KENNETH

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

For a few years I taught creative writing as a volunteer with my friend Vince Cefalu at the Braille Institute in Hollywood, California. One of our students was an elderly African-American named Kenneth. He was in a wheelchair, partly blind and with a speech impediment. Toward the end he was also a little demented. Kenneth had been cruelly abused and neglected as a child, and he once told me just a little of those nightmare years. His life had been a painful one and he said he looked forward to dying, it would be a relief. But, sitting next to me in class one day, he told me a simple yet profound truth I never forgot and it is now part of me.
“So many bad things happened to me,” he said. “Things that should never have happened to a little boy. But this time is my time, my only time, to be alive. This is Kenneth’s time.”
And then he gave his funny Kenneth giggle. So, with a holiday and a new year upon us, it would be good to remember gentle souls like Kenneth and try to love one another. Or at least try to understand that this time is truly our only time to be alive.
Peace, love and blessings to all the people in my life. I am grateful for you one and all.

David

THE HILL

Every morning, before breakfast, I walk the hill. It slopes down past my farmhouse, then rises in a gentle serpentine to the far ridge. From there it wriggles across the fields to the village of Mastrontas, then past the Pero Pinheiro marble-cutting yards - great steel blades and water-sluices chewing through immense blocks of stone - and finally to Sintra, whose fantasy castle is silhouetted in the distance.

The Atlantic Ocean glitters on the horizon, my local village, Mafra Gare, sits, half mist-erased in the bottom of the valley, and Danish-made wind turbines are pinned on the surrounding hills.

My head is usually filled with the chaos of a night’s thoughts as I climb the hill and the walk lets me sort them out: What’s Portuguese for my DSL’s not working? How do I rewrite that character so she’s more rounded? Where the heck is that mouse Rockat brought in last night and whacked around the kitchen? And so it goes.

It seems a fresh thought rises with each step and the succeeding steps serve to resolve them. I have walked the hill worried about money, despondent at the mediocrity of my work and then just as equally exhilarated by its brilliance. Often my thoughts are of friends, about me( far too often), the world’s problems are regularly examined and resolved, while God and I are in constant discussion about his existence.

I walk home a different man, and scattered on the hill, invisible and decaying, are all the previous night's worries. Before me waits a brand-new day.

And a hungry cat.

AUTUMN

The swallows are gone and the year is changing. They have flown south to winter in Africa and in their place are bold robins. The landscape has changed too. The harvest is in, the grapes picked, the last pig transformed into bacon and pork-chops, and the figs are all eaten - mostly, it seems, by me. The days are clear, but brisk, and the nights cold.

This part of Portugal is the land of big skies and immense clouds above an ancient, detailed countryside. Here, in my farmhouse high over the valley below, it is easy to see the inexorable shifting of time. The days of poppies and cornflowers seem so far away now, and the earth has settled into hibernation. Soon the rain-storms will sweep in from the Atlantic and Portugal will belong to winter. But the swallows will return, they always do, fields will be green again, and I will be waiting for them.

KITCHEN GODS

The water heater nestles in the center of every American home, like a Minuteman missile resting in a silo beneath some wind-swept Nebraska prairie, unheralded but ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.


It is not that way in Portugal. First, the houses are much smaller, and second, energy is expensive here. So, while an average American home may house a missile-sized water heater, in Portugal there is a small suitcase fixed to the kitchen wall for all to see and admire. The really good suitcases have dozens of exposed pipes sticking out of the bottom and disappearing into the wall. They’re made by companies like Junkers, who I thought specialized solely in dive-bombers used to terrify fleeing Polish peasants and so give the Germans more space in which to live and build Volkswagens.


When buying a water heater, in Portuguese grandly called a termoaculador - not to be said at speed, lest you spit all over your friends - several choices are offered. They are as follows:
A) A heater that when turned on makes a loud ‘Woof,’ then mumbles while it produces a little bit of warm water.
B) A heater that when turned on makes a quiet ‘Woof,’ then mumbles while it produces a little bit of warm water.
C) A heater that makes no sound and produces constant hot water. This one has been discontinued, all models destroyed, the factory razed to the ground and the plans sent to China.
What you cannot have under any circumstances or at any price is a heater that delivers constant hot water.


Heaters A and B will offer a quick shot of water at 200 C to inspire hope, but that, by government mandate, may not last more than two seconds. Also by mandate it must, must, must, be followed instantly by a concentrated jet of ice-cold water - or nothing at all but a sarcastic gurgling from the tank.


There is a reason for this disparity between Portugal and the United States and it can be traced directly back to Adolf Hitler’s misguided pursuit of Aryan supremacy. No doubt you remember when Teflon-coated pots and pens that wrote upside down in six hundred fathoms of saltwater first arrived on the market. They were, we were told, the happy by-products of missile and space research. I never really believed that.


At the end of WWII the Americans nabbed rocket scientist Werner von Braun and his assistants from Nazi Germany and spirited them to the States. There they worked on the American space program, and in doing so also created Teflon, submersible pens and large water heaters, while the Europeans were left destitute. Without Werner von Braun’s genius, the European space program and water heater evolution were crippled. They’ve never managed to catch up since and that’s exactly why there’s no hot water in Portugal and the rest of Europe. It’s also why European cooks constantly burn the food and for communication Mediterranean divers must resort to sign language or a hammer, chisel and block of marble after sinking past the first fathom.


