This Was Not the Dream

On stumbling into a life

(Audio above is an extended version recorded at the live show.)

It was never my dream to teach English as a Foreign Language to five- and six-year-olds, or really to have anything at all to do with five- and six-year-olds. I don’t even have kids myself. That’s how little interest I have ever had in interacting with this particular demographic. If you had told me when I was 25 that at the age of 55 I would be teaching English as a Foreign Language to five- and six-year-olds, I’d have gotten a good laugh out of that. I’d have called you crazy. And then I’d have applied to law school, just in case you knew something I didn’t.

No. This was not the dream. The dream was to be a fabulously successful novelist by the age of 35, at which point I would move up to a cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains to write my fabulously successful novels in the company of a good dog and a patient wife. That didn’t happen. At 35 I was a publishing writer, I’d won some awards and published a novel, but I was still teaching at the College of Charleston to pay the rent. When a friend told me the Spanish government was hiring native speakers to teach EFL part-time, I saw a chance to recalculate, take stock, figure out my next step. The idea was to be here for a year, maybe two at the most.

Almost twenty years later, I’m still here. In Puente Genil, the unassuming town south of Córdoba where I’d been assigned to teach, I found a way of life that suited me. I wasn’t earning very much, but I didn’t really need much to get by, and there was time left over to write. I didn’t have a car, but again, I didn’t need one: I could walk just about everywhere in town, and if I ever wanted to visit another town, I could hop on a bus or a train. Coming from South Carolina, that was amazing. Public transportation? Relatively clean, relatively dependable public transportation? This was like science fiction to me, some dream from the distant future.

And the food. What can I tell you? Clearly, I like the food. It turns out that for the Mediterranean diet to work as a diet, you have to eat the Mediterranean food in the Mediterranean way—calmly, mindfully, bite by bite. For the Mediterranean diet to work as a diet, you have to take time to savor the food, to share the food around the table, to talk with the people you are sharing the food with.

I do not eat the Mediterranean food in this way. When I sit down at a table full of Mediterranean food, the Mediterranean food doesn’t stand a chance, and neither do the Mediterranean people I am supposed to be sharing it with. While they are talking—and talking, and talking—I am eating, and eating, and eating. I am slurping up the jamón, liquidating the langostinos, shoveling the calamares down the chute. Watching me eat lunch in Andalusia, you would think I have somewhere very important be. As a general rule, I don’t have anywhere very important to be. I just eat like I do.

In my defense, lunch in Andalusia isn’t served until three o’clock, and if you’re not going to feed me lunch until three o’clock, you can’t really expect me to be civilized about it. Come three o’clock, I am ready to eat, by damn. I am ready to give it my all. After I do, timetable permitting, I may be inclined to take a siesta. I’ll call it “reading.” I’ll tell you I’m going to go read on the couch. I’ll even take a book with me. But in short order, about three or four paragraphs in, the book is going to be little more than a decorative element perched on my chest, utterly useless except maybe as a kind of a bib for the drool making its way down my chin.

A colossal meal in the middle of the afternoon, followed by a short nap…it’s like Thanksgiving, every day. In fact, when I describe Thanksgiving to my students, even as I get nostalgic and a little emotional—it’s my favorite American holiday, the one I miss the most—they wonder what the big deal is. For them, a mid-afternoon family feast is not a once-a-year special occasion. It’s lunch.

These many years later, it still feels special to me. There are days when I have the sense that I stumbled into some other dream, one I didn’t even know how to imagine when I was a younger man. No, this was not the dream, but it is a very good life, and I am thankful for it.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Hope to see you real soon.