DISPATCHES

Five Years Dispatch

2011-12-13T01:20:00.001-08:00

December 8, 2011 marked five years in our house on Cotovelo Beach in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. All the clichés about time apply.

Here is the city of Natal from the air, with the Potengi River in the foreground, the Atlantic Ocean in the background. Cotovelo is to the south.

We had relatives arriving within days, so bought mattresses and ordered beds to be made by the local rustic furniture makers. An old sofa, two old chairs and an old table had been left behind on the veranda, and the living room had a built-in sofa…that was IT. We scrambled to find dishes, sheets, towels, pots and pans and discovered that household items, no matter how shoddy, were costly here. We now know the Brazilian government taxes all items many times over.

We had no idea how long this experiment in Brazil would last, so I was cautious about adding too many things to the house that we would never be able to carry back, having arrived with suitcases only. Eventually, we furnished the place, though it had a sort of bank lobby sparseness. This look has since fallen subject to the laws of the universe, and little by little additional pieces of furniture, plants, and objets have materialized. On travels we took to stuffing suitcases with items from our upstate NY storage bin and with comparatively inexpensive treasures from Target and Ikea. This is really our home now, and we just bought actual flatware to replace the plastic-handled Brazilian version, to demonstrate our current commitment to who-knows-how many more years?

Comparing the early days to now, I think of how we decided to approach some people at the next table in a restaurant who were speaking a mix of Portuguese and English to see if we could kick-start a social life. All of our surrounding houses were empty beach houses, soon to be filled up with January relatives and guests – none of whom would even make eye contact on the way to the beach. Then my English antenna would go off in the supermarket and I’d get contact info for social opportunities, though the resulting chemistry was sometimes lacking a few molecules.

Our group of friends has since grown and grown; some move away, as Natal seems to attract a sort of gypsy spirit, and the wealthy natives (our beach neighbors in summer) still keep to themselves – but the explorers who arrive on this shore are curious, intelligent, fun and, oddly enough, physically beautiful. Sometimes we feel like there are not enough days in a week to celebrate this charmed life with all of the many friends we cherish!

We just partied this week with friends almost non-stop from Wednesday to Sunday. Whew. More than typical for a week, but was it ever fun! I rather recently have three girlfriends who lunch: (l to r) Faith – an American who has spent her whole life in Brazil; Vilma – a Potiquar from the interior of the state who was married to a Scottish entomologist (recently deceased) and lived 20 years in Manhattan, as well as consulted for many years in Africa for the United Nations. She divides life between Cotovelo Beach and Loch Ness, Scotland; and Mary, the rare American I’ve known for some time who just ‘retired’ from editing for the Stanford University Press. They all live nearby. Besides the fact that these friends are brilliant, my favorite part is that we belly-laugh for entire afternoons!

The culmination of the week was the wedding of our friends Hian and Ana Paula. They met 13 years ago in Stockholm and have an 8-year-old daughter, but had never tied the knot. Most of our friends were there, witnessing a ceremony beside the ocean with a full, golden moon rising on cue! What a delicious and romantic dress-up occasion for us all. I also participated in the bride’s “hen party” in the nearby beach town of Pipa!

In the early days here, I spent countless hours alone in the breeze on the veranda, hand-sewing my Japanese quilt, making jewelry, reading in the balcony hammock, following my yoga practice. I continue to consider such hours the gift of calm bequeathed to the frantic life I led prior to Brazil. I still respond to “what do you do here?” with “I am still resting from my life in the US.” Some people get it, and some get upset. How nice that it makes no difference to me and I embrace the contentment in ever deeper ways.

This reverie is punctuated with regular jaunts into town for my free semi-weekly Português por Estrangeiros class at the university. This class has produced lasting friends, if not lasting Portuguese! So far, I’ve aced the tests but still say whatever I need to with suspiciously English syntax. What has improved is my ability to follow a rapid conversation among several people…more or less. Some people also get upset that I’m not killing myself to speak as well as possible. If I forget to call a string bean a ‘she,’ I can live with it.

Nowadays, Newton and I have come to love our routines and rituals together. We would surely grow tired of them if our travels did not intervene, but they do!

He works at his big desk, communicating at all hours with various spots on the globe. I spend far too much time on the computer at my little desk next to his. The computer used to make me physically sicker than it does now, an acclimation about which I am ambivalent…this can’t be good for me! Not to mention that when I am not communicating with far-flung relatives and friends via e-mail or Facebook – connections crucial to this move – I am monitoring the sad slippage of American democracy further into oligarchy/corporatocracy in the countless, inescapable ways this is documented online. It is painful-yet-compelling (compulsive?). I find that people are registering anti-American remarks increasingly.

On Fridays¸ I usher in the weekend by going to the next beach town south for produce at the little grocery, for shrimp at the fish store, and for a container of açaí berry sherbet at the beach. We pack up hot buffalo chicken wings our empregada has learned to make perfectly and consistently (a Potiquar feat), some cucumber salad with two toothpicks, beer out of the freezer in stryro holders along with two frosted glasses, also in stryo holders (‘estupidamente gelada:’ ‘ridiculously cold’). We grab two beach chairs and head off for the shady grassy knoll above the sandy beach below. Back home is the açaí dessert (Newton adds the granola and banana) and perfect espresso from our Nespresso machine.

The shrimp, you ask? That gets cooked and shelled early Saturday morning by the caretaker. Newton buys the lettuce/arugula/parsley/collard greens just delivered to the local bodega from the nearby fields in Pium Valley. While he deveins the shrimp, I wash all the greens. He steams the cut-up collard greens and cuts up loads of garlic. THEN we grab the same two beach chairs, the umbrella, my hat, and a small cooler of beer and head down to the beach by the water. Lunchtime: I make a salad while Newt sautés the collard greens with garlic and the shrimp with garlic. This is our lunch menu for every Saturday and Sunday after the beach.

We’ve been following several US cable series on DVD over the five years (The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Treme, Boardwalk Empire, and Damages, so far), along with sanity-preserving Jon Stewart and thought-provoking (with an adolescent slant) Bill Maher. We often set up the projector and pull down the screen Newton mounted near the living room ceiling to create our ‘theater.’

And we go out. A lot.

Early on, when we had made friends with several musicians who play rock and blues regularly around town, I made the offer to help a couple of singers with their pronunciation of English lyrics free of charge, as a ‘patron of the arts.’ Finally, just the other day, Gustavo of “Blue Mountain” blues band called me up to accompany him to the recording studio to lay down the vocal track over the instrumental for their first CD! It was such a fun afternoon and evening. First we went over lyrics he had collected while listening to quite a good, classic blues repertoire. I was able to correct many phrases and attempted to explain the meaning of such things as “warm or chill” or “ol’ van’s racking up the miles.” There were also instances of incorrect lyrics from online, not to mention pronunciation problems. Even with the slightly slurred diction of authentic Delta blues, Gustavo was making a mess of “pretty little.” I had no idea about the incredible recording technology nowadays, where Gustavo could literally redo just the smallest phrase and have it all blend. We said “pret-ty lit-tle, pret-ty lit-tle” together a few times, and then he would record that lyric immediately before the impression left him! He was a bit nervous recording for the first time, so the larger problem became his tendency to sometimes sing off-key. I really thought it important that the recording be right, so I started trying to help him with this, having a pretty good ear myself after an entire childhood in church choir. He tended to sing sharp, so I kept trying to get him to feel his feet on the floor, to take deep breaths and relax, but the improvement was random. What amazed me was that the recording technology actually allows for a degree of correction in the tone, so the playback always improved on the live voice! A free CD awaits me the next time I see Gustavo.

Another adventure was a weekend trip with our new Spanish friends (from my class) who live in Natal, but own a beautiful pousada (sort of like a motel/beach hotel) in Baia Formosa, a quiet little town and beach near the popular tourist destination of Pipa. Ernesto and Alicia have completely engaged themselves in the local life of their beach. It was really special to witness the way their six-year-old son Carlito studies jujitsu, surfing and futebol (soccer) on the beach with the natives, receiving the kindest help from some of the accomplished local athletes. Their daughter, Alicita, 4, is taken for walks by the young adolescent girls, who love nothing more than babysitting; Alicia takes a capoeira lesson (Brazilian martial art/dance) from the beach-roving instructor; Ernesto is in the middle of all of the above, an enthusiastic friend to everyone. There is no way to describe the particular local life that is buzzing on this beach and the simultaneous serenity of it. As Alicia said, “You have to see it to know.” We’ll never forget the spectacle at the far end of the beach when a small truck sunk lower and lower with the weight of load after load of fresh-caught fish (aceoba and tuna) that were carried by way of poles across two men’s shoulders from the boat to the shore. The vehicle strained off to market with the additional burden of four men, but that gleaming, silvery, slippery cargo miraculously stayed put!

From the beginning in our paradise, we expected an annual rhythm of rain and wind, of those swarms of yellow butterflies that made us feel like we were in the middle of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, of recurring birds passing through with their distinctive songs, of an end to the mosquitoes after ‘winter.’ While there is a slight change of temperature between July and January which we can count on, we have found that the rainy season begins and ends in an unidentifiable, spotty way; the windy season hardly begins or ends – rather just shows up in more or less strident, random ways. We never saw the swarms of yellow butterflies again, though this year a gigantic yellow and black specimen has been spotted a couple of times. The hummingbirds of two-different-tails have ceased to vie for the hibiscus bush, though the stubby one has appeared a bit this year; the parade of birds has rarely formed a pattern, which means we hear new songs on any given morning. I’m not sure if global warming has hampered the predictability of recurrence, along with causing beaches to shrink, but I suspect. We have retired our mosquito net in September every year until this very itchy year. We experimented last night by not re-installing the newly washed net, this being mid-December. At 3:00 am - being still-awake swatting and thoroughly bitten - we had a snack, pulled the bed out a bit and installed the damn thing, then finally slept like rocks.

The rich observation of nature and its profound way of teaching has been one of the biggest surprises and bonuses of these five years. The ants, lizards, frogs, large ‘water bug’ cock roaches and mosquitoes that share our house now seem like the normal consequence of all this beauty and burgeoning life around us. There is not a morning that I am not conscious of taking my time, stretching and twisting out the cricks while in bed with no thought of the clock, continuing the morning stretches on the balcony with the panoply of sea and sky and tropical foliage greeting me. Bursting into the light on the front garden as I round the corner of the house to the veranda with the breakfast tray gives me a daily fix. Gathering laundry off the clothesline beside a full moon on the ocean...yes. I wish I had an album of the hundreds of changing moods of the horizon. And I wish the iguana would stop shitting by the front gate!

I recently read an exciting article in The New Yorker about the Roman poet, Lucretius, who documented in a poem, “On the Nature of Things,” the epicurean philosophy of pleasure in all of life’s offerings. The debauched impression we have of this philosophy was manufactured by the church that followed, its doctrines of sin and punishment threatened by this embracing of joy and pleasure in the beauty of the elements of which we are physically a part; the stars, the here and now. I am an epicurean. It was thrilling for me to find an actual name for what I have discovered about myself in this place.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_greenblatt?currentPage=all

Every morning when I’m trying to work some of the tension out of my neck and shoulder muscles, what I want after five years is to be more Potiguar. I’m not sure I’ll ever succeed in eradicating these muscle knots, these emblems of such earnest striving to do…what was it again? And as much as I can become frustrated by the Potiguar tortoise pace, the lack of logic, the non-linear way of driving or even cutting a cake, I get the distinct sense that Potiguars do not have tension in their necks.

Here are some highlights from five years on Cotovelo Beach:

Our son Jake in the dunes: Our daughter Elise at Tabatinga Beach:

My three sisters, Donna, Janet & Dorothy, on a visit in 2008: My best friend, Lenna Baranoff Kottke, celebrating our 60th’s in 2009:

Newton on Zumbi Beach: The Nigerian fishermen who lost power and washed up on the beach south of here in 2009:

The moon out our bedroom window:

Our kids are arriving for Christmas this week. Let the holidays begin!

Love,

Sandy

Santarém Dispatch

2011-11-22T12:50:00.001-08:00

So there I was at last at high noon at Milan’s Malpensa Airport after the train delay, one half-hour ahead of my flight to Lisbon – my last stop on our fall trip. The check-in counter was already closed, so I was directed to another special services counter. There I waited for my turn, fantasizing that I could get all of my stuff through security (maybe losing those nice scissors?), make a mad run for the gate and still make the flight. Think again. My ticket was a mileage ticket through Continental, so I was directed to the Continental counter, “which may be closed, in which case you can call them about the next flight to Lisbon at 7:00pm.”

Closed. But with two numbers listed. I was unable to get through, being a rookie on the i-phone and I also could not get through to Julio and Gib, my expectant hosts near Lisbon, because I didn’t know how to get a “+” on the phone pad. I had just learned how to text, so Newton received my SOS while in a meeting in Gliwice, Poland. I asked him to reach extremely low-tech Julio and Gib ASAP before they left for the airport, then begged to receive instructions for that damn “+” so I could reach Continental. Eventually I was confirmed for the 7:00pm flight. I reached Gib to apologize and share the amazement that on my second visit to them in 34 years, I had, AGAIN, missed my flight. Last time was in 1977 when I flew from NY to vacation with them in Portugal and Morocco. The flight was oversold and I got bumped, but I had not known how to reach Julio and Gib outside Lisbon. Fortunately, they returned to the airport the next day to see if I would materialize. Needless to say, my reputation as a hopeless flake is well established with these two.

I passed the six hours till flight time shopping in the duty-free and having one last unforgettable Italian meal. I schlepped all my bags and carry-ons through the airport until I came to a bona fide sit-down restaurant with waiters and spent a couple of hours savoring a plate of assorted pecorino cheeses – including the peppercorn one – and white wine.

I did land in Lisbon (Lisboa…“Leesh-BOW-a”) that evening at 9:00, and there were my old friends whom I hadn’t seen since they visited NY in the ‘90’s. Julio and Gib had been my neighbors when I lived in Cleveland, Ohio in the ‘70’s. An old neighborhood called Ohio City was undergoing extensive restoration and gentrification, and Julio was the most famous host of the extremely arty neighborhood, full of architects and designers (my early textile design days). He is a creative genius as well as an outstanding chef (he was the chef at the coolest restaurant in the neighborhood). Julio could transform any room with truckloads of flowers and candles and put on legendary dinners. Then, at the end of every feast he created, he would go on about “Deed you loave eet? Was eet fahbulous?” [pause] “I sing, too.” And he would launch a cappella into Jobim’s haunting “Tristesa Não Tem Fim” from the film ‘Black Orpheus.’ There is only one Julio.

He and Gib became a couple back in these Ohio City days, buying up several houses together on which Julio worked his magic to restore and rent, and jointly owning a shop of home décor treasures called – you guessed it: ‘Julio’s Fabulous Things.’

In the early ‘90’s the two moved to Portugal permanently, where Julio had inherited his grandmother’s house.

We eventually found the old Mercedes in the airport parking lot and had a harrowing ride home to their great villa outside the city of Santarém. I knew vaguely that Julio and Gib were older than me without ever thinking much about it. Well, they don’t look it, but they are 78 and 80 respectively. Gib drove, and it was easier to sense his age in this respect.

Amidst the amazement at the beauty of their villa, the quantity of ‘fabulous things’ they have collected, the delicious soup made from a chicken Julio had hack-hacked the day before, there were numerous comments about how Gib’s back was aching – a condition that results from stress, the stress being caused by driving at night, the night driving caused by my missed flight. It was pretty uncomfortable, and my gifts from Italy were not making a big impression since Julio is relentlessly insistent on Portugal’s superiority. At least I was flying home to Brazil after two days. EXCEPT…I then received a call from Newton explaining that when I missed my Milan-Lisbon connection, my remaining flight reservation was automatically cancelled. He could only secure me a seat on his flight back to Brazil four days later. I did not think Julio and Gib would consider this any better news than I did. It turned out that with 35,000 additional award miles I could take my original flight back in first class. I said to Newton: DO IT.

I then had two lovely days with Julio and Gib. I studied the fabulous things in their house and pigged out on their delicious food.

I missed catching the men with their olive pickers in these trees, but the pastoral scene out the kitchen window was worthy of Millet or Van Gogh:

Here is Gib, preferring his seat by the fan to a hot hike through a nearby town.

Julio took me to an amazing produce market and then to the lovely town of Óbidos, where we had some beers and reminisced about our old neighborhood and all the fun friends we had there. I bought some small colorful cotton rugs for almost nothing.

You can see how hardy and fit Julio is at 78:

Here is an old interior in Óbidos. These blue tiles from Portugal are so famous that all tiles in Brazil are called “azulejos,” even if they are not blue.

I took Julio and Gib to lunch in Santarém, then was able to catch a train back to the Lisbon airport (whew) and fly home after some long delay on TAP airlines.

This time the first class service was even worse than on the way over, but we did have our own bathroom this flight AND – I must give credit where it is due – I had absolutely perfectly prepared octopus…on an airplane! My complaints would be deafening if I had actually come up with money for this first class ticket. The stewardess was so rough and gruff, she almost tore my big paper lantern shade when she grabbed my fragile shopping bag – also containing a wedding present sculpture – and swung it into the overhead bin, my water bottle rolling out and hitting me on the head. Then she disappeared for four hours and I finally flagged down a steward and asked for a beer. But my personal favorite moment was after the meal when Ms. Rough-n-Gruff lined up my retractable tray with the storage slot in the arm of my seat and let go, allowing it to violently crash into place. My startled chest-tightening reaction eventually eased, and once again, I was saved by a good nap in my low-reclining seat!

And then…ahhhhh. Home.

Love,

Sandy

PS I know complaining about a first-class flight has to be the epitome of spoiled. If the shoe fits…

Milan Dispatch

2011-11-02T13:50:00.001-07:00

On this year’s fall business trip to Europe, a weekend in Milan provided the crossroads between our vacation in Prague, Newton’s connections to Poland and then Greece for meetings, and my connection to Lisbon to visit old friends. Besides, it gave us yet another chance to relish some Italian meals!

Having given away to friends the book that we consider our sacred guide to Italy: Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler, but having received a response from that very Fred on one of my Italian blog dispatches featuring him, I was able to e-mail Fred ahead of time for a couple of dining recommendations in Milano. Our other priorities were to see the Piazza Duomo with the famous Milan Cathedral and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, and to do some serious shopping.

A lovely tram adventure led us to Nespresso capsules for our machine (these cost three times more in Brazil). We had to settle for a non-Fred restaurant for our first dinner, as L’Osteria del Treno near our hotel required reservations and was booked. But we were lucky to select a place filled with natives, delicious food and free prosecco.

We decided to climb the exhilarating – if slightly claustrophobic – tower to the roof of Milan Cathedral. The pay-off was the huge blue sky and panorama of the city through the lacey flying buttresses. Sandblasting had rendered that black multi-spired Gothic icon from my college art history days into a glimmering ivory wedding cake! We got the same glorious blue sky we had in Prague, though in Milan it does wax brown around the horizon. The temperatures were actually in the ‘80’s, despite it being autumn…flip-flops and tank top all the way!

Here is the Galleria, considered by some to be the oldest shopping mall. It is surrounded by palaces, including a neoclassical built by Napoleon. Even MacDonald’s looks pretty good here:

Here is a typical study of Newton, studying locations and info on his i-phone.

No one really needs a reason to go to IKEA, but there are no well-designed, low-priced housewares in Brazil. We caught a subway to an IKEA bus on the surreal, garbage-strewn outskirts of something (I thought Fellini would materialize) and now we own loads more housewares, including bona fide flatware, limoncello glasses, a cheese slicer, a 220 voltage lamp and a new huge rice paper lantern shade (the old one’s frame is rusted out – the fate of all metal by-the-sea in the Northeast).

We managed a reservation for dinner this time at L’Osteria del Treno. Though from the street it appears to be a simple osteria near the central train station, once you pass through the front room a certain elegance ensues, with warmly lit peach walls, cloth tablecloths and napkins. We took the occasion to order a bottle of our favorite Italian wine, Brunello di Montalcino from Tuscany. It cost several hundred dollars less than in Brazil! The menu mentions “Slow Food,” the movement in Italy symbolized with a snail, which counters fast food with the traditional preparations of each region. I had a delicious codfish casserole with wild fennel – fennel alone is worth a trip to Italy! The night before I had ordered “baccalà” at the other restaurant and assumed it was “bacalhau” – codfish in Portuguese, though the menu translated it as “fly fish” and it did not taste like codfish. At del Treno, the name for the codfish was “merluzzo,” which is the name of a different fish in Brazil, not the ever-popular bacalhau imported from Portugal. This time it was truly codfish. It’s confusing, but Fred Plotkin was kind enough to explain it all to me after I reported back to him: merluzzo would be fresh cod, baccalà would be salted cod (what we know in Brazil) and then there is stoccafisso (stockfish) which is dried cod without added salt that must go through days of soaking to revive. Newton and I shared a lovely chocolate mousse in a pie crust, then coffee and…once Newton was having a limoncello, the owner came over and offered the ‘superior’ Sicilian dessert wine, Zibibbo, whose lovely subtleties did render limoncello a bit crass (but we will always love it!!). At this point we closed the place, but I felt I should mention Fred to the owner since that front room has a table along the aisle displaying several guidebooks that mention del Treno. They all happen to be in Italian, but I thought Fred’s book in English should have the exposure, so I gave the owner Fred’s name and book title. He said they were checking the internet as we were leaving! Fred informed me that he generally eats ‘under cover’ in Italy to get the authentic take on eating establishments. Maybe a wig, Fred?

