11 years ago TODAY, I posted a Lyle Mays song; Today, he died!

OK, this is a little bit too much of a crazy coincidence, but it's true! In fact, he died yesterday (2/10), but the news reached everyone only today.

How did I find out about my post? Someone (from Brazil!) posted a comment to that post on my blog, probably after finding the post when googling Lyle Mays, so I went to read the post (and the whole month of February 2009). I was reading when I decided to check the date of the post, and I was kind flabbergasted!

There are two musical deaths connected to my birthday (I'm sure there may be more, but I''m not about to Google that). Louis Armstrong died the day before I was born (so it was on the news on 7/7/1071). Then last year, the day before my birthday, João Gilberto, the most amazing interpreter and the "inventor" of bossa nova, died. :-( 

I don't really know Mays' works, apart from my favorite Zizi Possi song, but I sure will check him out now!

You can enjoy "Mirror of the Heart:"

Remember Slavery & the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Today is UNESCO's "International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade."

The very first class I took in graduate school was a class (taught only this once, back in 1998!!) on Slavery in Brazil, so this topic has remained of great interest to me and my two publications are related to it. You may not know this, but over 90% of all Africans brought to the Americas during the period of the slave trade were taken to the Caribbean and South America and around 60% were taken to Brazil. Brazil was also the last country in the Western Hemisphere to end slavery (1888).

An amazing resource is the The Transatlantic Slave Trade Voyages Database, especially its Introductory Maps! This is the first one, but you should check the others:

I hope to continue producing more scholarship related to this topic as well as raising awareness of it's connection to Brazilian history and culture in my classes!

12/12/12 12:12 pm

Fun, "historic" date! I couldn't miss posting today, could I? Since there are only twelve months, it's the last possible month/day/year "matching" date until next century, right?

I blogged on 11/11/11 last year, at 11:11 pm, but I missed 10/10/10. This one I'm scheduling, though (it's 9:24 am right now), because I will probably be at my sons' school at 12 pm today -- the principal printed out many posters saying "Today is 12/12/12" and spread them through the whole school, I thought that was cute!

Remembering of Matching Days Past

I should take photos of all the silly stuff I wrote on 8/8/88, I was really excited about that day! And 7/7/77 was my 6th (not 7th) birthday... interesting, huh? (my mom took several photos with the date on this green "blackboard" I had received as a gift). Oh, I posted on 07/07/07, my 36th b-day! My last "matching date" post (apart from last year's 11/11/11 one) was on 09/09/09 and I wrote about reading Little Women. My sister-in-law thought it was a "thoughtful and refreshing post," thanks, A! Yeah, that's it for matching dates and me & the blog.

Today I don't have much to say, apart on reflecting on matching dates past. It's a cloudy and cold day in December. I'm thankful that both my sons are in school (the oldest stayed home for two days with the flu) and that my husband will be able to drive me to university #3 this afternoon (we're staying overnight, they are footing the bill) so I can give my second final exam tomorrow morning (two more to go at university #2 on Saturday night and next Monday).

So, all is good! (more later!)

My Late Grandfather's Birthday

I know this is today's third post, but I don't mind, my motto this year is "blog with abandon."

I know I blogged about my maternal grandfather back in 2008 (I have to fix some of the photos in that post), but I wanted to do it again today because I thought of him all day.

He was born 108 years ago today and it's because of him that my mom and I have brown eyes and curly brown hair. He was a very fun grandpa (vovô) and I am thankful that I had him for 15 years. I hope my sons can enjoy my parents and in-laws longer than that. I love my family, even those who are no longer with us.

P.S. I have to ask my mom what's going on with his and my grandma's remains.

Happy Birthday Vania!! or My Dearest Cousin Turns 50!

I can hardly believe it, but today my dearest cousin in my mom's side of the family* turned 50 years old! That means that a year from now I will turn 40, since she's eleven years older than me. I'm really sad that was unable to talk to her on the phone, but I hope to talk to her tomorrow. Better late than never...

Here's young Vania with her older brother:
And here she is seen behind me not too long after she met me for the first time (I was two years old and had returned from Europe with my parents less than a year earlier):Vania and I are on the right side of the picture. You can see my pregnant mom in the background -- we're wearing matching homemade dresses! The other girl in the photo is my cousin Maisa, the daughter of my mom's other sister.

I posted a similar picture to the blog when I wrote about my aunt's 50th anniversary back in 2007, but here it is again, mothers (8 years apart) and daughters (11 years apart):When I went to Brazil last December and January I had the rare chance of seeing Vania and her family twice during my visit! I went to visit her family for a weekend and then she came with her family to my parents' house (here's a photo of them!). That's when we took these:
She doesn't look 50 at all, does she? I hope I can look as good as she does when I get there. I have to follow here example of fitness, though, and start swimming several times a week and exercising regularly. The only difference is that I'm going to start now and she's been very active for many years, so chances are I won't look that great! :-(

In spite of the age difference we became really close after I grew up. In fact, I always looked up to my older cousin. I vaguely remember her 15th birthday party (equivalent to the "Sweet Sixteen" here), the party favor was small red cutout heart with her photo in the middle and when I turned 15 eleven years later I made the same party favor with my photo. I've always loved babies and kids remember when Vania's son and daughter were born (I was 14 and 16, I think). I loved to play with my baby and toddler cousins and looked forward to the day they would be in my wedding, and they were, together with their other four cousins (some photos here). Now we're looking forward to the day when my son(s) will be in her daughter's wedding -- pairing up with her new, adopted daughter, who is Kelvin's age.

