Hrumph Goes to Spain
Chapter One: Journey Into Narcissism The beginning of this pilgrimage started in the same place, Bongo Java. As you may remember from our last book, this was the place Marietta suddenly burst out sobbing with our good friend Ellen McPherson as the audience/therapist when I mentioned that I wished we could go to Cortona when we went to Italy.Since then I have become more aware of my fear of travel, especially foreign travel and Marietta has become more accepting of my seeming lack of interest. It is not that I’m not interested, well perhaps it is. It is that I like the familiar and am frightened to leave the safety of my Nashville identity and community of knowns, some people who care about me and some who don’t, and go to a place where nobody knows me and nobody but Marietta cares.However, I remember my ten-year-old self, whose back did not ache, who wasn’t afraid of anything and who wanted to see the world and all seven of its wonders. In the spirit of that ten-year-old boy, I begin to trust that there are beds in Spain that my back will appreciate.Back to Bongo Java. It’s the same scene; the only difference is Greta, my new dog, is there instead of Greco, my old dog. We three sit outside under the same giant trees, comfortable with the New York Times on the table for whoever is waiting, while the others arrive or while the others are in line ordering and the one waiting (me) holds our table.This time the conversation is focused on Ellen’s family and Marietta’s mediation practice. When Spain was mentioned, Ellen reassured us that we would have a great time. I wished I had echoed her sentiments but at least I did not do what I did at the same place before our last trip, which was to play the long-suffering husband put upon by his wife who demanded that he leave the comfort of his bed and go to places where he didn’t speak the language and where the beds and the walking and looking were guaranteed to hurt his back and he was guaranteed to complain loudly.This time I simply acknowledged my fear and reminded all present that once I arrived at our destination on all of our foreign travels that my fears calmed and I enjoyed our trip. I was hopeful that would be the case this time.Ellen wished us well and we parted from her without any drama. She did, however, email a warning that each of us should carry our own water on the hikes because we were likely to become separated talking to various members of the group and walking at different speeds.As we prepared for our trip, I campaigned for a new form of travel, simple travel, where we each took only the barest of necessities. For me this meant three shirts, two pairs of pants, the pair of walking shoes I would wear on the plane, a small camera, three pair of underwear, three pairs of socks, my iPhone, a razor and toothpaste, a rain jacket, water bottles, a backpack and little else.I was hoping, begging, for Marietta to also take only the bare necessities, not her two large bags plus her computer bag, which I would feel obliged to carry, even though she promised that she would. To my surprise she did her best to accommodate me. She took only her small rolling bag filled until it looked more like a ball than a rectangle, plus an overflowing purse. This was a great improvement and I presume a great sacrifice and my back appreciated it.So much of my curmudgeonness revolves around my back or that’s my excuse. I’m not sure which. Marietta has her ailments too. She has cramps in her calves in the middle of the night, but only in Nashville. She has problems sleeping but only in her bed. Could this be the reason she wants to go somewhere all the time? I would think getting away from me was the reason except that she wants me to go as well.The day arrives. We have both bought special hats to take to protect us from the sun. As we leave home I am wearing my hat which Marietta says is an Indiana Jones hat and she is wearing a hat that reminds me a great deal of Ms. Marple. So it would appear that our pilgrimage was to solve a crime or find the Holy Grail.A word about my pilgrimage. I try to approach a trip such as this one to Spain for two weeks as a spiritual journey, a chance to observe and experience myself in a strange environment. In my last two such pilgrimages with Marietta, my focus was on becoming a better travel companion and to that end I used Francis Maye’s book Under the Tuscan Sun as my model for how to observe and experience Italy.This time my book was Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. National Public Radio reviewed this book and interviewed its author. The interviewer compared Lerner to Hemingway, each were examples of American men of their time in Spain as expatriate writers interpreting and describing the intersection of American male culture with the Spanish culture.I am a big fan of Hemingway as a man or role model for how to be a man. However, this is how the culture of the late 20th century portrayed him. He was the quintessential modern man, like John Wayne, John F. Kennedy, Cary Grant, Mickey Mantle, and other larger than life heroic figures of that time.These men were my role models and heroes. And I am not ashamed of many of the qualities that I took from them. These modern men don’t fit well in a postmodern world. They are exposed in Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris as narcissistic self-absorbed misogynists. In the postmodern world they are laughable clowns, not admirable men.The companion of Lerner to Hemingway suggests that Lerner represents the postmodern American man who is best seen and understood when placed in a foreign context. I found that to be so as I read Leaving the Atocha Station. In the last part of this essay I will have more to say about this and how this relates to my pilgrimage. Back to the trip.Our first misadventure occurred to us on the way to the airport. Just as we turned onto I-40, Marietta asked if I had my passport. I did. Did I have our money? I didn’t. Then my cursing at myself began. We returned home and retrieved the money.Our second travel mishap was in the Nashville Airport. We were checking in and Bonnie Humphries, who drove us to the airport, walked in escorted by a police woman. It seems I had not left her the car keys and she was unable to drive away.With that resolved we got through security without further events and headed toward a food counter for lunch, except Marietta didn’t. She went to get a book and I went to order lunch, irritated. Marietta often does this to me and I am often left waiting in line with no Marietta paying for mine wishing to pay for hers and she’s not there. Or worse getting on the plane without her. And that was my specter, me on the plane going to Spain without Marietta, my Spanish speaking guide, companion, babe and security blanket.But once again, at the last minute, Marietta arrives, orders and I am able to pay for us both. We get on the plane together and we are off to Spain via Dallas, Texas, DFW airport.In Dallas we came upon Pam Taylor, an A-list divorce attorney on her way to Paris and Bordeaux for two weeks. She is flying first class and she invited us to wait with her in the Admiral Club. Seated in soft chairs in a high ceiling room with nice bathrooms adjacent, we waited together, talked shop (I did not blurt out how awful I thought she and the A-team attorneys made divorces). But you got to give her this. She was traveling 1st class to Paris and Marietta and I were to be huddling up together in the cheap seats on our flight to Madrid, Spain.Our packed to the gills airplane took off on time. Our seats were terrible, the food barely tolerable and I got only a little sleep. Marietta got no sleep. I vowed to pony up the cash for 1st class on our next trip. I was sure my back would pay for this nine hours in a cramped seat. But when we emerged from the plane at 9:30 Madrid time, my back felt pretty good.We were not so exhausted as we had imagined. We moved through customs baggage and to a bus to the city center with ease. We got off the bus, walked half a mile pulling our rolling bags to Hotel del Arts. We checked in, explored the neighborhood and jumped on a red double-decked city open bus for a tour of historical Madrid.Maybe its Spanish pigeons but I saw this pigeon coming out of the sky diving over the bus to its landing spot on a light pole next to the street and I never saw such a beautiful graceful flight and landing. Surely the pigeon represented how I felt about our arrival in Spain.The city was filled with very old buildings and statues. I don’t know why I despised the Catholic monks