Velut arbor, ita ramus

I take my daughters to a skating rink twice a week. I should sit in the stands and watch them skate, but often pack a laptop, order a coffee, and settle down to work at a table in the cafeteria overlooking the ice. The place fills up with skaters waiting for their lessons to begin and families waiting for lessons to end. Skating lessons aren’t cheap: many of the regulars among the children come in private school uniforms: their parents look prosperous, some of them tony. It’s an upper-middle class preserve.

Siblings run pretty wild while their brother or sister skates. One boy who may have been seven or eight lobbed a soccer ball at the wall (he never failed to catch it) a few feet away from the mounted flat-screen TV, until, to be fair, his mother stopped him. The wonder, to me, was that he tried it at all. I’ve seen high-speed games of tag between the counter and the table, slowing only when one child hid under an unoccupied table. One day I had a visitor under my table, by my feet, for five minutes or so before his older sister coaxed him out. He might have been five or six, his sister ten, his mother—three or four tables down from mine—was chatting amiably with a gaggle of mums, all of them coping easily with a child or two. As behaviour, my squatter’s taking refuge beside my boots struck me as unusual, but not extreme: not what tends to happen, but what might happen.

A few days later the lure of after-Christmas specials drew me to one of Barcelona’s pricier grocery stores. From an aisle full of jars (mustards, sauces) I went around the corner into one stocked with olive oil and vinegar, some in plastic bottles, some in tin, some in glass, and dodged a ten-year-old on a scooter. He and his sister (also on a scooter) belonged to a tall, late thirties father in a navy jacket and quilted vest that might have been from Barbour’s. It was as though the bicycle-dodging pleasures of central Barcelona sidewalks had been re-scaled and reconfigured to make a scholar’s point about analogous public spaces.

All of this leads me to wonder whether a Catalan childhood leaves one ill-equipped to cope with the social world of a Catalan adult. If childhood can seem understructured, unbound, and untroubled by rules and authority, life at twenty-five, thirty-five, or forty-five often seems to comprise a series of administrative hoops through which the individual must leap, of increasing difficulty, in a kind of circus act where the citizen plays the elephant and the state, the tamer. Starting a business or applying to be vetted for tenure can entail trunkloads of paperwork and require consummate patience. I doubt that the cultures of childhood and adulthood make for a perfect match, and an easy transition, anywhere in the world, but I wonder whether they are here peculiarly ill-matched, and the transition distinctly difficult.