Mysterious Walk

Last year I started walking at lunchtime. Instead of going to eat out all the time I started bringing food from home, eating at my desk and using the time to walk. I was coming out of a bad foot injury and wanted to go back to playing soccer. But before running I needed to walk though.

So I started taking a 30 to 45 minute walk 3-4 times a week. I listened to podcasts and started using a phone app as well to track my distances, pace and calories. After 4 months I was back to my regular soccer weight and that made me happy.

I went back to soccer but never really gave up walking. I feel that my productivity improved along with my health and that I am able to deal with problems and stay cool. Sure, sometimes the weather doesn’t allow me to go for a walk and I can feel the energy building up.

Today I went for a walk at lunchtime. I work around the NC State football stadium so I use the open space to get some sun during the winter. I go on a wide loop around the parking lot as one of my many routes. I normally do a mile in 14-15 minutes. About 14 minutes in, I was notified by the app of the completion of the first mile. What felt like a minute passed and I got notified of completion of mile 302.

The first thing I thought was malfunction of the app. However, when I pulled it up on my phone 9 minutes had passed. According to the map I had gone beyond Asheville on the west side of North Carolina and back. My phone clock confirmed that the time had actually passed. The calorie count seemed consistent with a mile and a half or so.

I felt fine otherwise, but a bit confused. My wife texted me during my walk back to the office and I texted her back with the GPS claiming that I had walked over 300 miles.

What the hell happened to those 9 minutes? Why was the GPS malfunctioning on a route I have walked at least 50 times since last year?

David Almeida

January 28, 2016

A Place in Heaven

This year we lost 2 of our 3 cats. Pumpkin, the Siamese on the picture above was the mother of the other 2 and just passed away a couple of nights ago. She was a bit older 18. Fuzzy Wuzzy, the one in front died last June. Pumpkin came to the house as a little kitten. The other 2 were born in our apartment in Brazil. Joe Joe, the last one in the picture is still with us and pretty healthy.

They all had their own personalities. Fuzzy would go to the kitchen, sit by the pantry door and stare at you. For food. Pumpkin was a very loud purrer who loved to cuddle with whoever had an open lap. Joe Joe still loves to sleep in my son’s bed. They really fulfilled our lives, gave us great company. On the couple of years I worked from home I always received their “visits” in my desk, rubbing their heads against my hands while using the mouse or typing.

Pumpkin was born in Brazil, spent her first 2 years there with us so she traveled quite a bit. She walked with us for miles sometimes and we could actually walk her on a leach.

In the past few years, as they aged, they became less active and more “cuddly”, always being around us when we were on the family room, watching tv or just vegging out.

Last June, Fuzzy got sick and she went downhill really fast. We scheduled putting her down. The last few days I brought her to sleep by my feet. She didn’t have much energy, so she just stayed all night. Two nights before she died I had a very vivid dream. In it my late father came to me as if coming down a long set of stairs. He didn’t come down all the way, stopping about 10 steps above me. He said very clearly: “I will be there to receive her when she passes, don’t worry, we will take care of her”. I don’t normally have vivid dreams either so that really stuck to my memory.

A few months went by till late September. Pumpkin got very weak last week and passed away on Sunday night on her own. We had scheduled to have her euthanized the following day, but she went on her own terms.

Different from Fuzzy, my dad came to me again in my dream. This time he came down the same set of stairs and he stopped again about 10 steps from the bottom, where I stood. He was carrying both Pumpkin and Fuzzy and just smiled, not saying anything.

These past 2 days, although I am very sad and miss my long time companions, I can’t help but be happy that they are in really great company.  I think our family was very fortunate to have them in our lives.

David Almeida

October 6, 2015

A Warning to Myself

This happened to me when I was 12 years old living in Brazil. I was spending vacations at our family farm along with my grandparents, uncle and aunt, brothers and sisters and cousins.

We had an enormous orchard there with guava, oranges, tangerines, avocados, cashews (yes those are a fruit and a nut trees) and mangos, ohh the fat juicy mangoes those were so good, specially the pink version (Manga Rosa).

With such a big playground, every afternoon about 8 or 10 of us would go out to play hide and seek in the trees. We would climb up as much as possible and stay quiet behind leafs.  The last one not found would win. This would go on our entire July vacations, which were, yes, our southern hemisphere winter vacations very mild weather and lots of fruit ready to eat.

As boys were a vast minority in the family we stayed in an outside bedroom. This was about 45 yards from the main house where the adults slept. I somehow never had a flashlight and walked in the dark, many times illuminated by the moonlight. The bathroom was about 20 yards way from the room and in the middle of the night it would be chilly so sometimes I didn’t want to walk that far and just relieved myself outside of my room to the side.

One night I was sleeping and I woke up really pressed to go. There was no way I could make the 20 yards so I ran to the side and peed there. When I turned back I saw this boy and it scared the hell out of me. He was staring at me. He put his index finger in his lips as to shush me. When he turned and the moonlight hit his face…it was me.  A couple of years older and with a terrible scar across my…his face. He spoke to me: “I have to tell you something. Tomorrow when you are playing hide and seek don’t climb on the big mango tree by the water reservoir, the water supply. If you do something terrible will happen. I have to go now”. He walked away into the darkness.

