On Clocks, Culture, and Me

On Clocks, Culture, and Me

It just turned 1900. I still have to drop the zeros and take away twelve to know what time it really is.   

I’m an American and it shows up in so many ways—not just when I open my mouth and you can hear my US accent—like, for example, when I am cooking for roommates and I ask what time they plan to eat.  

Such an American, time-driven, clock dependent question. Now they just look at me and smile, because though I know its a silly and probably unanswerable question, I still ask it, because I need to know when. 

I mean, it’s not just me and not just Americans.  The other evening, I walked to a bookstore for a book group and arrived exactly at the published start time, knowing full-well almost no one would be there yet.

Well, at the corner before the store, I ran into a friend from Madrid who also goes to the group. He was protesting that the organizer wasn’t there yet. We were joking about people’s perceptions of time and he kept worrying people would not show. 

About fifteen or twenty minutes late, he looked down the street and said, ah there come Maite and Pilar. They were late but they also were on time and showed up. 

We all went in and conversed as person after person arrived.  At some point, maybe forty minutes late, the organizer lured us into talking about the chosen book. 

Even after years of living in Latin America, I can’t say I really understand other than intuitively, Latin and Spanish senses of time. 

There are real differences that makes this Anglo more comfortable with Germans than with Latins; I seem to always mess up in what seems to be an imprecision of time. 

Of course, I also mess up with Germans. Today, as I approached an intersection with a red light for cars going my direction, I came up on a very blond, tall and slight man telling his three little blond girls that because the light was red they needed to wait for it to turn green before walking. 

Even though I understood, I didn’t even think about not continuing to walk since there was no traffic. I moved into the intersection just as three Spaniards on the other side did the same. 

But that is not about time, it is about following rules, these formal or informal norms that are established and recognized. Germans seem to fetishize them in ways I do not so much, even when there are laws at home about jay walking. My name should have been Jay. 

But the rule of the damn clock is built way deep inside me, so much so I almost never even think about it. 

I organize my day by counting back from timed obligations to make sure I will have everything done in time to meet them. 

My friends here seem to organize their day according to need as such shows up, or according to people. They tackle the day as it comes, rather than having a kind of schedule by time block as seems to lie behind my way of being, sigh.  

The rule is that latter kind of organization, especially in a place like the middle and upper-middle class United States where being organized is a sign of virtue and where day planners are a business model, even in digital form.

In all that, even in the shadow of the Franklin Planner Corporation—so many people I knew over the years worked there—I reached I a point where I refused to go along, to allow myself to be ruled by my cell or my laptop’s calendar with its schedule. I deliberately kept my schedule loose to allow for freedom without having to commit the absurdity of scheduling “free time”. 

Yet now that I no longer have to account for my time in a business day, i.e. a university day or week, I still find that looser form of a schedule dominating my life.  A schedule, not loose.. 

It may not need too but I run up against my deeply held notion that commitments of time to people or to institutions are somehow sacred. I know not every American feels that way but being in Spain, I feel the weird the degree to which I do. 

I seem to have a clock constantly running in my mind, such that when I awaken at night, I need to know what time it is and, thus, whether time—the all knowing marm of my life— allows me to go back to sleep or whether I may as well get up. 

It is a beautiful, drizzly day in Alicante.  The fall rainy season has started. It was evening when I started this note and is now morning, 0915. My desire to write ran up against an obligation to go home and make dinner for my housemates and me.  

Despite my rigidities, I think I’ll enjoy this day and its cooler air and moody weather that is unscheduled, even if the weather app thinks it can tell exactly when the drizzle will stop and start and if it will turn heavy.

I will remind myself that scheduled times here start later than written and that there often is an expectation things will go later. People also seem to expect to continue past the formal event to “socialize”, to just converse or to go to a café or bar for a caña, a draft beer, and to continue talking as the day wears on even if wet. 

  

Finding Dreams and Memory in a Coffee House.

Though I  try to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground and my face below the clouds, I fear I am often lost in a hazy and dreamy romantic world. 

The world as it is, at least the part I occupy, is reasonably ok, although It probably isn’t for my homeless neighbor who sleeps in the entryway of the building across the street and, it isn’t for the Palestinian graduate student from Gaza with whom I had a fine conversation a few weeks ago, much less for the young Palestinian woman jailed endlessly in the US on laughable causes. 

In a particularly dreamy mood a couple of days ago, I entered a new coffee house, but one that looked rustic, removed from the space of designers and planners. To be frank, it looked like the small town Andes where I have spent much of my life. 

As very blond haired and too-fair skinned boy, of clear Saxon and Scandinavian descent in the Southwestern US, I used to dream of things Spanish. I did not know Spain then other than through the reference of the people who lived around me. Many of their ancestors came from this appendage of Europe that drops into two seas as if a world unto itself. 

Two of my dream worlds, joined, when I took the small steps down and into this space which I had known before as a Pakistani grocery store, though one with many Latino products.  

The sign on the street offered me a breakfast of Colombian campesino coffee and empanadas. I thought, why not and entered into a place made delightful in reference to memories, films, experience and dreams. 

