Normal
… or what is starting to appear normal, even though it’s all new
Having a dog comes with a level of consistency that I’d forgotten about over the last couple months. Mitzi has arrived, so my days have taken on the relatively stable tick and tock of taking walks on roughly eight-hour intervals. Imagine, for example, if Bilbo Baggins had a dog. You’d have something like:
- Breakfast
- Take a stroll around the hill with the dog
- Second breakfast
- A visit from a pile of dwarves seeking to hire a burglar
- Take another stroll around the hill with the dog; have a think about these strange dwarves and their plans
- Stay up late playing host to a wizard
- Listen to puzzling songs about far-off mountains and dragons (thank you, no)
- Make one more round of the hill late that night with the dog; have another think and realize you’re being played by this wizard and his dwarf friends
- Finally get to bed after finding space for a host of dwarves and a wizard
- Wake in the morning to an urgent note about burglars. Take the dog for a walk around the hill and say good riddance to a pack of dwarves and their schemes. The end.
- See the difference? (If you don’t, go read the Hobbit again.)
This is what it kinda feels like living in a whole new place, tackling all sorts of unusual-yet-mundane tasks, and trying to decipher all of it in another language (or two). When you add a dog in, suddenly there’s a rhythm to the strangeness that makes it all feel normal.
Wake up before the sun, not because you’re a particularly early riser, but because the sun doesn’t rise until after eight o’clock. Make coffee and eat breakfast on a quaint stone terrace. There’s a breeze and it carries a faint odor of the sea. Yeah, that’s normal now. In the meantime, notice the sunrise, the aroma of flowers that permeates one corner as you walk past, the quiet roar of the waves. Normal, but not normal.
To very quickly break down our walk, I gather Mitzi’s things and head out the front door — turn the key in the lock twice, because it’s Spain. We walk down a narrow street with cobble-stone sidewalks, and turn right toward the sea. The sun is just above the clouds on the horizon, and I can just see the light glistening on waves. Normal.
We hustle a bit at this point of the walk because Mitzi is a mid-western dog with mid-western expectations — that there be at least a patch of grass to pee in. Well, we don’t really have that in Valencia, so we need to get to her favorite palm tree quickly. It’s about two short blocks away, and grows out of a hole in the sidewalk; some weeds have taken root in the sandy soil here, so Mitzi is willing to consider it ‘grass.’ Once that task is complete, we can stroll a bit, either down to the water or up the sandy part of the boardwalk. Perhaps we encounter another dog or two, and I painfully try to communicate that yes, Mitzi is big and scary looking, but no she is not aggressive. Quite the opposite in fact; she’s likely afraid of your little fluffy dog and acts a bit nervous with new ones. I’ve tried words like ‘simpatico’ and ‘tranquilo’ to help the conversation, but it often just comes across like an American weirdo who apologizes too often.
Some examples of the weird and the normal:
- One day last week, a storm came through in the evening. Some combination of the season, the storm, the tide, and other mystery factors made a host of people come out to fish, some of them all night long. See the video here panning the seashore, where a fisherman/woman had set up every twenty meters or so along the length of the beach.
- And, the following Thursday near midnight, a video of the same boardwalk and seashore, completely deserted. Perhaps the fish are gone now?
- How about a two-part video taking in this glorious sculpture in the center of a roundabout, Part 1 and Part 2. I cannot get enough of this/these dude(s) and their joy and/or contemplation of knowledge. Luckily, it’s on our bus route to Spanish class two times a week.
The weird just permeates everything, but making it regular with several daily strolls down to the sea with my dog makes the weird seem normal.