and nuns who were memorialized everywhere or the blood of a famous priest that is kept sacred in a church and on a certain day in July transforms from a dried coagulated solid to a red liquid and back again to solid the next day. Also low on my list were the statues of Spanish Conquistadors who enslave Indians and stole South America’s gold with the blessing of the Catholic Priests who came to South America to destroy the native culture. The history of Spain seems filled with religious duplicity and evil at every turn, the most recent example being the Catholic Church’s support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in which 500,000 Spanish died and horrible acts were committed by all sides, mostly against civilians.It was cold when we arrived, highs in the fifties, lows in the low forties. I immediately wished that I had packed warmer clothes. It was disorienting for me to realize that I left on Tuesday in Nashville and arrived on Wednesday. That first day was spent walking the Paseo del Prado, a beautiful avenue with a park in the middle. I found a hooded cotton navy blue jacket with a red bull emblem on it which zipped in front. For the next six days this was essential daily wear. By the end of my stay in Spain the temperature was in the nineties, the cotton jacket was in the drawer and we were wearing shorts.At this stage of the trip I was on a pilgrimage with no sense of purpose. Though I’m a spiritual skeptic, I have found it personally useful to assume or at least hope God has a purpose for me to be on this trip. So I wonder what the purpose might be for me to leave the comfort of my dog and my bed, spend money, endure the discomfort of second class travel, come to a place where I don’t speak the language and wander about. I was curious what the theme of my pilgrimage would be.Our two days in Madrid were a surprise to me and Marietta. We never thought we would be across the street from Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofia.Like Hemingway, Picasso is another man I despise. It’s a shadow thing. His ambition and love of his art seemed to drive him to be cruel to women who loved him and friends who did not agree with him. His biographers depict a great artist and a cruel narcissistic man.I was prepared to see this famous painting and to dismiss it as childlike drawings on a grand scale of horses, bulls and people by a man who could not paint a realistic picture.This was not what I saw. I saw tormented terrified horse, a bewildered and sad bull representing Spain, a woman with a wounded leg frightened, anguished and determined to push on. The painting did move me to have some sense of the chaos and anguish that came from the bombing of Guernica, Spain and the World War that followed. Franco asked Germany for help in the Spanish Civil War and Hitler and Germany responded by using Guernica, Spain as a demonstration of blanket bombing and its horrendous effect on civilians. Picasso’s wall sized painting was certainly not silly. It carried a message then and it still does today.Madrid Centro was easy to navigate. Several streets were pedestrian only wide streets paved with marble, yes marble. Marble was ubiquitous in Madrid. It was often the floor of public buildings, the sidewalks and the fascia of many buildings, at least six feet up from the ground.Madrid has some inclines but no hills. One could stroll or walk with dispatch as one chooses. Public transportation and walking is the most used method of moving about the city. It seemed to me to be a very difficult city in which to drive an automobile.We loved walking. Paseo del Prado was our most frequented street. As I mentioned earlier, it was more like a park than a street. Dogs were running about freely as their owners strolled up or down the center of the street which was really a park with shrubs, trees and flowers architecturally planted along marble paths and squares. The only drawback to strolling in the center of Paseo del Prado was the smell of dog urine.Marietta’s six week crash course in Spanish paid off. She could talk to anyone. However, there was usually someone about who could speak English. Marietta was rightly proud that she rarely needed a translator.The food in Spain centers around pork. Jambon is a smooth, thinly sliced piece of cured salt pork, cut from the hoofed pork leg. Every restaurant I saw had legs of pork hanging from the ceiling around a bar. Restaurants also served what we would call pork chops. There were some chicken dishes on menus but few beef dishes. The fish dishes offered were usually a combination of fried squid, calamari rings, sardine and shrimp. Tomatoes and or caramelized red peppers were often part of a sandwich or tapa.Tapas were the most frequently served dish. They cost between 2-5 euro. They were small three bite dishes of almost anything you can imagine, usually on a piece of toast or served as a sandwich. On most streets there was a series of Tapa Bars. Patrons walked in the bar, stood, looked at the small kebobs or other options, pointed and ordered. A few minutes later the chosen tapas with their favorite beverage (usually wine, sangria or beer) emerged. And they stood as they ate, drank, and talked to their server or the persons standing next to them.Among the surprises in these bars was that wine was cheap and excellent. Usually two euros a glass. Most people seemed to order wine or what we would call a wine cooler or sangria. Always beer, wine or sangria was cheaper than a coke. A mixed drink was usually five euros.Even with cheap alcohol, I never saw anyone who I thought was drunk.The theme of my pilgrimage began to come together the second night. That day as we emerged from the hotel we walked past an attractive girl handing out flyers for a Flamenco dancing performance. We made reservations and appeared promptly at 9:00 P.M. for dinner and the performance. Marietta and I were at one table and two other American couples from Atlanta were at another table. In front of our table was a stage. Behind were other empty tables, a dance floor and a disc jockey setup.The meal was served first with great ceremony and excellent presentation. The food, not so good. Then the lights went down and a strong voice shouted above rhythmic clapping, drumming, guitar playing and heel stomping. The curtain pulled back to expose two young female and two young male dancers, clapping and stomping accompanied by a woman singer, a man drumming the box he sat on and a guitar player.There was nothing subtle about this art form. The music was loud, the costumes bright, the dance postures pompous and demanding of attention. My mind began to combine Picasso’s arrogance with the bravado of the music, the dancing, the pictures of bull fighters and I saw images of narcissism everywhere I turned. We left after the performance, returned to our rooms and packed because we were leaving to meeting up with our tour director and touring companions the next day.That night I had gentle healing dreams about my brother. He died over a year ago and we had a difficult relationship. In these dreams he was being kind and considerate in ways that surprised me.On the train the next day Marietta read to me from Rick Sieve’s travel guide about Ronda, our eventual destination. Ronda was the home to Spain’s oldest bull ring. Images of picadors, toreadors, and bulls were everywhere in Madrid (and later Ronda). As Marietta read about the bullfights, thoughts of narcissism and arrogance again emerged.Spain’s history is replete with the lessons of hubris, arrogance, overreaching, overspending, bravado, pomposity and cruelty. The Spanish Inquisition lasted 400 years. In the Spanish Civil War civilians who were suspected, (yes only suspected) of sympathizing with the wrong side were lined up and shot or thrown off cliffs and bridges. When the opposing side took the town, the same thing was repeated only this time the victims were those suspected of sympathizing with the former victims, now defeated. And I don’t want to begin to recount what the Spanish did to Jews and Muslins during the Inquisition or what they did to the Mexicans and South Americans.As we rode the train to Ronda and Marietta read to me about Spain and Ronda, it became clear that my spiritual journey had something to do with my need to be special, entitled, better than, unique, one of a kind, important, privileged and I could go on. I was sick of myself and sick of Spain. Yet, I felt drawn to follow the path Karen, our tour director, had placed in front of me and determined to avoid acting out my version of Spain’s bravado. I had not yet read