Crashes, Bars, and People

When I walked out my building’s door this morning, I saw a motorcycle parked there, perpendicular to the cars,  had been knocked over. It smashed its handlebars into the back of a small car decorated with warm and loving stickers. The panel was crunched. It’s fiber glass could not resist the falling bike

I do not know who the car or the bike belonged to. Nor do I know who knocked it down. 

Parking places are scarce in this older part of town, El Centro. People drive around to look for one on the streets or they search the underground parking the city and private businesses provide. My neighbors who have cars (some do and some do not) have contracts  at some distance.

Once in Sugar House, Utah, I came out of a coffee house to find my sedan I’d parked on the busy Highland Drive with its side smashed. No vehicle stuck around to claim responsibility. No driver left a note. I was panicked for a minute about what to do and decided I had to call the police to make a report.

Fortunately there were witnesses. As I calmed down, they showed up and stayed to tell the cops. It turned out a public bus side swiped my car.  At least that was now officially registered. 

They bureaucracy of the agency tried denying it, but the police report made all the difference. I do not even know if the bus driver filled out an incident report which he should have. In any case, the bus company and I  entered a period of struggle. Finally, they had no choice but to pay: my insurance went after them. And they had to give me a rental car, though they tried to give me one with advertising for them on it.

Screech,  I do not know how this fits together, such is the way of accidents. I can only imagine locked brakes sounding like the shrill breaks and squawks of a beginner on a tin whistle. 

Tonight, November 2, I, a beginner, spent a couple of hours in a bar playing Celtic music on that tin whistle in a pick-up group. Odd encounters from earlier times pushed me into athis different reality. 

I’m a bassoon player and do not know how to play the tin whistle but I can figure it out with a little work. A student from Ireland gave me a token of himself when he presented me with one. As I had to get rid of almost all my belongings before coming to Spain, in a split second, I put the whistle in the to keep pile. And here I am with it as the only instrument this former musician brought to Spain and it's my entry fee into a new world. 

Over the years, I have spent little time in bars.  As someone raised Mormon, the culture of such places was foreign. When I ceased to care so much about the religious issues of identity, I just did not have the custom of going

The learning curve of the culture left me with little desire to cross those boundaries unless I was with a group of people who were going there. I have done my duty, to be sure, serving people from a pitcher of beer when I have gone without me drinking any, though I am not a rigorous tea-totaler. 

Once upon a time I got caught not drinking while serving by a significant Peruvian anthropologist who was twelve years older than I, Juan Ossio. His. formative studies of historic messianism—resistance through ritual—in the Western Peruvian Andes had already caught my attention. 

He visited the University of Texas Austin where I was a graduate student. After his talk, we Andeanists went to an outdoor bar. Pitchers of beer were ordered and I did my thing. Ossio interrogated me as to why I was not drinking. 

I had to tell him about my background as a Mormon. He dismissively told me that with that and my refusal to drink I could never make it as an anthropologist in the Andes.

But I did and oddly, it was my Church that killed that career path when they took away my funding and my job. Without those, I could not afford to do field work nor travel to professional meetings, though I kept trying.

Once ensconced in Utah Valley University, I was able to recover a bit, but those key missing years were a gap that hurt and was ultimately unfillable.

That accident of being crushed by power in a community invoked a collective response much larger than a single individual. I raised my fist and resisted, sometimes with others, but at times alone. (A poem written and read in the Salt Lake First Unitarian Church during the depth of those days can be found here: https://avoidingentropy.blogspot.com/2025/11/it-happens.html )

Ossio accompanied lMario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s great novelist, in an important if controversial 1983 commission to the community of Uchuraccay, during Peru’s years of internal war, to investigate the killing of journalists. Later, Ossio became Peru’s Minister of Culture.

His writing has been informative. Beyond that, I learned from him what a snake pit the professional world is in Peru. Unfortunately, our paths never crossed again after Austin.

In a wrenching transition, let’s go Back to the bar today. I had a great time. Though I did not play anywhere near my former standards, I enjoyed playing jigs and reels with two violinists and two guitarists, the violinists from opposite ends of the US and the guitarists from Scotland and Wales, the Celtic fringes.  When I could not play because of key or because they had no sheet music, I sang.  

I walked away and thought now, as I get ready to turn 71, it is time to get over myself and learn to enjoy bars. I do not have to drink, because I really do not enjoy that although I no longer have a religious prohibition against it. 

