We spent a few hours yesterday in a café-bar in Pamplona.  The woman tending bar there thought I looked like a certain actor.  I left to get a haircut.  Several places offered them for 30 Euros, but I found one that was available for only 18 if you were willing to get your cheek cut with a razor.  When I got back to the bar, the bartender said, “You are very handsome today.”  Today.  Mom thought this was just grand.

Morning, Zubiri.  Is it really necessary that pilgrimages begin before first light?  I can just as well do my penance in daylight.

“Well,” said Julio, from his bed, “there was no concert,” said Julio, “last night.”

“Oh yes there was,” Mom said.  “David and my son.  My son snored all night.  I was hoping someone would adopt him.”

An ever-smiling woman from Salt Lake, Lela, heard of my mother’s struggles to get some healthy food and handed her some packets of greenness, some kind of dietary supplement.  She refused to take payment.  She asked to see the calf.

“Got some mental blocks today, eh?”  She was under the impression that my calf issue was, in addition to being psychosomatic, something new.

“If I’ve got mental problems they pre-date today,” I said.  “But I was very handsome yesterday.”

She began to massage the calf.  “Oh, it’s very hot,” she said.  “You do have some inflammation there.”  After a bit, she hugged and kissed Mom, saying, “You’re so cool!” and took her pack and was off.  I don’t think she had stopped smiling since the day before.

We said goodbye to the turtles in the pond, to the grounds of the albergue in some disrepair, and the hopeful, half-finished second-floor addition that had been interrupted when the Jesus y Maria albergue in nearby Pamplona came about.  And then we left Cizur Menor.

Stiff and tender.  The left calf, of course, and now a flash of pain in whatever that part of the foot is called that’s at the very top.  Thankfully it was on the same foot, so one limp took care of both of them.  So I had that going for me.  We had 19 kilometers to cover.

It was beautiful country.  It put me in mind of both Northern California and Tuscany.  Once again we were blessed by the weather gods.  Stick, stick, stick.  I did some walking meditation as I’d learned it from the Shambhala Center in Portland, attending to the feeling of the feet hitting the ground, the way they rolled, the feel in my ankles and knees and hips.  It was good.

“Walking into the future”.  A nice thought, that of walking toward Santiago and arriving in my future – with firmer ideas of where

I’d live, for example, and what writing projects I might do — but it’s still just a story, not a reality.  I have thought many times that I have seen or felt the last of something, or someone, and been wrong.  For example, coming here I thought certain things were behind me.  But there last night, defeating all storylines, was an email from someone who shall remain nameless, declaring me responsible for all the bad that had happened in the world in the last half-century, with the possible exceptions of the Kennedy assassinations, the modern concept of jihad, and U.S. representative Michelle Bachmann.

So sometimes I was not in the present, the only place joy is found.  Sometimes I was in the past, and at others, I was in the future.

Ungrateful . . . take responsibility . . . victim . . . ow . . . foot . . . get those personality disorders under control . . . hungry . . . interesting landscape . . . wind turbines . . . like north of San Francisco . . . OKCupid . . .  New York . . . thirsty . . . chocolate . . .

Mom sang German lullabyes.  I filmed one of them.  “I used to sing that when you were young,” she said.  “Before I started yelling.”

“Ah, you didn’t yell that much.”

“I know.  I was just always so stressed out.  I always wanted it to be later on so I couldn’t be in the moment.  ‘If it was only ten years from now,’ I’d say.  Now I’d do anything to get those years back.”  Stick, stick, stick.  “But I could never have imagined in a million years I’d be here.”  She then gave thanks to her beloved brother Gunter, now deceased fourteen years, and his wife Elfriede.  “Because Gunter earned it, and Elfriede saved it and then passed some of it on to me when she left.”

 

I asked Julio about women.

“Well,” he said, as if approaching a subject of some enormity.  “I am using –“ he stopped and searched for a word.  “I have been using—“

“In English we say hookers,” I prompted.

“No, not hookers.  That was in Cuba.  Recently I put an advertisement for someone to travel around the world.  For one year.  Man or woman.  Most of the responses I received were from women.  And they were not so interested in traveling as in finding a husband.  So that’s that.  Maybe I will try again.”

“But what about dating?”

“I tried twice and it did not work.”

“I don’t mean Marie Anne.  Dating now.”

What he said was complicated, but it seemed to involve his lack of interest in women who either spent all day before the mirror or wanted men to repay several hundred years of chauvinism immediately.  “And when they start talking about a family I go the other way,” he said.

“Do you think you could be what we call a commitment-phobe, Julio?”

“Maybe,” he said.  “It could be.”

“I used to think I was.  I thought the solution would be to get married.”

“Of course,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

 

Puente La Reina.  The public albergue charges only 4 euros, and we sleep in rooms of eight.  I met a social worker from Tel Aviv, Schlomit, who had heard of the Camino only two months ago, a young Brit, Jethro, who’s been walking for three months, from Britain, and an Italian, Marco, who runs a hostel in southern Brazil.  Mom and I explained to Jethro that English accents make everything sound more intelligent and more funny.  And he was in fact quite witty.  He said he was out of money, so I invited him to join us for dinner with the understanding that he would entertain.  He didn’t disappoint. Marie Anne had somehow turned rice and mushrooms and other ingredients into something like a great risotto.  Marco also joined us for dinner.  He and Jethro and I watched YouTube videos of James Brown, and then we all went to bed.

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