Brazil by Accident

Going out in Brazil, in a small town especially, is a lot like being twelve. Typically, I arrive at a party and am forced to be the conversation pusher at the mandatory all-girls table, where demureness and nouveaux riche ambiance prevail. Nobody is brave enough to start on a topic of conversation and I end up proposing one. Since my gabbermouthing activity could best be characterized as lazy when lacking stimulus, I get tired soon enough and traipse on over to the guys’ table. This has about a 50/50 chance of resolving the boredom. It all depends on who the guys are. Some of them are as self-conscious as the girls and for those, football/soccer and drinking prowess are the only topics worthy of manhood. They don’t stare anyone down like the girls do, but rather, beam sideways glances at their competitors. Competition is healthy among these boys, though, so, unlike the girls, they can still be friendly while watching their backs.

I’ve seen it before. The fifth through the eighth grades. Saint Adalbert’s Parish Catholic School, to be exact. I was 10 when I arrived from my little European life and dropped dead of schoolgirl shock. Just last night I recounted the famous Barbie story. It goes: I rapped at my neighbor’s row-house storm door, wielding a set of Barbies in front of my nose. “Ya wanna play?” I squealed, maxing out my dimply cuteness levels, so she wouldn’t feel threatened by the Eastern European factor of my person. To this, she nearly blew out her whispering bone when she let out the most resolute, commanding and powerful “shush” I’d ever known. It went on for as long as it took her to usher my chubby feet into her house and shut the door. “What are you crazy?!?” she said indignantly as my Mary Jane’s clacked hurriedly up to her bedroom. “Wha?” I inquired and she looked like she could probably slap me right then and there. She took her time to lead me into her room, and when she shut the door, it was like Mommy or Daddy in an after school special, sitting down with Cindy or Melanie for a talk about the facts of life. 

“What are you a retard or sumptin’?” she inquired. I shook my head, “no.” “Well, then what were you think showing up with a Barbie in front of my house?!?” She said the word “house” with what I’d come to know as the typical Philly working class accent, where you insert an extra-long vowel sound into whatever you’re saying. In this case, the word became “hee-ouse” and I made a mental note of its discrepancy with the ESL tapes I was still studying. 

In her peculiar accent, which I’d later come to acquire then work hard to purge from the caverns of my mouth, she explained that we were ten going on eleven and in the fifth grade now; all facts I thought I thoroughly knew. But then, she also added that fifth grade was a time for hooking up or “being with boys” as the ‘hood slang of the hour called it. Barbies were for babies, she topped off. I never played  dolls again.

In Brazil, small town Brazil, many…I’m finding lots of gems and lovely stones, so it wouldn’t be fair to say “all”… But many folks live like kids who’ve had their Tonka Trucks and Easy Bake Ovens prematurely removed from their repertoire. Usually, it’s the rapidly rising lower middle class who seem to give up their joys the easiest. There’s something about becoming newly comfortable (and in many cases, newly affluent, nouveaux) that precludes being exuberant about life. I guess money and upwardly mobile status make you somber? In any case, I’ve ended up with a finely tuned radar for those Brazilians who aren’t living life as if it consisted of their nice new house and carro zero (brand new, never used, 0 km vehicle). I’m now like an interview specialist, circulating from person to person in (sometimes desperate) search of those individuals who seem to be looking out with their eyes open onto the world. 

Of course, this isn’t as dismal as it may seem. In fact, it might be that a bigger percentage of South Americans I’ve met have that open-eyed look than anyone else. But doing it in a foreign language, Portuguese in my case, is a different ball game. It’s like being in a field of vibrant green and having the whole of it at your disposal, only to note that a whole is kind of overwhelming to have at once. 

