Marti-Marti

The Hat is not the critical part of this story although it hangs in the hall and my wife still wears it on occasion. It is old and dusty like we are and a reminder that silly times, fun and spontaneity can be had at "the drop of a hat"! LOL! I don't think you can find happiness alone. I can be as content as a cow in a spring meadow by myself but "happiness" is shared laughter, dancing always takes two.

I really wanted a good hat, well built and colorful as all of Spain, but practical, something to keep the sun out. I found the marketplace huge, crowded and full of vendors selling anything one could imagine. Isles and isles of food and clothes and radios, live chickens, dead chickens and cooked chickens, everything. I found the hats but they were very simple, very plain, designed to last the season and disappear. I asked everyone who could understand me where could I find a store that sold hats?

Jackelyn Kennedy, the President's wife bought her hats in Spain, in Barcelona in fact, at a

little hat boutique manufacturing shop called "Marti-Marti". I am sure it is still there. It is not

opulence at its worst to see it, maybe an eight foot tall entry door with huge brass handles. On either side of this door was a huge plate glass window maybe twelve feet in length and from the sidewalk to the top of the door in height. Each window displayed only three hats. Leather, fabric, straw, and maybe three other materials, certainly there were six distinct styles.

Remember how I was dressed? Logger's boots, short pants and a shirt, all dirty from hitch-hiking and I hadn't shaved in three days. In my heart I was a King and willing to pay a king's ransom for a hat! Free, illgotten money maybe (see earlier blog! are you following this story?)

and I would happily exchange it for a simple, well built and colorful hat.

This door lead me into a rather wide hallway with three doors on either side and a desk at the end. A receptionist was there eyeing me a bit as I came down the hall. I told her I was looking for a straw hat and she directed me to the marketplace. No, I had just come from there and was directed here. I was told you had the best hats.

She is on the phone in a flash and gibbering in Spanish far too fast for my ability to understand. Soon a man approaches, pauses midstride to gather himself I assume, walks right up to me and asks how he could be of help? This is the Spain I loved, friendly and helpful and smiling. He lead me down the hall into one of the rooms and offered my a brandy!

"We don't sell hats to men but maybe if you could describe the lady?" I am thinking I will see ten hats and choose one off the shelf and he is telling me that they are all custom made to order,

a particular style and color for a particular person, say Mrs Kennedy, for instance!

I am trying not to get his couch dirty. I am sitting on the biggest, softest, blackest leather couch I have even seen with brandy in hand, he offers me a cigar! A Havana, no less. I describe Jane as best as I can. We had only known each other three days. He wanted size, shape, complexion, height and hair color and he wrote all these things down. Next he is on the telephone, again so fast I am not catching a single word. Then six women appear, entering without knocking and each wearing the most beautiful straw hat that I had ever seen, striking colors and each a different style. Wow! I am just a 20 year old kid with a Cuban cigar and a glass of brandy trying my best not to screw this all up.

"Great, I'll take that one!" I said pointing at a girl looking much like Jane and wearing a straw hat slightly pulled down in front of her eyes. They all laughed including the man, at least I was entertaining them. These, it was explained to me, were not really hats. Not finished, not ready to sell, they were mock up models, approximations, an idea of a hat.

"Well, but of course, I knew that!" I said with little authority. How little I was about to find out because this process went on three more times. First they came back, all like runway models, all wearing what appears to be the same hat with subtle variations. Then there was color and I said orange would be beautiful. They returned, all wearing identical hats in six colors of orange. I didn't even know there were six colors of orange!

Finally I got the hat and it was put into a proper hat box, strong eneough to be used as a step stool and tied with a ribbon! He told me I had made an excellent choice and she would be beautiful while shopping along the Ramblas late at night. I told him we were hitching to Malagar tomorrow and she would appreciate the sun filtered from her eyes and keeping the dust out of her hair. He snatched the box right from my hands!

This is when I learned about Mrs Kennnedy and his other clients. You just don't do this to his hats, not "Marti-Marti" hats anyway. He untied the ribbon, removed the hat and gently with a letter opener on his desk, removed the lable from inside the hat! I could have the hat, he said, but I had to promise never to tell anyone where I had bought it.

My other blog is HERE!

I am Rich!

Living in Europe on three dollars a day was pretty easy in those days. Youth Hostels were everywhere and cost about twenty-five cents for the night. In Spain you were rich with three dollars.

