SOCIAL NETWORKINGIn the days before email, we used to compose handwritten letters and stuff them in envelopes and affix glue-backed stamps and carefully print the recipients' postal addresses in the correct format.
About 16 years ago, I got my first email address at the University of Washington. I virtually stopped writing letters at that moment, and my circle of correspondence became synonymous with my online email address book. We early adopters of the burgeoning email system were excited to realize that we could stay in touch with people we otherwise would likely have stopped exchanging handwritten letters.
The only problem with this evolutionary communication transition was that I immediately lost contact with all my prior correspondents who did not yet have access to email! I simply stopped writing to people whom I could not contact
via the comfort of my keyboard and without the nuisance of postage stamps.
The most unfortunate casualty in my failure to bridge my pre- and post-internet correspondence absolutely has to be the host family in Spain with whom I lived during my junior year of high school as an exchange student. I spent the academic year of 1990-91 living in their home, eating their food, and generally being a loved, intimate member of their family and community. I only infrequently wrote to them after I came home, and called them a handful of times, but as my Spanish language skills deteriorated, my letter-writing and phone-calling crawled to a halt. And then email came along, and buried any hope of me staying in touch with them.
In the past decade, I've done the occasional Google-stalking to see if I could locate any of my friends in Spain; unfortunately, their internet footprint had not yet been fully established and Google-able, and I was also handicapped by the fact that everyone in Spain basically has the same small set of first and last names. I very much wished that I could just find an online directory of people I used to know, and send them a friendly electronic "Hello".
But I didn't try very hard. I still felt the painful self-consciousness of my poor Spanish skills, and with every passing year I also grew more cognizant of my ongoing negligence in staying in touch with those people in the first place! Simply, I was embarrassed and ashamed. And lazy.
Very recently, I have come to ponder on my time in Spain and to consider my above-mentioned negligence. I am acutely aware, now, of how immature and rude I must have acted in my adolescence towards lovely people who extended profound gifts of compassion and goodwill towards this American teenager. (I suppose adolescents in general are pretty rude and immature, but I am speaking particularly in this case about myself, and about my exchange student host family). As a 16 year old kid, I'm certain I did not express a level of gratitude anywhere near what was called for in that scenario. I was welcomed into their home and supported through a difficult time. That year provided a profound life-shaping experience for me and I have wonderful memories of my time there.
I feel badly that I did not have the maturity or language skills as a 16 year old to express my gratitude to the folks in Santa Coloma de Queralt while I was there; as I've emotionally matured (somewhat) in the years since my adolescence, I feel the double pain of understanding finally how much I owe them and how very little I've done to express myself to them, while every year losing more and more my ability to state these feelings in human language terms they will understand. I could expound here on my blog, but that doesn't do them any good. I doubt they have successfully Google-stalked me; even if they had, their English is probably worse than my Spanish!
The small village of Santa Coloma de Queralt in northeastern Spain is a tiny community of about 2,500 people. It is, if I recall correctly, about a 2 hour drive inland from Barcelona. This area of Spain is called "
Catalunya" and boasts a rich cultural and linguistic heritage. The Catalans have their own distinct Romance language, on equal linguistic evolutionary footing as Spanish, Italian and French. In fact, it was much to my dismay to discover that my two years of high school Spanish would prove almost worthless! Everyone in Catalunya speaks Catalan, and only begrudgingly speaks Spanish if necessary. I liken Catalunya to Quebec. They even have their own government -- "L'Ajuntament de Catalunya".
I was also initially a bit dismayed to find myself in a tiny farming village. In time, however, I grew to realize that the smaller a town one lives in, the greater number of people one gets to know. (Fellow exchange students in neighboring cities helped me verify this theory of inverse proportionality). By the time I left town to return to the United States, I'm pretty sure I had met every one of those 2,500 people! They all certainly knew who I was, because I was the oddly dressed tallish boy with apple pie cheeks. Also I had a funny name. My name became even funnier when I realized people referred to me as "The Max". The Catalan language employs a definite article when referring to the proper name of a person. Thus, "La Marta", "El Josep", "La Silvia", and so on. I became "El Max". My last name befuddled them as well. In Latin countries, people's last names are very descriptive of their genealogy. They have two last names: their patronymic followed by their matronymic. Thus, if a guy named "Juan" has a father whose last name is "Perez" and a mother whose name is "Garcia", then Juan's full name would be "Juan Perez Garcia". Everyone thus knows who Juan's parents are immediately. I only have one last name, so they thought I must not have a mother. Even more confusing, my MIDDLE name is, in fact, my mother's last name. I eventually reversed the order of my middle/last names so that people would stop being confused; I became known as "El Max Booher Clark". My name looked really funny on the school roster.
