Passeig de Gracia

Barcelona had put on her best for us. The evening light, still bright at nine p.m., was rich and gold. It touched breezy sixth-story windows and lingered on the brown arms of Spanish women as they crossed the boulevard. Gaudi’s La Pedrera was shining further down the street, beautiful and proud and odd. The Hotel Majestic’s rooftop sign was glowing too, writing its name across the skyline in perfect cursive.

And the moon. I gasped when I saw it—a deep orange color that did not exist on my side of the Atlantic. It hovered over the city, marking these last quiet hours before real night came in and turned the volume up. Later the discotheques would throb with music until dawn, and the Spaniards would fly through the narrow streets of the Barri Gotic shouting from their motorcycles. But for now there was just the clink of dishes in the cafes, the low thrum of the subway beneath the street.

I closed my eyes and tried to save the memory.

The girls came and we ambled off toward dinner, choosing our café by one thing only—the presence of cava on the menu. As we walked, they said all the obvious things: “I’m going to miss this so much,” and “I love Barcelona.” I could hear the exclamation marks punctuating their sentences—even the sad ones—but I still enjoyed the enthusiasm in their monologues about leaving. As they planned future visits, and linked arms, I was reminded of Anne of Greene Gables and her bosom buddy, Diana. I was reminded of a lot of things I loved when I was a kid, which was why I had chosen these two dinner companions in the first place. “We’ll keep in touch,” they said. And they meant it. Here in the last evening of their first trip to Europe, everything was possible, everything was still to come. At this table, in the company of these two women, I could be something I hadn’t been in almost two years: young.

As soon as our cava arrived, we felt like toasting.

“To Spain!” Sara said.

We raised our glasses.

The food arrived. As if flattered by our praises, Spain had delivered a Catalan banquet: grilled octopus with lemon, roasted potatoes, thick, crusty bread covered in fresh tomatoes and garlic, hard cheeses and chorizo arranged in lovely patterns on blue ceramic plates.

Sara laughed through a story about her mother trying to call the Nikbor. “Doesn’t anyone speak English over there,” her frustrated mother had asked Sara when she finally managed to get her on the phone. Sara’s family was having a difficult time imagining a country where their own language was not used; “No one speaks English?” Sara’s sister had asked, incredulous, “No one?” The significance of Sara’s story hit home as she told it; I recognized how much of a risk this trip had represented to her, what a step it was to go so far away from the familiar and the comfortable.

I was overcome by all the things I wanted to tell them about travel and independence. How many competing priorities there would be: health insurance and car payments, and the ever-looming IRA, IRA, IRA! All the terrible monsters of responsibility, all the time suckers and money takers, the boyfriends who wouldn’t want them to go alone, the children who, someday, they would feel guilty for leaving.

I looked at my friends, who were holding their arms up against one another. “You’re more tan,” Hillary was telling Sarah.

“Maybe, but your tattoo is fantastic. Matt will love it. Will you try to convince him that it’s real?” Sarah asked.

The cava made me want to stop their conversation, to call their attention to the value of this night. To say important things aloud: You think you can always come back, but you will not always have these chances.

I didn’t say anything. Maybe only on Oprah can you get away with such grand, sagacious statements. Besides, this was not the time for teaching. I looked at our delicious meal and at the gorgeous city. We learn our own lessons; we teach ourselves. So I said only, “I hope you both always take trips.”

They nodded, they toasted: “To trips!”

“Now let’s all toast to something,” Hill said, “Each of us gets to choose. Anything you want.”

Sara began, “To our secret colors!” We laughed and clinked glasses.

“To Matt,” Hilary giggled, “I’m sorry! I know we’re having a girl’s night. But I can’t help it! I really wanted to say that.”

I smiled—really smiled—thinking of Harvard, and then of all the boys who’d made me fall. Of how incredible it was to be in love like that. The long-distance phone calls; wanting to curl myself up and crawl into my lover’s voice. The patience simple things took. A subway ride felt interminable: Just get me there. Just get me to him. Those memories had seemed so far away since my father died. They were things I had felt in another lifetime. But here was something—distant, but familiar—an old friend whose face I hadn’t seen in a long time. Not love in its sad, last measure, or in the throes of loss or good-bye. Not love in its placid, comfortable middle. Here I was, across the table from the first, wistful moment of love, beginning.

