DISPATCHES

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Vancouver Dispatch

Our son Jake spent five months with three buddies in Vancouver. They rented two apartments on the upper floors of a swanky building with stunning views of the city, the water, and the snow-capped mountains that embrace it all.

I met up with Newton there after his California trade show and my sister reunion in Arizona. Because the apartment was small and Jake’s roommate would be there, we reserved a hotel room on Hotwire.com, which means pre-paid and non-refundable. Then Jake’s roommate decided to travel. Well, once I had seen the state-of-the-art design of Jake’s apartment, the depressing hallway of our hotel only reminded me of bad textile designs I had to work on in the ‘80’s, even though our dark room was much more updated and less smoky. I made Newt pack up with me after the first night and move over to Jake’s! Yes, waking up to this view was just fine by me:

So I am a bit obsessed with design – it’s true. I just found, Nordestino country bumpkin that I now am, that living with this coral glass wall in the kitchen (can you find the refrigerator?...and the dishwasher along the wooden cabinets?)…and with this glass sink and glass wall in the bathroom, and with all the beautifully designed and well-functioning fixtures a very satisfying thing.

We got to see Jake around the clock this way. Our downtime together included, as always, card games and word games and Jake’s utterly confounding card tricks. He had given me two handmade ‘coupons’ on Christmas morning in Brazil: one, a dinner out in Vancouver to celebrate my September birthday; and two, a dinner out in Vancouver for my Christmas present. He knows what I like! And we did, indeed, have lovely dinners at two of the many great restaurants in the city, along with exceptional wine. Loved them, Jake.

I initially found the many predominantly glass high rise apartment buildings sort of jangling in their varied reflections as we drove in from the airport late afternoon. But as night fell and the interiors were lit, I saw a different vision of the glass city. The dwellers are all there together, visible to each other to a great extent – the murals of stacked interiors drawing us all in from various directions. It seemed intimate; beautiful; human.

Then, as you walk or drive around, there are frequently views of the mountains beyond the sightline at intersections, as if the city can never separate you from nature’s grandeur. I thought these two aspects really set the city apart.

I also loved our short drive up into these pristine mountains in crisp early February air.

Newton caught a flight to Japan; I caught a flight to Los Angeles to visit our daughter for a few days.

Jake returned to his home in Las Vegas for a month and has now taken off with his buddies for Japan, China and Thailand. He has a nice 25-year-old, Texas Hold’em life!

Love,

Sandy

Postscript: My friend, Linda “Doyley” Calder, who grew up in Alberta, Canada, remarked how Vancouver had always meant the ocean to her, visiting from inland. She noticed I only referenced the surrounding mountains. I had to laugh…I never saw the ocean there! My excuse: our visit was brief, our views not to the east, and we live on the ocean in Brazil, so do not seek out the sea as enthusiastically as we used to.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Scottsdale-Phoenix Dispatch

Words with Friends. The online scrabble game. The reason my blog has been neglected, despite a USA/Canada trip, Carnaval in Rio Grande do Norte, and our recent week in Buenos Aires. So, I’ve now declined two “Words” contenders and vowed to refocus my life - one day at a time.

I write these dispatches for myself as much as anyone – as memoir and the capturing of impressions, but I’m so tardy that a couple of people from the dispatch recipient list have inquired. That is so sweet!

In late January, after arriving São Paulo>Houston, Newton headed to a trade show in California and I headed for Phoenix, Arizona to visit my sister Dorothy and brother-in-law Bill at their winter home in nearby Scottsdale. Bleary-eyed from only one hour of sleep in 24, I was excited nevertheless to see them and their condominium on a lake. As Dorothy shepherded me through the house and I marveled at her great decorating job, a funny look came across her face as she nudged me towards the kitchen. Who was sitting at the table, but sister Donna from New Jersey and sister Janet from Denver. A surprise Sisters’ Reunion!! The shock bolted me out of my sleep-deprived stupor, though I was truly grateful they had not gone with Plan B: to hide in the closet till I started unpacking; clearly heart attack material for easily-startled me! We are rarely all together; most recent was in Tulsa a year ago November when Mother died. We had even managed a reunion here in Brazil two years prior to that, so we’re improving as we retire and age!

Donna, Dorothy, Janet and I

Much of the week together entailed some interior design solutions, particularly new cushions for a lounge chair and ottoman. While Bill worked daily on his golf strokes, the sisters covered the city in search of the perfect fabric and, when about to despair, discovered this great one that – it turns out - my old dear friend since way back in my textile days, David Barrow, had worked on! Dorothy and Bill have furnished their condominium mainly with great quality second-hand furniture and paintings from the consignment shops of Scottsdale. Here are the results:

We also spent some time on Dorothy and Bill’s catamaran called Prickly Pair, docked out front. The two of them take it for a spin on their lake most every evening. (This is one emblem of their dual lives in Scottsdale…golf, yoga, relaxation, boat rides…and in their home of many decades, Durango, Colorado, where they are pillars of the community…Rotary (Bill was the governor!), Salvation Army, book club, and more commitments than I can name.) We all loved the tranquility of our boat rides in this pretty place!

