What my Eyes could Read, Part 3

If you haven't read Part 1 yet, click here or for Part 2 click here

San Jose, CA, 1970s

            “The world doesn’t revolve around you.”  It was one of my mom’s favorite reprimands.  I was five and had long past hit my wall; we were at the fourth and final errand, but the worst of them: the shopping mall.  The first two weren’t bad; waiting in line at the post office and the bank are boring, but quick enough, and I could watch the line to see there was an end in sight.  The pharmacy stop was the best: a little more interesting with some stuffed animals and stickers; my mom knew what she needed; no line.  But she saved the best – for her – and the worst – for me – last, with the shopping mall, with its scary tall ceilings, bright lights, noises of music and talking, and, worst of all, endless rows of shops to tempt an eager young mom.

            I had become accustomed to my mom’s two favored phrases, “Quit whining” and “The world doesn’t revolve around you.”  At five, I didn’t know her world, as a housewife and mother, really should, at least with appropriate boundaries, revolve around me, her only child.  Not knowing this, I accepted the reprimand, but felt like collapsing to the floor, right there in the mall walkway, ready to trip any poor oblivious shopper.

Sea-Tac Airport, late May, 2005

            The sight of my husband holding our one year old little girl and our four year old son, standing next to them, meeting me at the airport upon my return from my three week mission to Venezuela will sit indelibly in my mind as one of my most precious memories.  My husband’s face and glowing smile was filled with pride.  My four year old was shrieking in delight, jumping up and down, and clapping.  My little girl was the last to see me, and when she did, she burst into a full mouth beam, squealing in giggles.  Who do I hug first?  My four year old.  He had seen me from a long ways off, was bursting with excitement, and holding himself back from running straight into me.  I bent down, put down my luggage, gave him a big hug, picked him up, held him tight, swirled him around, and kissed him on the cheek.  Then I hugged both my husband and little girl in one big hug, kissed my husband on his cheek, reached out to take our little girl, who was leaning toward me with both her arms stretched out, and pulled her into a tight hug, swirled her around, and glowed in her giggles and exclamations, “Mama! Mama!”

San Jose, CA, late 1970s

            Swirling my children came naturally.  Dad had done so with me.  I remember that more from São Paulo than San Jose, partly because I was littler there, but also because Dad worked so late once we were in San Jose.  As busy a metropolis as São Paulo is, at least it’s in South America, where family is placed at a premium.  Dad had settled into Brazilian culture and its language like a baseball glove made just for him; he was nine when his father moved their family there for engineering work.  Mom was twelve when her family moved for the same reason.  In part for their ages, but more for their temperaments, Dad assimilated more deeply into Brazil.  My own family was now in San Jose, and I didn’t get to see Dad much during those early years there, where he was building a prominent place for himself as a computer engineer at IBM.  At least when I was older, I could see him when he came home from work, but when I was five and six, he often didn’t make it home until after my bedtime.  Thankfully, Mom and Dad made an exception for his schedule and my bedtime for favorite TV programs: Wonder Woman, Love Boat, and then once I was eight, Dallas, when I’d get to sit in Dad’s lap.  As lonely as I was, I soaked this time in. 

            I shouldn’t have been quite as lonely, but I lacked friends and had a mom who was present, but absent in that big, overwhelming three-story (though split-level) house.  I’ve teased her for being a “race horse with goggles.”  She can easily see directly in front of her and move very fast in that direction, but she has a hard time seeing around her.  She had played with me and read to me when we were in São Paulo, but not when we were in San Jose.  Colin, the brother people called “imaginary,” still visited me when I was in Kindergarten and occasionally also when I was in first grade in the playroom (an advantage to an overwhelming roughly 3o00 square foot house).  But his visits were becoming more sparse.  Colin was a year younger than me, had spikey brown hair, didn’t say much but made funny noises, and loved to play in curious, creative ways.  He could transform our playroom toys into all sorts of other things.  Pick-up sticks were also drum sticks or antennas on buildings of blocks; toy cars were also airplanes, submarines, or objects useful for crashing into those buildings of blocks.  Both Colin and I could get pretty upset, so we built up a lot of buildings, and then we took those cars and crashed right into them.

