Part 1:  Food on the Camino

Monday.  We’re in Sarria now.  I have before me a bottle of wine that did not cost extra and has no label.  This makes me very nervous.  This time the “espaghetti bolonaise” came in the form of penne pasta tubes.  I think the Camino Spanish have some confusion about what spaghetti is and how spaghetti is made in Bologna, and I propose a fact-finding mission to Italy be scheduled by a team of qualified Spanish culinary and scientific experts.

I wonder how many Spaniards per year name their sons Jamón.  I would not be surprised by any answer but this one:  “fewer than sixty”.  In the United States, I remember reading of two girls who had been named Orangelo and Lemongelo (the “gelo” instead of “Jello”, I assume, to avoid actual trademark infringement).  This is child abuse.

I’ve been to Madrid, Bilbao, Pamplona, and Barcelona, among other Spanish cities.  I know that they do have restaurants.  But the cafe-bar, especially on the Camino, has a distinctive kind of menu.  I wouldn’t claim that a 500-mile walk through the rural United States would yield a greater diversity and creativity in the food, so what I say here applies only to the cafe-bar on the Camino — which is to say, to just about every place you can find to eat for over a month.

The menu del dia along the Camino de Santiago usually comes with a first plate, a second plate, dessert, and your choice of wine or water.  It costs between 8.50 and an occasional high of 12 Euros – usually 9 or 10.  The choice of first plate is invariably one of the following:

The Camino notion of spaghetti Bolognese, which somehow does not involve a tomato, or even, necessarily, spaghetti.

Ensalada mixta, mixed salad, which is lettuce, a few slices of tomato, and a scoop of tuna – even when the menu does not mention tuna, it comes with tuna.  A cucumber, tomato, Caesar, arugula, beet, mushroom, pea, bacon bit, corn, spinach, or any other type of salad is not possible.

Other options are jamón and cheese, jamón and tuna, eggs and bacon, and eggs and jamón.

The second plate offers a choice of fish – cod (bacalao), usually – or grilled chicken.  Sometimes beef, or another type of fish.

Dessert can be flan, yogurt, some kind of cake (tarta), and only occasionally ice cream.

In Sarria, I go to the bar to pay and the proprietress reminds me that dessert was included.  Yogurt or flan.  I shrug and order the flan.  She reaches into a refrigerator and takes out a small white plastic carton of the sort yogurt comes in.  Right in front of me, she peels open the lid and turns the carton upside-down on a coffee saucer, allowing the flan to slide out.  Then she presents me with my dessert.

So far I have seen no to-go coffee in Spain.  Not a single Starbucks, not even in Bilbao, Pamplona, Burgos, or Leon.  The Spanish seem to hold to the charming creed that a person who intends to drink coffee should simply drink coffee, rather than drinking coffee while also doing one to five other things.  A Zenmaster would approve.

At the Bar Morgade, at kilometer 99.5, I had an empanada Gallega, or Galician tuna pie.  It wasn’t bad, but would have been greatly improved by cheese and grilling.  I also ate huevos con bacon, because the Spanish eat fried eggs and omelettes all day long.

Part 2:  Language in Modern Spain

I have collected a half-dozen different Spanish lessons on CD or podcast, and, since my arrival, have faithfully listened to virtually none of it.  (I also imagined that I’d listen to audiobooks on my long, presumably boring walks.  Never once has the urge struck me).  One of the Spanish courses, when I bought it in 1993, had long been used by the Department of State’s Foreign Service officers.  It has quaint phrases like “Deme la pluma,” or “Give me the quill pen”.  But I need something for a modern country, a member of the European Union in the year 2011.  What I could use in modern Spain are phrases like the following:

Do you have Internet?

No, it doesn’t work.

Do you have wi-fi?

This also doesn’t work.

Dear Orange, What do you mean by the slogan “Internet Everywhere”?  Because it doesn’t actually work.  Anywhere.  Ever.  Not for a minute. 

Is there a Thai, Indian, Chinese, German, Mexican, Japanese, or French restaurant in the area?

Dear Vodafone,

Your retail staff in Bilbao doesn’t know how your Internet service works.  Or your cell phones.  Could a shoe salesman have gotten into one of your retail stores?  Your Internet-access interface says I can click to find out my balance.  But it doesn’t work.  It also says I can recharge on the Internet.  But the link doesn’t work.  When I find the right page on my own, the form doesn’t work.  The error messages are alternately incorrect, nonsensical, or unhelpful.  In other words, they don’t work.  No one responds to my help requests.  Does anyone, I wonder, at your company work?

