Last weekend we spent 4 days at the beach. This Thursday, we are going to Buenos Aires for a 4 day weekend. 2 weeks after that, we are off to the beach in the Brazilian state of Bahia! It’s an embarrassment of vacations.

First off, let me share the pics from our beach vacation. We went to a beach called Juquei (or spelled Juquehy, I’ve seen it both ways.) If you drove to this beach on a Tuesday at, say, 10 am, it would take 2 hours and 45 minutes. Driving there on holiday long weekend, it took 7 hours. I looked at it this way: I pretended we were in Nashville and driving to Gulf Shores. That was 7 hours.

The beach was really pretty, the town was clean and had good food. The beach wasn’t super crowded and the waves were perfect for boogie boarding. Calvin really got into it, and Matilda was happy to jump on a wae as it rolled in. We rented a cute house one block from the beach that had a beautiful garden. Even with all of that, we probably won’t venture that drive again. I’d rather go to the pool in our condominium or fly somewhere!

Calvin is having a bit of rough time in Portuguese classes. It’s hard for him to be the kid in the room that doesn’t understand, so he’s checking out.

He also said that he wants to be YouTuber. Sheesh, how does he know what a YouTuber is?

I came up with an idea that solves both problems. We started making YouTube videos of the kids teaching Portuguese. We’re focusing on things they are learning or know already. I think it’s already helping out with attitude and enthusiasm.

Here is our first video:

And here’s lesson #2

Lesson 3:

I will post our other videos in a separate post!

I think in many ways, driving here is one of the most memorable things about living in this city.  At least, it’s one of the first things I did after getting off the plane, so it’s rooted deep in my memories.

First, the motor boys.  “Motor Boys” is what everyone calls the guys (and sometimes women) who ride through the city on motorcycles.  They are mostly doing courier and delivery work.  They are the grease that keeps the entire system running her.  Seriously, they are a key part of the infrastructure of the city.  And the reason is that they do not obey the laws of the road.  They zip between cars, they weave between lanes, and ultimately it means they outsmart traffic.  I was once at a stop light and there were 7 Motor Boys lined up between my lane and the lane next to me.

Oh, and if you don’t leave a big enough gap at stop lights, they will honk at you or slap your car.  I’ve been in cars and had the driver back up and move over to make more space.  It’s the price we pay to get things delivered in an efficient and cheap way.  If regular cars did all of this work, it would triple the time because traffic is slow.

But damn if they don’t scare the shit out of you.  They go so fast, so close to other cars, and sometimes they going into the lanes of oncoming traffic!  They skirt within a few inches of your car, and I was warned that if I ever hit one, every Motor Boy in the vicinity will come to their aid, loaded with a lot of rage at the car who hit them.  They are a protected danger of the city.  We respect them and give them right of way, and in return, we can get documents and take out buzzed across the city at lightning speed.  At least they all wear helmets.

The other thing is the hills.  This city, and in particular the part of town where I live is so hilly.  I don’t think whatever you are imagining is hilly enough.  45 degree angles, I kid you not.  In the van that drove us around the first few weeks, I would have to close my eyes and clutch the seat in front of me as we stopped at a red light, the car clinging to a 40 degree hill.  I was certain gravity and rubber would fail us and we’d go tumbling down the hill.  It didn’t happen, though.

Next, the roads themselves are bumpy.  There are speed bumps everywhere, which do ensure that people don’t speed, but they are fat and steep.  Then there are drainage gutters carved into some streets across the intersection.  There are then the just plain old bumps from patches to pot holes.  It’s the bumpiest, hilliest, ride, watching Motor Boys fly past you.

Now that I’m driving, it’s even more challenging.  3 or 4 times I have driven the wrong way on a one way street.  There are tons of them and I’m so focused on not hitting Motor Boys and finding the right street or parking that I don’t notice the sign saying it’s a one way.

There are also roundabouts.  Of course there are.

