Life Beckons

This is actually a very short post. Its title refers to La Vida Llama, a new composition released last week by my nephew, Rafael Francisco Góchez (the guitar-playing dude at left), and sang by Sarita Cáceres, also portrayed here.
What I have done for this post is give you my own translation of the lyrics.
If you know Spanish you'll see a difference between the original and the translation. Instead of just translating "literally" I tried to accommodate words to the music and that's not an easy task for somebody like me, neither a poet nor a musician.
I did that because songs of course are to be heard, not read.
So go ahead, click here and prepare to listen to La Vida Llama in youtube. Maybe the English verses will make you want to sing along.

Here are the lyrics:

LA VIDA LLAMA
LIFE BECKONS
© Rafael Francisco Góchez

Abonaré la tierra de horizontes sin final
I WILL ENRICH THE GROUND WITH ENDLESS HORIZONS
perseguiré la huella de tus pasos junto al mar.
FOLLOW YOUR FOOTSTEPS BY THE SEASHORE.
No dejaré que el miedo pueda con mi libertad
WILL NOT ALLOW FEAR TO STRANGLE MY FREEDOM
defenderé mis alegrías, compartiré mis utopías.
WILL STAND UP FOR MY JOYS, AND SHARE ALL MY UTOPIAS.

Presentaré candidatura para restaurar
IF DARKNESS'S BENT ON TORTURING MY HEART
el corazón martirizado por la oscuridad.
I AM GONNA LEAD THE FIGHT FOR RESTORATION.
Haré campaña de esperanza sin mirar atrás
I WON’T EVER LOOK BACK, HOPE’S GONNA BE MY LEAD
anotaré en mi agenda el día
AWAITING FOR THAT DAY
en que regrese tu sonrisa.
WHEN YOUR SMILE RETURNS.

Y el corral de la noche
AND IT’S THERE AT NIGHT'S DEEPEST
donde se esconde la aurora,
WHERE THE DAWN IS HIDDEN
se siente ya
WHERE YOU CAN FEEL
el palpitar
THE STRONG HEARTBEAT
de la mañana que asoma.
OF THE BURSTING OF MORNING

Despierta y anda, la vida llama
GET UP AND RUN, IS LIFE THAT´S CALLING
no puedes dejar de creer.
HOW CAN YOU HARBOR DISBELIEF.
Encuentra fuerzas en quien espera
FIND YOUR STRENGHT IN THOSE WHO WAIT
La oportunidad de crecer, por amor.
THE CHANCE TO GROW UP THROUGH LOVE

Si crees que no tienes ya caminos por andar
IF YOU EVER THINK THE ROAD´S COME TO AN END
es tiempo de recuperar tu creatividad.
THE TIME HAS COME THEN TO RECOUP YOUR DREAMS
El límite más poderoso es el de no luchar
THE STRONGEST LIMITATION´S THE UNWILL TO FIGHT
deja volar al firmamento
SO LET YOUR YEARNINGS SOAR
Lo más querido de tu anhelo.
TO THE HIGHEST OF HEAVEN.

Y el corral de la noche
AND IT’S THERE AT NIGHT'S DEEPEST
donde se esconde la aurora,
WHERE THE DAWN IS HIDDEN
se siente ya
WHERE YOU CAN FEEL
el palpitar
THE STRONG HEARTBEAT
de la mañana que asoma.
OF THE BURSTING OF MORNING

Despierta y anda, la vida llama
GET UP AND RUN, IS LIFE THAT´S CALLING
no puedes dejar de creer.
HOW CAN YOU HARBOR DISBELIEF.
Encuentra fuerzas en quien espera
FIND YOUR STRENGHT IN THOSE WHO WAIT
La oportunidad de crecer, por amor.
THE CHANCE TO GROW UP

Despierta y anda, la vida llama
GET UP AND RUN, IS LIFE THAT´S CALLING
no puedes dejar de creer.
HOW CAN YOU HARBOR DISBELIEF.
Encuentra fuerzas en quien espera
FIND YOUR STRENGHT IN THOSE WHO WAIT
La oportunidad de crecer, por amor.
THE CHANCE TO GROW UP THROUGH LOVE.

