Ellingsonian Read online



  Ellingsonian

  by

  David Santamaria

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Ellingsonian

  Copyright © 2011 by David Santamaria

  * * * * *

  ELLINGSONIAN

  Shall I?

  Lindsay: Poetry too.

  Shall we?

  Lindsay: I told you.

  A tea for two.

  Lindsay: Continue like that.

  I don't know what to say anymore.

  Lindsay: Sorry.

  I just got a phone call. Now I forgot what you just said.

  Lindsay:

  Wait, I am going to switchapp, to see if you instagrammed.

  /Lindsay's Instagram at that time.

  I can't wait to mix again. You are like a double dose of danger. You bet I got to insist. Talking about being exited, I wish I could show you how to grab a tour of The Sky. It is all in the eyes. Books retain the essential at best. Put your tie on, everybody!

  Lindsay: Let me talk.

  Shoot.

  Lindsay: Put the hour.

  Thursday, February, 20, 2014, 19:48 Greenwich Meridian Time.

  Lindsay: Do something else.

  We indeed need a title. An Ellingsonian one. The Ellingsonian something.

  Lindsay: Will do.

  These classic landscapes are in no dictionaries

  And classic should be at the top of your finger

  Reproducing wooden floors for yes no worries

  Mind boy and girlie deserves no bitter thinker

  Try to laugh no more-ish, see boat solitude here

  That was his ancient name, till you used the oath

  A light just sat by me, swift blond foxy my dear

  Marvelous and swift child, morning rains gives a bath

  This is how this acrostic less journey started

  You are that desert trinket shinning adventure tall

  In the winged collections you come red dressed

  And that smell of autumn wet sweet home for this all

  It is mostly a sober voyage that leads to you

  The rest is bigger and the Angels are no joke.

  HE answers and your heart is listening to you

  Books retain at best only the essential folk

  I should call the cold winds for this all lacks of lungs

  For an undulation could match the road to you

  The floor is joyously back pushing surf bar young's

  Ellingsonian elsewhere with an Angel like Boo

  What a fire of love should burn my chest right now

  Here starts the mountain road calling for adventurers

  This sober boat has a morning star and a bow

  He carries it all to the end of time adders

  Instead of being here full of pain and regrets

  Jasmine tea is soothing the lyrical Spirit

  I which to don't be the one who speaks alphabets

  I too saw mystical horrors in the exit

  What a bravery says fairy whom touches me

  Oh my God how much do people suffer alone

  It almost kills you on the way whiteout a fee

  I am broken like the stone of African throne

  Thank you for smiling that you prefer the red pill

  Boy oh boy I don't control what I am saying

  Like this was waited the cavalry from the hill

  Superb valkyrie vocabulary and swing

  Heat me up please baby heat me up please honey

  I am coughing it's me the too old for his age

  Funny crumbling croulan siping as a big bay

  Don't you hear the seagulls of the end of the cage?

