Goya Goya Goya

The continuing education on dealing with uncertainty and panic and matters far beyond human control… remember the frantic running back and forth through immigration controls, on the brink of a mistake and then realizing the true cost of being stuck in Dubai without Visa or available shuttle flight...  

Planning in the face of external constraints and internal worry/panic, all the while dealing with the unknowing infant and the balancing of relationship tensions over salon styling, packing, and miscommunications, words spoken past each other in the fog of white noise.  It’s chance.  In many ways.  I have to ask Dad about that saying from the old yearbook.

As you type on the Southern Sun shuttle back to the airport for the second run, on the roadside are unmarked cement gravestones waiting to be sold and engraved.  Passing Syax FC.  The best is yet to come.  Like the Twitter commentator who posted that Tomorrow is always the favourite football memory.  These are all moments that are part of a buildup that began in 2012 and the dream of Brazil more than a decade ago, culminating in tomorrow.  No need to flight track obsessively any more.  The sun is shining, this is the route, the Chestern Lodge “place you’d rather be”

Yesterday amidst the worry and frustrations, when you took AA out of the apartment for a walk to settle the anxieties, the little man sat quietly and at the end of a dusty crimson brown dirt road, three young kids were having a kick-about with a deflated green football.  Bricks for goals, the two smaller guys against a slightly bigger and rotund one still in his school uniform, buttoned up Oxford blue and navy shorts.  The young guys getting the better of him, wheeling away in delight at the goals.  

The game has not been officially around for that long compared to the overall span of civilizations, but it feels that way as a world traveller.  Universality.

“It’s fun to think of all the characters we’ve come across this trip.”  And you think about all the interactions, fleeting and important, from Mirriam and our collective past, in transit, over food, in restaurants, hotels, everyone playing out there own part and roles.  Such a vast and incomprehensible existence.

Like the guy at breakfast today, who upon hearing the Tongan bull was going, said, perfectly, in that African-accented English: “He has to be there.  He has the prescence to change the whole thing.”

I refrained from looking up the Airlink plane location, and there she is, what a beauty.  Prayers to the God of the second chance.  And much more from the desert.  

Where you should try and more fully take in the lesson your son is trying to teach in his serenity now mantra.  Goya.  Preach.