Southside's link with Spain

Fourteen young women spent their junior year of college in Madrid in 1963-64. Now, as senior ladies, many of them have  gotten together four  times in Cluster Springs in the last 25 years.

Eight  of “Las Chicas,” as they call themselves, met in March at classmate Pickett Craddock’s home, Oak Grove Bed and Breakfast.

A highlight of the women’s visit is a regular trip to Paco’s Spanish tapas restaurant in South Boston. Before opening his establishment in 2024, Paco Arrocha catered several of their dinners. Now they dine at his restaurant at least twice on each visit, conversing with him and his staff in the language they learned 62 years ago.

This time Arrocha found a video with scenes from 1960s Spain on YouTube and posted them on the restaurant’s TV screen.

“I think he is excited to have us there because we speak Spanish and of our experiences in Spain,” says Sara Jane Hartman of New York.  “It is so wonderful to feel so genuinely welcomed, and the food is genuinely Spanish.”

One of the Chicas is Meredith Carter Patterson, who grew up with Craddock in Halifax County. She lives now in Burlington,N.C.

““ When we get together it is so special becausenobody else understand how wonderful that year was for us,” she says. “As American students, we were given special treatment by wonderful teachers.”

 

Both Patterson  and Craddock attended Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., where the program was led by their teacher Dorothy Mulberry. This teacher also visited Oak Grove at one of their reunions.

How did Craddock get involved in the program? “I majored in Spanish just so I could go to Spain,” she says.

The 14 young women  stayed at residents’ homes, learning about Spanish culture from professors and picking up the language too. Julie Rawson of Vancouver, Wash., still communicates with one family that hosted her all those years ago.

Several became Spanish teachers. Craddock did not, but the Spanish was useful in arranging an adoption from Honduras and conversing with a foster child from Guatemala and one foster child’s parents.

I attended most breakfasts and one dinner with the group myself, and I played the piano while they sang  an old Spanish song that had no sheet music.

I did enjoy some of our conversations, but I don’t have the appetite for talking that they have. I marvel at how they can all converse  for hours on end for several days. I suspect that the bond they formed over this novel experience was a very strong one.

Viva las chicas!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arming myself for combat

It’s almost time to prepare for battle against dangerous intruders. These aggressive invaders are trying to destroy our way of life. They’re not the Viet Cong, the Taliban nor Al-Qaeda. They are  bamboo stalks!

On our Cluster Springs property, my wife, Pickett, is the creator. She plants bulbs and seeds that lead to beautiful flowers. I am the destroyer, the marauder challenging overhanging branches and expanding bushes too big for their britches.

About 100 years ago, one of Pickett’s ancestors planted a small patch of bamboo, thinking it would be a pretty addition to the farm. It spread quickly, and now it takes up 5 of our 400 acres. I’ll admit it looks nice, but it would double or triple in size if we left for a year and never cut anything back.

So it is my task to take clippers and cut down every new stalk I see. Frequently I come back from the battle with war wounds: cuts from the thorns from other plants it hides behind.

 Do my attacks kill the bamboo? No. I can’t cut that deep. It just keeps it from growing enough to spread further through an underground network of roots. If I keep the stalks from sprouting leaves, it drains them of energy.

The invasion is the worst in May, when bamboo pops up seemingly overnight. The ones I missed are the easiest to spot the next winter, when their leaves are the only green things amidst the bare trees.

Some years ago, a distant bamboo society came to inspect the huge strand, but they couldn’t take our bamboo with them. People have suggested getting pandas, but that’s quite impractical. They wouldn’t get along with our dogs anyway. Maybe there is a way to poison the bamboo, but Pickett is opposed to pesticides.

A few weeks ago she found someone who can eradicate the bamboo with a process called forestry mulching,  but at a high cost. Then  I thought, “What? A huge bare spot outside our kitchen window? It would take months, years, for trees to replace it. Leave it there!

So I guess I will lead an infantry attack on bamboo until I am no longer physically able. Here is a a secret that I will share with you: I actually enjoy it!

