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Saturday, September 07, 2002 Can you believe how I went on about coal in that last entry? Must not be enough going on in this little life of mine. It's 11:30 on a classically beautiful September morning. The first Saturday a.m. of September 2002. I've been up since just after seven working around the house. When I pulled myself out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen, the temperature outside stood at 40 degrees. Since then it has eased itself confidently up to 76 and continues climbing. There's been little rain in recent weeks, so the ground is dry, the grass sparse in spots, but the insects that carry on their lives in the grass and bushes are in full voice, singing twenty-four hours a day. Clothes hang on the line that stretches from the barn to the utility pole out in the yard, billowing slightly in the occasional breeze. Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me plays on the radio in the living room, a show that just seems to get funnier with the passing weeks (either that or I'm getting much easier to please). Radio: one of the few things about life in the States that I missed during my time in Madrid -- specifically, a few NPR shows (WWDTM, Car Talk, Only A Game, Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, now and then A Prairie Home Companion or Fresh Air), along with the general output of a few college stations from the Boston area. Humor, a wide range of music, no commercials. Not that Madrid lacks radio. On the contrary, cruise the dial there, you'll find a loud, lively overabundance of music, etc., but only a few outlets held my interest – one unpredictable college station right down at the bottom of the dial; Radio 3 (a government station playing a broad, progressive spectrum of music); Radio 5 (a government all-news station, great for language practice); an eccentric, wide-ranging station at 100.4 FM, owned and run by El Circulo de Bellas Artes, an arts organization which owns a large, beautiful building in the center of the city. That edifice houses one of the most beautiful cafés I've ever seen, much less spent time in, a large, sweeping space with high ceilings and high windows looking out on la Calle de Alcalá, right where Gran Vía branches off and stretches away toward Callao and La Plaza de España. Lots of motion and activity passing by, loads to watch. There is also -– one last Madrid radio note -– a strange station that calls itself Radio Olé, whose programming consists of a bizarre mix of fascinating, flamenco-based Spanish music and treacly, sentimental Spanish pop warblings (heavy on the syrupy violins). I've never heard anything quite like it. In a short while, I'm going to be stuffing my bike into the back of my car and heading off to do some back-country riding on a long dirt trail that cuts through miles of largely untraveled country, about fifteen minutes from here. The trail used to be the bed of a local branch railroad which went out of service 40 or 50 years back. At some point the tracks were pulled up, the bed began a new life as a back-country track, a route now used by bicyclists, folks out for an easy hike, and the occasional car, truck or ATV. Easy passage through some truly beautiful, mostly empty country, beginning in the town of Marshfield and stretching away for miles and miles, through the Groton State Forest, just down from a small mountain called Owl's Head. This will be second attempt to give my bicycling muscles some exercise in the last week, the first attempt having been foiled by what I'll call technical difficulties, meaning I loaded the bike into the car with the lock still on the front wheel but neglected to bring the key. (Bugger.) I went riding at this same spot one weekend in May a couple of years back when friends (Steve & Naomi) were up for a weekend. Steve drove us there, our bikes standing at attention on his rooftop rack. We parked by a teeny hunting shack in as beautiful and green a location as you could ask for. After an hour or two of biking fun, we returned to the car, began loading the bikes back up on the rack, at which time clouds of ravenous mosquitoes and blackflies began an assault of such intensity that I finally stopped helping with the racking work to take on the role of arm-flailing bug killer as S&N attempted to finish with the bikes. My bug-slapping frenzy had little effect on the overall blood loss, and the drive home featured continued bug slaughter as numerous winged plasma-sippers managed to find their way into the car before we took off. One more nice thing about bike riding: you're generally moving too quickly to become fast food for the insect world. But enough blabber. Later. rws 1:52 PM [+] |