While each of my sisters is outstanding in countless ways, particularly as three of the best grandmothers I’ve ever seen, I would like to dedicate this dispatch to Dorothy and Bill, who celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary with us. We went to the Talking Stick Casino for an outstanding dinner, but what made the evening so memorable was the question Bill asked us over cocktails on a little terrace: “What do you remember about our wedding day?”

Back when Dorothy and Bill were teenagers, the year was 1961, she went off to college, being some months older than Bill, still a senior in high school. Come New Year’s Day, 1962, Dorothy gave birth to their son Brad, though she didn’t really look pregnant in big sweatshirts. They married a few days later. I was 11; Donna, 13; and Janet, already married and a mother by then. Dorothy and Bill did not trumpet their 50^th anniversary, coinciding as it did with their son’s 50^th birthday, but, times have changed, and recalling the details of a very young couple having a baby rather unexpectedly and the way they, through their love and the love that surrounded them, not only made it work, but produced two generations, so far, of one of the most amazing extended families anywhere – clearly their accomplishment deserves nothing short of jubilation! And for the sisters, the celebration of Dorothy & Bill’s anniversary is always a celebration of our incomparable parents who, back 50 years ago, had only one thing to say to their frightened pregnant daughter, “We love you.”

Brad, of Durango, got his degree in percussion: from timpani to jazz to composing; he runs Bill’s recreational vehicle business, just built an entirely ‘green’ home, and coaches wrestling at the high school. He is married to Tracy. Accomplishments aside, Brad carried into his generation my father’s depth and search for the greater cosmic truths. Their children are Emily, heading for the tip of South America; Mary, a professional dancer and choreographer in Chicago; Nick, a high school ice hockey ace who also just won a state title in wrestling; and Bradley, also in high school and also a wrestling and hockey aficionado (and oh, both so handsome!).

Dorothy and Bill’s son Todd, of New York City, is publishing his second children’s book and a wonderful autobiography about his crazy foray back into wrestling after finishing college (he wrestled for NYU and got a degree in film): Wrestling for Gable describes his grueling attempt to place with the University of Iowa team under the tutelage of America’s most famous wrestling coach, Dan Gable, who is writing the forward for the book. It even recounts his meeting his wife Jenny there. Todd added a graduate degree in history at Iowa, then an MBA at Yale. He now works for Parents magazine. Besides the accolades, Todd is the family comedian who has directed countless family Thanksgiving videos from his original comic scripts. He is also the sweetest, most devoted husband and father imaginable! Their sons Samuel, 14, an imaginative inventor, and Ethan, 11, an imaginative filmmaker, are students at The Studio School in Manhattan.

Dorothy and Bill’s daughter, April, of Woodland Hills, California, has just filled out her first application for the Olympics, crowning a career as a horse woman that dates back to her childhood. She is married to Marty, runs a beautiful stable atop a hill in Topanga Canyon, has completed a couple of triathlons, and maintains a formidable riding competition record. Accolades aside, she has always set her sights high and made her dreams come true, sanity intact! Their lucky children are Ryan, 7, another ice hockey ace, and Addie, 6, the one who carries my Mother’s fearless openness into the next generation.

So here’s to you, Dorothy and Bill.

We all visited a very special place, the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. We met up there with Janet’s daughter, Amanda, who works for Southwest Airlines in Phoenix (and therefore flew immediately to Tulsa when Mother was dying and stayed by her side some hours till the end). I got to pass some very rare time with Amanda perusing the exhibits, which are arranged geographically. Earphones tune in to each display’s video to show not just the traditional instruments being played, but the native dances they accompany. It is a beautiful and marvelous place. My New York friend, Jeffrey Greene, plays all sorts of traditional instruments with his group, Tribecastan. When I told him I had seen the museum, it turns out the MIM had requested a video from Tribecastan. If that had been up during my visit, I would have really flipped out! Here are Russian balalaikas:

To make the trip complete, we had Mexican food with Amanda’s son, Derek, 17, a Chinese-speaking, long distance bike-riding Eagle Scout, and daughter, Lauren, 14, an exceptional artist, soccer queen, and smart and funny beauty. It was so fun seeing their rooms and getting a glimpse into their lives, which usually feel as if continents away.

OK. On to Vancouver!

Love,

Sandy

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Five Years Dispatch

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: