from Sandy Needham

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Paradise Lost Dispatch

“Dear Cyrela Development Company,

Regarding the In Mare construction in Cotovelo, a part of our veranda has fallen as a result of your pile-pounding machine making its way across the road in front of our house. We need to speak directly to someone about this, as it has created a precarious situation.”

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Pile-pounding

The beautiful and peaceful coconut field in front of our house is, alas, being supplanted by a huge condominium; the project will continue for the next two years. The view from our veranda and balcony, which used to be this:

hammocksDSC03110 - View from Balcony

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(our house is on the road to the beach left of the coconut field)

 

 

 

 

…has transformed into the following stages of destruction/construction:

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“Dear Cyrela Development Company,

Even though the foreman, Victor, informed us that dump trucks and delivery trucks would be using the road opposite our house on the far side of In Mare construction, the trucks are using our road instead. We are being pummeled with dirt and sand, fumes, noise and vibrating. Even though the trucks are fitted with tarps, they are not even bothering to use them.”

Sometimes the trucks back up in front of our house, idling, awaiting re-entry to the construction site (the entrance is near the beach.) I sometimes lose it and stomp out to the trucks to demand they turn off their engines. I encountered a driver by the gate studying our house closely, then remaining there with a threatening face while I found the idling culprit in the path of the ocean wind. My Portuguese becomes even worse when I am upset, so I’m sure the drivers were mystified by my furious comment that life in my house is pure “inverno” (winter), rather than “inferno!” Effective.

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“Dear Cyrela Development Company,

We appreciate the trucks using tarps all the time now. We have not been able to reach Victor to determine when the eight stinking dump trucks will stop using our road, so for our sanity, please inform us of the end date for this “exception.” Their constant thundering past is simultaneous with the four bull dozers inside the site working non-stop to fill the trucks.

Imagine our shock the day the dump trucks actually turned our corner and thundered along our side road, as well. That side of the house is protected from the ocean wind and, therefore, not protected by the acrylic panels we have installed on all other open-lattice transoms above doors and windows to block the dirt and fumes. We happened to be outside and actually watched the sand and dirt pour into our kitchen and upstairs bedroom. The cleaning lady had left fifteen minutes before.”

The answer was “in 60 days” (end of September). In Mare is managing to build five stories, though only three stories are allowed by the ocean; two stories will be below the street level. The trucks carry the sand/dirt to another formerly beautiful field across the highway that Cyrela also owns. The work starts at 7:00 each morning with a prison-like siren, but the workers arrive by foot along our road from 6:30am, shouting and laughing. Because the wind dies down at night and there is no construction work, we sleep with the window open, hearing the ocean once more. The house next door, which is situated out our bedroom window on the ocean side and used by the owner only in January, has a part time caretaker who installed a hen and rooster in the yard during our recent trip to the USA. The rooster started crowing LOUDLY around 4:00, but increased his cocka-doodle-doo’s in entire series of crowings. After he got up to 57 crowings at 4:10 and subsequent series dwindled to 25, 20 and then 12 crows by 7:30, I appealed to the caretaker. I explained that with the stress of the construction, the rooster would probably do me in completely. I was spending my dawning hours with my chest absolutely frozen with tension, counting and anticipating when the random cocka-doodles might cease. It took another eight days, but he did take the rooster away, which is why I’m here writing and not institutionalized…yet. I am extremely sensitive to any disturbance on Sundays – our one day without construction. Too bad it is election year and all the politicians use cars with blasting speakers to spread their messages to the illiterate. Also, too bad that some nearby alarm has been going off all night.

“Dear Cyrela Development Company,

The misery we have experienced in our home is a very big problem. Since we have no other residence and work from home, we are forced most days (except Sundays) to stay inside rather than enjoying meals, yoga and craft work in the ocean breeze on our veranda and balcony. We can no longer read in the hammock after lunch; we are like captives. Trapped inside, we can no longer enjoy fresh air coming into our non-air-conditioned house; we must keep the house closed up to avoid the terrible fumes from the bulldozers and trucks, the great amounts of flying dirt and to reduce the deafening noise. It is very hot and airless. The noise is akin to being in the center of an airplane engine with a sadistic dentist (metal saws). When at last we venture out for dinner at night on the balcony, we now face blinding lights from the entire site, continuing the prison theme of our existence here. And that is only if you actually stop at 7:00pm. More “exceptions:” last Thursday the machinery didn’t stop till 11:00pm.

