When I first went to Spain, my initial thought was that Flamenco was too much, too emotional and dangerous, too florid, too “too”.

Today my Spanish friends left to go back to Spain after being in Rochester five years, and where did my emotions lead my Yankee heart? Right to where emotions live: flamenco.

Every Spaniard knows the song, “Algo se muere en el alma cuando un amigo se va….”, “Something dies in your soul when a friend leaves.”

“Cuando un amigo se va y va dejando una huella que no se puede borrar…” “When a friend leaves, and goes leaving prints that can’t be erased….”

“El barco se hace pequeño cuando se aleja en el mar” “The boat gets smaller as it goes farther out to sea….”

“Cuando se aleja en el mar, el barco se hace pequeño y cuando se va perdiendo que grande la soledad,” “As it goes further out to sea, it gets smaller and as it gets lost from view how enormous is the loneliness…”

“Ese vacio que deja el amigo que se va,” “That empiness that a friend leaves when they are gone.”

“”El amigo que se va es como un pozo sin fondo que no se vuelve a llenar.” “A friend who leaves is like a bottomless well that cannot be filled.”

And like the clip of these Spaniards singing and dancing, the sadness of the words and emotions is countered by the clapping, the stomping of feet, the swirling polka dot skirts. Sadness and the joy of living.

My parents celebrated their 50th Wedding Anniversary the year before I got married.

One of my sisters sidled up to me, “When you are doing the seating for your reception, make sure to give me a good table. I got kind of a boring table last year.…”

The seating arrangements for after the wedding are the most difficult part: you try to keep everyone happy. Close to impossible, but finally settled upon.

Guests filed in, seats were taken, plates were filled, a toast was given, and the eating commenced. Then, a sudden movement to my left and one long, loud, wheeze brought everyone’s eyes to the far side of the room, where one guest suddenly stood and vomited an impressive column of bright yellow commotion. It was horizontal; the force was so strong.

Now, there were at least nine guests in the room who were doctors. They were glued to their chairs. Another column was produced. The crowd was transfixed. Finally, my uncle got up and helped the gentleman to the men’s room. They came back a bit later, my uncle paused and whispered in my ear “It was the chicken. It was a little dry. Everything is okay, now.” I kissed his cheek in thanks.

Yeah, my sister could say a lot of things. But she could not say her table was boring.

When you have just had a good brush-off, you need a friend to help you through.

“And he KEPT calling me, ‘hun’, and he thought $3,000 was way too little! What do you make of that?” I vented at my friend, José Luis. “Then I went to the shop on Velazquez and the lady stood behind me and pulled my bra-straps back and nearly shouted, ‘you need to make your breasts perkier!’ She almost maimed me! What type of shop-owner does that?!”

José Luis looked at me with blue laser focus. He sat back in his chair, tilted his head to the left, and eyed my breasts, “Were you wearing the same bra? You probably could use a different bra. I don’t think you are doing yourself any favors with that one. Now, do you know what you want in a dress?”

“Something normal, not puffy. I am so short I would look like a mushroom if I wore anything puffy.”

“Good. White? Ivory? Cream? Ecru? Blush?”

“God! How do I know? Something that looks decent on me and doesn’t make me look silly.”

“I am glad you have given this so much thought. Listen, I just did a music video and my costume designer was fantastic. Why don’t you call him?”

So, I called Juan and his partner Cristian. We met and had some beers and looked through the stack of wedding magazines my colleague had given. We looked at dress details that we liked, and critiqued my figure. They ended up making me two dresses, a test dress in black and the wedding dress in cream. They did not cost $3,000.

Back when I wrote research for an investment firm in Madrid, I shared my office with a brilliant and lovely woman who was from a very old and very important Spanish family.

When she heard I was engaged she brought in copies of Vogue Novias.  One issue featured her in her wedding dress.

“You have to use my designer! He will make you the perfect dress!” She was already dialing her designer’s phone number before I could answer. “You are going to LOVE him. Very kind. Very nice…” someone answered the phone and she enthused to the person, “…yes, she is American, but she is marrying a Spaniard.” She covered the mouth of the phone and whispered to me, “Where? Where are you getting married…?” I mouthed back, “The United States.” She nodded and continued, “Well, but, no, she will not be getting married here in Spain. There, she will be married there in the US….right, right, well, let me pass you to her…right, thank you and I will come in to look at that pant suit, right, ciao, here she is!” and the warm receiver was passed into my hand while she made an excited gesture with her other hand. A gesture that said, “There! I have fixed everything!”

“Hello….” I said tentatively.

“¡Hola, niña! How are you? You must be so excited! Let’s see, so, congratulations, and you will be getting married in the United States? In what month, hun?”

