dear son peter…
you’re perfectly right…
as I found their uniforms pretty…
who got in trouble… was me…
I was the one who led myself be fooled…
this was one of the most senseless thing I’ve done in my whole life…
but I only realized it… when I was…
near the end of the second year of the gymnasium-school… ( at age 12…)
and specially… at the beginning of the third-year… ( at age 13…)
when I got into the “colegio-militar”…
I was still living in recife… ( amelia street)…
I’ve been studying there for only the first-semester of the first-year…
in july… ( our winter-vacation…)
we moved back to rio-de-janeiro…
more precisely… to ipanema…
into an apartment on prudente-de-morais street…
( the first street parallel to the street of the beach…)
an apartment… which my father had just bought…
as we arrived in rio…
they could accept me at “colegio militar do rio de janeiro”…
since I was transferred from “colégio militar do recife”...
and this transfer was of the type “automatic”…
meaning that I wouldn’t have to take another entrance-exam…
which were… usually… very hard… specially for the “colegios-militares”…
the reason for this waiver was because.
I had already passed the entrance-exam in recife…
six months ago…
this entrance-exam used to be so hard…
that… when we were still in recife…
my mother had enrolled myself into a preparatory-little-school..
specialized in entrance-exams to the “colegio-militar”…
in other words…
since I was very young…
I found myself inside an environment of too much responsibility…
of too much discipline… of too much study…
of too much worry…
nowadays… as I reflect about all that…
I see that… what happened to me…
( the fact that… since very young… I used to carry too much…
responsibility on my “shoulders”…)
has its advantages and also its disadvantages…
the advantage is that… ( in spite of being too early )…
I was preparing myself academically…
studying a lot…
which… obviously… has its advantages…
the disadvantage is that… if a ten-years-old child…
doesn’t play…
he ends up compensating this lack…
years later…
much older…
and… probably… this… maybe… did happen to me…
when at age forty-four…
in hawaii…
I used to spend hours and hours playing guitar…
on the stairs which lead us to the cafeteria…
of the university of hawaii at manoa…
( no problem… let’s move on…)
--- --- ---
july 1965… eleven-years-old…
the first semester of “colegio militar do recife”… all done…
everything ready to move ourselves…
from recife back to rio-de-janeiro…
in order to say “good-bye” to recife...
my uncle marcos… (my father’s brother…)… carolina… and sons…
invited me to stay a week with them…
in a little fisherman’s house… that they’ve rented at rio-doce…
( a beach far away from the city…
so we could enjoy a week on the beach…
in a fisherman’s village… ( rio-doce )…
which nowadays has nothing to do…
with that little-fisherman’s village from the old-times…
nowadays it is a super-populated neighborhood of olinda…
which in turn… is considered as an uninterrupted continuation…
of recife… becoming everything a sort of a megalopolis…)
anyway… they rented this little beach cabin…
and invited me to stay with them… at rio-doce beach…
in my last week of recife…
there I went…
calmly…
in a very nice environment…
a family very united…
very harmonious…
they’ve always treated me very well…
at night… that marvelous sky…
my uncle… ( always on the hammock )…
chatting with me how beautiful those stars are…
there was no electricity in rio-doce in those days…
so… the stars used to be even more beautiful…
since there were no lights on the street-poles…
early in the morning…
I liked to wake up early…
and go to swim in the ocean…
alone… in such infinite northeast sea…
I used to take with me a sort of a morey-boogie...
which I had gotten recently…
but hadn't used it yet…
( I had never caught any wave in my life…)
( I didn’t even know the meaning of such expression…)
since the waves… here in the northeast… are usually… very small…
I used to go… very early in the morning…
paddling with the board…
laying down over the board…
I used to paddle… in that cool water of the morning-time…
exploring those natural reef pools… etc…
on the last two days…
the sea decided to gift me…
with some nice little waves…
which could push us… (me and the board)… for about twenty meters…
the first wave was unbelievable…
how wonderful…
it was the feeling of the wave pushing me… laying down over the board…
for about twenty meters… or even more…
what a divine sensation…
what a pleasure…
I had never felt anything so good…
thereafter I had so much fun…
I caught many other waves…
I used to catch them already on the foamy stage…
it was easier this way…
specially for someone who was doing it for the first time…
back on the sand… I talked to a man…
(maybe he was one of my uncle’s relatives or friends…)
as I chatted with him that I had a lot of fun catching the “jacare”…
(which was the name everyone used to call the “body-surfing”…
or else… today’s “boogie-boarding”…)
the man told me that in rio-de-janeiro they do it…
but there… in rio… they do it… standing up on the board…
I replied:…
“ standing up… on the board…? “
he answered…
“… yes… as if they were skiing…
and they have a long board…
and they slide together with the wave all the way to the sand…”
I was fascinated…
this would probably be really very good...
no doubt… I would like to go to rio-de-janeiro…
I would like to see closely…
people sliding on the waves…
standing up…
on a very long board…
--- --- ---
should we stop here…?
I guess so…
otherwise… there will be nothing left to tell…
a very tight hug…
in both of you…
I hope you’re doing well… healthwise…
stay with God…
see you soon…
a big hug…
your father…
…luis antonio…