We have increased stress and physical tension, frequent headaches from the toxic fumes (we have been forced to leave our house on occasion when the fumes were intolerable); we are sad, exhausted by 12+ hours of constant noise and house trembling, covered with dirt and distraught over losing the tranquility of our home and the beauty of its outdoor spaces. Our stress and grief are unquantifiable.”

So far without a lawyer, Cyrela has agreed to completely replace our veranda. This is one thing we were hoping to win because the steel beams are old and corroded from the sand and salt that fills the ocean air. Cyrela documented the small cracks already in the veranda plaster before construction began, so it is a good thing that they will start over with new beams and improve on the original work.

It looks like any additional compensation for trying to maintain sanity will require representation. We’ll see.

I am struggling; Newton is mostly impervious to noise and airlessness. Creative projects and walking on the beach are the best distractions while he works in the office all day. I am not fond of running errands in the city traffic, though I frequently do. I have been refreshing the décor of the house, probably because I am stuck looking at it, not because we can entertain or have visitors, especially with the veranda about to fall. Will paradise be regained?

I put up these family photos to comfort me while I’m forced to eat breakfast and lunch in the stuffy, closed-up dining room after six years:

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I know these are surmountable problems (I hope) in the scheme of things. Apart from the house, good things continue to abound here: international friends we love; Wednesday night Pub Quizzes run by a fun Irish guy; Volume IV of Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ; a new Tex-Mex restaurant, run by a real New Mexican; a great new cleaning lady one day/week and a smiling cook (for half a Monday) whom I really adore; our beautiful beach; poker, tennis and squash for Newt and his buddies; and an almost-full moon over the ocean right now. 

Love,

A rapidly aging Sandy

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Three College Friends Dispatch

We had managed to see each other in bits and pieces, rarely all together. I had missed a couple of bigger reunions, my being in Brazil. In one case, at least 20 years had passed since we had seen each other. But THIS particular early June weekend, three fellow 1971 graduates of Northwestern University and I showed up at the same midtown Manhattan hotel on the same day.

monica in DubaiMonica Postell, originally from Chicago, lives in Delray Beach, Florida. She travels world-wide, training employees of multi-national companies in innovative customer service. Here she is in Dubai. After a busy schedule stateside, she heads to India this fall.

After a training session in Rio in 2007, Monica flew up to Natal for a visit! I’ll never forget her courage on the ‘ski-bunda’ in the dunes. I cannot imagine her being daunted by anything.

Camaroes dinner with Sandy and Newt

Monica is a Francophile – or one could say your general mediterrophile (like me). She is also an accomplished painter in oil and water colors.

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Her website is: http://www.postellartworks.com/

Above all, Monica is a brilliant, generous, vibrant force of nature…the eternal smile version. I can barely recall what her face looks like when she is not smiling!

shoreLinda Doyle Calder, known to me as “Doyley,” is originally from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. She now lives in Westhampton, Long Island, New York. She is a former Manhattan attorney and a current Hamptons attorney. Early in her career Doyley served as a Senior Law Clerk for the renowned Chief U.S. District Court Judge, Constance Baker Motley, a former NAACP civil rights lawyer who won many college desegregation cases at the Supreme Court. Doyley and I have managed a couple of lunches in Manhattan in the last few years, one with her opera-loving and amateur chef-husband, John. Their daughter is just out of college.

 

linda & johnwith Anne

doyley 3I remember Doyley freshman year as the most well-read person I had met! Above all, she is a tremendously astute “tiny thing” that packs a formidable wallop. She’s another one whose intelligence is accompanied by a perpetual grin, which is perpetually framed by those cheekbones!

