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