Newton had to fly off on business, so I moved into a single room in the hotel for one additional day in Milan. I had a morning of much needed girly-shopping along the huge Corso Buenos Aires for shoes, underwear and make-up. Can you believe that they only sell black eyeliner in Natal, as if everyone here has black hair?? Brazilians, not to mention Europeans, come in all shades. I’m talking about the inexpensive general store, the expensive cosmetics store and the exorbitant imported cosmetics store. I have mixed feelings about the Potiguars’ (citizens of the state of Rio Grande do Norte) lack of entrepreneurial acumen. They miss so many obvious chances to make money, but then again, they do not think that making the most profit possible is the key to life, as in the US…so there is a refreshing aspect. Still, one needs eyeliner.

I didn’t want to travel by metro alone at night in Milan, so decided to go to Fred’s suggestion, Piero e Pia, for Monday lunch. Two metro stations (great-looking in that contemporary Milano way) and a long trek through a wonderful university neighborhood got me there just ahead of lunchtime cut-off. Only one table of business men and me were eating in the outdoor sidewalk section. The owner brought me a simple-but-perfect salami on bread and a glass of great white house wine, then I had perfectly cooked bronzino filet (sea bass – always a favorite of ours in Italy) on a bed of veggies – zucchini, carrots, celery, etc. (I can’t get celery in the Northeast of Brazil, so I was thrilling to the delicate sweetness of it!). I was slightly surprised to find the zucchini as cooked as it was, but the veggies could not have tasted more delectable (you could taste them up the insides of your face – my benchmark), and Fred later explained this about the zucchini: “Italians cook their zucchini more than we do. Have you noticed that when it is softer it has more flavor?” When I expressed my frustration at having to select sorbet or gelato for dessert from a long list (it was down to the mandarino sorbet from Sicily or the pistachio gelato, also from Sicily), the owner offered a bowl of half and half. The pistachio won; that was the most exquisite pistachio ice cream EVER. Not green, covered in grated pistachios, and yes – I could taste it up the insides of my face!

The next morning I checked out of the hotel to catch the Malpensa Express train to the airport for my flight to Lisbon. We had taken this train on the way in - a very fast 45 minute ride, and Newton had explained that arriving at the airport one hour in advance of these short European flights was adequate. Some guy helped me buy my train ticket from a machine, wanting a euro in return (worth it), and I managed to schlep my bags and large rice paper lantern shade onto the train in time. What I had not anticipated was the 35-minute breakdown of the train en route.

Next chapter: after 34 years, Sandra AGAIN misses a flight to Lisbon to visit her old friends Julio and Gib.

Love,

Sandy

Prague Dispatch

2011-10-25T14:25:00.001-07:00

After years of glowing recommendations from anyone who had been to Prague, Newton and I forced ourselves to go somewhere not on the Mediterranean ahead of his annual fall business trip to Europe. I was jazz-starved and remembered from back in Nyack, NY days that one of the best performers during the summer garden jazz series at the Edward Hopper House across the street was a musician from Prague – a mecca for jazz in Central Europe, I then learned. And I had always been hopelessly jealous that the Czech Republic had a poet/playwright, Vaclav Havel, for its first president. The Czechs must be extraordinary people!

Amidst the elaborate arrangements to get me over and around Europe via award miles from the airlines and Newton over and around via an actual ticket, I ended up not sitting with Newton on the initial flight. The only award ticket available on the way over was in first class, from where I could have maneuvered a seat by Newton in coach, but didn’t…as we left on my birthday! Now before you get bubbly visions of champagne and caviar, let me remind you that this was a flight on TAP airlines of Portugal, sometimes called “Take Another Plane” in Natal. It is so easy to go directly to Lisbon from Natal rather than fly 3-1/2 hours south to São Paulo first, where there are many choices to Europe, that our ex-pat friends join us in grabbing the 6-1/2 hour TAP flight…and complaining later!

Instead of the usual champagne, only water or OJ were offered before take-off. Later, when I was offered champagne, it turns out one guy had requested it before take-off and the staff had left it out…so I got warm champagne, followed by the warm water they offer throughout the flight. The food was OK, better than coach - no doubt about it, but seemingly airline food. We were 6 passengers, 3 stewardesses and almost no service. The only bathroom available was the coach one beyond the galley behind first class. The big pay-off was the reclining seat. No argument there. A nice birthday nap! For the record, I went back to visit Newton several times!

OK; we arrived in Prague and took a taxi to the little pensione we booked online. But one must go ‘around the corner’ to the management office to get the key, so I stood by our bags while Newton went looking for the office. A guy was walking right towards me and I thought, ‘Wow, he looks just like the actor Adrien Brody.” When he got close enough I saw that it was none other than he. Of course, I clobbered him, saying, “That’s you! Do you live here?” “No, I’m just visiting.” Then I grab his arm and say, “You won’t believe what I JUST watched: “King of the Hill” (a wonderful 1993 Soderbergh film based on the Depression memoirs of A.E. Hotchner, in which the teenage Brody artfully plays a very sweet rascal…it had shown recently on Brazilian TV). Brody seemed impressed and friendly, so I, truthfully, went on to say I watched the film years ago with my kids and told them at the time, “Watch THAT guy; we’re going to be seeing more of him!” “The Pianist” and the Academy Award, in fact, followed. He admitted to me, “I’ve done well.” We talked a bit, he recommended the restaurant next to our pensione, asked my name and said to enjoy my stay. It was quite an unexpected welcome to Prague. “King of the Hill” is well worth seeing if you can find it, and also great for young adolescents, as it is the quintessential coming-of-age story.

After taking turns wandering around to find this management office, Newton and I finally got the key and got rid of our bags. Off to a late afternoon pilsner and snack next to the incredibly beautiful Vltava River. We were fortunate to be staying in the very center of the old city, walking distance to everything and particularly close to the hub of activity, the Charles Bridge.

Note the huge Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral in the background of the photo above. The weather was not at all the Central Europe fall weather we expected, but summery…more summery, in fact, than their own summer had been at almost 80 degrees! It is just plain lucky that I had thrown in my flip-flops at the last minute with actually only hotel room use in mind, along with one tank top and summer t-shirt, since I used these to hike through the city every day!

Prague was just exquisite in every way: sweet-smelling air (electric trolleys), a cloudless blue sky that remained blue at the horizon (not smog-brown); impeccably clean everywhere; full of very happy people, whom we joined walking across the bridge on a sunny, perfect evening. I will insert right now that the old center of Prague is a gift the Czech people have given the world, because it is almost strictly about tourists. As much as I mind this in most places, Prague offers its best to the tourists, not the bad food, not the inflated prices, not the predatory hawkers typical of a tourist trap. We could eat anywhere and have excellent food at affordable prices (they kept their own currency, korunas, so everything is reasonable). Obviously the local citizens frequent the museums, theaters and cafés in the old district, but the plethora of tourist shops are for you-know-who. The pristine architecture ranging from medieval to Art Deco enthusiastically distracted me from those shops, and it was a great joy just to walk for miles among the old neighborhoods and, of course, catch a boat along the river. The city is especially breathtaking at night.

The city forged ahead in the fourteenth century when Charles IV reigned (1346-1378). As King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, he transformed Prague into an imperial capital, building the Charles Bridge, St. Vitus cathedral inside the castle, and one of the oldest universities in Europe. An intellectual and cultural richness persisted into the 20^th century. Writers, artists and composers thriving here included Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mozart, Smetana and Dvorák. This richness went underground while Hitler and the Soviets had their way. As the Prague Spring in 1968 demonstrated, with pressure from the Writers’ Union (of which Vaclav Havel was a part), even the Czech Soviet secretary wanted democratic freedoms for his people. The tanks came and remained till the Velvet Revolution ended Communism in 1989. Hints of the Soviet era are hard to ascertain because the city’s old beauty and intelligence has prevailed. This surviving richness reminded me so much of reading Roger Cohen of the NY Times when he was in Tehran during the Green Revolution election protests (2010) and writing so movingly about the educated and worldly Iranian citizenry that are subjected to the brutal theocratic regime there. I know the day they manage to overthrow it, there will be a flowering already in place!

Here is the famous astronomical clock in Old Town Square. Charles IV also gets credit for this, though legend has it that after the astronomer/engineer had completed the clock, Charles IV either 1)had him blinded OR 2) burned his hands (we heard both versions)…so that no other monarch would be able to have such a clock. Apparently, the clock creator threw himself on the clock in revenge to throw it off, and it took 100 years to get the clock working again. Guess Charles IV had a bit of an ego.

We climbed to the top of the clock tower!

FROM THE CLOCK TOWER

We liked seeking out the grand old cafés of the city, having acquired a list from Maurizio, the Italian owner of our neighborhood Zen Bar in Cotovelo, who lived in Prague for six years. Here is the magnificent Kavarna Obecni Dum café in the Municipal House theater:

Here is the Café Louvre, dating from 1902, but closed down in 1948 by the Communists as a “bourgeois” institution. It reopened in 1992:

And this is the famous Café Slavia, which dates from 1881, but has been restored to its 1930’s Art Deco décor. It is across the street from the National Theater and has always been a meeting place of artists and intellectuals, including Vaclav Havel during his dissident years (between imprisonments):

My favorite was the Grand Café Orient in the wonderful Cubist Museum, also known as the House of the Black Madonna. The building was designed by Josef Gočár and demonstrates the role Prague played in the early Cubist movement. This café was closed for 80 years, not because of the Soviets, but because cubism fell out of fashion in the twenties. This was one of my favorite stops in Prague, as the structure and the decorative and fine arts within evoke the essence of Kafka’s era.

Speaking of the Soviets, how about the Lennon Wall (as in John)? This wall became a magnet of self-expression in the ‘80’s and, despite the Communists’ constant effort to paint over this outpouring, the wall was apparently filled again by the following mornings! It continues to attract people who can imagine a better world.

Prague Castle, while crowded with tourists, does have an ongoing governmental function as the seat of the Czech government and the site of many international summits. Besides the glittering example of high Gothic that is Saint Vitus Cathedral, there are numerous buildings and squares from many eras in this gigantic complex. Already a big fan of Vaclav Havel – both the first president of the newly democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989 and 4 years later of the separate Czech Republic, I was very moved to see the balcony from which he heralded the people’s victory after 40 years of Soviet rule. He remained president till 2003 and since, though now old and sick, has been a scholar, humanitarian, and playwright.

The views were lovely from the castle:

We also made it to the Reduta Jazz Club, where Clinton played his sax in the ‘90’s as Vaclav Havel’s guest (Havel was a big jazz and rock fan). We thought the musicians and the compositions were marvelous and truly appreciated an evening of sophisticated, even challenging jazz…at last! What’s better than Brazilian music?…but the Brazilians in the Northeast don’t quite have their jazz down pat.

I will end this lengthy travelogue the way we ended each and every day in Prague: at the Hemingway Bar in the ground floor of our pensione. Yes, the collection of photos of Hemingway in Cuba is extraordinary; yes, the intimate size, yet quiet-buzzingly populated interior with the warm, glowing lighting that bounces off the crystal and silver accoutrements are irresistibly inviting; but it was the Zen master bartenders that stole our hearts! The bar sign touts “fine mixology and luxury spirits,” but that is an understatement. We always sat in Milos’ section – just a sort of journeyman bartender at the moment, which explains why he did not participate in the mixology competition that took place while we were in town, of which his two co-workers took first and second place. But Milos is the kindest, most gracefully dexterous, knowledgeable and conscious bartender I’ve ever met. He recommended Prince Charles’ favorite gin for a martini, then over-filled the stainless steel shaker with ice so that the domed lid was also full, then he shook it and shook it…and shook it with utter concentration until there was actually frost forming on the outside of the shaker. THAT was a martini. He introduced Newton to Glenmorangie single-malt scotch and me to the delicious Czech herbal liquor called Becherovka, served on the rocks with a slice of fresh orange. For our last night, he voluntarily demonstrated the preparation of a cocktail of absinthe with the beautiful, vintage pieces that also set this place apart. Here is the ice water dispenser and the “see-saw” water dripper that were traditionally used back in the day when absinthe was the preference of bohemian artists. It was outlawed around 1915 in many countries, having been mistakenly touted as a dangerous spirit, but was reinstated in the 1990’s when the claims were proven false. The taste is of anise with the intricate dilution by water…I felt like Rimbaud or Van Gogh! This special something about Milos and his intelligence, diligence, agility and attention in this beautiful space seemed to explain something to me about this special city.

I recommend both our inexpensive pensione and the incomparable Hemingway Bar, in case you find yourselves in Prague!

Borsov Pension – Boršov 279/Prague 1 Hemingway Bar – Karoliny Svetlé 26/Prague 1

Love,

Sandy

Brazil Dispatch 34

2011-08-12T12:30:00.001-07:00

We are all tucked in under the mosquito net, it’s after midnight. We hear…a cowbell? Out to the balcony to investigate: oh. Six cows ambling along our road, unattended. Except three of them are on the inside of the coconut field fence, three outside, and there’s no access we know of to the inside of the field from that direction. They seemed puzzled themselves by this fence between them, but we figured they would all meet up at the highway, so returned to bed as the cowbell faded.

Other sounds that pierce the rhythmic white noise of the ocean here: a migrating bird that sounds like the tea kettle going off (I always head towards the tea kettle, confused); stray cats who have screeching 2:00am arguments over who rules our yard; the ingenious roving vehicles with speakers blasting all the daily specials at the grocery store (too blurry to understand); the distant security alarm of an anonymous house beyond the coconut field which goes off over and over for the duration, lasting a whole day and night; the loud, cackling laughter from our caretaker’s cottage, which is Eliselma – our twice-a-week maid – reacting to the dubious humor of Brazilian television all evening (I feel like Jane Eyre!); oh…and additional wonderful birdsongs - always passing through; the whisper of breeze; rain; the whoosh of strong winds. No lasting complaints, really!

The rainy season ended pretty abruptly mid-July and the windy season kicked in, though we have some perfect summery days with just mild breezes, occasional rain, some cool evenings, and days with all of the above! About now is the mid-point of winter, and we actually wore our warm PJ’s once when it got to around 67°, but by 3:00am it was hot and we had to give up on that idea. Our plants are green and healthy from the rainy months, and soon we will power wash all the dark, puddle-stained areas of our beautiful stones and paint the house trim, just like spring up north!

We took a three-day trip with friends to Serra do São Bento, a place in the interior of our state, Rio Grande do Norte. When we moved almost 5 years ago, we drove to Natal from Ceará along a forbidding highway landscape and had never seen any other part of our state since. I must now attest to its beauty. As we approached the São Bento area, we all had the same reaction to the other-worldly landscape of green rolling hills and the mounds of rock rising randomly out of them: alien.

Our lovely motel had the great view above, and very expensive bad food and service. It is a disquieting clash when these places try to be sophisticated, but rely on the innocents from the interior to pull that off…totally unfair to both the helpers and the customers. But I woke up to the amazing fragrance of fresh herva doce – licorice – wafting over our balcony from the myriad plants around, and I savored the view and aroma while doing my yoga.

The highlight of the trip was a side excursion to the national park called Pedra da Boca (Rock of the Mouth) on the border with the next state south (Paraíba):

A guide led us past the Pedra da Caveira (Skull Rock):

We passed so many types of plants, trees and wildflowers, my father’s little verse called ‘Hawaii’ kept coming to mind:

I’m glad it’s not my duty

To identify the beauty.

Everyone but Hian and me got rigged up in order to rope their way down a rock mound. I found a resting spot:

From left: Ana Paula (S. of Brazil), Jesseli, her daughter with Hian (Singapore-not pictured), Rob Hofman (Australia), Newton, Rob’s wife Samantha (London). Newt descending.

We saw old petroglyphs (no one knows their age):

By the time we headed back towards the parking lot it was absolutely sluicing rain. Unfortunately, I have no photos of our bedraggled group slogging along in the mud, stopping sopping wet under a kind woman’s porch overhang to wring out wraps and wait for Hian to arrive with the car…because our cameras would have been ruined!

A couple of local, very local haunts supplied us with very local fare for lunches (also mixed reviews, but no refinancing necessary). En route home we stopped for lunch at a former train station in Nisia Floresta, not far from Natal, where the beauty, good food, good service and prices were all in perfect balance! The colonial architecture is lovely (the train ran between Recife and Fortaleza until 20 years ago). To our surprise, they sell a guaraná (Brazilian fruit soft drink) named ‘Jesus’ here, no kidding:

In the meantime, we have been staying home more than usual, something that makes me supremely happy, as I am as enamored of my home as ever. Newton has finally taken up tennis again after five years, so is supremely happy, too, with his two lessons-plus-free play per week. I am on break from my Portuguese classes, so never need to know what day it is! The second semester will start at the federal university on September 12^th, which means I can further procrastinate cleaning out our walk-in closet, as I made the start of classes my deadline. I have also been laid low for a week with a stomach virus, missing my favorite foods and impersonating a slug and a lug. Surprisingly enough, the 12 exquisite oysters, martini and chocolate mousse at Hian’s restaurant the other night made me feel like myself again!

Our son Jake lost a bet and was required to play in the women’s Texas Hold’em tournament, one of the events around the annual World Series of Poker Tournament in Las Vegas…in drag. It was probably a good thing that he did not win!…(though by Nevada law, tournaments cannot be exclusive.)

He also played in the main event of the WSP for the fourth year, lasting till the third day. He just returned from Mexico, where online play is possible.

Elise is in heaven with too much professional work in LA. She is currently under contract with the Jonas Group, shooting and editing all sorts of fun things for their teen website, including an interview with the stupendously friendly and funny Dolly Parton! She also has some free-lance graphic design work. Elise felt like she had really arrived in LA when she stopped at a stoplight in her little convertible and Demi Lovato - a teen star she had accompanied as videographer on two South American tours – rolled down the darkened window of a limo in the next lane and called out, “Elise!”

I cannot imagine a luckier person than I, even with my petty complaints about the third world. Guess I would have a few of those if I were in the USA right now, anyway! What nonsense, our absurd Congress, and our being decimated by greed. Speaking of third world, I’m here if you need any tips in the coming months. With the dramatic fall of the dollar and some price increases here, our buying power has decreased by half since we arrived in 2006. Thank goodness room and board are still cheaper and life simpler here!

Love,

Sandy

Rio-Rio Dispatch

2011-07-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

On our way to the USA and home from the USA we stopped in Rio de Janeiro. En route was the second annual reunion of Newton’s high school buddies on beautiful, lush land just beyond Niteroi, Rio’s twin city across Guanabara Bay, where they all lived as teenagers. Amidst the fun and silliness of the four buddies and relatives, the incredible beauty of the forest reached out to me. I happened upon an entire horde of these transparent butterflies, though most went into hiding by the time Newton joined me with his camera.

We spent two nights in Niteroi with Natal friends Rossana and Cassio, previously of full-moon-boat-with-music on Natal’s big river, great hors d’oeuvres (Rossana) and percussion (Cassio) fame. They moved to Niteroi last November with their daughter Olivia. She goes to a truly happy Paulo Freire school, which I loved visiting. Cassio’s opportunities, as the consummate professional musician that he is, are greatly enhanced in Rio; we await Rossana’s inevitable restaurant there someday!

They live across the road from a mountain. Cassio led us up to catch lovely views of the area:

Newt captured more butterflies on film there:

And what is more beguiling than the beach in late afternoon? Rossana took us to Itaquatiara Beach, Newton’s favorite as a teenager:

Note the nifty maneuvering of this surfer

Dusk brought even more magic on Piratininga Beach:

On our return from the USA, we visited our friend Maria Candida in the Leblon neighborhood, at the end of Ipanema Beach. Maria Candida is THE native Carioca guide to Rio, as she loves being out and about there as much as any tourist! Friday night was spent at Trapiche de Gamboa, a marvelous old, gutted structure with a high, high ceiling and an actual ‘roda de samba,’ – a circle of musicians playing and singing traditional samba.

On Saturday we visited the street scene of the city’s center:

We spotted this guy who looks like the model for the villain in the captivating animated film, “Rio,” which we had just seen in LA. Newton tried to get a closer shot of him, but was beginning to seem suspiciously stalkeresque and had to settle for this:

We joined a large lunch crowd in the elevated neighborhood of Santa Teresa (where this cable car travels from downtown:)

We ate at the charming seafood restaurant we picked out of several choices that curved up a hill. Here Maria Candida joined in with the local talent while we waited for a table.

We went to a beautiful old structure that has a gallery, live jazz, and spectacular views of the city from its significant height.

On Saturday night we finally made it to the neighborhood called Lapa, where nightlife reigns (last visit, both Maria Candida and I got sick and we all stayed in). Being jazz-starved, I was particularly happy to end up in a really good jazz venue. The old aqueduct was right outside the club:

The ebullience and youthful energy of the Lapa scene engulfed us:

I guess I’ll always be in love with Rio, the place where I fell in love with Brazil 30 years ago! Maria Candida was part of that. Let’s hope the city is able to prepare for the soccer World Cup in 2014 (along with other Brazilian cities) and the summer Olympics in 2016. It has lots to repair, build and solve in that short time, though its dramatic physical beauty, urbane energy and samba beat are a siren song…which made great bookends for our California visit with Elise and Jake.

Love,

Sandy

LA Dispatch

2011-07-20T07:51:00.001-07:00

Newton and I were very excited to get to Los Angeles and see Elise and Jake, as well as Elise’s new home there. Having lived 29 years in New York, we found plenty of contrasts in LA, the most striking of which was the big, sunny, airy sky and the big, sunny, airy apartment! Because I had barely seen a glimpse of LA since riding on an upside-down bucket between my parents in the front seat of our old Pontiac in ’53, I felt every bit the tourist. As luck would have it, Elise was missing a roommate until our last night (her friend in NY who holds the lease was frantically trying to solve this), so our family stayed in Elise’s apartment together and felt like LA residents, as well.

Jake had already arrived from Las Vegas, so we filled Elise’s parking allotment:

First things first: Trader Joes. ‘Nuff said. EXCEPT, it turns out I DO have to say more…because…I can: have you ever had their chocolate-covered pomegranate seeds?...or their dark chocolate peanut butter cups? Goat cheese with pesto and red pepper spread? There’s so much more to say, but I’ll move on.

