Cinco de Mojito

This is a day where you're more than certain to hear us whistling our favorite countdown tune: uno de enero, dos de febrero, tres de marzo, quatro abril.  cinco de mayo...where we stop and cheer before June and July get their due.   

Usually, by cinco de mayo it's warm and wonderful, with all things weather hinting fiercely at the arrival of summer and all that portends: full tables on sunny café terraces, the challenge to find empty chairs at Luxembourg garden, empty Velib stations, longer days and later dinners.   By May, the worst of the winter and wetness of spring are behind.  Usually.

Not so today as the wind whipped like a wild thing and forced us to bundle in heavy (though fashionable) coats and scarves and boots.  Oh, the sun gave hope, but offered little warmth.  Summer feels as far away as ever, but for the bags of fresh mint that lay waiting to be mortared and pestled into that hot weather favorite, the mojito.   Nor could we imagine a rosé; drinking the pink today would be like wearing white before Memorial Day.   

Wearing white, of course, reserved not even for the seis de junio - but for our favorite damn day of the year: seis de julio.   Ya falta menos.

Balcony View

Here's what we saw (more or less) every morning from our balcony on Estafeta during the fiesta.




Those white-and-red clad days passed too fast. We drank too much. Slept too little. Though it should be said moderation was practiced (relatively) compared to other years. Age? Wisdom? Infirmity? Exhaustion?

All of the above.

And until next year.

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Ya Falta Menos

Departure stress aside, there are only good things ahead. A long train ride to the Spanish border. Good friends en route at the same time. A peaceful breakfast on a Basque terrace. The remembering of long hikes, sacrificial breasts and William Faulkner. Home-made paxtaran. Those people in the mirror. Soon enough we'll be driving down a familiar route, finding a familiar face with familiar keys and a familiar balcony. Bullrun watching will occur. Kaiku y Cognacs and mullets. Breakfasts at long, friendly tables. Late nights out and early morning visitors using keys on strings. The Ham bar. Fitero. Sixto. Drive-by the Windsor. Shampoo. Al Capone. Cafe Luis. On the ledge at the Kayak. The corrida. A box of bakery cookies and the lyrics to El Rey. The Geriatric Club. Bets are taken on when the mid-week crisis will occur. It will. And then things will resume. Music in the street, all day and all night. The boom-boom-boom is about to begin and will not let up until the end. ¡Gora San Fermin!

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Out of the Bag

All things San Fermin come to mind, we are focusing on and distracted by our preparation: the washing and ironing of white clothing, buying beads for bull earrings, organizing the arrival at our piso, calculating purchases of actimel on a Sunday, worrying about which pañuelo to wear.

I realized I couldn't put it off any longer, so those dirty shoes came out of the bag and the mysterious gray grime that had caked the side and bottom has been cleared off and cleaned up and this footwear is good to go for another filthy fiesta.

In a lapse of respectability, I actually had a job last week, running a workshop about cold water washing. At the event, I had the privilege of meeting a scientist who referred to himself as a bleach expert, and we had a lengthy discourse about getting tough stains out of white clothing. I told him a little tidbit we learned last year from a little old lady we talked to in the mercado. Dee Dee Sue asked her which of the laundry soaps she recommended to get the gray street filth out of the bottom of white pants and she told us her trick: wash with any laundry soap and a little Coca-Cola! A little secret there I was just ready to give away to the folks at P&G, but they didn't seem impressed.

I tried it after the fiesta last year, washing with the caramel-colored cleanser. Remarkably (I know, how could I doubt a Basque grandmother?), it worked.

And if the countdown to the Chupinazo isn't hard enough, a friend's photographs were featured in the New York Times blog, the Lens, further ramping up our anticipation.

It won't be long now. Ya falta menos.

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Preparing the Whites

It's my birthday today, and since there's no white knight here to celebrate it with me, I've made my own. I bought myself a birthday present his morning. It was as spontaneous as it gets. Saw 'em on the rack, tried 'em on. Sweepin' that Visa with aplomb.

Though, I must say, it wasn't much of a splurge. Dee Dee Sue (and Mother Theresa) will appreciate that in this particular case, the cheaper the better.

Because they won't be white for long, will they?

Ladies, prepare your bleach-pens. And happy birthday to me!
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Quatro and Cinco de Mayo

In honor of Dee Dee Sue's birthday (yesterday) and the calendar-count-down day of the 5th of May (today), I considered letting the shoes out of the bag.

Their original sin: a week of slogging through July streets too disgusting to describe (and yet we do it every year) and in the haste of departure, bagged so as not to contaminate the rest of the contents in my suitcase. Once home, the thought of letting them out of the bag was too dirty a task to face (tomorrow was a word I whispered to no-one).

The bag slowly made its way to the back of my closet. But as another season of stomping in the gray filth with white pants approaches, I'm called, faintly, from behind the winter boots now tossed on top. Pulled from behind a long winter of heavy footwear, the bag sees the light of day. But can I open it?

Even the Cinco de Mayo doesn't give me the courage. Perhaps tomorrow. Or else the 6th of June.
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Tres (z) de Marzo

The countdown continues.

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