Spain the Bypassed

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Here is an essay I’ve been working on lately. It is probably of interest only to my expat friends and others well versed in Spanish culture. It is long, but it does have lots of pictures.

I have now uploaded a revised version of this essay, with some new 19th century paintings. Anyone who has already slogged through this essay may only want to glance at the new pictures on pp. 16-20.

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Published by murraymcclellan

As a retired teacher who has fled the US and is now living in Spain, and as someone who has until now eschewed most forms of social media, I am belatedly beginning to create an online presence. To that end, I am using this WordPress website to archive some of my miscellaneous non-academic writing.  I hope that some of my friends and former colleagues may enjoy this collection, which consists mainly of political editorials, light-weight essays, and silly poems.  I also post here the latest version of my US History textbook, Key Moments in American History.

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7 thoughts on “Spain the Bypassed”

  3. It’s more than an essay, it’s a thoughtful, educational and entertaining ebook! Many thanks for sharing, and Merry Christmas from Keene where it’s cold and snow-covered.

    I’ll leave you with a poem that appears in my new unpublished novel. The presumed author is a dyslexic robot.

    ernie

    DARBY TOWN in 1979 by Faith Sanz

    Let us honor our village, the grassed “Square” (actually a somewhat inebriated ellipse), the mini obelisk of local granite featuring plaques honoring veterans of bulging bloody varicose-vein wars, our brick Victorian style library, Harold and Arlene Flagg’s general store, Mount Folly Grange Hall, the Church of the Redeemer, the steepled town hall with Roman numeral clock, houses in the Colonial and Cape Cod styles, most of which include screened-in porches, some with barns, sheds, and mis-matched add-ons of eccentric designs, lawns and flower displays in the front yards, vegetable gardens in the back, nearby woodchuck domiciles tucked in bankings, chipmunk dens in ancient stone walls.

    Let us applaud our town fuckers (excuse me, that’s founders), and perhaps the descendents of the Connisadawaga Naive American Nation for building those walls that zig-zag across property lines, along road sides, into the deep woods, to the tops of hills and upward into the sky, ending at St. Peter’s toll gate.

    Let us not forget sugar maple trees with their sweet sap, whirlybirds, and hallucinogenic falling leaves that teach us that dying is not so bad, if you attend it with a little color.

    Let us remember, in mirth, the brief blooms of lilacs that perfume the air in the spring whose aroma continuously breaks the heart of Birch Latour when he remembers the mother who planted those same bushes on the very day he killed her with his birth.

    Let us forgive the townspeople’s libido for store-bought arborvitae that surround the foundations of houses, as if to hide a shame that leaked from a bedroom on the second floor to the cellar that the proprietors never got around to surfacing with concrete that allowed an invasive bamboo shoot brought in, on the boots of a plumber, to take hold in the dank cellar soil and struggle toward the light from a ground-level window broken by a baseball batted by a boy later killed in military action defending his country and now remembered on our granite memorial obelisk.

    See how the bamboo reaches for sunlight in its doomed but heroic efforts to exist beyond the time allotted by rain, dear? Reindeer? No, that’s a glitch, brought on by my creator’s old age; it’s not reindeer, it’s the Redeemer who allots time in wise guise to save us.

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    1. ernie:

      Thanks so much for your kind words, which mean so much to me as coming from a real writer. And that wonderful passage is so evocative of the Darby we have come to love. Faith is hardly dyslexic! Take care, my friend.

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