renewed faith in my luddite standing

I am in the attic wondering how I can possibly clean out this house before the end of the week. I was here last month removing the remnants of my stuff, comic book collection and the train set my father gave me when I was five or so.

It is 35C in the attic my job is to simply find everything up there and throw it down the steps so that I can box it in a more welcoming atmosphere.

Up there I look to the right - the forgotten part of the attic – and see a pile of my sister’s early art work. I take it that she didn’t want it but couldn’t be bothered to take it down and junk it.

Typical - I think – until under a pile of clothes there is a small box of my stuff.

Sheepishly after throwing what I can down the steps, I carry the box down.

There was my great collection of coca cola bottle caps when they placed the capitals of the world and countries under the caps for collecting – not for winning prizes. Torn, I know if I throw them out, I’ll find out that I could have bought all of Witless Bay with Bay Bulls thrown on the value of the caps.

There are other sundries that quickly find their way to the dust bin.

Then there is the wooden box. I am a sucker for boxes, I open it and find green and yellow outlined envelops with blue and red. My years as a fluminense. Letters from my friends in Niterói mixed with letters from Bradford and London before I headed over.

I didn’t get around to reading the letters I was too enthralled with the envelops, the franking of the post office, the date stamp, where it was mailed how people put their return address. Ana Teresa Teixeira de Freitas Magalhães Duarte who after a while simply wrote ATTFMD. Trying to remember people by their handwriting. The distance travelled.

While I save e-mails, which is problematic for must of them are no more than post-its, I wondered what the fate of these letters would be if email had existed back then. I cannot image the mystery of an email, there is nothing to really open, the format is determined by my provider not by who sent it so they all look the same. While the message would be the same, there is no sense of distance travelled.
I fear that I would have simply chucked them.

So that is where Cathy was when she was in Bradford – forgot the name of the college library.

That wouldn’t have hurt for obviously I forgot that they existed but now that I have found them a history that I am sure I have sanitised and made revisions will be corrected. The gossip of the day - ah yes Thaïs did go off to an all girls school in Furnas, Rio. I still cannot remember Paulo Roberto Cecchetti, the articles about Flamengo.

I replaced the letters glad that they wouldn’t reflect how bad my Portuguese was.

The real prize though were the Tickets to the stands of Maracanã. I had thought that I had seen more Fla x Flus and less of other teams but I do remember that going made me feel less a tourist and while not a brasileiro, a brasilianista.

There was a remembrance of better times also as one ticket was for the preliminaries for the 1970 world cup Brasil x Colombia.