Now for Zeus. You don’t come much mightier than him. My termoaculador(I think I made this word up is called Zeus, who I had not realized was the god of water heaters. There seems to be a logic flaw in naming a water heater after him, particularly a European heater. The Greek gods lived in the sky above Greece, which is a hot country, so they probably never worried about the cold, and I don’t know if they ever needed to shower anyway. Surely if you’re a god you can just say - “Dirt, be gone! I command you to stay away from my godly body!” - and it would be so. And I can’t imagine Zeus working out and sweating. I appreciate that Zeus sounds powerful, but why not call the heater Nanook? After all the Eskimos know a thing or two about staying warm.


Then there’s Thor. He’s a clothes washer at the other end of my kitchen. By amazing coincidence, two separate manufacturers came up with Greek gods’ names for their entirely different products, and while I can(very)vaguely follow the logic behind connecting mighty Zeus and heating water, Thor has me floored. I thought Thor was the guy who was always chucking hammers around when he got mad and what that has to do with washing my underwear escapes me. Not that it washes all my underwear at once anyway. This is still Europe, remember.


Back to the US of A for an educational moment. There the washing machine has a room of its own, not the kitchen, and it’s a very simple machine. You jam in all your family’s clothes until there’s no space left, turn it to super-hot and walk away. Ten seconds later you open it up, take out the clothes, stuff them into a dryer, turn that to nuclear super-hot and walk away until they’re cooked. It’s all over in twenty minutes.


Not so here. First, there is no such thing as a dryer anywhere in Europe; you hang your washing up on a line or drape it out the windows. Get over it, that’s life.


Thor is not a large machine. It can hold six kilos of clothes, which translates to one T-shirt (short-sleeved), one pair of Calvin Klein underwear (not boxers, too much fabric) and a sock, left or right, doesn’t matter which, but not both. Once loaded and switched on, the Thor cannot be stopped, short of blasting it with a shotgun. The door is locked and nothing will pry it open. This is an example of European engineering at its best.


Activated, Thor begins to work his magic - but only if you don’t look at it. First, nothing happens. Then there’s a cough from deep inside the machine and the clothes flip over. Then silence again, followed by the sound of gurgling water - the sound of, not necessarily actual water. The clothes flip over once more, the gurgle, gurgle sound happens again, and then more silence. This routine goes on for about four hours until finally Thor slams into a spin cycle that sounds just like an F-18 on full afterburner. It whines so loud it scares cats, shatters glass and alerts dogs for miles around. Wisdom suggests getting far away from the machine at this point.


Just as you’re sure Thor is going to launch itself right through the kitchen wall, it suddenly stops dead. No sound, no movement, no denouement. Nothing. It’s as if it had a heart attack and expired. A female friend of mine says it reminds her of her ex-husband in bed - all power, glory and great intentions, then crash, finished, fast asleep and snoring like an asthmatic walrus.
That’s about what you can expect with a Portuguese kitchen full of Greek god appliances.

SENOR FRANCO

He was a young man once, and proud. This was his farm, passed to him by his father, and he lived in the big house. The farm was built by generations of the Franco family; there had always been a Franco living on this hill. He farmed the fields and hunted the hills and his life was patterned by the seasons.

He married the beautiful girl he loved and was also a little in awe of, and they had children who lived in the cottages around the big house. It was a simple, hard, yet satisfying life, and he worked knowing he was one of a line of farmers stretching too far back to remember.

Then he and his wife were old. They moved into one of the small cottages and his son brought them food every day. His wife had a stroke and for the first time in their lives, they were separated. She lay in a bed in their granddaughter’s home down in the valley, while he was alone in the cottage on the hill.

An Americano came to live in the big house; a man without family and who spoke no Portuguese. He talked to him anyway and the Americano replied with a few Portuguese words and many gestures. Several times he tried to explain how once he and his wife lived in the big house, but the Americano just smiled and said thank you in Portuguese.

Now he sits on warm afternoons outside his cottage and stares at the big house where used to live. When he was a young man once, and proud.

TILE & TILE AGAIN

It is neither safe nor wise to stand still for too long in Portugal. If you do, there is a great likelihood you could end up tiled and there will be found a colorful image of some saint across your back, or a delightful picture of a galleon sailing bravely out to discover new worlds in order to pillage, loot and enslave the locals for the sole benefit of the Portuguese nobility who will then turn them all into Christians as payment for sucking their country dry.

It seems as if everything stationary in Portugal eventually ends up tiled. Where Americans might hire a couple of undocumented folk up to no good loitering about on a street corner to slap on a coat of paint, spread around some stucco, or nail up aluminum siding, the Portuguese lay tiles, beautiful tiles. Inside a building or outside, big or small, yours or mine, it doesn’t matter, sooner or later everything gets tiled. If you have a creative eye the buildings might seem very artistic, but if you’re inclined to be more practical then everything can look a bit like a public toilet. A pretty public toilet, though.

The precise term for these tiles is azulejos, which, like most Portuguese words, is not pronounced at all as it appears. Portuguese is somewhat similar to Welsh, but with vowels, or Navajo with the sh sound tossed in every other syllable. If you don’t know Welsh or Navajo I can’t help you and you’re on your own. Perhaps the easiest way to pronounce Portuguese is to remember when you were a kid staggering around pretending to be drunk on Australian sherry like your uncle Bill at Christmas and slurring every word. Works well for me, but then I’ve had a lot of slurring practice. Staggering around while slurring is optional and doesn’t convince the locals you can speak their language, but it does confuse them. And that way you’re equally baffled.