What I mean by that is that back home, things came in stages. First, I discovered this; then that; then laid low for a while; then discovered something new again. Here, it’s all coming together, and every day is too much to take in how many new things I’m feeling. It gets to be schizophrenic at time, going from hot to cold, happy to sad, nostalgic to ecstatic. That’s one of the caveats for anyone going abroad - you will feel like a looney for a long time. You need a strong sense of purpose and lots of things that make you happy individually, no matter who or what is around. I’m still learning that part. So, when I go to parties, I have a 50/50 chance of coming out sane. I do my best to find a groove, and discover the gems. But when it looks like I just can’t seem to locate even one, I find it in myself and go the rest of the night discovering me in the big, noisy room. 

Tomorrow, I’m gonna start Yoga!

Elections are on Sunday. Last week, I did something very embarrassing in preparation for them. Since the Brazillionaire, like all Brazi’s, can’t refuse to do anyone a favor, he got roped into driving around a campaign van for Junior’s mom (she happens to be the incumbent mayor). He got paid a nice salary to basically simulate driving a Mr. Softee Van, without the ice cream, for 10 days. Instead of the jingly, elfish and mouth watering music, it was Junior’s momma’s campaign hymn that emanated from the speakers. I’ve already mentioned that this pretty much sounds as if someone put some Baptists up to the task of composing a country cowboy tune. There is lots of clapping, and populist lyrics make it sound like you’d be putting your pasture’s future in the right hands if you voted for this woman. The back of the vehicle, a kind of baby pickup truck, had its bed closed off with a contraption that allowed for the speakers to be protected against the Southern Hemisphere sun, while giving maximum exposure to the Lady Mayor’s smiling mug in 4 feet by 3 and half. Next to her face, that of the vice mayoral candidate. Because I can only assume the Brazilians are too nice, even when tricking the general population with brainwashing, church-y tunes, to forget someone as forgettable as the vice-candidate. Finally, next to the incumbent vice-mayor’s face, there can be seen, large and clear, the sequence of numbers one ought to push when voting for Our Lady Help of Mayors and her grinning Robin. Yes, dear readers, Brazilians, unlike us Americans, don’t get to push the button next to the candidate’s name, for the sake of making life easy. They need to memorize their candidate’s name and number in order to give their opinion about who next should run their town. 

Of course, you might just think, why don’t they just get a flyer at the booth? But that’s illegal here in Brazil. In fact, all electoral campaigning must stop a week before elections, and the candidates need to get out of sight, lest they be arrested for what is called “boca de urna,” or coercion on election day, exercised upon a people who’ve been through corruption, captainship, and populism throughout their forlorn lives. And yet, lots of people still vote “white” on the mandatory voting day. Which actually has nothing to do with racism, but basically means “null” in colloquial Portuguese. That’s right. White is nothing. White is “I don’t know.” Like the maid next door said the other day, “I’m doing my duty getting up on a Sunday to vote. I ain’t got time in my day to know who to choose.” So, she’ll be pushing the white button, followed by a green button that means “confirm your vote.”

This is good. I agree with her attitude. And since I can’t vote in Brazil, I too, will be kind of “white” or “blank” on the day of the choosing. But that isn’t for lack of election showtunes having been drilled into my slowly aging, disintegrating brain, the trilingual-ness of which has left really very little room for anything other than words. I could go on forever about how odd it feels to be an accidental supporter of a woman I met once, who shook my hand while Junior poured whiskey in my cup and whose physician husband once prescribed flu medicine to me without realizing he’d met me three hundred times before. Chivas Regal was the name of that stethoscope. Suffice it to say that the point of this post is simply to say that the twilight zone has descended upon me. I often feel like screaming out, “Don’t you hear this? Don’t you see these candidates aren’t saying a damned thing???” Not just the Lady Mayor, but all of them, have put out vans and megaphone equipped Mr Softee Trucks to cheer the populace into remembering their number at the voting door. They don’t say much about who they are or what they’ll do. They just blare 30-second bursts of “I’m the best; vote for me; you won’t regret it.” Literally!

