By Beebe Bahrami

As a walking traveler wanders on foot through rural Spain, she takes solace in advice from a grandfather who served as a prisoner of war.

As a child born and raised in the Rocky Mountains in the USA, I recall my Iranian grandfather’s advice to me. “If you get lost, go downhill, and follow the stream.” I felt safe with these few words. All would be well, I concluded, if I go downhill and follow the stream.

Only as an adult did I think how odd such comfort was. Certainly, my grandfather was an old hand in the mountains of northern Iran, yet he also had been an army general and the times in his life when he was the most up the creek, he was never in the mountains and there was never a stream nearby.

One day, as a member of a team inspecting Iran’s eastern border with Pakistan—because part of the border is a river that periodically changes course—my grandfather was alone and in the desert when his Jeep’s radiator overheated. He spied along the dry horizon a tree, and hiding in it, a Baluch tribesman. He went to him and asked for water. The man disappeared and returned with water from some mysterious source along with an armful of grass, which he dropped in front of the Jeep. “If your animal needs to drink, he’ll be hungry, too.”

My grandfather loved telling that tale. It ennobled the tribesman as much as it revealed the existence of people leading traditional lives that modern technology had not touched.

During World War II, Russians held him as a prisoner of war. Two years after his release, the British detained him and other young, educated Iranian nationalists and placed them in a camp to keep watch on any potentially dissident types. Inspired by Gandhi next door, he became a hunger striker to protest foreign occupation.

A few years after the war, when the world was rebuilding itself, my grandfather backed Mossadegh, striving for an independent, nationalized Iran, not one playing the role of world oil puppet. When Mossadegh’s leadership failed, my grandfather was quietly retired.

His life had not been an easy one, but he had made the most of it, always seeking the right paddle, not the easiest paddle, for the boat and for the creek.

Trekking one day in northeastern Spain, near Soria, west of Zaragoza, I got lost. I had hoped to find a local bus to the nearby village of Garray where stood the famous Celtic stronghold, Numancia, an archaeological ruin dating to 134 BCE.

No bus was forthcoming. I started walking, figuring that if I followed the Duero River nearby, I’d arrive in Garray and then Numancia. I passed through undisturbed beech, pine, and oak forest. Only once did I see another person, a fisherman hip deep in the river with his rubber boots, casting his line, oblivious of me.

Two and a half hours later, Numancia’s hilltop stood before me. It told the story of the famous last stand. In 134 BCE, the Celtic-Iberian Arevaci had managed, through determination, strategy, and fierceness, to hold out against Roman domination for years. But the Romans built a wall all around their hilltop and slowly caged them in and cut off their water. After so many years of resistance, they weakened and began to die. Knowing that life as Roman slaves was worse than death, the Numantines set fire to their homes and killed themselves. Spanish school kids today still learn about Numancia. It instills a national message about perseverance and holding out through hard times.

I returned to Garray. I waited an hour for a bus that villagers told me was coming. It never did.

Continue to Page 2 – Spain Travel Story

Music makes a good gift in this season of holidays. As you are considering gifts of music to give, you may want to take a listen to recordings which themselves give gifts. Here are three albums with which the musicians have decided to contribute to helping others.

The Celtic traditions have many gentle lullabyes with which to rock babies to
sleep, and which soothe tired parents and grandparents as well. That connection was on the mind of Lindsay O’Donovan as she became aware of the work of One Home Many Hopes. As she volunteered with this orphanage in Kenya, which has programs which not only care for children but help them learn useful skills and good character, the idea for Lullabies for Love: A Celtic Collection came to be. Hanneke Cassel, Altan, Aoife O’Donovan, and others gave their time and their music to create an album which would make a fine gift for people of any age.

The Appalachian mountains in the southern United States have long been a well of song and story. That’s true of the album Still Moving Mountains: The Journey Home The songs and stories on this recording arise out of the effects of coal mining, most especially, mountain top removal mining. That is what it sounds like: tops of mountains are blasted away to get at seams of coal. Proceeds from this album go to grants for communities and people who are working with economic, ecological, and health effects of this practice. Kathy Mattea, a native of West Virginia in the Appalachian coal country, is among those whose support this with music on this recording.

India and Indiana are distant from each other in many ways. When Americana song writer Carrie Newcomer had an unexpected opportunity to visit India with her music, though she found threads of connection through singing her songs of hope, grief, faith, and family. When she returned her experiences on this journey found their way into song, and she invited the Khans, who are masters of the Indian instrument called the sarod, to join her and her Indiana musical friends in creating music to frame her words. The result is the album Everything is Everywhere. Newcomer has decided to give proceeds from the album to the Interfaith Hunger Initiative, which works to end hunger in Indiana and overseas.

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Here’s what I’ll be snacking on this weekend:

- Half Pound of Baked Kippered Salmon
- Quarter Pound of Pastrami-Style Smoked Salmon
- 4 Ounces of Sliced Smoked Nova Salmon
- 3 Ounces of Sliced Smoked Norwegian Salmon

All of this for the rock-bottom price of $15.20 at Acme Smoked Fish Corporation, which is hidden away in the industrial district bordering Greenpoint and Williamsburg on Gem Street, near North 15th.

Specializing in everything smoked fish, from packaged salads and peppered lox to hot-smoked hunks of tuna and pickled herring fillets, Acme opens their wholesale warehouse outlet to the public just once a week, from 8am to 1pm, for what they call “Fish Fridays.” It’s a small shopping window for out-of-towners and, really, somewhat of a haul at an inconvenient time even for New Yorkers, but smoked salmon-loving area locals like myself flock to Acme as often as possible for both the selection and the bargain prices.

