One is brief. Strolling along the Rambla de Mar on a torrid August day after college I come upon a glassed display of tortes. I think it foolish that the case is out in the sun. Maybe I choose a Xuixo, a puff pastry filled with crema catalana.
I don't remember. In that moment Xuixo is what I crave. However, I do not retain the pleasure of devouring it. Yet, that pastry becomes my emblem of what is a highest good of any city.
The other is long winded, but begins with a college buddy stepping off the train at Barcelona-Sants. I had traveled alone all summer. It was great to be able to share travel. We left town immediately. No emblem there.
Instead, he and I hitchhiked two hundred kilometers to the principality of Andorra, the final ride a drive up a swervy mountain pass. There we descended some forty kilometers on foot into France through pastures clanging with the bells of dairy cows, stopping to loiter along mountain streams drinking wine and eating Jamón on baguettes.
In hindsight, I was in the best shape of my life. (Just before, on my own, in Monaco I swam a half mile of the harbor, just at the foot of the steps descending from the Monte Carlo Casino.) Mental maturity came later. Despite the idyllic setting I remember squabbles with my friend. Again why? Perhaps, I had traveled too much on my own. A second decider meant a different framework for choices. More likely, through travel, I had grown into someone different than my college student self and our encounter forced a reunion on the old terms.
It is far easier to revisit Barcelona then rekindle that odd emotion from a remarkable hike. I just remember I was spitting mad. It is a virtue not to make a meal of emotions. We keep in touch infrequently. I wished him happy birthday on social media a month ago. Maybe that is what my Barcelona cream puff tells me.
Some forty years later I write this headed at almost three hundred kilometers per hour on a Spanish Renfro train to that same spot. A whole lot has changed. Maybe this visit will fill in what time has emptied. Surely my designation of 'world class' must have had other than the singular merit of a Xuixo.
I am a visual person. What my eye takes in is almost everything to me. I prefer mountain vistas above all else. Of course, the essence of a precipice ridge is the tumultuous forces of collision and erosion. I fancy it untouched by human strife. No need to get under the hood and rummage about. Much of what we see in the world today is not beauty, but anger and contention - people spitting mad. The landscape between Madrid and Barcelona is an unremarkable void; a hostile landscape. My eye wants to find some beauty in it. For in beauty there is solice. There is none as I hurtle toward Barcelona.
This trip has jumped forward day to day to the next place. No time to savor. In Madrid all I could do was hobble to key points. I retired early to my small pensione near El Oso y el Madroño at Puerta del Sol. All night I was serenaded by joyful crowds mingling in the pubs below. There are ways other than the eye to make sense of things. But it is my way.
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