Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Fall in Brazil

Fall in Brazil does not mean leaves turning and falling from the trees, football on Sundays or cranberry sauce or stuffing. It does bring longer shadows when I walk out of the building at night and cooler mornings standing in the kitchen in my bare feet holding Pete way too early in the morning. It also, unfortunately, brings illness.

We’ve all been sick. I bounded around the house for the better part of two weeks acting as though impervious to illness as it befell first Elise, then Sam and finally Pete. I am bringing up the rear. We have been told by Zilda that it is the change in seasons, as we move from the rainy season to the dry season. It is still hard to believe that when we arrived in December, in the wet, soggy heart of the rainy season that there could possibly be a dry season at all here, but here it is. I am witnessing it firsthand. We have been told it will not rain again until September or October, nor we will have much of a chance of seeing a cloud before then, either. I have heard it will be dryer than the Sahara. I didn’t believe it, but I do now. Elise and I eschewed humidifiers. I always felt they were for the weak and infirm, for old ladies propped up in bed, watching game shows on black and white televisions, coughing into their handkerchiefs. Now, we have two. I don’t know how I would have slept the last three nights without one.

For Easter, I grew a beard. When I was working for my dad, every year I would grow what Elise and I dubbed the “July Beard”, because my dad left the office for the entirety of the month of July to summer in Aspen, leaving me to man the fort. The anticipation of a federal fiscal shutdown also prompted anticipation of a new opportunity to grow a new beard, a “Shutdown Beard”, but there was no shutdown and, therefore, sadly no shutdown beard. Instead, I took a week off (ten days, actually) when my mom (“Nanny”, to Sam and Pete) came to visit and promptly grew the beard anyway, discovering I really only needed a long weekend, maybe an extra day off from work, to get a sufficient enough start to grow a beard that looked like a beard instead of simply the byproduct of laziness or something that looked like a catfish or monkey had attached itself to my face. I think it makes me look more diplomatic. It definitely makes me look more Brazilian. So, now I am bearded.

Last Friday was my birthday. Not the big one. That one is next year. The beard didn’t come from turning 39 and it, in and of itself, hasn’t changed me. But I do sense changes. I am starting to feel like I am becoming that older person who is out of touch with new technology. I just don’t have the time for it. I don’t have the time to search out new music. I don’t have the time to find a new album, then do a first listening of it in its entirety from start to finish, A side and B side, transcribing all the lyrics, often having to stop, rewind, and replay certain refrains multiple times in order to comprehend and transcribe all the lyrics accurately, painstakingly deciphered like a WWII codebreaker, and transcribed for no one’s benefit except my own. I don’t have time to draw in colored pencils the covers of tapes of bands I would be in and opuses we would write, double albums with many flaps that folded in on one another, yet still fit in the plastic cassette case with the band name lining up perfectly with the spine of the plastic cassette case. I don’t have time for these things much less the time to figure out how iTunes works, or how to convert my entire LP collection to MP3s, or upload my CD collection to the “cloud”, or even have time to own or figure out how an iPod works so that all my music is at my fingertips, which is unfortunate, because—as Elise recently discovered—music…my music…specifically, Rogue Wave radio on Pandora…has the power to shift my mood after getting up with Pete at 4:50 a.m. for the better in a matter of seconds.

When we arrived in Brazil and I was faced with the challenge of how to unlock an iPhone, I froze. I didn’t know where to start. All I could think to do was ask for help, so I went to one of the locally-hired staff in the IT section downstairs who in the span of one short afternoon totally effed up one of our iPhones permanently. I’m a smart guy. I should know how to do this stuff. I should know how to set up a flawless WiFi network in our home with layers of security features. I should know how to supply millions of movies to my family through an online, streaming plasma TV. Why don’t I know how to do these things? I used to be able to program in Basic, saving my rudimentary programs that I wrote on our Commodore 64 onto cassette tapes. I was the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in the making. On some level, I know what happened. I started drawing. And after that I started writing, then swimming. Then waiting tables, running, cycling. Other interests interjected themselves and technology, honestly, to me, was never that interesting. I was much more in love with the patchouli-scents of vinyl, the damp smell of old books, an hour or four outside running and things drawn by hand instead of by machine.

Now, my time is filled in other, better, more productive ways.

I am also starting to feel I’m becoming that older person that is keenly aware of the precarious nature of life and the stability of civilization. I try to channel that into an appreciation of all the wonderful things life and modern civilization have to offer. I think it has more to do with my new job. It makes the world feel smaller and current events closer. I guess this isn’t surprising. Fortunately, I compartmentalize well. I know Sam and Pete don’t care about the partisan politics, the national debt, global warming, the Arab Spring, Dancing With the Stars or Charlie Sheen, so it is easy for me to not care about these things either. I am much more worried about when the new Thomas the Train DVD comes out, what is going to be the next Lego we build and what we’re going to plant in our garden now that Paulo pulled out all the cilantro. I know my dad lies awake at night worrying about his personal finances or commercial real estate deals gone awry. I don’t know how he did this when the triplets were younger. When you have kids you don’t worry about these things. You don’t have the time or the energy. Most nights, I’m twitching myself to sleep before Elise even has the bedside light out.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else fall in Brazil has to offer. I’m looking forward to not being sick anymore so we can reinstate Running Club (Elise and I are part of a 3-member running club that runs Saturday mornings in the Jardim Botânico) and I can go to Oba and buy a Colorado Ithaca Stout and drink it without wondering if I was drinking more than beer.

1 comment:

morgan said...

Running Club definitely needs you back on your springy legs. And I personally feel that from now on, running club should end with quiche at La Boulangerie. Get well soon.