any of Lerner’s book and I was to get to it and see how he experienced this part of the world. Day 1 in Ronda Chapter Two: We Are All Going to DieOn the first night Karen, our tour director, arranged for our group of ten to have dinner at an elegant restaurant with a beautiful view of the valley below.It felt like we were in an Agatha Christie novel, ten hapless strangers, each of us traveling for a different purpose. There was Dorothy, a fifty year old, single, dietitian. She was a short, gentle spirit, ready for adventure like a character out of The Hobbit. Clearly this was a life highlight for her, meeting new people, traveling with others she knew from prior trips and trusting in Karen to ensure a safe and stimulating trip.Oh I should begin with Karen, our tour director. She owned and sold a bookstore just before the market for books began to bottom. She used her freedom from tending her store to create the business of guiding walking tours through various parts of the world, mostly Europe with an occasional trip to South America. She began her adult life working with troubled youth. She was educated to be a social worker. She has the air of a humble kind shepard. She is a single never married woman who is much more anxious than her calm demeanor would suggest. She is a petite attractive woman who uses the authority of her position as the person in charge to take care of even the least of her flock.Then there was thirty-eight year old Mary, her sixty-six year old mother, Liz, and her sixty-eight year old aunt, Grace. They seem to delight in one another’s company. Mary just completed her master’s degree in journalism. In her youth she was a champion skier and she looks the part, attractive, fit, strong and red-headed. She had an insatiable curiosity. She shadowed our tour guide, peppered him with questions and supplemented his history of Spain with the knowledge she gained from her background reading in preparation for this trip.Mary had a serious relationship with a man in her hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her significant other has two girls and she was struggling to find her role in that family. She seemed to have a talent for tending children and animals. I felt confident she would find her way.Her mother, Liz, was a very straightforward woman. She delighted in the company of her daughter and doted on her as much as Mary would allow. She was especially sensitive to her daughter’s cues for space. Liz was long-divorced and raised Mary, a son and another daughter in Winter Park, Colorado. She continues to live there as a well-established single woman. It was obvious to me that she had other chances to marry and that she chose to remain single. Her stories focused on her children, their achievements and adventures.Grace was a puzzle. She appeared to be the blonde Southern woman who eschewed taking on authority and gave away her power. Though she was humble, she walked with strength and a sense of purpose. She may have been among the oldest of us, but she was almost always near the front of the group. Beneath her blonde, unassuming exterior, she was curious and smart. She lived in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her husband was an investment banker. She was the mother of four now grown boys. Being an Aunt to Mary seemed to be an important and cherished role in her life. I could see how well she must have mothered four rambunctious boys, with a combination of cunning, flexibility, kindness, strength and perseverance.Ted was a seventy-plus year old retired stock broker. He had been retired for twenty years. He and his wife were veterans of Karen’s trips. He lost his wife in a car accident precisely a year ago. This trip came at a time when he needed a distraction. Ted lived in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. When there, he awoke every morning at 4:30, met his buddies at 6:00 A.M., walked three and a half miles and had breakfast at McDonald’s at 7:30 A.M. At 8:00 A.M. he was at home taking his dog for another thirty minute walk.Ted had the air of a compliant good ol’ boy with a gentle Southern accent. He was self-deprecating and understated. One could tell that he was used to being a husband in harness to his deceased wife’s needs and demands. He seemed a bit lost without her to set the agenda. Ted was probably our oldest member. Though he was sometimes awkward in his movements and sometimes stressed by the hiking, he had the stamina of a horse and was never at the end of the line.Will and Jane, were husband and wife, like me and Marietta. They were good companions for one another and for the group. Will had been retired for about five years. He was an executive for a company that dole food to restaurants all over the United States and Canada. In his retirement he played golf, traveled to be with his children and grandchildren and now that Jane was retired, he traveled with his wife.Will was of sturdy German stock. He was an eager traveler, curious, interested and willing. He had a can-do attitude. He and Jane came to Madrid a few days before our tour began in Ronda and they planned to stay in Spain to visit the Spanish Mediterranean coast for a couple of days before returning back to Nashville.Jane was a tall, upright, statuesque, attractive blond. She was an accountant by profession and worked as an executive for a healthcare company until she retired a year ago. Both Jane and Will had a good sense for how to play well with others. They had to have that skill to survive and prosper in their respective corporate worlds.Now, as they had obviously reaped the benefits of their success in corporate politics, they were proactively building a life in retirement that focused on healthy, active living, travel and family.It was difficult to guess the ages of Will and Jane. They appeared to be in their mid-fifties, but I suspected they were older.Jennifer was from Cincinnati, Ohio. She was married. Her husband recently had back surgery. He has had back problems for thirty years. Trips like this one were difficult for him. He was glad for Jennifer to take these trips without him, because he did not want his ailment to limit her life. She is a 70-plus year old grandmother. Her adopted daughter is a single mother with two girls. Jennifer helped with her grandchildren when she could. She is an avid walker and she enjoys Karen’s walking tours.David was our tour guide. He was a British expatriate. He moved to this area twenty years ago. He came as a teacher and quickly saw the potential of developing notes and guidebooks for walking tours in this region. He explored the countryside for suitable routes that exposed the beauty of the topography and vegetation in the area. He formulated the maps and routes for our tour and for others who used his notes to take self-guided tours as well.He knew the names of all the plants. He helped us look for izbecks on the crests of the mountains and we found some. He was full of information about Spanish history and the history of Andalusia (the state) and Ronda (the town).David was in his early sixties and he was living with and has been living with a woman from Wales, Linda, who had been a pediatric oncologist in England before she met David and moved to Spain. She had become his partner in the tour business. She was his photographer and she helped him publish his books and tour notes.David was a talented leader. He was so confident in what he knew that he was constantly empowering the group with choices. He worked very hard. For example, the day before one of our walks it had rained heavily. David awoke at 5:00 A.M. to check the footing on the trail we were to use. He discovered it to be very wet from the previous day’s rain. So he adjusted our route to one with a drier and more stable path with fewer streams to cross.Karen might have taken David’s published notes and led the group herself. However, she seemed to prefer letting someone else play the expert role and she seemed to enjoy the role of liaison/geisha connecting us with one another and with guides who were native to the area.And there was David and Marietta. David (me), you might recall was the reluctant curmudgeon traveler who was trying to morph into a curious eager cooperative traveler. Marietta was the learn-and-speak-the-language traveler who worried that David won’t like something and tried to please him on the one hand and on the other complained that his limitations confined her so that she wasn’t be able to explore all the places, events and restaurants which she wanted to explore.They each wore characteristic hats. As you may