While we’re discussing foreign languages, of which Portuguese is definitely one, I have learned how to communicate with the local peasantry. It’s not at all necessary to learn their language, just let them chatter away while you respond in English. Then point at what you want, wave some euros around and off you go with a lot of grinning on both sides. Could not be easier, just don’t wave dollars because nobody wants them anymore. Do not, I repeat, do not, under any circumstances speak a single word of their language because that will only encourage them to keep talking that way and so they’ll never learn English. Then how will they communicate with you?

Back to the azulejos and their history. The Moors, whoever they were, invaded Portugal years ago and brought tile-making with them. Supposedly, they got it from the Iranians, who insist on being called Persians nowadays, at least those who live in Beverly Hills and build all those huge, ugly mansions do. Where the Persranians got tile-making from is anybody’s guess, maybe from whoever started Home Depot. After several hundreds of years of oppression the Portuguese kicked the Moors out, but kept the tile-making. Where the Moors went I have no idea, presumably back to Mooristan.

Freed from foreign rule, the Portuguese went tile crazy. By the 17th century, which is way too far back to interest most Americans who know nothing about about the world before the day Elvis died, the whole country was covered in tiles. Eventually some king had to put a stop to it because there wasn’t a tree or a dog or cat that remained untiled.

In a way tiling back in those days was a bit like graffiti is today, and just as difficult to control or eradicate. So it was decided that if you couldn’t beat them you might as well join them, and everyone was allowed to slap tiles all over their buildings. There were severe penalties however for tiling animate objects. For a couple of years there was a lot of grumbling about censorship and restriction of artistic freedom, but the Portuguese are a pragmatic people by nature and eventually it all calmed down.

Today Portuguese buildings, subways and train stations are covered in azulejos, and glorious it all is to behold. Now and then, some clothes designer or automobile manufacturer gets a wild idea about azulejoizing their products, but it usually comes to nothing. Azulejos are made to cover walls, not cars or jeans.

Although the Portuguese are sensible about tiling things nowadays, I would still suggest not staying still too long in public, though, just in case you end up with a galleon sailing across your chest. I mean, who wants to look like a public toilet, even a pretty one?

GET YA FREE WILLY!

All countries have history; what else could they torture schoolchildren with? But Portuguese history is fascinating for one particular reason. Before 1974 no one in Portugal spoke Portuguese, everyone spoke English. Portuguese hadn’t even been invented and they only called themselves Portuguese to make the Spanish mad. Didn’t work, the Spanish don’t care. Then came the great 1974 Carnation revolution. A guy called the Salad Czar was running the country and according to some Portuguese I know, he did a mighty fine job. There was no crime, no Adam Sandler movies and Coca Cola was illegal. Nothing to complain about there, until an American corporation got involved and it all went sideyways. Now, I’ll try to be historically accurate, but remember we are dealing with a foreign country here, so facts might be a little malleable. It seems the Carnation Company was a freedom symbol for the Portuguese -- go figure! The population took to the streets, threw Carnation cans at the cops, poured condensed milk down the soldiers’ rifle barrels and generally created chaos. The Salad Czar bailed and the Portuguese had their own country. But they didn’t have their own language, not until a committee created one. It was made up of the most confusing parts of the languages the committee members spoke. So, Portuguese is part Spanish/Italian/French/Serbian all bound together with a bit of ancient Norse and some Welsh swear-words. To make it more incomprehensible, the committee chairman had lost most of his teeth on the soccer field and spoke with a wet lisp. That is why the Portuguese slur every word and learning Portuguese is as exasperating as pushing Jello up a ladder with your butt.
Which brings me to the humble abacaxi, or pineapple in the sensible, civilized world. This Portuguese word was made up by a committee member who was a Scrabble player and those were the letters he had. A side-note here: don’t ever try playing Portuguese Scrabble because there are no rules. No one wanted to call the pineapple an abacaxi until the committee member pointed out it would irritate the Spanish no end, so they all instantly agreed. They also agreed that now they were an independent nation it was essential only they could speak the language properly. So classes were formed to teach the Portuguese how to look stupid when faced with a foreigner trying to speak their language. They were very successful, and here’s an example. Yesterday, I went into a bakery to buy bread rolls. Simple, really. So, in my best Portuguese I asked for two bollinas. And got the blankest stare you’re ever likely to meet; this young lady had obviously been top of her class. I made all kinds of lunatic Americano gestures until she was quite satisfied I was properly humiliated, then said ‘Oh, bollinas.’ She’s lucky I don’t carry a gun anymore, not since that silly tragedy in Dallas. Now, think on this: I was in a bakery, so you would assume I intended to buy a bread product. If so, my bollinas was very close to her bollinas, so don’t you think she could have figured it out? After all, I wasn’t trying to buy spark-plugs for a ‘62 Mercedes, or show her a picture of Christiano Ronaldo’s willy. Christiano’s a soccer player who’s big around here, but I don’t know how big his willy is though, and don’t care to find out.
And while we’re on the subject of willies, here’s an American- English/English-English faux pas. As everyone in Britain knows, a willy is something all little boys have and love playing with until they’re about seventy five years old. So imagine the chuckles several years ago when the Americans (God bless them) released a movie about a killer whale titled FREE WILLY. Free Willy indeed! Dozens of young men were arrested in London after the movie came out. It seems they would wander around the streets, unzipped and smashed to the eyebrows, shouting to any young lady they passed, ‘Wanna free willy, darling!?’
Said young ladies and the local constabulary were not amused, while a few young men were gobsmacked when some of the braver lassies replied, ‘Looks more like a guppy, sweetheart!’
Such are the perils of foreign languages. It’s good the Portuguese have their own country, but they made a mistake with the language. I know that when there are no foreigners around they speak English to each other, so why not drop the pretense? Why don’t we all speak English, with or without willies, and make the world a safer, happier place? That would make the Spanish mad.

