Spain Dad, a baby blog

Our friends Robyn and Samuel and their one-and-half-year-old Josiah are staying with us for two weeks.

They’ve lived in Spain for a couple of years and recently relocated to Seville. If there’s one thing you should know about Seville it’s that it’s the last place on earth you would want to be in August because of the heat. It’s like a prison. The only way to survive is to lock yourself in your room, pull the shades, and sit in front of the fan.

So, when August rolls around, people in Seville scatter like pigeons. They get buddy buddy with their friends who live on the coast.

Lucky for us, we happen to be those friends. Shmuel and Robyn will be staying with us for two week, then moving on to our other friends Jesús and Rachel, who also live on the Spanish coast.

Yesterday I went to the library to get movies and Robyn came along. We walked in the front door, and Robyn said, “I’ll be in here,” pointing to the sign above the door on the ground floor, “Lectura de Niños” or “Kids Books.”

I went upstairs, spent about as much time to find a movie as it would take to watch Seven Years in Tibet (because I’m incredibly indecisive about these sorts of things, and it didn’t help that all the good movies were checked out because all the kiddies are home for summer vacation), and finally returned to the first floor to find Robyn. I half expected her to be asleep at one of the reading tables (evidence of sheer boredom) or to have simply given up on me and walked home (willing to risk it even though she didn’t know the way).

Instead, I found her standing next to one of the reading tables with a pile of books equal to the stack on April’s desk for her Masters thesis. She was flipping through a picture book, completely engaged.

I almost didn’t want to interrupt. She looked fascinated. But she saw me at the door, so I walked over.

“Did you find anything?” I asked, looking once again at the stack of children’s books.

“I found all kinds of books,” she said, “even Shmuel’s favorite, but in Spanish.” I noticed she mentioned Shmuel, her husband, not Josiah, her toddler.

She picked up the book, the title read “Dónde está mi mamá?” or “Where’s My Mummy?”, and began paging through the glossy pages of green crocodiles with red button eyes, monkeys as blue as superman ice cream, and pudgy elephants, tiptoeing in front of a violet sky.

We checked out the books with my card, and I handed them to Robyn as we left the building.

Something about the exchange of books from my hands to hers felt unsettling, like one of us had just gotten off the teeter-totter.

Here I was holding two movies that were, at best, “just okay,” and Robyn was holding children’s books. That’s when it slapped me in the face. Robyn was holding the very essence of childhood (innocence, curiosity, simplicity, playfulness) in her hands, in tangible form, like some kind of Rosetta Stone. The mysterious languages of childhood that I (we?) had lost when the dust of adulthood settled were here in these books, available to anyone, at no charge, at the library just up the street.

Illustration by Jo Brown.