We headed for Hollywood Boulevard and, at last, I saw Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the sidewalks filled with inlaid stars of famous stars. Looking down constantly does not lend itself well to maneuvering on crowded sidewalks, but I did thrill to the film and television memories passing before my eyes. Even though you can’t tell it, we are in front of the Hollywood sign here.

Next on our priority list was to get started on the Mexican food! There are many choices near Elise, so sometimes we simply chose the restaurant with the $1 taco special that day. Once we discovered the Tex Mex place with barbeque rib tacos, we never cared what day it was again. Here’s the four-straw margarita special:

A hike in Runyon Canyon (named for the writer, Damon Runyon), entered just off Mulholland Drive (of David Lynch fame), was the ideal way to experience that big blue sky, views of nature, beautiful homes and the LA skyline, and to begin to appreciate the extent to which perfect-looking people show up around LA. In this case, they had perfect-looking dogs with them. Elise and I especially liked watching Jake and Newton run backwards up part of the return trail, oblivious to the stares from Central Casting. A skywriter was making the most of that huge blue palette:

A day at Venice Beach confirmed that New York is utterly sane compared to LA. They were selling bikini tops made of coconuts, sea shells, and athletic cups! Here is where we handily got both Botox and marijuana:

An incredible athlete wowed the crowd with this feat:

Venice Beach

Elise has been back several times since that day; it is her funky kind of place!

I was pretty cold, especially at night, having believed that the 91° weather Elise mentioned the month prior upon arriving there would still be in effect. I took almost nothing warm, so was delighted to notice a large Goodwill store right around the corner from the apartment. Not only did they have beautiful long-sleeve shirts, sweaters and blazers at Goodwill prices, but everything was in perfect condition and the store was very well-run. I returned for shoes, dresses, belts, and a great ‘50’s table for Elise. Now the rest of my LA shopping experience consisted of an entire afternoon going through the endless, stuffed racks of the Men’s Department at Macy’s to replenish Newton’s wardrobe after some years…and a couple of hours with Jake – the one with the money – at Nordstrom’s at the chic Grove for two pairs of jeans and some shirts for many times the dollars. Just sayin’.

The four of us had time together at Elise’s for Bananagrams, Chinese Checkers, Hearts, shenanigans, even all-night conversation. We had seen the wonderful animated film, “Rio,” at Grauman’s, then just had to watch “Toy Story 3” on Elise’s flat screen, noting that some of the current animated films are far better than the usual fare. We also had a lovely Italian Father’s Day dinner in Santa Monica, temporarily breaking the Mexican streak.

A constant parade of terrific-looking, friendly young women came through the apartment to consider renting the second bedroom. “Awesome” seems to be the most oft-used word at the moment! Most of them would have been decent roommates, but the final decision was Maritza, a lovely UCLA film graduate who works at the Armand Hammer Museum.

And speaking of friendly, I enjoyed joking with the kids that Southern California was partly settled by Okies who arrived during the Dust Bowl. This also explained the way people went out of their way to cross streets only at the crosswalks and only with the ‘walk’ signal (regardless of no traffic), and the early dining, with restaurants closing at 9:00pm.

We had the surreal experience of meeting up with our part-time Cotovelo Beach/Pium neighbors, Cleveland, of San Diego (left), and Larry, of LA (right), in Santa Monica. Larry has already come back to Brazil; Cleveland, who generously treated all of us to cocktails and dinner, is expected back in October. Both hope to find a way to stay as permanent residents.

My niece, April, had us over for grilled salmon at her home in Woodland Hills, though the real treat at her place is her whole unbelievably adorable family. Ryan is 7, a natural athlete, sweet, smart; did I say handsome? Here is Marty creating his grill magic:

Addie is 5-1/2, personable in a completely disarming way, and quite fond of Jake! We took them a favorite book from Elise and Jake’s childhood, Hailstones and Halibut Bones, a fabulous book about colors, which Addie ended up reading expertly to us!

After our 11 days together in LA, Jake returned to Las Vegas (with the queen-size blow-up mattress) and Newton headed to a trade show in San Diego. Elise and I joined him the next evening, blowing in from LA with the top down. Downtown San Diego is really well-planned, and despite some parking challenges, we loved walking around there. Both evenings had fancy trade show parties, one on the top floor terrace of a skyscraper, overlooking Petco Park while a Padres game was in session.

The next day Elise and I visited the famous San Diego zoo. It is really something special, even with many of the animals out of sight in their little caves or bushes. Watching the panda chewing on his bamboo was a highlight.

Our last night was back in LA, Newton now on the sofa and me in Elise’s room while Maritza got settled in the second bedroom. Elise was busy with all sorts of jobs she had dug up, many utilizing her professional graphic design and videography skills. She has recently been a regular at the Jonas Group offices, both shooting and editing video footage of the artists they manage, and this makes her very happy!

Time to get back to the rainy season in Natal.

Love,

Sandy

BRAZIL DISPATCH 33

2011-07-05T10:30:00.001-07:00

Our ‘autumn’ in Natal ushered in the rainy season, which does not mean incessant rain for months, but unpredictable rain at any time. The world gets truly green, as well as our clothes and shoes in the closets. One challenge of the season is to keep in mind exactly what has been set out to receive bright, intermittent sun so one can race to retrieve it when the sudden showers arrive. I find myself often half-awakened in the night by an onslaught, foggily wondering if Newton’s loafers are still on the ledge outside…or not? Laundry presents its own set of problems with no dryer…let’s just say we went to bed with clean, damp sheets. The occasional days with completely bright sun and blue skies are typified by everyone being quite happy – the way New Yorkers get on the early, odd spring day.

The event of the season was a four-celebrant birthday party – one of them being Newton – with our ex-pat friends. The host, John, a Brit from Madeira, went all out with tents (just in case), a two-man bar, an espitinho man (little kabobs), a man on grilled steak duty and a DJ. We contributed a keg of draft beer and more food. It was a night to remember!

Here is our friend Ali (Turkey), whom I met in my Portuguese class, and his wife, Priscilla (from the south of Brazil). He is a researcher and she a professor, both in ecology at the federal university here…they are FUN!:

Our friend Lauren (Brooklyn, NY), is in Natal on a Fulbright grant and is also in my Portuguese class:

Here are birthday girl Bella (British), friends Michelle (Montreal), Luciana (Natal) and Darius (Persian British):

Luciana had recently been in London at the same time as Darius. They went to a wild night spot complete with a snake handler. Luciana held the snake while someone snapped the camera, but as she looked away, the python BIT her in the eye and cheek with its fangs. She had to have two surgeries and almost lost the eye. Here she is nearly completely recovered with barely any evidence – hats off to the British surgeon!

Unfortunately, a week ahead of the party I had slipped in the shower and hit the right back of my ribs on the low barrier enclosing the shower. While I bruised the ribs (at least), the worst pain came from muscle spasms that shot down the right side of my back. By the time of Newton’s party, I could dance, and loved cutting the rug – especially old rock-n-rollin’ – with Newton. I believe my spasm-shortened right side is what caused us to NOT connect hands on a particularly risky swing to “Wake Up, Little Susie” (after all those years of NOT landing in the middle of the band on these moves). Alas, I fell backwards, trying to catch myself with my already challenged, congenitally weak wrists. It was a short fall, me being close to the ground height-wise, but my wrists hurt afterwards. Though I applied ice from the bar till we went home at 4:00am, I awoke to a very swollen and blue left wrist on Sunday morning. Off we went to get X-rays, planning to check out the back ribs while we were at it. After five hours at our so-called ‘better’ private insurance hospital, it turns out I didn’t break anything! Our friend Ali felt compelled to theorize, being a scientist, and concluded that rock-n-roll is more dangerous than osteoporosis! I sadly had to adapt two of my five Tibetan yoga poses that were already challenging to the wrists, but have steadily regained most of the practical use one needs moment to moment. I just HATE injuries.

I presented Newton with one of those amazing Nespresso machines for his birthday, which some friends brought back from London for me, along with 50 capsules of various types of espresso. I would say this is the closest to a science that something as arbitrary as making a great cup of espresso can get, and Newton is a huge espresso devoté. The machine from London and the capsules cost exactly one third of the price in São Paulo, where Brazilian import duties are prohibitive. We are loving the espresso.

Newton and I went to a new place that opened up just across the street from our beloved Buraco da Catita, called Consulado Bar. This very interesting old building was literally the Italian consulate during World War II, when there was an American/Allied base right here in Natal. The owner of the building has an extensive collection of WWII memorabilia, including fantastic old posters hanging in the restaurant from the US (‘Loose lips sink ships’), Britain, and Russia. There is an old photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Natal, as well as aerial photos of the base. The big surprise comes with the floor tiles in a foyer:

Those damn Fascists.

Here are some of my friends who gathered one evening at our neighborhood Zen Bar to send Mary, an American from the next beach town, off to her second extended stay in India. From left to right are Glades, of Nigerian fishermen fame – she’s the one who helped them for months – and she has since moved to Florianopolis in the south of Brazil, being from the south herself; Neuma, a native Potiguar who owns Zen Bar along with her Sardinian husband; me; Mary; Julie, a Brit who teaches English here; and Jennifer, an American who is in graduate school in linguistics here. It is highly unusual to have three Americans in one space in Natal!

My Portuguese for Foreigners class, free at the federal university on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, has been quite difficult this semester. While it is common for Brazilians to use the proper words without knowing why…without learning the rules exactly, Newton has been particularly surprised to see all the rather formal items that we have been taught. I’d like to speak better and understand better, pure and simple, but it helps to know the names of things in order to learn them, so the route, particularly to grammar, is a circuitous one. The verbs, which are famous for being difficult, are nearly impossible for one whose short-term memory fails her regularly! I have to re-learn the irregular verbs over and over, pining for the good memory of my youth.

Here are the conjugations of VER (to see) and VIR (to come), for example:

I see/you, he, she sees I saw/you, he, she saw Note: three words:

we see/you, they see we saw/you, they saw see, sees, saw

vejo/vê vi/viu

vemos/vêem vimos/viram Note: eight words

Now for VIR:

venho/vem vim/veio

vimos/vêm viemos/vieram Note: seven more words

I came and I saw, but I did not conquer. Note how ‘we saw’ (past) and ‘we come’ (present) are the same? This is just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t even think about the imperfect, past perfect, the subjunctive present and past, the future, future conditional, past participle, etc. One needs to memorize and remember.

The course sometimes adds an additional afternoon with a Brazilian movie with Portuguese subtitles to help us. I find the spoken and written words often going by in a blur. I need more conversations, more immersion…which means it would be helpful if our caretaker and his wife – the people I speak to every day - spoke proper Portuguese, which they don’t (I finally learned that when she says “bichinho” – ‘little animal,’ she means ‘thing”); or if Newton spoke Portuguese with me, which he never has (not that his is exactly correct after 29 years abroad); or if I watched more Brazilian TV, which I dislike; or if I were more ambitious, which I’m not; or if I had not forsworn the entire notion of ‘should’ when I moved here, which I did, after a lifetime of ‘should.’ In the meantime, my Portuguese is improving, and I wouldn’t trade my English-speaking friends for the world, one of whom is Marcelo, the director of the program at the university, who also loves to speak English!

Newton walked around the block by the beach here and picked these colorful flowers for my Mother’s Day bouquet, arranged them like an expert, then made breakfast with the - are you ready?... American style bacon we had just discovered at a store here. It was a beautiful breakfast, and I am extremely lucky.

Elise spent the spring in New York preparing for her move to Los Angeles by cleaning out, selling, donating, packing, shipping, good-bye partying and catching a plane. She already had an apartment waiting because a friend of hers in NYC holds the lease. She pulled all of it off with some help from her friends, bought a used Bug convertible, and was awaiting our upcoming visit.

Jake was on a trip to Europe when the US Justice Department decided to close down the three biggest online gambling sites. Even though he was in Madrid at the time, his accounts were now frozen American accounts, so were inoperable there, as well as subsequently in Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam. The Justice Department was ostensibly going after the off-shore companies for finding ways to get money into and out of the sites in the USA, which had previously been prohibited, but it seems the real reasons behind this infringement of freedoms has to do with the formidable domestic gambling interests who wish to overtake on-line gaming. Until it is reinstated by way of the powers that be, it helps that Jake has a European Union passport (Italian via Newton’s great-grandfather), which now allows him to play Texas Hold-em poker from foreign shores.

As the rains increased in Natal, Newton and I took off for the USA, west coast only this time.

Love,

Sandy

Brazil Dispatch 32: Summer & Carnaval

2011-03-24T07:33:00.001-07:00

The advantage in/advantage out of the condominium development project across the road continued to define our days after we returned from the USA. Quite elaborate weekends were set up for people inquiring about the future condos, including live music all day in an outdoor bar with hors d‘oeuvres, cold draught beer and caipifrutas, as well as massages, a children’s entertainment center, and a live concert in the evening on the lovely bamboo stage they built by the water. To our horror, they needed a second generator to sustain these activities and placed it precisely in the path of the wind off the ocean that blows into our windows and transoms. We woke up around 9:00 that Saturday morning to the perfect sound system delivering the live guitar and bossa nova singer from the bar. By 9:12 we had headaches and nausea from the generator fumes pouring through our windows.

We had an invitation from a realtor, so after returning from the beach, we went over to see the two elaborately furnished models and spend the afternoon and evening being served and entertained. It was really lovely. They spared no expense for the best musicians, elegant setting, food, drinks and service.

The following weekend we went to beaches and points south, knowing we’d be sick if we ate at home with that generator spewing away. We watched dolphins playing in the ocean from a little spot atop the falesias – cliffs of sand – while eating shrimp. Realizing that we could not stay away from our house the entire weekend to avoid the generator, we walked over to the development, asked for our nice realtor and explained to him that we had to hang out there to avoid being ill. That was another evening of entertainment and service. To our tremendous relief, the low turnout never justified such expenditures, so by the third weekend, the 2^nd generator did not materialize. We had an invitation to watch a soccer match televised at the bar, so returned for the afternoon with our friend Cleveland from San Diego, who lives part of the year in Pium. The caipifrutas (like caipirinhas, but usually made with vodka rather than cachaça and with fruits other than lime) were just beautiful. Here is one made with kiwi:

After this, only live bossa nova and draught beer were offered on the weekend. We woke up for the fourth Saturday in a row to yet another duo on guitar and vocals, realizing that all duos had the exact same repertoire of the most popular songs we had always loved…and were now beginning to find torturous. These people sang for HOURS both Saturdays and Sundays; we were contemplating violence. Latest report: this weekend there was silence. The turn-out just wasn’t happening, so they dispensed with all measures. Silence.

Here is what the coconut field used to look like (that’s our house on the left, second-from-the-beach); and here is a rendering of the condominium plan from the ocean side, which clobbers the field from side-to-side, as you can see:

Interspersed with the daily drama of the development, summer also brought neighbors and their parties to the beach houses on the other three sides of us. Loud, bad music is usually the norm, with a blinding spotlight some nights through our bedroom window that precludes TV or reading in bed. The bass speaker from one neighbor was so out-of-balance that we were quaking to the thump in our office, despite having shut every window that direction. The music and voices usually persisted till the wee hours during January; February continues the festivities only on weekends, though there were occasional silences that we duly praised!

Our beach is always very animated through the summer, an up-side to the neighborhood coming alive. We particularly enjoy watching dogs and children negotiate the surf with even doses of exhilaration and hesitancy. Newton took some intermittent kite surfing lessons; we broke in a new maid – Marcos’ new tiny 26-year-old wife, who is perky and energetic, if not able to retain any information! We like her and her cooking and cleaning, so the two days a week of illogical foibles are not making me crazy. We hung out at favorite restaurants and music venues with our local American friends, Cleveland and Larry from Los Angeles, also a serial resident of Pium. Our friend Maurizio from Sardinia who owns the lovely local Zen Bar had a wonderful birthday celebration with lots of jamming musicians. Here are Maurizio and Cleveland, and Larry and I cutting the rug à la American Bandstand:

Carnaval festivities started the weekend prior to Carnaval at many bars that would be closed during actual Carnaval. I found the hot night, the airless interior and the pulsing, dancing crowd inside one of our favorite places, Buraca da Catita, just too much for me. By the third time a stranger had came up and draped a sweat-soaked body over me and tried to pull me into the dense crowd to dance, I just lost it and started screaming. This last one said she understood completely and covered my hands in slobbery kisses. Newton stayed on inside, loving the great live “frevo” and marchés do Carnaval , and I survived my Americana curse by stepping outside and maintaining a couple of feet of air around me, while also loving the music from the great 9-piece band. I’ll chalk my coping challenge up to claustrophobia that is particularly sensitive to a lack of air and obviously, a plethora of body fluids.

Directly ahead of actual Carnaval, we went to a new Blues club and to a dinner party the following night, so this would add up to seven nights out in a row…I’m just saying. I made Newton the “Carnaval Chairman,” as he is the one who knows what feels like real Carnaval to him. Besides hanging out at the beach everyday and cooking very little, our Carnaval evenings looked like this:

-Friday: We went downtown in Natal to a beautiful wrought-iron-fenced courtyard surrounded by three colonial buildings that are dedicated to the arts. One of our favorite singers, Crystal, was performing Carnaval music onstage with a band, and the crowd, while enthusiastic about celebrating, was just the right size to allow for dancing space and air. A strolling brass band followed with Marchés do Carnanval, and a teenage girl with a tiny umbrella (a classic Carnaval prop) was added to my list of favorite dancers. She moved like a feather and was a vision of rhythm, loop-de-loops and frevo footwork.

- Saturday: We started with feijoada, the national dish of Brazil, accompanied by a samba band at our Singaporean friend Hian’s new botequim near Ponta Negra beach. Both Cleveland and Larry came along. Here we are with our friend Ana Paula, Hian’s Brazilian wife:

We ventured on to Gringo’s bar where many of our friends had gathered to watch the live music & giant puppet parade in that neighborhood. This was also a homecoming for our friend Tom who had been pirate-hunting in the Indian Ocean.

-Sunday: There was a chance that we would have stayed in this night if it weren’t for a power black-out in our neighborhood. We headed to the bowels of the city for the transvestite competition. Though the crowd was the poorer inner-city population - which means we stood out rather conspicuously - the Potiguars are gentle folk and we never felt that anyone was targeting our pockets. The ridiculously funny competition ended early and we returned home to lights and power.

- Monday: This was Men-in-Drag Day in Pirangi, the next beach town south. I was the only female in a wig; I had just bought it at the beach.

This was definitely the best people-watching imaginable, with 90% of the males in drag…some of them outrageous, some of them extremely pretty, some just funny. All the guys enjoyed being in make-up and bikini tops and dresses, flirting shamelessly with any man who did not come dressed for the occasion (Newton), some dancing up a storm in high heels…hilarious!

The music was on top of large trucks doing their best to pass through the crowds in the street. While this was already beyond loud, parked cars with gigantic speakers in their open trunks were often situated near each other playing competing ear-splitting music. Little crowds danced around the car of choice. The deafening din became overwhelming. Don’t miss the spectator wearing the wedding veil in the background of the photo to the right:

We escaped after some hours to a serene Italian restaurant, wig removed, for wine & pizza on a quiet balcony. We were surrounded by very tall palm trees and NO MUSIC!

- Tuesday: Our last night of Carnaval was spent in Ribeira (downtown by the port) on a closed-off street with a huge stage at each end. Real Carnaval music was playing on one end with our friend Gilberto on trombone and lots of dancing, beer venders, and the university crowd we often see in that neighborhood. This gave way to horrid heavy metal rock at the opposite end (NOT very Carnaval-like), during which we took a walk on deserted streets; next was a rockabilly group from Rio – very fun.

On the way home we stopped at Pastel Paulista (meaning from São Paulo) – Newton’s favorite place for his favorite Brazilian snack – meat or cheese, etc. inside a fried thin pastry. This ‘establishment’ is a van that pulls up in front of the Bridgestone Tire store every evening, converts into a kitchen, puts out plastic tables & chairs in the small parking area in front of the store, and stays open till 3:00am, nourishing late revelers every week, not just during Carnaval.

We went home to bed, though the music from the town plaza in Pirangi thumped across the beach and into our bedroom till 4:00am.

The following week would have shifted into the start of my Portuguese for Foreigners classes at the university, but shifted instead into my first illness since moving to Brazil more than four years ago. It was basically just a cold, but I thought a truck had hit me. I just rested and let my immune system have its workout.

I’ll interject here a catch-up on some of my favorite recent reading:

·The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies of the SETI Institute (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is a remarkably satisfying, thin volume of surmises, imaginings, observations, projections, theories and hard facts from a real scientist who dreams of SETI finding success, but cannot attest to any success yet. There is a real elegance to this scientific search and to this man’s explanation of it.

·Angle of Repose by William Stegner was on a list of the 100 best novels of the 20^th century. Even though it was written in 1970, it is timeless – an historical account of the 19^th century settling of the West, based on the diaries of an actual New York illustrator who married a mine engineer and roughed it out West for the rest of her life. I was actually in Colorado for part of this read, so had the appropriate backdrop.

·Just Kids by Patti Smith. I don’t know how to adequately describe this elegy to Patti Smith’s soul mate, Robert Mapplethorpe, and to their era. This book is so poetic, so moving, so riveting in its depiction of artists’ sensibilities, such a portrait of ‘70’s bohemian life at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC with the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Dylan, etc., that when I finished it and stopped weeping, I couldn’t open a new book for a week…so enveloped was I in the little spell it cast.

·Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann was recommended by my Nyack friend, Lucia, in time to buy it live before returning from the USA. It is an astounding, haunting modern novel inspired by two World Trade Center events.

