The part I neglected to tell you....

January 12, 2012  Rota, Spain

During the last several years, I have censored my posts to keep from upsetting Andrea who didn't want to know anything about my "personal" life.  But I find that this blog has become a sort of diary and I can't just ignore things that were big parts of my life.  So let's fill in the gaps....

After Andrea left, I sold the boat.  And it sold almost immediately and long before I was emotionally ready I found myself standing on the dock with 15 cardboard boxes of personal effects, waving goodbye to the boat in which we had lived so many adventures.  A double loss!  And really sad!  But being alone gave me the opportunity to reflect on my marriage - and I realized that we weren't really all that compatible... which is why she left me 4 times. Her idea of relationship was very different from mine. I finally was able so see what I didn't want to see when I was crazy in love. I finally realized that I couldn't ever go back to that marriage.

So, as reported previously, I rented an apartment and started putting together a new life.  Well, as the months passed, I realized that flamenco and parties with the gypsies only went so far in satisfying my needs for a fulfilled life.  I am not naturally a single person.  I know many folks who prefer being single, but I'm not one of them.  I like sharing life with someone special.  And my way of dealing with grief is to look forward, not backward.  So I decided to look for a new life companion as a way of coping.  And it made me feel better to look forward to someone new.

Now, I didn't expect to find anyone all that special, but I wanted to relate to someone of the feminine persuasion a bit.  The gypsies had their limitations.  Here in Rota, I couldn't see any possibility of meeting anyone interesting.  I met an Englishman living on his boat in the marina and he had been telling me of all the women he had been meeting on the internet.  So I wrote down a list of the sites that he recommended and put myself on a few of them.  Of course, that connected me with women who spoke English.  But it was fun to spend time reading about all the women who wanted to meet someone.  Matching someone with me isn't easy.  She would have to be tall, non-smoker, politically liberal, and I preferred slim.  Oh, and speaking Spanish with a willingness to be around flamenco would be an advantage. 

At that point, I still considered the possibility that I would return to the US some day, so I searched for women around Santa Barbara, assuming that I might like to live there.  There were lots of single, attractive women in my age group there.  In due course, I found one that appealed to me and wrote to her.  In short order, we were emailing daily.  It looked pretty good.  We were born in the same town and about the same age so we shared lots of cultural memories.  She was smart and cute.  So as time passed it seemed logical that we needed to meet.  She had a lot of air miles saved up and so decided to come visit me here for a week.  I put on my tourguide hat and picked her up at the airport.  I gave her the quick tour of the best attractions in Andalucia.... Sevilla, Cádiz, Jerez.  We had a great time, but I couldn't see a future there.  In spite of getting along well, I couldn't imagine leaving Spain and going back to a plain-vanilla American life.  And she was in the process of becoming a Catholic - and subscribed to a newsletter from Newt Gingrich.  So she went back to the US and after a while the emails sort of dropped off.

Next, I tried searching for women already in Spain.  There were quite a few ex-pats living here, both English and American.  However, most of them smoked or were living a life totally removed from Spain - playing golf in Marbella, shopping, and drinking in bars along the coast.  Nope.
Finally, I found an Englishwoman who was living in her own house in the country in the province of Malaga.  She was in the small town of Iznajar between Cordoba and Malaga.  I went to visit her one day (and played a benefit show in her town that same night).  We got along pretty well, so we had some more visits in my town and in hers. 
Then I found out that I was losing my apartment because the owner wanted to rent it to summer people.  So she offered to rent me a spare room there and I moved my 15 cardboard boxes and me to Iznajar.  There I discovered that living in the country is a lot more work than living in an apartment.  She spent her life working on her place and socializing with English ex-pats.  She spoke good Spanish, but only seemed to mix with the locals a little.  There was a very tightknit ex-pat community there with lots of drinking - lots of drinking!  But very little flamenco in the neighborhood.  By the end of the summer, it was pretty obvious that we were too different in too many ways.  And I missed my friends in Rota, so when the house on Calle Gravina showed up on the internet, I rented it.

I again buried myself in the flamenco life of Rota, taking a break only long enough to visit my son for Christmas - as shown in one of the posts below....  You will have to await the next chapter.  I can't imagine anyone is reading this - it is becoming sort of a confessional, but I need to do that before the next chapter.