I have put off posting anything for months now. I have my list of excuses, if you care to hear them: I have a brittle right foot, my camera was stolen, and I find myself strangely put off by the prospect of barely following an interview that I myself am conducting.
And then there’s the abundance of free time, which comes with its own sorts of (minor, pleasant) obstacles. Once I opined to a retired person that not having work must give her lots of time to do things. “Less than you’d think,” she said. “We you can always do it tomorrow, it never gets done.” There are always distractions, including the epic saga of “Friends” – when will Brad Pitt show up, I keep asking myself – and podcasts in which smart people square off and NPR personalities charm you.
Then there’s my biggest excuse: a feeling that I need to wait until I have a real story to tell. I have been waiting to interview people, and then I have been waiting to interview interesting people, and then I have been waiting for my foot to heal to interview interesting people, and now I’ve worked myself into a corner.
So as of this week I’ll be posting three times a week. It is the job of creative writers to weave something out of nothing, and I could be in worse places to do that. Zaragoza feels busy, even more than it has a right to on paper. I’ve been claiming for months that Zaragoza is denser than Brooklyn, but Wikipedia says that isn’t true. Even so, the average block in Zaragoza is lined with apartment buildings seven or eight floors high, cheek to jowl, framing a narrow street. I often feel like I’m on an enormous movie set with extras constantly bustling around. Compared to Boston, where I was living until last summer, it feels like a piece of the Big Time, as long as I don’t wonder too far. (As one writer put it, Spanish cities don’t taper off, they just come to an abrupt end.)
And then there are the zaragozanos, who often go in for the slightly dramatic or colorful in conversation. Not during the day, when you go into the tailor’s or the bike repair shop and find people a bit colder than they would be in America. It’s after dark that everyone softens and casual interactions take on a kind of collusive quality. The camarera behind the bar laugh when the customer smacks the hanging light, sending it in circles. No pasa nada, the camarera says, chuckling at the lamp-knocking girl. Imagining the same scene in the U.S., I picture a flustered bartender swiftly silencing the lamp, trying not to look peeved. A country could do worse than no pasa nada for a mantra.