Bars are about so much more than drink.  They are social places where people gather to hang out. 

So here we go, on the day the motorcycle destroyed the rear of the car in front of my house, I crossed to a different part of life, in a sequence of random associations that somehow seems significant. I now accept having bars as part of my life and enjoying them. While I could still reminisce with Juan Ossio, sadly, it is too late for me to meet Vargas Llosa. He died some six months ago.

 

   

  

Rustlings

Dark has fallen like a velvet cape, heavy and black. Already blood and gore walk the streets.  

Not the hospital stuff, nor the politicians, people of all ages in costumes. Maybe a third of people promenading on the pedestrian street, or pushing on the sidewalks to get home from work or the store, are costumed. But the spirit of Halloween is here. 

I was surprised while reading about Spanish celebrations to note that the Celtic north east celebrates Samhain, the Celtic Holiday that became Halloween in the US. They always have. Besides their own customs, they are borrowing now from the transnational Halloween phenomenon.

Tomorrow is Todos Santos, All Saints Day and a national holiday. When I asked, earlier this evening, a server and graduate student with abundant dark, curly hair if he planned to celebrate tomorrow with his family. 

“Of course. Todos Santos is very important in Spain.”

There you have it. The day Protestants lost due to the Reformation, while retaining Halloween—the night before,  was reinforced here and has not gone away. If anything, it is reported to be gaining strength even against the media power of Halloween.

From what I have read, since I am a foreign guest in the country and not yet part of such intimate networks as family to be part of that celebration, families will go to the cemetery, clean and decorate graves. They will share stories of their dead, and will take dishes of symbolically important food to share with the departed. 

I was told there are tours tourists can take to the main cemetery tomorrow to see people’s  ritual work on their graves and their gathering together. 

Following Spain’s Celtic customs in Samhain, people here in Alicante, they say, will roast and eat chestnuts as well as sweet potatoes called boniato. They will also share sweet wine, from what I have read.

Towards evening, as people dress to walk in the streets, see and be seen, food trucks will appear, If I remember right from last year. Chestnuts will scent the air with their roasting. People will also look for Saints’ Bones which are made from marzipan and sugar syrup.

Many if not most Alicantinos will attend mass, even if they are not religious per se. 

Almost everything will be closed tomorrow, as the country turns inward to its personal and family life. 

Still, given the importance of flowers and food to this feast, the flower markets and the food markets will be open tomorrow morning until about 2 pm, about lunch time when people should be home. Then in the evening the time for promenading, turning outward again, street vendors will work their trade. 

Tonight, halloween, there will be festivities, noise and fierce darkness that the city’s lights will attempt to pierce. 

Maybe, though I doubt it, I will hear a “trick or treat.” That custom seems not to have been transplanted outside of the American expat community, 

Kinds of People, Silvia Plath and Ted Hughes in Benidorm

Post siesta, while sleep still blurs my eyes and fogs my brain, I find myself sort of reading about a famous American and her famous partner in Benidorm before it was Benidorm. I wake up.   

The article is by a Spanish journalist in a digital magazine. In other words, it is very of the moment. 

While that moment right now is one where I want some caffeine though the light is fading. Soon the skies will darken. We lost Summer Time and kicked the clocks one hour back yesterday morning. Still, a whole bunch of day, if not light, remains. 

In this moment I see more and more American couples on the streets, in the cafes, and the grocery store of Alicante. 

They look like retirees and look like they have come to stay. Here, instead of in some retirement development in Florida or Costa Rica. 

They, along with the digital nomads and the nightly renters of rooms online are controversial for maybe worsening Spain’s housing crisis. 

I am one of those American retirees who is staying, though I came before the Trumpets blew, so to speak.I speak Spanish and I am making my life in Spain now. 

Thus, as a personal part of the moment, a small group of writers and I meet in a local Hookah bar-cafe every other Thursday to talk about poetry and share our writing in English, although I would also enjoy it in Spanish. Sometimes, I wonder what it means to be Anglophone poets and writers in this Spain, today.  

A short tram ride from Alicante and not far from its urban sprawl, Benidorm’s glitter and high rises shine bright in the mediterranean sun. As a result, it is hard to know its past beyond official facts and return to the time in the fifties when it, even then exaggeratedly, is described as a sleepy fishing village. So different from the beer-and-drugs-party town of prawn-red, overweight Europeans near the beach it has become. 

