dear son tauê…
dear son peter…
life is full of up’s and down’s…
there are moments… in our lives..
where everything seems to be “going-down-the-hill”…
on the other hand… there are other phases… in our lives…
where things begin to show some nice feed-back…
we feel good… we feel that we are producing something…
we feel that we are relating well with people around us…
in short… it’s like we’ve finally found… the formula…
the recipe of how to live a life (reasonably) happy… etc…
sometimes these good phases last only one month…
thereafter… it could happen another bad-phase…
which could last a few months…
but these duration-times are not fixed…
they may vary from times to times…
they may vary… depending on several factors…
if the person had just passed…
through a suffering phase which lasted too long…
usually… the tendency is that… on the next phase…
this person is going to experiment…
a period of calmness… of tranquility… of peace and harmony…
at least in my case… during my life…
things happened… nearly this way…
sometimes… I used to be sick for a long period of time…
I had to take care of myself…
I felt pain…
I suffered…
but… after this period…
it was like I was receiving a sort of compensation…
after this period of suffering…
usually… I was blessed by a period of peace…
tranquility… health…
peace with myself…
with my own consciousness…
one of the “tough” phases that happened to me…
was when I arrived in rio-de-janeiro…
coming from recife…
at age 11…
it was the month of july…
right in the middle of the year…
when we were living in an apartment…
at prudente-de-morais street… in ipanema…
I was attending a very crazy school…
the colegio-militar of rio-de-janeiro...
in the tijuca area...
I had to set my lunch-time to 10:15 am...
take the bus number 433… barao de drummond – leblon…
which passed at 11 am…
at the bus-stop on visconde-de-piraja avenue…
I arrived at school at about noon-time…
and I had to be in formation at 12:20 precisely…
“to-be-in-formation” means to be in line…
in crescent order… from the smaller to the highest person…
each class used to have about three rows…
the distance from one person to the other…
was measured by the length of a straightened arm…
whenever the sergeant screamed… “squad… cover !!...”
we… ( the “little-tin-soldiers”)… obeyed his order instantaneously…
as if we were a kind of a robotized-human-machine…
whose only function is to obey orders… without hesitation…
squad attention !!...
forward march…!!
the class… ( already in line… aligned in a way close to perfection…)
as we listened to the order…
all of us together… in a robotized perfection…
launched our left leg forward…
and… started marching…
towards the classroom…
all of us synchronized…
like the movies we watch… about true little-soldiers…
this was the environment I found in rio-de-janeiro…
suddenly… I found myself included in a school…
which was the craziest thing in the world…
the class of students used to go marching from on classroom to the other…
the bottom line is that… this is the methodology of the military philosophy…
very antique… this methodology…
probably… much earlier than the christian era…
men realized that… as a group of people is conditioned to march…
as if they were robots…
these people would become automata…
they wouldn’t think too much…
they would be ready to obey any kind of order…
even if these orders were completely absurd…
and… non-sense…
but… there… at colegio-militar…
this philosophy of “blind-obedience”…
was in contradicton to another characteristic of the school…
the educational system of the school was good…
it did have a high-level standard…
the teachers were good…
specially the ones related to math… portuguese… geography…
english… french… etc…
so it was a school where there was this incredible contradiction…
if… on one hand… the educational system was good…
on the other hand… the military methodology…
the military discipline…
the displacement of the class…
marching as if we were little-tin-soldiers…
created a scene kind of pathetic…
where we could see a bunch of kids age 11 to 17…
studying in a sort of a “fake-barrack”…
--- --- ---
in contrast to the colegio-militar…
there was… nothing more… nothing less… than a place named…
“arpoador’…
such a wonderful beach…
very near our house…
and… in those days…
the water of the ocean was still clean…
the urban development wasn’t being capable yet to pollute the ocean…
the way it does nowadays…
the surf mania was still beginning in brasil…
more precisely… at arpoador beach…
certain american boys…
used to ride their bikes…
from leblon… towards arpoador…
they used to tow a sort of a bike-trailer…
attached behind their bikes…
with those surfboards…
beautiful…
made of fiberglass…
coming directly from california…
the boards were of the brand…
“hobbie”… ”hanzen”… “gordon-smith”… ”greg-noll surfboards”…
“surfboard hawaii”… among others…
there at arpoador…
in the crowded days…
we could see… at most… some… twenty boards in the water…
there weren’t only americans in the water…
the brazilians were also… already… ripping the waves…
when the swell showed up…
and… the waves covered the last rock…
it was awesome…
a crowd of people used to come over to see the guys ripping…
and I… on the weekends…
with my head filled of so much math…
... so much portuguese… so much geography…
used to rest my eyes…
seeing so much beauty…
seeing in reality… the materialization of what the man had told me…
in recife… at “rio-doce” beach…
“the guys slide along the waves…
standing up…
on really long boards…
as if they were skiing…
…and… go all the way down to the sand…”
--- --- ---
see you soon…
stay with God…
I miss you guys…
I’m sure you will be ok…
a very tight hug…
your father…
…luis antonio…