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.