As a family of three with Mom and Dad, weekends were often special.  A great quality about Mom was her adventurous spirit; she was great at planning fun weekend get-aways, often to the beach.  San Jose was a little over an hour from our favorite ones.  If we didn’t have a get-away, Dad usually tried to spend some time with me, playing “Tickle Monster,” or teaching me to dance to the Beach Boys or the Beatles or, to nuture the brasileira in me, bossa nova, that treasured type of romantic, nostalgic, pop-like, jazz-like music from Brazil he so loved.  He continued to speak to me in Portuguese, and I, still lazy, replyied in English.  Fala en português, menina, fala en português.  I loved his encouragement and his Portuguese, which made me feel warm and cherished.  There’s something about this beautiful language that softened the lonely desperation I was otherwise feeling, one sometimes enhanced by the heaviness of English.  I wished I was ready to please him by speaking in Portuguese, but it was hard and I just wanted my time with Dad to be fun, without the work of building a second language.

Had I known how Dad had interpreted my hesitation, I’m sure I would have tried more.  Years later, he told me that I hadn’t seemed interested in Portuguese.  I said that wasn’t true at all, and we both grieved over it.  By the time I returned from Venezuela, Dad was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, so I never shared with him the following memory that emerged upon my return: I was six.  We had just finished dinner.  Mom was going over the checkbook with Dad.  Something wasn’t reconciling, and they were mad at each other.  Both considered the error the other’s fault.  Their fighting grew louder; I was scared; they decided to “protect” me by shifting to a less familiar language for me: Portuguese.  My family’s language of love and comfort was now their language of argument.  Isolation was deepened.  However a 6 year old can think this, it seemed to me that life had gone from happy in São Paulo to miserable in San Jose.  Young though I was, I intuitively understood what I would later read Jesus to have asked, For what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?

Ellensburg, WA, June, 2005

            “Remember, if you are good, we’ll end at the carwash.”  Both of my children, buckled into their carseats, shrieked with glee.  I couldn’t believe our town had a deal so good: get your car washed and keep your kids well behaved while running errands, all for two dollars.  If I knew our outing might need about two hours, I planned in a carwash at the end as a reward.  Both of my children delighted in every phase of the wash, from the thunderstorm at the start, to the best part, the huge washer wipers loaded in suds soaping up our car front to back, side and side, and back to front again, to another thunderstorm for rinsing, and then the drying stage with its whirling sound and funny-looking ripples it made on our windows.

            It was at the car wash that my catarata de recuerdos returned, but this time, they were revealing memories from San Jose, starting with those errand days with my mom.  Both pride in my own parenting and bitterness in hers began to well up within me.  The world doesn’t revolve around you.  “Well it’s supposed to for a mother!” I wanted to scream at her, that very moment.  I wanted to pull the cell phone out of my purse, call her, hold the phone up so she could hear the delighted giggles of her grandchildren, and then tell her precisely what I thought about what real parenting looks like.  How long had our outings, my mom’s with me, been?  Certainly more than two hours, sometimes more than three.  Four?  I couldn’t remember, just that they were long, and didn’t end with something fun like a carwash.  Thankfully, I was wise enough not to spoil that moment for either my kids or their grandmother.  The bonding Mom and I enjoyed upon my return from Venezuela with the memories I had shared from Brazil, also still fresh in my mind, endeared me to her enough to refrain from that call.

            The good news, which my husband and both of my children gratefully attest to, is that, to this day, I hate shopping.  My kids have been spared long shopping trips, and my husband has been spared a sinking wallet.  On occasion, I’ve groaned with my mom over her two favored phrases of my childhood, but I’ve never reproved her for them.  I try to accept what she could do as a mother, and be grateful that one lesson I have learned, which many people never do, is that the world does not revolve around me.

            Continue to Part 4

© 2020 by karina.  All rights reserved.  Please use with permission or a citation that links to this blog.

What my Eyes could Read, Part 2

If you haven't read Part 1 yet, click here

Valencia, Venezuela, May, 2005

            My lack of a quiet and gentle spirit clearly presented itself with my North American teammates who gave me, their translator, what I was calling “translation overload.”  But my spirit quieted considerably with my Venezuelan teammates.  At a natural break between activities, one of my Venezuelan teammates, Armando, brought me into a private room, turned on the CD player and began playing David Bisbal’s “Silencio.”  Silence.  The first lyric: Ya no tengo palabras.  I have no words left.  The first lyric to the chorus, booming in volume: Silencio / Eterno y mudo.  Silence.  Eternal and mute.  The next line of the chorus: Como el recuerdo.  Like the memory.  The chorus continues with the repetition of its title: Silencio.

            I knelt like Mary, one of the sisters of Bethany, sitting at the feet of Jesus, with tears streaming down my face. The song kept repeating the word I needed, Silencio.  Meanwhile, its chorus expressed the word flowing into me, recuerdos.  Later that evening, one of my North American teammates was also like Mary’s sister, Martha, quietly but firmly reprimanding me for escaping my job to listen to music.  I simply nodded in silencio.