SAMMY JUMBO

After the blog about my Euroweenie 106 XR was released, thousands of American car buffs e-mailed me asking for more information - although none showed any interest in actually buying the car. So, here goes, and I’ll try not to lose the rest of my readers by getting too technical.

I’ll start with the engine. Yes, it’s got one, although I haven’t yet found it, but something’s burning gas, unless there’s a leak in the tank. There’s no radio because that drains too much power from the aforementioned engine, particularly if you’re going up a slope while playing anything by Abba. There is no rev counter because Peugeot wanted to hide the fact that the Euroweenie motor idles at 5,000RPM, but there is a large clock so it’s easy to gauge acceleration. After exhaustive tests I can assure you the Euroweenie 106 XR zooms from 0-60MPH between 3:00-3:25PM.

Next, wheels and steering. The Euroweenie’s wheels are roughly the size and thickness of an Oreo cookie. And probably about as sturdy. The tires are so narrow there’s no space for treads, just one wiggly line down the middle looking a bit as if it were drawn by a one-eyed ten-year-old boy with hiccups and a magic marker. They might also be solid rubber – or cookie dough.

The steering is a marvel of Belgian engineering and a credit to a nation of fine lace-makers. The steering-wheel is firmly connected to the front wheels by four rubber bands: two thin, two thick, one of each per wheel. Turning the steering wheel from rest is easy because the thin rubber bands stretch. Then at speeds over 40 KPH (about 150 MPH) the thick bands take over and you drive with the sudden understanding that although fine control of the vehicle is a bit elusive, life is truly precious. It usually helps that no other car on the road will come within 5 kilometers (175 feet) of a moving Euroweenie 106 XR.

The Euroweenie has power-windows, one per side because it is a two-door sporty vehicle, but they’re each powered by six AA Duracell batteries stuffed in holes in the door arm-rests and don’t last long. Four ups, three downs and you’re about out of juice, and these Euroweenie windows neatly disprove the old adage that what goes up must come down.

The locking gas tank can only be opened with a pair of pliers because the key is broken and there’s a mere stalk left - or maybe it came that way to deter theft and encourage frugality. The gas tank shows half-full while going uphill and nearly empty going downhill, so when I’m low on fuel I try to drive uphill as much as possible. At least I did until someone pointed out that the little engine uses more gas going uphill than down, so it all works out about the same.

And gas is expensive. A liter of gas costs about ninety euros and in warm weather there are approximately twenty five liters to an American gallon. For easy reckoning, twenty dollars equals about a euro and a half and the dollar is pegged directly to the day’s temperature in Celsius.

The Euroweenie runs on unleaded, in Portuguese charmingly called sem chumbo, which to my cultured American ear sounds an awful lot like Sammy Jumbo.

The Euroweenie 106 XR has a five-speed gearbox - automatic transmission being unknown in Portugal. But not all gears are connected to the engine. First gear is because you’ve got to get going somehow, and usually second gear is too so the engine isn’t screaming its valves off after a few minutes. The other gears are only incidentally linked to the engine. They’re cleverly routed through something quite unique. The Portuguese name for it is beyond me to translate, let alone pronounce, but the nearest thing in American would be revverizer.

The revverizer makes all the appropriate sounds as you shift through the gears, BUT none of this in any way affects the speed of the car. You can flash up and down the gearbox like a really good race-car driver, right hand a blur, little legs pumping madly away at the pedals as you look serious leaning hard into the curves, and all the while creating just wonderful sounds. But it’s all quite safe because you’re only doing 50KPH (12MPH) and saving sem chumbo like a sem champ.

And while we’re discussing driving, let me mention European drivers. Now in America we’ve got acres of land, millions of cars and lots of Mafia-owned concrete companies, so our highways are really wide with dozens of lanes. As all Americans are created equal they have an equal right to drive in any damn lane they want and at any damn speed they like. Not so over here. The lane(s)on the left are for folks driving faster than you and it’s best to stay out of them. Otherwise you’re likely to get a honking great Mercedes so far up your tail its fancy hood ornament will leave a permanent impression on the back of your neck.

Portuguese cars also have this amazing little device that really should be standard on all cars, particularly American ones, and everyone here uses them. A short stick pokes sideways out of the steering column and as you’re about to make a turn, you push it up for right or down for left, and blinking lights on the outside of the car tell other drivers which way you’re going. It’s a safe and considerate signal for fellow motorists and someone has to bring it to the States. They’d make a fortune, surely.

And then there are roundabouts, or rotundas as the Portuguese call them. We, of course, know them as traffic circles and they scare us witless. But they’re actually much better than the American eight-way stop intersections where you’re supposed to let the guy on the right go first, but your car’s nicer than his and you’re in a rush and pretend you lost count as you wave an apology and miss him by a millimeter - that’s almost six inches. Stop signs stop traffic while rotundas keep everything moving.