·Blow-up and Other Stories by the Argentine, Julio Cortázar, in excellent translation, gets me back to the short story form, a favorite of mine. This was recommended by my friend Marie Arana, the Peruvian/American author, whose novel, Lima Nights, I also loved. Cortázar was a genius and a master of the magical realism for which Latin American writing is known. He spent his adult life in Paris, so many stories take place there. The ‘70’s film ‘Blow-up” was inspired by the short story. I’m partial to the story where the apartment guest continues to vomit a bunny between two floors on the elevator up. He is writing a letter to the absent apartment owner, describing his attempts to hide the bunnies from the housekeeper and documenting the increasing signs of damage from the now twelve bunnies…as funny as absurd gets! Better still are simply Cortázar’s words…his amazing use of language.

By the end of the week I was feeling well. The week had been an unusual one without much wind, so while Newton had no chance of taking up his kite-surfing lessons again, the sky was clear and the colors extremely vibrant. The waves came in at an odd diagonal, and I noticed the hummingbird and the yellow butterfly were happy to chase each other around the hibiscus blossoms – a new one. The exaggerated beauty culminated in the ‘Super Moon’ party organized by our friends on the small beach beyond the falesias at the end of our beach. We hiked down from the highway under a strange blue vortex defined by the lighting and the clouds. The moon rose around 5:30pm. We were perched on a rise near some rocks, but as the evening pulled the high tide back out, we could not resist running down to the flat expanse of sand and dancing and spinning in the other-worldly moonlight. It was a heavenly event, with all present sharing a sort of giddy happiness and sense of well-being, induced as much by the children’s sense of freedom to run around and write their names in giant letters in the sand as by the dramatically lit, black and white seascape in front of us.

Love,

Sandy

Winter in the USA Dispatch

2011-02-25T10:43:00.001-08:00

Our late January stay in New York City was a whirlwind of rendezvous’ amidst a whirlwind of snow!

We especially appreciated “our” neighborhood at 98^th and Amsterdam where Elise lives, with its quiet streets, church bells, and restaurants of every imaginable stripe. Now that Elise will be moving to Los Angeles at the end of April, we know our visits to Manhattan will be curtailed, though not terminated!

Elise and I arrived with sushi at the apartment of our longtime friend, Carolyn McMonegal, and her cat, Kayli. Carolyn was staying in with health troubles, but rallied plenty and entertained us royally. Kayli is the picture of health. You can see here that Carolyn’s beauty has not suffered at all.

That night Elise, Newton and I met up with longtime friends Joe & Guadalupe Warren and Nancy Taylor at the Broadway notables’ hangout, Joe Allen’s on West 48^th. I was ready for a perfect martini, since any version is hard to come by in Natal…and I was NOT disappointed! The food was excellent, as well. Joe and Guadalupe have just sold their beautiful Manhattan apartment and will forthwith be residents of Cleveland, Ohio and Buenos Aires only. World traveler Nancy had just returned from Europe, but her year included Syria, which she loved, and Iran…not so much.

After a day of delivering Oklahoma mementos of my Mother’s to our storage unit upstate, Newton, Elise and I joined Newton’s old cohorts from his first job for dinner in New Jersey. It looks like there are no longer any guys holding-out for marriage and children, so we love catching up with the growing families.

We actually had a lazy Saturday with lazy snowflakes out the kitchen window, Netflix, and order-in pizza. That was topped off with a meet-half-way dinner in Morristown, New Jersey with my sister Donna and her husband Larry (coming from Lawrenceville, NJ), and niece Sara and her husband Rob (coming from Freehold, NJ). It is impossible not to love any event with Donna!

Sunday morning sent Elise and me to a happening place in the Village for brunch with some long-lost cousins – actually the three children of my Oklahoma City cousin Tad McCracken, only one of whom I had met years ago. They are all lawyers in Manhattan! I found out for the first time that Tad is not really my cousin’s name; he is named Donald after my uncle, whose nickname in the army had been ‘frog’ because of his deep voice. Tad is short for Tadpole.

While we were up - or down, rather, Elise and I spent the cold afternoon shopping (mostly window shopping) in Soho. It had been a while. We bought some sale T-shirts at the kitschy Japanese store, Kid Robot.

Newton was off to Japan on Monday, but drove me up to West Nyack for my day at Blue Rock School before returning the rental car at Newark. I savored every minute with my great staff and student friends. My lunch duty was with the 6^th, 7th & 8^th grade class – the children I had known since preschool! I told them about my travel peaks and valleys during lunch (see previous dispatch). My dear friend Lucia drove me all the way back to Manhattan after after-school coffee with Caty, the school director, and a great Indian dinner.

Newton took this great photo of Mount Fuji from the bullet train:

Las Vegas was my next stop. It was brief but fun, with Jake and I going out, shopping, and hanging the framed posters we had given him for his birthday. I made my Mother’s obligatory macaroni and cheese recipe for the dear boy! Unfortunately, Jake now has a trivia game that relies on strategy (his strong point, my weak point) as well as knowledge (both reasonably strong on this), so I was not able to prevail every game. And this is my only chance to beat him at anything, though we haven’t tried Chinese checkers (in storage) in years.

I connected through the Phoenix airport to arrive in Durango, Colorado. Just want to say that the Phoenix airport is one of the nicest I’ve seen, with several wonderful installations of “The Museum at Phoenix Airport,” not to mention airport shops with exquisite southwestern offerings. I tried to see my niece Amanda, who works for Southwest airlines there, but it was her day off. I was visiting my nephew Brad and his family in Durango, home also of my sister Dorothy and brother-in-law Bill, though they now spend winters in Scottsdale. Brad and his wife Tracy have a new “green” house on a hill with huge picture windows on the town in the valley, the surrounding mountains and the snow-capped peaks beyond them. It is such a beautiful place. The temperature was mild for winter, with snow on the ground, sun in the sky and not a cloud in sight. Brad took me on an extensive tour of Tarpley RV, the business Bill owns and Brad runs. I got to ride in the old VW convertible (top down!) that the shop there had transformed into an electric car. I viewed several recreational vehicles (trailers) of varying sizes, and studied the solar panel display that Brad offers for RV electric power. Brad has such dependable employees that his own time is greatly freed-up for percussion practice, percussion gigs in rock-n-roll, jazz, country, and the timpani with an orchestra, plus time dedicated to coaching and chauffeuring his two sons to their extensive wresting and ice-hockey commitments in the surrounding states. Tracy and Brad have four extraordinary children – two older daughters who live elsewhere now: Emily, on a two-year trek with her boyfriend to Mexico, Central and South America (we’ll be seeing them in Natal eventually), and Mary, a professional dancer in Chicago. Because Emily – the first great-grandchild in the family – was born just three months after Jake – the youngest grandchild in the family – Brad and I bridged a generation by raising our children concurrently! Nick, 15 and Bradley, 13, are the two handsome, consummate athletes. I was wowed by both of them at their respective ice hockey games. Luckily, no one’s teeth were knocked out or anything on my watch! Tracy and I had loads of gabbing time and we saw the harrowing film, “Black Swan,” together while Brad did sports duty. The three of us had some rounds of Bananagram crossword after an elegant dinner at the famous Victorian Strater Hotel in town. I was happy to just be around and see Brad’s family in action, as our paths cross so infrequently.

My next stop was Tulsa, Oklahoma, my hometown. I put Tulsa on the itinerary because I had had so little time to talk with cousins at Mother’s funeral in November. I stayed with longtime friends Vivian and Mike Nemec, who live in the house where Vivian grew up down the street from me. I continue to look away when passing our old house, now remodeled, as I cannot bear to remember it any other way than as it was when I had the happiest childhood imaginable! On the first day in town I managed to go out to breakfast with Vivian and high school friend, Jan Rogers Magee, shop and run errands and then get out to the edge of town to see my father’s cousin, Mary Alice and her daughter, Mary Kay, from my grandmother’s “Little” side of the family. We had a great time and I got loads of information for the extensive family tree that Newton is growing online. I made it back to Vivian’s just before the snowstorm of the century struck: 15” of snow and cold temperatures and very little city plowing. They are not used to this quantity of snow there, so their 38 snow-plow trucks did very little effective clearing in the subsequent three days. This meant that the dinner planned with our junior high friends the next evening was impossible and that the Oklahoma City cousins’ dinner I had planned for the next evening – usually a two hours’ drive on a turnpike – was even more impossible, as the turnpike was still closed. Vivian and Mike were the ideal hosts for this refugee, as our snowed-in hours flew by with the endless conversation I absolutely adore with these marvelous two. We three shoveled my rental car out in front from its snow-trap.

Newton had returned from Japan in the meantime for the annual company ski weekend at Lake Tahoe and trade show in San Francisco. We each discovered around midnight the last night that both of our flights to Houston had been cancelled, as 2” of unheard of snow was expected there. We spent half of the night resolving this via Skype phone and, sure enough, I was able to pull away in my car in the 10° below zero morning – sans gloves, which I lost in New York, and creep my way to the airport to catch my flight. LUCKILY, I met Newton at the Houston airport (ahead of the snow onslaught) without incident! Our flight to São Paulo wasn’t until 10:30pm, but our reunion day was lovely, between the Continental President’s Club and an outstanding wine bar/restaurant in the airport. Even though I was back in coach, I got to fly all night in those tiny seats draped over Newton!

Disembarking in São Paulo was the usual trek ‘through pork soup,’ as I always describe the heavy humidity and heat that hit one in the jet way when arriving from winter. The next six days were spent with Newton’s parents, Alfredo and Jannice, sister Lilian, and nieces and nephew, Mariana, Mayra and Michel – going to dance and music performances, eating in and out, running errands and sweltering in the heat.

Newton had schlepped his scanner every mile of the trip so he could dig out the old photo albums in São Paulo and scan photos of his relatives. These included pre-digital photos of Elise & Jake, as well! What great fun. Many of the ancestors’ photos will appear in the family tree project.

Our last flight took us home to Natal. AHHhhhhhhhhhh.

Love,

Sandy

Travel Peaks and Valleys Dispatch

2011-02-21T11:24:00.001-08:00

Usually when Newton and I travel, he is on business and my ticket is free via airline miles and American Express points. I usually fly Continental and its partners on Star Alliance. This allows me to make a reservation that is held for three days while American Express points are transferred and reservation adjustments are made.

On our recent 3-1/2 week trip, Newton had an elaborate ticket from Natal to São Paulo to New York to Tokyo to San Francisco to Houston and back to São Paulo and Natal. My free ticket with the two allotted layovers got me from Natal to New York and from Tulsa back to Natal, with 6 days layover in São Paulo. My other planned USA stops in-between were purchased tickets.

Newton and I arrived at the airport a little late at midday and rushed over to check in. The agent showed no reservation for me. Newton whipped out his laptop and earphones and called Continental on Skype. He discovered that the reservation had been cancelled back in December because no miles were ever transferred from American Express. He had forgotten about this last step, and I had never confirmed that he had done it. He then tried to arrange a new reservation for me while I raced to the TAM airlines counter to see if I could get on Newton’s flight to São Paulo. There was some talk about getting on the waiting list, which meant joining a crowd of people not in line around an agent who continually left her post. With ten minutes left before Newton’s flight and a dropped call to Continental, he just had to go through security and catch his plane. I found out that my name on the waiting list was too far down for any hope on any other TAM flight to SP that day, so I raced to the GOL Airlines counter to buy a ticket. All they had left was a flight at 1:30 AM, which I grabbed for the last minute price of US$500. What this 3-1/2 hour flight meant was that there was a chance I could get the TAM day flight the next morning from São Paulo to NY.

You see, Newton surprised me on Christmas morning with tickets to the New York City Ballet over our upcoming NY stay. I had been completely moved that he would think of this perfect gift for me! I had selected that next evening since one of my favorite Jerome Robbins ballets was on the program. The tickets were waiting at Elise’s apartment.

Newton managed to reach my Brazilian cell phone on his barely working cell at the last minute and we had a plan…I would go home and get a new award ticket reservation – now from São Paulo – and transfer the American Express miles for it.

Our caretaker, Marcos, drove me home from the airport and I thought I’d go down the beach for lunch once I had everything for my trip in place. What ensued was continued surreality, as calls to Continental were on hold for 20 minutes, and only after the third try did I guess that they could not hear me because the mike was not working on Newton’s computer. I dug out my just-stored computer and reached them after another 20-minute hold. I could get on that TAM day flight to NY and get back ONLY as far as São Paulo now...with an additional 17,000 miles from American Express to add to the original 100,000 and another purchased ticket returning to Natal. I was thrilled anyway!

I followed Newton’s instructions for transferring miles from the American Express website. We have had plenty of occasions where the internet connection we have via radio here by the beach shuts down for some minutes or hours, but what happened next was just twilight zone. I followed the instructions and at each click to proceed on the site, thirty minutes would pass before the needed page would come up. I was going crazy enough, but then noticed the statement on the site that it may take 24-48 hours for miles to transfer. Now I panicked and called the contact phone number. Five minutes later, the miles were transferred and I was ready to call Continental back to ticket the reservation. A small peak in an afternoon of valleys.

I had reached Newton on his São Paulo layover, and he confirmed that he would pick me up at JFK the next afternoon in his rental car, as his flight would get him in very early. I thawed out a chicken dish from the freezer and waited till midnight, when Marcos drove me back to the airport.

My first concern was the fact that the flight was delayed till 2:30AM. This meant a shorter window in São Paulo the next morning to catch the international flight. My next concern was that there were no seats left in the Natal airport, so I stood waiting till 2:30…then 3:30, experiencing increasing panic that there would not be time to make the NY flight. When we boarded at last, I was reminded of that other feature of last-minute booking besides higher prices: the ‘B’ seat in between two sprawling guys. If I folded my arms, I still had to tuck my fingertips under to avoid touching the guy. There were no pillows for my lower back and no snacks.

Once in São Paulo I raced to the baggage claim, eyes on the clock…waiting, waiting…finally grabbed my bag and ran to the international terminal, praying the entire way that TAM, being a Brazilian airline, would not enforce the closing of flight check-in one hour prior to the international flight. They did. But a sympathetic agent, seeing the gasping of an aging woman, took mercy and let me check in. As he handed me my boarding pass he said, “Here’s your first class boarding pass.” I said, “first class?” and an entourage of people ushered me into a swanky office where they figured out how to get my bag on board in time. An agent escorted me through immigration and security in minutes, then handed me over to another caretaker on board who led me past the full business class section into the 4-seats-across, deserted first class cabin.

The next nine-and-a-half hours were ample compensation for the hellish previous twenty! Immediately came the pillows, comforter, slippers, all kinds of products, incomparable breakfast, champagne, huge flat-screen movie, more champagne, nap on the completely horizontal bed, incomparable lunch with the best white Bordeaux of my life, two desserts, and a beautiful bathroom all to myself. And as if this were not enough, when I disembarked another agent escorted me to US immigration and met me beyond with my bag.

I went out and headed directly to the pick-up sidewalk. I was watching carefully for Newton, as I didn’t know what rental car to expect. I waited. And I waited. After about two hours I decided I had to go in and try to call Elise. I had no cell phone for the US and knew that Newton was expecting to buy a new phone while there. I was petrified that he would arrive as soon as I went back into the terminal and mistakenly decide that I had caught a cab…to where?...but I was getting desperate, colder and colder as darkness fell, and the ballet curtain time was approaching. I found a phone that took credit cards, figuring it would be complicated to get cash machine bills and then change. I got Elise’s voicemail and left a tearful, anguished message, then raced back outside in case Newton had arrived. After another hour passed and I was in tears and it was virtually too late to get to the ballet on time, I thought about getting cash and catching a cab to the ballet or to Elise’s apartment…but what if I just had to stand outside in the cold, abandoned, there? I decided to go back in, get cash from a machine, buy a phone card and try to call Jake in Las Vegas to see if he could try to reach them. I thought I’d just try Elise once more first, and presto! – we were both suddenly screaming into the phone, “WHERE ARE YOU?????” It turns out that Newton and Elise had been waiting outside immigration for three hours, thinking I still had not come out. I hadn’t looked for them because Newton had used the words “pick you up,” not “meet your plane,” and they did not see me when I came out. We had been tripped up by syntax, missed views, missed call, and assurances to Newton from workers around there that it could, indeed, take that long for me to come out. He had already confirmed with the NY City Ballet box office that we could get in without the tickets that were still at Elise’s apartment.

From this valley - me frozen, all of us incredulous and going over every faux pas repeatedly - we took off for the ballet, knowing it was just starting. We had fully planned to change at Elise’s first, so all of us looked skuzzy. They let us go in twenty minutes late. There I was back in the New York State Theater, my ‘church’ for nine years from 1978 to 1987 when I had a subscription every season, fourth ring, front row center. Chopin’s etudes were being played on a piano while romantic couples and groups interpreted various interludes of Robbins’ gorgeous Dances at a Gathering. A peak. This was followed by Robbins’ late ‘60’s NY Export: Opus Jazz – as fresh, athletic, colorful and inventive as ever.

The remainder of the trip was fun and eventful, but less dramatic than this first 36 hours.

Love,

Sandy

Brazil Dispatch 31

2011-01-22T10:50:00.001-08:00

Our recent intermittent life in Brazil has been characterized by the circus across the road, which is the changing scene of a new development project. The building and moving of sand and soil and planting and hammering have been going on for some time.

The low point was the week our friends were planning to stay with us a couple of nights before moving to Rio. As the bull dozer sent clouds of dirt wafting through our open lattice transoms, the cleaning lady fought to wipe everything down and leave the house presentable. It turns out that just after she left around 3:00pm on her first of two days for the week, the unmistakable groaning of the bull dozer began. It made a bee-line for the pile of dirt situated at the perfect diagonal for the breeze to deliver the goods. The second appearance of the maid that week coincided with a perfect storm of wafting dirt, an eye-stinging fog of wafting smoke from a strategically placed field burn-off, and the combat zone ambiance created by actual international war games in Natal…roaring a couple of feet over our roof. After she left and the freshly washed stone floor was drying, here came the groaning again. Newton and I ran upstairs to hammer little nails above the bedroom transoms and hang old sheets.

But then our fortunes changed, and changed, and changed. Our caretaker picked up the scuttlebutt that an elaborate party was coming soon across the road; a grand opening perhaps? Free champagne? We wondered if it would be open to us. Work continued on a second version of the elaborate planter, lights were installed at the base of every coconut tree remaining in the field, producing a nightly fairyland, and fancy white tents started springing up. Our anticipation grew.

Then a truck arrived delivering pre-fab parts for perhaps little sales offices? This was constructed just opposite our front porch. But those panels with photographs were ugly, even if they hadn’t been installed upside-down. Oh, and a port-o-let in front of it all? Not good. Then a black wall went up the length of our road.

After listening to an entire night of hammering, we awoke to a covered stage and stands built on top of the now-empty planter. Newton went to inquire after cars started arriving. It was a party exclusively for realtors. At around 8:00pm the most wonderful live music interrupted my yoga. Newton joined me on the balcony and we realized that a famous band, Cheiro de Amor, was performing in fantastic colored lights right in front of us! We grabbed four little stools – two for tables- and brought them up, along with our smoked salmon and cheeses and a bottle of wine. It was such fun, perching on our stools or jumping up to dance during our private concert! It was more fun than crashing.

We awoke the next morning to find the planter reappearing, the port-o-let and pre-fabs, which had been dressing rooms for the band, gone; and the black wall coming down. Someone over there couldn’t decide about the planter, which to date has had three different plants, a concrete circular surrounding surface painted with a design - hacked to pieces to be replaced with a circular wooden surface. We eventually went over to take a look at the elegant new sales building and study the scale model inside. What is planned is basically a monstrosity that fills every inch of the coconut field with a 5-story resort-like condominium and elaborate water park, to be completed in 2014. Because the law allows only three stories by the shore, they plan to dig out and build two stories below ground level – ugg. I guess the biggest offense is simply that I don’t perceive our little plot, this haven, as a setting for a glitzy, expensive juggernaut of a development. But that’s just me against untold millions of developer dollars (or rather, reais).

In the meantime, I had a talk about the garbage the laborers were throwing down that was blowing all over the road, and that situation improved just in time for the arrival of Elise, Jake and Jake’s girlfriend Larissa for the holidays. Newton had installed green tube lights coiling up our three coconut trees in front. I believe the moment each holiday dusk that I went out to turn on our tube lights, and the lights on the coconut trees came up across the street, and the work had come to a stop, that the festive peacefulness that befell the scene was as calm as a new deep snowfall. It really worked out for the holidays!

The kids were content to hang around and go to our beach nearly every day, so the holidays were filled with loads of low-key fun, games (nobody could beat Jake at the word games), sunburns, a gift-filled Christmas morning, and lovely dinners in or out. We added a day in the sand dunes with a cool lake lunch and a day at the more animated Pirangi beach to the south.

Quite a special New Year’s Eve was spent at a burgeoning beach town to the north of Natal, Sao Miguel do Gostoso. We bought the New Year’s Eve package at Captain Jack Sparrow’s, a simple bar right out on the sand of a wide, dark beach with stars upon stars above and fireworks from several sources bursting overhead at midnight. We entered the sea to jump over seven waves for good luck, all wearing the traditional white. Then our favorite band from Natal, Mad Dogs, performed. We tried out various fruit drinks, deciding that watermelon prevailed that night. We relaxed in hammocks and watched dawn arrive with the moon and amazing Saturn overhead. (Saturn actually appears as an oval with its rings, though the insufficient lighting in the photo below makes it appear to show rings.)

The kids’ two weeks with us were cloud-and-rain-free.

Concurrent with the holidays was the arrival of our caretaker Marcos’ new wife, Eliselma. If under-five-feet-tall Marcos seems miniature, Eliselma is Thumbelina! The strangest detail is the humongous furniture her parents bought them for their tiny house next to our garage: a red overstuffed sofa and love seat, which can only fit in the room if the love seat blocks the door to the kitchen and the sofa blocks the shutter that opens the window; and a table with six chairs that would preclude reaching the refrigerator and stove in the kitchen. We love the Potiguars!

