One year here. And a month of Live Music

Leaving Boston for the last time.

It is one year today since we arrived to occupy our new home here in Portugal!  Vivemos aqui por um ano.

( In Spanish, which we learned before Português, a year is un año, and woe betide the person who forgets the tilde, because ano means anus.  So we laugh about it sometimes, because bums remain a source of laughter your whole life.  This jollity is probably shared by millions of Spaniards.  The Spanish and Portuguese people are not particularly fond of one another, and will disparage each other whenever the opportunity arises.)

Our house as it was advertised before we bought it.

What we have learned in the past year (in no particular order): 

a) How to use an Aga woodstove in the kitchen which also heats our water and provides underfloor heating.  (We didn't have hot water until three days after we arrived last winter!)  

 b) That we don't want it anymore so will be switching it out in the near future.  Asthmatics and smoke don't really suit each other.

I have a love/hate relationship with 
this dinosaur.

c) That people are really friendly, most of the time, we have so many wonderful stories to prove this.  [Except when they are driving, when they become the same raging monsters found all over the world.

And also when they hunt.  Every Sunday is hunting day in this predominantly Catholic country (weird) and I personally want to eliminate all the hunters, as they shoot everything that moves, including birds, even little ones.  They say for example that thrushes eat the olives, but honestly, generally speaking, there should be enough to go round for everyone (same for the earth, right?).  I am trying to make my garden, an ongoing project from scratch, into a haven for all the animals to hide on Sundays.]

d)We have learned to negotiate tricky things like the particular panic of buying an old Toyota for cash from a seemingly dodgy car-dealer, who turned out to be really sweet in the end, and also easier things like ordering food in a restaurant.  

e) We miss our friends, the old familiars we left behind all those years ago in South Africa, and now as well, those dear ones in America, where everything has gone mad.  Shared histories are valuable as gold.  Hooray for video calls and shared memories, conversations, poetry, articles, photographs.  

Tim digging, having wielded the
jackhammer, seen leaning against
the wall behind him.

f) We have discovered that the earth is full of stones and rocks here, so you have to dig holes for trees with a jackhammer!  Actually for anything you plant.

g) That we have chosen a beautiful place to live, with big skies and that gorgeous late afternoon sunlight that slants with shadows.  A place where we welcome the rain as the friend it always was in South Africa.  A place with new people inviting us on walks and for meals and giving advice when needed.  There is the ocean nearby.  The country uses renewable energy for 81% of its electricity needs.  

Late afternoon light with shadows. 

h) That politicians are corrupt everywhere, and shitheads abound here as they do everywhere else.  

i)  That we are brave and strong and true, like the song says.  We are challenging ourselves in our older age, to learn a new language, to make a garden, to make new friends, to put down roots, again, even with all the stones.    

 

And February has been a month of concerts! Also Rain!  

Every weekend we have attended a gathering of people playing music and an audience watching and listening, swaying, tapping their feet, bursting out with whistles and "bravos!" and applause at the appropriate moments.  Clapping is such a very basic human activity to celebrate something, isn't it?  We teach it to babies and everyone smiles and laughs. Apparently clapping releases dopamine in the brain because we feel ourselves to be a part of something lovely, something beautifully human. 

 

I bought Carmen Souza's LP, but don't 
know if I will love it or not, as we
don't have a record player yet. 

Live music, played well, is magical. It is entirely different from listening to it afterwards on a record or cd, or streamed. Many people are so inspired by the live performance that they avidly purchase a CD directly after the concert, only to discover later that the music sounds so different, maybe they don't even like it anymore. That wonderful live experience sometimes can't be recreated. 

 

The Gershwin orchestra.

The first concert of the month was a performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue by the wonderful pianist, Raúl da Costa, accompanied by a symphonic orchestra. The conductor was a delightful Spanish man, Jose Rafael Pascual Vilaplana. 

(Spanish and Portuguese people tend to have really long names, because they choose family names from the mother and the father of the child.