Part 3:  Sarria

The municipal albergue in Sarria was one of the least pleasant we’ve seen.  (The taxi driver had dropped us off there; in the morning we walked past half a dozen visibly nicer albergues).  Each floor’s beds were all bunked around a triangular, all-glass airshaft that enabled anyone trying to sleep to hear the noise and see the light of pilgrims on all the other floors.  There was no Internet.  The kitchen was tiny, and shared space with the washing machines.  There was one outlet, in the hallway by the bathroom.  Competition for it was fierce.

In the albergues, I have seen a number of things I would rather not have seen, usually in the nature of older Europeans without sufficient cladding.  In Sarria, as all the pilgrims on our floor quietly prepared for bed just before lights-out, a fiftyish Spanish couple arrived at their bunks, speaking loudly.  The generously proportioned woman stripped to a shirt and her panties and lay on her stomach, and the man began to vigorously rub a cream of overpowering scent into the backs of her ample legs.

This went on for some time.

Then they hung a towel from the top bunk so as to obscure the bottom bunk, and our uxurious husband climbed in with his creamed-up wife and they yakked late into the night, indifferent to Mom’s attempts to hush them.

Part 4:  Into the Cabbage Groves of Galicia

The Camino ends in the capital of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela (“St. James of the Field of Stars”), and the Camino as a pilgrimage was originally a Galician tradition.  (This was before the kings of Navarra and Castilla and Leon realized how much revenue could be raised from pilgrims, most of them from France.)  The Galicians have placed milestones, so to speak, every half a kilometer on the Way, so that pilgrims can count down the distance to Santiago.  These have been defaced almost beyond legibility by people’s names, messages to one another, and relationship status.  (Almost all are in Spanish).

I had understood Sarria to be a neat 100 kilometers away from Santiago, but the morning found

us walking by a restaurant that called itself “Kilometer 111”.  Uh-oh.  Mom’s ailments tell her she can do 16 kilometers a day, but not 19 or 20.  We’ll have to figure out how to make up this difference and still make Santiago in time.

Mom said she’d read that pilgrims walk more slowly in Galicia, perhaps because it’s so beautiful and they don’t want it to end.  The beginning of our walk was not so promising.  The smell of fresh animal dung as we left Sarria was strong enough to be detected in outer space.  We passed a curious Galician custom we would see repeated in every village thereafter:  cemeteries that looked like a blend of mausoleum (tall concrete structures) and morgue (small doors, three high, into which coffins, or ashes, were slid).

Once we got into the country, the day became simply magical.  We were back in the trees,

and we wound our way through one small farm after another.  Mist rose from the fields, seemingly without source, for we could see no rivers or ponds nearby.  We crossed quaint stone bridges spanning tiny trickling creeks.  And the smells!  We breathed in not just astringent, bracing cow dung but loam and the leaves of autumn, the sweetly pungent smell of sorghum, woodsmoke, and pig farms capable of being detected from universes parallel to our own.  Cabbage was cultivated in what could only be called cabbage trees – six-foot stalks with the eating end at the very top.

Soon we began to climb, and the landscape became even more storybook.  The small farms

spread across gently undulating hills, with ever more hills in the distance, and were bounded by mile upon mile of walls made of carefully stacked stones emptied from the fields themselves.  The houses themselves were made of the same stones, all found in nearby fields.  Mile after mile we could smell the sorghum, and sometimes we could see the plastic tarps that covered it up.  German Shepherds could be seen in most farms, apparently the Galician guard dog of choice.  Roosters crowed nearby.

And then there were the slender, elevated buildings near many of the stone homes in the country, standing on foundations about five feet off the ground, six feet tall, ten feet long, three feet wide.  Were they for hens?  Some were topped by stone crosses and even had

inscriptions:  were they mausoleums?  Or, as a German maintained, for bees?  My guidebook said many houses had next to them something called “corncribs,” which raised more questions than it answered.

“The sky!  The sky!” I could hear Mom saying to herself.  It was yet another perfect day.  “My cells are loving this!” she said.