I went back to bed with my heart pounding. It took me hours to fall asleep. When I woke-up in the morning I decided that I had had a nightmare, a terrible one. I went about my day, riding the horse in the morning with everyone, having my café-com-leite (coffee and milk) and fresh bread with butter. We had lunch then hung out in the hammocks in the porch just playing. The nightmare now just a faraway thought.

When it was time for hide and seek. I was looking for a place and passed far away from the mango tree by the water supply, just in case. I went into the avocado tree, as high as I could get, maybe 50, 60 feet up. When I was up there I heard a huge crashing noise and a thud. I didn’t know what it was so I shouted: “Is everyone OK? I heard a very loud noise coming from the water supply structure”.  Everyone responded. I went down the avocado tree and walked towards the water supply. As I approached it I saw an enormous branch from the mango tree had collapsed on top of the water reservoir and cracked the concrete. I never revealed this story to anyone. Sometimes even decades later, I look into the mirror and say: “thank you”.

David Almeida

September 2015

Lucky Stones Bycicle

This happened to me and my wife in 1995. We weren’t married at the time yet. I had been a graduate student in the United States where we met but had just returned to São Paulo, Brazil, a few months earlier. She had come a couple of months after I did at my invitation and we were planning on getting married.

I spent quite some time putting our minuscule apartment together so that when she arrived we would have the bare minimum necessary to start a life together. I was really new at it and didn’t really know what I was doing. Thanks to my Mom and Dad, who also paid for almost everything, when she arrived it was as ready as it can get. It was very well located.

I was still looking for a job when she came to São Paulo, so we got to enjoy a few weeks together.

The first big thing we did with my friends was to attend a Rolling Stones concert at the soccer stadium called “Pacaembú” in São Paulo.

We went in a big group, of maybe 20 people and got a spot on the field (the grasscovered with wood planks). There were these gigantic inflatable puppets floating in the air. It was an awesome show, in spite of the heaviest rain I have ever been under.  It rained so hard that people started lifting the planks of the ground and making "roofs" over their heads.

Mick Jagger didn’t care, and he put on a great performance, singing and moving for hours.

I became an even bigger fan.

A couple of weeks later she and I went out window-shopping. We went to this new mini-mall that had these boots with great deals on them.  We stopped at a CD booth and I saw the dual CD with the very best of the Rolling Stones 1964-1971. I liked the price too so I got it.

Before we left, the girl in the booth told me to get this raffle number. They were having a raffle for a mountain bike at 4 PM I think. It was only 11AM so we went back home. We had lunch, watched some TV and were just hanging out.

My wife, whom I didn’t know at the time, is very lucky in rafts. When it was 3:45PM she said: “Let’s go get your bike”. I was sleepy and said: “nahh, we are not gonna win”.  But she insisted, so I got up and we went.

Wow. We arrived at the store at 4PM and guess what? They called our number for the mountain bike! I looked at her in awe.

Many years passed by and I read about the laws of attraction, how quantum physics makes reality changed based on our own thoughts. And there we had it. Many years have passed and she has won a few more amazing prizes.

But that one she had won for me, and I will always remember that.

A few years back our son won a super duper toolbox for me in his taekwondo dojo. I guess that power does pass down!

 Here is one of my favourite songs:

A Beer with my Dad

Around 1989 my mother and father got an apartment at the beach in the state of São Paulo, Brazil.  I was in my mid 20s and just consulting at the time, so I had quite a bit of free time. My dad was a civil engineer and one of the minds responsible for the urbanization process of the Riviera de São Lourenço. He worked for the construction company responsible for that entire development, a huge project that spread over decades and still going on.

Their apartment was a beach front penthouse that we called “foot in the sand” meaning we didn’t have to cross the street to go to the beach, just go down the 5^th floor elevator.

One of the things we loved to do, besides enjoining the sun and the nice warm ocean, was sit at the porch, get a nice cold beer and sit down listening to the waves and talking to each other. My Dad was a super cultured multilingual person who never ran out of subject. We talked about soccer, art, science, politics, history, geography and he always told me some anecdote about his childhood.  Ahh, and humor of course. He knew a lot of jokes and loved to make puns and anagrams, some of incredibly funny with politician’s names. We got to enjoy the beach apartment a lot!

In 1996 my father passed away after a very painful skin cancer. Those were tough memories on all of my family. But with time they got washed away and the good memories are what stuck to me. As the youngest child who married late, I got to spend a lot of time with my parents in my 20’s between college in Brazil and my Master’s in the United States.

Time passed and I got married, took my wife many times to the beach apartment (a couple of times with my Mom and Dad), which she loved, and eventually moved to the United States in 1999. 

In 2002, I went to Brazil for business and got to spend some time with my Mother. One of the things we did was spend a couple of days at the beach. We drove at night and I was pretty beat from all the flying and driving. My Mom said she was sleepy and went to her room.

