I’m on my way to work and although it’s only four kilometres I get a lot of traffic. I face the day in a bright mood so I put on some nice music and look at life on the streets. Today the latest song on my playlist is by a Portuguese band called Capitão Fausto. The title is “Boa memória” (“good memory” in English) and the singer tells us about how he doesn’t really have to remember things for …
Tag: mother
My son Afonso turns twenty-four today. As a storyteller, I have decided to write him a story for his birthday. … Once upon a time there was a boy, who was much loved by his family and had good friends, but even so he was shy; his father thought sports would do him good; after an unsuccessful attempt at basketball he enrolled him in rugby, not too popular at the time in Portugal. He had been told rugby, as a …
This is a Spanish expression with no literal translation into English. We have it in Portuguese and we use it when we don’t really want to say goodbye to someone, when we know it’s not likely we’ll see each other again but still we want to leave that door open; it means maybe one day we’ll be together again. It is something we say when we lose someone we love and the thought of a new meeting somewhere in …
I had promised the boys we’d make the most of our trip to Maputo to go to Kruger Park, a game reserve in the Transvaal province, South Africa, only about one hundred kilometres away. So after a few days in Maputo we set out from the Polana at around 9 o’clock with a very nice driver, Mr. Fernando. Mozambicans are talkative so soon we were deep in conversation with him, learning more about what happened in Mozambique during the …
Giving life was undoubtedly the most intense and overwhelming experience I’ve lived through as a living being. It’s not easy to describe it with words. Pregnancy It all began when I knew there was life inside of me, after winning the battle against infertility. I was a few days late and was holding my breath and hoping this time it would be for real. It was only a few days after that we had the courage to buy a pregnancy …
Every year, as Christmas decorations appear I begin to feel nostalgic about other Christmases, of long ago. If I think about it, it seems I’ve had this feeling during most of my life, as after coming from Mozambique we missed our warm and merry Christmases out there. Only when the boys were small did I recover some of the magic of Christmas and I loved seeing the wonder in their eyes as they looked at the lights, as they expectantly …
She was by far the most beautiful girl in the village: tall, statuesque, with thick dark tresses and bright green eyes. She was always the belle of the ball, even if her 1,70 m made her taller than most local boys. But she didn’t mind, as she paid them little attention: she dreamed of one day finding a tall, handsome Prince Charming that would sweep her off her feet and take her away with him to see the world. She …
Your birthday was on the 4th of April. You were born on a distant day of the year 1918, in the city of Lourenço Marques, in Mozambique (nowadays Maputo, a name you hate, I know). You were the third child of Manuel de Freitas and Marie-Agnès Grabowski, what we would call today an “international couple”: he was Portuguese, born and bred on the island of Madeira having emigrated to Mozambique in his early twenties in search of a better life; she …
“Blue Eyes, Baby’s got blue eyes, Like a deep blue sea, On a blue blue day” – so goes the beautiful song by Elton John that always makes me think of my elder son. My own Blue Eyes was a much desired, much longed for baby. On the very happy day that he was born I looked at him and told everyone “this baby will have blue eyes” – everyone said no, it’s just the “milk” (supposedly all newborn babies …