The silver lining to all this is how nice Brazilian drivers are.  Because there isn’t always a clear right of way, people are just really nice and let you in.  You have to assert yourself, but as soon as you stick you nose out there, they just stop and let you go without any anger or frustration.  They know it’s a tough place to drive and left turns are tricky, so they just let you in.  The speeds are often quite low, too.  But, the first few days driving our car I was too afraid to poke my car into a lane to get in.  The cars were coming, they had a green light.  The expectation is that you will just jump into the flow, like double dutch.  I’m getting the hang of it.

This all comes back to a big observation I have of Brazilian culture.  They don’t get ruffled.  Long line at the hardware store and now that person wants to check the price of an item?  No one rolls their eyes or huffs.  Car just jumped into the lane in front of you?  It’s cool.  Baby screaming in a restaurant?  Babies are cute.  I didn’t realize until we got here how quick Americans are to get pissed that things are slow or crowded or inconvenient in any way.  Does whining about the long line you got in actually help?  Does sucking your teeth and sighing dramatically make things go faster?  No.  Maybe it’s what happens when a culture gets used to inefficiency and struggle.  But listen, it’s not like it’s any longer of a line than anywhere else.  It’s jus that people let things roll off way more.  It’s a good habit to pick up.

Again, forgive the rush and lack of editing.  I’m sure it’s filled with typos and incomplete thoughts.  It’s a necessity!  Consider this a first draft.

There’s a lot to talk about in the day we landed in Brazil.  We left Cincinnati at night on July 20, and arrived in the morning on July 21.  We had 21 checked bags and a handful of carryon luggage.

When we walked off the plane, Matilda asked, “Is this Brazil?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where my room?” she asked.

I have to explain.  Part of us getting the kids excited about what was coming was telling them that when we got to Brazil, we’d go to our new apartment and pick our bedrooms.  This is how we answered questions about where we were going to live.  We picked our apartment from photos and videos sent to our emails.  We had never set foot in our apartment.  And there’s only so much you can see from photos in a rental listing.

What Matilda heard was that the plane would drop us straight at our apartment building, like a door-to-door bus service.  If only.

We had to walk through the airport and go through customs.  David had Everett’s carseat strapped to his backpack like a giant turtle shell, and we pushed Everett in the stroller.  Or maybe Everett was in the Ergo and Matilda was in the stroller?  I can’t exactly remember.  We did that a lot on the US side of our trip.  Keeping Everett close and calm in the Ergo was a life saver.

The line for customs took a while, but went smoothly.  Then we had to walk to baggage claim.  So, the thing about 21 bags is you have to get them out of the airport.  Even if David and I each pushed a cart, there’s no way we could get 21 bags on two carts.

I found a few other teachers who were also flying in (all the teachers arrive on the same day) and just having someone that was connected to us was reassuring.  None of them had as many bags as we did.  Portuguese to the rescue!  I found some guys who worked for the airport and explained that we had a ton of suitcases and needed help wheeling them out of the baggage claim area and into the terminal.  The admin of the school would be on the other side waiting for us with vans and lots of extra hands.

The airport guys lashed together 2 or 3 carts of suitcases and we each pushed one and somehow we got it all out of the baggage claim.  Seeing the school admin and other employees just outside the door wearing school shirts and smiling was a really amazing feeling.

It was a blur of introductions and meeting all kinds of people that I had skyped with or perhaps never heard of.  Our bags were labeled and taken off to be delivered to our apartment later that day.  We had also arrived with another family who had a 2 year old, so it was decided that the families with kids could go ahead and board vans bound for school.

I have to stop and write a little bit about the van ride across Sao Paulo.  It was Saturday, but the drive still took about an hour, or maybe even a little more.  The kids had made friends with various grown ups, Everett was in his carseat, but no one slept.  Looking out the windows, my eyes were full to the brim.  Super high apartment buildings and office buildings, crowded highways, graffiti, guys on motorcycles zipping through traffic.  Bridges, almost-dry riverbeds, opulence and poverty.  We saw it all through the tinted van windows.

