A prophet is not without honor*

            June 1991: I was unblindfolded when I met my future wife on a blind date, on "The 2nd of May" plaza, where Napoleon's troops massacred unarmed protestors, not on the Coast of Death near A Coruña. That night, we dined on Spanish, not Italian, pizza late in the evening, after the drug dealers had closed up shop. I had known Goya well before arriving in Spain; but I ignored the content warning label. Later, I would come to know the siren shores of those man-eating coasts up close and personal.

            Thiry-four years old and ready to heed the siren call of a permanent relationship, there would be rocks and hard places, feasts and famines. But after that first massacre, there would no turning back, no charting a course to safer waters. A siren had my number, I had to call her back. After three years of long-distance "dating," I finally reeled this mermaid into to my net, to a place not far from white sands beaches that know no ocean. The siren fell in love with the beaches...and a now former fisher of women, and I discovered a cornucopia of Mediterranean delights. 

            The odyssey of love can take one to strange lands; my mermaid and I later visited Massacre Canyon in Arizona, where a grandmother and her granddaughter had fought the Spaniards to the death, at "The Place Where Two Jumped Off." And then, my Odyssey came full circle in a creative writing class with a student from Gallup: U write "You're Not From Around Here,: my ONLY piece of writing published on a prestigious national website. My guiding lighthouse as a writer? The reader must meet someone they do not know, someone whose experiences are different from theirs, someone whose point of view and expectations are different. Just for a moment, the tide rises, exposing a bounty to be consumed, then it falls back into place, until the next tidal change.

            Now, in my very LAST creative writing course, I have just learned something no other writer taught me: Playwrights have an unsatiable hunger, a unquenchable thirst, for immortality; they are gluttons for fame, they are not inhabitants of the the Third Circle of Dante's Inferno on their way to reach il Paradiso escorted by Beatrice. Plot does NOT matter; plays are about contentious characters picking a fight, in a castle, in a bar (any reason will do), to entertain the paying patrician Romans, who hunger for the pain of lions, Christians and gladiators, all herded together inside the Coliseum like cattle for the slaughter. Afterward, home to the Bacchalian feast, raising lead-lined wine goblets to toast to two-faced Janus, through whose door we ALL enter and leave this world, and then to the vomitorium and the defecarium. Such plays are thin, flavorless gruel, even to my unsophisticated dry, dusty desert palate, long ago numbed by a marching band parade of red hot chile peppers. No, I do NOT seek immortality. So, why does the need to write gnaw at my insides like a tapeworm, which only releases its hold by me when I (the worm is expelled and live and dine another day)? What is the nature of my bittersweet craving, which I am unable to slake, as I move through a pre-ordained finite universe, toward eternal oblivion? Are not we all lambs being led to the celestial slaughter? All the whole world's a stage, but even Shakespeare has not heard a single word of praise from an audience since 1616. Is my desire a biological impulse, like hunger, or thirst, or sex, our holiest human Holy Trinity? Is this the real reason the Fates sent me to Madrid, in June 1991? I am no Hemingway; my modest "successes", in work, in life, in writing, have not even brought me any real honor or prestige of any kind, in the country of my birth. And I was born in the desert, where fish comes in cans or as oily, fried, breaded "sticks."

            Christmas, 2002. For eight years, I have been spending Christmas in Madrid with my wife's large, extended family; they live on la Gran Vía, Madrid's most important street. My "political family" (la familia política in Spanish) are a fine lot; the holiday feasts of my youth at home were more like scenes from Joyce's The Dead (John Huston's last film, and a favorite of mine). And I have often thanked the lucky stars that guided me here. My paradox: I am not big on holidays of any kind, anywhere, other than as an excuse to not work and to travel, but I never want to be a Grinch or a Scrooge. 