Being somewhat precocious, in spite of my above mentioned adolescent immaturity, I became friends with several adults in the community. The one-man post office was a tiny room where I spent a lot of time hanging out. I can't remember the postman's name, but I visited him probably daily, seeking letters from home or posting my own. He would occasionally flag me down in the street to let me know a package or letter had arrived. He was a hardworking soul, with a wife and a couple small children. One time he took me to meet them and he showed me his various collections and hobbies.
Likewise, the barber (actually there were two barbers in the village, but I'm sure I didn't know the other one well) became a friend, as I stopped in the barbershop to chat with him frequently. Of course he, as most people there, peppered me with questions (and, mostly, opinions) about America and our government's policies. It just so happened that I was in Spain during the Gulf War of 1991, so I got to experience a bit of palpable anti-Americanism. Because of the close-knit community, I felt safe and was not directly vilified or attacked.
The owner of the local electronics store was a hardworking friendly man named Joan Pontnou ("Joan" in Catalan is not pronounced like the female name "Joan" as in "Joan of Arc"; rather, "Joan" is the Catalan version of "Juan" and is pronounced as two syllables: "Joe" = "Awn"). I remember his name because his electronics shop bore his name and was located virtually across the street from where I lived. I bought lots of batteries from him that year. He frequently invited me over to dinner and I got to know his wife and small children. In fact, he actually let me camp out in his living room so I could watch his satellite-dish equipped televison and see the 1991 Rose Bowl. From a tiny hamlet in northeastern Spain, I watched the UW Huskies beat the Iowa Hawkeyes 46-34 in Pasadena, California. I watched it in real-time, so it was the middle of the night where I was. He understood my interest in the game, once I likened it to the European Cup, a wildly popular soccer championship.
The mayor (el Alcalde) in Santa Coloma was a tall red-headed man, who looked more like a Viking than a Spaniard. (Generally, the complexion of the Catalans is more Continental than Mediterranean). He, too, was a frequent interlocutor of mine. I can't remember his name now, but I can picture his face perfectly.
A neighbor of the mayor's, and a not-so-distant relative of my host family's, was a boy my age named Sergi Mullerat Segura. Sergi was a small, wispy lad with short-cropped hair, a huge intellect, sharp wit, and an amazing capacity for amiability and verbal charm. (Many years later Sergi would serve as my mental image of the title character while I read John Irving's
A Prayer for Owen Meany). Sergi also attended school outside the village so I only saw him on weekends, but he proved to be a good friend and soulmate. His cousin David Segura was also a dear friend who perished a couple years later in a car crash.
On the street where I lived, there was a grade school (called "Collegi Mare de Déu del Carme") run by a group of Catholic Nuns. As soon as the head nun heard there was an American teenager living in town, she asked if I'd be willing to teach English as an extracurricular class to the kindergartners and sixth graders. Of course I agreed, not quite understanding what I was getting into! My initial session with the 5 year olds nearly crushed my will to live, but the sixth graders were a fun group and I continued to do weekly evening sessions with them throughout that year, and I learned a lot from them as well. (In fact, I probably learned more Catalan and Spanish from those 12 year old kids than they learned English from me; I kept telling them NOT to imitate my poor American English accent).
At the grade school I met a 4th grade teacher who took compassion on me and helped me out a bit with the kids; also, she helped me out a ton in many other ways as well, by providing all sorts of maternal advice which I desperately needed, being a teenager in a foreign country. She had 3 lovely daughters, towards the eldest of whom I made a series of severely awkward attempts at flirting. She (the daughter) politely rejected my amorous interest, but became a very solid friend and remained one of the very few people I actually did correspond with in the few years after I came home. Her mother and I also exchanged a few letters, but... email came along and ruined everything.
I had the opportunity to know the various captains of local industry, including the owners of the local ironworks facility and several construction and manufacturing companies. Business owners in town always had an open door and welcomed my business (when and where appropriate, which was rare: the post office, the barber, the electronics shop and the photo development facility) and always seized the opportunity to engage me in conversation. Often the "conversation" consisted of me listening to a lecture on the evils of American imperialism, but typically they simply wanted to talk about what everyone in a small town likes to talk about: each other.