My attention bounced between the kids, new teachers also arriving, admin getting to know us and welcoming us.  It was chaotic but ebullient.

The vans pulled into the school and we got our first look.  First impressions: very little of the school was indoors (“Did you know my school’s hallways have no walls?” Calvin said a few weeks ago.  “In Nashville my school had walls in the hallways.”) The boundary between school and nature was thin.  “Nature” was relative in a city of 25 million, but there were palm trees and flowering trees and all kinds of shrubs and flowers I had never seen and they were just a step beyond paved walkways and classroom doors.

The school was labrynthine and twisty, with pockets of order.  A lot like the neighborhood around it with streets at all kinds of angles, punctuated by rectangular apartment buildings.

Brutalist architecture, lots of concrete and straight lines, but a lot of construction happening.  An architect once told me you can tell the health of a city by the number of cranes on the skyline.  Constructions a good sign of growth and change.

There was lunch in the cafeteria and 7 or 8 stations to stop in to sign documents, fill out forms, get our start-up cash, and learn about health insurance.  I signed my name 50 or 60 times and collected tons of papers, and tried to remember the details of the kids’ bus schedules.

Meanwhile, the kids were amped up on exhaustion and adrenaline and were crawling around the floor and cackling like happy banshees.  Parents reading this will know the anxiety with which I viewed this scene, knowing that any second that joyful, screeching laughter could become an epic melt down.  We need to get these kids indoors and near a bed, stat.

There was a make-shift grocery store set up for us as well, and we loaded 4 tote bags up with basic groceries.  At about 1 pm, a van drove our exhausted, bedraggled family to our long-awaited apartment so we could choose our bedrooms.

Again, didn’t edit this or even re-read.  “No time!” the White Rabbit exclaimed.

I had such grand designs of writing about our arrival.  Then the actual arrival came and it’s been a whirlwind.  I haven’t had any time to sit down and reflect–much to my dismay.

There is so much I want to say and record.

Then I remember Anne Lamott’s one inch picture frame.

So here’s what I can see through a one inch picture frame when I think about flying to Brazil with 3 small children:

On the flight from Cincinnati to Newark we realized we had left their tablets back at my parents’ house.  This was a major blow, akin to Oedipus’s tragic fall.  In our packing hubris, we forgot to get the tablets.  The kids cried.  We gave them our phones.  All was well in the land of 21st century problems.

Matilda fell asleep in the stroller in our layover in Newark.  This was a blessing to all because she was becoming insanely tired and cranky.  When we boarded our flight from Newark to Brazil, I looked back as we walked dow the aisle and couldn’t find Matilda.  Calvin ran back and found her curled up on one of the first seats, asleep again.  She was so tired she decided to plunk down on the first available seat.  It’s hard to explain to an sleepy 3 year old that we have assigned seats and those aren’t them.  We finally got her to our row and she fell back to sleep on my lap.

Everett, on the other hand, was wide awake.  At 10 pm.  This is a kid who goes to bed at 7:30 every night.  We strapped him into his carseat for take off, he was super tired.  But there was a delayed connecting flight, so we had to wait take off until those passengers arrived.  All that kid wanted was to sleep, but all the lights were still on in the cabin.  He cried and cried.

10 seconds after take off, he fell asleep.  He slept most of the night.  Calvin and Matilda slept curled up like kittens on our row of three.  They slept on me, on the window, on each other.  Restless kittens is more accurate.  Pigs in a barn?  Not sure the right simile.

I got about 90 minutes.  Too much responsibility and dry airplane air.

We landed.  We survived.  We were tired.

Okay, that’s all I got.  I didn’t proofread (no time, don’t judge).

Today is the big day!  Tonight we board a plane and wake up in Brazil tomorrow morning.  This is my last post about selling our house and all our stuff.  I’m getting a little tired of talking about it, too.  From here on out, I document this adventure.  

I watched a house burn in slow motion. 