By the sixties it was becoming  become the Benidorm we know—the so called New York of the Mediterranean although perhaps the Las Vegas sin-city of Spain’s Mediterranean is more appropriate with its Manhattanesque skyline. 

I think it sad when a skyline becomes the ruling image of a place, though I guess “fishing village” is probably just as reductive and absurd in a very of this moment marketing way.

Benidorm became Benidorm once officials created the possibility and tour operators began putting packages together;  they started bringing in groups who would only stay for a short time as their schedule required them to depart for the next exciting spot in the new dizzying world of Elvis, the Twist, and the hyperreal., all the while dropping lots of money. 

The American, a poet, Silvia Plath and her new husband, a Yorkshire poet, Ted Hughes, came on their honeymoon to this place transforming as backdrop for their intensifying romance. Their visit has been the subject of a library of texts mostly as part of interest in Plath.

The two saw it as a romantic site of Mediterranean and Spanish charm, perhaps influenced by Hughes’ study of Garcia Lorca and his poems even though Benidorm was on the cusp of becoming a place that dwarfs itself regularly with people who come to stay for a few days away enjoying of sun, fun, and drink. 

The poets stayed for a bit more than a month. The article notes that locals as a result did not have a word to describe this couple other than as veraneantes, someone who comes to summer there. 

I do not know, but it is possible they may have seen themselves more in the Romantic tradition of poets abroad, such as the writers who came to Spain to support the ill-fated Spanish Republic, or who moved to Paris’ left bank. In honesty, I am just starting into the literature on Plath and Hughes in Spain but there are things I can already say by looking at the two as part of a world in change.   

One still finds groups of romantic, literary souls traveling through European, Latin American, and Asian cities. They settle for a while while populating coffee houses and open mics. Some of them openly describe themselves as writers and as nomads, sometimes as digital nomads. They emphasize impermanence as a hallmark in their self identity.

The locals here in Spain did not know of that twentieth century literary fashion. They just knew the onset of outsiders was composed of people who wanted to spend some summer away time. 

This fishing village had already been receiving travelers from Madrid who were probably coming to the beach escape stifling summers. At the same people started coming from other places to do the same thing. They were seasonal visitors who wanted to spend a part of their summer in the waves. 

Plath and Hughes they stayed for more than a month, a relatively long time. They rented a local house where they lived. They shopped at the local market and drank in local establishments. In any case, they left some traces in some people in Benidorm. 

In these, they distinguished themselves from the veraneantes who stayed in hotels and ate in restaurants near the beach rather than cooking for themselves or taking advantage of local bars, especially those a bit away from the beach. 

Whether they meant to or not, Plath and Hughs were distinctive as briefly resident foreign poets. They stayed, got to get pissed off and argue with their first landlady, the amazing widow who also wrote poetry, bargained in the market, and became local color people gossiped about and some remembered. 

To be fair, people might well have forgotten them if they had not become famous and if books and magazine articles with their names and pictures had not started to appear in local news stands. 

As tourism has grown, tourist has become a meaningful label. Travel and going there, wherever there is, has become a big deal and people pay fortunes to go places and visit things on the check-off-able list of what you must see.

Tourists are transitory, they come and go over a relatively short time. As some come, others leave. As a result, they feel to locals and analysts as a solid reality in places, like Benidorm, and to a lesser extent the city of Alicante, where there are always tourists, just different ones; sometimes more of them and sometimes less. 

Tourists, digital nomads, Non Lucrative Visa holders, immigrants, we are all woven into the new fabric of Spain and this at a time of a nascent political movement of reaction. The question of the real Spaniard and of real Spanish culture is now in the air as are still fringe proposals to begin massive deportations of those who cannot display those credentials of the real. 

I’m excited to read more about Hughes and Plath’s time here and to ask what it means to write poetry and essays while living in the land of Matadors and communist widows who return from exile to take in people like Plath and Hughes. These people rent them rooms, become openings for foreigners to know Spain. and for them to know more about the outside world. 

Here are a few words by Silvia Plath about Alicante. 

Alicante Lullaby by Silvia Plath

In Alicante they bowl the barrels

Bumblingly over the nubs of the cobbles

Past the yellow-paella eateries,

Below the ramshackle back-alley balconies,

While the cocks and hens

In the roofgardens

Scuttle repose with crowns and cackles…

A Bus to Romania

The day is speeding away, ever faster. On average each is colder. Winter stalks us. 

