Happy birthday, Steven

Through the thick fog of your condition, across the deep gap that tears us apart, over the pain that enfolds us, against a hard reality out there that prevents me from being with you today, here I come, with my poverty, with my helplessness, with my joy at having you, with my pride because you're my son... here I come with this heart breaking prayer that is not even mine... it's Leonard Cohen's:

"You who questions souls, and you to whom souls must answer, do not cut off the soul of my son on my account. Let the strength of his childhood lead him to you, and the joy of his body stand him upright in your eyes. May he discern my prayer for him, and to whom it is uttered, and in what shame. I received the living waters and I held them in a stagnant pool. I was taught but I did not teach. I was loved but I did not love. I weakened the name that spoke me, and I chased the light with my own understanding. Whisper in his ear. Direct him to a place of learning. Illuminate his child's belief in mightiness. Rescue him from those who want him with no soul, who have their channels in the bedrooms of the rich and poor, to draw children into death. Let him see me coming back. Allow us to bring forth our souls together to make a place for your name. If am too late, redeem my yearning in his heart, bless him with a soul that remembers you, that he may uncover it with careful husbandry. They who wish to devour him have grown powerful on my idleness. They have a number for him, a chain. Let him see them withered in the light of your name. Let him see their dead kingdom from the mountain of your word. Stand him up upon his soul, bless him with the truth of manhood."

Happy birthday Steven... my crown.

Thanksgiving - a song of gratitude

I'm one of those who call it a blessing from above, but whatever your belief there's thankfulness. Thanksgiving Day in Canada! Blue sky, sunny day, cool breeze... too much beauty out there

Soy de los que le atribuyen al cielo tantas bendiciones, pero cualquiera pueda ser la convicción, hay gratitud. ¡Día de Acción de Gracias en Canadá! Cielo azul, día soleado, brisa fría... ¡es tanta la belleza alrededor!


Katie Melua - Thank you stars

Obama: Nobel Peace Prize 2009!

The moment it really sunk in.

Friday, October 09, 2009
"Honey, Wake Up! You've Won the Nobel Prize!"
by Jone Shore (www.crosswalk.com/blogs/johnshore/11609571)


[Scene: early morning. Bedroom o' the Obamas.]
Michelle: [gently shaking Barack] Honey. Honey. Barack. Wake up.
Barack: [talking in his sleep] We're bombing the moon?
Michelle: Baby. Get up. Wake up.
Barack: Huh? Wha--? What's up? Are the kids okay?
Michelle: The kids are fine. Pumski, listen to me. You've won the Nobel Prize.
Barack: [pause] What?
Michelle: You won the Nobel Prize.
Barack: [pause] What?
Michelle: I'm tellin' you. They just announced it.
Barack: Are you kidding? Is this you being funny?
Michelle: No. I'm serious. You've won the Nobel Prize!
Barack: Why would I win the Nobel Prize?
Michelle: Do I look Swedish to you? All I know is you won.
Barack: I won the Nobel Prize.
Michelle: That's right.
Barack: There's got to be some mistake.
Michelle: There isn't.
Barack: Maybe I won it for chemistry?
Michelle: Yeah, they gave the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to a guy who can't make instant oatmeal.
Barack: You're telling me that I've won the Nobel Peace Prize. Me.
Michelle: That's the headline for the day.
Barack: And it's not some nonsense cooked up by Fox. Glenn Beck does look awfully Swedish, you know.
Michelle: It's not Fox, baby. It's real. You're the new Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Barack: But how ...? I mean ... is it possible the Nobel Prize people just don't read the papers? Do do they not know about Iraq and Afghanistan?
Michelle: And Guantanamo?
Barack: Yeah, and Guan---wait a minute. Whose side are you on?
Michelle: [kissing him] It's not about what you've yet to do, baby. It's about what you've done thus far.
Barack: I am a pretty peaceful guy.
Michelle: You are. And you're very noble.
Barack: And they did give it to Kissinger.
Michelle: There you go.
Barack: Does the prize come with a crown?
Michelle: I don't think so.
Barack: I'd look good in a crown.
Michelle: You'd look good in a suit and tie. C'mon now. The press is waiting.
Barack: Are you sure the Nobel Peace Prize doesn't come with a crown? I'm pretty sure it does. Can you find that out for me?
Michelle: Will you stop?
Barack: I'm telling you. I'm gonna end up wearin' a crown. And I mean wearing it all the time, too.
Michelle: You think so, huh?
Barack: You just watch. It's only a matter of time.