We Americans are rightly terrified of rotundas, but they’re very easy to use if you just follow the Portuguese method of entry. When approaching one, slow down, look to your left and then accelerate, regardless of traffic, unless it’s a gigantic semi loaded with abacaxis - pineapples - just showing off my Portuguese vocabulary. Once in pole position, if you miss your turn keep going around and around, accelerating all the while, just as if it was your very own miniature NASCAR race-track, and then use your accumulated speed to slingshot away down the right exit before you get dizzy and throw up. Space shuttle pilots exiting the atmosphere, whirling Dervishes getting closer to God and professional skaters screwing themselves into the ice have no difficulty with this manouevre -- and neither will you with practice.

SPUD LEGS & EXPLODING DUCKS

Now, even if you’ve never been farther away from home than around the block, let alone to a foreign country, you’ll still be aware that people do things differently out there. And if you have actually been to another country - excluding Canada, of course, which might as well be in America - you’ll know that things can get very strange. Maybe we should re-include Canada; Canadians can be very odd sometimes. Eh?

For example, I am an American living in Portugal, a country very different from ours, yet sometimes I buy my bread from the Arizona Bakery - which is actually a truck parked outside a huge palace. How about that one for weird, then?
One thing you will discover immediately in a foreign country is that most of the inhabitants speak little or no English. This is a great handicap for them in struggling to communicate with you. But be patient because they will catch on eventually, and do try not to show your amusement when they say something silly. And rest assured they will.

The farther away you go from home, the stranger things can get. I’m informed that in China they love eating fish-lips. I suppose with all those billions of people competing to be fed you have to eat what’s put in front of you and pretend you like it. Maybe to a Chinese kid a bowl of fish lips look just like Cheerios.

So the trick to successful foreign travel is to expect the unexpected and not be put off by it. That doesn’t mean you have to eat fish-lips if there’s a perfectly good McDonald’s within a hundred miles.

I’ve travelled extensively all over the world and I’m always learning something new. Yesterday I found out that Portuguese potatoes have legs. Scrawny vestigial legs, but legs nonetheless. This came as a surprise, but as a veteran traveler it was not a shock and I took the information in my globe-trotting stride. The only question I had was, what happens to all the legs when the potatoes are turned into french fries? Perhaps the French like them. They’ll eat any damn thing and say it tastes good, even if it’s really horrible. They do this primarily to annoy Americans and have been at this nonsense ever since we defeated them in the Vietnam War and banned those silly-looking Citroen cars from our highways.

I did venture into the french-fry plant, a place called Ti Ti. In Portuguese it’s pronounced Tee Tee, but any ubiquitous little boy who speaks English knows, shall we say, a more titillating pronunciation. I wanted to learn more about the spud-legs, but unfortunately no one there was educated enough to explain the facts in simple English. A few of them laughed in reply to my question, but that’s what a foreigner will do when faced with his linguistic failings.

This brings me naturally to my new steam-iron. It’s called the IRON STAR and looks very smart, all swoopy blue racing stripes on gleaming white plastic. It’s not an expensive one, in fact it was the cheapest iron I could find at 9 euros and 99 bits of a euro - about $150. I wonder if a European financial expert is called a eurologist?
It looked simple enough to operate and even though I’m a man I do have some prior experience with irons. But then I foolishly did what no man should ever do - I read the instruction manual. Or at least I tried to. The Iron Star manual is written in no less than eleven different languages for the European Union countries. Can you imagine such a thing for something as basic as an iron?

We get a bit bent out of shape in the US of A when an automatic telephone answering system asks us to press uno for Spanish, or two for English. What if we had to press eleven for English? That could be the end of our language and American way of life, folks, because there is no eleven on a telephone!

The languages are: German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Netherlandish, Polish, Hebrew, Hungarian and Greek. With my extensive travel experience, I of course read most of the instructions in the original languages and was struck by their inaccuracy. Each seemed to get farther and farther away from the first one, which should by logic and seniority have been English, anyway, not German.
I checked the maker’s address to discover it was not made in China, but at 1322 Himmelsburger Strasse in Germany. That explained the language order and also such strange phrases as: “You’d better put the water in the right way,” or, “it is quite normal for stinks to come when iron is first using hot.” Easy for you to say, mein Herr Fritz, and the start of all the problems.

After that tragic beginning, things went haywire and I’m sure each translator did his work then handed his version onto the next man. It must have been a bit like that kid’s game where you all sit in a circle and whisper a message to each other. What comes out at the end bears no relationship to what went in at the beginning. Thus it was with the Iron Star manual. So, an instruction in German that reads, “WARNUNG: Auf keinen Fall die Bugelsohle beruhnen, solange sie noch nicht abgekuhit ist! I would translate quite easily as, “NOTE: Turning iron upside down to press armpits while wearing garment is not advised.” Simple, really and quite sensible. But by the time we got to the Greek this straightforward instruction now read, ““Do not look at that duck funny because it will explode.”“ Although my Greek is a bit rusty I know enough to translate that line as, “Do not look at the duck funny or it will explode.”

There you are then, the perils of multi-culturalism. The European Union might be a good enough idea on paper, but in reality it’s a place where in Germany some folk try to iron their armpits and have to be warned not to, while in Greece one wrong look and a duck blows up in your face. I blame the Germans, over here they start most things that cause trouble.

Give me, press uno for Spanish, por favor any day. God bless America.

TRADITION!