remember, David’s hat made him look like Indiana Jones. Marietta’s hat seemed to transform her into Ms. Marple. Both hats were rainproof and could be wadded up and thrown in a pack. Hats were essential gear on this hike. They were needed in the rain and for shade from the sun when it wasn’t raining. Now that we have the cast of our Agatha Christie’s mystery (which instead of staring Monsieur Poirot, would be staring Indiana Jones and Ms. Marple), we can return to my quest and my question about its purpose the purpose of this quest.After our first evening’s dinner we all gathered the next morning in the hotel lobby loaded with backpacks and hiking sticks. Initially our plan was to take an all day hike from Benojan over pastures, hills and fields up into Ronda from the valley below. However, it was raining hard on this our first day so Karen and David decided to switch the itinerary around, making day three, day one and that would mean that we would spend the morning of our first day touring the inside of an ancient cave. We were transported up a mountain road to the famous Polenta Cave that had been inhabited 30,000 years. Its last inhabitants were left 4,000 years ago. This cave contained some of the earliest known cave drawings.There were drawings of bulls, horses and fish. There were symbolic marks that represented calendars and traps. Anthropologists theorize that these drawings were part of a religious visionary project. Perhaps the tribal shaman believed that by drawing something and praying in front of that representation, hunters would successfully capture or kill the prey symbolically drawn on the wall and imagined in prayer.I was mostly bored by this one and a half hour tour, guided by the cave’s owner whose Spanish words were translated by David. What I did get from looking at the drawing, bones and pot chards was the clear message (perhaps from God, who knows?) that I am destined to die and that my individual existence is of little importance to the history of humankind. And that while my life makes little difference to anything, I do however, if I so choose, have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to values that are eternal.I can choose to express and receive kindness, compassion, truth and justice or not. In my life I can enjoy these values as part of me or I can disregard them and focus narrowly on me, mine, money, dominance and fame.I am sorry to say that for much of my life, I have missed the opportunity to love and serve others and have instead focused on my life making a difference. When I saw the cave, I saw how silly that was.We left the cave at about 10:30 A.M. It was raining. For three hours we trekked across country on a slippery, muddy path, mostly downhill, through pastures of wet sheep and cows, some chickens but mostly scrub brush and olive trees. We only attended to where to place our next footstep and staying as dry as possible and little else. Two of us emerged with muddy bums.We, one by one, walked into our lunch restaurant minutes apart from one another. Mary and I were the first to arrive. The woman proprietor/cook and her husband seemed stunned and unwelcoming as we two drenched, muddy English speaking trekkers walked through the front door. She originally met us with both arms waving in front of her “no, cerrado” until enough of us had gathered at the door and she realized we were the group for whom she had opened the restaurant. “Oh El Groupo, Senor David,” she said.She took our wet rain gear and placed them on chairs to dry. She gave out dry shirts and jackets; she took a bucket of water, washed off muddy behinds and then she seated us at our banquet table. Once seated, course after course of food emerged on large plates from the kitchen. The plates were passed about. Wine bottle after win bottle appeared and was emptied.After being fed, washed, dried and relaxed, we were loaded on the bus and taken back to our hotel to take hot showers, naps and catch up on our email. That night we were taken to dinner at a restaurant a block behind our hotel, next to a church and a garden plaza.My poor social skills were beginning to be evidenced in the group. I had little to say as the group sat at three tables of four and discussed the events of the day. Again the food and ambience was wonderful. I was embarrassed to be my quiet socially lamb self.I have always had disdain for small-talk and little respect of trivial conversation. Yet, here among these people with diverse beliefs and political and religious persuasions, conversations about weighty matters would only have spoiled the company. Some of the group were talented at keeping the conversation on safe surface, topics, e.g., the weather, the day misadventures, the names of flowers or birds. Karen was especially good at changing the subject or asking a question to move the conversation away from a subject that could easily create tension.Here we were, all of us moderately wealthy people. Most of us except for Karen, maybe Mary and her mother, perhaps Grace and Me and Marietta were likely Republicans, who disliked Obama and here Marietta and I were blue-dog democrats and ardent Obama supporters. How were we going to get through the rest of the trip (especially me with my insistence on telling the truth) without causing a scene?I envied the talent of those people who could easily navigate these social waters with grace and poise. Grace may have been the best at it. She eschewed authority with every opportunity, making a statement, then following it with a disqualifying “but what do I know” flippant self-effacing remark. She was so not competing to be the alpha dog. She was always easy to be with, always non-assuming. I was hoping to learn from her.The next day we were off to hike eight-plus miles in and around Grazaloma, Spain. It was our tour guide, David’s plan that our destination each day was a tavern or bar. On this day we hiked muddy and/or rocky terrain, though pastures of sheep and a few cows on trails marked by kairns (rocks piled one on top the other). The kairn’s were useless to us because there were piles of rocks everywhere, as well as stone fences and abandoned stone houses. After the 1950’s Spain’s rural inhabitants abandoned their farm homes and moved either to work in the city or to return to their fields from villages by motorbikes to tend to their flocks, gardens, crops and trees.The houses were all painted white because of the plague in the middle ages. The white wash purified the walls and helped prevent the spread of the plague. Ronda and the areas which we were exploring were inside an area designated as a national park. All buildings in this area which were built after the Moors left Spain were required to be painted white and to be roofed with red clay tiles. This is the reason for the picturesque white villages with red-tiled roofs that spot the countryside in the Andalusian Region of Spain.The demographic movement from rural Spain left an abandoned countryside, with deteriorating stone houses. The animals, including deer and Ibex maintained the trials upon which we walked. David told us a story of a woman who used to live in the abandoned home where we stopped to have our packed lunch. These farmhouses were fairly large structures of about 1,000 square feet. They were occupied by people and animals, people in half the house, animals in the other, usually separated by a wall.This family was sharecroppers, as were all the other families living on the land there. They shared one-third of their earnings with the landowners, who owned the land and every structure on the land. The landowners lived in a nearby village. This meant that the home built and maintained by this family and their forbearers did not belong to the family who bought and transported the expensive roof tiles, cut the timbers, hauled, stacked stones and made cement to hold the stacked stones in place. The sharecropping family plastered, painted the plaster white and maintained the houses.As we began our walk, many sounds accompanied the crunching of our footsteps on the gravel road. Barking dogs, clucking chickens and crowing roosters surrounded us for the first half mile, as we passed a cluster of farmhouses that lined this road.When we moved from road to path, our feet no longer made noise as we walked but we heard baa’s from sheep and clanging bells that were draped around the necks of some cows and some sheep. The cowbells had a deeper sound than the sheep bells. David offered an explanation for the bells. Herders put a bell on the animal that most often tests limits. Somehow the bell calms the animal