Tag: Sara

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.

Temperatures have dropped here over the past month and we have discovered that our apartment becomes an icebox in the winter. But it was a big day and I had no choice but to get out of bed. Shivering, I grudgingly got up and took a shower then waited for David to take his. He didn’t have to come with me, but because he knew how nervous I was, he was accompanying me. I grabbed the notebook that David had found for me the day before, looked at the clock with dismay and headed out the door. I was going to be late on my very first day.

(…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.

A good thing about having a scooter that's made in China is that it’s such a no-name brand that it’s not even worthy of stealing. In the beginning, David was so overprotective that he would check on it regularly to make sure it hadn’t been stolen. Now, he’s so underprotective that he has actually removed the anti-theft lock for a day to use on our bikes instead. In fact, we’ve gotten so laissez-faire about our scooter that, twice, we’ve forgotten to move it for market days. Something that used to send us into a panic because our scooter would get lost in the crowd and have who knows what happen to it.

Whether we embrace it, fight it, admit it, or deny it, the fact remains that much of life is based on luck. Luck makes sure that we’re in the right place at the right time so that we can experience the thrill of spotting Al Pacino leaving a fancy New York City restaurant just as we’re passing in front. And luck can even determine the outcome of a special day, as was the case on Tuesday, David’s birthday.

I have been in Spain long enough to know that arriving at an intended destination requires a fair amount of luck.