I was Monica’s and Doyley’s unofficial roommate at our rather counter-culture version of a sorority house the couple of years I lived off-campus.

 

 

 

 

marisi

Marie Arana is “Marisi” to all of us. She is half American and half Peruvian. Her amazing autobiography, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (a finalist for the National Book Award) describes her magical childhood in Peru and her adolescence in the USA.

Here is one of her book jacket portraits!

Marisi lives in Washington, D.C. and Lima with her husband, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic. It is hard to know where to begin with such an accomplished artist and intellectual, but I will begin with the fact that Marisi remains an extremely kind, fascinating, funny, unaffected andesperson even after serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Washington Post’s “Book World,” gathering all that literary talent and managing the First Lady’s annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall, publishing Cellophane and Lima Nights, and becoming a Library of Congress Scholar. She has just written a biography of Simon Bolivar, soon to be published. And she recently traveled to the Andean gold mines to write a script for “10 X 10,” a film about ten girls, ten writers and ten developing countries. The remarkable girl growing up in that lawless, desolate place captured Marisi’s heart.

marisi 2Here she is on a speaking tour. Did I say infectious smile again?

Her website is: http://mariearana.net/

Marisi dinnerAn operatic voice (I performed a modern dance in college accompanied by Marisi playing piano and singing an original song) and an undergraduate degree in Russian are additional icings on this beautiful cake!

 

Marisi has a daughter and a son and is the only lucky one to be a grandmother among this foursome. Above all, she has a presence…as in being present, that is richly infused with equal parts intelligence and good will (and not       necessarily with noticing where her credit card is).

 

 

 

cevicheriaWe all loved walking miles together around Manhattan. A fantastic dinner was shared at La Mar, an elegant Peruvian “cevicheria” at 25th and Madison. My first pisco sours. On Saturday, several problems were solved handily by this strolling post-menopausal swat team: retrieving a laptop adaptor and a credit card left behind in interesting locales; urgent purchases made; my NY driver’s-license-renewal-eye-test administered (which means I can renew online from Brazil now!); picnic provisions secured. A happily crowded Bryant Park provided the backdrop to our fabulous cheese and surreptitious wine picnic. And we were able to pull all of this off without one word being left unsaid!

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Sunday morning we had to return to the Italian restaurant where we had eaten dinner because my iPhone was missing. Sure enough, they did not have it! Marisi even tried calling my number during brunch to see who might answer. Nothing.

My three outstanding cohorts caught their various trains while I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping my way up Fifth Avenue to the Apple Store for a new iPhone (these cost much more in Brazil). My flight to São Paulo was that night. I’ll never forget the ten minutes it took to walk out of the Apple Store with a new iPhone, considering the endless complication involved in buying anything in the northeast of Brazil. Despite that miracle, I felt a little down since Newton and I had lost four cell phones recently. He left an old one behind in a hotel and our last two new ones had been robbed in Brazil.

I returned to the hotel to pick up my suitcase and way too many USA purchases. The cab got me to Port Authority and I climbed on the airport bus, handing the ticket that was tucked beside my new phone to the driver. Once I sat down and peered into my purse, I couldn’t believe my eyes: the new iPhone was now missing. Did the driver manage to cop it?? Utterly stunned, I became aware of a weightiness on my lap. Next thing you know, I pulled not one, but two iPhones out of a hole in the lining of my purse. The older phone had inadvertently been set on vibrate, which went unnoticed when Marisi called the number at our noisy Third Avenue brunch.

“So filled with antennae” is the apt way Marisi later described our little group. Even I, currently less productive than the others, have so many offerings for my antennae receptors in this time-filled paradise…at least the sort of antennae that are not responsive to cell phones on vibrate! It is one of my grandest pleasures to know these three smiling, brilliant, finely tuned-in beauties, and I am thankful for them.