Carrie was going to take a picture of Mom and me walking side by side.  I put my hand on her back and began to walk.  “Are you in there?” she said.  “I don’t feel you.”  I understood what she meant, and I visualized light flowing from myself, down my arm, and out my palm into her back.  “Oh!” she said.  “I see a big blue light!  It’s like a . . . what’s the word?  An aureole.”

I don’t know what to make of this.  I can’t say I believe it in the sense that such a belief would matter – belief matters only when and to the extent it affects behavior, as we may see by watching the uninspired conduct of many of the super-religious and god-fearing.  If I really believed what people say about my energy then I suppose I’d spend all my time visualizing myself healing people, starting with Mom.  Which I don’t do, obviously.

At times we walked in a sort of bounded walkway ten feet across, with stone walls three to five feet high on either side of us.  For long stretches the rock walls were covered in ivy,

and the stone itself invisible.  The path itself was impassable by car, and we had to pick our way carefully over the uneven stones.  I’ve never seen such byways on any farm, or anywhere.

“Who put all these rocks in our path?” a German woman joked.

“That’s what I’d like to know, too,” Mom responded, also in German.

We did, I thought.  God did.  Does it matter?  They’re still there.

Part 5:  Pilgrims Have Increased by 20% Since This Book’s Publication

I have been asking pilgrims a simple question:  “Why are you on the Camino?”  Quite a few Germans say it’s because they read a best-selling book, first published in 2001, by a well-known German comedian.  This is a disappointing answer.  The book itself, at least as translated into English, seems to me incapable of inspiring one even to finish it, much less to walk 500 miles.  Even Mom complains that it’s boring.

I asked one German, “Is it good in German?  Because in English it’s not funny at all.  It doesn’t have any fresh observations, or information about the locations, which you sort of expect from travel writing.”

“We know the author,” the man told me.  “It’s interesting if you know him.  We can hear his voice.”

Over three million copies sold.  Either the English translation was doing the author a great disservice or his readers were doing all the work.

Part 6:  La Bodeguina in Mercadoiro

Tuesday.  We reach Mercadoiro.  The La Bodeguina albergue costs a princely 10 Euros (about $13.30), but it has a patio with tables, a large yard with picnic tables, and a superb view, as well as a lounge-like room and free wi-fi.  A single laptop is available for surfing, in exchange for a donation that we see no one pay.  The bathrooms and showers are all new.  The showers even have six hydro-massage heads that can be angled to effect stimuli from the thighs to the chest.

The menu has more variety than we’ve seen, and the entire operation is run by two men, one of whom speaks English, and other of whom is simply very helpful.

However.  The menu showed a picture of an assortment of sliced fruit beautifully arrayed in a bowl.

“Son las frutas fresco?” I asked, hoping that meant, Are the fruits fresh?

“Si,” he said.  But the kitchen was not open, he explained.  Then he shrugged and went into the kitchen.  Amazing!  He was going to get me something to eat anyway.  I was feeling very grateful.

He returned with a bowl of canned peaches in sugary syrup.

There are more flies in Spain than in the rest of the world combined.  This is called a hypothesis.  I now ask graduate students from around the world to prove me wrong.

The downsides of the albergue:  for perhaps 50 people, it had two bathrooms, each containing a toilet sans privacy and two showers.

Part 7:  Mom and Food, Part 27

Mom tried to buy bread this morning, in a small shop, and was told it was reserved.  “All of it?” she asked, incredulous, pointing to the array of bread.  Yes.  All.  Reserved.

Wednesday.  In Ventas de Naron, Mom and I were sitting at an outdoor table, reading.  She wanted to know how to ask what time dinner was.  I told her.  She practiced it a few times before she pulled out her notebook and pen.  “This is an important sentence,” she explained.  She got up to go to the café.

“And if she says seven-thirty, I’m going to slap her.”

Afternoon in El Acebo

In the end, I did not perform much of a ritual myself at the Cruz de Ferro. It takes time to create a meaningful space, or a meaningful moment in time, and I hadn’t invested that time in the Cruz de Ferro. I spent a few minutes mindfully intending to let go of some of the hurt I’d felt in my marriage and, especially, during the divorce, and the guilt and sadness I felt about my own many mistakes, and the hurt they had caused, especially before and during my marriage. And that was all. I did not want to suck from the mountain all the oxygen that my mother needed to breathe.