 “Um, right, delighted to meet you, um, the summer, we are getting married in the summer.”

“¡Muuuy bien! Summer. Very romantic! But, before you tell me anymore, hun, just how much are you thinking on spending on your dress?”

I hadn’t really even thought of that. I was not a woman who had dreamt of a fancy wedding let alone thought of putting a price tag on it. My colleague was listening; I had some face to save.

“Oh, about $3,000….” I hedged rather proud that I had come up with a figure. There was no way in Hades I was spending three grand on a dumb dress, but there it was…

“Oh! – Oh! Oh…$3,000? NO love, no, hun, for that price I can’t do anything for you. No, no, nothing at all. No! For that price you are going to have to go to a ready-made shop. Look, there is an all right one on Velazquez Street. All right? Well, nice talking to you, ciao.”

“Gracias for everything. Ciao.” I said into the receiver. The designer had already hung up.

“Well?! What did he say?”

“He suggested I go to a shop on Velazquez – hun – we are not in the same league!”

Brushes with fame don’t always happen when you meet someone famous. When I studied in Poland way back in 1985, I had a group of people come up to me saying, “Annie? Annie?” I have no sisters named “Anne” or “Annie,” so this stumped me until one guy held out a pen and a slip of paper and pointed at my shorn copper hair and asked, “Annie Len-nox?”

Once the words were out of his mouth, he knew that I was not the woman he thought I was.

A few years ago, in the express lane at Wegman’s grocery store, the teenage clerk suddenly stopped scanning my toilet paper.

“Oh! My! God! You are….” Her voice went from deep to shrill, and I was waiting to hear what she was going to say.  “YOU. ARE! Aren’t you?”

Was she questioning my being? I looked down at myself. No stain on my shirt. I didn’t look pregnant. So I kind of nodded my question at her and shook my head.

“I am….?”

“YOU are Hilary Clinton, aren’t you?!!!” Oh, my God, just wait ‘til my parents hear!” And she looked at what I was buying, as if she would get more bang for her own bucks from the knowledge that Hilary Clinton had bought Coca-Cola, toilet paper, and milk.

She was almost shrieking, “Hillary!” People had turned to stare at me, and for a second I had a flash of what celebrity must be: a total lack of being able to buy toilet paper in peace.

It’s true Hilary Clinton had been in the area, and her picture had been plastered everywhere, but it is also true that she is more than fifteen years older than I am.

To stop the eyes and the shrieking, I lowered my voice.

“If I am Hilary Clinton, where are my bodyguards? And why would I be buying toilet paper and a gallon of milk? I am just a mom.”

“Hillary is a mom!”

I couldn’t argue.

“No, really, want to see ID?’

“You could have a fake.”

“Okay….hey, what high school do you go to?” She waffled a minute and then told me. Pay dirt! My sister teaches at that school.  I asked “Do you take any languages?”

She must have thought it was some sort of interview, so she primly answered, “Yes, French.”

“Good, the language of diplomacy. My sister teaches French, you must know Madame G…..?”

“Oh, you kind of look like Madame….So, like you’re not Hilary Clinton?”

“Nope, sorry, I am just me. I am Madame’s younger sister, that’s all.”

And I left Wegman’s with my Coca-Cola, my toilet paper, and my gallon of milk, and I was very happy to be just me. 

My four older sisters have beautiful long names. When they started school those beautiful long names got shortened to fit the teachers’ mouths, “You can’t have a long first name and a long last name!” they scolded, as though we had picked our last name.

Now that we have all reached a certain age, the nicknaming is useful for identifying people.  Anyone who calls one of my sisters by her nickname has to have known her during her school days, because no one would dare call any of my sisters by her nickname.

One night I was out and I heard a joyful, “Krissy!”

I kept drinking.  A hand dropped on my shoulder and spun me around.

“Hey, Krissy!  Krissy Brzustowicz! I would know you anywhere!”

“Right,” I said, “I am Mary.”

Dexter was my parent’s oversized poodle. To keep the house running smoothly, our mom would occasionally hold eating competitions, allowing Dexter to compete. It was a good tactic to focus four teenagers’ angst on a “safe” objective (as long as your mouth wasn’t the one being stuffed with food…) and to get us working together on a project. I guess she was really an early proponent of team-building.

Well, Mama usually beat Dexter, out of a sense of pure pride and an uncanny ability to consume junk food.  Dexter was a spoiled dog. He would charge into an eat-off with Mama and then feign fussiness.

Our father insisted that “poor Old Dex” eat before the family sat down to dinner. Dexter would wait until our father put his finger in the can of Alpo and begged the dog to eat. Dexter thought this was a grand game and thoroughly enjoyed having Dr. B. getting down on all fours and pretending to be interested in the dog food. Dexter was a true ham actor: his timing was incomparable, his sense of humor mildly cruel.