At this point, a new wall of ugly, worn, uneven boards went up in front of the coconut field…oh no; but next time we looked, it was torn down and a neat, nearly transparent fence had been rolled out. Whew. A redesign of the planter itself took place, a trampoline was installed, and clowns have been flipping and unicycling in front of us at breakfast. Preparations are underway for the field to be used for a concert. This time we’ll be away on our trip to the US/Japan(for Newton). Who knows what we’ll see across our road when we get back!

Love,

Sandy

Germany Dispatch

2011-01-15T15:32:00.001-08:00

It was time to return to Germany and see Anke Borsdorf Vorndamme, our American Field Service exchange student from 1964 at Tulsa Central High School. My sister Donna was a high school senior that year, along with Anke. I had visited her in Bielefeld in 1967, and she and husband Klaus had visited the US a couple of times since then; we had last seen them in the early ‘90’s in New York.

After spending a full year with the Needham family, Anke was a family member for life. Our parents were her parents. We also loved referring to her real parents as Mutti and Vati!

Anke met me in Hannover and we drove to her current town, Herford. We were able over the next few days to enjoy the orderly, nature-rich sights of Herford, the near-by spa town, Bad Salzuflen, and Anke’s original Bielefeld. The common denominators in these towns are orderliness, quality everything…the stores offer such fine materials and craftsmanship, and a deep appreciation of nature’s beauty permeating all.

Here is a street in Bielefeld: Here is the serene cemetery where Mutti and Vati are buried:

Here is a certain plant that ‘catches’ the salt from water as it flows past, and the entire wall where this transpires in the spa town of Bad Salzuflen:

Here are Anke and Klaus leading the way on a country walk near their house, pictured with the red roof on the right:

This fine level of quality typified every inch of Anke and Klaus’ house, where a state-of the art kitchen complete with amazing German utensils and gadgets amazed me daily, and where all furnishings and structural workmanship surpassed anything I remember seeing. The doors were perfectly soundproof and the fixtures everywhere were extraordinary examples of contemporary, functional design.

Anke and I visited the controversial Frank Gehry museum, Marta Herford, and while enjoying many pieces in a contemporary exhibit, also had plenty of giggles - like the high school girls we used to be - at the pretentiousness of certain installations. What fun!

Let me start with the most impressive things about Anke and Klaus: Anke is a principle in an organization (Kinderschutzbund)that provides family support and tutoring for children of immigrants and poor Germans. Anke was specifically assigned to a Romani (Gypsy) family a couple of years back and had many interesting stories to tell. I cannot think of more timely and forward-looking work, as the assimilation of these children is the best hope for Europe. She is also president of another organization, so is busy in her retirement, for sure. She was a professor of history and German at a gymnasium (high school for the college-bound in Germany) for many years. Her recent advent into painting just blew me away:

In addition, she is beautiful – just gorgeous coloring, features and figure, on which her clothes always look so great. She prepared several meals that could have qualified for the finest restaurants: asparagus wrapped in a thin prosciutto-like ham; pumpkin soup with shrimp, pine nuts and pine nut oil – exquisite; and with chef Klaus’ help: bratwurst from the grill with red cabbage. Klaus is active in the kitchen, too.

Klaus is the head of the region for a German bank. This hadn’t been announced yet, but his region had just won “One of the 100 Best places to Work” because his organization is so employee-friendly and has great policies and benefits. Wow. Something for all bankers to aspire to! He was very proud about this (as was I!). Klaus seems to take his hard work in stride, including many weekend events he or they are obligated to attend on behalf of the bank. He is looking forward to retirement, though they recently asked him to stay 3 more years, to which he has committed to two. What I like best about him is his easy, graceful manner, infused with humor and impeccable kindness.

We were able to see one of their two daughters, Britte, along with her new baby, and their son Jan, a college student.

Here are Klaus and Britte; Uncle Jan on the right:

Newton had joined us from Poland for the weekend, but flew back one day ahead of me, as I could not get the same flight on my award ticket.

I had one great shopping day in Hannover before flying back to Natal by way of Frankfurt and Lisbon. I cannot quite describe the shock of landing at the Natal airport after having been immersed in the order and efficiency of Germany. Brazil just seemed starkly outrageous when it took one hour and twenty minutes to leave the airport after landing, due to the lack of logic and organization (worse than usual!). It started with luggage from our crowded flight appearing on two different carousels, neither designated for the flight. Then after a few bags, there was a 20-minute lull where about half of the passengers passed between the two locations with their luggage carts, trying to anticipate which one would receive the balance of the baggage. Then that mess was herded into a single file backed-up customs line, where one man questioned each passenger before exiting. THEN everyone had to get past the hugging families that invariably BLOCK the exit from customs, causing more back-log. It was jolting!

Love,

Sandy

Athens 2010 Dispatch

2011-01-15T13:40:00.001-08:00

From Rome we flew to Athens. My brief stay in Athens, entertaining myself while Newton met with business partners, was highlighted by the new Parthenon museum. I took a bus and the metro from our hotel on the Adriatic Sea. The museum is down the hill from the actual Parthenon. It is wonderfully conceived and executed, presenting basically a walk around a simulated temple with the original surviving marbles in their original ‘places,’ complete with explanations. I love a museum where one feels like it is possible to see the entirety of the exhibit.

I then traveled by metro to Technopolis, an old industrial part of the city – the former gas works – to see its transformation into a cultural center. There are galleries and restaurants adapted to the structures that existed for the gas works, many with the massive equipment still there!

Add to this a couple of unforgettable (as always) dinners out with the Athens business partners, and the brief stay was just perfect.

Instead of joining Newton in Poland for business, I headed for Germany.

Love,

Sandy

Happy 2011

2011-01-12T12:08:00.001-08:00

MOON

You smile like the Cheshire Cat at mid-globe mortals,

Fooling, teasing, mimicking our lunacy.

You disappear for nights at a time,

In the shadows, behind the clouds, under the horizon;

Then you mock us moonfaced romantics

With just a thumb smudge on a clear day.

Ah, but when you peer over the ocean in full bright gold,

Casting your shimmering net across the water,

We watch you rise in yellow and preside in silver

Over the seascape you have painted with luminescent ink.

Moonglow.

If nights were always bathed in radiant indigo

We could dance in the courtyard under your spell

And pick our way to the beach at midnight.

On black nights caution reigns, lest we stumble or get lost,

Your elusive face as baffling as your dark side.

Perhaps you’ll give us a sliver of silver on the inland side?

Wynken, Blynken and Nod’s boat sailing across the ocean of sky?

Fleeting glances between clouds and buildings,

Phasing in and out?

We used to catch such glimpses of Mount Fuji in Japan,

Driving nearby or riding the bullet train past.

Before it vanished - just as suddenly - behind structures and passing landscape,

We were awed by its stunning, breathing solidity

Reaching out to us so palpably.

Constant.

You astound us, too, and take our breath away,

But your silent revolution counters our longing with caprice;

As you pull and push and play your Blind Man’s Bluff,

We notice that sometimes the beach is wide

And sometimes there’s no beach at all.

-SN

Wishing you a golden year,

Sandy, Newton, Elise and Jake

Natal, RN, Brazil

Laurene Dispatch

2010-12-12T05:54:00.001-08:00

My mother, Laurene McCracken Needham, died on November 14^th. She was just two weeks shy of 96 years old, and 2-1/2 months beyond the point at which she was still sharp and ready to pass on.

Mother was born in 1914 along with her twin brother, Lawrence, in Choctaw, Oklahoma. Their mother, Dolly Brown McCracken, died in childbirth, and the twins were raised for two years by several of their father’s eight sisters. My grandfather then married Maude Hill, whom I would know as my grandmother. Granddaddy McCracken was an ‘89’er pioneer (a young child in the 1889 land rush) and rode in the annual parade in his surrey with fringe on top – something that made a huge impression on me in my youth! He was the principal of a cluster of schools and later operated the Sunny Lane Cemetery in Oklahoma City – property of his wealthy brother-in-law – along with my grandmother, who ran the office for decades. She had been Mother’s and Lawrence’s school teacher before that in a two-room school. The twins grew up on a small farm with their older brother and sister and their half-brother, my Uncle Donald, right next door to the cemetery. Mother always spoke of the ‘play house’ Granddaddy made for her and Lawrence by planting a rectangle of tall sunflowers.

Here they are at their 8^th grade graduation: Mother, the valedictorian in a dress borrowed from her cousin; Lawrence lacking no bravura!

They attended Capitol Hill High School and then graduated from Oklahoma A & M, which is now Oklahoma State University, in 1937. Mother got her degree in math and English and returned to her high school to teach. Also in 1937, Mother married my father, Herbert Needham, who had courted her during college. He went to work for the telephone company. After Janet and Dorothy were born, Daddy took the family by train to Boston for Naval Officer’s Training at Wellesley College. He kidded his whole life about ‘graduating from Wellesley,’ still a women’s college. He made it home from the Pacific theater of the war and returned to the phone company. Donna and I were born in the subsequent years. I guess we considered ourselves the typical ‘50’s middle class white family, though we all now know how extraordinary both our parents were in terms of honesty, intelligence, faith (never blind), open-mindedness, unconditional love, and fun. They were free of greed, neuroses and hostility. My parents talked out their problems and had a rule never to go to bed angry with each other. Mother no longer worked, but volunteered with the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, the PTA, World Neighbors organization - along with Daddy and Lawrence, and all sorts of Methodist church activities. She still worked at the polls every election day until not so long ago. She and Daddy were both expert Bridge players. In her youth, cards were forbidden as a game of ‘chance,’ and only the card game ‘Rook’ could be played in her very Methodist home. Once her grandparents passed on, her parents became big Bridge players, setting the tone for Mother’s life as a card shark. Here she is playing cards with her great-grandson Derek last August:

In the meantime, Mother was a great combination of fun-loving, fearless farm girl and serious contributor to the welfare of the world. Even though she was considered one of the sweetest, most positive and compassionate human beings around, she never hesitated to knock my croquet ball far into the neighbors’ yards upon capture; she could beat most everyone at ping-pong (later winning an Oklahoma Senior Olympics gold medal in this sport), and was at home on carnival rides that left me retching. I remember her visiting me at Northwestern U. in Chicago when the dorm curfew was 2:00 am. We rode the elevated train home from the Chicago ‘loop’ just in time, and Mother did what she always did: smiled at all the derelicts on the train. She did not have many inner fears and demons to project on others, so everyone was OK as far as she was concerned!

Mother and Daddy loved to travel. They drove all over the USA & Europe, though they had trouble getting out of Rome with all the roads leading back to it. One would drive for an hour, then they would pull over and walk around the car to stretch their legs and switch drivers. They were always equals. Mother wrote wonderful travelogues, particularly about the back road routes they liked to take in the US. Their last hurrah before Daddy died in 1990 was an 8-week drive to Alaska from Oklahoma. One can see on a globe that this distance is about a quarter of the longitude of the world, and it was covered at 52mph, when “the car handled best.”

Mother had a habit of instigating an endless variety of friendships. Once the daughters grew up and moved away, Mother was the designated grandmother for all the neighborhood families. I always thought this was ideal, as her openness and endless repertoire of games simply could not be squandered! The children would ring the bell for card games and the adults would come for counsel and comfort. She met a young German man who swam with her at the “Y” and introduced him to the Austrian divorcee across the street (they are now married); she visited the daughter of other neighbors, a professor of French film at the University of Hawaii, and kayaked in the ocean with her. She became friends with the Kuwaiti cook who brought his mother, one of several wives of his father, to meet her. She ended up knowing the entire family of her banker friend from Shanghai after they came to Tulsa to visit. She attended the weddings of her surrogate grandchildren all over the country. Once Mother had sold our family home and moved into the Methodist Manor retirement community in 2000, she met a young Russian pianist on an airplane who was coming to visit his brother in Tulsa. He ended up using the Manor piano to practice, working in plenty of card games with Mother, then played a concert for the residents. After his brother no longer lived in Tulsa, he actually returned to visit Mother, play more cards and performed another concert at the Manor. Another time she was on a plane reading Thich Nhat Hanh when she struck up a conversation with a Princeton philosophy professor sitting next to her. Of course, he lived near my sister Donna in New Jersey, so Mother called him on subsequent trips. Mother also had a regular Bridge game with my sister’s mother-in-law and two married gay guys. I took her to a concert of the local gay men’s chorus once when I was visiting, and she knew three men performing and the only other females in the audience – a lesbian couple she had met at some other event. She was friends with all of the staff at the Methodist Manor – nurses, aides, dietary, maintenance, administration, and, of course, her fellow-residents.

Mother was known at World Neighbors organization as the ‘most frequent’ contributor; this designation was honored with the World Neighbors Village Award. She was so dedicated to this self-help model of international outreach that she donated to them in honor of friends’ and relatives’ birthdays. Christmas presents were donations to the Child Fund International. She and Daddy also selected other charities as they traveled, such as for runaway teenagers, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY City, and Oklahoma Native Americans. They always gave 10% of their income away, in the old Methodist tradition.

Another element of Mother’s reputation was her joke-telling. She knew, it seemed, 100 jokes at any given moment, while I could remember ONE, and that for a limited time. She established herself as the stand-up comedienne at the Methodist Manor’s annual talent show for nine years, and enjoyed the notoriety as the funny lady there. After a couple of racy preacher jokes, the Manor monitored her subsequent routines! She was also famous for practical jokes, particularly with the grandkids. I believe the family favorite is when she greeted her grandsons Brad and Todd in Durango, CO with a pillow stuffed under her shirt to make her look pregnant.

My niece Amanda works for Southwest Airlines in Phoenix. When word went out that Mother was failing rapidly on her last evening, Amanda was able to immediately fly to Tulsa and sit by Mother the whole night until she died near dawn.

Newton and I got the news of Mother’s death in Natal at 10:00am on that Sunday morning. Miraculously, we were on a flight to São Paulo>Dallas>Tulsa by 2:30pm and arrived in Tulsa at 9:00am Monday, ahead of all stateside relatives. Our friends Rossana and Cassio and their 10-year-old, Olivia, had spent the night with us before their move to Rio de Janeiro that day. Our caretaker was visiting his mother in the interior. Like a bad television script with too many unlikely things happening at once, our friends sent us off and agreed to close the house and set the alarm before catching their life-altering flight.

Once my three sisters, Janet, Dorothy and Donna arrived at the Tulsa hotel, our work was cut out for us. Even though we followed Mother’s wishes that she expressed about her funeral last May, we had plans and calls and all sorts of arrangements to make. Our four heroic husbands – Rex, Bill, Larry and Newton - were content to stand by and do absolutely whatever was needed, while being generally ignored by us.

We met with the funeral director and found out that Sunny Lane Cemetery was now a highly impersonal corporate entity in the ‘Dignity’ cemetery chain. Even though we had a document with the exact plot number, and Mother’s name was already engraved on the gravestone, they were insisting that someone come ahead of time to Oklahoma City to verify the plot location because they had been sued for a burial in the wrong spot. Can you imagine their foisting their incompetence on grieving, extremely occupied families! Luckily, the head man responded in our favor after we threw around the family name.

There would be no casket at the Tulsa service, which took place at the Methodist Manor. There would be visitation for a couple of days at the funeral home, so they asked the daughters if we wished to pay for a hairdresser to fix Mother’s hair. To my astonishment - being a person who could not look at my father after he died in 1990 - Janet and Dorothy decided that they would fix Mother’s hair and make-up so she would look like herself as much as possible. I was so impressed with their courage that I did look at Mother. They did a beautiful job, but, alas, that body was no longer our mother.

The four daughters planned the celebration honoring Mother’s life with the Manor chaplain, a friend of Mother’s and an extremely calm and sensitive man who required nothing for the service, beyond our wishes. We cleared out Mother’s room at the Manor in two days (with husbands’ help), saving cherished items to pass along to relatives and friends. We wrote the obituary; called Mother’s list of friends; designed the program for the Tulsa service; bought flowers; planned the brief Oklahoma City graveside service, which we were to officiate; handled Mother’s business affairs; greeted friends, our children and grandchildren as they arrived during the week; and took care of details too numerous to recall. This we did in a harmonious collaboration, easily agreeing on most everything! Despite the emotion of the circumstances, we four daughters savored our busy days together.

My best friend, Lenna, arrived from Boulder, Colorado, to share in the family gathering as the member that she is. All the family and several close friends gathered on Thursday night before the Friday funeral to tell stories, to select keepsakes – particularly ceramic chickens from Mother’s famous collection and the costume jewelry she loved to wear - and to enjoy the rare phenomenon of all being in one room! We are a far-flung group.

The services went beautifully, so there was a sense of contentment among us afterwards. In Tulsa, the congregation sang a couple of Mother’s favorite old hymns, “In the Garden” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Dorothy and Donna did a reading in unison of Corinthians, Chapter 13.

We had one member of each of the daughters’ families present a remembrance: grandson Randy spoke about Mother’s inspiring character; grandson Brad spoke about what a humorous character Mother was; granddaughter Sara spoke about how positive Mother always was, even wishing in the face of pain to remain positive – and about how frank and modern Mother was when Sara interviewed her for a project on marriage in 2000. Despite the traditional nature of the funeral plans Mother had chosen - much like the life-long church services she attended - it occurred to me that Mother just did life so well…so I represented my family by leading a rousing round of applause for her!

My friend from junior high school, Susie Monger Daugherty, lent her formidable voice to our father’s favorite hymn, “Above the Hills.” This is to the melody of “Londonderry Air” (“Danny Boy”) and was removed from the Methodist hymnal some years ago for being a secular tune. Daddy always felt that the melody itself was something sublime and evocative.

A family friend volunteered to provide food for a reception after the service. My sisters and I appreciated seeing friends from school and from our old neighborhood and cousins from both sides of the family, among many Manor residents and old friends of Mother’s.

We all drove the two hours to Oklahoma City for the Sunny Lane Cemetery burial. We spotted the graves of many relatives – Mother’s parents and siblings and our cousin who drowned as a young man, and, of course, Daddy’s plot, soon-to-be-shared. All ten grandchildren served as pall bearers.

Pictured here l to r: Brad (partially hidden), Jake, Todd (completely hidden), April, Elise, Randy, Sara, Mark, Amy and Amanda. (The man in front, on staff).

Great-grandson David sang an original song, “When I Leave,” to acoustic guitar. The previous director of World Neighbors, a dear friend of Mother’s, made some charming remarks, then Dorothy read several short ‘poems’ that Daddy had written:

THANK YOU
Thank you God
For all the
Blessings of Life:
The ones we recognize
And
The ones in Disguise.

MY WIFE
Laurene deals
in compassion
on wheels.

YES
Love is -
Being gentle and
Understanding at the
Right time.

LAURENE
Everyone is unique,
But you are uniquer.

EPITAPH - LAURENE
Yesterday She served
The World.
Today She serves
The Universe.

Janet read a benediction and Donna and I attempted a harmony of the Beatles’:

“And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

We were not entirely successful. The line does express perfectly the vast amount of love Mother carried to her grave, inspired by the affection and devotion she offered so generously.

Uncle Donald’s daughters provided the lovely reception at the cemetery, which we could never have done without them. We waited awhile to return to the gravesite until the casket had been lowered and covered. This allowed space for us to take a photo of the gravestone, on which are engraved lines from another poem Daddy wrote to Mother:

My nephew Todd from New York City has arrived for years at Thanksgiving at Donna’s in New Jersey with an original script for the funny annual family video. He has a blog on which he posted this tribute to Mother, including some fun video excerpts:

My Grandmother Needham passed away last night. She was almost 96 years old, and I think she'd be the first to tell you that the key to happiness is to not live past 93.

I was blessed to have her for so long, and I'm grateful that Samuel and Ethan and Jennifer got to have her for so long as well. She was a grandmother to be shared.

Some things I've learned from her:

1. Smile.

2. Forgive.

3. Try not to giggle when you're bluffing in poker.

4. Make the world a better place because you were here.

I'll do my best to pass it on.

Todd’s montage of Mother

I will end with a tribute to my nephew Mark, who moved his family some years ago from Colorado to Tulsa. He became Mother’s self-appointed caretaker for years after Mother stopped driving, taking her to doctor’s appointments, sitting in on exams to get all the information straight, buying supplies, helping her to dress. He did all of this with a most willing heart and sweet disposition, and was assisted in much of this demand by his beautiful, generous wife, Jenny. My favorite quote of all came from Mark right at the end of the cemetery reception. I asked him, while introducing him to a second cousin from California, how long he had taken care of Mother. He replied:

“I think she took care of me until a couple of months ago.”

Love,

Sandy

From the Tip Of the Boot Dispatch

2010-11-08T10:26:00.000-08:00

The ferry carrying us and our car arrived in Villa San Giovanni from Sicily at 8:30 pm. We plugged a Tropea address, a coastal town to the north, into the GPS and we followed Martha’s confident instructions…away from the sea. Besides the sinking feeling that we were, once again, heading higher and higher into interior dark mountains, we had no map of the mainland – a map of Sicily only having come with the rental car. We did not plan ahead with a mainland map to “confirm” the GPS instructions. There were two highway exits Martha seemed to like that seemed promising for heading to the shore in the vicinity of Tropea, though Martha just insisted that we make U-turns each time we exited (four times in all at the two exits), and the roads seemed to lead nowhere. Dark altitude surrounded us and the time kept getting later with each revisited exit. We finally decided that the next big town along the highway, Cosenza, would be a better place to spend the night at this point. After an excellent highway rest stop dinner (only in Italy – sautéed asparagus, spinach, and exotic mushrooms!), we arrived in Cosenza just at midnight and drove around following signs for hotels, praying that someone would still be at the front desks. The first one we tried was way too expensive, the second one affordable…and for good reason. In Italy for the Gourmet Traveler Fred Plotkin describes Cosenza as a town that was frozen in time: the old center has the same look as 1914 -1940; the newer city still looks like early ‘60’s. Our hotel room definitely looked like early ‘60’s, so I rather enjoyed this fact while Newton, unamused, fell out immediately from exhaustion. The perfect ending to this leg of the trip occurred the next morning at 7:30 when the early sounds of construction were, in this case, sounds of destruction – alarmingly near. Once we got up and opened the curtains during a lull in the pounding and shaking, sure enough – there was scaffolding outside our third floor window and the men soon returned to continue hammering away at our wall. The hotel breakfast was bad, but we followed Fred’s recommendation in the old center to a 200-year-old café for a charming and delicious breakfast from 1940.