We sold everything we owned except for what we could fit into 20 suitcases.  The bureaucracy in Brazil is such that getting a shipment of furniture and boxes can be very expensive and take 6-9 months.  So, our school pays the extra bag fees and furnishes our apartment.

So for our last 6 months in Nashville, we burned it all down.  Everything in our 4 bed, 3 bath bungalow had to go.  But, as opposed to an actual fire that eats up your whole house in a a night, I had time and I got to choose.  I set aside the things to keep: the mandolin came off its hook on the wall and went into its case.  It will be going in the overhead bin on the plane.  Our wedding photo albums and the kids’ hospital bracelets and the clay owl creation from camp have been packed into boxes for my mom’s basement.  I fished out the baggie of baby teeth from the drawer in the bathroom.  I almost threw it in the keep box, but then I felt like that was a bit nuts, so I stuck them back in the bathroom drawer.  I’ll sleep on it and decide, I thought.

But almost everything had to go.  If I had to guess, we got rid of 95% of our possessions.  The ugly hand-me-down chair that I tried to sew a slipcover for, gone.  The ironing board and the rack that held it on the wall, gone.  The martini shaker made out of a mason jar, gone.

Many things we sold online, still more of it went to Goodwill.  My in-laws came into town and we asked them to bring their pick-up truck to haul off more big things.  As my husband and father-in-law were getting ready to carry a load to the dump and Goodwill, I grabbed a framed IKEA print right off the wall as I walked by and added it to the bed of the truck.  Mismatched winter gloves were gone.  Tiny toddler sandals that lost their matches, gone as well.

Another way to look at it is that it’s a little bit like dying before I’ve died.  This is what someone would have to do with my stuff if I died.  They’d have to sift through each thing individually, deciding if it was useful or sentimental.  What about the giant cup of pens?  What about the awards I won in middle school?  The stained glass rooster?  But I’m not dead, and I get to do it.  Or rather, I have to do it.

It’s exhausting.  It takes an hour to go through a shelf with 30 books on it, asking myself if I love this book enough to put it in a suitcase to Brazil (Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, yes) or enough to put it in a box in my mom’s basement in Cincinnati (Speak with my teaching notes in it, yes.)  I feel terrible deciding the fate of books I’ve loved so much.  Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist was such an amazing book.  But it doesn’t make the cut for our 20 suitcases, and it doesn’t make sense in a basement in Ohio.  I’m a fat Roman emperor holding a thumb up or down to the poor soul in the ring.  I’d love to just stop and not have to make all these decisions.

But I can’t stop, because we had to burn this all to the ground by the end of June.

It’s the decisions.  So many tiny decisions that pile up.  Everything needs a decision.  The two opened packages of solo cups?  Plastic disposable cocktail weenie forks?  A stack of handmade ceramic appetizer plates my sister-in-law gave us for Christmas?

It’s the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up on steroids.  The Life Changing Magic of Throwing it all Away, no tidying needed.

For David, the challenge was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs.  All seven seasons on crappy DVDs with terrible disc menus: bad graphics and cheesy, looping music.  He’s having a hard time getting rid of them.

Buffy was his joy and first binge-watch during college and beyond.  He joined the Buffistas, a web forum for fans of the show, and met many friends that way.  We watched those DVDs together early in our relationship.  One of our closest friends in Nashville is a Buffista who responded when David posted that we were moving there.

Throwing Buffy away feels hard, so he wonders aloud if anyone would want them.

No, I say.  No one wants 15-year-old DVDs.  Oh, and there’s 28 of them.  It’s a real commitment to take those on.

It feels like our stuff is alive and somehow we hurt them with this treatment.  They judge us and glare from their Goodwill garbage bags by the front door.

But a few weeks after verbally confirming that Buffy needs to get thrown away, we actually get around to doing it.  We slide all 28 DVDs out of the DVD binder where they were stored and put them in a garbage bag.  On top of the Buff DVDs we throw in old couch pillows that no longer have slip covers, school binders and binder dividers, old scrapbooking stickers.

