Category: Written Word

Biannual Roundup Time

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san-antonio-song

As 2016 begins, you, once again, have given me an excuse to write about whatever strikes me. Your favorite posts on this blog during the past six months are as random as the thought process of the writer pecking at the keyboard.

I have to admit I love it that you continue to let the ghost of Helen Madarasz haunt Brackenridge Park, care enough about the future of Alamo Plaza to go back to old rants and are still looking for the cowgirl’s “San Antonio Song.” You care about art and artists of San Antonio, even when the art is tiny, and cherish San Antonio’s Fiesta traditions, even when raucous. And you tolerate family stories and postcards from our travels. All of these are therapeutic breaks for the blogger struggling to complete the story of the Coker Settlement.

The numbers in parentheses represent the rankings from six months ago:

  1. The Madarasz Murder Mystery: Might Helen Haunt Brackenridge Park?, 2012 (1)
  2. Artist Foundation unleashes another round of creative fervor, 2015 (2)
  3. How would you feel about the Alamo with a crewcut?, 2011 (8)
  4. Weather Forecast: 11 Days of Confetti Ahead, 2015 (10)
  5. Please put this song on Tony’s pony and make it ride away, 2010 (7)
  6. Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Favorites on the food front, 2015 (12)
  7. Take pleasure in little unauthorized treasures along the River Walk before they vanish, 2015
  8. Playspace of Yanaguana Garden bursts into bloom October 2, 2015
  9. Photographs from the 1800s place faces on the names in Zephaniah Conner’s Bible, 2014 (11)
  10. Cornyation strips down to bare kernels of comedy in current events, 2015
  11. Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: More street art and signs of protests, 2015
  12. Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Tattooed Museum Walls, 2015

Thanks for dropping by every once in a while. Love hearing your feedback.

Postcard from Madrid, Spain: Parting shots from ‘los jubilados’

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To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

Charles Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

Saw a tweet the other day and wish I’d saved it. Asked to define her career goals in a job interview, a woman responded: “I want to use ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ as verbs.”

Not sure that proved a job-scoring answer, but I loved it. Because one of the best aspects of getting older is the freedom to wander. No one holds you to two or three weeks a year any longer. Slow travel.

We used to ponder whether our goal should be to become boulevardiers or flaneurs when we “grew up.”

Okay, time for a confession. We have failed.

Both words seem more than a tad decadent for our traveling lifestyle. We don’t stay in hoity-toity hotels. We stay in small apartments. Breakfast is not spent in cafes, but in our home-away-from-home.

As the Mister says, we are not really vacationing as much as temporarily switching zipcodes. According to the Mister’s Fitbit, instead of occupying seats in trendy spots, we traversed about 50 miles of sidewalks a week in Madrid. We only ordered a cocktail seated at a bar once. Instead of late-night barhopping and tapa-feasting with the Madrilenos, we settled in for a light salad or homemade vegetable soup en casa.

Hardly deserving of the title boulevardiers or flaneurs, we admit.

On the other hand, the word “retirees” does not have a nice ring to it. The English word sounds so exhausted and past tense.

After all, the Mister is still a bluesman, and I’m still writing. The tools of our chosen avocations – guitar and computer – accompany us everywhere. But we use those on our own schedules and because they are our passions. In Madrid, sundown generally found us at home, nestled in our basement quarters contentedly plucking on guitar strings and pecking on computer keys.

A month spent wandering in Madrid, and we are leaning toward a more optimistic-sounding Spanish term for those who no longer are hemmed in by or defined by work.

So here are some random, parting shots from los jubilados.

Hope you don’t mind switching continents, but the next slightly postdated postcards will be “mailed” from a zipcode in Puebla, Mexico.

Postcard from Madrid, Spain: Paradise found in parks

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Better to reign in Hell,

Than to serve in Heaven

Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

There he is, the fallen angel himself, painfully ensnared atop a beautiful fountain, guarded by gargoyles, in the heart of Madrid’s Retiro Park. John Milton’s Paradise Lost inspired sculptor Ricardo Bellver to create a monumental depiction of the devil in 1877. Both widely acclaimed and highly controversial, the statue is regarded as the only piece of major public art dedicated to the devil.

Anyone bedeviled by the artwork can easily avoid it, as Retiro Park is huge and is only one of many found in the capital city. Madrid has more parkland in its center than any other major European city, and Madrilenos take full advantage of them any time they are free.

These photos are from Retiro Park and the Jardin Botanico next to the Prado.

Totally swooned for the handsome tuxedoed birds. Exotic in my mind, but considered nuisances by many – common magpies. As with the storks earlier in our trip, never recalled setting eyes on them before, which might be lucky as a multitude of legends portray magpies as harbingers – or at least a single magpie – of ill will.

With his theft of glittering objects, the magpie envisioned by Gioachino Rossini in the plot of an 1815 opera almost caused an innocent maid to swing from the gallows. And the magpie’s reputation surely was not enhanced by the inclusion of the overture to signify impending over-the-top violence by Stanley Kubrick in his 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange.