, Madrid is just waking up (it’ll continue this leisurely process until about 9 p.m.). Porteros y porteras pensively mop the sidewalks in front of their buildings, even if it’s cloudy and the skies might crack open in a few hours. At ten, the cafes are divided between those who drink coffee and those who drink beer. The high school students jostle on the street in packs, smoking cigarettes, a sight that never fails to appall me. Elegant young women, dressed to the nines, agilely wend their way through the traffic on their Vespas. There are lines, to remind that these aren’t normal times: in front of the health office, the unemployment office, the covid-test laboratory, the bakery that currently only lets in people one at a time.

This morning, as I walked, I decided Spanish class might be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and also that I don’t want to do it anymore.

That I can consider learning a language that difficult shows what an exceptionally easy life I’ve had. (Or maybe how bad at languages I am.) But the thing is, most things that are very very hard, like going through childbirth or watching someone you love die, either take place fairly quickly or you somehow manage to extract yourself from, mentally, out of self-preservation. But learning a language just goes on and on and on, unless you’re a baby. A 50+ year-old brain is not as malleable as a college student’s, and by 50, being wrong all the time stings more. Besides, when you’re the only student in a class, the situation in which I currently find myself, it’s impossible to detach. The whole point is not to — to be present.

In order to get the sort of discount that allows a person to be able to take language classes for over a year, I pay for my classes in “packages.” And now, as the year draws to a close and covid cases ramp up, just one more class and I’ll have used up my current package. It would be so easy — to just pull the plug on on the whole endeavour.

This was an enjoyable fantasy to indulge in. No more telling someone “I needed the exorcism” when what I really meant was I needed the exercise. No more attempting to debate bullfighting or write a rhyming poem. No more being the recipient of rolled eyes, whether from the beggar who called me perra (bitch) or the man who asked me where the Chino was (Chino is colloquial racist slang for the equivalent of the Dollar Store) only for me to answer that I hadn’t seen anyone from China while I was standing there, but many Chinese students took classes in the building behind me.

An eon ago, when I was first being introduced to the subjunctive mood, a teacher attempted to explain it thusly: you use it to talk about things that aren’t factual, to discuss things that, rather, exist in some realm of not-sureness, of unknowingness, of magic.

This left three-fourths of the class even more bewildered than before.

But — desires are in the realm of magic, likewise emotions, negative opinions and giving advice. Agreement is fact, disagreement — the realm of magic.

If you believe something, it’s fact; if you don’t, you just pop it into that vague, unknowable realm of magic. As I walked to class, I imagined a future without Spanish class. I’d just speak in very simple sentences, since connectors confound me. I’d never use the imperative. I’ll avoid that realm of magic like the plague, constructing my sentences only with positive opinions. I’ll never ever make suggestions!

I was feeling good about this plan when I walked into the classroom.

My current teacher, R, who’s really a philosophy professor except there’s more work for Spanish teachers than philosophers these days, asked about my weekend and waited patiently through my strangely-worded response. He played a radio interview and I attempted to guess what the hell people were talking about. He played me a song by a famous Spanish musician and explained its metaphors; I wrote a new stanza for it. I tried to make jokes; he smiled — I think, I hope — underneath his mask.

One class down, one more to go, I thought after I said good-bye.

But R had done what good teachers do, pushing open the door to understanding just a tiny bit more, just wide enough that I could catch a glimpse of the realm of magic that lies beyond the threshold, and I realized that (after a break) —I’d probably be back.

Never say die.

El Parque del Buen Retiro, Madrid’s most gracious park, is Europe with a capitol E, as you’d expect it to be: stately with monuments and gridded promenades, clotted with tourists and buskers. El Retiro is a Madrid must-see, as vouchsafed by the guidebooks. Peacocks stalk its southeast quadrant; confectionary fin de siecle apartment buildings overlook it.

But the L-shaped park I tend to think of proprietarily as mine, El Parque de Oeste, is to the west of all that, and otherwise. Before it became a park in the 1890s, it was a landfill. During the Spanish Civil War, it was Madrid’s front lines. Afterward, the gardeners tasked with transforming it from denuded wasteland back into greenspace had to keep a weather-eye out for unexploded ordnance.

El Retiro belongs to the world; Parque de Oeste belongs to the neighborhood, to dogwalkers being walked by lithe galician greyhounds and pensive construction workers nursing midmorning bottles of beer and all the college students who smoke and court there.

Parque del Oeste is dotted with statues.

Franco’s grandson was the model for the child in one of them;

another is still pocked by bullet holes.

Three of the 20 machine gun bunkers built in the 1930s still sit in a shadowy, piney section of the park, beside a scattering of picnic tables.

A while back, I read that a battle-scarred stone had been placed a stone’s throw from the hindquarters of one of the equestrian statues, as if the bunkers weren’t mute testimony enough to the battle fought there. I looked for it on my next walk, circling the horse statues at opposite ends of the park, but couldn’t find it.

This morning, I was thinking of foliage, not of the fallen.

And there it was. No commentary, no plaque. Just trees, and falling leaves.

The past week has felt like an excruciatingly slow version of a choose-your-own adventure, from a Montaña Rusa — aka a “Russian Mountain,” aka a rollercoaster — to a fugue state to interminable to a nail-biter to the twilight zone. Last Wednesday through Saturday we watched more CNN than we had in the past year and a half. This would also turn out to be roughly same amount of time it would take me to get hooked on Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalists’ twitter feeds, after years of disinterest in the medium. Every night we clicked off CNN and staggered off to bed, slept restlessly if at all, woke at 3 a.m. and staggered back out to the living room to click it back on. We’re too old for this.