Lluvia que lavas el día
RAIN THAT CLEANSES THE DAY
con tu frescura temprana
SAME AS DEW IN THE MORNING
ven hacia nuestra ventana
COME BY OUR WINDOW
a rescatar la alegría
AND FRESHEN OUR JOY

Lluvia que lavas el día
RAIN THAT CLEANSES THE DAY
con tu frescura temprana
SAME AS DEW IN THE MORNING
ven hacia nuestra ventana
COME BY OUR WINDOW
a rescatar la alegría
AND FRESHEN OUR JOY

Moon Over the Gables

Back a few years ago they were flamingos.
As part of one of those urban beautifying campaigns run periodically in cities all over the world, the flamingos were ubiquitous in most of Coral Gables, to the delight of children mostly.
This time around (I am sure the information is already out, but I just haven't had the time to compile it) they are snails.
Huge bright pink or fuchsia (take your pick on what to call it) snails, mostly in pairs, strategically set where local residentes and visitors to The City Beautiful can snap photos, and children can climb on top.
It's actually hard to miss them.
What you most certainly would miss, I bet, is the also beautiful sight of the moon over the Gables at around 8:54 AM on 27 January, 2011.
Hope the pix is good enough to show it right there, about an inch to the left of the building in the background. You have two captions to locate it.

Earth Day MMXI - Every Little Bit Counts

Shopping for household stuff is one of the most simple and non-complicated things for me.
Other than the basic one about, Do I really need this now? there are two main considerations for deciding what to buy. One is, which brand? The other, at what price?
Price usually comes up when you are wondering whether to try a new product. For us all, animals of habit, what usually happens is that we stick with the tried and true. The brand your mother got home after a trip to the supermarket will probably be the one you are gonna reach for at the shelf (provided, of course, it survived long enough in the marketplace.)
Well, that bit of marketing know-how out of the way, let me explain now why I am pontificating on shopping habits and more specifically why I alluded to MY shopping habits.
Here is why?
Because my cooking is practically non-existent, I really don't have many dishes to clean daily. Which also explains why "dishwashing liquid" is not an item I jot down too often on my shopping list. In short, a 24-oz bottle of the stuff is gonna last me for a very very long time.
No matter how little you use, eventually you are gonna run out of said liquid.
One of these days, I did.
And since piling up unwashed dishes in the sink for even a few minutes is totally out of the question (one of my pet peeves, by the way) there was the obligated mental note to stop at the supermarket on the way home and buy dishwashing liquid.
I bought two 24-oz bottles of Dawn!
For a long time now, this detergent has been used by wildlife rescuers to help save wildlife affected by oil (make that crude oil) spills, think Exxon Valdez or BP exploration well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Dawn does it without causing additional harm to the feathers and skin of animals. It's not a marketing ploy, it was actually a find by wildlife rescuers.
Now, you may say, what happened to not having to do a lot of washing dishes and your regular bottle of the stuff lasting you for a very long time?
That one's still true and it's also why I titled this post, Every Little Bit Counts.
Over the past year, whenever you as a consumer activated "your" donation online, for every bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid you bought the manufacturers have donated one dollar, up to $500,000, to its wildlife conservation partners, The Marine Mammal Center and The International Bird Rescue Research Center.
Even though the $500,000 goal was already reached, donations are still being added and as of 18:00 EST on Thursday 6th Jan, 2011, the total had climbed to around $557,400.
So, having enough dishwashing liquid to last me for perhaps the rest of the year, I guess I have two choices: cook more, and dirty more dishes, or give it away to a friend or a neighbor in hopes that using this environmentally-friendly product will become his or her (and kin) favourite.
And then wait for the next Dawn campaign, to buy (and donate) some more. For two ways to find out more, on the Web go, here. Or you can also go to the facebook page, here.

