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Jan. 19th, 2004 10:00 amThe next novel I will read is Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride.
Jan. 19th, 2004
Heading Home
Jan. 19th, 2004 10:08 amToday begins the last lap in my race towards unemployment. Only two weeks left, including this one, until I am jobless and happy. It's as if I'm losing my religion, going pagan with blood on my vest. Ecstatically so.
The cello makes a lovely sound. I wish my parents had forced me to learn a musical instrument. Instead, I barely know where to place my fingers on the recorder. I told my high school principal, ten years ago, I could play the flute. It was paramount I came across as an active teen if I wanted to get into the universities I had applied for. She wrote it down on my applications, to be sealed and sent to the people in charge of selecting me among many applicants. She forgot to tell me that all universities would accept me because I was a foreign student and I paid exorbitant fees.
I could have gone to Harvard if I had done some missionary work in my spare time. I could have gone to Yale if my dad mortgaged our home and took on a second job. But I went to Concordia University instead, in Montreal, did a lot of drugs, flunked out of French class (I redeemed myself later by taking an intensive 6-month course in my final year in Montreal), made friends with 1st generation immigrant children, went dancing to clubs that played 80s synth music 5 years before it became a name - electroclash, finally cut my waist-lenght hair and retired my doc martens, and lived in spacious apartments on the Plateau (later named, by the New Yorker, as one of the trendiest places to live in North America).
One of my oldest friends, Henrique, will be picking me up from Sao Paulo's airport and driving me to my mother's farm. It's roughly a two-hour drive through Sao Paulo State, then Minas Gerais State. We then have to enter the tiny city of Cambui, take a road past farms and man-made lakes, until we reach the city of Corrego do Bom Jesus. This is where my mother was born, where her mother's family comes from. It's a city encrusted in a valley, founded by Italian and Portuguese immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the turn of the century looking for work and lands to cultivate. Almost everyone in this city is related to me in one way or another. As we drive through the city, I'll see the farm house on the mountain that rises to the right. The farm house sits halfway on the mountain, just below an expanse of pine trees planted by my father and that grow all the way to the top. My mother is now building little chalets and transforming the farm into a "pousada" (our word for a country retreat/bed and breakfast style hotel.)
I wish I had a digital camera so I could easily register everything and upload it for you to see. I'm taking my little automatic instead, and I'm hoping I'll find cheap places to develop my films. The photos will come and I will be smiling in all of them.
The cello makes a lovely sound. I wish my parents had forced me to learn a musical instrument. Instead, I barely know where to place my fingers on the recorder. I told my high school principal, ten years ago, I could play the flute. It was paramount I came across as an active teen if I wanted to get into the universities I had applied for. She wrote it down on my applications, to be sealed and sent to the people in charge of selecting me among many applicants. She forgot to tell me that all universities would accept me because I was a foreign student and I paid exorbitant fees.
I could have gone to Harvard if I had done some missionary work in my spare time. I could have gone to Yale if my dad mortgaged our home and took on a second job. But I went to Concordia University instead, in Montreal, did a lot of drugs, flunked out of French class (I redeemed myself later by taking an intensive 6-month course in my final year in Montreal), made friends with 1st generation immigrant children, went dancing to clubs that played 80s synth music 5 years before it became a name - electroclash, finally cut my waist-lenght hair and retired my doc martens, and lived in spacious apartments on the Plateau (later named, by the New Yorker, as one of the trendiest places to live in North America).
One of my oldest friends, Henrique, will be picking me up from Sao Paulo's airport and driving me to my mother's farm. It's roughly a two-hour drive through Sao Paulo State, then Minas Gerais State. We then have to enter the tiny city of Cambui, take a road past farms and man-made lakes, until we reach the city of Corrego do Bom Jesus. This is where my mother was born, where her mother's family comes from. It's a city encrusted in a valley, founded by Italian and Portuguese immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the turn of the century looking for work and lands to cultivate. Almost everyone in this city is related to me in one way or another. As we drive through the city, I'll see the farm house on the mountain that rises to the right. The farm house sits halfway on the mountain, just below an expanse of pine trees planted by my father and that grow all the way to the top. My mother is now building little chalets and transforming the farm into a "pousada" (our word for a country retreat/bed and breakfast style hotel.)
I wish I had a digital camera so I could easily register everything and upload it for you to see. I'm taking my little automatic instead, and I'm hoping I'll find cheap places to develop my films. The photos will come and I will be smiling in all of them.