Lunch was deliciousness in Salerno, with quite a crazy waiter who served extra dishes to people and made up his own prices afterwards. We’re accustomed to the non-linear in Brazil, but it was funny to see the reaction of an innocent American couple when their bill was almost double what they expected! Fred had already described the sleepiness of Calabria and the craziness of Campania, so we were ready. Our destination was the Amalfi Coast, to the west. Let the beauty begin! It is possible to forgive the tourist flavor, once again, when one is driving in such a thrilling setting: the Mediterranean glistening below, the road winding above along the cliffs, the green hills and towns rising up. It is an exaggeration of Cinque Terre to the north; bigger, higher, more chic, more dramatic. These photos do it little justice, especially being hazy…better to go there!

Newton was expert at driving on the curves, unfazed by oncoming tourist busses because Brazilians, like Italians, see “plenty of room” where this American does not!

Here is a terraced vineyard along the Coast:

We had great luck finding a hotel in Amalfi on the i-phone – our favorite hotel of all. Fred’s dinner recommendation led us along the labyrinthine enclosed ‘streets’ above the town’s main street. Alas, his recommended restaurant had a new name and few diners, so we opted for a crowded trattoria where I actually had my favorite meal of the trip: mozzarella baked in fresh lemon leaves and sautéed endive, accompanied by Fred’s favorite white wine of the region, Fiano di Avellino. This was followed by limoncello liqueur at a bar, since flavorful Amalfi lemons from the rich volcanic soil are the official source for Italy’s limoncello.

Morning in Amalfi

We decided to stay in Amalfi two nights and commute to Pompeii.

Pompeii is an amazing excavation because it is an entire city that was well-preserved under the ash and rock of Mount Vesuvius’ 79 A.D. eruption. Only two-thirds of the city has been unearthed. We decided on a guided tour in English (heavily-accented English) and appreciated hearing the details of this amazing record of Roman life. An earthquake had occurred there seventeen years prior to the volcano’s eruption, so some structures were still in mid-repair when buried. I visited Pompeii when I was 17, but did not remember much beyond driving up to the volcano, the well-preserved frescoes in a house, and the men being led to view pornographic paintings which were off-limits to us delicate females. This time the guide reliably pointed out the bas relief penises pointing the way to the brothel district, then led all of us through a brothel with its stone beds and descriptive frescoes which enabled men arriving from all over the Mediterranean to simply point to their preferences. Part of the excavation work at the site has involved pouring liquid plaster into the pumice soil and rock and later removing the hardened shapes left behind in vacuums of disintegrated utensils, urns, and human or animal remains:

There are lead pipes along the streets for running water to the public drinking fountains and baths:

There are stepping stones for crossing the streets:

There are many shops, like this ‘fast food’ shop:

There are small homes and elegant mansions, such as this one:

Also, temples and government buildings:

Frescoes are especially well-preserved because of the method of painting on still-wet plaster. These are inside a home:

Vesuvius looms compellingly in the background.

Extend the sloping lines upward on the two sides to imagine how it looked in 79 A.D.:

When we returned to Amalfi for the evening, we were too tired to drive one town over to Ravello to have dinner at Fred’s favorite place in the region. Our rather touristy dinner in Amalfi was nevertheless good, and conversation with an interesting couple from Toronto – he, a film producer and she, a newspaper editor – added a welcome dimension. My ears still get prickly when I hear American (or Canadian) accents, having run into so few Americans in Natal. Americans were pretty scarce in Sicily, as well, so my antenna was way up to overhear them in this region.

The route over the mountains was by choice the next morning on our way to Naples, the birthplace of pizza, for a pizza lunch. We found Fred’s recommended fresh mozzarella, basil, and fresh tomato sauce pizza after an hour of Martha’s unsuccessful maneuvering among non-traffic streets, one-way streets and dead-end streets. Luckily, a helpful woman noticed we were stuck in a place with no escape and instructed us to enter a “do not enter” street and make our way to parking possibilities. Newton could always understand everyone’s Italian! Fred describes Napoli as a place of excitement and perpetual motion. He says that – as the Romans are sensual – the Neapolitans are excited, living under the threat of hovering Vesuvius. We walked the busy streets of the center and confirmed the blur of motion, the animated citizens touching each other, arguing over the best fresh lemonade, playing great street jazz, hurrying. Here is the beautiful galleria:

It was now time for poor preparations to catch up with us again. We had meant to reserve a hotel in Rome for the last night, but had never done it. We sat in our parked car in Naples checking for internet hotel listings on the laptop…until the battery ran out. While this left the hotel question unsolved, it made the rental car return schedule in Rome very tight. Martha headed us to Rome and to the agency address. We called to check about closing time once we were in Rome and had just about the right amount of leeway when we miss-counted the exits in a crowded roundabout. Martha likes to just say “Enter the roundabout and take the third exit,” for example. In this case, she said the fourth but we took the third. By the time Martha corrected this mistake in traffico Romano, the rental agency was no longer answering the phone. We pulled over and started looking for hotel possibilities on the extremely slow i-phone. While we deliberated choosing a hotel near the airport, a parked car pulled out of a free parking spot right beside us. We pulled in and decided to roam the area for a hotel. Newton held his i-phone and we walked to various hotel addresses listed there. The first one sold out one minute before we walked in; the others were non-existent (?). We knew there was a reasonably-priced hotel out near the airport and that we could return the rental car there; it was just tricky now to get an online reservation since the i-phone connection was so slow and the hotel was not answering the phone. While we walked back to a trendy, lively restaurant that had caught our eye, Newton secured our reservation for the night. Our last dinner in Italy was amidst a local crowd in a restaurant with a film theme. There were many photos of the late Massimo Triosi and his actual bicycle from “Il Postino.” It was fun, but Fred would never recommend the food. Once again around midnight, Martha led us to our country hotel in Ostia – an archeological site from the ancient port of Rome. When we awoke the next morning, we were surprised to find a castle fortress right out our window!

We passed the ancient ruins en route to the airport. Clearing out the glove compartment before turning in the car, we happened upon a…map of the mainland! Oh well.

“Arrivederci, Italia,” we said as we caught our flight to Athens and our trip metamorphosed into Newton’s business trip.

Love,

Sandy

Sicily Dispatch

2010-11-02T07:39:00.001-07:00

The theme of our Sicilian vacation is “Fred and Martha.” Fred is Fred Plotkin, the author of The Gourmet Traveler’s Guide to Italy. Some friends gave us his book for our 5-week stay in northern Italy in 2004. We just could not face Sicily or the road to Rome from the tip of the boot without Fred’s passion, palette, intimate portraits of each region of Italy and its populace, his descriptions of dishes and agriculture and wines, not to mention his recommendations in each city. There was a 2010 edition from UK Amazon awaiting us at our Palermo hotel. Also awaiting us there was Martha. This is the name we affectionately (at first) attached to the American woman’s voice on our new GPS. They were both our constant companions.

We can fly directly from Natal to Lisbon, so a trip to Europe is a simple thing compared to travel to the US. The incredible food started right away in the Lisbon and Milan airports! I sat people-watching in awe…Europeans seem handsome, healthy, fit and chic. We had a nice room in Palermo with ceilings so high that we could see an entire dome out the tall balcony door. The cappuccino at breakfast came in a cup the size of a soup bowl. Yea. The only problem was the alarming amount of noise in the morning: garbage being dumped – all breaking glass, seemingly amplified voices arguing, a dog chasing a motor cycle; after we laughed about a car alarm being the last missing sound, they began drilling into metal at a nearby construction site! Oddly, these morning car alarms and construction noises persisted in other cities.

Sicily has been invaded and occupied by so many cultures, it is possible to find endless varieties of architecture. Here, the Palermo cathedral combines Arabic, Greek, Romanesque, gothic, and Renaissance influences:

The former nobles of Sicily had so much money that this chapel with priceless Byzantine mosaics (these are not paintings) is part of a family’s palace-fortress:

Besides its beautiful buildings, Palermo still has remains of bombed out properties from World War II:

Here’s Newton-as-beast-of-burden:

We picked up our rental car, a Lancia, with stop/start technology that kicks in at every full stop to save gas and reduce pollution. Ah, Europe. Martha led us with her soothing-yet-confident voice to a gorgeous beach just outside Palermo on a lazy October weekday. The temperature was near 80°F:

My favorite ruin of the whole trip: a well-preserved Doric Greek temple of sandstone, surrounded by green hills in Segesta. As occurs in the Parthenon, these columns and horizontals incorporate a slight curve to fool the eye that they are straight, while managing, unlike mechanically straight construction, to float and express a grace that, when beheld, nearly lifts me off my feet.

In Trapani, gargoyle masks on a church and a leather goods store :

I am always grateful in foreign lands to have Newton at the wheel, despite my aversion to speed and sudden maneuvers. After learning to drive in Brazil, there is not much that can flummox him. Did I mention that I call him Walter Mitty sometimes when his persona slips into a Formula One driver? The funny thing about driving in Sicily is that the cities forgo traffic signals and stop signs and just use the “nose into oncoming traffic” system. Honking ensues immediately for those who hesitate! The old streets in the city centers can be so narrow that pedestrians must step into doorways to allow room for the cars to pass. Newton was intrepid at one point and, clapping in both rearview mirrors, started through…well, the eye of a needle. Alas, this was too narrow for any skill level and we had to figure out another way. Martha became a little vague around traffic circles, as we were not absolutely sure how to count the exits; she was fond of recalculating directions in the GPS tradition when instructions and diagrams failed us and demanding U-turns of us, ever more virulently.

Here’s Newton watching the road AND the purple line on the GPS screen map:

We happened upon an inviting wine bar in Marsala one evening, beckoned by some intriguing recorded music. Forswearing the sweet dessert wine for which the town is famous, we sampled a sparkling rosé brut and a good red while enjoying the rousing debate over whether Roman men or Sicilian men are more virile. The free hors d’oeuvres, which melted in our mouths, forced us to buy a jar of pistachio pesto spread to bring home. Never have I tasted pistachio all the way up my cheeks! We didn’t realize what early dinner hours they observed around there and arrived at one of “Fred’s destinations” as the kitchen closed. The non-pizza dinner we had at a mobbed night spot was the only bad meal we had in Sicily.

Baroque architecture in Marsala:

As Fred says, the Sicilian mafia presence is not particularly felt along the coastal areas as it might be further inland, if at all. My first reaction was at a lovely restaurant in Palermo where a small boy, as part of a large family dinner, was running around with a black toy pistol in his hand. My second reaction was later in Siracusa at a nice jazz club when a hulking guy was talking in a Don Corleone voice. It turns out that he was a tourist from Venezuela speaking Spanish; he was drunk and trying to interrupt conversation among Newton, an American young man and me. He then started to insult us. We left quickly as the young man went to inform the manager. A few streets over by foot, we suddenly realized that a car that had to do a turnabout in the tight street was being driven by him. We ducked into a doorway and luckily remained undetected by the drunken goon. That meant that the only mafia connection we encountered was the Palermo Opera House where Sophia Coppola as Michael Corleone’s daughter dies on the steps in “The Godfather III:”

Fred explains that Sicily’s cuisine is famous for its flavorful fresh produce (resulting from rich volcanic soil) and fresh sea food, mixed with the spices of North Africa. One of my early favorites was pepper muscles. We loved the arancini – rice balls with meat or cheese; sarde a Beccafico – sardines stuffed with cheese, herbs and raisins; involtini – roll-ups of chicken, veal, etc. with cheese and spices; cuscus; piacentino (sheep’s milk cheese) and majorchino (pecorino cheese) with black peppercorns; calamari, shrimps, octopus, fish, clams, grilled zucchini and eggplant, and the wonderful greens. There used to be a tradition of French chefs and bakers in the households of the nobles, which led to a tradition of nuns leaving the convents and learning how to make French pastries and exquisite sweets. Some convents today thrive by supplying the best marzipan (pictured here) and pastries in Sicily. The breakfasts included in most hotels sometimes consisted of vouchers for a bar in the nearby piazza for cappuccino and croissant or brioche - as delicate and flakey as any French counterpart. Also famous in Sicily is the citrus produce, including madarino tangerines, along with several tangerine varieties that come out month-by-month. I tasted both a fresh tangerine and a mandarincino liqueur after dinner... yes, both, all the way up my cheeks! Fred was clear that he had no interest in the tradition of French cuisine in Sicily, apart from the pastries. He loves the fresh bounty from the local small farms, the fresh seafood from the fishermen, and the vino locale from the wineries that have always made up the fare of the traditionally poor populace. Eating in restaurants is a relatively new and casual phenomenon among the people.

We peered through the gate of this building in a small coastal town and a lovely older man approached, opened the gate for us and explained in perfect English that this was his weekend refuge from Rome. Sweet:

We always like to joke with our kids about which funny little car is our actual rental:

In Agrigento there is an entire park of Greek/Roman ruins with the sea in the background. I felt like I was in the middle of an old French painting when I looked at this:

This was the last standing column of the temple of Zeus (later Jove), which tumbled in 1914:

These human figure columns also supported the weight of the temple:

Like many ruins around the Mediterranean, these temples were frequently appropriated by succeeding conquerors – after the Greeks and Romans, the Byzantines, Arabs, Christians…so many have been damaged, adapted, re-adapted, and restored.

Fred is particularly enthusiastic about a man (deceased since publication of the 2010 edition) who made gelato and sorbet in the purest, most traditional way in the city of Noto. He eliminated any gums or fillers and concentrated on egg whites and natural flavors. The establishment, Corrudo Costanzo (#7 Via Salvia Spaventa), named after him and continuing his strict standards by way of his family, still makes the original Arabic sorbets of rose and jasmine, as well as what Fred considers the best taste experience of his career: sorbetto di mandarino. We were on a pilgrimage to taste these and the mulberry, lemon, pistachio, hazelnut and almond gelatos that Fred favored there. As we headed out from Agrigento, having duly entered Constanzo’s address into the GPS, Martha led us on a wild goose chase up and up and up into the mountains above beautiful farm fields separated by low stone walls. It seemed strange, as Noto was near the coast, but we put our madcap faith in the sometime trickster and headed to an autostrata on the other side of these mountains. The scenery was so lovely that I had mixed emotions about the beauty, the receding shore, the blind hairpin curves on a road too narrow for two cars, and the sinking gas gauge. The autostrata did eventually lead us to Noto, and we eventually walked our way to Costanzo’s only to find it closed for renovation. I had hoped to follow my Mother’s annual summer tradition of a meal of all the ice cream we could eat!

Siracusa is a wonderful city. It was a center of great learning in ancient times and produced Archemedes, among other notables. We loved the hipness of the city center – an island called Ortigia - combined with the traditional varieties of architecture, great stores, and another spectacular park of Greek/Roman ruins. Interestingly enough, not only the ruins, but the entire city of Siracusa is on the UNESCO World heritage list!

Here are the Roman theater and a video of the Greek amphitheater, interesting to compare (the rectangular indentation in the center here was for stagecraft):

While Newton walked around the amphitheater with his camera, I sat on a rock and contemplated the concentric circles of pain emanating from the two outside toes on each foot. I know, I’m wearing sandals, but they are not my usual flip-flops, so I had blisters on all four toes. Just the beginning, as I would be forced into closed shoes later up north.

Here is a video of the “Ear of Dionysus,” who it is said could eavesdrop on prisoners held captive in this cave by way of its extraordinary acoustics:

We found a laundry service in Siracusa and washed our clothes. It is run by a friendly American woman who has the most handsome bachelor clients. Decent occupation. We followed Fred’s recommendation for food shopping and found great salami, cheeses, olives, bread, and wine all in one store for our post-ruins picnic. And speaking of tasting flavors entirely up the cheeks, we had unforgettable mojitos with giant fresh mint leaves lining the glass at a cool little music club. Maybe I should tell Fred? It seems odd that Syracuse was not on my radar before. Just a fantastic place.

There are no billboards in the countryside or the old city centers…imagine! The beauty is everywhere, unobstructed. We stopped in Taormina, built on cliffs that rise high above the sea. As Fred confirms, the many tourists do not spoil the gorgeous setting or diminish the charm of this city, even on an overcast day:

Martha had quite a bit of trouble getting us to the ferry in Messina that carries cars over to the tip of the mainland’s boot. She kept insisting that we had arrived, but there was no indication of a ferry there. We finally figured something out, though we were entering the port at the exit and had to be directed by helpful personnel to the waiting area. The ferry wasn’t till 8:00 pm, so the darkness continued through our arrival on the mainland a half-hour later. Martha knows when it’s dark and had her tricks ready for us.

Love,

Sandy

Brazil Dispatch 30

2010-10-01T07:44:00.001-07:00

So I did end up checking out a Canadian-model bilingual pre-school in Natal at which to volunteer. The place is sparkling new and looks very Scandinavian with its white tiles and colorful furnishings. I attended several sessions of the three-year-olds. I was interested to see what they were like, having been familiar with four and five-year-olds at Blue Rock School. I found several things problematic, yet interesting: the Brazilian teacher, whose English is excellent, never asked me to sing songs or tell nursery rhymes to the children, as I offered; the children seemed much more adverse to having a stranger there than my experience with their American counterparts, though I could see that they were not amused to have yet another person speaking English to them. They could understand some of the English, but never spoke it. They told me I should speak Portuguese because it’s easier, and worried if I had someone at home who could speak it! Then when I did mix some Portuguese in, they thought I talked ‘like a baby’ with my funny accent and incorrect genders. Another contrast with their American counterparts: they are more dexterous with small motor skills - one boy was about to tie his shoes! The girls went off to ballet class, all changing into tights, tutus and ballet slippers (labor intensive) while the boys went off to judo. The teacher has two great assistants for the twelve children and they all play independently so very well – something I try not to interrupt – that I simply wasn’t needed there. I basically was driving all the way from Cotovelo Beach to laboriously pick up plastic blocks in the heat, so I decided to suspend my volunteering for now, having added my wonderfully fun Portuguese for Foreigners class to my “schedule.”

My Portuguese professor, Marcelo, lived in Chapel Hill, NC for six years getting his Ph.D. in linguistics. His English, with a mix of the British accent he studied and the North Carolina accent he picked up, is hilarious. He was the perfect addition to a party Newton and I threw for our international friends. Marcelo told the class that American drivers are so careful that in NC he used to step to the edge of the curb as if about to cross the street just to watch the drivers stop! My friend Maria Candida had observed the same thing in Florida, except there the drivers already stopped a block away! (In Brazil, drivers all have the right of way, so one can see old ladies running for their lives to avoid turning cars at every intersection – it’s pathetic, especially since I’m one of them.) We Portuguese students never tire of hearing the names of each other’s uncles and grandmothers as we go through a grammar drill: Satish, Andreas, Shio, Ivan, Yenny, Malmoud…or about our daily schedules, the foods we like, or the fact that Brazilians often marry their first cousins, etc. The casualness with which Marcelo brings the lesson and lets it unfurl spontaneously in the group is just perfect. He adds in plenty of slang and vernacular, with gems such as “burracracia” - combining the word for donkey, which is also the word for stupid, with the usual ending for bureaucracy! This is a Brazilian university in the northeast, so the casualness is ingrained. Two times in a row we were locked out of the classroom, with Marcelo and all of us waiting for the person with the key to arrive; finally, the guy and his maintenance entourage came lumbering down the hallway at an inhumanly slow pace!

I had quite a harrowing day last week, beginning at lunch on our front porch. I got ‘burned’ by a gigantic poisonous caterpillar. He started at my left heel, but by the time I had dashed some unknown, slightly stinging thing away, the side of my right foot and my right ring finger were also beginning to swell and turn purple. As you can see in the photo, we had quite a jolt when we saw what it was. The branch-like tentacles are like tiny medieval weapons. The caterpillar is about 3-1/2” long and about 1” wide.Newton picked him up on a stick and threw him away down the road. The caretaker was away, which explains why this monster from the neighbor’s cashew tree had not been spotted and swept away already. As the pain and swelling increased, Newton decided to go check about this “taturana” on the internet, and found out there were 6 fatal cases on record. We decided to go for an antidote, but while Newton was getting info and directions to the specific hospital for this, I went out to the carport for more air. Then I got faint and sat down. When Newton came out, I had fainted and fallen over on the stone ground, resulting in a huge purple goose-egg on my forehead. He panicked, thinking I keeled over from the venom! I managed to avoid another fainting spell en route to the hospital by rocking back and forth like a crazy person, saying “OK…OK…OK.” We had to stop for gas quickly and the attendant just said to pay on the way back after seeing me rocking in the car with the big forehead! I continued this anti-fainting strategy while in the waiting room at the hospital. Newton left to park the car and some folks in front of me turned to ask what had happened (to make a person act so strangely?). Getting mixed-up, I said a “tartaruga” instead of “taturana” had gotten me in three places. This means turtle and they are not poisonous, so weirdness reigned! Their puzzlement led them to ask Newton upon his return, and he set them straight. The hospital had no antidote, though this caterpillar in the northeast is not as lethal as its cousin in the south of Brazil. They gave me an I.V. for the pain. The I.V. was out of place and my arm was swelling up with the solution, which made me faint again – apparently after a mighty convulsion that scared Newton all over again. The wailing fisherman who had been bitten by a fish didn’t help my concentration! Finally, after they lifted my dead weight to lie down on a gurney and gave me oxygen, I began to feel better. Ten days later, now the swelling has gone down significantly except in my finger, which is still rather numb but beginning to itch, which is a good sign; the purple burn dots are turning into little raised blisters. As the hospital said, time is the only solution.