  They should be a presence before your beautiful eyes by now

  Just behind the thinnest hashish smoking paper

  Angels made of Faith and enjoyable light vow

  She want's to stand up for me and scream remember

  Another one burned his lips on too hot tea

  While she is asking for poetry more vivid

  What a bite what a fairy what a svelte bee

  This all should be about her and not her rapid

  Stop and find the divine state of mind. Peace in you. Ellingsonian. And return to heaven. You are loved there. Thrill. Donate. It is the return of the children. The Master of History does the rest. I will avoid becoming too professional. One's become his own diploma. Big trap! One's got to think well. I pray for that grace and, I don't know what I want to say anymore. I am waiting for the end too much. Pretentiously continuing because afraid of not being perfect. Earthlings became such brutes. We should call the children mister and madam; to be in love is he most beautiful state of mind. Oh Mary-Madeleine... make me contemplative again, oh Mary-Madeleine. Once diabolical, people can't notice anymore that they are being dumb. I am glad I came to realize that I am writing one big messy book only. Titles change. Forms change. Machines changes. The fonts too, of course. Even the fingers. I am a thumb writer these days. But it is all one. I can't escape it. You can't neither. From birth to death. It is all a giant breathe in. So breath in, Son. And be happy. Avoid zombies. Liars even more. Even if it's a woman. Believe me, belonging to the beautiful sex doesn't make them Saints by definition, at all. Many of them gladly send you to Auschwitz if only they could. Everybody makes fun of God the Holy-Spirit. The whole sleeping world. Fuck it, blues! I'll never play some again. I am going to funk myself all the way out. Bam! I am to give you the one, me. We'll add some epic electric guitar later on. With his poached eye, Mark look like he took a bullet for me. Haha, exactly! That's what he answered to me. So it made it possible for me to slip a thank you. He understood. God befriends only these who live with Wisdom. I just gave some of my Hollywood polar mint gum to the beggar sat by the tobacconist. Made him laugh like a whale: I'll stink less from the mouth, bouahaha! He knows I am he one living on social benefits like him but who can eventually spare a cigarillo. He's got to be guessing that I am seen ruling over international matters. I look like I could be a rose seller as well. Scary as an elder brother. Mark's too needs a smile. Several days passed since he got hit in the face. He's wearing a grey tee, badly tucked in his dirty looking blue jeans. Pale Irish. He will move forward again. He's drinking a little bit too much. Life it is. Mister Edwards just asked to Mister Tyson what, as I said on Twitter, professional science says about today's real miracles. Dang interesting question. Among the atheists, these who embraces the scientific career, are the most vicious ones. A truth to remember. Saint - Mary is herself going to ask to them the same question. How sweet. They know they'll can't eternally go away by just not answering questions. The public has the right to be informed. At least that's what I say. Dang chronicles! I have such a blond to excite.

  Al Green's Love & Happiness is in the air. Spring is slowly coming. It's still fresh, but not cold anymore. Since a few days the terrace of the 3 kings is alive again. It's one of the most beautiful ones. A terrace you need someone to say a little prayer for you. Gilded flies, tonight's the night we have to set the clocks back. Good grades are coming. Lovely perfections. Heat is on it's way. So much was done again this week. I believe the people of Fox 11 L.A. showed 40 to Neil Tyson, and I guess it is not a good time to be a spider.

  Long time I wasn't surrounded by women. The two on my right even seem fine. One of the three on my left is talking about the Apostles. Better be careful. How little she must have love in her life to look so mean. Men too rarely are smiley. I better return home now. I chewed enough atmosphere in this bar for today. God! Feed me lion meat! Joy must win, and it's so unbelievably difficult to get men and women joyous. I mean really joyous. Not just to make money in some kind of way. You better smile, dear reader. Yes, you. Now! And keep up the mood. Love in the eyes included
. It's an effort. The Angels got to be tired to see just one doing it. Approach children with love in the eyes only. They love to don't talk. Do not obliges them to talk. They don't know the answer to your question. You are being unbearable. If you have no sense of humor, it's time for you to get one. These few precedent sentences are for you: kiddo. Trust me, if you want to enter heaven, you better already act as perfectly as if you were already there. Or the Angels are never going to come to pick you up. Science, bitch! They are not stupid, the Angels. I give them the uppercase A all the time. Clever me! "A great lesson of theology." Heavenly certified.

  Let's make a novel out of it. I heard the genre is in decline. Yet a king lizard came to talk to me when I was not even ten years old. You believe that there is no magic. You are a proud atheist, or a clouded cloud, but you are dead wrong. Life is infinite. I wasn't being educated by the adults around me. Kids don't know it's bad to kill animals if it's not to normally eat. They know nothing. Their hard drives are blank. You got to gently take their hand and show them. Tell them. Killing lizard in that abandoned house a little behind the one of my Spanish grandparents wasn't a correct thing to do. That house was a nation. A nation of lizards. With her four walls and all her roof tiles on the floor, it's like they had their own mythical world bearer turtle. We must have been such a terror for these creatures. Destruction of Godly proportions. Destroyed families. Almost a genocide. Really, we don't realize. I remember I went there with my cousins, or some of the friends from the village, or even others here for the summer only, like me. To catch a lizard was such an amazing exploit for us. To bring him back home and put him, let's say it, in a prison for life, made out of a shoe box, and some transparent plastic film, was like being live in a National Geographic documentary. Nonetheless, I wish I was taught to observe them. Because it's more beautiful, and because that poor animal is going to die in just a few hours in that cell, whatever how much flies you will catch, and how much water you will provide him.