The campesino coffee made me think of Mexican caté de olla, a delicious coffee cooked rather than brewed in pot with cinnamon and orange peel. 

At the bottom, who should greet me, but a tall man with  weeks-old gray scruff who spoke how I imagined a Spaniard should sound, resonant, precise, with every vowel and every consonant, even final s, in its place.

It turned out, he was more romantic than I and was married to a Colombian woman. He had lived twenty years in the back-hills of that county’s famous coffee district. 

Like the Indianistas or yore, he had returned to Spain, not with Colombian gold or even “snow”, but with another valuable: high-ranked Colombian coffee. 

He sat me, at a small, brightly colored table, wooden table in a room with five or six such, a glass display case, and an expresso machine. 

Of course, unlike formal servers, he did not limit himself to telling the shine and joy of his toasted beans made dark mahogany liquid, though good they are. Instead he told me about coming to Spain to begin this coffee house and how they had only pushed open their heavy doors less than a month ago. 

In my mind those doors became heavy, hand-carved ones appropriate to massive Adobe walls and low slung, rustic tile roofs with moss. 

The man, whose name somehow did not stick in my mind, asked me where I was from and why I spoke Spanish. So I returned the favor with a twist. I asked where he was from and about his Spanish-so pristine and beautiful, as if a shiny emerald in an imperial crown.

He seemed to me as if he had returned from my imagined past and neither Spain where I now live nor from the mountains of Colombian where I have been even if I have not visited the Eje Cafetera formally. 

His was the voice that I would imagine coming out of the colonial houses of Old Medellin or old Cali. 

He surprised me and yet didn’t surprise me when he said he was from Toledo. 

Even though I have been there, is still a city more mythological than real to me, rising on its bend of a gorge with a river far below. I did not expect him to be a Toledano, someone who might have posed for an El Greco painting.  

When I mentioned his Spanish and its even, moderate pace—so unlike the desperate race of so many Colombians and almost all the Spaniards among whom I live now as well as its clear, almost text-book enunciation—he simply said “soy castellano”, I am Castilllian. 

He might well have been the King of Castille speaking from his throne at that moment: a figure two thirds myth and one third reality. 

I pinched myself and looked around to make sure Cervantes was not scripting this encounter along with windmills just outside the door. 

He then said the Spanish here was heavily influenced by an underlying language, Valencian, and that Murcian and Andalucian were extraordinarily fast. 

It struck me I liked him and his Spanish, not just because of all that, but because his voice reminded me of the old men with whom my father would gather many evenings in my northern New Mexico redoubt when I was a boy and talk. 

Yes, many people came from his dialect region to settle my New Mexico, but also my Bolivia, unlike the Andalusians of the coast and the Caribbean. 

Being in Spain is like a dream scape. Not only do I see people from literature and film, I also see faces and bodies I have known throughout the Latin World. I have known their their distant kin. 

In a week or so, this gentleman will return to the Colombia of his dreams, while I shall remain here dreaming now about Toledo and El Greco. 

P.S.  the coffee was good, if not the Mexican café de olla. It was more like a camp coffee also boiled but from very good and properly toasted beans.  

Tortillas, Beans, and More

Alicante is one of the more diverse cities in Spain. It certainly has large percentages of Arabs (Algerians, mostly) and Latinos (Colombians mostly.)

Unlike the US, it has relatively few Mexicans. As a result, though Mexican-labeled  food abounds, the quality varies widely from abysmal to tolerable. For the home cook, 

it is difficult, because you have to look around to find basic ingredients in this city. The ordinary supermarket tortillas are generally a disaster even if they carry US brand names.

That is the opinion of this afficcionado of the food of Mexico.  I am sure there are people who will disagree with me. 

Yes, the tacos in the market are good as are those of the Tres Carnales, but they are only so-so good, rather than I need-to-go-back good. In any case there is so much more to Mexican food that tacos. 

I do have to confess that I have not been everywhere such as to the places in suburban and touristy San Juan. 

I stopped at a green grocers shortly before they closed yesterday evening. The owner was working the till. 

On my way home to cook dinner, people eat late here, I had come to buy some limones (called limas here and limes in the US). I

 was making chicken milanesas with french fries and rice, as well as a sopa de tomate with fideo like Mexican mothers make. As a result I needed limones for the milanesas. I could have used the wonderful yellow lemons here, but I prefer limes for this dish. 

 While I cheated on the milanesas and was using pre-breaded ones from Mercadona (sigh), the soup I made myself. The tomatoes are so good right now, it tuned out scrumptious.

At the register the man, who I knew was from Pakistan, asked in somewhat hesitant Spanish (unfortunately I do not speak Urdu) where I was from

He has seen many many times but this is the first time he has broken the ritual of “6,50 Euros…Adiós”.

He recognized my Spanish and said he had lived for 7 years in Houston and then in New York but had left the United States for Spain after being robbed by armed men a few times. It is much safer here, he claimed.  He has two green grocers and a Colombian bakery-cafe in Alicante. 

