The night before the night before the night before

It's not the night before Christmas: it's several nights before my 65th trip to Spain. Well, maybe it's not 65 trips, but it's a bunch of them. My thoughts range from the ridiculous (Why do different cultures exist?) to the sublime (What kind of shoes can I take that I can walk in ALL day and look 'dressed'? Still no answer to that 30-year-old question.)

My first trip to Spain . . . was around 1970, just about when Ramon Sender*, a Spanish author, published La Tesis de Nancy, sometimes referred to in English as 'Letters from Nancy' (Cartas de Nancy). Poor Nancy - a naive sweet innocent dumb doctoral student from USA- writes home to her cousin about her 'intellectual' experiences in this new land in the south of Spain, Sevilla. She's particularly taken with the kindness of the men, who are particularly taken with the opportunity to escort a real live Americana, not nearly so numerous back then under Franco as they are now when nobody looks twice at a foreigner because there are so many. Mutual misunderstanding in hilarious episodes, at least on one level, is what drives the novel. On another level, it's a frank bicultural analysis by a man who had one leg in each land - kind of like Jorge and kind of like me.

What does that mean? I don't know. Maybe nothing.



Wikipedia:
*Ramón J. Sender was born in Chalamera, Huesca Province in the autonomous region of Aragon in Spain. In 1923 he was obliged to serve in the Spanish military and take part in the Spain Morocco Rif War, which lasted from 1919 to 1926. Later that year he returned to Madrid, where he worked as a journalist for El Sol, a paper critical of the current government. In 1926 he was imprisoned for writing Casas viejas. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Sender immediately enlisted to help resist Franco. While he was at the front, the enemies of Sender went to his house and shot his wife and his brother. He had been an anarchist and then a communist but after the Spanish Civil War he reneged on this ideology and sought asylum in France in 1938. He left Spain for New York after the Spanish Civil War in 1939, and then relocated to Mexico like many scientists, artists and intellectuals. He became an American citizen in 1948, and he lived in the United States until 1972, when he returned to live in Spain for several years before dying in San Diego, California in 1982. Sender's son is composer and writer Ramon Sender. His grandson is Chicago-based designer Sol Sender, best known for the development of the Obama campaign logo.