Beauté… n’import où

Un homme s'assit dans le métro à Washington et se mit à jouer du violon; c'était un matin froid de janvier. Il joua six morceaux de Bach pendant environ 45 minutes. On a calculé que pendant ce temps, à une heure d'affluence, plusieurs milliers de voyageurs avaient traversé la station, la plupart d'entre eux pour se rendre à leur travail.

Au bout de trois minutes, un homme d'âge moyen remarqua qu'un musicien était en train de jouer. Il ralentit le pas quelques instants puis s'empressa de rattraper le temps perdu.

Une minute plus tard, le violoniste reçut son premier pourboire: une femme jeta un dollar devant lui, sans ralentir, tout en continuant à marcher.

Quelques minutes plus tard, quelqu'un s'adossa au mur pour l'écouter: il regarda sa montre puis reprit sa marche, étant visiblement en retard à son travail.

C'est un petit garçon de trois ans qui fut le plus attentif. Sa mère était visiblement pressée mais l'enfant voulut s'arrêter pour regarder le violoniste. La mère le tira par la main et l'enfant se remit à marcher à contrecœur, en gardant la tête tournée en arrière. Le même phénomène se répéta avec plusieurs autres enfants. Tous les parents sans exception les forcèrent à avancer.

Pendant les 45 minutes où le musicien jouait, seulement 6 personnes s'arrêtèrent pour l'écouter quelques instants. Une vingtaine d'entre eux lui donnèrent un pourboire tout en continuant à marcher normalement. La recette fut de 32 dollars. Quand il s'arrêta de jouer et que le silence se fit, personne n'y prêta attention. Personne n'applaudit ni ne manifesta un signe de reconnaissance.



Joshua Bell in metro
Uploaded by PareDoseNet. - Videos of family and friends from around the world.

Personne ne le savait mais le violoniste était Joshua Bell, l'un des plus grands musiciens au monde. Il avait interprété l'un des morceaux les plus difficiles jamais écrits, sur un violon d'une valeur de 3,5 millions de dollars. Deux jours plus tôt, il jouait à guichets fermés dans une salle de Boston où le prix moyen des places atteignait 100 dollars.

Ceci est une histoire vraie. On a fait jouer Joshua Bell incognito dans le métro dans le cadre d'une expérience conduite par le Washington Post sur la perception, le goût et les priorités des gens. Il s'agissait de savoir si nous sommes capables, dans un endroit ordinaire et à une heure inappropriée, de percevoir la beauté.

Mercedes Sosa in memoriam

Gracias a tu canto hubo vida. Gracias a tu serenata , risa en el llanto.
Thanks to your singing there was life. Thanks to your serenading, tears gave way to laughter.
Grâce à ta chanson il y a eu de la vie. Grâce à ta sérénade, du rire dans la pleurs.

Mercedes Sosa "Como la Cigarra"
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The Year my Parents Went on Vacation

Two years ago I saw twice a Brazilian movie: "The Year my Parents Went on Vacation" (O anho em que meu paes sairam do ferias). It has all the ingredients to make it compelling to me: the narrator is a kid that right now must be exactly my same age; the story is set in 1970; the immediate context is the final rounds of the Football World Cup, which is the very first one that I saw, the same one that had been enshrined as the pinnacle of not just football history but of the history of humankind! An exaggeration you say? Then you don’t know us, soccer-mad patients. Worse. You haven’t been reached by the saving gospel of football.

Beauty of football aside (and it’s not soccer, mind you: its real name is football!), a yet another more powerful reason recently drove me to see it for the third time.



"The Year my Parents Went on Vacation" is set in the days of brutal military dictatorship in Brazil. It tells the story of a young couple that had to go into hiding but, not to disturb their kid, they took him to Sao Paulo, to his grandad's, telling him that they were taking a short vacation as a couple. Before saying goodbye in a hurry because the Army is looking for them, dad promised the kid to be back in time to watch the final game together. The whole movie is about this kid waiting for his dad to come back. In the meantime, and among the many things that happen, the kid remembers that his mom used to tease dad saying that whereas grandad is never late, dad is never on time. At the end of the movie, while the Brazilian squad pulverizes Italy 4-1, the kid learns that his mom has come back and is waiting for him at his grandad's. But only mom has managed to reach home. The kid doesn't understand why she is so weak and can barely move. It's up to the spectators to connect the dots to realize that dad didn't survive the tortures. At the end, the kid says that that very same year "we went to another country and became refugees, although I don't even know what is that. Perhaps being a refugee means having a dad that is never on time... or perhaps one that will never show up."