In the meantime, we have been living in our paradise, continuing to be interrupted by passing cement mixers and bull dozers as the construction proceeds across the street. Even though many coconut trees have been knocked over and a gigantic pile of this debris piled up across the road - prominently featured during our meals on the front porch - a tree strategically hides this pile when I walk out on the balcony of a morning and greet the surviving beauty there.

I have the loveliest, most fun female dentist here. I told her I like the fact that I actually kiss my dentist! She was surprised to learn that people don’t kiss each other on each cheek in the US. I said we shake hands with our dentists. She prefers the kissing!

Newton ran a 5-kilometer race on a Saturday morning in Natal. Even though they gave him an electronic chip to tie to his shoe, his stats were never offered on the website set up for the event; he is not sure what his time was, especially relative to the winner. But he enjoyed training a bit beforehand and participating. There were many people running also a 10K and a 25K race.

A very odd item appeared in the local news: a woman dropped her boyfriend off at work early one morning in the city and two robbers - one with a gun – came to rob her in the car. Natal is still one of the safest cities in Brazil, so this is not a common event. After taking her purse, the robber with the gun rode off on a bike. The woman hit the accelerator and ran him down, killing him. All the mixed responses to the story ran through my mind, until I learned that the age of the robber was just 15. Disturbing.

We will bid this wondrous, crazy place farewell for three weeks when we take off soon for Sicily by rental car, then Athens for business, then Newton to Poland for business and me to Herford, Germany to visit Anke, my family’s year-long exchange student in Tulsa in 1964! Newton will join us in Herford for the weekend before we fly back home. I’m airing out the fall clothes and checking for mold, faded lines, bug holes and the odd larvae nest. The hard part: I’m going to have to give up flip-flops and stuff my feet into those closed shoes again…NO!!!!!!!!

Love,

Sandy

Brazil Dispatch 29

2010-08-24T12:59:00.001-07:00

The first night back in my ocean-breezy bed after a month of travel, I dreamed that I was floating, but not in a good way. I was lost. I dreamed that I didn’t know where I was or even who I was, exactly. It was good to wake up to my sunny, palmy view through the mosquito net, my stone floor, and the mirror. I was home! Let the re-integration begin.

Our month-long trip served the aspect of myself that I inherited from my mother: wanting to be in the middle of a party. Back on Cotovelo Beach, I can indulge the aspect of myself that I inherited from my father: wanting to have still, beauty-drenched moments. What is missing is an airport/airplane gene.

Back to the foliage and the foibles of Brazil! The first sight to capture our attention after landing was a huge dent in the trunk lid of the car as we met up with our caretaker, Marcos, at the airport. He explained some unlikely timing whereby the car was mysteriously damaged while he took some minutes to buy one of those mosquito-zapping, rechargeable tennis rackets, as requested by Newton. When we reached the house, the news was that the downstairs bathroom flusher had broken the day before when the maid had come (with her nine-year-old daughter) to clean and cook. Besides the gallons of water that had gushed out of the bathroom wall, there was more pouring down the inside of the wall and flooding the cesspool outside the gate. The dining room ceiling and floor outside the bathroom were wet. I was home alone when little explosions began bursting from inside the increasingly hot wall. We called the handyman. He could only come a couple of days later, so we turned off the electricity for that area, which was all of the downstairs except the office, plugged in the refrigerator and freezer with long extension cords to the office, and cooked dinner by candlelight. The only way to change a flushing mechanism in this house is to break the brick/cement wall. There went the dining room. But the leak was from further up, so there went part of the wall in our upstairs bathroom, as well. The really “Nordestino” part of it is: the handyman and Marcos finished the job and sealed up the (very wet) wall, plaguing our dining room with the unmistakable and enduring smell of mildew…and leaving the upstairs toilet in a new, now-leaking state. The water bill was about US$70. We’re pulling for the added plumbing tape and some exceptional flushing methods to bring the water bill down.

But then there was the paradise of my hammock again! I was reading 2666 by the Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño. This book won prizes and was on many Best of 2008 lists (in a remarkable translation). It does represent a re-thinking of the novel and the language is truly astounding, but it has a brutality that makes it tricky to recommend. I guess it’s those more than two hundred murders of young women in a fictional version of Juarez, Mexico, recounted with coroner-like detail, that give one pause. I asked my bona fide literary friend from college, Peruvian-American author and former editor of the Washington Post’s Book World, Marie Arana, for a private paragraph-long review of this momentous and disturbing work: “It's a labyrinth. A catastrophe. And yet, he takes us where he wants us to go. And so, it's a masterpiece, for sure. But to me, it's like a Mahler symphony or Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet---messy, harsh, with tender interludes, and bewitchingly human.”

I tried soothing my furrowed brow after that book with my beloved Alice Munro’s Open Secrets short story collection. Then it was time to tackle some pulp, the heavy volume of Dan Brown’s latest: The Lost Symbol. This is basically a hack screenplay that passes for a novel, shamelessly formulaic. One can rush through it as there is no language to savor – it is written in the vernacular! But for all the shock of bad literature after good literature, it was fun hearing about the Masonic Founding Fathers and their mark upon our nation’s capital. At the moment I’m reading about the Puritans who founded Boston in Sarah Vowell's informative and funny The Wordy Shipmates.

As Richard Russo put it, “reading is a primary reward in life."

We innocently drove to our favorite pizza place, Curva do Vento, when we got back in our groove. It is a small restaurant/bar on a tiny windy corner of land next to a high-rise construction site. In a shared Twilight Zone moment, Newton and I rubbed our eyes and looked again: there was nothing but rubble there. Newton found the lost Curva on Facebook and learned the new location. We were astounded at the owner’s story: apparently after some palms were greased, the builder of the high-rise was able to take over the corner illegally, which was unsalable city property. The Curva owner was informed that he had forty minutes to clear out before the bull dozers arrived to raze the place. That’s what I mean by ‘foibles.’ He is suing for both the illegal sale and inadequate notice to evacuate.

We enjoyed the World Cup final with a big group of ex-pats that included not only the Dutch locals but the Spanish locals, as well! It was a very orange and red occasion, and just as jovial and good natured as the Holland-Brazil game had been. We wouldn’t miss a shindig with our international crowd of friends; these are always fun.

Our favorite bohemian spot recently reopened, Buraco da Catita. This is basically a street corner in a bedraggled section of downtown where a great mixed crowd gathers on Friday nights to hear chorinho music – the ‘sad’ samba that is “a little cry.” There is a corner bar there that has expanded and the side street has been closed off to traffic now.

Here’s the way Brazilians are sad:

We also heard some good local blues at “Feijão & Rock,” meaning black beans and Rock-n-roll. This happens on occasional Sunday afternoons at the large tree-filled property of one our Blues-playin’ friends.

I am relieved to report that we still have a coconut tree field across the street, even though next to the cashew bush barely visible on the right there is construction of a makeshift wall, a makeshift road, the beginnings of a structure (the office to sell the future condominiums), and all manner of trucks, bull dozers, saws, drills and shouts filling the morning air. We have to lean out the right side of the balcony to see what is going on, so I am still grateful every morning for the coconut tree “mural” in front of the house that I see walking out our bedroom door.

Our Brasileirinho trees are blooming for the first time since we’ve lived here – what a surprise: blossoms whose petals sometimes fall and accentuate the stone walk with bright accents of persimmon!

And then there’s Saturn in the western evening sky, just huge, brilliant and actually oval-shaped, which qualifies as seeing the rings with the naked eye, even if the space between the rings and the planet is not visible. I mistook Jupiter over the ocean for a smaller planet, having seen it a couple of years back in a closer orbital position, as big as the current Saturn. But Jupiter is rising every night and still dwarfing the surrounding stars, even if it’s further away this time.

We took a 27^th anniversary trip to a simple island-like peninsula to the north, Galinhos. After parking and arriving on the ferry, we were offered donkey-taxi rides, but our expensive-but-simple pousada (inn) was walking distance on the beach of the salt lake along one side of town. The ocean side had a beach that turned west (just picture that jutting corner on the map in the northeast of Brazil), thereby avoiding heavy wind and offering a most spectacular ocean sunset. The almost-full moon had a gigantic halo around it, and Saturn was outshining the beach lampposts over this western bend in the ocean. A small group of boys, probably around 8 years old, were practicing both their caporeira front and back flips in the sand (the Brazilian martial art) AND Michael Jackson moon walking and pelvic thrusts! It was so entertaining!

We took a boat trip to the salt mine and the dunes on the peninsula, passing Huckleberry Finn and Tom sawyer on the way:

We were a bit disappointed about the food and the weather on Galinhos, so decided to start back to Natal around 11:00 Sunday morning and have at least a good lunch in Natal. By the time we waited for the ferry, boarded alone, put-putted away, stopped, turned around to go back for more people at the dock, waited while the people – a band – loaded their collection of gigantic speakers, amp, drums, guitars, stands, cymbals, backpacks and plastic bags for about a half-hour in the rain from the high deck to the boat next to some precarious stairs below, and then put-putted to the parking lot, we were already feeling hungry, having had breakfast at 8:00. Just as we spotted a lunch possibility in one of the towns we passed and were making a U-turn on the highway, our friends Lorraine and Tom called to invite us for a big barbecue at their house. We arrived an hour and forty minutes later; after quick hellos and hugs to the group, we raced to the bathroom and then begged for food. Happy Anniversary, Newt!

Newton bought a real movie screen and installed it near the ceiling on the living room wall to make a home theater. We have been drawn in by the incredible texture of the music of New Orleans via the first season of HBO’s Tremé, by The Wire creator, David Simon. The title refers to a musical neighborhood in New Orleans, and the series begins with Katrina. The musicians involved really make you sit up and take notice. We also had never seen AMC’s Mad Men until Newton downloaded the first three seasons. We are absolutely haunted by the portrayal of that mid-century disappointment and disillusion. We also downloaded some classic comedy films and have had some good laughs via Howard Hawks, among others. Our nephew Michel was in town with his girlfriend and they came over to see Buster Keaton’s wonderful Seven Chances.

I have begun a free course on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at the Federal University here, Portuguese for Foreigners. It is pretty basic, but affords me the chance to fill in some gaps since I never studied the language formally. Also, since most of the students have not been speaking it even badly and sparsely for 28 years as I have, I now feel like I can speak pretty well! This gives me more confidence, which is the first rule of speaking a foreign language. I’m not going to become a paragon of Brazil’s native tongue in this lifetime, but this is clearly going to help. The professor is young and relaxed, and the group of 18 is a wonderful mix, including a Turk, three academics from India, a wild-haired physics researcher from Russia, other South Americans and Europeans. I’m the only American.

I’m starting to investigate volunteer possibilities with children, so will see what fits. I wouldn’t want to be too busy to lovingly hang the laundry and then lovingly fold it and return the items to their proper places…the small joy-filled accomplishments of having time. Not to mention reading and writing. And after a too-frantic life, I call it all ‘resting.’

My Mother got sent off to the dreaded Methodist Manor Nursing Center she was hoping to avoid, so the family is feeling heavy-hearted about this. Her painful arthritic shoulders necessitate more help for transitioning into her wheel chair than is offered in Assisted Living, so her safety was in jeopardy. My sister Janet was able to line up some excellent Hospice care to show up several times a week and keep their very expert eyes on her pain, her quality of life, and on the Manor staff. I am so thankful to my sisters, my brother-in-laws and nephews who have been able to show up and offer some hard labor and moral support to this most deserving of human beings. I love you, Mother.

Love,

Sandy

New York June 2010 Dispatch

2010-08-07T06:47:00.001-07:00

Back in 1977, I was divorced and living in Cleveland because I had gone there for my ex-husband’s job. Now I am not a Cleveland-basher. The city served me well, not only because we lived in an old downtown neighborhood being restored, full of the most interesting, creative people - but also because there was an out-of-the-way home textile company there that hired me – with my degree in English literature – to be a designer. This happened because it was not New York, and professional designers were not knocking on the company’s door in droves. This firm had a New York office and was run by a notorious woman with a Cruella De Vil-type streak of white hair next to her widow’s peak. She was sometimes called the Black Widow Spider Lady. But enough about her. Let’s just say that after 4 years of designing and coloring and printing textiles and visiting New York pretty often, I said, “Why not consider a move to New York?” A co-worker was getting married in New Jersey and had asked me to be in the wedding, so I decided that I would just toss the idea of my future up into the air with a sense of openness…and try to get some interviews in the city after the wedding. I mention the Black Widow Spider Lady because a couple of the three interviews I got that first day were at high powered, very respected textile print firms that had no openings; the equally notorious stylists just wanted to hear some inside dope on Cruella. By day two, I had a job, and a good one. So, thanks for tossing an answer back to me, universe!

For me, Manhattan remains tinged by my magical beginnings there. It’s not that I didn’t have “lonely crowd” moments or that the textile industry didn’t suck outside of the artists, but my gang of friends was spectacular and we have many stories we still love to rehash! And the avenues still offer up random memories at any given turn. And when we stay with Elise, we can run out the door and grab…absolutely anything within a few blocks. And when we visit friends in the city or the tri-state area around the city, there is something magical about them, too.

At the end of our month-long trip, Newton and I had a short whirlwind stay in New York. Blurry as it was, it was good. I saw my friend since 1978, Carolyn, and her cat, Kayli. Newton and I took a day to drive upstate and downsize our storage bin in order to downsize the yearly bill. My friend Lucia had lined up the 19-year-old son of the Blue Rock School caretaker to help us: the handsome, smart, able and strong Lucas. So he was the first bit of good luck, then the second bit was when the storage company had a smaller bin available across the hall from our current one. Additional good luck allowed everything to fit in the smaller space! Lucas was adept at visualizing the most efficient configurations of furniture and objects and then brute-pressing boxes ever higher. Apart from the good points, we were appalled to see that during the installation of a new roof, our entire bin had been pummeled with clods of dirt. Just filthy. The manager volunteered to vacuum the upholstered pieces while we dusted off the boxes and objects. Not amusing. And worse, there had been a little water damage before the roof replacement. Wouldn’t you know that Elise had requested we bring back the box containing our old photo albums, and that was one of the items with water damage. She has not had the courage to open it up yet and assess the condition of our irreplaceable old photos. She also requested Newton’s bike, which she has since been riding around the city.

Our dinner date in Nyack afterwards with Lucia, the kindergarten teacher, and Claudia, the office assistant/everything else at Blue Rock School, was a casual one. Newton and I were covered with that roof dirt and slightly travel-stupid. But there they were across the table from us – two friends forever. I look forward to more time, less dirt, and better food next time!

The next day was a trip to Easton Connecticut with our Manhattan gang I referred to earlier. I met David in 1978 in my textile studio when he was a visiting designer from London. He stayed and became friends with my old Cleveland friend, Joe, who had moved to New York, and on and on – oh, the stories! David’s wife Helen was one of my favorite textile designers and is now an expert interior designer. Their daughter Amelia is 10. David is the last remaining designer I know of in cotton prints. The industry is about over in the US.

Joe and Guadalupe, recently retired, are waiting for the market to improve before selling their Manhattan apartment and dividing their time between Cleveland and Buenos Aires. Nancy Taylor is the most traveled of the group, or of most any group. Driving them up to David and Helen’s new house in our rental car meant a couple of extra hours of conversation. Nancy had recently returned from Syria and is now involved with a project that sends refugee Iraqi students from Syria to universities in the US. She is also involved in a lost languages project, whereby speakers of near-extinct languages are tracked down.

My college and early New York roommate and her new husband Steve had accidently discovered that their new friends, David and Helen, were also friends of mine. We could not believe such a coincidence! Karen McDonald or “Mac,” as I have always known her, was there! We decided it had been around 30 years since we had seen each other, and it’s true, we were pretty inseparable that day.

The setting was idyllic, like a country cottage in England! Only the duo of David and Helen could make a place so comfortable and lovely, inside and out:

The next day was the New Jersey wedding of Newton’s former colleague and long-time friend, Joe. The setting was not unlike David and Helen’s cottage – just idyllic.

The groom was getting married for the first time at age 49. We just loved the way he smiled his big, shy smile, answered a resounding “yes!” to the wedding vows, and later threw himself unabashedly into battling the planned choreography of the dance with the bride. The beautiful bride wore killer red shoes and had the great idea of offering the guests comfy little Chinese slippers at the reception!

We shared a table with friends we’ve known since 1983 from Newton’s old company. This marked the end of the single guys, at last!

The next day was last-minute shopping for our inevitable list, happy hour at Elise’s neighborhood Mexican restaurant with Elise and her lively friend visiting from Miami, and off to catch our plane to São Paulo.

The next day we caught our connecting flight to Natal. My feet were swollen, my skin was dry, my fingernails were breaking, and my bodily systems were confused. It was time to be back home again. Newton, who had thrown China into the month’s mix, was fine.

Love,

Sandy

Cruise Dispatch

2010-07-30T13:38:00.001-07:00

We made it onto our cruise ship, the Carnival Splendor, without Jake’s “rum runners” being detected when our luggage was x-rayed. These were sturdy plastic bags with caps that can be filled with liquor using the most adorable little funnel, then packed surreptitiously in suitcases to ‘beat the system.’ Jake discovered this solution to the cruise’s edict against bringing liquor on board, though we were allowed to carry on one bottle of wine each. This did not prevent Elise, Jake, and his girlfriend, Larissa, from sampling the ‘drink of the day’ that first evening and entering the “Mixology” contest. Each of them devised and named a special drink from a long list of available ingredients: Elise, the Banana Boat Float; Jake, the Sweet Pine Splendor; and Larissa, the Frozen Beach. Both Elise and Larissa received notices in their rooms that night that they were finalists for the Mixology contest the next day. I complained to Jake that ‘Sweet Pine Splendor’ sounded more like a toilet cleaner than a drink. Elise and Larissa were told to show up at 12:30pm. We all arrived for the contest together, but when the other finalists did not appear, the activity director decided to let Jake’s toilet cleaner back in the contest. Elise’s drink wasn’t quite sweet enough and Larissa’s was too thick to drink, but Jake’s: just right. It even turned out green, so the pine part worked! He was the winner and the drink was available at any bar on the ship for the whole week.

Jake had woken up that morning with a terrible pain in his ankle from a jump off some ship stairway the night before. He couldn’t put any weight on it, so I called to see if he could have it looked at and get some crutches. The doctor wouldn’t be back till late afternoon and only a wheel chair was available till then, so a wheel chair was delivered to his door.

Now I’m not saying that his drink wouldn’t have won, but his arriving at the contest in that wheel chair may have softened the judges’ hearts! The contest was projected up on the huge screen by the pool and the video was replayed on cabin TV’s all week. Also, Jake’s name and his drink appeared in each daily info pamphlet for the week, so he was getting famous. The problem was, I gave him homeopathic arnica for the foot and it recovered before time to see the doctor, so no more wheel chair – and lots of explaining to people who recognized him! He won this hat, modeled after the ship’s chimney, and several drink coupons.

Our group started buying up Sweet Pine Splendors, which instantaneously appeared on many waiters’ trays. They went down very easily and swiftly, tasting basically like pineapple juice and rum, so before long we were exhibiting the effects:

I kept making Elise repeat the lines from “Titanic” in perfect accent: “There are not enough life boats on this ship”…“enough for the better half.”Jake had already won a nice load of money at the Texas Hold’em table in the ship’s casino the night before, even though he would lose half of it later – to the same guy. I will admit to dreading an affordable American cruise. I’m just not one for glitzy interiors, and this one superseded my wildest expectations with metallic pink polka dots closing in on me in every lobby. To add to the sensory onslaught, there were loud announcements being made in our room, loud music in the main pool area, and activity directors who shouted out at intervals, “ARE WE ON VACAAATION?” to which plenty of willing celebrants shouted back. I wore some handy ear plugs when I passed through that area, but had to venture to the outer decks to replace the pink polka dots with the hazy seascape. I could envision getting into Cuba from Brazil, a cruise on the North Sea or to Croatia, perhaps? I actually crossed the Atlantic in 1967 on a 9-day Holland-American Line cruise. That had no polka dots or shouting;

some avant-garde people enacted a “happening” by throwing something overboard in a most serious fashion! But this cruise fit well into Newton’s LA trade show schedule and my family was loving everything just fine, so I willingly acclimated. Besides, we shared an assigned table in the dining room with a most elegant and friendly family from Spain, and had a very sharp and funny Czech waiter, Martin, who participated whole-heartedly in the waiter-entertainment segments. What we liked best about him was that he moved so

rapidly serving bread, drinks and plates, he would just say “you’re welcome,” or “my pleasure” as he set items down and moved on, before “thanks” was even possible!

We made three stops in Mexico over the week. The first one was Puerto Vallarta. We were suckers for the expensive taxi at the dock, which whisked us past wh-what? Every known American chain restaurant, including Chili’s, of Mexican food fame. We arrived at Playa Los Muertos on an overcast weekday, so it was not crowded. We chose a simple beach restaurant and enjoyed really excellent food, such as this shrimp ceviche:

Too bad they doubled the price when they brought the check as if they had not quoted anything less…so our first day off the ship we were obviously wearing “Kick Me” signs on our foreheads. I found a beautiful tote bag. I do love this photo of me going wild over the colors and designs and my Sugar Daddy pulling dollar bills out of his wallet! I bought the wide-striped one in my hand:

Our second stop was simply wonderful: the town of Mazatlán. I had read online that one could forgo the extremely touristy beaches here and head straight for the old center of the city which was being restored. Besides the art school, galleries, beautiful cathedral and nice little restaurants, there were several lush plazas, feeding my starvation for green from which I had been suffering since Las Vegas. This reinforced me well to head back to the ship and face the pink polka dots!

