Spanish Royal Palace rear entrance, the biggest palace in Europe

My family always had a strange relationship to money.  They had some, they lost all of it; they knew deep poverty and they new the comfort of a pleasant middle class lifestyle.

My mother’s family brought her to the US for the first time when she was fourteen years old from Scotland.  They crossed by the Queen Mary and also flew from time to time.  As my mother loved to say, We were not one of your huddled masses burning to breathe free, we flew.  No Ellis Island for her. 

Her parents were successful union organizers and the entire family came as one to work in a factory that was owned by some cousins.  They bought nice homes, sometimes duplexes that they shared (Uncle Burt and Aunt Ina lived in the same building we did).  I remember all the Scottish women dressing exactly the same.  None of them worked and they all participated in the Daughters of the Eastern Star (yes, I come from Scottish Freemasons).  They all had sensible shoes, skirts to the knee, and fur coats and pearls.  Their faces were quite powdered and they all smelled the same.  I thought they were beautiful classy women.

My dad came from more humble means.  His dad had died of rheumatic fever at the age of thirty-five when my dad was seven.  My grandmother was nearly blind and didn’t work.  She lived on a widow’s pension and family savings.  Dad quit college to come home and help pay for the bills.  

When my mom and dad got married, they did well.  They both worked for insurance companies in the Empire State Building, and eventually settled down in Connecticut and lived on my father’s good salary.  They bought a lovely ranch style home at the end of a circle in Norwalk, on a street filled with immigrant families that had done well and could afford to live in Fairfield County.  We were Irish, and the neighbors were Italian and Jewish, with the occasional Polish family thrown in.  My mother was Scottish so she didn’t quite fit in (having literally flown through immigration), but she loved the neighborhood.

As I’ve written before, my family’s fortunes would go bad and never recover.  By the time I was nine, we were pretty poor and had moved to Pennsylvania, in a lesser educated and very much working class town.  

So one can imagine that my mother had very strong feelings about working and making money.  She was union through and through.  It had been good to her parents and to her.  She felt that one should get down on their hands and knees and thank God Almighty just to have a job.  The Depression and having their back door blown off during the Battle of Britain brought to her a kind of fatalism.  

So, in typical Protestant fervor, I sought out employment that was dignified (no desk jobs for me) and checked groceries at the neighborhood store.  Mom didn’t expect that we could afford to go to college and she thought that was to be my life, in groceries, and I should be thankful for it.  

When I decided to take financial aid and loans to pay to go to school, she nearly blew a scone through her nose.  You don’t walk away from a job!  And no matter how poor we might be, we did not take handouts (food stamps, for example).  

My dear father on the other hand, who despised his well-paying job, said, “Son, just be happy.”

Those two views have waged guerilla warfare in the lobes and folds of my brain ever since.  I have taken risks that my parents would never have contemplated.  I became a singer, a social worker, a minister, an actor, a non-profit guru, and lived all over the country – away from the clan.  

So I did take risks, but I always fretted about them.  My mom still yells at me from the ethers (or Brigadoon) about security and safety.  And dad always said,  have an adventure.   

So once again, the war is on.  I’ve done well for myself.  I make very good money (far more than my parents ever dreamed of making – which was not a particularly high bar).  But after twenty some years of office work, and community work, and fundraising, and politics, I am burned out.  

I have not fallen in love with someone for nearly ten years now.  I’m too set in my ways.  But I did fall in love with a city and a people.  When I first went to Spain five years ago, I just felt at home.  I spoke very little Spanish and almost no one in Madrid speaks English, but the people are the most warm and generous (and crazy and cruel at times) people that I’ve ever seen.  They envelope you with their heart and passion for life.  And there is a revolution going on over there.  Social changes in gay marriage, woman’s rights, equality, immigration, worker’s rights that puts us to shame.  They are also building the most beautiful buildings and bridges.  They are changing the way the world eats, now being home to the world’s greatest restaurant, El Bulli, whose reservations are booked through 2009. As The New York Times recently put it (in a terribly condescending way) “Spain is the new France.”

So, I am making very little money, but enough to live on and enjoy the pleasures of life.  I work when I want to, and I am going to be living in Spain (once the civil workers of Spain get their act together and issue that damned permiso).  I want to do this for one to two years.  My mother is going to punish me from the grave.  

How in the world will you make up for the lost time in your career?  Aren’t you ashamed to have your salary cut by a third?  They’ll forget you when you come back. You are too old to do something this foolish!

Yeah, but I’ll be in Spain eating tapas and speaking Spanish, and arguing about the world with people that don’t think like I do.  And besides, just when is the cutoff age for adventure?

So, I’ll take the risk and be a different person for awhile, watching my Euros and trying to make sure I can afford the menu del dia at my favorite cervezeria every afternoon.  And boy, will I have stories to tell.  ‘Cuz one thing my old man did tell me that stuck is this:

When they write your gravestone, do you want it to say, I didn’t try and I played it safe?  

Maybe, but just not yet.  Mom and Dad were both right, but for me, it’s all just in the timing.