Category Archives: Grist for the Mill

At final tally, almost a foot of snow fell in Madrid between Thursday and Saturday. Today, the temperature rose to about 37 degrees and the sun came out — but the question now is what does one do with all that snow? If you’re a Madrileño with a top-floor terrace, you shovel it into theContinue reading “(Not Quite)Mopping Up”

Philomena, the storm of the century, was forecast days ago, but people kept saying it just wouldn’t happen: Madrid doesn’t get snow, not the kind that shuts down a city. On Thursday, it spat flurries, and people said there’s your snow, but El Pais said well, that was just un aperitivo, so I crossed myContinue reading “Inédito(Unheard Of)”

Sixty-seven percent of Spanish children prefer to get their Christmas presents from the Three Kings than from Papa Noel (Santa Claus). Thus, tomorrow, Epiphany, is another holiday. The festivities, however, start tonight. Why have one party when you can have two (or three), or only one day of Christmas when you can draw it outContinue reading “Epiphanies”

Over the past 15 years, as life’s become increasingly less analog and increasingly more digital, I’ve devised, without thinking on it much, a ritual that effectively closes the book on each year and turns the page to the next. The ritual is this: some time between Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, I sift through theContinue reading “On Flânerie”

For a year now, I’ve steadily gorged myself on information, wanting to make meaning from its ceaseless flow. Now I have more of it, of information, than I can possibly handle. But the day I bookmarked Wordometer.com’s case count, some time back in the spring, there were 785,807 cases of COVID-19, 37,820 deaths — inContinue reading “Bookmarks”

This time last year, I was in Amsterdam; in 36 hours I’ll be there again. But a different Amsterdam this time, a way station rather than a destination, with hydro-alcoholic gel everywhere. My flight to the U.S. was canceled, then it was changed a number of times: all that hard work setting up travel duringContinue reading “Flights”

Yesterday, the plumber who came to our apartment to replace our water heater informed me Kamala Harris was a communist. I was caught off guard — not just by the vigorousness of his opinions but by the vigorousness of his need to tell me these opinions. It was like One America News Network had suddenlyContinue reading “Vale*”

Twenty-four years ago, six months after M and I married, we moved from Austin to Germany. Needless to say, 9/10s of our friends advised against this step. That we lived to tell that tale is testament to our strong bonds (or deep inertia). When we moved back to the U.S. two years later, I letContinue reading “Strangers in a Strange Land”

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. WhetherContinue reading “Loving One’s 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 inContinue reading “Hidden in Plain Sight”