Parallel-o-Gram

You know, I was just considering that my grandmother made a similar venture when she was almost exactly my age... travelling with the man she loved to a South American country that she knew so little about.

My grandparents' honeymoon transpired on a boat headed to Sao Paolo, Brazil, where my grandfather had an engineering job waiting for him. No sooner had their suitcases hit the ground than my grandfather was summoned on what should have been a two day work detail (building railroads).

What should have been a brief interlude arduously dragged into a month. The roads had closed down without warning and, in a cellphone exempt age, he had no way of contacting her at their temporary hotel lodging. With barely any grasp of Portuguese, my grandmother only timidly ventured outside, where she remembers invisible hands pinching her posterior unmercifully.

Quite the looker, my grandmother used to tutor a Brazilian man she worked with at the American consulate in English, until she came to understand that he had no interest in the language aspect of their lessons. When he invited her to dinner and she declined because her husband was out of town, he became infuriated and asked why on earth she thought he had been putting up with all of these early morning meetings??

She was once followed by a group of machismos who finally forced her to break feminine propriety and whack them all with her purse. She might have been in troubled waters, but a police officer came and shooed them. And then proceeded to hit on her himself.

Despite its rather agonizing moments, Grandma often recalls their sojourn in Brazil glowingly, as a defining moment, something that pushed her into self-reliance.

I go to Columbus, Ohio tomorrow after second attempt at shots. Grandma, with her faithful companion, the orange hoss-cat Bummer, have promised that the next few days will be full of cooking, stories--some new, some true favorites--and perhaps a visit with one of her Peruvian contacts. Perfect.


- Lex