Have been on the ground now for almost a full twenty hours.
Amazing how instantaneously cultural habits return, how easy it is to slip back into an old skin…
Doing Heraclitus great injury, I would appropriate his – no man wears the same old skin twice the same way.
It would be easy to become judgmental about perceived inefficiencies, about lowered expectations, haphazard workmanship, and the slightly disjointed way the social fabric is stretched and maintained. But judging would fail to bear fruit. It is much more productive to dive in and swim like a fish, as though these too are your waters, as though these were the only processes, the only social order that mattered, the only reasonable workmanship given the circumstances.
So it is that I find myself in a hammock, in a room without walls, in a house without running water (again, today the water ran out mid afternoon, it did not say where it was going or when it would be back). Is this normal? Even by local standards, it is not. Yet, here I am. It would be easier to become appalled, abhorrent of such flagrant lack of … civility. But what to gain from that that cannot just as easily be gotten by just working to remedy the situation as well as we can – and so that becomes the first step down the same road the rest of the social order is on – just do what you can.
Dad seems to be in fairly good shape, he does not have the feel of a man who’s near demise.
I’ve spoken to him about the house, it’s occupants and how the current situation could change if he so wishes it. How we may get the person who’s renting the upstairs as a storage-space out, and how then the whole house might be made habitable again. If we accomplish those first two goals then to deal with who might live in the house, and what possible benefit that might bring to my father.
There is also the matter of a family member who has found himself needing a place to live and taken up residence here almost by default. While my father is more than willing to offer aid, it may not actually be what this person needs most at the moment. The case appears to be that there is some disjunction between expectations or perceptions of reality and what is met and produced. What this person might need is not a shelter, but to seek professional help with aligning their thoughts and perceptions with reasonable means and ends.
After having that conversation, I left my father and dashed off to meet the lawyer, who’s from Santa Teresa, but likes to frequent a bar here near the Largo do Machado “para tomar um chop” on his way home. The lawyer seems helpful, if vague in some areas, and apparently has plenty of time on his hands to work on getting the paperwork done to clear up whatever the problem with the water company might be – note, no running water in the house as of now – as well as pursuing getting the title to the house in order. We shall see what fruit his efforts, the native son on his native soil, bear.
The above all came to a wrap by six-ish, and the rest of the evening I spent drinking green tea and talking to my father about driverless cars, miniature computer-controlled robotic aircraft, the guy who’s attempting to dive to earth from 23 miles up, and how the Mars rover landed through a series of science-fiction like engineering maneuvers.
And I ate a whole bunch of bananas I bought from a street vendor on my way home. The whole dozen, and I feel quite well indeed.