I had only about a dollar of Spanish money on me and maybe six dollars in Lira's, Italian money. I needed to find a "cambio", money exchanger. This was on a Sunday and the banks were closed so I would have to find the train station where there were dozens of money exchangers all making a living off the unsuspecting tourist.

Spanish money is beautiful, in lots of colors and even the paper money is in different sizes.

The bigger the denomination the bigger the bill. I found the money exchanger and presented my six dollars in lira, expecting maybe five dollars in pesetas, the coin of Spain, the rest would be lost in the transaction. He put my lira's in his drawer and began counting out Spanish bills beginning with very large ones! And he kept counting. I am thinking he is not talking to me. I knew a little Spanish, enough for directions and to order wine and I could count. This was not my money.

It is in a pile with the big notes on the bottom in descending order with small bills on the top.

It is a beautiful pile sitting there like that in greens and reds and golden ribbons. It was well over eighty dollars in Spanish money and there were coins on top of this pile. This man is in a hurry. He looks at me as if to say, do you want this or not? and he is after the next person in line.

I am a thief. I took it, wading the bills into my fist and stuffing them into my pocket, not counting anything my heart was racing. I can imagine Spanish prisons. I was eight blocks away, headed to the market place before I counted the money, carefully unfolding it and separating the bill according to size. I had over eighty-five dollars in Spanish money. I was a wealthy man.

I should have felt horrible but I was absolutely dancing with joy.

The House was Gone!

One day, on a Monday afternoon, I came home from teaching school and the house was gone! Jane had gone to England to visit with her mother and I remember telling her that I might do something with the house while she was away. No plans of any kind, maybe rebuild the steps or put a garden in. It was May, there was a month left of school and I had the summer off.




I must be thirty years old and have never worked a full year in my life. I had worked seasonally




along with my wife at the local cannery, a job I had while putting myself through college. Now I was a teacher of fourteen year olds and had the entire summer off with pay!




I remember drinking with my neighbor the night before. He was unemployed and we were drinking cheap wine together, getting drunk as guys tend to do. I vaguely recall talking about remodelling my house.




It was a small house, not particularly well built and had no foundation at all. A "fixer-upper"



they were called, but we had lived in it for almost five years without any major repairs.



When I came home from school that day the living room remained and the bathroom floor



with facilities in tact. No walls and no door, just a toilet, a sink and a wonderful six foot cast iron bath tub, all open to the air and the neighbors to the back and side of us. The rest of the house lay in a dead heap having been attacked with a chainsaw by my neighbor. Now I remembered!





This time in my life I didn't own a saw, not much of a hammer, not many tools at all and I had no idea what I was doing, neither the process nor the application. To top it all off I didn't have any money! You learn to act quickly as a school teacher or you will soon lose all control over the classroom. The next day in the teacher's lounge I was laughing I hope and telling this tale to fellow teachers. They were extremely helpful. One wrote me a check on the spot for $2,000,


something to get started with and others told me the process, about needing building permits and plans drawn, blueprints. As a kid I had built lots of tree houses and forts and never needed all this confusion, all this paper work, all these details. I just sort of built it as it came to me.


I made lots of phone calls and within a week I had all the proper documents and had the building permit in hand. Two more weeks until Jane got home and all I had was a living room and open air bathroom. I had a lot of work to do.

I still had teaching to do but I got the foundation under the living room and the steps poured before Jane got home. "I need tarps around the bathroom," she said.
My wife has this unflinching belief that everything will turn out alright, and as long as she has a shower she seeks no room to complain.
We took three days to get from Genoa to Barcelona and it was hot and dry and dusty the whole time. She had mentioned that she would like a hat, something to keep the sun from her eyes.
We found a little pension in the center of town, a tiny room but one with its own shower! I remember the cost was $1.25 per night, a little over budget from the normal 25 cent youth hostel. She wanted a shower and offered to wash my clothes if I would go out and find us something to eat. This is way before laundromats and we always washed our clothes in the bathroom sink when we could find one. This is Spain on a hot day in May and I am wearing short pants, a shirt dirty with street dust and my size 13D loggers' boots! I hadn't shaved in three days, I am sure I looked a mess.
I went on a search for food, that bread and cheese and wine that we lived on, but as I left
her for her shower I knew I was hunting for a hat.