or reminds the animal to behave and stay with the others.I wondered if the bells did not make it easier for the herder to find an animal that wanders from the herd.Back to the landlord, and sharecropper family that lived in the home where we sat and ate our jamon and queso sandwich, with an orange and cookie. Every summer the landlord would take his family for a holiday up the mountain on his land for two weeks. The tenant family had to prepare their home for the landlord’s family, move out of the house and devise ways to tend their flocks, maintain their charcoal making facilities, weed and water their vegetable garden while based in rooms they either rented or were shared with them by friends in the village. To do their daily farm chores they had to walk miles from the village to their farm each day for that two weeks.I suppose I should think nothing of this, but I do because I own land from which other men log timber and other men spray defoliates and plant young trees that I rarely see and I profit from their labor. And for no other reason that I inherited this land.Somehow I am able to accept my way of life, but I was still and still am highly incensed that this emperor landlord displaced this hard-working peasant family from their home for no other reason than he wanted to escape the summer heat in the village some 750 meters lower in altitude and four miles away.Of course, this was and is a vestige of the feudal system in which the nobles owned land worked by peasants. Peasants were allowed to live and work on the land at the nobleman’s discretion. In turn the noble family was allowed the privilege of overseeing the land which was owned by the king and collected rent from the peasants. If the noble families did not pay their taxes to the king or was otherwise not loyal to the throne, they were thrown off their land (just as the peasants might removed from the land if the noblemen so chose) and someone else was given this land to oversee and collect the landowner’s portion from the peasants.Not so unlike today where people own money making enterprises, land, businesses, factories and the government is their resented silent partner to which they must pay some portion.David told us about the European zoning rules that assumed the land in some form belonged to all the people (or at least access to the land) and people could walk through anyone’s land so long as they did not leave the path. The path belonged to everyone. The land on either side belonged to the landowner. This was the reason we were allowed to walk through these pastures.Also, as I mentioned earlier, some parts of the country were designated natural areas. People could live in already built homes but no new structures could be built and all structures must be painted white and conform to certain building codes. Here in Spain the people did not believe that landowners were free to do whatever they wanted on their land. Landowners had obligations to future generations. The government, in return, reforested the land for free.I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if the Native Americans had developed technology, science, written language and universities before the Europeans and they had traveled east in boats and discovered England and Europe in say 1000 A.D. and conquered Europe. What if the Native American’s had brought with them to Europe the assumption that land could never be owned, that the earth belonged to us all and it was everyone’s responsibility to protect and nurture the land. I wonder what sort of society would have developed from that assumption.A pattern that existed on the first day reappeared and was confirmed on the second day. On the first day, I was in front of the line of hikers. David tended toward the front middle and Karen was often at the end. On the first day, I was the first to arrive at our destination, even though it was comparatively a short walk, two and half miles.When I imagined this trip, I had resolved that I would not walk in front. I have always been a front walker shouting and encouraging those behind me to follow. It was as if I were Kit Carson, scouting the path for the cavalry. I did have a mind that seemed to always be solving the problem of which way to turn next or where was the best spot to place my foot. If people chose to take the path that I scouted out and devised, they would have a safe journey or this is what I always believed.I was always irritated when those behind me chose another way after all the hard work and figuring I had done for them. And it seemed to me that people were ungrateful and often resented me for knowing the way. It took me years to understand how self-defeating this life pattern was for me.I did notice my brother Bill’s leadership style. It was very different from mine (though I always thought I was trying to be like Bill). Bill was the best friend to all of his peers. He was the person whom they chose to lead in almost every situation. He was a natural leader.Instead of being in front, Bill was mostly at the rear. Instead of telling people which way to go, he asked people which way they wanted to go. While I was always impatient to get there, Bill was more interested in how comfortable the pace was for people.David and Karen were leaders like Bill. They intuitively knew that the more choices they created for the group, the more the group would gladly follow their lead. They were never insecure about their authority. Rather they were so secure in their role as leader, that it rarely mattered to them if they were in front.I wanted to be like Bill, David and Karen on this trip but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t. My feet needed to move at their pace. I was impatient when I had to wait until the person in front of me took their next step. The group felt my impatience and often made way to let me pass. And pass I did.Oh I have a bit of an excuse. Slow walking hurts my back. My back does much better when I’m constantly moving or if I am sitting. Standing or walking slowly and looking - the usual museum pace, kills my back.But who am I kidding. I like to be out front setting the pace. Though I’m not nearly as competitive as I once was, I often felt my inner race horse wanting to be the nose that breathed the out front air. The desire is just in me. It has been there as long as I can remember.As I have become older, I have tried to temper this urge, but with only a modicum of success.When we approached Grazeloma, I was once again in front by a ways. Marietta suddenly came up from behind me jogging. I knew why. She needed to go to the bathroom and she often felt the pull of the barn, or the near the end desire to run so that the pain in her legs would end.Here she came and I joined her gallop, worried that the body weight coming down on the base of my spine from these faster more forceful steps would pinch a nerve in my back. I risked it just for the joy of moving in tandem with Marietta pushing to the end together.We got to a fork in the road and we made a choice without stopping, knowing that we risked making the wrong choice. We hit the town plaza and a john in a bar on the plaza. As we came out luckily, the others behind us emerged. I’m sure that they were a bit irritated and worried that we were lost. This was a normal position for me. I used to think it was their problem for not keeping up as they should. Now I know better. It is my responsibility to stay connected to my community, always, not the community’s responsibility to keep up with me.Soon all was forgotten and forgiven. We were sitting in the shade in front of a bar drinking Clera’s (beer and lemonade), sangria (wine coolers), wine or beer or a coke. For me, it was always a coke. Alcohol would make me even more tired than I was and I was exhausted.This hike was more strenuous than a normal eight and a half mile hike. Our feet were stuck in mud or jumping from dry spot to dry spot or falling off an unstable rock. Instead of moving about one yard per step, we moved half that. Instead of walking on a flat surface, we were going up and down hills. Sometimes the inclines were steep. Ted is in the habit of walking four miles every day. Even he was exhausted by these hikes.After we sat at the tavern, had our drink and felt a bit refreshed, the bus came and collected twelve dragging bodies and deposited us in front of our hotel. We schlepped our backpacks to our rooms and what the others did, I don’t know, but I fell on the bed, slept without moving an inch for an hour. Then I took a shower and dressed for dinner.We gathered in the hotel lobby, looking refreshed. We