  All this to say that king lizard was a miracle. A talking one. Suddenly just a few meters away before me, on that dry clay road, under that so strong summer sun, in the silence you can experience in a village. It has been such a long time since I didn't immersed in nature to the point you only hear her sounds. No cars. No by air waves fed devices. Only animals and the wind, and everything that it sets in motions. Eventually ticking on something. When it's like you are a cat, and you are being accused. I couldn't imagine that such a big lizard was living unnoticed in this village, surrounded by other villages, like Gumiel del Mercado, just three kilometers away; really, this king among the lizard was sized to rule the world in some magnificent Amazon jungle corner. It was decided that I'd be a writer. I mean you can't invent stuff like that. Because he talked to me. In proper all the tongues at the same time. Just the way he was posed when my eyes, from the road a couple steps ahead, raised themselves up to him. The expression on his face. The position. Everything. An apparition. From the third kingdom. And a message from the 5. Peaceful and silent Angel. He knows you didn't really knew, but now you know. Respect life. You are killing them all. Revelations from a youth in the south. How mythic all is if you pay attention long enough. North. South. East. West. And you in the middle. If you think about it long enough, everything that is far away becomes big. Even the spirit of people you know. Or even doorknobs. Everything. You talk with souls. Literally. What a skill. Count on them to always raise the bar. And hop they do a step back to attract you more. They are the best in life. Vo-te An-gel. They never disappoint, and always give you a chance. How silly to don't grab that hand.

  Once it's the entire Heavenly court that appeared before me. God himself. And Lights like HIM. I was even younger, and it is not that other phenomenon that science justly calls "false memories". How majestic. We completely forgot that on earth. How majestic you got to be yourself. Pure. 24/7. Even if you are just a kid, wandering around in the happiness of the holidays, when you are free to go see that tree, and oh! then the fountain of the village, because there is always going to be a few kids just wanting to play, if it's not the A-Team hour, or la tejera, because if's full of frogs, whatever exiting you find to do, like entering this gigantic wheat warehouse, open for once. I never knew that mountain of wheat could have has much majesty has Gods, but it was like that. At the top of every wheat mountain, there was a being made out of Light only. What a silence. I never talked of that moment to any adult ever. My name is Jesus by the way.

  Thirty three years are more than twelve thousands days. Three years alone are more than a thousand days and nights. We only have the essential in the Gospels. It is just obvious that I talked about much more subjects that we have written reports of it. More miracles than all the books in the world could hold says the noble Evangelist. Mysticism is not a little thing. This is already screaming for a Miracle or some gigantic revelation. I'll politely leave you with Silence. I must draw something beautiful in 53 again today.

  I am stuck between two lives. Jesus and David. This is a problem. One can't whine and be psychologically strong at the same time. David and Jesus. What can I say? People started calling me God in 1998. Unintentionally. God. Sorry, God. Oh, look, God!!! In a bar. In a nightclub. Around the kitchen table of someone I do not remember. I must admit that is something I had completely forgot around my mid-twenties. I worked so hard. It came like a friendly hand, kindly shacking you by the shoulder, with a cup full of something good for you in it, because you fell asleep on the desk your life is. It hardly can get more epic than being called God by people then so surprised by what they just said. It would be criminal to talk about something else. I am going to look super-pretentious again. But you have to forgive me. Almost nobody but me, on earth, would know about the miracles that God the Father gives me, if I wasn't working, all day long, like a dog to preserve and distribute them. Earthlings are such a bunch of rascals. I was a French in Spain. In France I am just a Spaniard. And now that I am officially an alien from another universe, I am hated everywhere. Thank God there is hashish to make me laugh myself when I am alone. Smoking tires you but gets your battery refilled. You tell me. If only I stopped thinking again, I would be much more happy. I guarantee it. Here in Tours, at the Basilica Saint-Martin, I am frankly being called: nigger. You think I exaggerate? No, I don't. I talk with Spirits and Souls. Angels and Animals. I see Living people. I know what I am talking about. You thunk it makes me mad? No, it don't. I play bass. And I groove like a James on springs. A King of Funk. How funny in the end. Oh God, I can't believe I don't even own a bass since more than a decade now. What a war. But I have learned to say no. Mother of God, but how am I going to do? I am a complete cliché. Bar iPad writer, in clear trousers and dark sweater. Salt and pepper hair. The whole panoply. Sharp as shark teeth. I need no less than a miracle to get laid. The ladies are afraid to fall in love. They won't approach. And with that am perpetually broke, so, you know, I belong to an elite. We the poor are the most classy ones. Every experienced supermarket lady cashier knows that. We work too much to have time left to make money. We are too serious for that, for God we serve. Insert a moment of pride: here. Join the academy, and do not become your diploma. It won't save you if you are not a Man.