That’s when it happened.

(Bear with me, because this part is hard to explain.)

In college, I studied art history, and at the Met once I had seen Degas drawings. They were charcoal sketches of women (prostitutes probably, but that’s only important to differentiate them from his ballerina drawings, which are very different). These drawings were almost violent—the way the thick, black lines cut across the paper, separating the women’s bodies from the surrounding negative space.

Before coming to Barcelona, I had felt like those drawings: crisscrossed with dark slashes of depression. My sadness marked me like a heavy, jagged outline. It kept me from making direct contact with the world, everything was muted, distant, seen through soot and smoke.

All the loss I’d experienced was messy and, the same way charcoal gets all over your hands when you draw with it, grief had smudged over every part of my life. For the past year, I had had trouble remembering happiness. I had difficulty remembering Harvard before he failed me. And most disturbing, I could not remember my father’s face except as it had been during his illness, ravaged and sharp with cancer.

But sitting at this meal, I got the feeling, the same one I had had on the mountaintop and at the Picasso museum and the flamenco concert. This time it was less fleeting. It rose up from inside my chest, my heart, my throat. It wound itself around me like ocean water. It was slow and total; it stayed long enough for a vision to form. The way one ray of sunlight breaks through clouds after a really violent downpour, a single, clean, pure memory started to tunnel its way through the darkness in my head.

It was a very particular memory from my sophomore year in high school. We were waiting for my prom date to arrive. Dad was wearing a navy blue sweater with three wooden buttons on the front of it, near the collar. He looked vibrant and strong. His head was thrown back and I saw every detail of his face. Not his sick face. His face: healthy, handsome. I heard his laugh.

My memories of him had been drawn over with so much sadness; the whirring of the machines that helped his breathing, the sounds of his soft crying, his thin frame doubled over, listless, in his chair. But like a bird released, this image of him came into my mind and filled my eyes and ears. It rang. It rushed. It was as present and real as the food on our table. And, just like that, I got my father back.

It was my turn to toast. Still hearing my dad’s voice in my head, I smiled at my friends. I didn’t need to tell them what I was toasting to. I raised my glass and drank.

I wouldn't think about it till many weeks later, but the name of that street in Barcelona was the Passeig de Gracia. I noticed the street sign for a last time the next morning, on my way to the airport: the passage of grace.

Passage: an occurance or event. Death.

I came back to Philadelphia and--after almost a year of barely holding my life together--I finally allowed myself to crash. I admitted for the first time that my relationship with Harvard was over and that I needed to create a life in this new city that did not include him.

Passage. An act of emptying.

I started talking about my dad. I started writing again. I spent day after day in my office with the door shut, hoping my co-workers wouldn't hear me cry. Eventually tiring of this, I started therapy with a very nice woman named Laura who told me that everything that had happened to me sucked, and that what was still ahead might suck too, but that--if I was patient--it would all someday be ok again. I let myself believe her.

Passage. The process of passing from one condition or state to another, as in the passage from childhood to adulthood. A journey. A path, over or along which something may travel.

I made a home. I made friends. I wrote a story that won me the chance to study this summer in Prague. I slept with a world-renowned musician who introduced me to ten thousand kinds of touching when he played Prokofiev on my naked back. I auditioned for American Idol and sang for my father, "Someone to Watch Over Me."

Passage: a segment of a composition, especially one that demonstrates the strength or virtuosity of the performer or composer.

Grace: (n.) Mercy; reprieve; gracefulness, charm; amnesty; beauty; pardon; prayer.

Grace: (n.-- my definition.) If life is a movie, then "grace" is the moment when the soundtrack kicks in. Nothing flashy. Something exactly perfect for the action of the scene. An acoustic guitar. One singer’s voice--a Billie, or a Joni. The kind of voice that’s beautiful because it’s been through things; the kind of song you take with you on road trips.

Grace is a song you sing along with every time you hear it. Even when you think you can't, or when you don't really want to. Because it's just that good. And, though you know the words, and though you know the ending, grace (n. -- still my definition): the thing that opens you up and leaves you ready for more.