At first the terrain leading away from the Cruz de Ferra was easy – a slight downhill slope

on compacted white sand bounded by milled lumber. To our left ran a road whose many patches bespoke a great deal of freezing in the winter. Before long, though, we entered an all-downhill, punishing, rocky single-track trail, some of it straight down. Well before we reached El Acebo, Mom was convinced we’d already gone well beyond 16 kilometers.

But no, tiny El Acebo was a 16.7 kilometer hike. It had been hidden for some time, so when we saw it, earlier than expected, some compensation for the more common false summit, we were happily surprised. It sits high up on a small mountain above the valley below, so small, so isolated, that for the first time on the trip my Vodafone USB got no reception.

The village was a typical Camino village: a single road bounded by a few houses, and a handful of albergues and hotels with restaurants attached. We chose the Meson. Mom was ready to eat.

Carrie ordered the Botilla del Bierzo, which on the menu was translated as “pork with paprika”. According to the menu, it was a specialty of the Bierzo area. I ordered the same.

The very nice waitress set down our plates. On it was boiled cabbage, chickpeas, chorizo, and a beating, pulsating, human heart.

At least that’s exactly what it looked like: a heart covered in paprika. Tentatively I set my

knife upon it and began to saw at it. Grudgingly it parted in two, yielding unrecognizable chunks of white (bone marrow?), shards of pig bone, and something that was like, but not quite, meat.

I turned to Mom, the expert, and said, quietly, so that Carrie would not hear, “Could this be organ meat?”

She peered at it. “I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Try it.”

Ha ha. I haven’t fallen for that since my age was counted in the single digits. My German aunt Elfriede, post-mortem benefactress of Mom’s trip here, had once submerged something utterly revolting in some opaque white soup – it may have been tripe – but my boy-sonar had found it effortlessly, and I had refused to touch even the bowl.

“See what it is,” I said to Carrie. “You’ll probably really love it,” I added.

She shook her head. “I’m not touching it.”

Foiled.

Eventually I caught the waitress’ attention. “Perdon,” I said, politely, holding up a single, graceful finger. “Una pregunta.” A question. “What the hell is this?”

Actually, I said, “Que es eso?” What is this?

She pointed to the casing of the heart-thing. “Thees is the tripe,” she said, “and thees” – now pointing at the stuff in the middle, “is from here.” She put her hand on her back. “It is the goats.”

“The goats?”

“Jes,” she said. Her own face a question mark, she watched my face to see if I was satisfied.

I smiled enormously. My smile was like those stars that could easily swallow the sun a million times. “Thank you so much,” I said. She went away.

“What did she say it was?” Carrie said. I turned back to the table, still smiling.

“Stomach lining and guts,” I said. Carrie’s mouth bulged as if she would puke. Neither one of us touched our human hearts again. Mom tried a tiny bit of mine and made a face. “All the meat I’ve eaten here tastes very strongly of the animal. It’s too strong. Very pig-like.”

The web says:

The “botillo” is a meat product made in the Leonese county of El Bierzo, with different parts from the butchering of the pig (above all ribs and tail), chopped up and marinated in salt, paprika, garlic and other natural spices. It is packed in natural skins and, before being eaten, it must go through the smoking and part-curing processes. Its exterior appearance is defined by the shape of the skin, although it normally takes on a globe shape, reddish grey in colour and weighing between approximately 500g and 1,600g per piece. When cut, it shows deep red tones, a firm consistency and an intense aroma. It is eaten cooked and accompanied by vegetables, above all cabbage, potatoes, chickpeas and chorizo pepper. It is a simple, hearty dish with no great secrets in the preparation, but it is one of the stars of El Bierzo’s cuisine.

The waitress was very apologetic when she realized we’d been surprised. I told her it wasn’t her fault, it was the menu (“pork with paprika” it had said, benignly). When I saw her a little later, on break outside the restaurant, she winked at me. Who winks anymore?

In the afternoon, Carrie lost one of her money purses. Luckily she had taken Mom’s advice not to put all her money in the same place, so she lost only about 15 Euros. But she was still upset. At dinner, I asked Mom if she still wanted wine, as she’d mentioned earlier, to celebrate the Day of the Cruz.

“Yes!” Carrie said, a little too enthusiastically. You want wine? we both asked her. “I need it,” she said.

At dinner, the waitress moved to stand right next to me, brushing my side, while I looked at the wine list, and went so far as to lean on my shoulder as I explained that their being out of my preferred desert was nothing short of a disaster. When she had gone, Mom and Carrie started laughing. “What?” I said. “We think she likes you,” Mom said.