Tradition is all very nice, but it does tend to go on far too long and doesn’t seem to change much. If you’re not careful, it can end up being the same damn thing all the time.
That’s why American traditions, outside those silly ones the Texas A & M football team invent and then cling to as if they mean something, are always being refreshed. That’s why we demolish any building built before 1965 and buy a new car every two years. It’s also why the Los Angeles Goodwill stores are full of clothes that still have the price tags. You have to admit, it can get boring looking at the same stuff, day after live-long day. Innovative thinking is what we do best in the US of A and I’ll give you a perfect example.
My neighbor in our Portuguese village is a shepherd and owns a bunch of big brown sheep he takes to pasture on his burro - they walk, he rides the burro. He lives at the bottom of the hill and the pasture-land is at the top. Now, every morning he gets aboard his trusty burro and herds the sheep up the hill. They chomp away at the grass all day, converting it into wool, meat and those black marbles they poop incessantly, and then he herds them home. It’s all very traditional and unbelievably quaint, but is it efficient?
I did a little cost analysis and came to this conclusion. Traditional it may very well be, but it ain’t good business practice. I explain thus: the sheep trundle two miles uphill, burning calories and ejecting little black marbles every inch of the way. Then they eat grass until it’s time to go home the same way they came up. If, for the sake of argument, they expend ten units of energy on their journey and gain ten units of energy from eating, then all this wandering about the landscape is for nothing. Surely it would be better to let them stay at home and maybe give each one them a Power Bar and some multivitamins?
I’m not even adding the time/energy of the shepherd and his burro into the equation. If the sheep stayed in one place they wouldn’t need to go galloping all over Portugal. He could find a job, say in a factory making Portuguese souvenirs - little statues of shepherds are popular with the tourists - and the burro could be put to work giving thousands of overweight bratty kids a ride on the beach. That’s efficiency for you and tradition put in the right perspective.
But it’s no good explaining this to him because even with all those hours with nothing to do but stare at sheep he hasn’t taken the time to learn English, and it’s all a bit too complicated for his simple rustic mind anyhoo.
Then there’s the other neighbor, the one who looks like Mussolini -- but is much nicer. He’s old, there’s no getting around that, and so is his wife - one of the sweetest old ladies you’ll ever meet. His son, who happens to be my landlord, visits his parents every day, driving up that steep hill from the village below. What a great son. Then, every other day a van (a Citroen Jumpy) bounces up to our farm and the baker pops out and sells bread. Good bread it is too; still warm and wonderful with my coffee for breakfast.
This has been going on for donkey’s years, so it’s become a tradition in a way. And there’s the problem. The more efficient American way would be to slide Gramps and Grandma into a nice clean nursing home where they’d have cable TV and company and meals made for them. Then the son wouldn’t have to slog uphill everyday and could renovate the cottage and rent it to German tourists every summer. The nursing home folk would make a little bit of money to tide them over and the baker could stay behind his counter out of the weather. It’s win win all the way around, which shows how it’s always always wise to let the marketplace decide what’s best. Of course, I wouldn’t get my fresh warm rolls for breakfast anymore, but hey, isn’t that why they made frozen food and microwaves?
Then there’s the kissing-women-thing tradition. In Portugal if you meet a woman you know, you’re supposed to kiss her on both cheeks instead of sensibly saying Hi or shaking hands, or high-fiving if she’s a cool chick. The kissing thing sounds charming, but it gets to be a real problem fast. Let’s say you walk into a business meeting where there are half a dozen guys and half a dozen women. You all start kissing each other on the cheek and pretty soon the place looks like it’s filled with a bunch of bobbing penguins. And if you screw it up by starting with the wrong cheek – always the right side is kissed first – all hell breaks loose. You can smash your nose into someone’s face or get an earful of some babe’s chin. It can ugly real fast, and God forbid you count wrong and miss one, or kiss Carlos by mistake. Hi, hon, gimme five, works just fine for me.
As I said, tradition has its place, there’s no denying that, but it’s only good when it doesn’t go on too long or get into multiple kissing. So be a man, an American man, shake that hand, flatten that building and buy yourself a new Cadillac.

