Long legs in Spain

This is spooky, right?

It's ham. In Spain. And yet...it's so much more than ham, no?

I found myself in the doorway of this shop in Donostia-San Sebastián gawking at this strange food/aparatus...and thinking, "Whoa." Then J--'s friend M-- came up next to me and said, "Whoa!"

It's a strange brew of associations. I'm getting....



Marlene Dietrich's legs photographed by Milton Greene (the abstraction of the leg)



A leg brace (why does the leg of ham need to be braced in *that* particular position, I wonder...).



Pointe shoes (a leg with a hoof always looks like someone standing on tippy-toes)



And, of course, pigs. A happy, healthy, college-educated, organic, tax-paying, liberal, pata negra.

Then I think, this is just my dirty mind. Spanish people are not mixing swine and sensuality. This is just a practical solution for getting the perfect slice of cured meat and simultaneously showing patrons that this is a pata negra. No big deal, just food, right? Move along, move along.

But later that evening I found myself eating...



...a pig's ear.

It was so delicate, so tender, like biting into a little piece of pork chop fat. There's something disconcertingly intimate about having something that soft between your teeth. And then the very idea of nibbling on an ear makes one (not me, of course) think of nibbling on a lover's ear...

Well, anyway.

Then the NEXT day at my friends J-- and N--'s wedding, there was an enormous cart of fresh oysters...



So I was trying, nonchalantly, to gobble down as many of them as I possibly could while not being noticed standing nearly 6' tall in a hot pink dress. Just act cool and maybe nobody will notice that that's your sixth oyster. I'm not very good at hiding my feelings and my enjoyment must have been apparent because people began handing me oysters, which was kind of embarrassing, but also kind of convenient. And then...

A pretty woman in a bright red blouse reached over and popped a piece of...ham...in my mouth.

Oh yum. Oh wow. The flavor was so clear, like a bell ringing in my mouth. The meat was naturally sweet, not sweet like some honey-baked-ham nonsense, but sweet like the flesh of pigs who are blissed out because they have been eating acorns all day, *their* own bliss food. Sort of a bliss chain: the pigs were drunk on pleasure, so I was drunk on pleasure...

I think the Spanish are just more comfortable with pleasure. I mean, look at this...



This is not a silly postcard picture. This is just one exquisite hour of the day in Donostia-SS, where the light and sky and ocean are one continuous drama. I said to N--, "Do you realize how scandalous it is that you live around this kind of natural beauty every day?" People live in places like Ploiest, Romania:



Or, you know...Hong Kong:



Well, anyway, what I'm saying is, those Spanish (and Basque and Andalusian) folks are just way more comfortable with way more pleasure, and it shows in their food.