You can see why this movie hit me.

Absences, mostly if they go unexplained, have this ability to make a loved one’s presence more palpable, even tangible. A soccer ball aimlessly kicked around by a desperate kid in a Jewish quarter in Sao Paulo was a constant reminder of the painful vacuum that was left by a father who couldn’t make it to the finals. A father’s absence drills a bottomless hole in the deepest layers of his kid’s soul. This is a black hole that will never cease to suck in every ray of light for the rest of this kid’s life.

You can see why this movie still hits me.

Lonely dinner table

A dinner table was meant to be shared. The culture that invented it must've been one whose skins bore the deep furrows that loneliness surely left on them after centuries of soul wrenching battles. At the end there prevailed this conviction that if the human being is not meant to be alone, there is no other moment in which loneliness blows its icy breath the coldest than at meal times. Having bread alone is like loving... alone, with no one to share it.

Although this blog is supposed to revolve around food, it does not do that every time. One reason is that blogging amounts to setting the table at dinner time when one is utterly alone. This is so because writing is a solitary excercise. Greek-French cartoonist and writer Vassilis Alexakis so describes it in his Je t'oublirierai tous les jours:

"En ajoutant un mot aprés l'autre, je construisais un mur invisible autour de moi, je protégeais ma solitude."

However, coming to the table of this blog is not a quest for loneliness. It's an evidence of its cold presence all around.

Enjoy your summer... and strawberries!!

A token of wisdom, from S. A. Lane (Lunenburg, Nova Scotia), on a letter to MacLean's Magazine (July 2009):

"The method for success is to freeze the berries whole, with stems on, in a single layer on cookie sheets overnight. The following day they can be placed in freezer bags, and thawed when ready to use. They taste like fresh berries and are a real treat in the middle of the winter."

There's some hope for us, mindless cicadas, but let's tone our merrymaking down a bit and roll up our sleeves this summer next to these clever and hard working ants.

Father's Day

Hi guys:

Today is Father's Day around here. A columnist, writing for The Globe and Mail, used the other day the same expression that one of you mentioned last Sunday: that Father's Day is a Hallmark Day. The same can be said of almost everything: Mother's Day, Earth Day, Christmas, etc.

Since Hallmark doesn't produce cards for dads to address his kids on Father's Day, and taking advantage that very few men do that (I wonder if any does it), I thought that I'd write to both of you on this day.

Let me follow the path of emotions in order to describe what does it mean to be a dad. As soon as I got the confirmation that you guys were on your way, my first emotion was fear. This is a very complex emotion, because it's one of the very few that is shaped by its object, by what provokes it. Fear to the unknown is different to the fear that stems from being threatened, and its' quite different from the fear that is stirred up by the ugly and horrible, or by what is different and new.

In hindsight I'd say that Dr. Ventolini's announcement confronted me with the challenges of being a man. Thus, I discovered that fear doesn't necessarily have to lead to paralysis. In my case, fear prompted me to act as a man, that is to embrace the joy of sharing life with what is at the end the fruits of love. It's a brave thing, this business of raising children. It's so brave that one is always left with a nagging feeling of inadequacy.

Now, 22 and 20 years later I want to say that I'm glad that I was invaded by fear when you guys were born. Years later, I read in a poem that we come to this world to face our own demons: "What I do is me: for that I came". Busying myself with becoming me took me through the dark valley of fear, and if there's any success for me to claim it's because of you. Bursting through life, you spurred me on to conquer my fears, at least the scariest of them all: that of becoming a man.

Fearful? Yes. Dithering? No. This is what I am: a man with his fears, yet unwilling to surrender it all to its cold cuffs. Fear was displaced by love, cheesy as it may sound. The old book says that wherever there's love there's no room for fear.

I congratulate myself on this day because of you guys. Each one of you, each on his own way, is figthing the good battle, that which will see you gaining solid ground for you to firmly stand on. Let the ensuing scars render you truthful and sensitive to the beauty of the human mistery.

I love you both; dearly.

Dad

Unidad Cristiana Universitaria - 40 años

Hope

She wasn’t walking into the food bank. She was tiptoeing. Embarrassment all over. Embarrassment that came across as rudeness. Luckily for me, heaven dictated that at that very same moment the supervisor happened to drop by. Otherwise I would have jumped right away to the quick conclusion that this lady was just someone looking for trouble.