In 2011, Hit the Ground Running

For a while now and though still far from perfect, I've been rather constant with my running.
On average, the so-so weeks see me running at least 5 miles per day [by so-so I mean those weeks where I may run up to 20 miles on the weekend — that is to say 10 on Saturday and 10 on Sunday — and then do the other 15 over three different weekdays.]
On the good weeks, my total may come up to 45 or even 55 miles, especially when I do really well in managing my time schedule.
Most of my running I do on a treadmill, in a gym. It's better on your knees, whatever shape they may be in.
The gym is a rather inexpensive, no frills facility which I chose not only because is close to where I live but also because the sandwich board that advertises it had two words magic enough to attract my attention: No Contract!
When I first started visiting the gym it had been almost four years since last I had gone regularly to a gym. As a matter of fact, I recently joked that as far as I can remember my only running at the time was mostly to catch a departing bus.
My concern was not so much that I would not keep up with my intended purpose of getting in shape. I didn't.
It was mostly around the what ifs.
What if I have to change jobs? What if I move and that makes if difficult to come as often as I want? What if a longer conmute will prevent me from going to the gym as often as I need it?
Basically, why pay for something you are not using — you better believe it, bin dere done dat enough times to justify my concern.
Less than four months after starting my self-training schedule in early January 2009 I was able to run the 5K in the Miami Corporate Race in 34m51s.
Not otherworldly but not too shabby after a prolonged 4 year span of not doing any kind of competitive running.
I didn't run those 3.1 miles in 2010 and don't know whether running the MMXI MCR is in the cards for me this year.
Were it to happen I am more than confident that I would be able to shave off a few seconds off my 2009 time — how about 34m45s, LOL! God willing, that is.
An added benefit to my having been constant in my running over these past two years: I have strenghtened my knees and my ankles to the point that now [as you can see in the attached video] I can run on pavement without so much as resenting the pounding.
I am not much for those dreaded New Year resolutions but if I were to commit to some on this inaugural day of the second decade of the millennium, here they are:
— Stay close to God (and praise and thank Him always) as He wants me to.
— Do as much running or exercise as I can to stay healthy (He'll do the rest, I know.)
— Be more constant in my writing, beginning with my blog.
For Day One, it's working. Thank you, God, for all your blessings.

A View From The Past

It's actually two views. The drawing is from early 1975. As far as my recollection goes, at the time she was a soon-to-be architect who would regularly stop by my office. It was during one of those visits that my friend got ahold of this invoice atop my desk and silently, while I dispossed of the stuff that usually comes across your daily work, drew on the back of the receipt. Vanity of course made me store it! Just a few months later, while interviewing a foreign visitor tape recorder in hand, my photographer snapped the pix above. Almost as if, I now think, he had been looking at my friend's drawing.

Rainbowing to Beauty

It was, as happens with all rainbows, spectacular! After getting soaked in a heavy downpour on the way home after work, with the sky still overcast, the setting sun was powerful enough to filter through the rain and create this beautiful view.
UPDATE: Two is of course always better than just one! Same location, just a few days later! Again sheltered from the rain at the same corner gas station and lo an behold, just as the sun is setting this time is not one but two rainbows! You can't be more fortunate than that! [Because mine is not the best professional camera out there, jiggled the brightness a bit on the same shot to highlight where the second rainbow appeared. The unmodified pix is on top, the "retouched" one immediately below.]

Earth Day-v

Everybody knows that Memorial Day here in the US is the unofficial start of Summer. For subtropical South Florida es also the beginning of Hurricane Season, those dreaded six months of being constantly on the lookout, of wondering whether this one tropical disturbance being born faraway off the Western shores of Africa will turn out to be the punishing storm that will make your life miserable — not talking here of the actual landing of the storm, but the torture of listening to the weather reports for hours on end.
Just before the rains come, we are all treated to one of the most beautiful sights: the flowering of the royal poincianas (also called flamboyant) trees. For at least a few weeks, before the bloom fades and the rains and the wind slowly manage to cover the ground with a red carpet, the "tree of fire" (as it is also known) brightens the landscape.

Earth Day-iv

Not trying to make a statement at all, but I really got a nice feeling after seeing the results here. The day was overcast and that I thought would probably make this lone lilac flower stand out! To my surprise, its softness is almost overwhelmed by the glowing sunlight!

