First Grade

               I was six years old. We were all sitting in chairs in a semi-circle in front of Miss Lapiz our first grade teacher at Harper School. She was reading to us some story and I don't have any idea now what it was. This was a ritual. We had our reading groups in the morning and in the afternoon we had our “listening” session where Miss Lapiz read to us. This was a fundamental change from kindergarten in the suburban American educational system, however. First off, kindergarten was totally about free association. It was controlled chaos. It was finger painting and Orff instruments. It was not about reading or writing or arithmetic.
              But first grade? That was the big time. For one thing we had desks. We had our own property. Bill Cosby put some of this in perspective in one of his routines recorded on vinyl in the 60s. (I'm sure it's available online). We had the paper with the dotted lines that enabled us to keep our printed letters straight, and he was right. There really were pieces of wood still floating in the paper.
One afternoon in the semi-circle I was day-dreaming as normal and the girl next to me leaned over and whispered something in my ear. I didn't quite catch it. I said. “What?” She said, “I love you.” I was flabbergasted. She was beautiful. It was also true that I had never seen it coming. I had never looked at her as an object of desire before then, and now, at six years old, I desired her completely. She had short dark hair. She was wearing a light blue and white dress. She was stunning to me at that moment, and I was absolutely clueless. I was embarrassed. I blushed. I can feel it now...and I said nothing.
             It haunts me to this day that I said nothing. The next year in second grade, Robin leaned over at her desk and said to me, “You know... I like Jimmy now this much better than you.” She held out both of her hands about a half a foot apart. That much better? I was even more stunned. Not only had I done nothing about her profound demonstration of love in first grade, I was caught completely flat-footed by my demotion in second. I think that is when I gave up.