            This year, a siren had already put out the call a month earlier: On November 19, the Prestige, carrying the lowest grade of fuel oil to feed the world's insatiable gluttony for cheap energy, splashed onto the rocks near Vigo, Spain's main fishing port. I informed my Spanish family I would be taking the train or bus to Vigo the next day. No one batted an eye; these patrician daughters and sons of Apollo name public squares after massacred peasants. No, they do not understand anything much about me, nor I them; even after 33 years, I am still a griego (Greek), now gringo, a young Turk like El Greco, cooking with words, not paint. No one asked why I was going miss Christmas 

dinner for a diet of oily rocks and oiled birds. 

            However, anticlimactically, the clean-up was mostly done when I arrived; during my three days and nights, we only rescued ONE bird, which was not obviously oiled (we were told to catch any catchable bird, so it could be checked by a vet before being released). So, what is there to write about? I did not savor death during those three days 

and nights in the belly of the whale. 

            Day 1: Gondomar, which despite the name, is not near the sea. A cot, locker room and free meals in a public school was being used as the command post. A young man from a coast-less interior city of Castilla y León:

• ¿Qué te parece si compartimos un cuarto en un hotel y comer en restaurantes?

Great idea! We tourists could afford to pay for our room and board and, thereby, support the local economy, crippled by the oil spill. We scoured rocks low and lower around the resort town of Baiona; in Gondomar, we dined on steamed mejillones (mussels) and little clams called zamburiñas. 

            Day 2: La ría de Vigo, we found that only bird, but no one thought to take a selfie with it; that night we dined on chipirrones en tu tinta (squid in its ink) and pulpo a feira (octopus). 

            Day 3: A Guarda, across the río Miño from Portugal, we ate and drank nothing but sea spray all day, as we danced between the rocks to the fiddling, fidgeting wind. We went into a tavern to eat, drink and make merry by the fire. The owner:

• "Aquí, vuestro dinero no sirve para nada." (Your money's no good here).

            Day 4: Back in Madrid for a pleasant but uneventful New Year's Eve: Se me acabó la alegría (my party had ended), just south of la Costa de la Muerte. Spain is noisy, even when it is not a holiday; Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about Paris, but he preferred Spanish cuisine and called Madrid The Capital of the World. 

            I often reflect on works of great writers, especially ones that are mostly missing from most Americans' cookbook list of New York Times bestsellers, writers who are not "immortal" here, hoping that their rising tide will somehow fill the nets of my old man, wrestling with mortality, that greatest of sharks, not with a marlin off the coast of Cuba. In Naguib Mahouz's "Three Days in Yemen," (the Nobel Laureate, a Cairo bureaucrat who only left Egypt twice, the other time was to Yugoslavia), Mahfouz cites the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal:

• "Life is not the port from which one sails, life is not the vessel in which one sails, life is not the port where one's vessel arrives. Life is the journey."

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Perhaps like some Columbus or Captain Cook, I simply need to keep a ship's diary to note down my discoveries, though I never kept one during any of my voyages. Instead, I am only now writing the journal of the journey I started on a June evening in 1991 in Madrid, far from the sea, on a plaza memorialized by a painting of a massacre of unarmed protestors, who were offered no blindfolds as they prepared to taste death; at least Jesus going to Calvary was offered something to calm his pain. How is it possible a desert rat, who swims like a tortoise, not a dolphin, learned to love sushi in Alaska, and then after his Madrid girlfriend moved to New Mexico to stay, he took her to eat sushi for the first time in...El Paso, Texas? She, of course, fell in love with sushi immediately. And her son, now my son, born in A Coruña, near the Coast of Death, near the Roman torre de Hércules lighthouse.

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Finis (terre)**

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* Mark 6:4 (KJV): A "fisher of men: once said, "A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

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**Finis is Latin for "The End." Finisterre, near A Coruña, was to the Roman Empire, "Land's End"; La Torre de Hercules lighthouse guided sailor nearby. My divine comedy must have been pre-ordained by the universe's chef: Before coming to Spain, I worked near the Homer Spit, home to the Land's Inn restaurant, where I took my future wife in October 1991 on her visit to Alaska.