After taking my three young daughters to Spain for two weeks, I’ve returned with a few profound learnings: Little girls care more about purchasing the flamenco dress than watching the flamenco show; they can subsist for weeks on cured ham, baguettes, and packaged Nestle ice cream products; and, lastly, the Spaniards love freckles.
My five-year-old sports a few hundred freckles. Not Julianne Moore-style -- alas, no accompanying red hair -- but concentrated right across her nose and cheekbones, with a few stragglers fanning across her forehead. On her gorgeous, open face, they are the most distinguishing characteristic.
She’s always been ambivalent about her freckles. There was the time last summer when a boy in her camp asked to have a playdate with “the girl with the freckles”. I couldn’t tell if she liked this moniker or if it bothered her, which was uncharacteristic for her communicative nature. I’ve tried to be particularly sensitive to her feelings on this subject since the freckles came from me.
Actually, they came from my dad. And from his mom before him. And before her, from my great-grandfather John Francis Neylan, a bootstrapping Irishman. Neylan succeeded in channelling his tenacious personality to become one of the most powerful men in California in the 1950s. I like to think a little of his persona has trickled down through our family’s speckled skin and that this is the gift given to the Neylans by our long-ago motherland.
The heritage has proved a curse, however, even if it does carry the mark of the fighting Irish. My father died almost a year ago from skin cancer. His California youth of sun-drenched tennis and golf games ravaged his sensitive skin. My skin will, hopefully, only be the death of me in figurative terms: no combination of creams and lotions seems to make it cooperate.
But Esme has yet to find all this out. Right now, all she knows with clarity is that her freckles give her an identity, something to grasp as she starts to shape a vision of who she is. And the Spaniards who paused long enough to call her “Guapa!” or “Preciosa!” all seemed drawn to those markings so foreign to Mediterranean cultures: “Mira las pecas!”
And by our last day in the country, Esme’s feelings on the subject of her freckles became clear. With glee, she engaged her sisters in a game in which she pretended to grab millions -- in her estimation -- of her freckles off her face and give them to her sisters so that they, too, could have something worthy of the Spaniards attention. A happy currency indeed.
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