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But this was the best spot we had found on the whole circuit around the coasts and over to Lisbon. We did a lot of swimming and sun bathing. We had something of an affair, although it was a rather tepid romance, she being a marrying maiden.
I think already at that time I was conceptually against the concept of marriage governed by law, and thus I have never married, but still I lived with Sonoma for twenty-five years. The idea for me was people make agreements. If it takes the law, gendarmes and whatnot to enforce the agreements, then it is no marriage but war. Of course my theory assumes responsibility and an ethical commitment to the agreements, and where both persons are considerably considerate of each other. But then Sonoma had a boyfriend but I can't remember anything about that.
Several mornings we went to town for supplies and would visit a local restaurant for coffee, where we could sit outside in a garden setting. We would play one song on the jukebox - the Rolling Stones - Paint It Black, which may have been the first song I ever heard by the Stones. A lot of people seemed especially poor. But they didn't have a down-and-out, chip on the shoulder attitude like many in America. As poor as they might be, they seemed quite happy and pleasant to be around. It struck me then, that it was not poverty per se that may make people snitty, but perhaps an attitude about it.
About mid-week we began to be visited afternoons, more than we would have liked, by the local Guardia Civil, mostly one man after the first time, in his late twenties, married with kids, who ostensibly came to see how we were doing.
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