            The song had affirmed my silence and it encouraged my memories, which I referred to as my cascada de recuerdos, my waterfall of memories.  These were sparked by the tastes, the sounds, and the sights of the neighborhood of my Venezuelan partners.  They began on our first day, when one of our Venezuelan partners hosted lunch at her home.  The home felt familiar; it was middle-class and similar to ours in São Paulo, Brazil.  Roughly 600 square feet, it had a small sala, a little living space at its entry, then a round kitchen table, followed by the kitchen, and two small bedrooms to the left.

The meal included a little chicken, a side salad of sliced carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes, and the main dish, black beans and rice.  The black beans had been cooked longer and slower than we North Americans are used to.  They had likely been soaked overnight, which releases from them a rich flavor in a natural and savory broth.  They also tasted familiar, likely having been prepared similar to the way they had been prepared in Brazil, with a little vegetable oil, onion, garlic, salt, and a touch of bacon, very finely cut, and barely visible.  Only a few bites of beans initiated my cascada de recuerdos.

São Paulo, Brazil, mid-1970s, as recalled through my cascada de recuerdos

The taste of the rice and beans dish returned me especially to our dinners with our family friends, the Williamsons.  These were very close friends of my parents, with whom they had attended school in São Paulo.  Lucky for me, the Williamsons had three young children of their own; as the second youngest of four, I fit right in.  Unlike our house, their house had a special room just for eating, with a long wood table, long enough to seat all eight of us.  The Williamsons had a generous driveway for play and metal cars with pedals that we could get into and drive all by ourselves.  At the time, I didn’t know that the cars worked like a sitting bicycle.  All I knew was I could get in one and drive it.  Power! 

Other recuerdos flooded too: our trips to the beach, the park, my dad’s office at the University, and the Clube do Campo, the country club, where we often met the Williamsons and other friends.  I remembered the play equipment for climbing at the Clube do Campo and its snack bar, where I always ordered grilled cheese and Fanta de laranja.  It took many years in California before I learned the English term for this drink: orange pop.  But I found North American orange pop disappointing: too sparkly and not sweet enough.

The cascada de recuerdos brought me to recall Mom playing the “little piggy” game with my toes in Portuguese.  She carried out the littlest piggy’s cries of “wee, wee, wee all the way home” with suspense and drama: E esse porquinho, esse porquinho, esse porquinho chorou, “Cui, Cui, Cui, Cui, Cui” todo o cominho de casa!  Other than games like these or reading to me in the children’s books she had picked up locally, Mom spoke to me mostly in English.  And if I was in trouble, the language was always English.

Dad spoke to me mostly in Portuguese, and he kept pleading with me to speak the right language, fala en português, menina, fala en português.  Like most preschoolers, I replied in the language easiest for me: English.  But Dad was patient with me, and my cascada de recuerdos had me relishing in the memories of Dad swinging me, kneeling down to tickle and wrestle with me, and even comforting me in my crises, pulling me into his arms and reassuring me: Chora tudo menina, chora tudo.  Cry it all out little girl, cry it all out. 

Valencia, Venezuela, May 2005

Recalling Portuguese through my cascada de recuerdos may have prompted me to take interest in the dialect of Venezuela, this neighbor to Brazil.  I discovered the dialect of my teammates to be not only more enunciated than I was used to, but also more Brazilian.  Having visited Northern Mexico many times and having studied abroad in Oaxaca, I had become acquainted with the dialects of both Northern and Southern Mexico.  I had never heard the number two, dos, sounding more like the Portuguese dois.  Nor had I heard the number seven, siete, pronounced more like the Portuguese sete, which ends with a “che” sound.  That led me to notice my Venezuelan teammates often pronounced the “t” sound more like the Brazilian “ch.”  When I shared my observation of their Brazilian accent with Daniel the young pastor and leader of the Venezuelan team and his key elder, Samuel, their faces lit up.  They thanked me, saying that a Brazilian accent is prized in Venezuela.  Then they returned the compliment and anted up: Tu tambien, You too.  My accent, according to them, sounded less like an American’s than it did a Brazilian’s!  Verdad? Hijole!  With great grins, they repeated Hijole, a popular expression of amazement in Southern Mexico.  I could read their eyes: in Venezuela, it’s not a common idiom, but they had heard it, and were charmed by my use of it.

