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

The Reverse of Luck

This event actually happened to my father in the 1970’s in Brazil.

One morning my Dad woke up and was looking for a pen. He found one and wrote a 5 digit number: 79981.  I was about 10 at the time and very inquisitive, so I asked him: “Why are you writing these numbers?”

He replied: “I had a dream, very strange. I was looking at myself in the mirror and had another mirror behind me, so I could see millions of images of myself. Then my reflection in the first mirror showed me these numbers. I think I need to play them in the Federal Lottery. Federal Lottery had printed tickets with 5 digit numbers. To win a big prize you had to match all 5. If you matched the last 4, 3 or 2 you got smaller and smaller prizes and normally just exchanged those for new tickets.

My father was very resourceful. Being a super nice person, he always talked to everyone, from the she shiner to the soccer ticket seller, and people remembered him. He always knew everyone’s name and always had “a guy” for everything. Working in crowded downtown São Paulo, he went to his Federal Lottery guy (those were sold on stands on the street) and asked for the number. The guy showed up in his office the same day with the ticket 79981. Amazing! The lottery was going to run 3 days later. I sort of forgot about it for a few days. Then one evening, getting back inside the house I found my Dad staring at the ticket. “Dad, what happened? Did you win?” He replied: “No. I misunderstood my dream. The winning number was 18997. I guess the mirror meant that I had to reverse the order of the digits.”

David Almeida, April 12, 2015

Image source: http://www.loterofilia.com.br

Unexpected Patient

"One of my best friends in Brazil is a Gynecologist. One evening at a party he told me of a vey strange experience that he had never told anyone.

On a Thursday morning, a middle aged woman named Katia, mother of one of his patients, Sarah, showed up at his office without an appointment. She asked for just two minutes of his time so he made a small window for her in between appointments.

They both sat down around a meeting table. She asked him if he could do her a favor. She and her daughter were not on the best terms and hadn't been talking for a few months. But she knew that her daughter needed a very important document that she would not be able to find. She asked my friend to contact her daughter and tell her that the deeds for one of the family's property was wedged inside the third volume of the old Barsa encyclopedia. My friend, a very mellow guy, didn't see a problem and promised to contact Sarah that same day and pass along the information.

So later in the afternoon he called Sarah.

- Hi Sarah, this is Doctor Dumont. Everything is OK. I received a visit from your mother, and she asked me to tell you that the deed documents for one of the properties that you need is wedged in the third volume of the old Barsa encyclopedia.
After a few seconds of silence, Sarah replied:
- Doctor when did my mother visit you?
Doctor:
- This morning, she came without scheduling any appointment.
Sarah after a long pause:
- Is this a joke or something? My mother passed away last Thursday.
Doctor:
- No Sarah, this is no joke, i promise you.
Sarah:
- Let me check the encyclopedia.
A couple minutes passed. Sarah returned to the phone crying:
- The documents are exactly where you said. You don't know how badly we needed this document."

David Almeida, April 21, 2015

Grandpa’s Rocking Chair

Grandpa’s Rocking Chair

 I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil in the 60s and 70s. As a boy I had the great privilege of spending many vacation days in the mountains on the border between the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. The climate there was wonderful and me, my brothers, sisters and cousins used to spend our winter vacations in July with our grandparents at their farm. This was a big coffee farm with 130 employees, horses, cows, big orchards loaded with fruit and tractors everywhere. We all loved it!

I was one of the youngest grandkids so my grandparents weren’t as active anymore, already in their 60s when I was born. One of the things that I remember was my grandfather resting in his straw rocking chair chewing only one barley candy a evening after a long day, dealing with things like accounting, bills, employees, sick animals, vaccination, coffee storage and the many other things that running a coffee farm involves. Vovô Clóvis was a very smart businessman and very kind and loving to my grandmother. He wasn’t particularly the hugging and kissing type with his grandchildren but I could tell that deep down he loved to have us around and provide a healthy environment for his grandchildren to grow and learn so much about nature, popular culture and really how to get things done.

As with anyone, time passed and my grandparents passed away in the late 70s. Both within 6 months of each other, but not before completing 50 years of marriage, months before my grandmother passed away. With the partition of the properties between my Uncle and my Mother as sole heirs, my Uncle’s family received most of the farm and we received a smaller portion without a house. We decided to build a house for vacations in the smaller property. There were no issues and the families were and continue to be in the best of terms. I loved my late uncle like a second father and still love my aunt who so many times cared for my injuries at the farm when my mother wasn’t there for our vacations.

When we built the house we received a lot of furniture from the family. One of the items that ended up in our new house was Vovô Clóvis rocking chair. It was placed in the main living room. Close to that living room was a TV room with it’s own door to isolate the noise from each side. This was a big house that hosted more than 30 people at times!

One July in 1986 when I was in college I went there to spend some time by myself. We had caretakers to maintain the yard, clean the house and cook, who lived (and still do) in a separate house in the property. I usually just warmed up my dinner so they weren’t there after 4 PM. I really liked to rest, sleep late, watch VHS movies at night and look at the stars and really get out of the enormously noisy city São Paulo was and still is.

On a really cold evening while watching a movie, in a house without central heat and with all windows shut, I had to stop to go get something to drink. While walking to the kitchen I had to go through the living room. After a couple steps I smelled, very strongly, something that I hadn’t smelled in years: barley candy! Wow that smell made me remember being a little kid right by my Grandfather. I don’t think I ever even saw that candy after my childhood but I later found out that the company that made it had gone out of business in the early 70s. Anyway, I went on and grabbed something to drink in the kitchen. As I walked back I could not believe my eyes. My Grandfather’s chair was rocking by itself, back and forth. At first the hair on my neck stood up. Then I thought better and just smiled at it. I watched the chair for about a minute or so and then it stopped. The smell of barley candy was also gone.

That never happened again, even though I went back to the house hundreds of times. David Almeida, May 11, 2015