A Plaza Story

Statue of Lorca, Plaza de Santa Ana, Madrid

Antonio José working in his apartment in Burgos, circa 1934

Plaque on the wall outside the composer´s apartment in Burgos

             I was babbling like a hippie on bennies and probably made a fool of myself…no wait, definitely made a fool of myself, but so what. It wasn’t the first time and it invariably will not be the last. I was in Plaza de Santa Ana, one of my favorite places in Madrid, where in good weather there's a lot of outdoor seating for the adjacent restaurants. And for late March, it was a beautiful evening, in fact almost picture perfect. Spain has switched to daylight savings and the silver light of the long afternoons is starting to take shape in Madrid. I decided to get a table, but I was going to have to wait a while because the plaza was so crowded. I wanted a good glass of red wine and the one place I knew that had good wine was, of course, very busy and there were a people ahead of me waiting for a table. But I was in no hurry.
             The end of the plaza where this particular taberna had its tables set up is where the statue of the poet Federico García Lorca is located. The statue is life size. Lorca, cast in bronze, is standing, palms up and together in front of him, with a dove just taking flight from the cup of his hands. Under the statue is a marble plaque with the inscription “Madrid a Federico García Lorca”. The statue does not evoke anything remotely like the sentiment of many European capitols and American capitols showing 19th century generals on horseback. There is no flag waving here with Lorca.The former democratic socialist government of Spain, in fact, had finally taken down in its infinite wisdom the last statue of dictator Francisco Franco in Madrid. It was a vaguely anachronistic equestrian piece that was carted off in the middle of the night to prevent controversy, but in the end only the most die-hard Franquista has ever missed it. The Lorca statue, on the other hand, is very simple, elegant, pacifist even, and prominently displayed at one end of the plaza. Unfortunately, as I noticed while standing there waiting for my table, it had just recently been defaced. It seems some “idiota” had plastered the inscription below Lorca with a big bumper sticker advertising something or other. It was hard to tell what the sticker itself said, because it had been torn by someone else in a vain attempt to try to uncover the inscription. The inscription now read “ Mad..a Federico Garc”.
                  Well, not being one to avoid a challenge, I decided it was not only inappropriate that the dedication to a great poet be vandalized, but that it was important 40 years after the dictator, whose paramilitary allies had offed Lorca, that the tourist public collecting in large numbers in the plaza this evening understood: Madrid, nor any Spaniard really, was somehow angry with Federico. If anything it is quiet the opposite these days. So, I knelt down and began slowly tearing away as much of the sticker as I could with my thumbnail. That day the sun in Madrid had been very warm and possibly the heat had melted the glue underneath, because slowly at first, but with much more ease as the minutes went by, the sticker started to yield. First I got the “rid” of Madrid uncovered, and then bit by bit I could peel back all the rest. It took maybe all of 15 or 20 minutes. And what did I get for my service to Spanish culture? A table. Not that anyone noted my gallantry (some kids came running by and a few people took the chance to have a picture taken with the statue while I was hard at work), but my timing was just perfect, because a table opened up right near the statue just as I finished. I saw it as a sign. Thanks Fred.
                   So a little later while into my wine and potato chips (a Spanish delicacy that I am now totally addicted to, especially if the potato chips are cooked in olive oil) an elderly gentleman walks by my table looking for some place to sit down and rest a little. He was waiting for friends, he said, and I offered him a place. Now I am an older person, but I guess I still chaff at being called “elderly”. I have avoided joining AARP precisely because I still live by the myth that I’m really 19, only I never got around to telling my hair and my left knee. Nevertheless, I insist on keeping this self-mirage intact as it gives me great comfort…in my old age. But this man, probably in his 80s and relatively distinguished looking in a tweed jacket and a sweater, definitely fit any description of elderly. His gate was a little slow, he was tall and thin, but a little hunch over ,and he spoke in measured tones. He started to speak in Spanish and in my accented way I answered him until we realized we both probably spoke English better. In fact, he was Swedish, a theater director in Stockholm. His name is Mans Westfelt. He ordered a water from the camarera and asked me why I was in Spain. I told him that I was doing research on artists who lived under the regime of the dictator and his eyes lit up. He had recently finished directing a performance of Lorca´s poetry in conjunction with the Stockholm Cervantes Institute (the institute is the Spanish cultural ambassador worldwide, much as the Goethe Institute is for Germans). The presentation, he said, included music and at one point he showed me the brochure and pointed out that the program even included some of Lorca's own music. Lorca, in addition to being Spain’s premier twentieth poet, also was an amateur painter and an accomplished pianist. The brochure noted each poem and its musical setting, and the last poem was set to Lorca’s own composition. Mans was credited at the top. I was very impressed.
                     This appeared to me to be a great stroke of luck. I had just run into a gentleman, an artist, whose interest is right up my alley. This is the kind of thing that a fellow graduate student friend of mine says you just can't beat by sitting at home on the internet and doing research. But my luck was just beginning. My doctoral research has to do with the lives of three artists: a composer, a writer, and a painter. The composer is Antonio José Martínez Palacios, a brilliant young Spanish musician who was killed in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War at the time and under circumstances almost identical to those of Lorca. The poet´s death is one of the iconic tragedies of that war and certainly of artists under the regime’s rule. The story of Lorca is also a direct model for my interest in the life of Antonio José, as he became known. The composer, like Lorca, had mistakenly believed that when civil war broke out somehow being in his native city would offer him protection. Un gran error. In the end, neither artist was safe. Both cities, Lorca´s Granada and Antonio José's Burgos, rapidly fell to the armies of the Nationalists, who had revolted to overthrow the Republic. Both artists were associated with Republican values and were arrested by the Spanish fascist paramilitary. Finally, both were incarcerated without charges for a couple of months and then were given “paseos” into the countryside, meaning they were put in a truck with other Republican prisoners, driven outside of the city, shot and buried in an unmarked grave. And, as in the case of Lorca, people are still not completely sure of the precise location where the remains of Antonio José are buried. There has been and continues to be an investigation over Lorca’s remains, but in Antonio José’s case, at least so far, no one has ventured into the countryside outside Burgos, shovel in hand, to start digging. Burgos, however, like Madrid, does have a plaque dedicated to the the artist. The plaque is placed up on the wall just outside of the second floor apartment, where Antonio José lived when he was arrested and taken to jail. Its translation in English is “Here lived Antonio José Martínez Palacios, composer and folklorist from Burgos. The city dedicates this remembrance to him.” Well, at least a plaque hi up on a wall where it can't be reached is probably safe from vandals.
                     However, although Señor Westfelt sitting across from me at my table was a wonderfully articulate and interesting person for me to run into by accident this night, he was not the real story. The reason that Mans was hanging out in the plaza near the statue was, it turns out, because he was meeting with a Spanish theater producer and with Ian Gibson, noted British literary critic and historian who has made his career on researching the death of Federico García Lorca. To a would-be historian interested in the Spanish Civil War, the mystique that has surrounded the death of Lorca, and the horrendous years of the Franco repression after the war, the chance of running into Ian Gibson was akin to being a Red Sox fan and running into the head of Ted Williams. Except, Ian Gibson is very much alive and, as far as I could tell, his head is still firmly attached. And so, when the British author and his Spanish friend appeared near the statue, my guest got up to walk over to them and I followed behind. I figured, what the hell, the opportunity probably is not going to occur often.
                   After introducing myself, and after Mans himself had commented on my project, I saw my chance and launched into an encapsulated explanation of my research. It is here where I couldn’t shut up. Mr. Gibson seemed slightly bemused as I explained that I had read some of his work on Lorca and that I was trying to utilize some of the same ideas surrounding the meaning of the great poet's life, but only using an artist who was not as well-known, and that my project really had to do with three artists anyway, who were sort of a cross-section, you understand, for the travails of artistic expression during the dictatorship, and that I would love to sit down sometime and talk to you about my work and by the way I am sending Mans here links to the composer’s music and I am sure that he would be glad to forward them to you if you wanted to listen to some of the incredible compositions, and …and …

     “That’s nice” Gibson offered. “It’s good to be excited with one’s work.” With that he turned and went on chatting with Mans and the Spanish director and I sort of faded back to the table.
                   Oh well. This was one of those, what I like to call “Kid. You’ll shoot your eye out” moments. You have to have seen the movie A Christmas Story, I guess, to get the reference, but suffice it to say it has to do with ego-deflation. Still, at least I tried and you get nowhere if you don’t. There may be other opportunities and anyway, I can still put Gibson in my acknowledgments as an inspiration. Not that he’ll ever read the acknowledgments or any other part of the work for that matter, but it looks good to a publisher…that is...should any publisher ever read it either. Time will tell. If not, I had some good wine in a great setting and met some interesting people. Call the whole thing a plus and you can’t have too many of those at my age.