Thankfully, as V. said when I ran back home, having burst an eardrum on the campaign van’s ride along, “The old guard will be dead soon enough, and people who think will fill their shoes.” How awfully blunt, but actually true. Every time an old Brazilian “coronel” a.k.a. senator dies, old folks with rosaries throw a procession, as if the Pope himself had gone. And who does fill the shoes, indeed, the socks, pants, or skirts, and all? Progress…a generation who’s better off than the ones before. This is, sadly, not what I heard on NPR today about how life is shaping up back home :-(

And with that…I must get some sleep before I burst.

Walking around tonight. The purpose - train the overly fat labrador to walk obediently upon the sleepy streets of small town Brazil. It was a task that led us through lots of twists and turns of the corner, and yet not very far from each place where we stopped to let the dog sniff around, there was a church. Or a big airplane hanger with God inside, is what I’d say to describe it.

At one point, we reached a square that was neatly ringed with delapitated cars, but that were, nevertheless, obviously just parked, not abandoned, like the rusting and falling carroseries might suggest. The owners were nearby. But where?

Two churches. Not one. Battling it out, staring each other down, with tinted Byzantine-ish windows (but not TOO Byzantine, so as not to confuse with the Catholic Church that greedily hogs the founding square at the center of town.) 

“How do they choose?” I imagined it could only be an innie-minnie-miney-mo process. In everything I could see through the poorly lit streetlamps - yellow walls, painted windows, slanted terra cotta rooves, and wide girths - the churches were exactly alike.

Those two churches, huge, imposing, glaring down at each other from across the little square, where the motorized  testaments to the poverty of their patrons parked, were filled to the brim with importance and something that I could clearly hear was the throat of their God grumbling, “In here, heathen! Mwahahahah.”

The people inside stirred about, to and fro. The women wore skirts below the knee and long, long hair they never cut. I thought hair was for strength, so, Samson…sure…But why do the Delilah’s need so much?

And there’s more. 

All their milling about was underpinned by a slow, visual scanningthat they all seemed to have adopted simultaneously. It’s like they couldn’t really pay attention to God. They had to look every which way about… or was He lost? Why were they so on edge? so profoundly paranoid? Back and forth, the faithful walked about. 

I rounded the corner, as the dog tugged the cord twisted around my arm, and I thought I saw a quick glance from a woman with a burberry skirt and bunched up sweater. I looked back at her, but, apparently infected with the shyness or paranoia or whatever it was… a furtive glance is all I could muster. I realized I, too, have been looking for God in the shadows and corners, cause, for a while now, He hasn’t been hanging out at the altar, like the contract between church and flock would have.

Living abroad, it’s easy to feel disconnected from what’s going on in your place back home. I feel like my umbillical chord is somewhere, tethered to an empty womb that’s fallen ill with abandonment. I have waking dreams of my hometown and of Brooklyn, the last place I lived. Little tumbleweeds of melancholy memory roll through me in the shape of sad, electric currents of familiarity that’s been discarded. I can’t help but feel like I wasn’t done living in New York and re-connecting with childhood Philly. 

Is that something everyone feels, when they’ve moved abroad? I’ve met a million people who’ve “moved” for a year. They always knew they’d come back. I never met someone who stayed away, like I’m supposed to. 

Life here, in Brazil, isn’t hard for a foreigner. Or at least, for me, it isn’t. I haven’t much to complain about… except that I miss home so much! It’s like a spirit has lodged itself within me and taken over what was to be a fun, delicious sub-tropical life, one I’d tasted before, after all! I knew what was here, waiting for me. I liked what lay before me; I had no illusions. I just didn’t expect that the United States would turn out to have a psychic grip on me, a sense of unfinished business, of having abandoned something. 

Maybe it’s my loyal nature. I can’t give up on things, people, experiences. And of course, I’ve done just that by moving abroad. I haven’t turned my back on 20 years of my life, but my waking dreams the feeling of sadness that spreads through me like a virus sure make it seem like I have.