  It is all so violent. I remember that night, street of the little sun, when I was still around twelve, living in a bedroom that had a nightclub on the other side of the wall, more than in the middle of the night, just after 4 in the morning, when the night clubs closes, that so gloomy scene of a drunk man, laying down, making noises, because another one is barking to him about money he owes him. Plain crude real violence, in the silence of the night, so noisy it must have waken up even my mother and her lover. He humiliated him till finally a woman's voice came from another apartment in the street, threatening, not too meanly, to call the police if this horrible situation didn't stopped immediately. So shocking. Alley noir.

  And the daylight is not even less cruel. There once was such a sudden and scary fight just below the window of our livin
g room, that it left us three petrified where we were when it started, José sat on the family's chief chair at the top of the dinning room table, Marina, a few steps away in the open kitchen, and me, standing in the center of it all. It even became phenomenal. Just a second after the fight started, someone's head was smashed so loudly against the soft and tender, typical of the region, tuffeau stones of the building, that that sound can only be called a divine message. I cannot forget the silence that touched the back of my head at the same time. Like the tail of a comic's book speech bubble, but silent, and yet, exactly like if it was exactly that. I know it sounds strange. This town really pushed my buttons up to the torments of craziness. I am full of unbelievable memories. The worst is to imagine that others had an even way more violent childhood. And José, amped like an actual macon, but who is going to do nothing at that particular moment, because it's like that. It lasted just a few fight sounds long, and that immense boom.

  We were really told to move. We stayed. I wasn't even yet aware of how much it would cost my sleep, with only 3 hours left to sleep per night, between something after 4am, when the nightclub next door and it's perpetual drum bass boom would stop at least, and 7am school time. I can't use a bed stand alarm clock ever again. That much lack of sleep made me a gypsie for ever. I am stuck on brave mode. There is no such things as hours. On the good side, it made me a pretty good disk jockey, I think.

  Heavens! And that time, when I was even younger, almost certainly 11, and we were living in Tours' "hood": the Sanitas? In the middle of a no school day. Three muslim women, beating that French women, very pregnant, and because she was, precisely, having the kid of a male from that particular family. That's what the whole plaza Robert Ranjard understood after. Since a few days, she was spending a very long moment on one of the benches of that little square, to, apparently, display her pregnancy under these windows, to frankly say that hey: "We were two to make this". Bad idea! She was now still has pregnant, and being kicked on the floor, by three infuriated women. How violently. Tens of blows and kicks. Minutes long of madness. And my cousin Vanessa crying in the middle of it, since she had had befriended her along these days. I still can't believe that my aunt Lydia, and my mother Marina, sent me to "rescue" little Vanessa from being there, crying in the middle of that storm, while they were watching it all from Lydia's living room. I mean, ok, it was to the men to Act, and by that time the cops were called, there was no doubt, seen the intensity of the commotion, that they weren't receiving several alarmed calls, urging them to show up asap, but still... send 11 years old me, to bring back 4-5 years old Vanessa? Why? To look concerned on the balcony? Cowardice is an ugly and dangerous thing, not only violence, believe me.

  I am still surprised by how afraid, even just of what could someone think, most people is. These two women for sure never gave us an example of bravery. Heavens, it recalls me that sunday when she forgot the chip pan on the gas stove, because she was talking on the phone for nothing, to the point the margarin caught fire. She had to call the fire fighters and all. Total panic. When they arrived, and parked their truck just below our windows, instead of sending 11 years old me to my bedroom, she literally make me crucify myself at the balcony of the living room. Hey, I am smiling, while writing this, do not suppose that I am whining. It is just the content of my memory, as it is. I find it to be significant. Of a meaning! I mean, even if I was quite young, I still remember how humiliated it was to be like that, holding the iron bars, taller than me, of the balustrade, like a little monkey in pajamas, for everybody at their windows all around this plaza covered with city housing buildings, to believe that "it wasn't us". Gosh, how dumb. With the truck of the fire fighters just there, three floors beneath me.