THE EUROWEENIE 106XR

I am an American. Not by birth, but by admiration and subsequently naturalization. This makes me more American than a native-born American because I chose to become one, it wasn’t just the happy accident of having the right parents. And, being an American, I love my car, which is also American. Forgive me, I should have said it was American. Now I live in Portugal and no longer drive American. Instead I own a Euroweenie 106 XR.
Back to America for some reference points. I arrived in the States from Britain over thirty years ago and have always driven American automobiles. It’s my way of being patriotic, of giving something back to my adopted country, even as the American car-makers bought up foreign companies and out-sourced everything.
Back in the seventies I briefly drove a Volkswagen Fastback (that’s a misnomer if ever there was one), but the engine fell out one day when I was turning left on Robertson Boulevard in west Los Angeles and that was that. Over the years I’ve owned Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, Jeeps and Chevrolets. My last vehicle was a honking great Chevy Silverado extended-cab pickup truck with a manly V-8 motor that took me all over the country while gleefully sucking the world’s known oil reserves dry. Alas, it had to be sold when I left to live in Portugal. But at least it went to a friend.
Which naturally brings me to the Japanese, those fine makers of automobiles and samurai movies, and that leads on to how each country names its vehicles. I’ve been told Japan has cars called Daisy, Bluebell, and Serenity. And of course there is the Civic and also the Accord. All pleasant enough names, which undoubtedly reflects the Japanese character, while the Germans, naturally, rely on numbers. The Americans, a peace-loving people, opt for such monikers as Barracuda, Charger, or Buick Belligerent. I made the last one up, but you get the idea. Laugh all you like at the American names, though, but for real chuckles the Europeans have them beaten all ways up.
In my short time driving around Portugal I’ve encountered such names as: Kangoo, Sporty, Fabia, Partner, Caddy, Sunny, Leon, and my favorite of them all - Jumpy, smaller version of the Jumper. I swear to God I make none of this up. Maybe cruising around America, securely encased in tons of Detroit steel for thirty years has removed me from reality, but there is no way I can imagine going into a bar, winking at some babe and trying to impress her by casually mentioning I own a Jumpy. Maybe a Fabia. No, not even a Fabia. And the thought of what might happen if you put a Kangoo and Jumpy together in a dark garage overnight boggles the mind.
Of course all of this philosophizing is simply a way for me to avoid discussing my car, the Euroweenie 106 XR. When I came to Portugal I decided to buy a cheap car. Then, in a year or so, once I was settled, I would get something more substantial. Enter the Euroweenie 106 XR. It was made by Peugeot, which I think was once long ago a Belgian company, and if it’s not, we should mention poor little Belgium anyway because no one ever does. Belgium, a country renowned for...um, for being surrounded on all sides by France, the Netherlands, and I believe Pakistan.
They speak two languages in Belgium, French and Pantaloon, and so fiercely do the respective speakers hold to their native tongue that some wives cannot communicate with their husbands. Or want to. It’s such a divided country no one can agree on anything and so the Belgians drive down the middle of the road. But they do make fine chocolate and lovely lace. Their cars, however, are a different matter.
I bought the Euroweenie 106 XR used for 800 Euros, which at today’s exchange rate is about $40,000. How the mighty dollar hath fallen! The man who sold it to me, a friend of a friend, assured me it was a good reliable vehicle, “except sometimes the lights go up and down.” I thought he meant the Euroweenie rolled its eyes in disgust whenever I did something American while driving - such as talking on the cellphone, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper as I steered with my knees - but no, it was just his way of explaining that at times, usually when they were most desperately needed, the lights would go off. And stay off until they damn well wanted to come back on again.
My friend of a friend has taken the car to mechanics across Europe, but they all shrugged and said, “It’s a Peugeot Euroweenie 106 XR,” as if that explained everything. Which I guess it does. It does explain why Belgium no longer makes cars. I can only imagine the horrendous accidents that occurred as thousands of Belgians hammered down the highway (the middle of the highway, remember) then suddenly all went blind as the lights failed and they smashed into each other.
So I guess I should be grateful for the Euroweenie 106 XR because it’s probably the only one of its kind left alive. And at least it’s not a Jumpy. Or a Jumper.

THE PORTUGUESE CHAIN-DOG

I killed the dog. I had to; it kept barking. Being a reasonable man who likes animals, I first tried killing it with kindness, showering down praise and dog-biscuits, but when that failed I resorted to just plain murder. It really was the only way to have peace in my life.
This dog, like the thousands of other dogs chained up all over Portugal, was small, brown and ugly. Long, long ago, a Welsh Corgi and a Dachshund met somewhere on the Iberian peninsula, fell in love and mated. Throughout the centuries, their offspring mated and re-mated to produce today’s Portuguese Chain-dog. It’s pedigree points are: the color is always scruffy-brown, its body is ill-proportioned, being too long for its modest height, and the head should have huge ears, extra points if one flops down. Queen Anne legs are essential, as is a coat that appears to have been created by dragging the animal backwards through a roll of barbed-wire - many times. The perfect Chain-dog should be charmless and devoid of all ability, except for one: it must be capable of barking for hours, without pause or provocation, and such longevity is much sought after among Chain-dog owners.
In most Portuguese towns there are Chain-dog barking competitions which are fiercely contested and some offer tremendous prizes. Practice goes on year-round and country-wide. The very select of the breed - ninety eight percent of them - are also memory-deficient. This ensures that no matter how kind you have been to the animal, the moment it blinks all memory of your kindness is erased, and once more you are a hostile creature to be barked at and about.
In Portugal, the dawn chorus is a dog chorus. The rising sun belongs to the hounds, not the birds, and by government decree, at no time shall there be more than three consecutive barkless minutes anywhere across the land.
That is why I killed the dog outside my house. Its death solved one problem, but created another because it belonged to Senor, my neighbor in the cottage across the yard. He appears to be a man of advanced years, although being from the country he might be only thirty, and looks much as I imagined Benito Mussolini would look today, if only he hadn’t hung around that corner lamp-post too much with his mistress after Italy lost the war. Actually, I could no more guess Senor’s age than speak Portuguese backwards, or forwards for that matter.
The Senor, I have yet to learn his name, growls out Portuguese as though every word is a parade-ground command. On discovering I am American, and therefore genetically incapable of learning a second language, he settled on a military salute as the sole, yet direct means of communication between us. Every morning he appears at his front door (but not too early because the Portuguese are late risers) and his hand flashes up in a crisp salute the instant he sees me. I return it with an American insouciance learned from watching countless John Wayne WWII movies.
Senor then rumbles out some arcane Portuguese greeting, his body erect and head tilted back. Unfortunately his head is inclined so far off vertical that I can see only the underneath of his chin, thin lines where his eyes peer down over his cheeks, and two cavernous nostrils, Stygian-black holes that undoubtedly harbor unknown lands and unusual forms of life.
I will later discover the Senor has only one eye. He is also a kind and generous man with a wonderful dignity that is particularly Portuguese.
Senor is also my landlord’s father and therein lies the problem, me having offed his pedigree Chain-dog. Thank goodness no one saw me do it. I hope.
Other difficulties loom. I live on a farm, along with the Chain-dogs, twin shabby grey cats - or one very fast cat, my Mussolini Senor neighbor with a wife who looks and dresses just like him, and the next problem, a bunch of chickens, what is the collective noun? - herd, flock, franchise? Now I’ve never met a chicken yet that could scare me, not truly scare me, but I have a faithful companion whom it might bother.
Rockat, my Maine coon cat, is a city boy, Los Angeles born and bred. He is a tough, sophisticated California city-cat, which means he’s never seen any bird bigger than a sparrow. He’s caught, tortured and eaten a few of them in his time and it’s possible karma is spinning the big wheel of fortune in his direction. For the time being, we will not know what happens when Rockat meets a bird far bigger than he is, and one that speaks a foreign tongue too, because traumatized by the flight over, Rockat is buried deep in the middle of the bed and comes out only at night. The great Portuguese outdoors with its monster avian life still awaits him.
We, Rockat and I, are in Portugal and both alive, as is Senor’s Chain-dog, who died only in my wishful imagination. For now. But this is a strange and foreign land in which anything might happen. And most surely will.

