Carlos Bousoño, one of my favorite Spanish professors, said “The face of an old person cannot lie; one’s life is stamped on the face. Sadness in wrinkles, the smiles that have been smiled, the bitterness that makes these….” He pushed the corners of his mouth down, to demonstrate. He had to push down quite hard because he had huge smile marks.

Of course, gravity has a hand in the downward trend of our faces and the inevitability of gravity’s force made Bousoño’s smile wrinkles all the more marvelous. I lived for the moments when he would be reading a poem and his mouth would twitch upward and the multiple parentheses of wrinkles at the corners of his mouth would ripple up his face and meet the happy wrinkles near the corners of his eyes. It was like watching the best kind of natural confluence, an eclipse, but it was far more frequent than eclipses are.

I thought of Bousoño after I saw some pictures of a sixty-one years old super-model who looks decades younger. I know models and actors need to maintain a certain standard of looks, but I think about the lying face. At some point, spackling your face to keep its’ settling masked is unsettling.
​
When an eighty-year old, over-filled actor tries to smile and you can almost feel his skin creaking, it hurts more than your sensibilities. Then the ease of Bousoño’s flashing smile comes to mind, and I just can’t help but smile back.

When my son was in First Grade my mom liked to help him study for spelling tests. She was a stellar speller and loved the consistency of the English language, “Learn it once and you know it all your life.”

One evening mama stood behind my son, holding his vocabulary list in one arthritic hand. He sat at the kitchen table, his pencil hovering over a blank sheet of lined paper.

“Butterfly,” she read and raised her eyebrows at me and gave a proud shake of the head that said, “Watch me teach the child!”

My son wrote carefully and looked up at his grandmother.

“Cocoon.”

My son wrote and looked up when he finished writing.

“Lava.” She smiled.

My son put his pencil to the paper but didn’t write.

“Lava,” she repeated.

My son squished his face up in concern.

“Lava, LAVA!” his grandmother repeated. She looked up at me and held her palms out to me with the vocabulary list pinched between the curves of her fingers. Her patience was wearing thin, and my son was fretting.

“Grandma…?” started my son.

“La – va.” Encouraged mama.

“No, grandma, ‘lava’ isn’t on our spelling list for this week.”

“Are you trying to trick me into letting you see the list?! No way, I know all the tricks. Lava!”

I intervened.

“Mama, let me take a look at the list.”

Butterfly, cocoon….oh…. there it was, the problem word, “larva.”

“Sweetheart, I think the word is ‘larva.’ Give that a try.”
​
With smug satisfaction, my son wrote the word, and mama put her hands on her hips, saying, with her strong Maine accent, “Well, I guess SOMEBODY will just have to speak a little more clearly.”

I asked a prominent author and screenplay writer, “How do you write accents?”

“You don’t, they’re insulting.”

My son is reading Huck Finn for school. Twain wrote what he heard and I am sure the author with whom I spoke also writes what he hears. When I was in school I was on the staff of the literary arts magazine, and we could always tell when Huck Finn was being read because a lot of dialect would suddenly show up in our submissions.

The author I spoke with is known for his authentic and vibrant dialogue. He keeps things moving. It is all quick so the audience doesn’t get bored. I think that may be a trend, too.

I recently overheard two English majors from a local university talking about the worthlessness of Pride and Prejudice.

“It is just a BORE! Nothing really happens.”

“Yeah, like, you really just want Darcy to get Elizabeth in the sack!”

“Yeah, I know! Right?”

So is the trend for fast writing? Readers do seem to crave breathless writing. Dialect, complicated exposition, and romance don’t fly, because time, the ability to concentrate, and digital screen space all seem to have shrunk.
​
I guess it’s a good time to be a blogger.

Everyone loves an award. There is a bit of magpie in all of us that is attracted to the shine and validation that a prize gives.

The other day I received a perfect attendance medal for my father. It was from some medical association for having attended the conference every year for the last twenty years.