Earth Day 2010-iii

It's Earth Day all the time, so here you have a trio of pix to celebrate it!

Earth Day 2010-ii

As I shot the top of the Coral Gables, FL., City Hall building on Sunday 25 April at 12:10 pm in the pix shown at left, I thought about the beautiful sight we get every Spring when the many Caribbean trumpet trees (also called Paraguayan trumpet tree) in the area bloom. With the wind and the rain and the natural aging of the flowers, there is usually a carpet of gold greeting you every time you walk under the frond.
In time of course the dead flowers will decompose and become litter, unless the nearby house or business cleans the sidewalk.
How different though from the other kind of litter, the one we create on a daily basis. You can find examples, some of them really disgusting ones, at the following website: http://www.museumoflitter.org/ . If the pix there shock you and move you into some type of action to protect the environment, even better.
UPDATED: Back on the same spot, two Sundays after I had gotten the tree in full bloom, a single flower was still clinging to it, stubbornly refusing to let go of life.

Earth Day 2010-i

I won't be there but there is no reason why anybody able and willing shouldn't. Those of you who may have already visited the Earth Day 2010 main site probably know what I am talking about: The Earth Day CLIMATE RALLY at the National Mall in Washington, D. C. this coming Sunday 25th April. [The official poster's on the left.]
The political motivation for this event, of course, is the demand for the U. S. Congress to enact legislation, what organizers are calling a comprehensive climate bill that among other things will cap carbon emissions and secure the nation's future.
Sting, John Legend, The Roots, Jimmy Cliff, Passion Pit, Bob Weir, Willie Colón, Joss Stone, Robert Randolph, Patrick Stump, Mavis Staples, Booker T, Honor Society and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger are some of the artists scheduled to appear.

Earth Day 2010

At one time or another, I guess, we are all waiting for that magical defining moment that will convince us of the need to really protect it. And yet Earth's beauty is always there, waiting only for us to take a look around and enjoy it.
Today is Earth Day 2010! There are many ways for us to either get involved or do individual things to help our planet. For ideas on what to do, go to THE OFFICIAL EARTH DAY 2010 CAMPAIGN here: http://www.earthday.org/earthday2010 .