Saturday, it was supposed to rain, so to distract ourselves we booked tickets at a German Expressionism exhibit at the Thyssen Museum and then took a long walk, looping from the museum district through the picturesque barrios of Huertas-Cortes and La Latina and then back home — and the election finally was called. They were dancing in the streets in Philly, in New York, in Atlanta: here in Madrid, it seemed like more people were staring at their phones as they walked past us, but maybe that was just my imagination.

Since then, Spain has gone back into its own problems. At the micro level, our health zone has been confined two more weeks — and the residents themselves are criticizing the government for its lack of enforcement of the rules.

Starting November 23, travelers from 60 countries will need to have PCR tests done within 72 hours before they enter Spain, so now we know what we’ll be trying to accomplish on New Year’s Eve in Georgia.

I knew intellectually that all the dark clouds of uncertainty massed overhead wouldn’t vanish, post U.S. election, so why my surprise to find they’re still up there? It’s human nature, I guess, just as it’s also human nature to think ahead or behind. Damn it, it takes work, to sit still in this present moment, this not-knowing.

Madrid underwent a building boom in the late 19th century; it was all the rage to give the cornices of buildings swirled neoclassical embellishments. I’ve come to love the serene gaze of the faces that peep down on me as I try to stay in the here and now, with my errands here and there, from panadería to frutería to farmacia. They’ve seen so much, these neoclassical beauties, through dark days and fair ones, from civil war to dictatorship to democracy, from Spanish ‘flu to Covid— and so calmly.

For the past three days now, I’ve had a snippet of a Simon and Garfunkel song running through my mind:

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

Except I keep mentally replacing nation with world. Because the world’s eyes really are turned toward the United States right now, with an outward gaze and engagement it would serve the spinning top of my homeland well to adopt.

On Sunday, El Pais started things off with a lovely little civics lesson on the Electoral College and listed what time — in Spanish time — every single state’s polls would close. Since then, every single story on its Spanish-language landing page has centered on the election. For the time being, COVID has been completely erased from its pages. Are hospitals overwhelmed? Are cases rising or falling? Are things more or less dire? I have no idea, except in the tiniest micro-sense: The confinimiento of the Guzman el Bueno health zone hasn’t lessened cases at all.

This of course is not surprising: it hasn’t been enforced at all, either. I thought we weren’t supposed to leave the neighborhood, I told my Spanish teacher.

That’s because you’re not Spanish, he responded. This is right before one of my previous teachers, the one who loves rap and America, stuck his head into the classroom to tell me a certain candidate is a certain Spanish curse word.

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, things grind on across the Atlantic. As I write this, Trump has only 463 more votes than Biden in the state of Georgia — the state that only once in my voting lifetime has gone to a Democratic candidate.

My lonely gaze is so fastened on America that I have a twitch in my left eye.

On Election Day, 1968, things were different.

Or maybe not. The summer before, the Democratic National Convention had been convulsed by violence. All over America, people were lying down in front of buses of draftees, and weeping, weeping. Weeping with rage, with grief, from tear gas. But I was a four-year-old in Madison, WI; I knew none of that.

That November afternoon, my mother took me and my younger brother with her when she went to vote. The sun sets early this time of year in the Midwest and the polling place was some sort of institutional space I’d only seen before in daylight. My view was a forest of pants legs. I sweltered inside my winter coat, my knitted hat, my scarf, my mittens as we waited, edged forward, waited again.

Once we got to it, the voting booth was a private space, hardly big enough to hold the three of us and my brother’s stroller. My mother drew closed the curtain that clattered on its rings and lifted me to see the strange mechanism of the levers.

Would it be too much — to say there was something about the process that felt mysterious and almost holy?

One of the big debates earlier this week this week was whether or not those of us in the (theoretically) confined neighborhoods of Madrid would be able to visit the cemeteries this weekend. All Saints Day is a national holiday throughout Spain, and its celebration yesterday and today is one of the reasons Madrid and the two adjacent autonomous regions closed their borders to travel over the 3-day weekend.* Traditionally, All Saints is the day you visit the graves of your loved ones— to tidy up, to bring flowers, to remember.

Some sources said yes we could go to the cemeteries, some said no. At that point, I just threw up my hands and said who knows? and have been keeping my own counsel (this applies not just to the weekend but to the confinement in general).

The chestnut roasters appeared on the street corners this weekend; the leaves are starting to turn. We are moving toward the quiet still point of the year. This morning, we honored the day with a wander through the Cementerio de La Almudena, Madrid’s necropolis of 5 million dead.

*Well, the other two regions closed their borders until after the next 3-day weekend, a week from today. At the last minute Madrid decided to close theirs just this weekend and next weekend, but keep them open in between. Confused yet? The only thing I know for sure is that there’s a curfew between midnight and six a.m.

A flower stand that beckons to passers-by with its array of colourful bouquets and a churros kiosk redolent with frying oil both jockey for position on the sidewalk in front of hospitals San Carlos and Fundación Jiménez Díaz in Moncloa. A milling throng of people, both whole and hurt, indicates the presence of a bustling urban medical facility nearby.

But a short walk up the service road between the two hospitals takes you far away from the sound of traffic and sirens. There, one of the feral cats that is a fixture of the area emerges from the bushes to lead you to a high flat vantage point overlooking wasteland.