a gramita story

I am thinking of my grandma Gloria, and I am thinking of a trip I took to Tierra del Fuego, a province of Argentina, during my time abroad there.

Specifically, I visited the capital Ushuaia, a place also known as "the bottom of the earth", a fitting nickname, it being the southernmost city in the world.

They say that upon the descent of the airplane, you can actually witness this effect...that the world appears to just drop off the edge.

But come on people, Johnny Depp isn't my lover nor is the world flat. I will concede, however, that it was a lovely sight from my window-seat, and I think I took a few bad pictures that I will dig up now so that you can see what the bottom of the world looks like:

Anyway, back to Gloria. Upon hearing of my travel plans, she briefly returned to a time long gone, she was probably even younger than my current 23 years, when engaged to be married to my grandpa, a one dashing Arturo Lanza. Here they are circa 1950, the two on the left with Tia Edna, props to cousin Sonita for the picture:

Arturo worked for Ford Enterprises in Bolivia and this snazzy job had him traveling quite a bit around his part of the Americas. During one of these many business trips, perhaps to Buenos Aires or Santiago, Gloria met a man on a train, who, for whatever reason, greatly struck her fancy. Of course, she was engaged at the time, and judging by the picture above, not the type to up and abandon her responsibilities as a woman of the times. Thus, she declined this mysterious man's offer to run away with her to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, his homeland from which, traveling in Bolivia, he felt so far away.

Gloria thought of this mysterious train man decades later when the words "Tierra del Fuego" were passed across the phone line, and couldn't help but wonder if her Argentine heartthrob still existed.. if perhaps, he too, was a widower like herself. She would have liked to know such things, and she would have liked my inquiring of his whereabouts during my stance in the province. His name I don't remember in the slightest, it was something like Rodrigo Torres, but the point is that there was a name, and she was serious about the request.

These meditations were shared with my mother who then, of course, related them to me. We had a good chuckle at gramita's naivete, that the world might be so small as it was back then.

I, like Gloria, was quite naive though as well. What little faith I put in the power of memory and the odds of pure chance. I didn't mention the name to a single Patagonian barman, and there were many. I sort of regret this, but not too much because I was young and foolish! Really...19 seems centuries ago in terms of foolishness.

Obviously the older I get, the wiser I should become. It is not naive, come to think of it, to believe in destiny and coincidence, because I'm starting to see that stranger things happen every day. And thank God for these weird coincidences, I don't know if I could get on with life without a little magic along the way...