 

 

Left behind by technology (and my song about it)

Many seniors are feeling left out as the Information Age progresses.

It’s getting harder all the time to do business online. Websites and phone prompts are difficult to navigate and passwords more complicated than ever.

Younger people may be able to get by instinctively, but aging brains cannot. Seniors have been disenfranchised.

It isn’t enough to enter your user name and PIN anymore. Now you you have to enter a code texted to your phone as well in “double authentication.”

Of course, you must log in to buy tickets on many sites and prove that you aren’t a robot. Some seniors just show up at the door, hoping against a sell-out.

I may be 84 years old, but I’m not stupid. As a technology reporter for three national publications, I was an early adapter to desktop computing, the World Wide Web and Facebook. But I retired 17 years ago and my mind isn’t what it used to be.

Too many times I have booked the wrong date for  a hotel room. Now  I insist on calling the local hotel and making a reservation over the phone.

When I want a drug refill, I just tell the pharmacy clerk what I want a few days in advance. I have trouble reading the numbers on the pill bottle anymore or navigating the phone system.

This column was inspired by our experience with the Social Security website, when we needed a tax form. Not only was it hard to log in but it made Pickett take a selfie of herself and make a photograph of her driver’s license.

She finally gave up and we drove to the Social Security office, where someone printed the form out for her. We lost it again and she had to go back, but I won’t blame Social Security for that! Just last week, she opened an envelope where she had put one of the missing forms. “Here it is!” She said proudly.

So there’s the problem. What’s the solution?  I have several suggestions for tech companies that might help.

—Make more use of facial recognition, fingerprints and voice recognition.

—Let people speak to the website more easily to get what they want.

—Stop changing a website’s navigation so often with updates.

—Have uniform ways of doing repetitive tasks. Why can’t every ticket seller have the same format? And have you ever had to enter a new credit card to make automatic payments? Each company has a unique way of changing personal information. With passwords, of course.

—We can make more use of AI. Most older people hate AI, but when I have a problem like these, I go to ChatGPT and ask what to do. I wrote about this before: Once when I couldn’t get through to my cable company, ChatGPT advised me to just  tell the cable company’s AI voice  to “cancel” and you get right through. It worked. After all, AI characters know how their brothers and sisters think!

Appropriately, here are the words I wrote to a song I wrote several years ago.

You can hear it in this link.

Password Blues

I’ve got the password blues, I just can’t get  in.

My bank account is frozen and my wallet’s too thin,

What can I do? This just isn’t fair.

I wrote it down some place, but I don’t know where.

 

Refrain:

Password Blues, please let me in.

Password blues, I don’t know my PIN.

Password blues, I lost my long list.

According to the Internet, I just don’t exist.

 

“Forgot Your password?” Now here’s where to click.

This whole awful process just makes me so sick.

They texted my phone. But where’d I put  that?

I’ll have to call the bank and have a long chat.

 

They’ll give you a password but please don’t explode.

With capitals and numbers you just can’t decode.

It will pop up always in a a password app.

But when you need it, what happened to that?

 

Facial recognition, the new tech religion

Will solve this problem, require no decision.

But I’m wearing a mask or maybe a hat.

The website looks and asks: Who the heck is that?

 

To prove who you are and show you aren’t a trickster,

They’ll ask: How many cars are in this picture?

I just don’t know. My idea is better.

Give me your address, and I’ll mail you a letter!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posing as a financial whiz

My father said he didn’t know what I did for a living until I showed him a $10 bill.

“Look, that’s where I work,” I said, displaying the image of the Treasury Department.  “You can even see my window.”

He was shocked. He even showed $10 bills to his friends, proudly telling them the story.

But I wasn’t sure I wanted to work there in 1977. During a shake-up, I had been ousted from my job as a supervising editor at Associated Press and transferred to Capitol Hill.