Journalist By Trade-vi

Priestly involvement in national politics is nothing new in our country.
Matter of fact, one of the country’s Founding Fathers is none other than José Matías Delgado, a Roman Catholic priest who’s credited with locally spearheading back in the early 1800s the drive for El Salvador to become an independent nation. One of the most important decorations granted by El Salvador, if not the most important, is named after him.
Nowadays, religious involvement is not limited to the local curia and politicians fight openly for the blessing of some of the most renowned Evangelical Christian leaders.
It doesn’t really matter what one believes in terms of direct religious involvement in politics. A protestant pastor, it is well known, was one of the most important guerrilla commanders at the time the so-called civil war broke open. And whether you choose to believe that some of the Roman Catholic priests killed by government forces or murdered by rightist death squads were actively aiding the guerrillas or just ministering to their flock, seditious participation in armed confrontation is hardly what monsignor Romero ever did.
Events in El Salvador in 1980 coincided with the turmoil in Iran after the ascent to power in Tehran by the ayatollahs. Spurned by that similarity in him also being a religious leader involved in politics, wags in El Salvador had nicknamed monsignor, “el ayatola Romero.”
It was a correspondent for an American newswire service, I believe, who asked him at one of the mini-press conferences after the Sunday mass what he thought of the nickname.
Sheepishly, and I would say rather offended by the comparison, monsignor replied [and I am paraphrasing here, as my notes for that specific event have long been destroyed]: “I can hardly say that’s fair to me. I would never approve of anybody holding innocent people hostage,” alluding to the Islamic leader's sponsorship of the takeover of the U. S. Embassy in Tehran and the prolonged captivity of dozens of American Foreign Service officers.
There is however no question at all that he had actively become a participant in politics.
At the time of my last interview with him weeks before his death, I paraphrased my question about what had prompted him to become so involved.
I did so by recalling that back at the time we had first met in San Miguel he was known to be ultraconservative. You were, monsignor, I said, a somehow ill-tempered priest who would chastise a mother if she couldn’t quiet the wails of an infant as mass was being said.
Isn’t that, I added, something quite openly in contrast with the populist and at times raucous character of your Sunday sermons, punctuated by loud and frequent bursts of applause?
His reply, given also to many others on separate and different occasions, is already well known.
As it happens with many other things in life, violence doesn’t occur in a vacuum. For anybody who may believe otherwise, explaining violence, understanding why and how originates, doesn’t necessarily mean accepting it or worse yet, condoning or approving of it.
There is also the risk of oversimplifying it. Of just going after an immediate cause-and-effect sequence in order to assign blame.
As I said before in one of the previous posts for this series, it would be the equivalent of believing that Romero’s murder was just a spur of the moment decision prompted by his dramatic call to the military some 24 hours before his killing. Somebody may have organized it and somebody may have approved of the plans and somebody of course may have pulled the trigger to fire the shot that ended his life.
And there, we are all now guilt-free!
For me, is much more complex. It is, in a way, more of a collective, shared responsibility.
It is possible that you choose to blame the shameless and corrupt politicians who, months after his murder and in the years afterward, claimed to have fought courageously for a full and detailed inquiry, when in fact stood silently and did nothing of the sort.
Your chosen villain could be perhaps a local reporter or a foreign correspondent, the military or the guerrillas. And for that matter, even Pope John Paul II, whose more or less overt rejection of Romero's militancy may have been seen as a wink by the plotters.
Anybody, as long as blood doesn’t spatter you.
But as violence of another type gains ground in El Salvador and most everybody feels now unsafe at any hour and in any place, it stands to reason to ask what lessons are being learned about monsignor Romero’s immolation and whether his death meant anything at all to the ones that are still embracing the violence he fought so much against.
Monsignor Romero’s militancy is still very much alive, even if the reason behind the violence being waged nowadays is just common crime and not political motive.
But it is somehow ironic that the date chosen to honor Romero’s legacy has been that of his murder, March 24th. As if his anti-violent message had also died with him. Were it left to me, I’d choose another date to remember him, the date he was born: August 15th. Now that is a date I will never forget. Because it is a date of birth: of promise and beginning. Not an end.

Journalist By Trade-v

The first bomb exploded about the South West corner of the National Cathedral on that brilliant Palm Sunday morning. The thousands gathered to pay their final respects to monsignor Romero crowded all over the neighboring streets and the Plaza Gerardo Barrios immediately across the front portico where the coffin had been carried out for the funeral mass. The Jesuit rector of the Universidad Católica (UCA), Ignacio Ellacuría, who some 10 years later would also be murdered along with seven other people (five of them priests) was one of the pallbearers.
”It’s most likely a propaganda bomb,” I told the startled American TV correspondent standing right in front of me. Minutes later, to use a proverbial cliché, all hell broke loose.
The lucky ones were probably those on the outskirts of the massive congregation of people, who most likely fled away from the area without much impediment. Worse off were probably the ones closer to the cathedral, and most especially the ones on the street right in front of the main portico. Those were the ones trampled and run over by the stampeded throng running away madly from the unseen assailants.
Most of the dead that day were probably people crushed against the fence surrounding the cathedral. The gates had been locked to prevent people from entering the temple and to allow for the mass to be officiated at the front steps, just a few feet away where I and some other local journalists and foreign correspondents like myself had gained access.
As you may have read in the abridged recollection of my dispatches from that Sunday morning in the book whose pages I reproduced in the first article of this series of posts, there was a moment where I recalled crouching down as I somehow sensed that the bullets were literally whizzing by. And just as I crouched down, I immediately realized that it would prevent me from seeing whatever was happening in front and around me [that’s me, circled at the right hand side of the cathedral steps, on the pix that you can find at the web pages dedicated to archbishop Romero on this website. I said so in one of the many dispatches that I wrote over the many hours of that Sunday afternoon, banging away at the old telex machine.
And so I stood up again and remained standing for the whole of the madness, my eyes and my heart and my mind sadly registering the overwhelming cries of the dying, the panic of the thousands of children, women, and men gathered to say goodbye to monsignor, the drone of the guerrilla cadre over the loudspeaker, the implorations of some of the priests closer to us on the front steps, the haunting El Greco-like faces of the poor [as captured by Harry Mattison in the picture circled on the screenshot of the web page from the Harry Ramson Center of the University of Texas at Austin] who to my understanding at that particular moment and many years later, look as it they were just previewing the horrific nightmare my country had just entered in.
Back at the EFE bureau office on the third floor of the building across the basilica where monsignor had issued his most dramatic and open call for an end to the violence just about a week before, we fielded calls from radio stations from different countries and filed one take after another. We didn’t stop writing until well into the early evening and then headed out for a drive around the city, basically deserted.
To this day, questions on who was responsible for the violence of that day are still unanswered. In our dispatches and those of many other correspondents from San Salvador that day you have read the accusations from visiting church dignitaries that government soldiers or rightist militants were involved. Some even were as far as to say that shots were fired from the National Palace, then a mostly abandoned governmental building on the Western edge of the Plaza Barrios.
I cannot discount the possibility that either government agents or rightist operatives were mixed in the crowd and helped to stir the chaos and disorder that ended in mayhem and death. But I was there for the whole of it and all I can do is reiterate that at no time did I see soldiers around the area or shots fired from the National Palace or even signs that somebody may have been inside the facility.
Which brings me to what probably is my motive to reminisce on the events of 30 years ago.

