American in Spain

My grandmother, Joyce, knitted some mitten puppets for her great-granddaughter, Nora, for Christmas 2011. As often happens with presents not made in Chinese plastic molds, they got a little passed over on Christmas morning, but we’ve found them and the weather has finally gotten cold enough to necessitate insulating hand gear, so we put them on her yesterday. It turns out to be extremely difficult to actually get her thumb and pinky into their requisite holes, but she does enjoy the faces on them.
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I was going through some old photos and videos and discovered this gem that my mother-in-law recorded last Easter when she and my wife took Nora down to Extremadura and left me de Rodriguez. It was a great example of her Spanish language skills at 25 months old. Now, however, after the death of her great-grandfather, it’s a poignant video of them playing together in at his house in Extremadura. They had a really great time playing together that week.
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In the United States, the existence of the Thanksgiving holiday does a pretty good job of preventing the Christmas celebration and capitalism from encroaching too far into November like it can do in other countries. Of course, like any pent up desire, when it’s released, it’s extreme, resulting in the consumerism orgy that is Black Friday. Aside from shopping, the weekend after Thanksgiving is when many Americans put up their Christmas tree and other yuletide decor. Since my parents were visiting, I decided to partake in this tradition as well and put up our tree on Black Friday.
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My third and final living grandfather passed away today. He wasn’t my grandfather by blood, but by marriage and an immense amount of mutual respect and love.
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On July 4, 2011, my country’s 235th birthday, my family and I visited Tweetsie Railroad, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. I would be the first to agree that the name sounds like some sort of social networking app (and they might do well to unload tweetsie.com before the bubble bursts), but Tweetsie Railroad is actually a “Wild West theme park”, from back in ye olde days when theme parks actually had themes. The primary attraction since its opening in 1957 has been an old coal-burnin’, steam-tootin’ train engine that takes visitors around a three mile track.
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In North Carolina in the summer, it gets very hot. Like in southern Spain, there are several hours every day when you simply can’t be outside unless you’re actively cooling yourself with water. Marga and Nora spent a lot of time in swimming pools. First, they went to the municipal pool at the Morganton Recreational Center, which has a nice kids pool where Nora can touch the bottom. It’s in a nice location because they can walk there from my parents new house they bought a year ago. Later in the week, they decided to go to the swimming pool at my parents old, yet unsold, house, a pool my mother has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours cleaning in the twenty years they lived there. That was a lot of fun too. At first, Nora was a little skeptical of the water, but eventually she made it to the point where she was throwing herself into the pool from the steps.
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On Monday, Nora went with her mother, grandmother and our friend Amy to pick blueberries at a local farm. I was working, so I couldn’t go, but they brought back a lot of blueberries. Nora’s white dress was suitably stained when she returned home. It looks like they had a wonderful time, and I’ve been enjoying roughly a one-to-one flake-to-blueberry ratio on my breakfast cereal all week.
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My parents have three dogs: Buster, Sam and Blue. I learned almost a decade ago that Buster was the most likely to actually bite someone when I got a little too rough playing with him and I got a tooth to the bridge of my nose. It didn’t break the skin, but it was sufficiently scary to give me a sense of cautious respect when dealing with Buster. We knew from our very first visit with Nora that Buster should never really be in the same room with Nora. Buster is the alpha dog of the house and is pretty much completely deaf, as old springers often are.
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On June 2, 2011, we went into Santander to visit a private obstetrician, the same guy we visited with the first pregnancy. His professionalism and caring way of treating us impressed us both times we’ve seen him. About halfway through the sonogram, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you.” He took the time to carefully explain all the developmental deformations the fetus had, listed the many possible causes, and described the sum of deformations with a phrase I will never forget: “incompatible with life”.
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I spent a good part of my morning today trying to get my daughter to say “Happy birthday, Grandpa”. For the longest time, when I told her to say “happy”, she would shake her head and say “No!” It was appropriate, then, that my eventual success came by way of using behavior modification techniques my father taught me. I told her that if she wouldn’t say “happy”, then I would walk away and ignore her. I did this once, coming back a minute later to ask if she’d like to say “happy” and make me stay. She did, and I heaped praise on her. To add the second word, I had to temporarily abandon her once more in punishment. When I came back, she was happy to say the entire phrase to keep me in the room. I assume this is how Steven Spielberg directs his films, too.
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