I wish we didn't live so far away, but I visit her every time I go to Brazil. She hasn't come to visit yet, but that's just because I don't live in Orlando, FL (that's part of the reason why we wanted to move there! ;-)

Dear Vania, I just want to say in this very public space that I love you and I'm very glad to have you as part of my life! I hope you had a wonderful day with your loved ones in Brazil. I was thinking of you all day long!

* I have two dearest cousins, a female cousin in my mom's side and a male cousin in my dad's side who is a few months younger than me. Interestingly both of these cousins' middle names are my parents' names because my aunts were very close to my parents.

Tribute to my Best and Most Inspiring Teacher

I've been in school for a really long time. 11 years of elementary and high school (which used to be, respectively, 8 and 3 years long in Brazil), 5 years in college, and now almost 10 years in graduate school -- that amounts to exactly 26 years of my 36 years of life (I began school at 7 and took a three year break between college and grad school).

In all these years the teacher that remains the most inspiring of all to me is "Tia" Vanda Candido (we used to call her "tia," auntie, as many children still call older women -- teachers, acquaintances, family friends -- in Brazil). She was my teacher in 3rd and 4th grades (she taught these two grades together) and then my Portuguese teacher in 6th grade.

Tia Vanda was a talented educator who not only taught us the school subjects, but allowed us to talk about many different things during school hours. I still remember that many afternoons we would have very long and entertaining conversations about life, school subjects, and whatever caught our attention at the time, while we prepared our lessons. Her handwriting was absolutely perfect, clear, round, even, enviable, really! I tried all my life to imitate it, with not much success. Then, after having a really poor Portuguese teacher in 5th grade she became my teacher in 6th grade and all of a sudden grammar, sentence ("syntactic") analysis, and writing, became easy, meaningful, and enjoyable! I still have my composition notebook from that year and, although I didn't write that well (at least not from today's standards), I got mostly As.

I have to admit that we didn't get along all the time since our temperaments clashed a bit and, because of that, she was fonder of my brother (also her student in 3rd and/or 4th grades) than of me -- she even traveled quite far to be at his wedding (she couldn't attend mine because it was on a graduation day at her school). That didn't diminish my admiration for her and she was the one who inspired me to go study language and literature (Letras) in college and then in graduate school.

Yesterday morning she passed away after a fulminating brain cancer that took her life in less than six months. I'm sorry for her husband and her three sons since she was quite young (60 something) and her illness was completely unexpected. Two weeks ago I wrote her son an email with a message to her expressing how I appreciated her, but I don't know if she was conscious enough for him to read it to her. I'm sad that I'll never be able to see her and talk to her again to let her know that her student from many years back is about to get her Ph.D. I'm sure she would be proud in knowing that she inspired me to take this path.

Remembering Grandpa José

Vô Passos, as we used to call my maternal grandfather José, would be 105 years old if he was alive today. He died in 1986, eight years after my paternal grandfather, so he is the grandfather that I remember best. My mom was his youngest daughter, so my brother and I were much younger than all our maternal cousins (it was the opposite in my dad's family, I was among the oldest) and as the youngest grandkids of a retired grandpa we received lots of attention from him and our grandma. When we lived in Curitiba from when I was four to eight years old we saw them every weekend -- they took my and my brother to the park -- or more often. After we moved away we would come visit and stay at their apartment several times a year(this apartment merits a post on its own and I also have photos of the building!). They visited our home yearly and all our vacations (generally a week or so at the beach) were spent with them. [The photo on the left is a document photo, that's why he's so serious].

The most memorable vacation ever was a road trip my parents, grandparents, brother, and I took to Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Chile in January 1979 when I was 7.5 years old. On grandpa's birthday we were driving close to the the Andes mountains on our way from Argentina to Chile when, at a turn of the road, we saw the Aconcagua, the highest peak of the Andes. We stopped to take a picture of Vô Passos and his snow white hair against the snow covered peak. I have to find this photo (maybe it's a slide) and scan it! We have footage of this whole trip on Super 8 film (not yet transfered to DVD). I watched it a few times during my childhood, but even without the film and the photos, I'll never forget this trip! (also worthy of its own post).

This is a photo of Vovô Passos and me from Christmas 1973 when I was two and a half years old. My mom was practically nine months pregnant with my brother at the time and her outfit was just like mine in this photo.
Grandpa was a fun guy to be around. He had these funny sayings and questions for us every time we met: "Are you yourself?" ("Você é você mesmo?") he'd ask, and we'd laugh. He put us on his knee or foot and played horse with us and also played some (untranslatable) word games. He was an energetic guy, funny, caring, and full of life. He feared death, though, and was obsessed with it, checking the obituary of the church magazine every month and saying that soon his name would be there too. It was pretty sad when he had a stroke not long after the big party celebrating his 80th birthday in 1983. He had forgotten to take some of his blood thinning medication and nobody noticed. He recovered almost unscathed, but his sense of time and his awareness of the world changed considerably. He still remembered all of us and even people from the past that he hadn't seen in years, but he couldn't really have meaningful conversations and didn't know what day of the week it was, for example. This ended up as a blessing because his obsession with death disappeared. It wasn't easy to care for him (his vitality actually increased in certain "areas" and my poor grandmother had to lock herself up in another bedroom every night -- you know what I mean, right?), but his death was fairly quick and peaceful when it came three years later.

My brother was born only three days after grandpa's birthday, so we always celebrated their birthdays together. Here grandpa is 76 and my brother is 4 or 5 (1978? The candle count must be wrong for either grandpa or my brother):

Look at my smile :)

I want to end with a photo of my grandfather when he was younger. I think he must have been 20-22 years old in the photo below since he and grandma got married in 1922 and my uncle Paulo (isn't he a cutie? He's still very handsome) was probably born a year or two later.

I miss Vô Passos, but I'm glad I have so many fond memories of him as well as many mementos like photos and movies that I can pass on to my sons.