How Homonymous

The palm in Palma comes from the Latin palma meaning palm, as in the front of the hand. This homonymous people I believe then planted palms all over the island to confuse and invite the world to their paradise. But it isn't the whole world. Brooke turned to me today and asked if I had met or heard (or possibly 'seen') an American since we arrived. I hadn't. Neither had she. This may be the most international scene either of us have ever been to, excepting New York and London. But unlike the culture capitals, there seems to be one glaring exception to this experiment in multiculturalism - there are no Americans here.

So I thought I'd take a few minutes and focus in on these details - what does a world with no Americans look like?

Generally thin. I mean that in every sense of the word. Perspective and ambition are as confined as waistlines here. That's just flippant. But in truth, there are fewer smiles, softer voices, longer hair (for men), tighter clothes (for both), a common sense of personal limitation and situational definitions (I am and will only be what I was born into). Provincialism marks the urban. The children have rebelled in style and in their plunge into secularism, but they aren't going anywhere else. There is a bar, a kind of "local" to the British reader, on the base level of nearly every apartment building in Palma, each depressing and crowded with old men in the evenings. I suspect the men sit around in these haunts, doused in flashing gambling-machine lights and ridiculous blue posters of people eating ice cream, because that's what they're expected to do. Only they could fulfill that role, they think. That's what their fathers did, and their fathers before them (no blue posters of people eating ice cream, though). No foreigners make it in those haunts. Even if one tried, even he got the language or the accent or the idolotrous lust for football into his blood and onto his expression, he'd still be only that - a foreigner. The only person who could ever be a Spaniard, is a Spaniard. All this is very unAmerican.

And the bell just rang. The library now closes. Off to dinner, in a restaurant.

N + (B)