I’m a sushi popper and I need to admit it. There are things that one ought to keep quiet. Things like multiple sock days and missed flossings, and of course, should you be a 1970’s era suburban mom with a pill problem, you know where your skeletons ought to be stored. But sushi. I can’t lie. One after another, the sweet seaweed and its contents fly into my mouth. They’ve got little wings or springy backsides or whatever else…All I know is, they end up swooshing down my esophagus at velocities well above safety levels. There’s got to be a hazard hidden in how much I love raw fish wrapped in rice and dipped in salty soy sauce.

Yesterday was the kind of day I imagine a Southern Baptist mixed with a Texan cowboy would enjoy. Though these two incarnations couldn’t possible exist in one living human body permanently, I felt, with quite a bit of conviction, that they existed in me for the day. They intermingled and had themselves a cathartic rubbing of the shoulders. They drank afternoon tea, received a visit, and chatted with friends as if they were nothing but the truest of buddies. All thanks to Brazilian political campaign practices and a favor the Brazillionaire decided to do for a friend with a truly unique job. I spent the day feeling kinda like the voice of God.

It was a normal Saturday, which, as usual, had followed a Friday, and I was quite content in my weekend routine of rolling indecisively around my bed  from about 9 to 11 am, when my body finally chastised me and griped “Enough, you sloth; get up!”

I got up.

I teetered down the stairs, towards the magnificently smelling pot of coffee (which I’d sworn off after my near-death stomach virus in July and yet here I am, a few months later, slurping it up every morning like a thirsty mule on a busy day pulling carts). I had myself 3 glasses (not cups) of the brown stuff, which is NOT jet fuel. It’s Brazilian coffee, and you know, the biggest joke on us Americans is that Brazilian coffee ain’t nothing stronger than a sachet of Lipton’s Decaf Tea with more sugar than you’d think possible. Dirty, sweet water is what I call it. That’s why I need 3 glasses (they don’t believe in cups).

Then, my cellphone rang.

“Get out here,” commanded a voice, as the world outside my window filled to the brim with a Gospel choir-like sound. I hung up and trotted down the stairs while the choir sang their adoration. It’s her that people love. It’s her that the people want. For the love of our town, let her do her job. It was a surprise to hear that God was a “she” in a Latino town. 

Or so I thought it was God. But as I made my way out the door, I saw the Brazillionaire waving at me to hurry up and get into an odd sort of pickup truck, with a mega sound system hogging the whole of the “pickup” part. I suddenly understood. It was the mayor’s campaign ride, one of many that’s been circulating about town, blasting a choir of uplifting words, about the incumbent lady’s virtues and reasons for another turn at the oars of our little Brazilian town. The favor was to drive the thing around for a few hours, while the friend went on a job interview that would, hopefully, allow him to stop using his van for the purposes of raising secular voices up to City Hall.

I decided to get in. It wasn’t an easy decision, as I’d already formulated my opinion about the whole practice of forcing election tunes on unwitting citizens. But it was also an opportunity I couldn’t resist - the Brazillionaire’s lure had been effective enough. “We’ll cruise,” he’d said and how could I not cruise?!?! So what if I was to participate in the dullifying of the population’s pre-election brains? It’s not like I’ve any choice in the matter. It’s a long-standing cultural practice. And anyway, it sounds like church and church ain’t bad! Right?

Or, maybe I got in because I was bored of sleeping and drinking sugar with the brown liquid they pass off as coffee here.

In any case, it took just 3 hours of hearing the 20-second hymn to the lady mayor’s virtues, before I found myself turned into a complete automaton. I realized that my moments of internal silence, those seconds or minutes or hours (however long it takes) when thoughts aren’t actively occupying the brain, were now filled with the uplifting rhythm of the campaigning lady mayor’s graces. I even found myself swaying to the clapping noises that echoed inside me, long after the speakers were turned off and we’d gotten out of the Goddarific pickup truck.

