I drive and I listen to my Spotify list, and I hear the first sounds of “Airport”, a song by The Motors I heard back in my teens, and I think how appropriate it is for these days of my life. Although it’s not a ballad, “Airport” is a sad song, about parting, about putting distance between two people, about saying goodbye. Yesterday I just left my elder son Afonso at Lisbon’s airport – he was flying …
Tag: Christmas
In Britain they call it Boxing Day . No one knows exactly why it is called like that, but the most plausible theory is that it has to do with holiday gifts, handed over in a “Christmas box”. December 26 is also St. Stephen’s Day, an early Christian martyr who was stoned to death. In our family, as in many, I expect, it is a sort of “day after”, a day of hangover, when you try to recover from …
No Christmas is exactly like the previous one. You may keep most of the rituals, the people you celebrate it with, shop in the same stores and cook the same dishes for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but still, it will feel familiar, because it will be “your” Christmas all over again. Not this year. This Christmas will be different from all the Christmases we have lived before, and, even with those few we’ll get together with, …
It had been a stormy day, with havoc all over – flight and train cancellations, rain, wind…as in the previous days. I thought the rugby match of last Friday night would be cancelled – if not for other reasons, because the green grass field would have turned into mud; but no, it was on, and my son Afonso left for the club with his usual long, confident, strides, the exhilaration of the forthcoming game all around him like a magnetic …
Tomorrow it will be precisely twenty-one years that I received the most precious Christmas gift of all: my son Pedro, “the most beautiful baby she had ever seen” in the words of his proud Grandma, who naturally had already forgotten saying the very same words almost four years before, when my son Afonso was born, on a sunny February day that felt like an early Spring. Christmas baby Little Pedro was born on a grey December day, but he …
During the Christmas season I enjoy watching the somewhat corny and oh-so-predictable Christmas movies that show up on TV, and they are inevitably about a girl who’s had her heart broken and a boy with good intentions who will heal her heart, after some obstacles are won, of course. I do enjoy watching them over a cup of tea on those dark grey Sunday afternoons, and for some moments believe in romance and fairy tales. After, all, these movies are …
I’m driving – not exactly driving home for Christmas, as in the beautiful song by Chris Rea, but on one of the many errands I have to do during this busy season. As usual at this time of the year I put on Christmas songs, the inevitable Last Christmas by Wham and Chris Rea’s as well – and I sing along. The weather is fine – one of those sunny crisp cold (but not too much) winter days that make …
He sits outside and gestures for the waiter to bring him his usual espresso coffee and sparkling water. The café’s terrace if full of tourists – of course at this time of the year the island is even more crowded than in the summer, because of the mild temperatures and the brilliant celebrations of New Year’s Eve…even so, he enjoys sitting here on sunlit days, feeling the sun warm on his face and gazing at the blue sky and not …
Long ago Christmases were a magical time. Our eyes opened in wonder with the lights and gifts around the Christmas tree; we sat on the floor around Granny as she made the Nativity crib and we helped her by giving her figure after piece until the last one, the shining star that she put on the stable’s roof. Then she would tell us, year after year, how Jesus was born and how he was visited by three kings with gifts, …
I remember it so well – we didn’t really spend “Christmas” together as we didn’t celebrate Christmas Eve or Christmas Day together, but the moments we spent together at Christmas time were very special, because our love was so new and we were ecstatically happy. One of those moments was precisely on the 23rd of December of some years ago. We had been going out for only a few weeks and our relationship was still a secret; and we wanted …