strolled together down a hill to a restaurant at the bottom. The food was once again delicious. The time of sunset in Spain seemed strange to me. At 7:30 the sun was still well above the horizon. At 9:30 the sun had set but it was twilight. In Nashville this light seemed to occur an hour earlier. And Madrid, about 200 miles north of Ronda, is the same latitude as New York City.As we walked down the hill, the valley below was spread out on either side. Ronda is built on a ridge. The ridge is surrounded by farmland in the valley below. It is as if someone built a large town of 50,000 people on top of the Narrows of the Harpeth near Nashville. In Ronda a stream runs directly under the city some 500 feet down.The colors in the valley below are basic primary colors, red poppies, yellow wild flowers, green wheat fields and pastures, blue flowers, brown dirt dotted with dark green olive trees in rows, white horses moving about with cows, goats and sheep at pasture.After supper the return walk up the hill to our hotel was difficult on a stomach full with food and wine, but the pink in the sky and the muted colors in that valley and the dogs we met along the way made it easier.The next day was our most beautiful and spectacular walk. We rode the train to Benoajan. The ground was well saturated so David gave us the choice of taking a longer drier route or a wetter shorter route. The longer route would add forty-five minutes to our walk.We chose the drier longer route. We began walking on a gravel road, through groves of olive trees and cork trees. David told us some interesting things about these trees. Fresh olives, he said, were so bitter that they are inedible. Olives are soaked in water for days until the bitter taste dissolves in the water and they have no taste. Then they are soaked again in water with a recipe of a variety of herb and spices. The olives absorb the tastes from the recipe. Always salt is a prominent ingredient, but other spices can be added to create different tastes. Salt is added until an egg floats in the water. We ate some local olives that obviously had garlic added to the brine. They were unique and delicious.After olives are pressed for olive oil, the oil sits for several weeks because the oil contains so much sediment. David prefers to have olive oil fresh from the pressing. Every day the flavor and clarity of the oil changes. He and his mate, Linda enjoy the taste adventure that comes from having a different tasting oil each day.Cork trees are grown here, Portugal, Southern France and Northern Africa. The cork tree is in the oak family. It propagates with acorns. It requires a temperate climate and acid rich sandy soil. People who make their income from cork are threatened by the screw-top wine bottles and plastic faux-corks in the much of today’s wines. We reassured David that wine buyers in the U.S. knew little about good wine and they often judged the quality of the wine by whether or not its bottle had a real cork. I am one of those fools and there are many others like me.The cork trees are harvested once every seven years. Very old large trees have the cork bark sheared from their trunks and their large limbs. Most of the trees were two feet or less in diameter. The cork from these trees were harvested mainly from their trunks and usually only the bottom six feet or so. This care not to take too much from the tree protects the trees sap flow. The harvested part of the tree that gave up its bark to the cork farmer is a rust/red, while the rest of the bark on the tree is a gray/black. Over time the rust red turns darker as each year adds a new layer of cork.David also told us a story about a white-bulbed flower called the Asphodel. It was everywhere in full bloom among the trees ,in the pastures, along the paths and by the fences, wire and stone. In a battle against the Moors in the 1600’s, the Moors had the Spanish surrounded in the village. Villagers pulled the Asphodels from the ground being sure to take the bulb. They then built a fire and roasted the bulbs to just the right temperature. When the Moors attacked the next day, the villagers pulled the flowers out of the fire by the stems and smashed them on the rock pavement. This caused the bulbs to explode sounding like a gunshot. The intimidated Moors retreated, leaving this village alone.Every year in early May the village commemorates this event, repeating the roasting of the Asphodels and the explosions of their bulbs. You might think that over the years that this would create a shortage of Asphodels. But we saw no sign of this.This was our fourth day in Ronda. I had not had my fix of being sought after as a therapist for about a week now. I couldn’t stand not being Dr. McMillan, the one who knows, for another minute. Mary seemed like the best victim for my Dracula therapy teeth. Remember Mary, she was the youngest among us, daughter of a long divorced mother, thirty-five, recent journalism graduate, the stepparent figure to two daughters of her significant other. She seemed likely to have issues. There was the one about graduating with a master’s in journalism when there are few jobs for journalists. As I explored that avenue it seemed clear that she was probably top in her class and a likely candidate for a job in public radio.The first nibble she took from my posing as Dr. McMillan had to do with her personality style. It seemed that she got along very well with animals, children and people older than her and not so well with her peers.That sounded familiar to me, since I too had this same experience and had given much thought to this subject. I had two theories about this, one environmental and one genetic. I told her a version of the environmental theory.Here we were Mary and me, strolling in the lead. Mary like me was a good path finder and she liked figuring out and knowing the way. I was glad to give up the lead to her because of her obvious competence and because I felt righteous when I was not taking the lead role.We walked ahead through green pastures among gray white boulders and rocks, through fields filled with wild flowers talking, paying little attention to our surroundings. I was in heaven. I had an audience for my theories (I’m not sure how interested an audience she was) but I was so starved for my Dr. McMillan role that I’m not sure I cared.So I told her that often people like us (her and me) had enmeshed relationships with our mothers. We defeated our fathers for our mother’s love. This made us feel like we were co-adults with our mothers. We were often seen as precocious authoritative children who adults enjoyed. This made us believe that peer friendships were unnecessary and that anyway we were superior to them; not a good attitude for making friends or playing well with others. And what’s more we were well occupied and entertained in the world of adults. Consequently, we never learned the skills it took to go along and get along with our peers.I must have passed the test for being a more or less competent psychologist because then she shared her real problem. It seemed the twelve-year-old daughter of her mate drew a picture in which she (the twelve-year-old) was on the green grass, her father was the sun and Mary was a cloud between her (the daughter) and the sun. The twelve-year-old daughter didn’t understand why her daddy needed Mary. She wanted to know why she, the daughter, wasn’t enough.Add to this the mother of the daughter was constantly fighting with the father, Mary’s mate. Of course, Mary saw these conflicts from his point of view.All right, throw me a pitch right over the plate. I’ve got this one, though I worried that my response might seem a bit odd.The daughter was approaching puberty, any day now, and Mary did not think she (the twelve-year-old daughter) understood conception. First, I suggested that she be careful with the issue of puberty. If the daughter had her first period while she was with her (Mary) that she should immediately call the father, have him take the daughter to her mother and let her mother explain what was happening to her daughter and allow the mother to help the daughter cope with this frightening moment. This is a very important time in the life of a girl and her mother. Mary should be very careful not to usurp the mother’s role. This might help the mother see Mary as an ally rather than a threat.Once the daughter understood the engine behind conception, (i.e., that adults have sex and enjoy having sex) this often answers the daughter’s question of her father (i.e. why do you need Mary) and at the same time helps the daughter direct her