To Capture Something Ineffable

 

We have just entered the province of Cordoba en route to the city of the same name.  It’s a bit greener than La Mancha, there are more hills, it appears to get a bit more rain, but still, it is olive groves for as far as the eye can see.  Olive groves and scrub bushes and half-hearted industry.  My wife just slowed the car.  There was fire up ahead.  Could it be a forest fire?  Had a car crashed?  No.  They were just burning out weeds in the meridian of the highway.  Reluctantly you wax nostalgic about the normalcy of U.S. highways.

 

Mateo Fletcha has no connection I believe to my alma mater, the Fletcher School, though that is how you’d likely pronounce  the name there, in Medfah.  We are crossing Andalucía listening to this sixteenth century Spanish guitar.  We are digesting our late afternoon meal, adusting to the fact that dinner won’t be till at least 9:00PM or so.  Apparently, the public parking in Cordoba is only a short walk to the Airbnb there in the same city.  Slowly, we’re getting back into the rhythm of luggage and check ins.  Yesterday we got in remembered that in order to plug things into the wall we’d need physical adaptors which we rushed out to buy.  So rusty.

This morning we saw El Greco, in the scarcity of the Toledo cathedral.  Then we went to a museum built on what they’d thought was his home but later turned out not to be.  Grey, certainly, illuminated, I was intrigued to learn that he used people with mental health issues as his subjects to capture something ineffable.  Elongated faces and digits they wondered if El Greco’s vision notably was compromised.   Next door to what wasn’t his house was a lovely Synagogue which we took a walk through as well.  But it’s about one hundred and ten degrees in Toldedo just now and it was 2:00PM when every sane person was enjoying a siesta when we took the long trot back up over the hill to where it was we were staying. 

 

If I call a cab, will they know where to come?  If I explain, will I make sense?  Will I be able to clarify where we are going with any conviction?  It all went off without a hitch though I’d fretted about it before hand.  At lunch my older daughter asked me to explain what I knew about Afghanistan.  I told her what I could.  I suggested it was best that the U.S. ended this twenty year war.  But she felt ill at ease, vacationing when so many people were confronting terror.  She’s right, of course.  “Was this the beginning of another genocide?”, she asked.  She mentioned that there was a way to donate raise to help people.  It is the least we could do. 

 

We will be arriving in Cordoba in five minutes.  It’s best if I put this computer away. 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 08/17/21