And we met this reason-to-live Mexican girl in the cathedral:

We had left a message for Elise, Jake and Larissa to meet us at a locals-only restaurant in Mazatlán at 3:00 since they stayed up late on the ship and slept late. After lunch, we were lucky to flag an open pick-up truck/taxi with padded benches along the sides. He could take all five of us to the puerto (we had to return to the ship by 5:00pm). We had a rollicking ride when he turned up the rock-n-roll favorites to which neighboring bus drivers and motorists heartily sang along with us! After quite a stretch of time, the astute Larissa asked the question, “Is he taking us to the airport instead of the port?” Sure enough: the aeropuerto. And we had no luggage? The driver turned a new direction and flew. We boarded the ship at 5:55 with the gangplank at our heels and the ship beginning to move immediately. Jake’s fifteen minutes of fame was enhanced by our having been paged beforehand, just in case we had returned to the ship without our cards passing through the machine.

Here we are, missing the boat as they say:

Our third stop was in Cabo San Lucas, a manufactured resort like Cancun, set beside a beautiful stretch of rock formations and beach. This required a ferry ride from the ship and was the shortest stop of all, so we were determined to return to the ship in a timely way. After enjoying the beauty and witnessing intrepid Newton and Elise sample the ice cold water, we headed back in our hired boat to the ferry dock one hour ahead of boarding time. Because the entire cruise population ashore decided on the same timing, all returned late in the end. We did receive special congratulations upon embarking for not being the last ones that day!

Here is the Carnival Splendor:

Our time on board was spent eating, reading in deck chairs, soaking in hot tubs, pretending to be interested in buying expensive paintings to get free champagne, watching the early World Cup soccer games, playing Boggle (how many words can you make in all directions from these scrambled letters in three minutes?), playing organized trivia games, attending the Broadway-like musicals, dancing in the disco, and listening to many types of live music. The motion of the ship was strange and sometimes headache-inducing, as was the smoke we tolerated in the piano bar to hear the indomitable singer/piano player/comedian and to partake in the most happening nightlife with our kids.

We met a wonderful old man at a trivia game. He was sharp and informed and a great conversationalist. He had been a career sailor; then came the divorce; then the dog died, so his children suggested he try a cruise. This was his twelfth cruise this year, and he took twenty in 2009! I think he likes the sea.

The ship’s crew came from every-which-where, though Indonesia was the most represented. We had vacationed in Bali during our year in Japan in the late ‘80’s and already knew how gentle and lovely Indonesians typically are. Their faces would really light up when we said we had been to Bali and Jakarta. The most talented dancer in the musicals was a darling Indonesian who looked as if he had been born dancing! I am sure they were responsible for the ingenious towel-folding that left a different animal guarding our cabin each night:

The crew’s assignment on the ship is of such duration that the ship goes to Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska in tandem for the sake of the crew’s sanity (this from the Trivia mariner).

By Friday night, I would say I was completely in the spirit of the cruise. There was a rowdy contest held in the large ‘Moroccan’ lounge where teams of four (five in our case) competed to arrive at the dance floor first with the required action or item, waiving the sign with their team number for the M.C. to call out for scoring. I flew to the dance floor and landed in a splits, as requested, though the M.C. kept looking the other direction and didn’t call out our number 16 till I leaned all the way over to the floor… always graceful and dignified:

The last night Elise, Jake and Larissa stayed up all night with their new friends, among them a bar captain who spirited a bottle of rum into their room. To avoid losing his job when a cruise official arrived about the noise complaints, he hid in the bathroom! Very Marxian, I thought, as in Brothers. Here is Elise in a borrowed sport coat awaiting sunrise:

My best friend, Lenna, just went on a cruise of the Black Sea and the Dnieper River in Ukraine. It was sponsored by an alumni association of America and Canada and offered various lectures and excursions about Ukrainian language, cooking, poetry, history and culture. They boarded at the foot of the “Potemkin” steps in Odessa and ended up in Kiev, the beautiful city of Lenna’s late father. As I told her after reading the fascinating and very moving account of her trip, my cruise dispatch would offer the ridiculous to her sublime: (At least Jake and Newton refused to do this!)

Next, my beloved New York.

Love,

Sandy

Las Vegas/Los Angeles Dispatch

2010-07-21T08:06:00.001-07:00

I had several days in Las Vegas with Jake, his beautiful girlfriend, Larissa, and roommate, Charlie, both before and after our family cruise from LA to Mexico. The house was looking pretty good, especially after I did a marathon garbage and recycle haul to the curb to open up space on the kitchen counter and in the dining room. They had organized everything, just never knew which day was for recycle pick up, being very late sleepers. The house was surprisingly clean and neat, and I only succumbed to scrubbing the kitchen out of a rare compulsive flare-up. Larissa is there for the summer between graduate school semesters in Idaho. There are no jobs available, so Jake has deemed her his ‘personal assistant!’

It was a relief to have a computer again and catch up on e-mails and news, both after Tulsa and after the cruise. Thanks, Larissa, for the use of yours.

Jake was playing in a preliminary tournament at the World Series of Poker venue – the Rio – and only had some minutes left after the dinner break before running out of chips. Larissa and I went in to watch. Either because he only had a few chips and not much chance of staying in, or because he has discovered that friendly conversation is more disconcerting to fellow-players than the studied seriousness of a poker face, he was in a very relaxed and communicative mode at the table. Our son is easy-going and level-headed and has great powers of concentration – a good professional poker profile!

In this case, his loss was my gain, as this freed him up for a little hike, sushi, gambling on electronic screens with free drinks at a dive, Italian food, and playing games of trivia, Boggle and Anagrams. Charlie’s brother, a Boggle aficionado, came to visit. He managed to beat Jake at the Boggle word scrambling game. Perverse as it may seem for a Mommy, I am always happy when someone can beat Jake at a game, as if there is some balance to life…or perhaps it is just out of personal sour grapes, since my record is dismal. Jake prevailed as the invincible Anagrams champ. He stole ‘nave’ from me and eventually made ‘naiveté.’ I only stand a chance at trivia, and that is if the questions are not about teen TV shows from the ‘80’s on.

I always opened my guestroom shades in the morning for light and a glimpse at a sparse green tree across the street. There was an adolescent boy shooting baskets next door with headphones on – obviously an MP3 player in his pocket. Is it just me, or is there a season to everything and a time for every purpose under heaven, turn, turn, turn? I could only think of my father who, before taking up tennis later in life and becoming a seniors champion in Oklahoma, came home from work and shot baskets every evening into a hoop he had mounted on a tree. He could sink twelve Zen-like swishers in a row, and even taught me the secret: “See the ball making an arc right through the middle of the basket; concentrate on this.” Chances are, there is music that is appropriate to shooting baskets or enhances one’s ability, now that listening and shooting is even possible. I guess I should be impressed that the kid wasn’t speaking on a cell phone. I’m one of those people who thinks when one goes to a restaurant with friends or family, for example, it is the time for eating and conversing with them, turn, turn, turn, rather than the time to speak via cell phone with somebody who’s not there, convenience and emergencies aside. I sound like a dinosaur, but I’m sticking to my belief that I’ve got this right, turn, turn, turn.

Jake, Larissa and I drove for four hours across the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles on a Saturday to meet up with Newton, who had flown in from China the night before, and Elise, who had arrived from New York around the same time on Friday night. Together at last. I get a mental picture of far-flung points on a globe and marvel at those moments when we arrive in the same spot. My friend Rossana in Natal, who used to live in LA, gave me all sorts of great information about where to go and what to see there. This led us to Santa Monica for an absolutely great evening. Strolling along beautiful Main Street after dark, we started out in a youthful, semi-rowdy bar, had a great dinner outside in the gorgeous World Café patio, then ran into some guys in Beatle wigs on the sidewalk in front of a very lively bar, about to begin their next set. Elise and Jake were die-hard Beatles fans in elementary school, reading the biographies, collecting memorabilia, having a multi-age Beatles-theme slumber party. I took them to Radio City Music Hall to see Ringo, though the performer was a mystery to them till we got there. I remember their asking me if I thought they could stand up and scream when he came out, and just as I was saying, “Well, let’s see what the crowd does…” Ringo came out and I bolted up, screaming my head off. Newton and I took the kids to an annual Beatles Fest at a hotel in New Jersey. It was one of our favorite days, ever. Later, a Paul McCartney concert blew us all away. We followed the wigs into to the Santa Monica bar! Now, at that New Jersey Beatles Fest years before there was a fascinating contest to see who could replicate the sound of the Beatles most faithfully. A group of pudgy middle-aged men won with a dead-on rendition of “I’ll Be Back Again.” Newton and I love a local Natal group, Mad Dogs, who have performed their own, very different original interpretations of Beatles’ songs four times at the annual Liverpool Beatles Fest. But these guys in wigs at some crowded Irish bar in Santa Monica wowed us with song after song in nearly exact Beatle renditions. The crowd was extremely happy about this and sang along, one and all. We made friends with a middle-aged couple from New Zealand; a young man came up to me at the surprisingly early closing hour of the bar to say I had the most beautiful daughter he had ever seen; it was good to be together again.

On Sunday morning we had a 50th birthday breakfast for Newton at IHOP (since the kids hadn’t seen him since before his April birthday). They gave him a new car radio, our previous Brazilian one having been stolen, wrapped in the only gift wrap at Jake’s house and embellished with a balloon dog, courtesy of the IHOP waitress. Newt went to return his rental car to the airport and catch a shuttle to the cruise ship. Now was our chance to sight-see. Elise and Newton had driven around LA on Saturday before we arrived and had seen the Hollywood Boulevard/Sunset Boulevard sights. See photo:

I had been to Los Angeles once when I was three years old. I remember best the upside-down green bucket I sat on in the middle of the front seat between my parents, in order to see out. This was clearly the pre-seat-belt era, and I’m happy to say that my father was a careful driver. I can also remember someone commenting that “this is Lucille Ball’s house,” and some distant cousins staring at my green bucket. That’s it. The kids and I had to be at the cruise ship by 3:30. Disregarding all other sources of info available, we simply plugged “Hollywood Boulevard” into Jake’s GPS in Culver City and followed the Australian woman’s voice that Jake had selected for verbal directions. This put us on a generally non-descript street for a solid hour – unless one considers frequent pawn shops, endless traffic lights and a total of two attractive Deco buildings descriptive. We gave up on Hollywood Boulevard, considering our time constraints, and plugged some celebrity’s address in Beverly Hills into the GPS – at least something specific. We passed amazing purple trees. Finally, we were curving upwards around lovely green hills and stopped to admire the view at an overlook. Across the canyon we could make out the outline of smog-ridden downtown LA and the lovely, sprawling houses further up that must belong to the celebs. The problem was, our time was running out, so we got back in the car, plugged in the cruise address in the Port of Long Beach, and hit those famous multi-multi-lane freeways. We arrived at just the right time, parked and boarded. But the cruise is a separate dispatch.

On our return to Los Angeles early the following Sunday, we all headed to a hotel in Anaheim, where Newton had to attend a professional trade show that week. Elise, Jake and Larissa were no longer interested in sight-seeing, especially with Disneyland a couple of blocks away, so my knowledge of LA remains only slightly less sketchy than in 1953. Newton went to pick up a rental car and two minutes after driving away, got rammed in the passenger side by a guy running a red light. Newton then hit a car waiting at the left-turn light in the on-coming lane, which in turn hit the car waiting behind it. He seemed to be all right, although now he is having some sessions with a chiropractor in Brazil for his neck. He was able to drive back to the rental car company and drive away in another car soon after, so we are big fans of Enterprise now. The two of us found a laundromat to catch up for the days ahead. Elise, Jake and Larissa could leave Disney Land and re-enter, so we had a great dinner on our last night all together before the kids returned to close Disneyland.

The next morning we headed out to Woodland Hills to see my niece April and family. We last saw her in 2004 with an infant, Ryan. Now he is six, and Addie, the most disarmingly charming extant four-year-old, has been added to the mix. Husband/Dad, Marty, builds sets for movies and TV shows. I got to see a video of the very dashing and smart Ryan playing with his ice hockey team. Addie and I had lots of fun playing with some miniscule dolls I brought from Brazil. After a while, the very open, imaginative and intelligent darling says to me, “You know, we talked a little bit and played a little bit, and then we became friends!” I also loved the moment when we were laughing and, having learned beforehand that I am her grandmother’s sister, she said, “You remind me of Grandma.” The girl simply steals one’s heart away with her openness…she is certainly related to her Great-grandmother Laurene, with whom she shares her middle name! Besides being a really sane mother, April is an accomplished horsewoman who even has a shot at the Olympics. She runs a stable in Topanga. We loved seeing the gorgeous views from her training ground and the beautiful horses, some of them hers and some, boarders.

April’s brother, my nephew Todd from Manhattan, happened to be in town on business with his two boys, Sam and Ethan, so we had a family reunion! Todd just published his first children’s book, How About a Kiss for Me, which he was reading to Ryan’s kindergarten class that day. Todd has been writing comic movie scripts (OK, some of them are just the hilarious annual Thanksgiving family video scripts that are more comic to us than to the general public) and children’s books for some time, so we are all thrilled for him. The group had an Italian dinner together in Topanga, joined by Mary, April and Todd’s niece and my grand-niece, who dances with four different dance companies in LA (but who is about to move and join a company in Chicago). I am a proud aunt and great-aunt.

Then Jake drove Larissa and me back across the desert in the dark to Vegas, and Elise stayed one more day to make a video for Newton’s company with the marketing consultant.

Oh yes, about the cruise…

Love,

Sandy

Tulsa ‘10 Dispatch

2010-07-12T09:49:00.001-07:00

Newton and I went to the São Paulo airport to catch our respective flights – one gate apart and with the same departure times – to China by way of New York and to Tulsa by way of Houston. Between check-in and immigration, we headed over to the next terminal hoping to see Elise arriving from Lima, Peru on the South American tour of American teen singer, Demi Lovato. “OK, we’ll wait till 8:00pm,” we said; then, “OK, we’ll wait three more minutes;” and finally “OK, we gotta go,” after which we walked backwards to the escalators, craning our necks all the while to see if she would appear. Alas, she did not. She later explained that she was on the ‘A’ team of the tour, meaning she traveled with Demi Lovato in order to videotape all the fans screaming upon Demi’s disembarkation from the flights. In this case, the entourage was then escorted a secret way to a VIP lounge, having been waived more or less through immigration and customs. Oo-la-la! It would be ten more days till we finally saw her in the USA.

I arrived in Houston at 5:10 am. As if landing at ‘George Bush Airport’ isn’t insult enough (OK, he looked a lot better later compared to his son, but he was never a favorite of mine), the first thing I see at an early-opening news/book stand is a display with a couple of copies of Sean Hannity’s book. More disgusting than the title was some outrageous lie for a sub-title. As I always do, I looked for books with an opposing view – which are displayed together in New York as a rule. Alas, there were none, so I noticed the clerk behind the counter was not looking in my direction and I grabbed the two books and flipped Sean Hannity’s smug little mug to the back. Now at least it was harder to ascertain what the two volumes were. On a roll, I came upon a more elaborate book store. There was Mitch Romney’s prominent mug, Karl Rove’s prominent mug, and, bigger than all of them, Glenn Beck’s mug above a particularly disturbing title and subtitle. I tried the flip-over maneuver on Glenn Beck’s book, but there he was, almost as huge, on the back cover. Then I looked again for books covering, uh, facts, perhaps, and saw none…until I finally discovered the new biography of Obama, The Bridge, tucked over on a shelf with only the binding showing. This, of course, provided me with a great way to cover up Glenn Beck’s face and make a small dent in the uneven offerings. We all try to do our part as citizens.

In defense of Houston’s airport, the bathroom was sparkling at 5:30am, unlike the JFK version where one arrives after an all-night flight to the 30^th year of continuous construction and a bathroom with yesterday’s filth. I also nearly died of gratitude for the breakfast taco of eggs and cheese with salsa from a little catsup packet. Heaven at 6:00am!

At last I made it to Tulsa and to the Methodist Manor and was standing in front of my beautiful, wonderful, sharp, funny, 95-year-old Mother. She was looking fine and doing very well, to my joy. We had fun together, whether eating those strange and wondrous Manor meals, running errands, seeing people, or just being together in her room. I slept on a combination of her reclining chair and a pallet on the floor.

Mother gave up her walker for a wheel chair when the arthritis in her shoulders caused too much pain for her to press into the walker. She ‘walks’ her wheel chair to meals and activities, keeping her legs strong; she often declines offers of a push, explaining that propelling herself is her exercise! She has a motorized wheel chair for the long haul to Bridge night. The staff continues to adore her, a true friend to each of them. They take pleasure in taking good care of such a positive, loving resident.

I ventured out on the Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend to find a library for internet access. While waiting for the library to open, I struck up a conversation with a darling 10-year-old boy. By the time they finally unlocked the doors, he had volunteered that he had almost died of spinal meningitis when a baby, that his uncle had caught it from him, and that he was doing 9^th grade math in the 5^th grade. His handsome openness and innocence reminded me of an Oklahoma I knew very well.

Speaking of which, I got to see some of my old schoolmates that very evening! Linda Butler Jones and Jimmy Walker from my junior high school put on a lovely party on a perfect Oklahoma summer night for several of us who were around. Here is Jimmy with Linda on the right and our classmate Lolly Turnbull Jones of Tulsa:

Jimmy moved to Texas during high school and proclaimed, when getting too elaborate over the evening’s arrangements, that Texans do not know the word ‘prudent.’ Let’s say he was generous-to-a-fault with the food and champagne. Here he is getting birthday kisses from Linda and Steve Reeves of Jefferson City, Missouri:

It was just a wonderful gathering, with 15 of us gabbing and gabbing from 6:00pm to 4:30am. No kidding. Our classmate, Bobby “Greenshoes” Parker, showed up to play his Tulsa blues for us. He has a cool new CD, “Keep Cool Little Baby.” Linda has her own private investigation agency. One of my favorite quotes of the trip was from her: “I meet all kinds of people, but they all have an elbow half-way up their arm.”

Here I am trying to remember something along with classmate Linda Roark Strummer, Tulsa, of international opera fame (I told her we were probably trying to remember what we had for lunch that day!):

Also pictured are Jimmy, Nikki Madeira Collins of Tulsa, and Stan Clark of Houston.

Jimmy and Linda: You are the best!

A morning walk and breakfast with my high school friends, Vivian Nemec and Jan Rogers Magee, was also hugely special. We decided we will reunite some day at Vivian’s lake house and continue our endless gab-fest. I can’t wait. Jan just moved her mother to the same section of the Methodist Manor, so is able to give Mother squeezes for me!

Meantime, back at the Manor, I joined Mother for the weekly Bingo session. Best of all was watching her quickly scan her own two cards PLUS the two cards of the somewhat challenged resident who counts on Mother to sit next to her and guide her through Bingo. Mother has that quick mind of a Bridge champ! At the end, we could go to the prize table in the order of most “Bingo’s.” I was very pleased to bring back three little plastic hanger/clothespins – perfect for a house without a dryer.

I picked up a bottle of white wine to keep in Mother’s little frig. I just needed a corkscrew. To Mother’s horror, I went to inquire (she was afraid that wine was not allowed, but I reminded her that even Methodists probably allow 80-year-olds to do what they wish). The front desk couldn’t help, as the only wine-drinking resident they knew of used wine from a box. I went back to the wine store where I received a simple corkscrew for free, as Oklahoma law allows them to sell only items with alcohol. I couldn’t get the cork to budge one millimeter. Then I wandered around with a long brown bag looking for a strong maintenance or security guy, promising Mother that I would not reveal my Manor connection to her! The security woman in charge sent me to the Nursing Center dining room, where a big strong guy was polishing the floor. He laughed as he pulled out the cork, saying, “My Daddy always said to use the corkscrews with the handles.”

Mother and I returned from a walk around the Manor ‘pond’ right when a couple of residents were watching the Capitol’s Memorial Day Concert on PBS on the large screen in the living room area. It was very moving, with actors reading narratives from a WWII soldier and a young widow from the Afghanistan war, marvelous music, and the finale rendition of the music from each branch of the armed services by a joint orchestra. As veterans and soldiers from the branches stood up on cue, Mother turned to me from her wheel chair when “Anchors Away” began and asked me to stand up for her, in honor of my father. Blubbering ensued. I could only conclude that war is hell and the worst waste of human potential ever concocted.

I could receive e-mails from Newton right in Mother’s room. Even though she does not have a computer, she has an HP Printing Mailbox that connects to her telephone and prints out e-mails once a day from qualified senders. While in Shanghai for business, Newton was able to attend the huge World Expo 2010 for one day. Most of the better exhibits had hours of waiting required, so Newt chose the tiny lines for Belarus – photos only inside - and Tunisia – a scratchy video of factories! He also managed the large Black African pavilion with dancing and drumming and the Brazilian pavilion, which had a series of very high tech videos on walls and floors. This was a 50-minute wait among 95% Chinese people who, according to Newton, pushed and shoved their way in line and, at the subsequent opening of each waiting station “acted as if someone had thrown money on the ground.” Ah! It’s amazing how different cultures enact waiting in line or, as they say in NY, “waiting on line.”

My sisters and I decided we would like to get some of Mother’s preferences for her future funeral service. Odd as that seems, the daughters are determined - for our sakes as well as Mother’s - that this occasion will reflect her presence. Mother was fine with the suggestion, and she and I spent quite a few hours over a couple of days examining lists of contacts, singing the old hymns, going over biographical facts, and selecting favorite readings. Mother had to narrow down twenty hymns to just two, so there was lots of singing. Even though she occasionally stopped and said, “I keep forgetting that this is for my own funeral service,” we had such a great time putting it together. I wouldn’t trade those hours for anything.

I took off to catch a morning flight to Las Vegas with just enough time for good-byes after Mother woke up. I hated to part, we were having such fun. I don’t know how or why the universe granted me this mother, but that was my lucky day.

Love,

Sandy