Definitely a Jessica.

My daughter Jess asked me the other day why her name is so long, as she has four names, while all her siblings have only three. I joked back that maybe it was because she was the favourite [All four of my children think they know my favourite, and some think it is themselves. For the record, AGAIN, I do NOT have a favourite.] It turns out I couldn't decide on my second daughter's name for about a month. She started life as Catherine, which faded away after a few days, and then I named her Zoe for about two weeks, because I loved that name, but it just didn't suit her, she was such a contented sweet baby. I had always loved the name Jessica, since watching the Australian movie "The Man from Snowy River", and so she just fitted that, the beautiful mysterious heroine of the story. I couldn't let go of Zoe though, and wanted Margaret too, to honour my mother's family. This is the story I told Jess, how she got lumped with all those names!) 

 José Rafael Pascual Vilaplana was a very demonstrative conductor, who kissed and hugged all the principal players at the end, and who gave an emotional speech in Spanish, which was lovely because we understood it all! Portuguese is still difficult for us, but we are persevering with the help of our lovely teacher Marta, and managing little conversations with people like cashiers and waiters and physiotherapists!

The wonderful Carmen Souza and Pas'cal!

The next week our new friends Lucille and Eric told us they had two spare tickets for a Portuguese jazz singer-songwriter of Cabo Verdean descent, Carmen Souza, who used her voice like an instrument, and held the crowd spellbound, and endeared herself particularly to us as her last song was Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata!  She is in partnership with a wonderful bass player too, which thrilled Tim, our own bass player.  Theo Pas'cal is of short stature and wears a floppy little hat.  When he played the double bass the instrument was quite tall compared to him and he wielded great symphonic beauty from it.  

The following weekend we drove out to Ralph Vogelsang's lovely property on a hill near Loulé, where Sara Esperito Santo Vieira sang like a nightingale with the Fernando Tavares Trio, in the amazing little amphitheatre Ralph has built.  When we lost the sun it was very cold, but the audience of about 60 people was warmed by the beauteous singing of the exquisite Sara, pregnant with her third boy, she told us!  I imagined the little one inside her floating blissfully in the wonderful music surrounding him.  She had an interesting repertoire, comprising songs in three languages, even singing My Favourite Things, from the now 60 year-old movie, The Sound of Music, which sent me into the rich memory of being a young child, singing loudly and word-perfectly with my mother, in the car on the way to somewhere or other, far away in another time.  

The double bass contingent.

Our last concert was Os Planetas, The Planets, by Gustav Holst, which features such a huge orchestra that the musicians filled the entire stage right to the edges, and the conductor had to weave in and out of the violin players for quite a while to get to his podium!  The Planets is in seven parts, and Holst, a British composer who was great friends with Ralph Vaughn Williams, another favourite of mine, was inspired to write it after becoming fascinated by astrology.  

I watched all the musicians, and some stand out, like one percussionist who made an art out of playing the bass drum, his arms seemingly connected to the mallets as they flew up and down in a mesmeric way.  I love watching the percussion players, as they are so important but not always noticed by a listener, like the clash of the cymbals at a dramatic coda, or the pure light sounds of the glockenspiel, xylophones and vibraphone in Mercury.  

Holst was an innovative 20th century composer who died too young, at 59.  For the seventh and last piece, Neptune, he had two women's choirs who sang wordlessly in an adjoining room, unseen, and the way in which the song died out was that the doors to the room were slowly closed.  Our conductor decided to have ten women singers standing at the back of the orchestra.  It was lovely to watch them, such a strange notion of Holst's to put them behind doors.  The piece ends with the orchestra falling silent and the unaccompanied voices slowly fading out pianissimo.  Glorious.

Floating into the blue - I've been
trying to paint light in water.

How lucky are we, to watch and listen to these beauties.  While on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Nero is burning down Rome.  

And we don't forget that at all, we are concerned citizens of the earth, always.  But just for these brief moments, we can float into the blue....  

