The Favre is dead.
Long live the Rodgers!!!
So I promised you some photos and such a while ago, and here they are:
Our hotel, the Hotel San Francisco de Quito. Gorgeouos.
One of the things students were supposed to look for in Quito was political graffitti. (They had followed Ecuadorian elections and immigration issues all last year, and this year are studying left versus right, politically, in Latin America. So I figured they'd be able to tell it when they saw it.) Here are some examples:
"Petroleum and Copper (Make) Ecuador Poorer" (rhymes in Spanish)
No caption necessary. (So why did I put one...?)
"Ecuador Will Never Be A Mining Country" (What with the skyrocketing prices of copper, there's a lot of exploring and incipient mining going on in Ecuador)
My students in Mindo. What a great bunch.
I like this picture a lot. Luis Narvaez, best guide in Mindo, and his son, and me. A student (Sara S) took it, and gave it to me on a disk (along with most of the other photos you see here), and it warmed my heart to think of her thinking of me and these two in the same frame.
Here's Luis and his son from the front. The guy LIVED on that cell phone - it's how he organizes his whole business. The cell tower just went up in Mindo 3 years ago, and they are taking full advantage of it, believe me.
What a great eye Sarah has.
The boys (Matt, Ernesto, and Shyam) and their friend Guillermo, in Guillermo's dad's restaurant (the father also being a very good, new friend, as well as having the name Guillermo). This friendship came into being with absolutely no help from me what, so, ever - a fact that makes me so proud I could pop.
And now, a story.
In 1990, Christophe Haering visited Janneke van de Stadt in an apartment in Groton, MA. Almost immediately upon arriving, he attempted to wash a plate, but succumbed to the slipperiness of the soapy water and dropped it into the sink, whereupon a large crack developed, going almost halfway across. The plate survived, and Christophe, scolded vigorously by his wife, hung his head in a mixture of relief and shame.
The plate did, of course, break.
Yesterday.
That is to say: Eighteen years later.
Here's the evidence:
In other news, two young scamps rewarded their Papi for arriving safely from South America with a vigorous massage, of both shoulders and scalp:
Took a shot at drawing T last night, and came this close to packing it in in frustration after two minutes. But I stuck it out, and it turned out to be acceptable:
And finally, here's Tie, "helping" me to shovel the driveway:
Q has been playing the piano a lot lately. He has his second lesson tomorrow. Recently he asked Janneke to show him how to play the first part of a Bach piece she's been tinkering with, and he got the melody down quickly. Tonight, when I got home and was building a fire, I heard Janneke playing it, quickly, and talking to T at the same time. I wondered why she was playing if she was also answering a question from Tie - and then I heard her move into the kitchen. The music continued. I walked out from the living room, confused, and looked wide-eyed at Janneke, who smiled, fully appreciating my shock - He was playing both the melody and the rudiments of the left-hand accompmaniment, together! Janneke said that this morning, after I'd already trudged off to the salt mines, he asked her how to do both hands at once, and now he does it so fast and rhythmically that I was absolutely sure it was Janneke.
To those who would accuse me of being over-exuberant about a really relatively small accomplishment that doesn't necessarily indicate vast, untapped veins of talent, I say this:
A greater problem, in my experience, is parents who are under-exuberant.
And to those who say that I have mis-spelled "exuberant":
Please go somewhere quiet, and eat a turd.
No comments:
Post a Comment