It really brought something home for me. I saw how easily anyone’s conscious understanding can be overcome by subconscious, unwitting input from a world that’s jealous of our self-determination. All it took was a rhyme and a bit of Southern Baptist-like elation to flip that invisible switch inside me, which controls what I CHOOSE to think and what I think because it’s been CHOSEN FOR ME. The imaginary line between those two states of internal being is like a stream of liquid spilled on a picnic table on a windy day. You never know where it’ll run.

I closed my blog because I didn’t like that the majority of visitors typed the word “cameltoe” to get here. But now, I’m over that, especially ’cause I took that word out of my tags.

I was lying in bed tonight, thinking about how everything’s turned topsy turvy since I came back from my 7 week vacation back in the US. It’s literally as if the world unzipped itself, like a great big monkey suit, and flipped its innards outward, with all the messy internal bits now constituting the surface, and what I knew of as skin, eyes, teeth, nose and all the rest, now serving as internal organs. I can only imagine that it’s God’s way of saying, for the millionth time and to yet another sucker (me, this time), “Hey, chump, it ain’t easy. And since you’ve gone and gotten dumb enough to start thinking it was, I’m just gonna serve you up a plate of upside down reality. Here you go- a big, new life and a big, new you, with a dose of check-ya-self justice. That’s right, you’re now, inexplicably, suddenly, and without warning a spin-dried, washing machine-swirled version of who you were before you traipsed back home so soon after moving away. Nothing more than what you deserved.”

It all started when I decided to be happy, un-judgemental, open, non-neurotic, and self-confident on my trip and from now and forever, in life. I had decided that this little pentagram of solutions was the magic key to abolishing all self-doubt, culture shock, work related stress, career hangups, and social difficulties one might encounter in life. I walked around for about a year channeling my thoughts toward those five goals -  

Be joyful every day.

Be kind and loving to everyone around you.

Receive the energy the world gives you with hope.

Don’t obsess over negative aspects of  life, yourself or other people.

Doubt yourself not.

On the surface, you might think that these are good things to try and structure your life around. But they are also quite dangerous when applied uncontrollably. In my case, the result is that I’m back from the U.S., having received it so openly and with such rampant love and kindness, and yet I feel utterly lost, de-railed, and uncertain.

Actually, one thing is certain - I keep obsessing over New York, wanting to go back there and see were IT takes me. And of course, the running logic would be to ask myself, “How could I be so stupid as to want to give up my destiny to a place…and one so caustic and dirty, on top of that!?!?” It made me sick, literally. The Twin Towers, the Rivers, centuries of Progress, or whatever else, I don’t know…but New York was a place where every cold, sinus infection, and other ailment I never had before, struck me quickly and in blitzkreig time. The rats in the subways and sewage coursing through them could not have been a neutral factor, for sure. Yet, here I am thinking about it, yearning for it, dreaming of going back. The only thing keeping me from it is fear.  I’m AFRAID. And though it might seem like a crazy thing at my age, it’s the terror of being alone that keeps me chained. An odd hangup, especially in light of a recent spate of separate and unrelated events, where I was psychoanalzyed and labeled as “dynamic.” But, on both of those occasions, I managed to defend myself and declare, “I’m a type-A personality with all the accoutremen a girl needs to be one,  yet I’m trapped in some kind of B zone, usually reserved for a librarian, and I’m constantly “shushing” myself when it isn’t at all what I mean to be doing!”

Consciously, though, I know where my weakness lies. I could have a million people in my life, but without an anchor or a rock, I’m just a lonely, heart-shaped ballon that some kid let slip out of his imprecisely formed toddler’s grip. So, it’s the fear of losing someone who values me and treats me well and whom I value and love with all my heart, that keeps me moored to a place that makes me itch and scratch with the little flea bites of “let me out!”