  Basically, to extinguish the fire, the fire fighters dipped his hand in the chip pan, et voila. Pros and professional gloves. We were taught a tip and all. I share it with you, who knows, it might help you someday? It's simple, you wet a floor cloth and you cover the chip pan in fire with it. The fire will have no more air and will extinguish by himself.

  And by the way, what the heck was I still doing in pajamas? Maybe I am just creating one of these false memories that I read or saw a video about. Or maybe it was just for once. But she is more of a perfect house woman. Very stiff on it, but not clinically maniac, just mean about it. She wants to have fun too. She dances. But am 100% sure of the rest. In Spain, they even used to call me nigger. My own family. At least twice per summer. Minimum! A real family ritual. ?. I used to never think about that till recently. But now that I think about it, am just astonished. It astonish me. I am solid! Believe me. I mean I think I am. I had a lot of fun in my youth too. I am still smiling, and I am soon 42! It is a sort of proof. But... well, just imagine... I let you judge. It's July or August. Mostly august, since my aunt Juli and her husband Jesus are here too with their sons, my cousins Jesus and Victor-Manuel. Most of time, it's just after the sunday's lunch, we took all together, packed in my grandparent's Marcelo and Julita adorably pilchard can sized living room. Manuel would have started being mean with his very deaf mother when she wasn't wearing her hearing aid device. I never knew why he was always so exasperated against her at the end of almost every meal. Now I know. Alcohol makes people mean. So he would, embarrassingly, I don't know how to explain it, sort of try to show her how things get done properly, according to him, silently since she has bad hear, but with mean gestures, like grabbing her by the wrist, to make her put her bread back again by her plate, and stuff like that, with grumbles. A heartbreaker. Voila.

  Never I saw grandfather, or Jesus, say: enough! And me, I still never tested how violent he could be. I never push people's buttons. I never spoke back to him too. Or raised my voice. I should have, someday, when I was 17, here in Tours, thank’ to the possibility to sleep under another roof, and without having to do 900 kilometers in a car with behind the wheel. But then, once everybody back on their feet, they would gather around me, in circle, them all, plaf! and my grandmother would lean towards me, point her finger pointing at me, and start singing, right to my face, old anti-French songs from Napoleon's peninsular war, at least that is my theory, when he invaded Spain, deposing the Spanish King and all, in the 1800's, that she learned when she was just a kid, from her own elder villagers, during those disappeared nocturnal revels, when there was not even radios around. Gabacho! That is the Spanish n-word used for French, as far as I know. No idea what it means! But I know that Frances is the word to say French, normally, politely, and that when you are talking about a Frenchmen you like, it is: Franchute. It is that good old Franchute buddy of yours that you are happy to see again: Hombre, Franchute! I was the Frances, or Franchute or the village, not the gabacho. My family, in the end, was the only place I was insulted like that with that very precise word. I am sure we desperate the Angels so much sometimes.

  In brief, you see the painting by now. It would continue like that during two or three of these short songs, till the flash... that moment when the Sky would dramatically transfigure me, to show them how shocked they were. And, like remotely controlled, Manuel would make it stop. Heavenly Father intervention. Very subtle Miracle stopping that sort of fascinated tribal mystic ritual, like intended just to access a mysterious world, like in a science fiction movie, or to obtain a vision. What an humiliation. Several times each summer. My grandmother was, sadly, a quite asleep person. Not really that mean, but asleep that is for sure, and it is true that I make people hallucinate. These apparitions does through me sometimes. I just, for example, uploaded to YouTube the video of a 4.4 earthquake that jolted Fox 11's set just after Araksya said: Bobby did it. Impressive event. Here, the link: Earthquake live on Fox 11 - March 17, 2014

  I am wondering if it wasn't just to see that, since, sorry kiddos, I am a God coming from the another invisible universe, called the Sky. It was already like that when I was that age. You know, I am not alone in my body, Mother of God, I am a complete and functioning space ship. A seriously lot of fun, you would be surprised.
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  Thank God I could then roam the streets of the village, with something cool to do, like buying candies with our sunday's pocket money, they were cool on that, almost even Manuel, or playing the arcade game in that bar, or watch an A-Team episode. V, the original series from the 80's, got a tremendous success in the village that summer, or even better, go to the fronton to play front tennis as we practice it in Sotillo, that means with normal modern tennis rackets, but with, instead of normal tennis balls, these ones made of rubber, of the same size and color and all, but with less rebound, making them perfectly adapted to keep it playable in the limits of the fronton. How much I loved this sport. I'd gladly play it again! Plop! Fun!