emotional attachment away from her father and toward children her own age.The awareness of sex is the beginning of a child’s journey in to the development of a separate self. It is where adolescents begin to have thoughts that they cannot tell their parents. It is an important and difficult time. The daughter’s question (why do you need Mary) is a very important one and at the right time in her development, the answer will be obvious to her.I told Mary that I believed the role of the stepparent in a blended family was the most difficult family role. The person playing this role often had the responsibility of being a parent without the authority of a parent. The stepparent was easy to marginalize and demonize. The success of the stepparent often depended on the support of the same sex biological parent. Often the same sex parent was the person most threatened by the stepparent.Mary seemed to appreciate my thoughts and I appreciated having someone with whom I could share them. I was important again. My narcissism beast had been fed.As we came upon Ronda, the view of the white city on the hill was as magnificent as the view of the countryside was from Ronda.You may recall that the ridge that Ronda occupied was intersected by a stream and a waterfall. The two separate parts were joined by a bridge. The part of Ronda that was on our right was called the old town. The new town, on the other side, was built in the 1700’s.It is believed that in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway was writing about Ronda and this bridge as he described how people were thrown off a bridge in the center of town as punishment for being on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. I could not help but imagine this horrible event as we approached this beautiful sight.This walk exhausted us more than any other. It was a very hot day. We were swilling water every 100 steps. There was no shade and no clouds. Sun screen protected our skin from the sun but not from its glare and heat. At the trails end, I was ahead as usual. I got to a dead-end T in the path and waited in the shade some time before I saw the others. David pointed to the right and I was off again. It was all uphill and our destination was the place where we had dinner two days ago. I grabbed a chair at a table outside a bar, ordered a coke and waited while, one at a time, the others joined me. All were exhausted and thirsty.We rested in the shade of the tavern and its red umbrellas, drinking either beer, clera, sangria wine or coke. I couldn’t imagine how I would walk the last quarter mile up the hill with the effect of alcohol added to my tired sore legs. We must have stayed at the tavern for at least an hour. Ted generously picked up the tab and we walked up the ridge to our hotel.I took a shower and rested on the bed, while Marietta found the interest and energy to watch the movie version of For Whom the Bell Tolls downstairs in the hotel lobby.As we did every evening, we gathered at the front door of the hotel at 7:00. Each of us would give our key to the Concierge as we left. Then we walked to Karen’s selection for the restaurant of the evening. Sometimes Karen took our dinner choices and called them ahead to the restaurant so that they would be ready for us when we arrived.In Spain, 7:00 – 7:30 PM was considered early dining. Most restaurant patrons did not arrive for dinner until 9:30 or so. Lunch was similarly later than is the U.S. custom. Usually lunch in Spain is at 2:00 P.M. We kept the U.S. customary eating times. This helped assure us of easy reservations and good service, a problem for a group of ten-twelve. And it helped us be up and ready for the next day’s hike at 9:00 A.M.The dinners began to run together for me. I think we ate at another restaurant at the bottom of the ridge. What I remember most about the meal was that Ted was tired and left early. Once he left, the power of his suggestion reminded me of how tired I was and suddenly I could barely keep my eyes open. So I excused myself from the company and began my walk up the ridge in the twilight. Just before the path began to move into an incline I saw two men with Spanish spaniels mounted on two large well-formed horses, one white and one roan. Suddenly I was awake and focused. These horses were beautiful creatures and clearly their riders were master horsemen. The two mounted horses were prancing in place waiting for permission to move forward, while the three black spaniels ran in circles around the horses.I wanted to stay and see what the horses and riders were about to do, but I felt as if I was intruding and my legs were not willing to stand and watch for an indeterminate amount of time. So I proceeded back to the hotel and to bed. I wasn’t sure when Marietta came in. She later told me that she walked up the ridge with the rest of the group and watched the last part of For Whom the Bell Tolls in the hotel lobby.The next day was a free day. Karen had planned a city tour for the group that would last until noon. Any who cared to walk a trail along the bottom of the ridge were welcome to join her in the afternoon.Marietta had other plans for us. We took a bus from Ronda to Malaga. Though on the map the bus station appeared to be near the train station in Ronda, that did not mean that Marietta and I could not get lost trying to find it.We did, however, come upon the bus station by watching a bus take a turn and following it into the station. It was about 10:00 A.M. Our bus to Malaga was to leave at 10:10. As we were buying our bus tickets and boarding, four buses packed with tourists arrived and unloaded. Ronda was a tourist town. Its streets seemed fairly empty in the morning until 10:30. Then the streets were packed with people with cameras. At about 5:00 the people with cameras disappeared and buses packed with tourists pulled out of the bus station.The bus trip to Malaga was slow but only because the bus stopped so often. We got to Malaga before noon. The bus station had maps of the city. Marietta wanted to go to the Picasso Museum in Malaga. This was his home. He left Malaga at eighteen. Some of his very early work was displayed in the Picasso Museum here.We set off on a walk from the bus station across the city to the Museum. Malaga was a thriving busy pedestrian friendly city with large buildings and statues like Madrid.Our greatest discovery was the map app on my iPhone and we saw a blue dot on a street map of Malaga. It represented the location of our cell phone. We watched as it moved along Paseo de los Tilos to Bueanvista Palace the home of the Picasso Museum. Watching ourselves move along on a map toward our destination intoxicated me.When we reached the museum, we found a tavern on a side street nearby and had lunch. Marietta left me there and I wrote the beginnings of this travel log.I was worried about my writing because on my other trips I wrote each day. Since I had written nothing til this moment, I was afraid I would have forgotten some important details. And probably I did.I could not believe that I was allowed by the waiter to sit at this outdoor shaded table for two hours writing without me ordering anymore than another coke. He cleared up the plates around me, stood nearby in case I needed something while he watched a soccer game on T.V.Marietta emerged from the museum and found me about 3:30. She had some post card size copies of Picasso paintings which were displayed in the museum. They were beautiful realistic paintings that must have taken him hours to execute. They were not sketches on napkins that a child might draw and his signature.For a moment I was almost sorry that I did not take the museum tour along with Marietta, but I was pleased that I had written eight pages. Clearly my conception of Picasso’s talent was misguided. I didn’t think that he was capable of drawing something that actually looked like a photograph. I was wrong. Marietta explained to me that Picasso learned that a few lines could elicit the notion of a face in the viewers mind. And since he wanted to stimulate the thinking in his audience and make a statement with his work, he decided to use color and form as symbols rather than to represent reality. This he believed would make for a better conversation between the artist and his audience because the audience would be more involved in visualizing what was intended that was missing from the art. (And by the way he could produce a lot more art with fewer strokes and make more money.)While this explanation did redeem Picasso as an artist in my mind, I continued to think of him as a modern man just as