Rain moved in late yesterday afternoon, and with it an easing off of Madrid's recent cold snap. Something I'm sure the locals appreciate. I spent a couple of hours with a Spanish friend last night -- the two of us meeting at a Starbucks located midway between his workplace and here, talking half the time in English, half the time in Spanish. Both of us agreeing that we'd been given pretty bad coffee, deciding next time we'd go to a nearby cervezerÃa, get a good glass of Spanish beer, maybe some tapas. During the conversation, I brought up the cold spell, the local reaction to it, the fact that I thought it had been beautiful December weather. [See yesterday's entry.] He essentially laughed at everything I came out with on that subject, especially the idea of the weather being enjoyable. Pretty much said it all, I think, as far as the local reaction to cold weather
Got myself up and out to the gym this morning, like the good boy I am. Post-sweaty suffering, I retired to one of the two rooms the gym uses for classes of various kinds (Estudio 2 -- it's not just a studio, it's an estudio!) to stretch, etc. As I'm doing so, a 20-something woman entered -- slender, long black hair, attractive. She put some orchestral music on the room's small stereo, began doing tai chi, going through long sequences of slow, graceful movement. There was something strangely familiar about her, I finally realized she bore an uncanny resemblance to a friend of mine from the Cambridge/Boston area, a smart, attractive woman named Bev. Examining her face, I could see it clearly was someone else, someone I didn't know. When I returned to what I was doing -- glancing at her from time to time, aware of her reflection moving slowly in the mirrors that cover three walls of the studio -- I experienced the repeated, disorienting sensation of being around a friend I knew for a fact was thousands of miles away.
Her outfit: a red short-sleeved top, black sweat pants, dark socks. The pants, I noticed, were emblazoned with words, three words printed in a gentle curve across the woman's butt, reading ALMA Y CUERPO -- soul and body. I tried not to study her butt too excessively.
Later, emerging from the Metro here in Chueca, making the short walk home, I found that work on the building across the street had gone abruptly into high gear after several days of relative quiet. The truck with the crane was back [see entry of Nov. 25], parked in the narrow street in front of my building, shutting down local traffic. Across from me, the girders for the uppermost floor of the building are being put into place. The first step in wiping out of some of my view, a prospect which I confess gets me down if I dwell on it.
I've enjoyed the view I've had of neighborhood rooftops, I've liked being able to see the outer edges of some beautiful sunsets. I've been fortunate compared with people on the floors below me -- as the new building's gone up, they've lost more and more of the day's light. I won't lose much actual daylight, just a portion of the vista I've been fortunate enough to have out my windows.
Ah, well. Everything changes. I'm still situated here in the heart of a great neighborhood, one overflowing with energy and activity and people to watch. Still planted in the middle of a city I love.
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Postcard from Vermont --
Part of a recent email from a friend in Montpelier who works with the ski patrol at a large northern Vermont ski area:
"Do you know what graupel is? It's a kind of snow, like little white ball bearings, usually whipped around by high winds. It happens particularly when fronts collide and when temperatures drop suddenly. I was bombarded by graupel this afternoon, as I walked around town doing errands. Five minutes later, the sun was shining. But it's cold, cold, cold tonight.
"A story I forgot to tell you the other day: Though there was little snow on the slopes on Saturday, there was a skim of it on the road as I left, enough to send quite a few cars skidding off the road. The [mountain's] access road is long and steep and features a wicked S-curve about a quarter of the way down. I made it through that curve, but not without some significant fishtailing. Conditions were as bad as I've ever seen that section of road, slick and greasy with an underlying sheen of ice, and I came at it a bit too fast. I managed to ride out the skid in the classic way, steering the direction of the skid (with gratitude to my race-car driving dad, who taught me in a snowy parking lot).
"I'd picked up a hitchhiker on my way down, an eccentric, bearded character known as Callahan who works on the mountain, in the summer wielding a scythe to clear the sections of trail that are too steep to be done mechanically, and in the winter as a lift attendant. 'Lift-rats' are the lowest on the totem pole and he could do better, but chooses to spend his days in a tiny shack at the top of the quad, riding a stationary bike for hours as he watches over disembarking skiers. Callahan is legendary for the hair-raising ski trails he cuts in the backcountry -- and also for the fact that in summer, dressed in jeans and hiking boots, he rides his mountain bike up the access road every day, carrying a backpack full of 100 pounds of rocks. (The rocks may be apocryphal, but I've seen him riding many times.) He's not training for anything, he just likes to do it. Anyway, I think Callahan's knuckles might have been a little white as I skidded through that turn, muttering, 'Whoa, whoa, don't worry, we're okay, I got it!'
"I hope that's the worst trip this winter, though I heard later that there was some pavement resurfacing at that spot this summer that may have left it permanently slick."
rws 7:41 AM [+]