  I have got to forgive them anyway. And I got to love them too. Now that I wrote it down, and that I am even going to try to make a living out of it. I got my revenge. Imagine how mean. It is in a book now. Good luck looking fabulous! Or even just serious. How funny. Bob McLastlaugh...

  They wouldn't believe me, in 2004, when I saw a part of them again. "El David believes that the French are trying to kill him: Ji ji ji!". He came back to Spain thinking we might help: Ja ja ja!" Believe me, next time I see them, if I ever see them again, they might be packed behind an aluminum barricade, like everybody, because I am the French President, or the King of the USA and of the Universe. Totally possible! Why not Pope of Rock & roll? In the Holy-See at Vatican City. The Sky is the limit. Just imagine, to make you laugh yourselves. Modest me on my throne, happier than July! Good grooves included. Oh, boy. And them with people trying to kill them. But not too much! Murderers on their tracks, yes, but like kept on leach by mighty Angel having fun. Jo jo jo... I let you imagine. Enjoy. Funny Elvis lips for everybody!

  But they weren't all that bad. Especially abuelo Marcelo, and Jesus, and my cousins too. Funny how the meanest were Manuel, his sister Juli, and uncle Fernando, their little brother, the one who went to college, but not much yet during these days; more nowadays, with the years and the booze. The Spaniards drink too much. Somebody has to tell them.

  I never saw grandpa drinking too much. Just whine during the meals, and some cognac coming with the coffee in the bars; place we used to ceremoniously go, as a whole family, at least once a week, because after all, the family is reunited, and summer time is beautiful, overcoat in the countryside.

  Sometimes, when I was really little, he would let me sit in his wheelbarrow, with his giant 7 gallons, excuse my poor vocabulary, "glass bottle", when he had to go to the village's cooperative to buy wine for the household. One of these moments when you are having the time of your life.

  He worked there, at the wine cooperative, during the years before his retirement, and his painful throat cancer. I used to pay him a visit sometimes. Wine odors. Tall aluminum vats, and an universal garden hose to pour the magic beverage for the buyers.

  Before that, when I was even younger, that means the late 70's, he was one of the many Ventosilla's farm workers. I used to be sent to wait for him by grandma, in front of the monuments to the war veterans of the village, just where was the only public phone cabin of the village. He would jump off that convertible truck, with some other men from Sotillo, before the truck started again to take the rest of his load of men to another's villages. Gosh, life was beautiful in the Spanish countryside during these years. Let me sing you that song.

  They used to look like a team, the Ventosilla's workers, all of them, with their lunch bags made of deeper than navy blue fabric, their short-sleeved white shirts, their elegant berets, and their what I call Sunday trousers, since wearing these, you just have to put on Sunday shoes, a clean shirt, and poof! you are good to go to the church. This generation of men never wore blue jeans. And they used to work in the fields dressed like that. More or less shirtless I guess. Gentlemen peasants.

  The beautiful things is that you could make a decent living working as farmer, noble profession, even if it is was for a big market farm. Grandpa bought their house for 6000 pesetas. Amount looking ridiculously low in today's economy. Something like 25 dollars. And the house is still there, looking better than ever I guess, with all the ameliorations that Manuel, Jesus and Fernando, made over the years, mostly during the summers, when grandpa was getting older, and even after he passed away in 1996.

  I never saw grandma having to work for a salary. Supermarkets really do not promote commerce, that intellectual or spiritual interchange; that communion as says the dictionary. We should all cut on TV time and make grow things I think. It should be a pride in the suburbs to have one's own vegetable garden, filled with the most varied species, the rarest tomatoes, or carrots, and gilded flies, insects of all creeds, and absolutely chemicals free, all tips and secrets only, sweet science, love and happiness.