Love,

Sandy

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

NY-NJ 2012 Dispatch

Ahhhh…to touch down in Newark, New Jersey and be back on the east coast for the first time in a year-and-a –half! That means New York, actually, not Newark itself. Newton also touched down there from China the same day and we had an overnight at my sister Donna’s and brother-in-law Larry’s. They are the hosts par excellence of the family, so the perfect martini, the peonies off the bush, the delectable dinner, champagne, and the cushy bed were no exceptions to the rule, even with Donna just returning from our road trip. My niece Sara and husband Rob brought the flourless chocolate cake. Hardly a carb involved.

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Because Newton and I had upcoming engagements in both New York and New Jersey, we got a Hotwire.com hotel in convenient Bergen County, though it ended up in not-so-convenient Paramus. This meant that Newton could buzz off to meetings with his partners in the rental car while I caught the bus to Manhattan along vicious, crowded Route 17. I think I was the first person to actually walk in Paramus, NJ for a decade, as the overgrowth around the pedestrian overpass attested. I walked about a mile to catch the bus, then over a mile to return to the hotel later on the northbound side. The stroll was missing sidewalks, but well-supplied with giant speeding trucks, a patch of reeds reaching above my head to plough through, thankfully troll-free-yet-creepy muddy spaces under three bridges, and exits to cross with an endless rush of oncoming cars. I hadn’t run for my life like that since crossing any street in Natal.

2012-05-27 19.42.20 HDRWe met up in the city with dear friends David Barrow and Helen Webb of textile and interior design fame, along with their talented daughter Amelia. David is the last remaining textile designer I know in the USA. They came in from Connecticut for the divine tapas at Buceo 95 on West 95th. Oh, the cheeses. The olives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

That put us in my nephew Todd’s neighborhood. A cell phone call discovered his family just a couple of blocks away at a Central Park picnic, so over we went! Here are his sons Ethan (far left) and Sam (far right) with friends; as night fell we caught the view on the reservoir and noted our luck to be back in Manhattan on a perfect late spring evening:

Ethan sam park resevoir

graduationTodd is now General Manager of the Parents Network, the online source of “Parents Magazine.” His second children’s book, Ten Tiny Toes, is coming out this September. He presented Sam with this DeLorean for his eighth grade graduation. They have been DeLorean aficionados ever since Sam was enthralled by “Back to the Future.”

 

 

 

I had lunch with my dear friend, Nancy Taylor, the real world traveler. She was about to spend a month in Paris and had landed the apartment of Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company book store and publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. There is ONLY ONE Nancy Taylor.

My longtime friend, Carolyn McMonegal, and her cat, Kayli, treated me to lunch at their apartment. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bagel with lox stacked so high. NEW YORK! Carolyn looks great and is feeling better than she has in years. What could be happier news?

I managed a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but only had time to peruse the shop and pick out two new posters for my Natal living room. Just walking in Manhattan, even while hitting everyone with the protruding posters, was such joy. I love my old avenues.

We had a fun dinner in New Jersey with friends from Newton’s first job; also a delicious barbeque with Newton’s current partners.

Newton flew off to Rio for the annual reunion with his three high school buddies. I went up the Hudson River to Nyack to visit the Blue Rock School and my fabulous friends there. Serendipitously, rain had postponed the big Spring Play to the very evening I was there. After an as-usual wonderful day at the school, I got to see the 7th and 8th grade  - the graduating class, whom I had known since they were four-year-olds - perform an hilarious, stunning play in the wooded amphitheater. That is some school where 13-year-olds are so absolutely comfortable in their own skins and so accomplished on the stage.

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               7th-8th 2012                      Look: mascara and mustaches on my babies!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I got to spend the night at the one and only Lucia’s house – she’s the Blue Rock kindergarten teacher, official photographer, official gardener, and an amazing friend over the years and the miles. It’s about time to get a photo of Lucia since she’s usually the one behind the camera, but here are her adorable son Zak - a friend of Jake’s – and her adorable son Julian, graduating from high school:

ZakJulian Graduation

I dragged my suitcase and carry-on bag to catch the bus from Nyack to the city. The end of this marathon trip would be a weekend in Manhattan with three college friends.

Love,

Sandy

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