dear son taue…
dear son peter…
well… after last week’s interruption…
which… fortunately… had a happy-end…
I decided to continue with the stories of my life…
since last email was a little bit… too much scientific…
and… nothing like to listen to a story more human…
as opposed to the more scientific ones…
( it seems to me that the stories which are more human…
“get in” more easily… they are easier to “digest”…)
but this doesn’t mean that the scientific-type-of-stories are worthless…
they are important too…
it’s like in life…
sometimes we are not too enthusiastic about doing a certain type of activity…
( to clean the dust off the room… for instance…)
but we have to do it anyway…
because if we don’t…
we would end-up breathing-in all that dust…
which obviously is not good for us…
( although I read once in a book… in a humoristic tone…
that… it’s been scientifically proved that…
once the dust reaches three centimeters high…
we don’t have to clean it anymore…
because… it’s been proved…
that… beyond those three centimeters…
it’s impossible to accumulate more dust…)
--- --- ---
we had stopped our story… in recife…
at age four… ( or five )…
sitting… all day long on the front-yard-wall…
watching the cars pass by…
thinking on nothing…
just savoring the moment…
without deep thoughts…
without deep worries…
it seems like my childhood was sectioned in a series of three-years-periods:
the three first years of life… in boston…
the three next years… in recife…
and… the three next ones ( from six to nine-years-old…)… in rio-de-janeiro…
more precisely… in a neighborhood which is on the border of jardim-botanico…
…and gavea…
with a road made of those little-rectangular-stone-blocks…
a place resembling “the vila”… in ipanema…
where you used to play with juninho… and the other kids at “the vila”…
the aura was similar…
we used to play soccer…
on the sidewalk…
without much fussiness…
it wasn’t necessary a soccer field…
in order to play soccer…
the sidewalk was just perfect…
I used to study in a public school by the “lagoa” area…
and take the trolley-bus to school…
I was eight-years-old… when my mother said that I could take my sister clarice…
( who was four-years-old ) to her kindergarten…
which was located right in front of my school…
and… that was the scene…
me at age eight… taking my sister ( age four )… to her school…
and… from there… going to my classes on the other side of the road…
good times… no violence… a life with no stress…
my mother used to give me the exact amount-of-money…
for the trolley-bus-ticket…
at the end-of-classes… I didn’t have to pick up my sister anymore…
because my mother had already done it…
since my sister’s classes ended before mine…
so… at the end of classes…
since I had the exact amount-of-money for the trolley-bus-ticket…
I rather… instead of taking the trolley-bus…
I rather spend the money on a little-bag of pop-corn…
and… walk home…
arriving at my home-street… even before going home…
I used to “dive” into the soccer-game with my friends… on the side-walk…
a very calm life… with no deep worries…
but… not everything in the garden was rosy…
in contrast to my life of a dreamer in recife… sitting on the front-yard-wall…
thinking on nothing… just living…
there… on rio-de-janeiro…
at age eight...
I passed through an experience... that made me see the reality:
not everything in the garden is rosy…
one day… as I was coming home from school… on foot…
as I approached the street… with everybody playing soccer…
I started saying…
“you can throw me the ball…!!
like a “shower” throw…!!
so I can head it…!!...”
and… at this moment… all my friends totally ignored me…
as if I wasn’t existing at all…
they didn’t pay any attention to my presence…
they wanted to make sure that I was being ignored by them…
in a way that I’ve never seen anything like that…
in my whole life…
at this point… I didn’t understand anything…
I thought to myself… “what is going on…?”
I asked them…
they answered… saying that…
they were “giving me the cold shoulder”…
I didn’t know what the expression “give the cold shoulder” means…
they explained:
“ it’s when somebody stops talking to another one…
for some reason…”
then I asked what was the reason…
they told me…
but even today… I still don’t remember what was the reason…
( I think I was so shocked with the “cold-shoulder” episode itself…
that… when they explained me the reason…
my mind probably wasn't in conditions to understand what they were saying...
and I didn’t ask them to repeat the explanation… either... )
I became a little-bit disturbed with this first experience on my life…
of feeling that… the society… the group of friends…
has this capacity for rejecting someone…
and… life is a sequence of lessons of this type…
life keeps moving on…
episodes like this-one keep on happening…
regardless of the age…
we keep on knowing new people…
we start to feel relaxed and at home with them…
and… suddenly… something happens…
we hear something from them that suddenly surprises us…
and it does get us by surprise…
it’s like receiving a big “punch” in the face…
life… often embarrasses us with something similar…
but this kind of thing doesn’t happen only between two people…
sometimes such surprises… such disappointments…
show up between a person and an institution…
between a person and a government…
between a person and a school…
between a person and the corporation where he (she) works…
when I was in Hawaii… still on my first years there…
when I was studying for my master’s in math…
working hard to be a “straight-A” student…
I used to do my homeworks in an exaggerated diligent way…
on the first semester I got an “A”…
on the second semester I got a “B”…
on the third semester I got a “B”…
on the fourth semester I got a “C”…
suddenly… I received a letter from school…
saying that I was in “probation”…
that is… if I didn’t get an “A” on the next semester…
I would be “kicked-out” of school…
that was a kind of a “punch” in my face…
to realize that they had been so harsh on me…
yes... on me… who had tried to do my best…
as a “straight-A” student…
but… this time… in this case… I let myself get too much depressed…
because of a simple little letter coming from school…
I should… ( facing the problem brought by the letter…)
I should have tried to go there…
to get more information about what was going on…
I should have tried to listen to the opinion of my teachers…
who deeply knew me…
… instead of letting myself get so depressed by a letter…
that maybe was sent by an administrative-office of the university…
which… maybe… had nothing to do with the math-department itself…
but… the world keeps spinning…
after that letter…
by coincidence… my sciatic nerve got worst to the point…
that I couldn’t neither sit… nor stand up…
I really had to… quit the math program…
I ended up enrolling myself into the music department…
which… definitely… would add much more to myself…
as a human-being… than the math would do...
and… returning to my friends pals who used to play soccer with me…
at the time I was eight-years-old…
after the "cold-shoulder" episode…
fortunately… in two or three days…
everything went back to normal…
my relationship with the group turned out to be the same…
children… in general… don’t keep too much resentments…
they fight on one day… and on the next one everything is fine…
this capacity to forget the fight…
and to forgive…
the capacity of being able to say… “ let’s move on “…
this capacity of the human being…
I consider… a very good one…
see you next time…?
see you next time…
I want to give a very tight hug…
on you two… my sons…
with tenderness…
your father…
…luis antonio…