What follows is a portion of a rather half-assed journal of my summer trip through Europe.
Barcelona. Wednesday. 1 p.m.
They changed the airport!
This was my first thought when I arrived in Barcelona. The airport I’d grown to know so well, where I had memories of late departures, early arrivals, lost luggage, found love, bad bocadillos and good wine, was different. How dare they!
I found the bus that would take me from the new Terminal 2 to the old Terminal 1, where the train into the city waited. The train was the same – hard to figure out, prone to random delays, often containing one or more beggar, musician, or beggarmusician.
As I rode into the city, the flashbacks started.
Barcelona and I have a long history, in part because I played for a basketball team here long ago, in part because I played against basketball teams here not so long ago, but mostly, because of a girl.
It ended badly, me and the girl. And as I sat on the train, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for myself. How could I have let myself get hurt so?
I transferred at Sants and got off my second train in Vilassar de Mar, one of the cities along the coast north and east of Barcelona. My friend, a former basketball agent who once tried to steal me away from my agent, was waiting next to his tiny, oh-so-Spanish car. He smiled and waved, his tan body looking more like one inhabited by a 25-year-old than one inhabited by a 45-year-old. We ate dinner at a restaurant nearby, and then he showed me to my quarters – a hillside apartment he’d rented thinking he might lease it to people on holiday in the summer. And then he left and I got ready for bed and then I looked outside. The stars were shining above hills I knew would make me think I was in Brazil in the morning.
It was beautiful, and I was lucky.
I had a revelation inside a bar in Los Angeles not long ago. The way I experience life is based more on how I view what I’m experiencing than it is about what is actually happening. This, of course, is not much of a revelation, in that it sounds a lot like it came out of a self-help book on the clearance rack. But sometimes, the revelations one has in a bar are a well-traveled lot.
Why I realized this in a bar was because of the crowd. It occurred to me: I can look at these people as a group of potential enemies, or I can look at them as a group of potential friends. The hipster with a mustache and tight jean shorts can be a fucking asshole poser. Or he can be a friendly dude who’s just trying to make his way in the world.
As I stared at the stars, I decided that Barcelona is like the crowd in the bar for me. She’s hurt me, this city. But she’s also helped me. Was the end of that messy relationship filled with pain? Yes, of course. Can I help but associate some of that pain with Barcelona? No.
But do I have to look at things this way? Probably not.
Because, while the relationship went bad and while I can’t help but think of how much Barcelona had to do with that relationship, I can also turn it around. I can be grateful that I ever got to have the relationship in the first place. I can be grateful that I know Barcelona well enough that, back on the train, I could tell a group of Americans that they wanted to get off at Passeig de Gracia, not Clot Arago.
I can be grateful that I ever became acquainted with such a lovely city, where I now have friends who let me stay in their gorgeous apartments and let me borrow their cars and allow me to feel the warmth of generosity and friendship.
And all I have to do is choose.
The airport is newer, more modern, and probably better!
But goddamn, it’s a long way from one terminal to the other.
(It’s a work in progress.)
To read the previous Euro Bits entry, click here.
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