Find the brief moments.  

Friends and Mothers and Children and Families and Husbands, all the weavers.

It's a new year.  Already 7 days in, ....   Already 18 days in, ....  Already February now!  I keep restarting this blogpost, which seems like an inordinately difficult thing to do somehow.  It's the new year and already I am behind on so many things I wanted to do.  I am also behind in this blog, supposed to have 52 by the end of August, so I'm way behind with that.  And so what?

Amaryllis bringing light

The year has had an awful start for so many people in the world.     

So, believing that we should eat, drink and be merry, to counter all the negativity around us, we were supposed to spend New Year in Madrid with my forever-friend Cindy, but I picked up a virus from a coughing child on the aeroplane coming back from England to Portugal, and you can't really be much fun when you feel like you've been run over by a bus and can't breathe very well either.  I really really looked after myself and went actually to bed for 5 days.  

I ended up coughing and wheezing for 25 days, but then gradually it all petered off and I DID get better.  I still feel like one of those TB patients in a home in the alps, sitting out in the sun with a blanket over my knees.  Fragile and a little weepy now and then. The older I become the more I am prone to these illnesses that drag on and on, it would seem.  

Foreverfriends

However, I managed to see Cindy in Sevilla, just before she flew back, just for one perfect amazing and wonderful day.  She is one of the best people in the world, I think, so warm and kind and interesting and deep.  I have been friends with her for 32 years, and even though we live on different continents now and don't see each other very often anymore, we do the proverbial picking up where we left off.  

What is it about friendships, what is the glue that joins two people so powerfully, such a connection that you know will last as long as you live?  I would have liked to stay with her for a week or more, to have all the conversations, to eat all the delicious food, to laugh and walk and wonder and understand everything together, two women who love each other. 

We managed to see the great Catedral de Santa Maria. which Cindy and her sister told me would (temporarily, probably) change my religious views!  

It is the most astonishing edifice.  It is the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world.  Of course it was first a mosque, built in the 1100's, during what is called here, on the Iberian Peninsula, "The Occupation", although it was a pretty long occupation of nearly 800 years!  

The Royal Chapel holds the remains of the city's conqueror, Ferdinand lll of Castile, his son and heir Alfonso the Wise, and their descendent, King Peter the Cruel.  How awful, to be remembered forever in historical documents as "The Cruel".  What a horrible person he must have been.  Also Christopher Columbus and his son are buried there, who were also horrible people.  I have no time for these relics, these nasty old men.  Where are the women buried, where are those who achieved wonders, the women artists and poets and makers?  

My lovely big strong sensitive dad.

Even though the world seems horrifying right now, I am so glad I was born in this time, in that place, where my dad believed in girls, in their great brains, their powers, their capability for anything, and pushed his daughters to read and learn and study, not just know how to do the washing and cooking and all those boring things which women all over the world mostly do.  Where he supported our independence, our agency, even our wild emotions.

This time where modern medicine assures my life, enables my lungs to breathe, removed the cancer from my breast,  gave me new lenses when I was going blind with cataracts.  

This time where I have an equal partnership with my husband, where we share cooking and cleaning and all those boring bits of life, as well as all the good stuff.  

Only one missing!

My daughters came over in January for 4 days, to say goodbye to their baby brother, (still their baby, at 32) who was leaving for Mexico.  It was the loveliest time.  I don't think I laugh with my children how I laugh with anyone else.  It's a deep laughter of my whole body and soul, sometimes it hurts we laugh so much, falling on the floor laughter!

I think what families (and friends ) do is to mend each other when we are broken, when we are hurt.  I think that is our purpose.  We weave our people whole, again and again.  

I wrote a poem about this, about Tim, it's called The Weaver, but I can't reproduce it here because there are some rude bits, the in and the out of it all.  

My lovely clever complicated
mother with her three children.

I am so glad to have all these weavers in my family.  I think it is in our blood, as my mother's last name was Webster.  And she taught me how.