"Quando a merda tiva valor...."

Mamasan sits on a pile of paper related to a Western Union money transfer, properly disgruntled.

Since August I’ve been trying to establish a monthly trickle of funds to my daughter Palesa, in South Africa.  A single wire transfer costs $50. Since I’m trying to send her $20 a month, that’s absurd. I opened a new checking account and got a debit card for it and mailed that to her. It was stolen in the mail. Somebody tried to use it but didn’t have the PIN number. I got another debit card. Also stolen. She never saw it. Months passed.

Finally she found a Western Union office in a bank that is heavily guarded, where she can safely pick up a little money. I tried to send the money online for a fee of $1.99. The online order was rejected. I tried by phone, for a fee of $25. The order was rejected. I went to Western Union in person with cash in hand and filled out an order to send her $20. They charged me $10. And I’m still not sure she’ll get the money. We’ll find out in a couple of days.

When I told Sue this story, she told me an expression she learned from her Portuguese father: "Quando a merda tiver valor, os pobres vão nascer sem cu." “When shit has value, the poor will be born without assholes.”

In other news, Sue and I went to hear Grazingllama’s recorder quartet play last night, at Portland’s oldest coffee house, Rimsky Korsakoffee. They played Christmas songs in delicate, ever-changing four-part harmony. We loved every minute of it. Some of you may have noticed the beautiful six-word poems Grazingllama often leaves as comments on my posts. Some of my favorites:

We live however

we can, thankfully.

girls roam free

before womanhood embraces

Love is

your beautiful

self , visible

In the way we influence each other in this community, Lo Jardinier posted, as an homage to Grazingllama, this six-word poem in a comment on the blip I posted when I re-discovered Palesa in August:

Three years' longing

connection now

immediate

That brings this text full circle.