This was old, old country. I used to borrow a ten-speed bicycle and
ride out into the surrounding farmland on Sunday mornings, where I would encounter
10th and 11th century Visigothic castle ruins -- everywhere! It was stunning to me to see such old relics, crumbling next to a hop farm with a tractor parked in front of the old castle. I never tired of the beautiful countryside surrounding Santa Coloma, and wished I could drive around in a car and see a bit more.
Here is a picture of the Castell de Queralt:
Speaking of seeing a bit more: I got out of Spain on three occasions. The first was for a skip trip to Andorra, which is that tiny "country" sitting between Spain and France. Their "mountains" were charming and it was fun to ski in a truly multi-national location. I was intrigued by the sound of German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, etc. everywhere.
The second time I left Spain was on a long road trip to a small mountain village in Switzerland, whose name I can't remember now. My host father, Josep Pomes Noguera, owned a large textile factory and he had purchased a fancy new ribbon-making machine, basically a glorified, computer controlled sewing machine. However, he was struggling with how to make it work properly, so he decided to drive to the manufacturing facility where the machine was made, and learn from the technicians the proper methods and settings. He didn't speak German or English, and the Swiss techs didn't know Spanish or Catalan, but he felt that he could learn something anyway. I was invited along and was excited to see the French countryside and the hills of Switzerland. I was pressed into duty, however, and became a de facto translator. It was fun! I got to try to understand what the Swiss engineers were telling me in English (and they used lots of technical jargon) and I had to translate this into Spanish for Josep's benefit. I'm not sure how much help I provided, after all was said and done. But I sure felt useful -- maybe for the first and only time in my life.
In the spring, near the end of the school year, my class took a long bus trip vacation to Italy, and I got to go along! I got to see Monaco, then all the popular destinations in Italy: Venice, Florence, Padua, Pisa, Rome. I got to tour the Coliseum, the Vatican, the Catacombs, the canals of Venice, and see the Sistine Chapel and David. It was the trip of a lifetime! My two weeks' worth of experiences on that trip are worthy of a separate blog post, so I'll defer any further description.
But what of my host family, specifically? They were lovely people with enormous hearts. The father, Josep Pomes Noguera, was about the same age as my own father and had a great sense of humor and we often talked politics, sports, and the like. His wife's name was "Neus" (last name "Roset") which I think was the Catalan version of "Nieves", which means "Snow". They had two children: a daughter named Silvia who was about 5 or 6 years older than me, and a son who was about my age, maybe a few months older, also named Josep. (Of course, his full name was Josep Pomes Roset). I actually didn't get to spend that much time with either Silvia or Josep since both were attending schools somewhere outside the village, and they only came home on weekends. The elder Josep's father was still alive and lived in the house with us; his name was also Josep Pomes (Pont) and he was in his 80's or 90's during this time period. He was a fascinating old man with stories as large as his opinions. I was intrigued by his knowledge of, and involvement in, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. The Spanish Civil War is an almost forgotten war, obscured by the early rumblings of World War II. (George Orwell wrote an excellent first-person account of it in his
Homage to Catalunya). There were 3 factions in the civil war: the Royalists (representing the monarchy), the Fascists (aligned ideologically with Hitler and Mussolini, and politely referred to as the "Nationalists"), and the Republicans (or "Loyalists", who were more left-leaning). It was a brutal war. Josep had been a POW during the war, and didn't often like to talk about it, and I was just barely smart enough to know not to talk to him about it too much. His father Josep Pomes Valls had built the original textile factory there in Santa Coloma in 1922. His trademark ribbon contained an image of apples. "Pomes" in Catalan means "Apples". The Spanish language version of this word would be "Manzanas". Josep's current website, which I just discovered the other day, is located
here.
I found Josep's company's website very recently during my latest attempt at Googling him. First, I found that the local government of Santa Coloma de Queralt has their own website,
here.
I discovered that Silvia Pomes is now something like an assistant Mayor, or vice Mayor. My old friend Sergi Mullerat Segura is also some sort of official in the government.
From a link in their pages, I found
Las Manzanas dot com! And now I have an email address, and I am going to email Josep.
As soon as I can figure out how to write something meaningful in Spanish. Or Catalan.
How does one say "I'm sorry for being a negligent, irrespectful, ungrateful person"? It's hard enough in English. I can't believe it's been around 15 years since I've had contact with them. It is high time to close the gap of years and words between us, and see if I can't renew a friendship with my friends far away.