Our hospitality volunteer brought her a steamy cup of freshly brewed coffee and invited her to take a seat. I showed her a chair next to my desk. It was when she sat down that I was able to see that what I had in my office was a world that was crumbling down, coming apart, shattering to pieces. Her deep sigh spoke volumes of a life overburdened by despair. As she started to unfold her story between careful sips of boiling coffee it became evident that she was entering into the darkest night of her life.

There is a centuries old narrative that tells a story of darkness being defeated by a tiny ray of light. It goes on saying that out of this struggle life came into being. Only because darkness was put down we can now speak of beauty, and joy, and all those wonderful things that make life worth living. The way I read this story out of an ancient book makes me imagine a bird hovering over a dark abyss.

That old story also speaks of what I was seeing right in front of my eyes listening to this woman over a cup of coffee. Hope happens whenever there is darkness. Do not think that just because there is no light then there’s no way forward. No siree! (oops! No madame!!).

Darkness comes in different shapes. It is usually associated to despair, or to the end of some kind of road we have been traveling. Darkness is a no exit alleyway; a dream that refuses to come true. Darkness has the ability to engulf us. Its arms seem to multiply around us as they embrace us tight as if it were an unwelcome lover. It is an unwelcome lover, for sure.

What does it take for us to shake us free from such an invasive embrace? For the woman of my story, it meant to take her embarrassment with her and bring it along to have a cup of coffee with me. As we were ready for a second cup, her story gave place to another one full of initiatives that would enable her to walk across the valley of dark shadows she was going through.

Now, I’m having here a problem with language. Well, another problem on top of my thick accent. I say this because in my mother tongue, hope is a feminine word. Hope is never associated to a masculine world. On top of that, history and reality insist on showing us that this business of sending darkness to the back seat so that hope should lead the way has been done mostly by women.

Whenever darkness is being pierced by some warm ray of light it’s because a woman is deciding to dust herself off, pick up the pieces and put on her shoulders the task to craft a new beginning for her and those close to her. The Greek from of old they imagined that the world rested on the powerful shoulders of a male god. This deity was Atlas. Perhaps we should forgive them because they were talking from a point of history in which not many things had happened yet. Thus, they never knew that actually that Atlas must be a woman.

And so, the woman in my story found in the midst of her own darkness the she had within herself a heart strong enough to conceive hope. Darkness, her unwelcome lover was sent packing.

(Oswaldo Guayasamin, Manos de la esperanza - The Hands of Hope)

Straw Dogs

They say that it is usual for men to come to a point in their lives in which they either snap, or dramatically change their focuses in life or just walk away from familiar surroundings. Therapists speak of a journey to some elusive land that pulls men in even though there are no maps to ensure a safe travel. Those in the know thus make reference to the great myths that involve trips into the unknown: Jason and his Argonauts going after some golden fleece, Ulysses spending 10 years on a trip that he would normally make in few days, or the multitude of knights blazing just as many trails in order to get to the exact place in the dessert in which they would be able to get hold of the Holy Grail. All of these legends speak of a deeply rooted longing in mostly but not exclusively male psychology that impels men to all of a sudden turn their backs and break free. What could be those breaking points that turn a person's life around for better or worse?

With this question in mind I went back to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (1971 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067800). A young Dustin Hoffman plays David Summer, a researcher who is breaking ground in the field of Math and thus needs some time away to finish his research. He rents a cottage in England and goes with his wife, Amy (Susan George), on a sabbatical. The cottage belongs to his wife’s family and it’s located in the little town his wife grew up in. Once there, the young professor becomes a foreigner in a rather hostile environment. The men in the village think of him as a weakling while openly lust after his wife, specially her old flame from her teen years. The increasingly escalating tension boils up to an awful mix of rape, violence and murder that provide the context for this young professor to affirm himself as a male. Following a line similar to William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” and Jonathan Littell's “The Kindly Ones,” Sam Peckinpah unearth the beast that lies dormant inside of the most civilized and law abiding souls. Whenever it comes to proves one’s mettle, violence seems to present itself as the most appealing route to follow.

Hoffman’s character descends from a pedestal of snobbery on which he has perched his sense of worth to test himself as just another man in a backward village. However, at the end, as he drove away from a destroyed house leaving behind a wife he has neglected all the time, David Summer sports a smile that tells of a newly discovered freedom, as if he has just gotten hold of the Holy Grail, or the golden fleece, or Ulysses’s Ithaca. Yet, in Peckinpah the recovered male self is not marked by either a sense of going back home or finding the way home. Ironically, the final smile of this professor is punctuated by his contradictory words: “I don’t know my way home.” Sadly, violence is presented as a rite of passage that specially men cannot avoid. Does it have to be that way?