A Dispatch From Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean!

There’s hardly a spot in my passport in which the immigration goons in the countries Dame Zelda and I visit so plentifully can do their stamping. Aren’t Americans supposed to be defiantly ignorant of the world outside America’s borders? their scowls seem to demand. Noting how widely travelled we are, many of our acquaintances assume we must be rolling in clover. We are not. Indeed, thanks to my appalling employment history, I receive a small Social Security cheque each month, and otherwise have no income, unless the latest fleet that’s come in includes a seaman or two who like ‘em old and saggy and wrinkled, as so few do. We are able to travel as much as we do because we travel almost entirely at times when our destinations are desperate for tourism. 

A case in point is our visit — ongoing at the time of this writing — to the Azores, in the Atlantic ocean approximately a quarter of the way between the north-central coast of Morocco and Nova Scotia. We have it on good authority that in peak season, these islands are no less breathtaking than Hawaii. Heaven knows that there’s  a great deal of vivid green grass on offer, and gorgeous mountains, but all of the stunning vistas, depicted on fridge magnet and postcard, we had most hoped to see have been obscured by thick grey mist of a sort we’re assured dissipates at the time of year the high rollers visit.

Dame Zelda prepares to board a Ryanair jet.

Whenever possible, we fly one of the budget carriers, in this case Ryanair, whose CEO is famous for believing Ryanair passengers to be irredeemable cheapskates and imbeciles, poking them with sharp sticks as they queue up to board, trying to charge for use of Ryanair’s lavatories, and reportedly intending to sell standing-room-only tickets at the backs of his planes. 

We will endure any humiliation to save a few quid! 

Our favourite restaurant (of the three we’ve patronised) seems to be the only one on Sao Miguel (The Green Island) that doesn’t the national music of Portugal — fado — as you dine. One can get tired of fado very quickly, as it is very mournful. Here are some lyrics we heard the other night at O Roberto, as translated by one of Dame Zelda’s apps:

I am irredeemably inconsolable. 

My life is one of excruciating anguish, 

from which there is no relief

There seems to be a law requiring the local poor to mount a religious plaque above the front doors of their converted fishermen's cottages. Jesus in his crown of thorns seems to be the most popular, with Our Lady of the Holy Rosary of Fátima a close second. In Nordeste, on the island’s northeast coast, one doesn’t display a ticket on his or her windshield to demonstrate that he or she has paid for the privilege of parking in a particular car park, but a likeness of Jesus, suffering horribly.

If your preference is for streets with names like Oak, Maple, or even Martin Luther King Jr., you won’t like it here. The streets have such grandiose names — Avenida Joao Bosco Motal Amaral is an unusualy succinct one — that the nice lady on Dame Zelda’s GPS app is commonly unable to intone them fully before we’ve passed where we’re meant to turn.

In May, just before The Season officially begins, we will be visiting Turkey.

Another One From the Heart: "You Don't Know Me"

When I first heard “You Don’t Know Me” — Ray Charles’s version — as a teenager, I felt as though Ray was killing me softly with his song, singing my life with his (actually songwriter Cindy Walker’s) words, specifically, those about being too shy to approach the girls for whom I secretly lusted so fervently. Every day at school, just as in the song, I, afraid and shy, let my chance go by. I wasn’t afraid, as in the song, that the objects of my affection wouldn’t love me too, but that they’d laugh in my face. 

It was the last verse of the song that came to resonate for me most in adulthood. My first wife and I had split up — she couldn’t stand me, I couldn’t stand her, and one of us (she) wouldn’t go to couples counseling to try to regain the magic we’d had our first four years together.  Having moved down to San Francisco, where I worked, so I wouldn’t spend three hours riding Golden Gate Transit every weekday, I’d pick up our little girl on Friday evening, and drive her back on Sunday evening. Every Sunday evening, as I watched her disappear into the Swiss electronics millionaire's hilltop mansion into which her mother had moved, my heart would shatter all over again, and I’d drive the first five miles back toward The City either in tears or wishing I could burst into them to relieve the awful pain I felt. 

I’d loved my daughter from the moment my wife told me she was growing inside her. My adoration increased exponentially when she finally joined the party. When she spent much of our time together on weekends pining for Mommy, it felt like a dagger in my heart. I’d taken her, on the Saturday night of the weekend I’m reliving as I compose this, to Columbus Street in North Beach. We’d walked around, she riding high on Daddy’s shoulders, watching the cooks cooking and people dining in the wall-to-wall Italian restaurants, and savouring the delicious smells. I was happy beyond my ability to articulate, and imagined Brigitte was as well. But right at the height of it she informed me, “I want Mommy,” and  felt as though sucker-punched in the face. I nonetheless managed to  distract her from Mommy’s absence, and to get her laughing, as she kept doing the next day, halfway through which Mommy phoned to say that she and her new Swiss electronics millionaire husband were coming down to The City, and that I wouldn’t have to drive Brigitte back up to the wine country. I was ambivalent. I hated the long drive home alone less than I hated the idea of losing a couple of hours with my daughter. 