Women in the United States never leaned on me or winked at me, so I left what for Spain was an unusually large tip. “She can have that,” I said, “instead of me.” Carrie made a face.

In Burgos two nights ago, a man shouted out in his sleep, twice. I see him on the podium in Santiago.

The Santa María de Carbajal Albergue

In León, the Santa María de Carbajal hostel is a donativo, a donation-based hostel, and it’s connected to a convent. (The nuns appeared to have been warned of my coming, for they were not in evidence). Since the original Convento de San Marcos, founded in 1152, separated men’s and women’s dormitories, the men in León have been separated from the women. This is because, according to a presumably ancient document referred to in my guidebook, “it is a dishonest thing to have women and men in a single dormitory”, and the “quality of people who come to the hospice are not of high caliber.”

Among dozens of men in our all-male dorm the first night in León, only one snored. One. In the co-ed dorms we’ve slept in during the last two weeks, we always had at least a half-dozen. Based on last night’s statistically valid scientific sample, I have provisionally concluded

that snoring is evolutionarily adaptive. Snoring must be something men do only to attract the preferred sex. (The snorer in León’s all-male dorm, it must be concluded, was gay). Further study will be required to discover why the preferred sex is actually attracted by the schnarcher. I leave this to future Nobel laureates.

The hostel did not provide pillows, so, having heard that the windows would be left open at night, I slept in my clothes and kept a few more on hand, and packed everything else – including my camera case and FiveFingers – into a makeshift pillow.

The award for best hospitalero on the Camino will be hard to wrest from the gentle hands of Thomas Schlitt-Krebs, of Heidelberg, Germany. Thomas seemed to be everywhere, at all times, speaking at least English and Spanish in addition to German. (For all I know he spoke French, too). I saw him pouring coffee for people, and even mixing in their milk. He led pilgrims to their bunks. He gave out taxi numbers. He gave advice on what to see and do. We talked about the biophysics of running and walking. And always he had that brilliant smile, and an infectious lovingkindness.

And he went an extra mile for Mom. After we decided to stay an extra night at the

albergue, he led Mom past a room not yet filled up and put her in the same room as the night before – which she and Carrie had had to themselves. For this he got grief from a French hospitalera, who insisted on the rules: people must fill up space in the proper order, so Mom should be slotted into the dorm room that still had vacancies. But Thomas was firm, and told Mom that he had told the hospitalera he would take the matter up with the sisters if he had to. “I prayed for you last night,” he told Mom the next morning.

He asked her if the Camino was, for her, a religious pilgrimage. She said it was not. She explained that her father, a Lutheran, had been disowned by his family for marrying my Oma, a Catholic, and that she, Mom, had had some unhappy experiences in her Catholic school. “I have a lot of issues with that church,” she said.

He nodded. “I understand completely. You must believe in something, though, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I felt the Camino wasn’t even my decision, but that it called me.” She doesn’t put what guides her (I deleted the misleading “what she believes”) into words, and she seems to have arrived at the same place I have, which is that the explanation is far less important than the attitudes and behavior that result.

León

It’s tempting to think León is named for a lion, but in fact it comes from the Roman 7th Le/gi/on, which founded a camp on this site in the year 70 CE, just as the first Jewish War was getting underway in Israel. The Romans wanted to protect the Galician gold mines from the grubby hands of the indigenous population. The Romans worked tirelessly from here for 350 years in their attempt to conquer the barbarians of northwest Spain. It was for naught, of course, because the Roman Empire would fall near the end of that time, and León then saw a succession of Visigothic, Muslim, and Christian rulers.

After we had arrived at the albergue, I found Mom holding court with an audience of four

of five German men. One of them, their priest, was taking notes. “Good God, man!” I wanted to cry. “She sees you taking notes, none of us will ever eat or sleep again!” He had run for his notebook when Mom told him of her original rules for Carrie: get up as early as five, no time for fussing with hair or make-up, and no complaining or whining. (Carrie is, so far, the youngest person we have seen on the Camino, and by at least four years. She has complained less than any of us).

The priest asked Carrie what was the most beautiful stage on the Camino and what was the hardest. “The Pyrenees, for both,” she said. Did she regret coming? “No!” She would later tell another person, in response to his question, that the trip was “Wonderful!”

