Author: Paul

Wandering around Molinaseca we found a bar with a fútbol game on, a match with two local teams, Ponferrada vs. Pontevedra. The tables in the bar were full and the bartender, a big guy in a plaid shirt, gave us a tapa with our beer and brought a plate of meatballs out from the kitchen and passed them around to everyone in the bar. It was a 0-0 finish and the the locals seemed happy with that result. Ponferrada is the closest town. Maybe they were lucky to get a draw.

It is probably our age but when we walk all day we find walking uphill much easier than going downhill. When you put on an extra ten to fifteen pounds, the weight of our backpacks, you find the bottoms of your feet feeling bruised and the effort it takes to brace yourself against gravity on each downhill step takes a toll. Just saying, certainly not a complaint. The Camino experience is above complaining. We’ll walk by someone who is clearly in pain and they will smile and say “Buen Camino.”

Leonard Cohen learned to play classical guitar from a Spanish musician in his hometown of Montreal. “He took the guitar and he produced a sound from that guitar that I’d never heard… a six chord progression that many, many flamenco songs are based on. It was those six chords, that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs.” In 2016 Cohen received the Prince of Asturias award in Oviedo and he had dinner at the place we ate at tonight in Villafranca Del Bierzo. The owner was pictured on the wall with Cohen and the owner’s son helped Peggi figure out how to buy more minutes on her prepaid Vodaphone SIM card while we we sitting under a photo of his father and Leonard.

Every time the Virgin Mary appears to someone she gets a new name. And she always looks a little different so there are many depictions. The name associated with Santiago’s Marian apparition is Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Lady of the Pillar, and she is depicted with a radiant golden crown. Santiago, or St. James the greater, one of the twelve apostles, came to the Iberian peninsula to preach the gospel and he is the patron saint of both Spain and Portugal but they revere the Virgen Del Pilar more and today, October 12th, is her feast day. It coincides with Columbus Day and is celebrated as the national holiday of Spain, the “Fiesta Nacional de España.”

So it’s a feast day and a celebration of a genocide with a military parade in Madrid that costs 800,000 euros. We walked twenty two miles to Astorga and were too spaced out to figure out how the holy day/holiday was being celebrated. The shops were all closed and groups of people were on the street in traditional garb. We bought some wine and Tejas de Almendra and took them back to our room to toast the Virgin del Pilar.

We’ve been watching a Spanish tv show on Netflix called “Ministerio Del Tiempo” where the characters are given assignments that take them back in time, usually for the purpose of ensuring history unfolds the way they feel it should. We are forever backing the show up because the Spanaids talk so fast, Peggi can only catch a bit of it and we can’t read the English sub-titles before they’re gone.

Looking out the window of our train car in Utica I had the sensation we were time traveling. Maybe next year we’ll ride this old train up to Pete and Shelley’s place.

The Tierney side of my family had its annual picnic today and this one was more fun than all the rest for some reason. Only one set of aunt and uncles is left so it is mostly cousins and their families. I have a lot of cousins on this side and we are all around the same age. It always was when we were growing up especially the Christmas parties at my grandmother’s house where we would all run around while the adults talked in the basement. With most of those adults gone now the reunions are fun again.

My cousin, Kathleen, organizes these affairs and a few years back I told her you can’t call it a reunion if you have it every year. I must have read that somewhere. Anyway, she now calls it a “family picnic.” Kathleen is a natural born leader. A few years older than me, she organized us all when we were little kids. Today she is a nun, a Sister of Mercy. I told her we were doing the Camino in Spain and she had never heard of it, the oldest religious pilgrimage in the Christian world. I never knew exactly where she stood with Catholicism and I was especially curious because of all the recent turmoil so I dove right in. We registered our disgust with the priestly sexual abuse and cover-up and within minutes she was discussing how we can can get to the ordination of women.

My sister, Amy, had the brilliant idea to bring some of the watercolors that our dad left behind when he passed. She arranged them on a table and the relatives helped theirselves, each leaving with some original Leo Dodd’s.