WHY? WHY NOT?

The question constantly asked me for a while was, Why? and the only honest reply I could give was, Why not? Next came, When? to which I answered, April 6th. I considered getting a T-shirt on which would be printed: Rockat and I are going to live in Portugal and we’re leaving April 6th.
Once past the opening questions, there came more questions that varied only by degree.
“But it’s so far away from Los Angeles and everyone, isn’t it?” No, it’s not, and I’m right next to me all the time.
“Won’t you be lonely?” Yes, sometimes, but it won’t kill me. And at times I have been lonely in Los Angeles. It is the most human of conditions.
“But you don’t speak Portuguese.” True - mais, vo aprender -but I’m going to learn.
“What will you do there?” Probably starve to death, after I eat the cat. Then again, perhaps I might survive and get to explore a new country. I did it once before.
Back to why. There were many reasons for leaving, or at least I could rattle off lots of them, but really there was just one that made sense: it was time. I had emigrated to the States in 1975, determined to work as a director of photography in Hollywood, and I did just that for thirty three years. There were many triumphs, many disappointments (usually of my own making), and wonderful experiences I could never have imagined as a child growing up in a Welsh coal-mining town. I have nothing but gratitude for my time spent in Hollywood. But I felt I had reached some form of ending, and therefore a new beginning. I had no responsibilities or debts, and few possessions. In short, I was free to do what I wished. I understood too that no decision is irrevocable, I can always go back to the States, and probably will at some future time.
I did not leave unhappy; I did not flee the country. I love the United States, my United States, and it has been good to me. It made me who I am today and sure as hell made a better man out of me than I expected. I became, I am, and I always will be, an American. And thankful for the privilege. It became clear to me that no one, regardless how well they make plans, knows how their life will turn out and so it should be enjoyed. Even the scary bits are to be celebrated.
That knowledge is my bed-rock, and from that springs freedom to explore. Regardless of what jingoistic politicians say, one country is not better or greater than another, just different, and within that difference lies interest.
Why Portugal? I shot part of a television series here fifteen years ago and liked the country. There was something appealing about its size and scale. It’s a small country, only 360 miles by 160, but contained within its compact borders is an astonishing repository of history and culture. I felt it was time to live in a small place that had changed little over the centuries. Truth is, the coffee and desserts are seductive too.
So I left my apartment in Studio City, in which I had lived for over twelve years, sold my beloved pickup truck, gave away what I didn’t need or couldn’t take, and flew away with the cat to a small hilltop farmhouse thirty miles outside Lisbon.
And it has been difficult.
Torrential rain and wicked storms hammered the country during the first two weeks and I was always cold. All of my belongings were on a ship heading for Portugal and I had been living out of a suitcase in an empty apartment for a month before I left Studio City. Now I was living in a friend’s house for several weeks and living out of the same suitcase. Poor Rockat was so traumatized by the flight he hid in or under the bed and I rarely saw him.
I was starting from scratch and needed everything. That simple sentence hides a mountain of frustration. For what seemed an eternity, nothing got finished completely; there was always one more piece of paper or another official to see to get simple things done. My list of things to do never got shorter, just altered. I also have great difficulty at times with perception, and that can make me unhappy. I allotted all of April to get settled in Portugal and then begin my new life. But really I wanted it all finished by Tuesday. Sometimes too, just going to a store and asking for something in a strange language was exhausting.
Many times over the last few weeks I wondered about the wisdom of making this move, and once or twice I was close to certain I had made a terrible mistake. But I have good friends in both countries and they saw me through. Now my rented house is nearly completely furnished, the rains have stopped and this day is glorious. I have a wonderful view from my office and today I took a walk along the hill and picked wild-flowers. An hour ago, a swallow flew through the open window, circled the room and shot out again. I saw that as a pleasant omen.
What has settled me most of all is that I am writing again. I normally write every day and have not done so for several weeks. Now I am back where I belong, in front of a computer pecking out words one letter at a time.
I am writing a blog about moving to Portugal, even though I so dislike that word. It’s clumsy and brings to mind Belgian peasants clog-dancing in a heavy rain. Another story dear to my heart occupies much of my time, LUSUS, a comedy-love story about an alien who lands in Portugal.
I write about what I know best.