He told he he loved Mexican food with emphasis on loved. 

But he was frustrated here because he could neither find the food nor the ingredients he needed. The food seems insipid here to him because of a lack of understanding the flavors of Mexico and because the ingredients that come here are not the best. 

We compared notes and agreed. 

Though I did not tell him, I have often thought there is a line running from South Asia through Persia to Mexico as reflected in moles (as if a type of curry) and in the flat bread, not corn tortillas but the flour ones that fit in the world of South Asian and Middle Eastern flat breads. 

In any case, I was delighted by the conversation, not because he agreed with me, but because he made me feel good by seeking me out. He has seen me at his stores many times and this is the first time in a year and three months he has wanted to talk. 

There are a number of Pakistani or Bangladeshi establishments near here. They dominate the green grocery business and the kebab dine-in / dine-outs,  while Chinese merchants dominate the five and dime stores just called Chinos.

In any case, I am going to make my way to a small, Mexican-owned store that competes with the more numerous Pakistani owned grocers to find dried chiles and hopefully good tortillas. 

In the meantime, I shall think about how the Pakistani grocers also dominate the vending of Colombian products in this neighborhood. 

A Few Scattered Thoughts on Violence Coming Home

As many of you know, when a new, and therefore, young professor, I researched and wrote on violent attacks on Latter-day Saint persons and property in South America.

Almost thirty-two years later, an LDS ward in Michigan suffered a deadly attack worse than anything from the guerrilla violence of those days. Nonetheless, there are, perhaps, some things to learn in a comparison.

One very troublesome comparison: the United States is moving ever closer to the tactics honed by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile of silencing opposition and disappearing people (for now immigrants or those who are similar to them, but it threatens to do so with citizens and opponents as well.) 

A key difference: the US president and wannabe dictator has practiced a tactic of encouraging his followers to violence against enemies, such as the congress on January 6th, and then practicing legalistic and journalistic denials, as well as finger pointing at a mirage, Antifa and democrats, liberals, “sicko leftists” in general. 

This includes the counterfactual idea that violence stems from the left and not from the right. The fact that much violence is from lone wolves on the right who seem unorganized and receive no specific orders allows their politics to be denied and disavowed. 

The US tends to see politics as a partisan and group issue. Individuals, per se, cannot be originators of politics unless they are influenced by or derive their ideas from some established group with a political ideology that they exemplify. 

Names for ideologies are created from fever dreams among agitators and creators such as wokeism, ideology of gender, etc. Rightwing ideologues, such as  Christopher Rufo of the Manhatttan Project, spend time thinking them up and actively marketing those labels among the right, often with only dubious empirical referents. His baby is the now powerful label “Critical Race Theory”. He borrowed the label from academics, gave it a new though perhaps related set of meanings, and marketed it.  

The more current bugaboo is DEI that exists to define bureaucratic practices and values which when refocused and redefined becomes a “horror” to be attacked and undone. 

Back to the comparison. In the late eighties and early nineties, the heyday of guerrilla violence against Mormonism, Latter-day Saints and much of the press could not grasp that their proselyting and  building chapels was seen as a political act and could be made a political target. Instead, the onus was put on “bad people” or “irrational actions’ as a kind of denial. 

While there were interests of power in this, there also was simply an inability to realize that our way of thinking and defining things is not universal; that what we label as good can also be labeled as bad. 

In the case of the LDS young man who killed a political figure with the gun of his own ideas, there is a denial he could be “one of us”.  We tend to insist that some nefarious political ideology or spending too much time online and “transgenderism,” a newish bugaboo, must have caused a transformation in him.  

What we prefer not to see, are the tensions within our own community whether we are MAGA or Mormons that contribute to and even may provide the sociological base for the violence. 

The murderous attack on a Ward in Michigan this last weekend with the dramatic, almost cinematic, entry to the building and murder of worshippers was much more Hollywoodesque than anything that took place in Chile or Bolivia against Mormons.

Whatever the legal motives, those have yet to be determined and announced, the act takes place in a political context: the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk in Mormon Utah by a probably inactive LDS young man. It is no surprise, sadly, that the accused killer in MIchigan is of MAGA and deploys its symbols, while at the same time displaying vigorous anti-Mormon feelings. 

Please note, his ideas are not simply from right-wing, Evangelical radio and posts. He evidently lived in Jeremy Ranch, near Park City for some period of time and may well have absorbed Utah’s home-grown anti-Mormonism. 

That would be background to this set of oppositional ideas of various institutional addresses becoming charged with the drama at UVU and a single bullet from an old deer rifle taking down a prominent Republican figure who, to be sure, was controversial within elements of the Right. That charging would also give Kirk’s violent defense through revenge weight and power. 

There is another charging to be looked at, and that is the local issues in the killer’s area of Michigan that make the LDS Church controversial. It is useful to see how we are perceived.

In any case, the officials of law enforcement will investigate and bring charges. In both the case of the Orem shooter and the Michigan one. We will have to assess and learn though I, as an old and now retired professor, am very sad about the political situation in my country that is escalating violence.