Something to Count On

I have always been a counter. I count . . . well, anything, actually. I count to pass the time, to avoid boredom, or to distract my mind when I’m doing something that’s particularly hard or distasteful. When I was a girl washing dishes, I would look at the dirty ones and estimate how many of each type of dish there might be, then I kept track in my head as I washed them. Six spoons, two knives, four forks, three plates, two bowls, and a spatula . . . it was pretty tricky sometimes, and required no small amount of concentration. I found it weirdly entertaining, and enjoyed the challenge of seeing how accurately I could estimate the actual numbers.

I count breaths. I count cars. I count street signs. Anything. It could be related to the same element that caused Steven to arrange and sort his Micro-Machines instead of rolling them along the floor as a child. He would spend hours doing it. All the red ones, the blue ones, the yellow ones. Then he’d mix them up and sort them into rows of cars versus trucks versus construction vehicles, and on and on. He used to take forever to do simple homework worksheets of scrambled words. I couldn’t figure out why it took him so long, because he could unscramble any word instantly upon seeing the scramble. Then I watched him. He looked at all the words, and in the blanks next to them, he would place an “A” wherever it belonged in the word he was building in the blank answer space. Then he would find wherever a “B” fit, and write those in, continuing on through the alphabet until all the words were correctly spelled in their blanks. It made it interesting to him, and nearly killed me to watch.

Yet, still I count. Mostly these days I count steps.

Cuesta is a word that means slope in Spanish. Where I live, all the streets are “Cuesta de” something or other, and the connotation “slope” is a British-worthy understatement. Cuesta Alhacaba is my arch nemesis.

It is less than one kilometer of steep, unending torture. Going down is no big deal, unless you’re wearing high heels or pointy-toed shoes, in which case your toes will be squished and screaming by the time you reach even terrain at the bottom. Uphill is another matter altogether. After two months here, I can hike up that hill without stopping for breath with long, even strides from bottom to top. I might pant just a little upon arriving at Plaza Larga there at the crest, but my heart rate is back to normal before I leave the little plaza on the other side.

The other day, I went grocery shopping. I took my little grocery cart with me – a vinyl bag on wheels that will hold about thirty-five kilos of groceries, depending on what I buy and how I pack it – that’s nearly eighty pounds of foodstuffs. On level ground, the thing is a dream to maneuver; it nearly pushes itself, no matter how full. I bought a nice one with four wheels so it wouldn’t tip over if I left it unattended for a minute. Now that I don’t have children (read – grocery carrying slaves) to help me haul bags, it’s hard to do any serious shopping by myself.

Cuesta de Alhacaba is an old street -- cobbled with a half-dozen sizes and shapes of stones. It’s art, actually. Down the center of the street, and on the outer edges, like a border, they use brick-shaped stones in double rows to provide channels for running water during rainstorms. The stones inside the borders are round and when wet, are slippery as a wet pig (‘though I’ve never tried keeping my balance on a wet pig, I think I may not be far off). In the sidewalk area, and in some parts of the street, there are sections of long, slender, dark stones set up on their sides in decorative patterns. These stones are less slippery to walk on. My empty grocery cart rattles easily and noisily along the stones, bumping behind me obediently. Filled with groceries on the way home from a shopping trip, there’s no rattling, and the stones make navigating my four-wheeled friend nearly impossible. As I began my ascent that day, I approached my old enemy with trepidation.

Knowing I would be challenged to reach the top hauling two-thirds my body weight, I devised a plan. I would walk 100 steps and then allow myself a pause of twenty breaths before beginning again. I figured that breaking up the hill this way would keep my mind on the task at hand rather than wandering off feeling miserable and overwhelmed at such a daunting task. It was a good plan.

The first hundred steps were okay.



I was a little winded, and felt the pleasure of the twenty breaths expanding my lungs as my heart rate slowed back down a little.



After the second hundred steps, my heart figured out the deception and was angrily pounding against my ribs, less deceived than before by twenty measly breaths. After three hundred steps, I gave in and gave myself twenty-five breaths, refusing to look up towards my ultimate goal.



I couldn’t see the top of the hill, anyway, because the road winds and twists. The extra five breaths seemed to work, because as I neared my fourth hundred step, I felt like I could easily have kept going. I stopped anyway, just on principle.



Every step was a calculation in physics, geometry, angles and torque. Any passing vehicle forced me to edge closer to the gutters, which are lined with larger, more awkward stones, making passage with my cart nearly impossible. I began my fifth set of hundred steps with determination, convinced that I must be about half-way done. That meant the future was no glummer than the past moments had been. I could live with that.



I paused at five hundred steps and gazed back down the hillside to where the road curved away towards my starting point. I was feeling some success – I had come a fair way already, and didn’t have too far still to go when a trio of young people came up the street behind me.


Two girls and a boy, in their late teens or early twenties, were trudging up the hill behind me. Even without stopping, they would have easily passed me before long, since they were wisely carrying nothing at all. As they drew even with me along the hillside, the boy looked me in the eye and asked if I needed some help. I tried not to sound too breathless as I thanked him and explained that I was fine, just resting a bit before heading on.



He shook his head at me and reached for the cart, insisting that they were going the same way I was (there is no where else to go on this mighty hillside), and not taking no for an answer, he proceeded to pull my cart up the hill.



I chatted with one of the girls as we walked alongside my gallant new friend. She was from Barcelona, but had lived in Granada for about five years now. We talked about what a beautiful city Barcelona is, and about how I was here from the USA with university students, and how much John and I have grown to love Granada. We walked at a steady pace, but not quickly, so as not to get ahead of the grocery bearer. As we finally entered Plaza Larga, I retrieved my cart from the young caballero and thanked him. Then I asked how his heart was doing. He laughed, a little out of breath, and I felt the tiniest bit justified in my own exhaustion.

Truth be told, as grateful as I was for his help, and for the pleasant conversation I enjoyed as I shared the last part of my walk with them, I felt a little disappointed. I had not arrived, gloriously sweating and victorious on the top of the mountain.



I don’t even really know just how many steps it actually takes to get from the bottom to the top. I walked the same hill yesterday, and counted seven hundred steps, but that was without maneuvering a heavy cart. My five hundred mark was not the same as it had been on my shopping day. I think I’m most discouraged to think that if I really want to know, I’m going to have to fill that cart and do the whole thing over again. There’s something within me that just wants to know.

At least I can count three new young friends.