Valencia, Venezuela, a few days later

A twin home to mine in São Paulo.  Never would I have dreamed the Spirit had worked that plan into my three week mission to Venezuela.  But Someone was creative.  For my prayer for a quiet and gentle spirit to be granted, my cascada de recuerdos needed something very tangible – like a replica of my own house.  Three days shy of the conclusion of our mission, another of our Venezuelan teammates hosted us in her home, a perfect twin of my own home in São Paulo.  Entering this house so knocked the wind out of me that I could barely stand and had to be escorted outside for a drink of water.  The hostess graciously permitted me to tour through her house with her and a few of our teammates and to compare her house with the one I had lived in.  I had us start from the back of the house with the hostess’s back door, the one that opens that into the kitchen, and I explained, a little embarrassed, that our home opened at the kitchen.  I shared where our small, square kitchen table sat against the wall to the left, with three short, steel chairs.  Our fridge was in the same location as the hostess’s, as was the stove, and the kettle for boiling our dirty water, and the oven, which didn’t work, so I said Mom used it as storage for our pots and pans.  Daniel’s eyes grew big.  I then took them to the “back” of our house with the living area.  It was small, had a love seat and a big chair with a cushion that sunk down, but we didn’t spend much time in it.  Next came my mom and dad’s room, which had a bed on the left and, just like the hostess had, a cabinet closet.  I apologized that I remembered little of my parent’s room,  as I was rarely in it.  Daniel cast his face down, sad. 

We then moved to the other side of the hallway, where my room had been, and I remembered it well: on the right, next to the wall was my bed, a twin bed, and next to it was a little night stand with my books on it.  Then on the left side, I also had a cabinet closet, like the one the hostess had.  The English word “armoire” is far too sophisticated for these simple closets made of cheap wood, two doors opening from the center, and no drawer at the bottom.  But, upon opening the closet, mine had a shelf at the bottom.  My mother stored clothes for me on top and toys at the bottom, mostly stuffed animals, the dolls and accessories of Monica, Brazil’s most popular cartoon character of the 1970s, and then the most special items: a stash of toy cars.  I didn’t tell them why these were so special: they were the favored toys of Colin, the brother I had who other people called “imaginary.”  I teased with my teammates that I didn’t know cars were “boy’s toys,” and that it was a good thing no one had ever told me that.  Daniel smiled and nodded, appreciating my innocent tomboy spirit.  Then he asked about the color of the walls.  I thought for a moment and replied, Blanco.  White.  He lifted his head, struck, and his eyes gazed at me.  I could read them.  Daniel knew my story was true, my house was authentic, and it carried the humble quality of middle class homes of the 1970s.

            The following day, we drove down one of Valencia’s main avenues, one just like mine in São Paulo.  On the left side of the road were middle class homes, those 600 square foot casitas like ours, and on the right side were slum homes, which in Brazil were called favelas.  Since there were only a few across the street from our home, these would probably not have been assigned the term, favela.  But, other than freedom from crime, these structures were more dilapidated than most in the favelas.  These shacks were barely held up with scraps of wood, tarps, and slats of floppy, tin shingles, collected from the dump.  The mish-mash of materials collected from various dumps left openings that couldn’t protect their residents from the rain.  Our neighbors across the street cooked outside; the children were barefoot.  At three, looking across the street, I wondered, Why don’t they have a house like mine?

If you travel to Latin or South America today, you won’t see many of these. 

Today's poverty appears extravagant to that of the 1970s. 

While not from Brazil, these approximate what I saw across the street.  
But remove the background, as the shacks sat alone along a countryside, 
with open dirt behind. 

Source: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/10/1a/5c/101a5c63232bcde2b5448baf256f8770.jpg

 Ellensburg, WA, May 2005, on the phone with Mom

When I returned from my three week mission to Venezuela as one of the translators, I called Mom to give a report.  When I shared some of my memories from Brazil, she was struck by their accuracy.  To the one of my move into a “big girl bed,” she exclaimed, “Karina, you were only 22 months old when we did that!”

I also had a question for her: In Venezuela, the front door always opens to the living space, and the back door is for the kitchen.  Was it a normal house plan in Brazil for that to be the opposite?  My mom laughed.  “Our front door was broken!  It wouldn’t open.  So we always came in through the back door!”

That Mom responded with such astonishment and joy became an important blessing.  This bonding with Mom over my cascada de recuerdos from São Paulo proved to be an essential prelude to the memories that were about to come, now that I was back in the United States: my early memories, from ages five to seven, in San Jose, CA.

© 2020 by karina.  All rights reserved.  Please use with permission or a citation that links to this blog.
Continue to Part 3