As usual, Mommy was very late. Brigitte’s becoming more and more impatient hurt iike the devil. Finally the buzzer rang, and I walked her down to street level. Brigitte fairly glowed with what I couldn’t help but see as relief. Get upstairs, I told myself, now. I didn’t listen. I watched the three of them walk up to the corner, and then across California Street, to where SEM’s huge SUV awaited, Brigitte skipping ecstatically between them. It wasn’t like a dagger in my heart, but a fucking machete. A different part of Ms. Walker’s beautiful, heartbreaking song came back to me. “I watch you walk away beside the lucky guy.” I headed back upstairs intending to pour vodka down my throat until I lost consciousness or the pain abated — whichever came first! — but before I could, I encountered my across-the-hall neighbour,, who, seeing the look on my face, insisted I come in and chat with her. I think she may have saved my life that afternoon. I don’t think we exchanged 10 words after that — I was ashamed about having needed her so desperately — but Ms. Claudia Kingsley is one of the great unlikely heroines of my life. 

My daughter hasn't spoken to me in almost 16 years, and doesn't know me. I think she remembers a version of me that never really existed. According to her mother, Brigitte was nothing but miserable with me. That's  the cruellest lie anyone will ever tell about me. How many hundreds of times over the course of her childhood did I tell her how much I loved being her daddy? How many hundreds of times did she tell me, under nothing resembling duress, that she loved being my daughter?

Walking around in the late afternoon gloom this afternoon, thinking about how she's now not spoken to me pretty close to half her life, and isn’t likely to before my ticket gets punched, I wondered if I should ask my wife to play this for her when I check out, or one of the several songs I’ve written about her. I thought maybe I won’t ask her to play anything at all. 

No Latinos at Walgreen's

I witnessed something exquisite halfway through 1996, when my daughter didn’t graduate from Whited Elementary School, on the edge of northeast Santa Rosa’s Rincon Valley, but was promoted out of it. (It was apparently important that we parents not cheapen the word graduate by using it prematurely.) There was a little ceremony in the gymnasium in which each promoted student was called up to receive a little document and a congratulatory handshake from principal Mr. Coleman while his or her parents beamed proudly. It seemed that three-quarters of my daughter’s female classmates were named Ashley.

It was of course right around the time that the kids would cease thinking of their parents as those who loved them most, and come instead to view them as sources of excruciating embarrassment.  Three months later, I would accompany by daughter to her first day at Rincon Valley Middle School, and she would hold proudly onto my hand as we located her first classroom. Within a couple of months, though, when I met her on Friday afternoon after school, she would get into the car either snarling at me, or pretending that the car had driven up from San Francisco (her mother and I were divorced) on its own. There was no one on earth she wanted less to be seen with than me, and it was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life.

But back to three months before. There were a couple of black kids at Whited, and several Latino kids, many of whose parents worked at the nearby wineries. There was in my daughter’s class a very-large-for-her-age girl called Pilar, who my daughter said was extremely shy, and extremely hard-working. As her name was called, a man I assumed to be her dad, who’d been standing in the entrance to the gym in jeans and a white T-shirt, the clothes of manual toil, walked toward the principal, self-consciously swiping tears of what I took to be pride and joy from his face. After Mr. Coleman shook Pilar’s hand, the man presented Pilar with the helium balloon on a stick he’d brought for her. Happy Birthday! it proclaimed. My guess is that wherever he’d bought it hadn’t had any that said Congratulations On Your Promotion to Middle School, but that he’d wanted to give her something special. The tears came faster then he could swipe them away as he and Pilar embraced, ever so briefly, and Pilar returned to her classmates. I nearly cried myself. 

I felt paternalistic doing so, as he might have been one of the Spanish language’s most celebrated novelists, for all I knew, but I imagined Papi having been deprived of an education himself back in Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador. It even crossed my mind that the balloon said Happy Birthday because he couldn’t read, and had been too shy to ask the casher at Walgreen’s, or wherever he’d bought it, to tell him what it said — not that there were any Latinos at Walgreen’s. 

When we’d get far enough away from her school for her classmates to see her acknowledging my presence, my daughter would relax a bit, and actually speak to me. I told her one Friday afternoon how much Pilar’s dad’s obvious love for her had moved me, and asked if Pilar had remained the shy, dutiful kid she’d been at Whited. My daughter snorted in disdain and informed me Pilar had in fact turned into a bully who hung out with the pants-nearly-falling-off crowd, the hip hop badasses. 

To hearing that, I’d almost have preferred my daughter being even surlier when I picked her up each week.