The nondescript entrance is easy to miss–it’s the first door on Gem just past the big Acme sign, above–and once you’re inside it’s not immediately clear where to go. On my first visit, I just followed the guy in front of me as he clambored up a steel staircase just inside the warehouse space. He finally turned around and pointed me back down the stairs and around the corner to a refrigerated room, where I found a long line of shivering people eyeballing cardboard boxes full of pre-packaged smoked salmon and a tasting table laden with slabs of smoked sable, pastrami-style smoked salmon, smoked trout, and other fresh fish. Free samples are available for each one, and there’s no minimum order.

For something sweet to chase your smoked salmon with, follow the scent of fresh baked goods around the the block to Angel’s Bakery, a commercial bakery that sells individually packaged cookies, muffins, and other goods to the public out of a small room at 29 Norman Street. Everything here is (dangerously) cheap, like cookies for $1 and slices of pound cake for $0.75.

Acme Smoked Fish Corporation
30 Gem Street (at North 15th Street)
Brooklyn, NY
718-383-8585
Fish Fridays: 8am – 1pm

Angel’s Bakery
29 Norman Street
Brooklyn, NY
718-389-1400
Monday – Friday 9:30am(ish) – 5:30pm(ish)

This is the lobby of the historic King Edward Hotel in downtown Jackson, Mississippi as it was before renovations began in the fall of 2006.

This is the same lobby in the fall of 2011, when I stayed there on a short road trip through central and northern Mississippi. It’s now operated as the Hilton Garden Inn Jackson Downtown, but everyone I talked to still calls it the King Edward.

When Marika Cackett from the Jackson CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau) told me that the place had been an empty, blown-out mess for 40 years before restoration, with garbage all over the lobby where we sat visiting, I could not get my head around it.  A huge thanks to people like local Jackson developer David Watkins who can look at a disaster area and see infinite possibilities, just as I found with the spectacular SteelStacks redevelopment project in Pennsylvania.

Cackett also mentioned that she’s heard of many older African-American couples who like to stay at the hotel, partly because they were not allowed to enjoy its hospitality during the days of segregation and Jim Crow.

Interestingly, the Mississippi Blues Trail historical marker out on the front sidewalk says that there used to be recording studios in the hotel: OKeh Records in 1930 and the American Record Corporation in 1935. Blues artists cutting records there included Bo Carter, Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy, Isaiah Nettles and the Mississippi Sheiks.

Some poignant thoughts from the Preservation in Mississippi blog on the day after the hotel re-opened in 2009:

“As I walked down Capitol Street with friends, we saw other groups of people going in the same direction. As we got closer to the King Ed, the trickle became a stream, and past the Mayflower [cafe, still open today] the stream became a river of people. It was a wonderful feeling to be a part of a crowd on the sidewalk in downtown Jackson….One thing that struck me was the almost perfect balance between blacks and whites in the crowd, a hopeful sign for the city and for Mississippi, showing civic and business cooperation to bring this incredibly complex and difficult project to completion. This was not a “white” project or a “black” project. It was an Us project.”

Room rates were reasonable, WiFi was free, my room was super-comfy and more businesses and restaurants are springing up nearby, including the new Farish Street Entertainment District.

If you’re ever in Jackson, don’t stay in some suburban box hotel. Get yourself downtown to this gorgeous property.

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Home on the Range, Sweet Betsy from Pike, You Are My Sunshine, The Water Is Wide, Shenandoah — chances are at least one of those songs has begun playing its melody in your head as you read its name. In times past, when friends and family gathered for the autumn and winter holidays, they’d get around the piano, or someone would take out a guitar, and voices would be raised to sing these songs. As familiar and as sentimental as many of them are, in many ways they are sort of a melting pot of American music, a mix of folk songs and songs that were popular a hundred or so years ago, music whose melodies have become part of the fabric of life in the United States.

Or maybe not. These songs are not so familiar or well known now as they used to be, which is one of the things Robin Spielberg remembered when she began teaching them to her daughter. She recalled how she had learned them in her family growing up, and she began to think it might be fun, and also a way to share a family tradition of well loved songs, if she made an album of her favorites.

She certainly had the chops to do that. Spielberg is a classically trained pianist who has sold more than three quarters of a million albums world wide. She has been an artist spokesperson in music therapy, and sold out concerts at Carnegie Hall’s historic Weill recital hall in New York City. It was to well loved songs she learned in her childhood, though, that she returned for the album Sea to Shining Sea: A Tapestry of American Music.

She did in a different way that she usually works, too. Spielberg most often tours and records as a solo artist. She planned this album to be an instrumental one, focusing on melody, but she found she needed more than her own instrument. “I discovered early on that it was nearly impossible to capture the true essence of each song on piano alone,” she says. So she invited several musical friends, including oboe and English horn player Nancy Rumbel and cellist Catherine Bent, to make up a small ensemble. The result is a fine and flowing collection of well loved melodies along with three Spielberg originals, which fit in well with the well known pieces.

Carrying on musical tradition in the family Spielberg’s daughter Valerie also came along to play bells and marimba on several of the songs. ”It was loads of fun having Valerie involved,” Spielberg says. “Keeping this incredible music alive through the generations motivated this recording.” As you gather with friends and family this winter season, this might be music you will want to bring along as well.

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