(Remember those giant DVD binders that were our pride and joy in the ‘00s?  We curated our entire collection, painstakingly tucking all the booklets behind each DVD.  Yeah, that had to go too.)

Before I put them in the garbage bag, I take a photo of the Buffy DVDs fanned out across the floor.  I thanked them for their joy, and I posted the photo on Facebook.

The next day, I get a ping on my phone telling me I have a Facebook message.  A friend from high school who lives in Salt Lake City wants to know if I’d be willing to ship her the DVDs.

I thought the bag had already made it out to the garbage can, and I wasn’t about to go dumpster diving in for the discs.  I told her I was sorry.

And then I noticed a garbage bag in the corner our closet.  I could see through the plastic that the DVDs were at the bottom.  I fished them out, wiped off the goo from a half eaten Nutragrain bar, and we popped the DVDs in a box to Utah.

One gladiator was spared the tiger.

I dreamt we owned a donkey.  We kept it in our backyard, fenced into a home-made pen.  But I kept forgetting to buy hay to feed it (is that even what you feed donkeys?) and so it would bust through its rickety fence and eat our grass, braying mournfully.

I the dream, I kept looking out the window and seeing the donkey.  Then I would suddenly remember that I needed to find a new home for the donkey before we moved to Brazil.  That would lead me back to remembering that I needed to feed the donkey, and I’d yet again forgotten to buy hay.

The feeling of shame and guilt was palpable.  The feeling that I had taken on the responsibility of a living thing and now I was shirking it.  Worse, the dream donkey was suffering because of me.

This dream is really about my dog.  I adopted Django the week after finishing my first year of teaching.  It was my first full-time job and I had some disposable income and an apartment in Brooklyn that allowed pets.  I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I’d wanted a dog for a long time.  In the first week in July, I had two months of limitless free time ahead of me.

I rode the Long Island Rail Road out to the North Shore Animal League.  I walked through the grown dog room and the puppy room, but didn’t find a dog that felt right for me.  Finally I wandered into the recovering puppy room.  I saw a little black and white dog barking and rolling around happily on his back.  I took this as a good sign.  Other puppies cowered, shivering in the back of their cages.

A volunteer stepped forward and asked if I had any questions.

“What’s on that tag around his neck?”

“Let me see,” the volunteer said as she opened the cage and pulled him out.  “Vomiting, diarrhea, upper respiratory infection, heart murmur,” my eyes were wide at this point, “and anorexia.”

“Dogs can have anorexia?”

“But he’s recovering from all of these things!” she said quickly.  “He’s taking medication and is expected to make a full recovery.”

The volunteer had put the puppy in my arms, and I’m sure my face was going through that car wash of love and hesitation.

“Do you want me to bring out a vet tech to talk to you?” she asked.

I nodded.  The vet tech emerged to reassure me that the head cold and puking were treated with medication that they would give me to take home so I could finish the course.  The heart murmur wasn’t uncommon and would probably clear up on its own.

“And the anorexia?”

It turned out he had been brought from a kill shelter in Virginia to this no-kill shelter on Long Island.  He’d been through quite a bit, and it made sense that he was not interested in eating.  If he was adopted and loved on—the theory went—he would start eating again.

I adopted that fixer-upper puppy.  You may have read the story in my “Agridoce” post about carrying him home in a cat box only to drop the box on the subway platform.  I thought I’d paralyzed him, but he was just stretching.  His legs are fully functional.   

6 months later, I met the man who would become my husband.  A few months after that, we moved in together.  2 years later we moved to Nashville pregnant with our first child, and we bought a house with a fenced-in backyard for Django.

Calvin was born that December.  The daily walks with Django ground to a halt.  The belly rubs and couch snuggles were replaced by baby bouncing and rocking marathons.  In a haze of sleep deprivation, I lost my temper and snapped at Django when he shook and the clang of his tags woke the baby up after I’d spent an hour bouncing him to sleep.