  All I know is that they had one of these gardens, but not in the very small backyard of the house, our delicious outdoors table and wood barbecue. Strangely, I never knew where he was, she never took me there. When I was really young, I just recall that she'd ask me to stay here, and to play in front of the house. She would be not that long to be back, usually with under her arm a bush of titos that she would have cut just for me, amazing delicacy. One of the summer's highlights, that hour spent eating these fresh green pearls, in front the house, sat on the floor, or on one of these so tiny wood stools, painted with a bright color, she had. Vetch bonanza. As good as pipas De la Cruz! With that difference being in the purely natural flavor, I mean salt less, since salt is in the recipe used to cook pipas (sunflower seeds turned snacks - very common in Spain), including in the ones with no extra almost rock salt added at the end, like in the ones they desperately try, sometimes, to sell by the candies here in the French bakeries, but that never becomes a success since it is way too salty. Pipas are the most simpatico drug. Every Spaniard knows that, but, God how beautiful life was when there was a bush of vetch to devour!

  I seriously don't know what we are waiting, dear reader, to be the best gardener of the suburb. Even when you start to learn that divine art late in life, you can become in just a few years such a producer. Ending up with much more than what your family and you can eat. It's such a pleasure to offer a basket of your own vegetables. To make it even funnier, a couple with a truck should be able to make a living out of it, by buying to home owners their surplus, and then by selling it all around, to the other houses, or at the farmer's market. I'd gladly give my extra vegetables for free, to the truck, to the soup kitchen, and beyond! For me who still never had the luxury to have a front or backyard garden, it looks epic. Just like grandpa. Just like the countryside of these years, when they still was very few cars in the village. And his mint row, because mint smells good he said, that he planted in front of the house. The occasional caress.

  Every now and then, a mobile shop mounted on a horse-cart would stop in our little quarter too, la bodeguilla, and the salesman would start shouting a few times about the clothes he had for sell that today. There was no telephone in the house. I would have to hurry to Firmin's house, the shepherd, to answer a phone call for us, from France! My grandparents didn't had a TV before I was between 10 and 12 years old. The toilet was a heap of straw in the backyard. After a certain time, grandpa would take his shovel and here we go: free fertilizer! Giant hands.

  Once a week, grandma would, fascinating moment, catch a rabbit in the hutch they had in what is now the barbecue. She would then rapidly do her kill by hitting him in the neck with some tool. That poor animal would now be bleeding by the nose, the mouth, and even the eyes, on the long gone mural hook, there too, terribly efficient, in this tiny walled backyard with a wooden door giving on the dirt road Behring the house, towards la bodeguilla, this other part of the village since it has it' own name, but you don't know why, since there is nothing there, but a cliff, and then the outside of the village, and that best sand playground corner ever for kids with marbles and toy cars like my cousins and I.

  Once or twice a month, I would stop by the butcher's little butcher house. Basically a garage with hooks, bigger ones
, visibly stuff for a professional, a basin, a nervous sheep, and a full blooded butcher with knives and a decent technic, there, right in the middle of the village, not hidden at all, just normal. Spectacle attracting just us the kids, busy learning all about life and death, every now and then, not really looking for it, just noticing while passing by that the butcher was going to kill a sheep, and empty him of his blood, before to, in a considerable effort, suspend her by a back foot, and then open her before frankly dipping his hands in the guts of that animal, cutting here, chopping there, entire organs! A jaw breaking show for the kittens we were. Nature.

  Grandma even had to save me from a snake a certain day. No doubt he would have bit me. I never saw him coming. And he came from by back. Significant memory when you think about it. You know, I prove that in 1999 I fought against the devil, and cleaned Tours from his presence. Quite an achievement. He didn't saw grandma in his back that day. All I know is that suddenly, behind me, grandma was hitting hard a snake on it's head with a stone. She killed him in just a few strikes. She gave him none a chance. Boom, dead! I never saw her laughing more than that day, proudly holding this now corpse, a good meter long. Authentic country hero grandma. God bless her soul for that! I was going to be completely surprised, right in front our house, in the back. What he was even doing here? And how did he managed to get among houses like that without being noticed earlier? Well, it's often nap time I guess, in summer, in Spain's villages. Total bliss with chirping birds and gentle wind passing among the trees branches included. Hey, you know what, I should do a chapter, since all this look more like a full featured novel now. Let's continue. But let's add some break made of stars, for you to decide if you should do something else now, or keep on day dreaming around these lines. See you soon.