A rather handsome man, in good shape, with only one tooth in his smile sits on folded cardboard outside, in front of the Supermarket’s sliding door, an empty cup in his hand and the trained ability to quickly turn from smile to suffering in his eyes. 

This morning, when I went to buy food to make for lunch, he was surrounded by men in yellow and green vests and I worried something was up. 

Why should I worry?  Well, I have been speaking with him there and on the street corner now for months. Besides his normal plea for food—not money, he has shared a whole range of expressions, a positive encyclopedia of experiences and looks. He has told me about his six children, of course. He uses them as justification for begging when his person is not sufficient motivation. 

After a while though, I have come to believe him.  

My neighbor from two floors down came up to me. “David, I saw you talking to a Romanian. You have got to be careful. Do not believe anything they say. They just want to get money from you and even if they have to steal it.” 

I thanked him for his advice. He is after all, a good and big-hearted man. But after weighing his advice against what I have learned about this man, more than facts, bits and pieces of his life and soul, I decided to set it aside. I continued to talk to the man in front of the store, let’s call him Alex. 

Most days, when I go into the store, I say hello and ask him what he needs since he says it is for his children and that he does not have papers to live here and so cannot work. True and not true. With out papers you work a la negra, in the black market of jobs and labor. You are badly paid and people can take advantage of you. 

Alex prefers to beg. I think that is a harder task, to be honest with you. 

A man from Colombia I know in his early fifties, let us call him Luís, arrived without papers and found he could not legally reside anywhere and could not find a way to get papers for a job without an address, a local phone number, and someone to sponsor him with the city government in order to register him at an address, what they call empadronamiento. 

Every day, Luís walked the streets looking for opportunities and odd jobs. He found low paying occasional work that allowed him to pay rent and eat, but did not allow him to send money to his elderly mother nor for his youngest son who were dependent on him. They almost did not make it. 

One day, Luís lucked out. A local company needed laborers. They took him on sub rosa, liked him, and then decided to sponsor him. He now works legally.     

The process is very difficult and many do not make it, though many, like Luís, do. I do not know all of Alex’ history nor his ethnic and social background. 

He says he is from Romania, as my neighbor intuited. But my neighbor meant gypsy—he was being polite—and not every Romanian is gypsy. That is to say, Alex is not a light skinned, Romanian Romanian, but a dark skinned gypsy one, what people outside those circles often call Roma, to avoid the stigma of gypsy. 

In Spain gitano, the Spanish word for gypsy, is not a bad word. It is the normal one. I fact, the provincial government publishes numbers on how many gitanos reside in Alicante, the city and the province as does the Foundation of the Gypsy Secretariat. The Foundation uses in Spanish the word Roma while the government just uses gitano. Alicante Province has one of the largest numbers of Roma in Spain with more than 60,000. Alicante city has around 9,000 people.

I suspect that Romanian Roma do not integrate easily into Spanish Roma communities. Their language and customs and, maybe tribal belonging, are different. 

Back to Alex. I went up to him when the men in vests left, nervous for what might have happened. He greeted me with a wide and warm smile on his face, a cup of warm coffee in his hand and a half eaten pastry to his side. They had come to check on him. 

Alex had told me two days ago, on the street corner, that he was returning to his country. He has to go back. He can’t make it work here.  When I saw him today he said he cannot take his children with him. He barely has enough money for his bus trip and cannot afford to take them. Alex’ wife will stay here with the children. They are in school he said and he does not want to take them out. 

My fingers are crossed for them. Gypsies have one of the lowest rates of educational completion in Spain.

Alex has been complaining that it has been getting harder and harder for him. 

There is a gaunt, black and gray bearded Spanish man who often competes with Alex for that place, the best to get donations from people entering and especially leaving the store. I do not know him. His eyes are always down cast, making it hard to break ice. 

Another man, much younger, has broken into the territorial struggle. He is much more aggressive, both in begging and in claiming turf. Alex says he is a drug addict. 

I do not know about that but I can see Alex is facing difficulty in finding a profitable place from which to obtain the beneficence of the passer’s by.

When he returns, as he says he will, I hope to see him and learn more about his trip home and his family here. Maybe I will talk with some of the other street workers (beggars) who look like they could be his kin in terms of physical features, or who are just Romanians. 

Winter is coming and spring, along with warming weather and flowers, may well bring the next chapter of this story.