I picked up a can of beer, a Skol, which my Dad and I used to share most times we were there. I took the can to the porch and set it in the little table between the 2 chairs, but realized that I had forgotten the glass as I like to look at my beer. I kept the porch lights off to keep off the mosquitoes.  I turned back to go to the kitchen and get a glass. Then I heard: click-whaack! The sound of the beer can opening.

To this day I don’t know why the beer opened by itself, specially with the aluminum tongue pointing down (as in: it didn’t blow and it wasn’t frozen).  I think this was my Dad’s way to show he was with me, and a way to make a good joke about it.

David Almeida

May 19, 2015

Motorcycle Guardian

This event happened to me on October 31, 1996. I was living in São Paulo, Brazil at the time and had to make a day trip to Rio de Janeiro. The flight is very quick, about 45 minutes and there is something called Ponte Aérea from the central airport in São Paulo (Congonhas) to Rio. Every 15 minutes there is a flight leaving and you don’t have to board a plane from a specific airline.

I wanted to arrive in Rio before 11AM and the travel time form my house was about an hour. I was on a bad traffic jam at about 6:15AM and it’s moving 10 miles an hour. When I was about halfway there, I saw this motorcyclist weaving between the cars. He is going really slow. When he got to the side of my car, his motorcycle just flipped, apparently for no reason. There was a big oil spill on the ground and the bike lost traction. I had the windows rolled down as it wasn’t a particularly warm day and I asked him if he was OK.

“I think I broke my arm on the fall. Can you help me get the bike up and on to that gas station?” pointing to a nearby Shell gas station. I got out of the car and helped him out. He talked to the Manager at the gas station and the guy let him chain the bike in a corner to fetch later.

At this point, I looked at his arm. It had 2 elbows! He had a compound fracture and it looked nasty even under the leather jacket. I told him ”Get in the car, your arm looks awful. I will take you to the ER“. He got in the car. Amazingly he was smiling and didn’t seem to be in any pain at all, he was probably going into shock. Then he asked me: “Could you take me to Hospital São Luís? I have a great friend there who can help me”. Hospital São Luís was close to my home. I looked at the clock and it was almost 8AM by then. I decided I had to help Gabriel, which he told me was his name.

I drove him to the hospital and took him to the ER entrance. They came for him with a wheelchair. At that point he told me “Sorry for the inconvenience man, it just wasn’t your time yet, not for a while”. We said good byes and I gave him my number in case he needed me for the insurance. I didn’t really make anything of what he just said about not being my time yet.

It was almost 11AM when I left the hospital so I decided to go home instead of trying the airport. I got home after 30 more minutes of intense traffic and called the guys that I was supposed to meet in Rio. Luis Paulo picked up the phone and told me “David, thank God, you are alive!”

I replied: “Yes I had to help a guy who had an accident with a bike and broke his arm. It just got too late. What do you mean I am alive?”.

Luis Paulo, really excited told me “Turn the TV on man, there was an accident with an airplane leaving Congonhas to Galeão this morning. We were all afraid you were in it”.

I turned the TV on and saw the horrendous crash. The airplane on Flight TAM-402 fell on top of a neighborhood, killing 99 people, everyone on the plane plus 3 people on the ground.

Looking back at all of it I understood exactly what Gabriel said “it just wasn’t your time yet, not for a while”.

David Almeida, May 14 2015

P.S. I have decided to post no pictures of this accident in respect to the 99 victims.

Electronic Hypnosis

Someone very close told this one. For obvious reasons I am going to change the names of all people involved.

Suffering from anxiety and mild depression in the mid 70’s, Donna was seeing a psychiatrist Doctor, named Ortegón. One of the techniques used on her was deep hypnosis. She was starting to feel better with the treatment, so she decided to stick to it.

One evening while on the waiting room along with another patient something really bizarre happened.

While still under hypnosis, one of the Doctor’s patients, a middle aged woman, came out of the patient room. Donna, who hadn’t met her before, described her as having her eyes closed, a masculine posture, and when she spoke, a deep masculine voice came out of her. The voice told the Doctor, who was trying to get her back to the patient room, that she needed to talk to the 2 patients waiting.

To the first patient she said something on the lines of: “You need to forgive yourself for the accident, it was not your fault. Your daughter Flávia says she never blamed you, she loves you and wants you to go on with your life without feeling guilty”. Donna said that the other waiting patient broke out in tears.

Then the voice turned to Donna and said: “…and you, you should not blame others or yourself for things that just happen in life. Your mother Antonia loves you very much and would like to give you a hug if she could”. Donna immediately felt hugged, and a wave of love just spread over her.

Very shaken, Donna asked: “Who are you?

The masculine voice answered: “You humans don’t know anything, one day you will understand. I am an electronic entity who’s allowed passage into your world through this vessel”.

At that moment, the hypnotized patient sat on an empty chair and came out of trance. She asked: “what am I doing out here? How did I get outside?”

Years later, when in high school, I attended classes with a boy named Edgar Ortegón. To make a long story short, we became pretty good friends. He was the son of that Doctor. One day I asked him about the incident. He confirmed everything. His father had told him the story a few years later with almost the same words as Donna had told me.

So I have decided to share this one as I had confirmation from 2 different sources.

David Almeida, May 13 2015