I was talking to my mom’s cousin, Joe O’Keefe, when he leaned in to tell me my mom was always his favorite of the Tierney girls. My mom’s sister, Ann, walked by just as he said that and I said, “Does Ann know that?” He laughed and called me a “no good, bog-trotting, trouble making, Mic,” a mouthful of a phrase I had not heard before.

Some people know how to throw a party. Fifty years is a lot to celebrate. Quite a few of us didn’t even make it. I went to my fifth high school reunion this weekend and this one should have been the best. Maybe it was. Maybe the standards have shifted.

I was looking forward to the first few hours of chaos, when everyone arrives and you spot an old friend across the room that you haven’t seen since high school, or someone greets you by name and you have no idea who it is, when someone tells you the silliest story, something they remember about you that doesn’t even sound like you. That you. There is a real buzz in the air as you reconnect and find yourself talking to someone you never said a word to in high school.

We experienced all this last week at Peggi’s reunion outside of Detroit. The ones my classmates threw every ten years went like this as well but something was off this time. The get together at the sports bar the night before was pure fun. Surrounded by giant tvs we managed to whoop it up. The reunion itself, the next night at the old Happy Acres golf club, was almost planned to death. Name tags were distributed as we filed in and we were encouraged to find a table so an MC/minister/classmate could work the room. And after that the town supervisor, also a classmate, said his piece. They killed the buzz in record time but we managed to rise above it all. We just had to work a little harder. We were sitting with Joe and he knows how to act. And before dinner was even finished we were milling about and magical conversations ensued.

We drove out here with Frank, the school president in 1968, and we didn’t want to leave until he had finished holding court with Marianne, Holly and Mickey so we hung out by the bar. A classmate said goodbye but came back about ten minutes later because he had forgotten his sports jacket. The committee was packing up the Party Store decorations when we went out for the car. The guy who had forgotten his jacket was still there, trying to get an Uber. He said he might be impaired and he didn’t want to jeopardize his job. We offered to give him a ride.

The front seat was Frank’s because his hip is new so we asked our passenger to sit in the back with Peggi. He had a hard time getting in because both of his knees had been replaced. We found Frank at the door and met another classmate there who was smoking a cigarette. He had too much to drink so we offered to give him a ride even though our car’s four seats were full. He refused our offer and we left. Peggi asked our back seat passenger what his job was and he told us he was a financial planner. He dropped something on the floor and fumbled around for it. It was a breathalyzer. His own breathalyzer.

Berry Gordy purchased this house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, Michigan in 1959. The soundtrack of our youth was recorded in Hitsville USA. Now the Motown Museum was a must see for us this weekend when we drove to Detroit for Peggi’s 50th high school reunion. We stayed downtown last time we were here and and we were happy to see how much it has bloomed since. We had lunch in the Eastern Market and Peggi bought a “Detroit Girl” t-shirt from a vendor for five bucks. This time we stayed in Royal Oak with an old friend of Peggi’s.

The reunion was a multi-pronged affair. I took photos of Peggi standing in front of two of her family’s old houses and then we met classmates at a bar where a beer and a glass of wine cost us 23 dollars. The group moved to a party at the home of one her schoolmates. He had his drums set up in the basement with blacklight posters on the wall. A group of guys who were in a band when they all were in high school entertained us in a mature lounge punk style. I spent some time talking to a biker, the partner of one of Peggi’s classmates. He had a beard like ZZ Top and he told me he worked in a machine shop long enough to lose a good deal of his hearing, the low end in his left ear and the high end in his right ear. He said if someone calls “she can always tell if I’m talking to a man or a woman because I use the left ear for women and the right ear for men.” The two of them rode their bikes from Detroit to Key West and back this summer.

The following night was the actual reunion, name tags with the high school pictures and all, and it was almost anti-climatic after the shock of seeing everyone the night before. The dj was pretty good and the class got rowdy in a hurry. Peggi and I danced to Spencer Davis’s “Gimme Some Lovin'” and the Detroit Wheels’ “Devil With The Blue Dress.” Both sounded unbelievably good. I’ve been to all five of Peggi’s reunions so I can easily find someone to talk to while Peggi is careening down Memory Lane. A few people told me I was a good sport for going. I thought I was having more fun than that.