Crônicas do Cotidiano

Legacy of a Grandfather

Continuing along the line of thought of the previous posts, about “spiritual legacy,” I am going to share another item that I met up with while examining the papers and objects stored as special memories of our past—something my father passed on to his offspring, in this case one of his grandsons.

It is an envelope with a letter that was mailed to me almost six years ago—sent by my middle son when my dad died at the end of December 2002.  E-mail already existed then, but it seems that he felt that something written by hand would be more significant than virtual correspondence (and also ended up lasting longer). I think I need to explain some of the context by adding a few (somewhat disconnected) bits of information, so that you can understand the details in this letter.

Two sets of Cousins—Tacoma, Washington, Christmas of 2002

The writer of the letter is the tall fellow on the right.

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Growing up in the Faith. A Farmer’s Daughter but also Child of the King

I spent several hours recently interacting with our oldest son, very grateful because he decided to update the version that my blog is made in. I’m quite proud of the fact that I have learned to post by myself (and even insert images!), but I always end up confronting obstacles—be they small or big. My italics disappear, the spaces between the paragraphs vanish, I add an image and the entire text gets centred, the information on the right decides to take off to the bottom of the page… I fix everything and, then, when I push “save,” it all goes back to the wrong way it was before…. Since David lives on the other side of the planet, I often have to wait for him to wake up or come back to the computer to help me. In less than two minutes, he works with the “html” (something that I understand very little of) and everything is wonderful again.

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The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off.

—Acts 2.39a

An Album full of Memories (1941)

(I have translated the previous blog posting in order to share thoughts and memories of our spiritual legacy with the non-Portuguese-speaking members of my family (and any others who may be interested). Please feel free to comment at the end. Other postings in English can be found through the link “English” on the right-hand side.)

Ever since we moved (over a year ago) to our current apartment in São Paulo, Brazil, I have been occasionally intent on examining and re-organizing the contents of dozens of boxes that are the fruit of the accumulation of 35 years of marriage, four children, documents for companies where my husband worked, bills paid since 1974, etc., etc. So much stuff! I rarely have time to dedicate to this task but now and then I enjoy the pleasure of filling a garbage bag with paper items that are no longer relevant to our lives.

I bought some pretty (and smaller) boxes to substitute the old, mouldy or ugly ones which have stored the special memories of our lives as children and adolescents, of our siblings and children, of our parents and grandparents….  The memories of births, marriages and burials of the persons that were, or are, part of our family, both here and around the world, are being moved into these, as I discover the treasures in the middle of the “stuff”. And it is about one of these that I want to write this time.

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