 After that, I loved covering Congress! There was so much action! There were so many famous people: Sens. Edward Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater. Members fawned over wire service reporters, hoping their words would reach constituents. We got the best seats at congressional hearings.

The place was overflowing with young people, especially beautiful women whom congressmen seemed to hire en masse. You figured any woman who was even middle-aged was probably super competent or knew some dark secrets.

Then, an opening appeared for AP’s Treasury correspondent. I was sent there over my own objections. I didn’t want to leave. Unlike Congress, the Treasury was filled with old bureaucrats who were marking time until retirement. They looked down on wire services, hoping to influence fellow insiders through the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post.

But eventually, I liked it. For one thing, I believe I got more bylines than the White House staff because there were three of them and only one of me. I covered a huge swath of the government, almost everything with a dollar sign on it.

Other staffers considered me a guru on finance when I wasn’t. Sure, I analyzed the federal budget and even wrote specials on how to file your income tax returns. But I had a professional do my taxes.

If anyone questioned a story, I would say something like, “It all depends on the nondefense capital goods sector,” and that would shut them up. (It really means simply refrigerators and cars.)

I often thought about how much better this was than sitting in an office with a row of typewriters and a boss watching over me. There were only four of us in the Treasury press room:  AP, UPI, Reuters and Dow-Jones/Wall Street Journal. The one exception was the time a media company sent several pretty young women over to get a break on press announcements. Playing darts with these gals was something we wouldn’t have done at the main office!

But after awhile, it became a burden covering so much of the government and trying to make sense out of the meaningless economic indicators that came out monthly.

I quit and went to U.S. News & World Report, which was more analytical than AP. My new editor complained to me once, “This reads just like an AP story.” He meant it as an insult. I took it as a compliment.

 

 

Bringing back Sara

What has been my biggest life adventure? Well, it had nothing to do with journalism. It was a personal journey in the chaos of Central America in 1990.

When we decided to adopt a child in our 40s, two friends who were missionaries in Honduras put us in touch with a lawyer there.

Sure enough, she found a new-born baby, Sara Teresa,  in an orphanage in Tegucigalpa. Sara was already popular. The wife of the U.S. ambassador wanted her, too.

Probably unwisely, our lawyer sent Sara back to her birth mother for a few weeks to reserve her for us. Sara was malnourished there and lived among many chickens. Maybe  that’s why she loves animals so much today.

We flew to Tegucigalpa to see Sara, but first we wanted to stop at a Honduran resort on the Island of Roatan. We enjoyed this spot, frequented by rich people from all over the western Hemisphere, until disaster struck. Pickett fell off the edge of a pier (which had no railings) and broke her ankle.

There we were, the farthest we had ever been from what we considered civilization, and what could we do? As soon as we got back to Tegucigalpa, Pickett went to the hospital.

The doctor insisted surgery was necessary. But looking at the primitive equipment, Pickett wisely decided to wait until we returned to the U.S.

But first, with her leg in a cast, we were finally introduced to Sara, age 6 months, and enjoyed several days with her.

But for the adoption to become final, we had to wait another six months until we could return from Arlington.

In the meantime, we got a young woman to take care of her, and Sara was fed lots of  ice cream. This once-scrawny child now looked so fat in her pictures that the ice cream had to stop.  Meanwhile, Pickett got her leg fixed in a D.C. hospital.

As things dragged along, a friend actually lobbied the president of Honduras on our behalf as he gave the official a tour of Georgetown University.

But I think what really worked were the bribes we got the lawyer to pay the administrators.

Returning to Honduras around Sara’s first birthday, we took her home on Thanksgiving Day. The lawyer told us that the birth mother was secretly at the Tegucigalpa airport to watch as we departed, though I am not sure that really happened.

When we got home, Sara fell in love right away with our dog, beginning a love of dogs that led to her career as an animal groomer.

Post script: Sara expressed interest in trying to find her birth mother in later years, but the turmoil in Honduras at that time made it unsafe. However, she did meet some distant relatives in this country through DNA testing.