Don’t get it wrong. Desperation isn’t in the cards. If anything, I sometimes look at myself and realize I’m acting like someone who’s just looking to be alone, for aloneness’s sake. (I took a ladies mag quick back in the States, and it said so). I think I’m following a fad that exists only in my mind. Loneliness is purity. So, be alone, and you’ll be the least clouded…but in the end, I’m just afraid without being desperate, if that makes sense.

No, it’s that I’ve just seen too many women suffer, AND have felt my own skin ripped off so sharply by the harpoon of love, that the phrase ”A good man is hard to find” has become as certain as the sky is blue. But ha! How can love be so hard or a good man so tough to take?! If I throw it all away, I’d see North America, with its focus on the futile, the outwardly, and the young beating me back to my (almost) 30-year-old corner of the ring.

I know. You’re whispering wisely,  ”You’re never too old to learn; renew.”

But I will one day have to be the wise, gray-speckled professor, and really, I’d rather just be a kid, delighting in the crackling sound of the candy wrapper untwirling around me forever and anew with each breath of my wondering lungs. That’s what life has always been for me - the best piece of candy you could find. I’ve eaten and delighted in it every day, and each day, I woke up with a new piece of candy on my night stand. Well, something like that for all but about 5 years in my late teens, and now, this last month. The Candy Fairy hasn’t been stopping by my house, and I think it’s God’s way of testing me, but I’d really like it if my soul would hurry up and start figuring the answers out. I feel like Pluto, Disney’s stupid, slobbering dog who runs around in circles yelping for lack of any smarts.

I am back from obscurity in the jungle of “Back Home” that I got to enjoy for the summer. I am well, and well fed, now that I’ve returned to the arms of mother rice and beans with a slice of beef Brazil. My plate has never been fuller of iron - both mental and nutritional, and I’ve come back with quite a sense of fervor and excitement, appropriated, lustily, from the friends and family I delighted in seeing these last 8 weeks. It was a marathon of sights and sounds, dreaming American like I could never have imagined one could, and I discovered a new love that I find worth mentioning: American Flag Bunting.

They are those drape-y thingies patriotic peoples far and wide like to display on the railings of their wrap-around porches. It’s quite a creative object, which I can’t recall seeing anywhere outside of the U.S. A truly unique, American artifact. I almost brought one back with me, but then, I thought about what exactly would I do with it? Hang it from my window like a beacon that may or may not send the message that the lady in the pink house is a bit crazy?

So, I decided to leave the bunting to the people who know its uses best. And besides, I’m not sure how I’d get around my sense of slavic national pride if I got one…The only place I could see myself going with the whole thing, if I were to try and satisfy my multi-national nature, is to hang up all the flags of all the countries and cultures I’ve lived all at once, thereby creating a messy explosion of patriotic drapery against the backdrop of my already rather eye-catching home’s color scheme.

Well, so I’ll be Bunting-less for now. But I thought it worth mentioning, and if you have a good-wrap around porch somewhere in your life, you might just find it a lovely thing to drape with a bit of fan-inspired Americana.

Having love in my heart.

Not having it in theirs.

People. Or something closer.

Singers to snobbery.

Even family can get off the road to kindness.

My relatives. Visiting America the Beautiful.

To them, it’s shopping malls and digital photos; nothing more.

Lacoste.

Polo.

Ralph Lauren.

Sony.

Among others.

They are the words that mean “USA” to these cousins.

But not to me.

To me, the biggest word in the Norther Hemisphere is…

Honesty.

America’s not always 100%, but I am. Because of her. 

My mother, the most important person in my life,

is happy because of her.

I live in Brazil, where I’m happy, because of her.

These cousins are here because America took their kin once.

On refugee passports.

And that’s why she’s good.

To me.

For me.

It’s just so sad.

That all the digital pictures they take have to go in a bin.

For show-n-tell to old, leather-flip flop wearing Communists.

Who will sweat jealousy for Polo.

Ralph Lauren.

Sony.

And the others.

Instead of loving even themselves.