Journalist By Trade-iv

The setting was the early 1990s, at a Christmas party offered by the then Nicaraguan Ambassador to the OAS, José Antonio Tijerino. The topic among a group of diplomats attending the party was El Salvador, and the reasons for the apparent lack of progress in the negotiations toward peace between the government and the guerrillas.
If the killing of Archbishop Romero had definitely unleashed the dogs of war on the country, much of the impetus for a negotiated settlement to the bloody confrontation had been the result of another atrocity just about 10 years later, the murder of six Jesuit priests and two women: their cook and her teenage daughter.
Given Washington’s support for the Salvadoran government before and during the war, some of the diplomats talking with John Maisto, a top American diplomat in charge of relations with Latin America, wondered whether there was any receptivity from the decision-makers in the Salvadoran government side to the signals the State Department may have relayed on the need for a peace agreement.
“What kind of signals are you giving them? Are they clear enough?” was the question asked of Maisto, a Yoda-like man who was at the time one of the most skilled Latin American specialists at the State Department. “As clear as this,” was Maisto’s reply, cocking his right-thumb and –index in a pistol like manner and pointing it to one diplomat’s forehead. “You MUST sign peace.”
The anecdotal retelling by one of the partygoers is, I believe, appropriate. Allow me to explain.
Most everybody who on 23 March 1980 heard monsignor Romero’s now historic appeal to the military (and by that I mean men in uniform, not necessarily just officers) will probably tell you that his reaction was the same as mine. Count among them the ones that probably thought of that calling as an excuse to justify the violence against priests. Also the ones that probably feared that such a thing would happen. Or, as in my own case, a kind of premonitory feeling, not unlike the dread you get when your tot climbs up the steps.
My point here is that our collective mistake is attaching a cause-and-effect relationship to monsignor’s historic appeal to non-violence to his murder on the following day [the pix is from the archives of EL DIARIO DE HOY.] It may be so. But the killing of the archbishop, is my belief, was not decided at the time of his Sunday homily or in the hours after. It had by then been planned and staged. It was most probably the result of twisted minds thinking that (as it had indeed been widely circulated at the time) Pope John Paul II’s rebuke of Romero’s open militancy was a carte blanche for murder.
Which is not, let me hasten to clarify, assigning blame to the Roman Pontiff. Somebody should have made clear, should have cocked his thumb-and-index in a pistol-like manner, much like John Maisto did many years after to make a point, to tell whoever thought of killing a man of peace that doing so was an open indictment of the whole of Salvadoran society as a violent one.