Inspiration: Memories and The Passage of Time
A series of blog posts from the archives, published in March 2015 about my summers in Mar del Plata.
Summers in Mar del Plata
“Beautiful Memories” watercolor, pen & ink on watercolor paper 12×16. ©Dora Ficher
During the summers we went to the shore. My grandparents had a wonderful house in Mar del Plata.
Photograph of my grandparent’s home in Mar del Plata
After school was done in December (Dec. 21st, 1st day of summer), the baúles (trunks) would get all packed and we would get ready to go for the summer. A company called Rabbione would pick them all up.
I remember being at my grandparents house while everything was getting packed as well. They had lots of trunks. They would take everything since we were there for the whole summer.
They would also take everyone who worked at their house, the cook, the housekeeper and the housemaids. It sounds like Downton Abbey, I said to my mom today. She said “Yes, that’s how it was”. I’m sure it was, but in a much smaller scale. The houses were definitely not as big.
My aunts and uncles would also come. My grandfather, my dad and my uncles had to go to work so they would leave on Mondays and come back on Fridays. They didn’t stay for the whole 3 months like the women did.
I remember that my grandparents bought me a little chair that they always kept there. It was my princess chair. That’s the 1st thing I always looked for as soon as we arrived.
We spend the holidays there and stayed until right before school started in March.
We would all go by train. I recall the name of the train was “Marplatense”. “The Marplatense”. was all silver and had stainless steel wagons. It had air conditioning and an elegant restaurant. It would take us about five hours to get to Mar del Plata. The most fun on the train was the restaurant.
The Marplatense
Their house was wonderful. It had beautiful gardens very nicely manicured by the gardener. There were lots of flowers all around and great big trees that we could climb.
My mom, my sister Claudia and me. 1954-55
The house was always full of people, and we spent endless hours enjoying the beach.
The Barquillero in Mar del Plata
A draft of an oil painting I did of the house in Mar del Plata. ©Dora Ficher
There was one thing that all of us kids looked forward to every day at the beach, the barquillero. A barquillero is a person who sells a special kind of wafers. But it wasn’t just the wafers we wanted, it was the whole process of getting the wafers.
A container with barquillos and the roulette wheel on the top.
The barquillero wallked all along the beach, stopping when he was called like an ice cream man does at the beaches around here, at least at the NJ beaches. The children would spin the roulette wheel that pointed to different numbers from 1 to 4. Depending on the number it landed on, that was the number of wafers you would get. It was a game we all liked to play every day.
The wafers are made of a sweet baked wheat dough without yeast and sweetened with sugar and honey . The wafers are corrugated but flat and thin profile with a shape similar to a boat, hence its name,”barquillos,” which means little boats.
The wafers.
While we looked forward to the Barquillero, in the same way, the adults waited for the coffee man on the beach every day. He would go around kind of singing... ”cafe...cafe...”
On the beach with cousins and friends.