My chest swelled with pride as I dialed the Association’s number.
​
“I wanted to thank you for the medal you sent to my father, Dr. B…..Yes. Oh, yes, I am very proud of my father, thank you very much…. just one thing, if you see him at this year’s conference could you please call me? I’d love to see him…. Oh, no, nothing like that, it’s just that he died about twelve years ago.”

I lived in Madrid in the 1980s. At that time, the city was in pure “Movida-mode,” loosening up from the pressures of the Franco era.

I was having a great time when I got the parental phone call: “Stanley’s son is going to be in Madrid. He will be calling you.”

I sniffed. My dad’s best friend’s son was maybe a decade older than I. “Sure, sure, I will meet up with him.”

When you are a recent college graduate, living in the Movida Madrileña, even a parent’s best friend’s son can be tolerated.

“You know he is a newscaster.”

“Hmmm, yeah, so? Great.”

A few days later when the phone rang and a voice as smooth, low, and reassuring as Cronkite’s flowed out of the receiver, I knew that the time had come to be a good hostess.
“Oh, so you know Madrid? Where are you staying? Yeah, okay, so let’s meet in La Plaza Santa Ana, you know where that is? Great. See you at 9.”

I was hedging my bets. Meeting up at nine was early for Spaniards, but it was a fair time for me to be polite and then ditch this guy if necessary.

We met up.  He was a great guy but for me, a dedicated mumbler, the most distinctive thing about him was his incredible voice, each word fully formed and perfectly pronounced. I could listen to this man talk all day. So we moved from place to place, tapa to tapa, beer to beer.

Finally, I could hold it in no longer, “You know, you’re really nice, but you can stop using that phony voice with me. We have known each other since we were kids. Come on, use your real voice!”
​
“But Mary,” he soothed, “this is my real voice.”

Mama could make hauling trash to the dump fun. She found fun everywhere.

As a volunteer in the hospital’s second-hand shop, she delighted in baiting a compulsive psychiatrist with over-stocked items.

“Isn’t that a bit passive-aggressive?” I asked her when she told me how the man had bought thirty ties in one day.

“Not at all. It’s, win-win: the shop gets rid of merchandise and makes more money for charity….”

When the psychiatrist had a garage sale mama insisted on going. “Just to see, NOT to buy anything!”

Mama would bait us, too, just to test our tolerance/ability to withstand pressure.

There was one particularly horrendous plate with a large daisy on it that she put out for over a year trying to see which child would cave in and accept it. I succumbed.

“Mama, just so you know, I KNOW this is bait but I am taking it anyway.”

She smiled a small smile of triumph. “Ha! Finally! I wore you out!”

I think that is why it was so sad when mama, near the end of her life, said, “I guess I am worn out, that’s all.”
​
Worn out? You, Mama? Never.

​We had a summer farmhouse up in Maine, and that is where my particular addiction took hold: riding.

Back when I was little, it was motorcycles. I would hide my sisters’ boyfriends’ motorcycle keys until one of the boys promised to give me a ride.

The passion for riding motorcycles transferred to riding horses, for both require balance and a certain determined lightness. I thought of riding constantly. During long car rides I would look out the car window and daydream about galloping next to the road, jumping whatever obstacle appeared.

When I stopped riding horses, the craving for riding motorcycles started up again.

I lived in Spain at the time when it was shaking off the vestiges of Franco’s regime, when motorcycles embodied the yearning for freedom.

My boyfriend, now husband, and I crossed Spain a few times on his motorcycle. My husband is one of the most capable and experienced riders I have ever known. In fact, I trusted him so much that I used to sleep while riding on the back of his motorcycle.

Sometimes he would pull off the road.

“Eh, wake up!  You must have been dreaming….”

“Was I starting to flop? Was I making riding too dangerous?”

“No. You are always balanced, just too relaxed. We are going to be going up through the mountains. Can you stay awake? It worries me….”
​
I promised to stay awake. He started the motorcycle and I pushed my heels down, centered my seat, and watched the world go by as we moved forward.  But I kept dreaming – just a bit.