Django tucked tail and slinked out of the room, and henceforth decamped to the opposite end of the house.

The baby became a toddler and a baby sister joined him.  The sister became a toddler and another baby came home from the hospital.

Django looked at me with mild surprise and a little disdain.  Another one?

I will admit that I’d grown weary of being a dog owner.  No one prepared me for this.  I thoughts babies and dogs were soulmates (mine were not) and I wasn’t warned about how I’d feel about my dog after having a bunch of tiny humans to care for.

When my sister-in-law, Amanda, got pregnant, I confessed that I was struggling with balancing the kids and Django.  I warned her she might feel that way about her dog, Sadie.

“I’ve always had dogs,” she said.  “We’re dog people and we’ll always have dogs.”

But when her twins turned two, she had arrived to a similar place.  I felt a sense of relief in the camaraderie.  Maybe I wasn’t just a jerk dog owner and flunky mom.

“I’m not a good dog mom anymore,” Amanda said.  She just didn’t have time for all the things she used to do with Sadie.  Yes, Sadie was still loved and had food and vet care, but, like Django, she didn’t have the life she used to.

That’s exactly it.  I knew I wasn’t a great dog owner anymore.  I didn’t have much more to give after my kids went to sleep.  I was touched out.  I wanted time for myself, rather than time caring for the needs of another living thing.

Django is 10 now.  Over the past few years, when we talked about international teaching jobs, Django had been a factor holding us back.    

Last fall, when we started really looking at jobs, David again asked me about Django.

“We’ll find him a new home,” I said.  “It happens.  Sometimes you have to find your dog a new place to live.”

He was too old for 15 hours in the belly of a plane.  Add in apartment life and we really couldn’t take him.  It’s hard to confess this, but I felt relief that we wouldn’t be dog owners anymore.  I can say all of those reasons, but this just feels like the right thing for us and him.  I need a break from the mournful braying in my mental backyard.

I took pictures of Django and posted them on social media, asking if anyone wanted to adopt a very smart, very calm dog.  Within the hour, I got a call from Amanda in Minnesota.  Sadie had died the year before, and as she heard we were moving and not going to take Django, she’d talked with her husband and agreed that they would take him.   

But this is the dream I’m having about the donkey.  I am so worried about Django.  I’m exhausted by caring for him, but it weighs on me.  He’s my responsibility.  I’m looking forward to not being a dog owner, not because I don’t love my dog, but because it’s hard to look my crappy dog parenting in the face every day.  I’m ready to release that guilt.

And yet, my third child who is still just a toddler loved Django (Dado was one of his first words) and he hollers “Dog!” with joy when people walk their dogs in front of our house.  Hello again, guilt.

Another layer of worry is that my sister-in-law has a cat and Django is terrified of cats.  Back in New York, a little bodega cat on W. 106^th street named Dinghy used to pop out of milk crates on the sidewalk and charge Django, spitting and hissing.  I’m worried about Django living in fear of the very sweet cat.  The donkey of guilt is braying in the backyard.

I forgot to take Amanda Django’s records when we dropped him off with her on Easter weekend.  I got out a big manila envelope and went through all the paperwork I had in a filebox.  The things on top were the most recent.  Shot records, a teeth cleaning.  Behind the Tennessee records were the ones from Manhattan, and Brooklyn before that.  At the very bottom of the stack I found Django’s original adoption papers.  I sat on the floor of the dining room and cried.

It’s June now, and I get regular texts from Amanda with photos of Django.  My nieces dress him up in bows and draw his portrait in chalk on the sidewalk.  He’s slipped out of their backyard a few times (he loves a jaunt about the neighborhood) but the neighbors found him and brought him back.  Django is even warming to the cat.

I don’t know what the resolution is.  Am I a bad person for adopting a dog and then having three kids and moving away?  Or, have I given my two nieces fun memories with a sweet dog?  Does Django even remember me or understand distance or time or guilt?  Maybe this one doesn’t resolve, it just ends, but at least the dog doesn’t die.