A Bit of Unseemly Bragging?

One would assume the size of his Johnson doesn´t make the Ruffles potato chips in this store any better than in the gazillion other little placess like this in São Paulo.

It is silly, I know, but I love these kind of linguistic blind spots. Indulge me.

Tchau.

A Sweet Little Story

To counterbalance all of my negative comments about Brasil, past and future, here is a nice little affirmation of common decency that went above-and-beyond .

Today on my way home from the gym I stopped at a little meat market that is closer to our old neighborhood than to where we live now. I´ve only been there a couple of times in the past and I´m not sure why I went there today, since there is a similar market a block from our new apartment. But, for whatever reason, I did, and I had the butcher cut me six nice, thick slices of pork loin. For those of you in the US who are curious about living costs here, the price came to about $7.65, at the current exchange rate.

I handed my debit card to the old lady at the cash register only to have her tell me that they don´t accept debit cards. Actually (this is for you, Alexandre) she told me a lot of stuff that I didn´t understand, but I clearly understood that my debit card was no good. This does happen now and then, but usually I am with Heitor and, between the two of us, we come up with the necessary money. Today I had practically no cash. But it was no big deal because I knew that my bank had a branch only a couple of blocks away and I said that I would go there, get some cash and return. The lady tried to get me to take the sack of meat. I said, "no, I´ll get the cash and return." She insisted. She said, "I trust you." Since I don´t live in that neighborhood, and didn´t know when I would be back, I was equally insistent that she keep the package and that I would return with the cash. The butcher who had cut the meat was watching this conversation with the textbook definition of a bemused look, by the way.

Oops, I left out one detail. The price was R$13.44. When the lady told me they didn´t take Visa debit cards, I naturally checked to see how much cash I had, which turned out to be only R$9.00. The woman questioned the butcher, "R$9???" with a look in her eyes as if to say, "is that close enough?" He was blocked from my vision, so I didn´t see his reaction, but I kept saying that, no, I would get the money and return.

So I did get the money and returned in less than ten minutes and the transaction was finished. I told the woman that I would remember that she had trusted me. That only started a new rapid-fire dialog on her part, of which (for you again, Alexandre) I understood very little.

For those of you who are wondering about these asides, Alexandre is my português teacher, who will only allow this much English here. And he is a vegetarian, so he probably doesn´t even approve of my visits to the meat markets. :-)

Tchau.

Not exactly news from São Paulo

It has been so long since I´ve written anything here that I am out of practice. The reason is that Heitor and I moved into a new apartment on 23 December. I will write about our misadventures later. For now I still feel too close to all of the chaos to want to talk about it. I will just say that, as of yesterday, the dining room table, which had been laying in a pile on the floor for almost a month is finally assembled. I don´t like talking on the telephone in Português, but when I got home from my class and found that the guy had been here (unscheduled, typically), and left his number I got on the phone and got him back. But, as I say, more of that later.

Now I want to tell you a little story from, I believe, the summer of 2005, when I was still living in Redlands, CA. I´ve told this to many of you and shared these pictures, but I was thinking of it today and realized again what an extraordinary event this was.

My back yard in Redlands was relatively narrow, but quite deep. I am not good at estimating distances, but I would guess that it was about 50 yards deep. At about 35 yards, there was a chain link fence enclosing a smaller area that was probably about 15 yards deep.

I arrived home from work one evening and went into the back yard to see the dogs. Soon I noticed that there was something hanging in, or on, the chain link fence 35 yards away. I walked back and was stunned to find a young hawk hanging perfectly still upside down on the back side of the fence, hanging on with his claws.

At first, I didn´t know what to do, but eventually I went back to the house and put on a leather jacket and found some leather gloves. Probably, if it hadn´t been so obviously a young bird, I wouldn´t have dared to do this. I went back to the hawk and, from the opposite side of the fence, gingerly unhooked his claws from the fence and he immediately dropped onto a large rock at the foot of the fence. It happened so fast that I have no idea how he righted himself fast enough to land on his talons. But having landed there on the rock, he didn´t move a muscle. Actually I can see from the pictures above that his head is not in the same position, but he was clearly in some kind of distress. I went back to the house and got my camera and took the two pictures which are attached here.

I think the fact that he stayed on the rock instead of flying away was my first clue that there was more of a problem than his just being tangled up in the fence. And in the process of freeing him, it was clear that he hadn´t really been tangled up inthe fence; he was just hanging onto it for dear life.

All this while the dogs are frantically trying to get at this creature. It was probably ten hours since I had left for work in the morning, and who knows how long he had been hanging in that position, while two big dogs on the other side of the fence were trying desperately to get at him the whole time. You can see the fence in one of the pictures. It is almost like there was nothing between the hawk and the dogs. It is no wonder that he was in a state of shock.

The only explanation of events that I have come up with is that he was still young, obviously, and that he had landed on the fence to wait and watch, or maybe even rest. The dogs then frightened him, maybe even nudged him, and he fell off the fence to the side away from the dogs and managed to grab on with his claws, but then was more or less trapped, constantly harassed by the dogs from the other side of the fence, and he could do nothing but hang on because he had no idea the dogs couldn´t really get to him.

Almost as soon as the hawk was on the rock, with the dogs just on the other side of the fence going crazy, I decided this wasn´t an ideal arrangement. The hawk let me lift him up off the rock and move him onto a tree stump another 15 yards further away from the dogs. Then, not knowing how long he was going to remain comatose I thought maybe it would be better to set him on the ground, and he allowed me to move him again. I put the dogs in another enclosure close to the house so that they couldn´t get anywhere near the thing.

I assumed it was too late to search and find a raptor rescure program in the area that would still be able to come out and pick this guy up so late in the day, and then I realized he may not have had anything to eat or drink for several hours. I went back to the house and filled a little dish with water and, for lack of a better idea of hawk food, I cracked open an egg and put it in a dish. When I returned with the two dishes, I don´t think he had moved a muscle. I would have liked to stay and watch him, but I also guessed that from his point of view I was as big a part of the problem as the dogs, so I left him alone and went back to the house.

I was able to stay away for maybe 30 minutes or so. When I returned he had moved to the top of the fence that separated my yard from neighbor´s. He let me approach to within six feet or so of him, and then he flew off, apparently fully recovered. The whole process had probably only lasted about 45 minutes....for me. As I say, who knows how many hours it lasted for him.

The epilog. Several months later I went back to that last 15-yard section of the yard to fill the bird feeder. Some movement in the low branches of one of the trees caught my attention, and I looked up and saw a hawk with the remains of a little bird in his talons and a few feathers flying around. I would guess he was only 12-15 feet away from me, but he never moved as I filled the bird feeder, and he was still there when I walked away. I felt bad that this hawk was using my bird feeder as bait to catch his own food, but I liked to think he was "my" hawk and that he was so serene in that tree because of some vague memories.

Ok...next time news from Brasil.

Beijos.