If eating at our house was an adventure, eating at a friend’s house was often a lesson in patience.

I adored spending Friday nights at my friend’s house, but every Friday night, my friend’s family ate tuna casserole. I hated tuna, but I knew that the next day, my friend’s dad would make pancakes. It was an early version of that marshmallow test for delaying gratification.

Then there was my sister, who had a friend whose parents wouldn’t let her have junk food so my sister’s friend had a safe full of Fritos and Oreos in her room.

When one of my older brothers was little, he had a friend over. Mama started cooking dinner.

“What’s your mom cooking? It sure does smell good!”

“My mama doesn’t cook, she just opens.”

“Well, d’you think I could eat over here tonight?”

“Sure, she’ll never notice one more, you just sit next to me.”

Well, Mama, to her credit, noticed that Bobby was another body at the table. She did enjoy having lots of people at the dinner table.

After my father said the blessing, everyone dug in. Bobby set his fork down with a firmness much greater than his years.

“Boy, it sure did smell good, but, boy, it sure don’t taste good!”

“Amy has better snacks than you, anyway,” my son smiled as he slammed the car door and sauntered toward his tutor’s house.

“Ingrate!” I smarted and then, “Clever lad! He knows right where my soft spot is!”

As a mother, it is reassuring as well as annoying to realize that your children have learned to push your buttons. It shows that they have been paying attention. My obvious Achilles’ tendon would have to do with food. I pride myself on, if not making treats, buying them.

With this thought skittering around my brain, I turned the corner toward our house and noticed that the roll of Ritz crackers I had brought as a tutoring snack had disappeared: it had been carried off by a wily and hungry lad.

This story is for my friend. We met in kindergarten and he would have been 51 today. Besides being a fabulous father to his son and an amazing person, he is the only human I know who ever beat one of my mom’s eating records.

That rainy summer of taste tests and eating challenges in Maine had included a diabolical game called “How Many Hershey kisses can you stuff in your mouth?” It sounds easy, but just wait for the chocolate to start melting and globbing up in the back of your throat. Choking was a very real danger, “Don’t worry!” Mama would encourage, “I am a registered nurse! Try for sixteen!”

It was some dreary season in Rochester and the boredom couldn’t be undone even in the office of the literary arts magazine of our high school. Randomness was the norm for us but even so, this day was dragging. My older sister mentioned the Hershey Kiss contest.

“Wait! I have some free mods*! I will get some Kisses at the drugstore!” True to his word, Stevie was off and back before his free mods were over. He seated himself in the chair someone had dragged up from the curb and then covered with silver contact paper.

“Brzustowicz!” my friend commanded, “Unwrap those Kisses! I have a record to break.”

My sister was worried, “It is really hard. I stopped at 16. I couldn’t get any more in my mouth without gagging.”

He stared us both down, and used our mother’s logic on us, “What? You two afraid? You are both doctors’ daughters! Come on! Get unwrapping!”

My sister and I looked at each other and unwrapped. The office started filling up with people who wanted to see the challenge. I got worried, what if he really started gagging? I knew my sister was thinking the same thing as I saw her mouthing first aid instructions.

Stevie urged us on, “Come on, I have class at 2:06! Let’s start!”

So, we began. The office wasn’t all that big, maybe the size of a freight elevator. There were about eight spectators when we started placing the Hersey Kisses back near Stevie’s molars. He was all business, eyes focused, little nods of his head to encourage us to keep placing the Kisses in his mouth. We took turns inserting the chocolates in his mouth. We counted out loud as we placed. The room counted with us. Stevie stayed focused, his eyes going past the paper maché bust of George Washington that sat on top of a gray metal filing cabinet.

He motioned for more. Chocolate drool started to form at the corners of his mouth. At the twenty-second Kiss a tremendous hawking noise came out of him, but he kept on. Twenty-two had been my mother’s record. Stevie was like Secretariat in the backstretch of the Belmont Stakes, half a track ahead of the competition.

 My sister mouthed first aid procedures for choking (The first instruction should have been, “Do not place more chocolate in the choking victims’ mouth…”)

There were now about twelve spectators chanting, “25…….26…..27…..” Stevie’s eyes said it all, “Just one more!”

“28!”

Now the extraction. This was possibly the most horrid part of the whole contest: watching as chocolate goo and saliva came out of an overstretched mouth and into a plastic bag.

“Twenty-eight!” Stevie rejoiced, “THAT is a record that will last!”

And it has.

*Our school day was broken up into eighteen minute increments. A typical class was three mods long. A large group presentation was two mods, and science labs were four mods.