Mazel Tov

A week in Spain, the Pyranees, a picturesque drive from Barcelona, where I had not thought to become the owner of sanity once more, there, where the command of a mountain is to Look Up, leave the roiling band of unrest over airways, TV screens, the front page unquiet conversation we are accustomed to in our Nation, no escape from that, except in rarified altitudes of no rape. un-civil wars, terrorism, assaults with handguns, students killed in classrooms. "Loony Tunes" play in this country we love, America, and abroad a Middle East in crisis. It's a given, said my husband, born Algerian: no peace, No Peace. So, home again, I said, standing in a postal queue, Mazel Tov to absence of all this among the hills of rural Spain, where, Yes, there's rain, but much less pain. The postal clerk was unkind, he said, Girl? Why Mazel Tov? When here you could have merely turned your television off.