Tag: David

Some people can take an empty space, envision greatness and then make their vision a reality. They have a knack for interior decorating and they wow people with the final outcome. Well, I’m not one of those people. I’m the type, actually, who arrives to college and moves into a room that’s empty except for a bed and a dresser and it stays that way until I graduate.

It’s a good thing that I married someone quite my opposite in that regard. As David and I move from place to place, he has been the one who has always made our apartments feel like home. It’s thanks to him that we painted the living room in our spacious two-bedroom in East Harlem a cheery yellow so that our moods remained bright, even in the dead of winter.

I was 16 years old when my parents were approached by a group of people trying to raise capital in order to keep the Fahrenheit 451 bookstore in Laguna Beach, California open. They came to my parents for money because they hoped that, as former owners of the bookstore, my mom and dad might embrace the cause. I hoped the same and tried to talk them into it, but for slightly different reasons. The thought of owning a business was exhilarating. I could just imagine myself working the register and seeing the money flowing in.

My dad looks just like Santa Claus. Besides his stubborn tendency to wear shorts and t-shirts, even in the dead of winter, the resemblance is striking, actually. He has the same scraggly beard (except when my mom trims it), the same big belly (although abstaining from sweets has greatly reduced its size), the same jolly smile and the same twinkle in his eyes. And in true Santa fashion, he’s also extremely generous.

Year after year, he and my mom would work their magic and make our dreams come true. They’d pack us in the car and we’d head to my grandmother’s house in the mountains. And we’d hang our stockings from the chimney and examine the tree knowing that, by morning, it would be transformed.

In the days that followed, we learned more about Paco and only became more confused about our mysterious landlord. The agent who found us the place told us how she had discovered that he had put up a "For Rent" sign even after we had secured the apartment with a deposit. Apparently, he thought he could rent it out more than once. We assumed that he must know very little about how things work, having never rented his place before.

He told us that he wanted to stay on good terms with us and reassured us he would be fine reimbursing the fees we would incur in moving again (the post office charges of about $40 to forward mail

(…continued from "Of Mice and Men)

The look on David’s face took away my own smile. He had only been outside for five minutes, but I knew that something had happened in that short time to make him look this way. He had run into our landlord Paco, who, coincidentally, had exited his house at just the same time that David had exited ours. He had spoken with David, but, this time, it wasn’t about his family or childhood memories. This time, it was about mine. It was about the visitors who had arrived just hours earlier—the four people who had piled out of the car and entered our home. He asked David how long they were planning on staying and when David told him a couple of weeks, he replied they could stay two or three days, but then would have to find other accommodations.

Robert Burns once wrote, "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Oh, how very true that statement is. Life is unpredictable. You may try to create the blueprints and lay the groundwork to make it happen, but, at any moment, life can throw you a curveball; and when that happens, all you can do is take a swing. It happened to us in New York. One of us getting laid off would have been a fastball. But both of us getting laid off within a week of each other turned out to be a curveball—one that sent us for a loop and dropped us off in Spain.

Moving day is just around the corner! We’re excited to settle into our new house and thrilled that we’ll soon be able to call Altea home. How great it feels to finally be able to focus on the future because, for a while, it felt as though we couldn’t escape from the past. The fact that the restaurant project with David’s dad didn’t work out quite as we had hoped had filled us with disappointment and it took most of the summer to come to terms with how things had panned out. But we have officially put the regret of Al Cante behind us and have wholly turned our attention to the future.