was Hemingway and John F. Kennedy and John Wayne in the way he treated women. I still remember that in most Western movies of the modern era (1950’s) there was a scene in which circumstances were dire and the actress was hysterically crying and screaming, “What are we going to do?” and the male lead, often John Wayne as I remember, would slap her and she would become calm and look at him gratefully for putting her in her place. Regardless of his artistic talent or philosophy, Picasso was still one of these modern men, who had defeated religion with science, who spoke declaratively without question marks in their sentences, who saw statements as true or false, who knew the answer to everything or knew how to find the answer and who stood for good against evil and right over wrong. These were men who knew what was best and expected to be followed, especially by women.And the women who to me represent the modern woman were Jacqueline Kennedy, Doris Day, June Allison and Marilyn Monroe. They were attracted to the Cary Grants, John F. Kennedy, Hemingway, Picasso and John Wayne version of modern men.And I was attracted to those same women. I was raised to be the quarterback of the football team, the son of a town father who recruited industry to Arkadelphia and successfully promoted Congress to build a dam on the Caddo River. I was Bill McMillan’s son who would someday grow up to lead the community just as he had. I might run for congress. I certainly would take my turn as president of the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club. I would be the elder in the Presbyterian Church and the advisor to the presidents of the two local colleges. I would know the answers like my father and I would speak the truth and stand for honesty just as he and John Wayne and other men who slapped their women to calm them down did (though as far as I know, my father never laid a hand on my mother, but my mother was never hysterical. I’m pretty sure if she had been in such a hysterical state that my father would have done just what John Wayne did in the movies.) And of these modern men, Picasso biographies represent him as one of the most misogynist of all these men.In college, at what is now Rhodes College, I was introduced to feminism and I began to see that I did not want to be the man I was raised to be. Yet, I stood erect and square shouldered like my father. I loved sports and spoke the truth like he did. I was sure of myself as he was. I spoke in declarative sentences as he did and I believed in science and the truth. I too was trying to hang on to God but my image of God was a deist image of a God who was fast losing his power. In fact my God was changing sexes.I was relieved when I was told that I didn’t have to take care of, protect or open doors for women. I was intrigued that women who were no longer shackled by the patriarchy would be sexually liberated and would have as much sexual interest as I did. I was interested in sharing authority with women so long as someone was in charge. I did not have to be in charge but if no one was, then I would take charge. I had no idea about how to allow a group consensus to emerge or how important it was not to come to an answer too early. If someone else had an answer or a better answer than I did, that was fine with me, but if there was a question without an answer, I would provide the answer or go to get one and be back in minutes with a clear path. I was very threatened by ambiguity. Yet, I wanted to change my stripes from John Wayne to Alan Alda.I could not. And as I sit here writing this today I cannot. We followed our blue dot on the iPhone map back to the bus station in Malaga which was next to the train station. There we boarded a train at 6:00 P.M., instead of a bus, in hopes that we would get to Ronda sooner by train. T’was not to be. The train stopped at every station just as the bus had.We returned to Ronda at 8:00 P.M., found a restaurant on the street on the way home, ate supper and went to bed, ready for the next day which was to be the last hike of the arranged tour.Our last group adventure was to be a trek to look at a particular kind of vulture. In a nearby canyon there was a roost of over 200 vulture families. The plan was for us to walk down a trail for two miles where we would turn off the trail and walk only a few yards to a viewing area where we could watch the spectacular scene of vultures circling and landing on perches and nests that were less than forty yards across from us on the steep canyon walls.We loaded on the bus. Karen reminded us that none of us was obligated to go the full distance. Anyone could find a shady spot along the path and we would have very good view of the vultures from there as well.It was a very hot day. There were no clouds and no wind. Shortly after we began our hike we saw vultures circling and landing. Some of our group were nursing sore feet, ankles, knees or backs and chose to take Karen’s advice.The rest of us walked to David’s secret viewing point. All of us were rewarded with views of these very large birds circling above with eight foot wing spans. Once they landed they seemed to disappear in the rock. We had binoculars and cameras with high-powered lenses and we were eventually able to distinguish the birds from the rocks.All of us found a spot where we could sit and observe the circling giants above us. I was very tired from the week’s long walks and in moments I was sleeping.Just prior to the arrival of the sandman, I was wondering what meaning could be made for me that the last day of our walking tour was focused on vultures. Now granted these were unusual vultures, giant birds even among large raptors. Their circling flight high above was entrancing. Their flight as they swooped in to land on the rocks nearby was amazing. But their roosting posture and their walking about was awkward and clumsy, with their closed wings forming what looked like large shoulders extending over their head that seemed tilted forward.These particular birds mated for life. If one died they never joined with another mate to build a nest or hatch a baby. If we were able to keep our lenses or binoculars still we were able to see a baby’s head bobbing about a nest.Just before sleep took over my brain, I was thinking that these birds often symbolized death. They existed by eating flesh from dead animals. They were scavengers and opportunists who helped rid the earth of sick decaying flesh. Their existence forced us to face the temporary nature of our own existence, just as the cave had on the first day of our tour.As I feel asleep, I was thinking that my particular version of the narcissistic modern man was just one of many psyches like mine trying to find my way in a postmodern universe. In a relatively short time our bodies would be appropriate food for these birds. And what difference did our attempt at importance make?My wife somehow tolerated my arrogance and found a way to love me. I have some friends who have been able to accept me and find more good in me than bad. Yes, I am proud of my theory of sense of community and articles and books that I have published. Yes, I think I am, now, after thirty years a master at the craft of psychotherapy and working with couples, families, attorneys and the courts.And yes, today I was walking at the head of the line to get to this spot and I and our group expected that on the return trip back to the bus, I would be leading again. Though I want to change, to become more humble, to be a person who is easier to love, I’m not sure I can completely erase my sense of pride. Maybe I have to wait for death and the vultures to do that for me. But I plan to keep on with this project til then.The next day Marietta and I boarded the morning train to Madrid. Karen and some others of our group were on the same train in a different car. I was exhausted and irritable. I could not keep my eyes open. Every word from Marietta’s mouth that required my attention irritated me and I snapped at her over nothing and was ashamed of myself.Karen walked by our seats and stopped to speak. I was so exhausted that I could not keep my eyes open. I tried to converse politely but I couldn’t. As soon as Karen left I was asleep.I slept for an hour or so. When I awoke I decided to read the book I brought to help me understand what a new version, a post modern version of an American student expatriate in Spain would look like and contrast that with Hemingway’s clear image of modern American man in Spain as portrayed by his life and his main character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan.