When I was a little lothario

Sometime back in 1990 or 1991, my parents sent me to spent to the States to spend a month with a family friend and her son, who was about my age. They thought this would be a positive experience or some such thing. Me, I saw it in terms of having an entire month where I would have access to things like stores that sold Stephen King novels in English, American candy, and most importantly, Nintendo games. Buying these things as imports in Rio was prohibitively expensive, and typically when you knew someone going to the States, you considered yourself really lucky if you could put in an order for, say, Whatchamacallit chocolate bar, or your own copy of Contra (so you didn’t have to hang out with that annoying kid who lived two buildings over just to play it, and that kid always got surly when you were better than him anyway, so you couldn’t ever make it past the third or so level without him throwing a tantrum.)

 

To be sure, the perks of the trip were many. I read a ton of Stephen King novels during that month. I drank a ton of apple cider (a product that for some reason you couldn’t get in Brazil and which I absolutely loved.) I ate donuts and I became acquainted with American tv shows like “The Wonder Years.” But the apple cider…seriously, I drank it until I realized that it wreaks havoc with the digestive process, and then I stopped completely. I bought games like Super Dodge Ball, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Gradius, and so forth. This was also my first taste of an East coast winter, being that the family friend lived in Columbia, MD. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced. I remember my first heavy snowfall. I had to buy boots, gloves, a hat. I was so cold at first that we had to go get long johns, and I didn’t even understand what they were at the time. I was like, “But I already have pants…what do I need these for? And why are they so tight?”  

 

I had left summer in Rio behind, and I was shocked to find out that American kids only got two weeks off at the end of the calendar year. Kidsitting arrangements being what they were, I actually had to go to a junior high school for a few weeks during my vacation. (Interestingly – I was here on a tourist visa, and I went to a public school for three weeks. I’m not sure how that worked out, now that I think about it.) I discovered that I was way ahead of the class in math – we spent weeks learning stuff I had learned the previous year. I knew very little about American history, of course, but I did fine in most of the other classes. I didn’t do so well navigating the social setting of an American junior high, but I have relatively few emotional scars to show from that time, so I guess it wasn’t too traumatic. I remember spending an unseemly amount of time picking out a Trapper Keeper. “This is going to be very important, you want to pick something cool,” my friend told me. “Grown-up. Something with sports cars on it, probably.” “But,” I would reply, “this one’s got a tiger on it.” “No,” he would say, “that might as well be one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You need the one with the sports car.” 

 

What I remember most about this trip isn’t really the month I spent in Columbia, Maryland. It’s the flight from Rio to Columbia. See, my parents and my grandmother in particular subscribed to the notion that you get dressed up for flights. I had to wear my finest clothing, lest I appear to be some sort of slovenly indigent. This meant dress pants, dress shoes, and a belt. For a twelve year old male, wearing dress shoes and a belt is a fate worse than death, basically. It also meant, however, that I had to wear my “finest” dress shirt. The shirt that was reserved for baptisms and weddings and Christmas. And the shirt in question was a gold silk shirt.

 

What I remember about the shirt is not how repellent it must have looked, but rather the fact that I learned a valuable lesson about how good of a conductor silk is. Stepping outside of the airport when I arrived – setting foot in 0 C temperatures for the first time since I was a baby living in Chicago – the entire shirt basically turned to ice on my body. One second my body temperature was normal, and the next I was gasping for air as if I’d been plunged into Arctic waters. It sucked.

 

And what set me off on these memories was Ms. Abstract Citizen, the other day, watching someone being interviewed on Good Morning America – he had saved someone from a fire, or something? And he was wearing a shiny silk shirt. She paused the show so we could admire his shirt, and I suddenly flashed back to that month, and more importantly, to the moment where I thought my lungs had frozen, all because of my gold pink shirt.