I was with my grandfather in Granada, Spain, walking through the old town.
My grandfather asked if I was hungry and suggested we stop for a bite of lunch.
Walking through the crowded city center during the mid-morning break, el almuerzo, it was difficult to find a bar or café that wasn't packed with businessmen and shoppers.
We came upon a place that seemed new and more geared for the tourist trade, but it was nearly empty and clean, so we decided to walk inside and look at their menu.
We decided on some toasted sandwiches with layers of thinly sliced grilled aubergine, courgette, red onions and cheese.
A middle-aged woman, who we assumed to be the establishment's owner, took our order cordially with a sincere smile, asking where we were from.
I told her my grandfather lived in Chicago and that I currently lived in the Netherlands but had lived in Granada at the end of the 1980s.
The woman looked up from the note pad on which she was scribbling our order and said she thought I looked familiar, like someone she had known years ago from a photograph.
Thinking about it for a moment, I said that she looked familiar as well and then I remembered a woman named María Dolores, who worked at the Wagons-Lits travel agency not too far from where we were.
I asked the woman if her name was María Dolores and if she worked at a travel agency some 35 years ago and she looked at me dumbstruck.
That was my mother, she said with a shocked look on her face. She owned that travel agency and in fact, you're standing in the exact place it existed until her death about ten years ago. We had the place boarded up until I retired from teaching and my husband and I opened this sandwich shop franchise about three years ago, right before COVID.
With tears in our eyes, we reminisced for a few more minutes, the woman remembering the photo of her mother with the young American traveler that she proudly displayed on the credenza behind her desk at the travel agency. The woman then excused herself and went to give her husband our order.
I told my grandfather the story of how the shop owner's mother was my travel agent back when I'd lived in Granada and was the one who arranged my flights to and from Spain the few times I had returned to Chicago during the two years I'd lived in Andalusia.
My grandfather asked if I knew why one of the shop's windows was covered with a thick velour curtain and I explained that once a week, a puppeteer, who has his workshop in the hilly stone streets above the city, comes down every Saturday to entertain children from one of the sandwich shop windows which was beautifully crafted into a puppet castelet, where the puppeteer would perform with his handmade puppets.
A few minutes later, the woman brought our sandwiches over and set them on the counter; they were cut in half and daintily wrapped in translucent purple parchment that showed off the fine colorful layers of grilled vegetables and cheese.
Then I woke up.
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