The German priest said that, for him, León was more beautiful than Burgos. It is a charming city. Its many pedestrian streets are a riot of color: shops, café-bars, painted two-story buildings and their shutters, pots of flowers in windows. We ran into a Mercado Medieval,

a sort of street fair with a medieval theme, and perhaps a hundred different hawkers of crafts and food dressed in medieval garb. Burros gave children a ride around a park. Eight birds of prey sat on display, and a local Boreal Lynx prowled, or tried to, on its ten-foot leash.

The cathedral in León, copied at 2/3 scale from the Rheims Cathedral in France, is a more pure example of 13th century Gothic than the one in Burgos, whose 15th-century Flemish-Gothic additions complicate matters. León’s is also less elaborate, arguably less gaudy. The interior is more understated. But what distinguishes Leon’s cathedral are the exorbitant number of its stained-glass windows.

We walked in to the transporting sounds of a single man (a monk? on tape or live?) singing Gregorian chants. We sat down and listened while craning our necks to look at the windows far above. My guidebook, The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago, suggests pilgrims savor the cathedral slowly, and to

rest for an hour on the benches in front of the cathedral’s west façade and watch the afternoon sun play on the sculptured portals and the spires of the towers. When the sun strikes full on the rose window, go inside and stand for a few moments in the middle of the nave[,] breathing in the colors of the light. Watch them change intensity as they glide across the floor while the sun drops. Think of how these soaring towers of stone, this vast open internal space, and these dancing colors must have blown the mind of your average medieval pilgrim.

Was it because there was so much less gold in León’s cathedral that I didn’t think about blood as much as I had in the Burgos cathedral? Here was a space that felt more inhabited by the sacred.

A sign said pictures were not allowed, but I risked eternal damnation, or at least a longer

stint in purgatory, and got some good shots that are now on Facebook.

From the outside, the stained-glass windows looked uniformly daubed in something like soot and dirt: they were entirely an opaque tan color, and not at all representative of what we found within. I wondered how much more brilliant the light inside the cathedral would be if the windows outside were clean. An excerpt from a novel written in 1605 provides a clue:

I went inside, but I was sure that I hadn’t, and that I was still in the plaza, as the cathedral is so glassed and transparent . . . You can drink from this church as from a glass cup.

León also boasts an 11th-century collegiate Church of San Isidoro, which one guidebook says may have the best in situ paintings in Spain, if not all of Europe.  Next door is the Pantheon of the Kings of León, named, I believe, after the rock band from Tennessee.

Thomas took me aside at breakfast this morning. Interestingly, Krebs, the latter part of his hyphenated surname, is German for “cancer”. “When there is a sickness in the family,” he said, “everyone is affected. Everyone has it, in a way. I know this. So there may be times when you need to say, ‘Mom, I must go my own way for a bit, I must be for myself now.’”

We thanked him profusely when we left. “Well,” he said modestly, “special circumstances call for special measures.”

Pilgrims

With Julio and Marie Anne gone, we found ourselves meeting and talking to more people than before. A French student and a wily Basque offered me some wine. (The Basque had earlier played Elvis’ “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” from his cell phone while readying himself for the shower. I started to sing it, he joined in, and we were fast friends thereafter). I gave my map to a departing older Irishman who told us jokes about Ireland’s weather, like its “four winters per year”.

So as to have a meal that involved neither jamón nor queso, we went, with a Danish medical student and an actor from Chicago, to an Indian restaurant. The waiter was also the cook, so we were there for a long time. The actor said he’d heard of an American doctor’s advice to a patient not to take anti-depressants but to go on the Camino instead. He himself took this advice, and said his depression of the last eighteen months has disappeared during his long walks. We talked to a beautiful young Scottish woman, an art student, who was at a loss to explain why she spoke with an English accent or to provide a convincing rationale for not being twenty years older. There were four Seattleites.

And last night, about thirty of us pilgrims followed a nun, sixtyish and diminutive, to the sisters’ modest little chapel, which boasted a brilliant-gold retablo that would have dominated any church in the U.S.  Before we entered, she said something to the effect that we were not tourists, but seekers of God. She led us through a singing of some verse, in Spanish. “Muy bueno,” she said. And then she paused for a beat, and added, “Mas o menos”. More or less. We all burst out laughing. Then we entered the church, and there they were, arrayed in the choir, a baker’s dozen of nuns, and after that I understood nothing. Except her loud claps at an unfortunate young woman whose cell phone rang four or five times.