Who wants to be a Brazilianaire?

Last spring, I competed in a speech contest at the district convention in Rapid City. One of the other contestants told about her adventures as she swam in the Amazon in Brazil…with piranhas, mind you.

That caught my attention because my wife Belinda and I have been to Brazil three times in the last six years and never have we even seen the Amazon let alone swim in it. But we have our own adventures. Most of them have dealt with two things we hold most dear – food and money.

So let me tell you about our adventures and they occur in three different places – the megacity of Sao Paulo, the small city of Bebadouro and the beaches along the Atlantic Ocean.

The reason we fly 4000 miles to Sao Paulo is that’s the home town of our daughter-in-law Camila. It’s a city of about 25 million people to 30 million people – second only to Mexico City as the largest city in the western hemisphere. As the late Anthony Bourdain said, “It’s so large it makes LA look like Hooterville.”

Now imagine if you will a Sunday morning street fair in Sao Paulo. There are fruit and fish vendors lined up for miles along a thoroughfare. As we get out of the car and walk toward the crowds, my son – who is married to Camila – feels it necessary to tell me, “And whatever else you do here today, don’t get lost in the crowd.”

Well, imagine my surprise when I’m hanging out with my gang of about 12 people at the street fair only to turn around and find them all gone. They have vanished. All I see is a sea of people and what’s worse is they all look the same. They all have brown skin and black hair. I can’t use my cell phone because it doesn’t work in Brazil.

I don’t know if I should move and start looking for them, or should I stay put until someone notices that I’m gone and comes back to find me.

Alas, I see Camila’s sister – or at least someone who looks like her sister – but, sadly, no. It’s just another of a thousand people at the street fair who looks exactly like my Brazilian relatives. At last, I find my wife. She’s ordering something from one of the vendors. So I walk over with happy elation written all over my face. Then I come upon my son who scolds me for getting lost.

“You are a known flight risk,” he says. “Stay with the group.”

Belinda is ordering homemade candy. And they are making it in front of our eyes. They have a hot iron skillet that they fill with tapioca flour and fry it over a blue propane flame. They flip it and then pour sweetened condensed milk on it, fold it over, take it out of the pan and hand it to Belinda. It’s simple to make and tastes like you are eating a Mounds candy bar.

We love it so much that Belinda buys a small bag of the white tapioca flour. The vendor tells us that once the bag is opened, it needs to be eaten at once or it will spoil…thus the small bag.

Well, this is perfect. We look forward to taking our bag of tapioca flour back to North Dakota and making our own homemade candy, until we get to the airport in Sao Paulo. A bag of tapioca flour looks a lot like a bag of cocaine to airport security personnel. So after having our luggage x-rayed, opened and examined, the tapioca flour passes the smell test and we are allowed to keep it with us.

My second story about food occurs in Bebedouro, a city about the size of Bismarck. Camila’s grandfather and a couple of uncles live here. After Sao Paulo, Bebedouro seems like Mayberry. Everyone is friendly and in the center of town is a park. It is at the park that we come upon hot dog vendors.

Now, we are no stranger to hot dogs. We’ve eaten hot dogs in every major league baseball park and a few minor league parks. We’ve also eaten them in New York City where they are affectionately known as dirty water dogs. So no, it’s best not to invest too much time into the integrity of the sausage. Simply close your eyes and bite down on them.

But the Brazilian hot dog is a different breed altogether. While American dogs are generally dyed red, the Brazilian dogs are orange….no, not just orange, sort of a florescent orange….like the color of the vests worn by hunters in North Dakota.

So here’s a street vendor selling orange hot dogs. But instead of the normal condiments like ketchup and mustard, the Brazilians are used to eating their hot dogs smothered with cooked green peas and mashed potatoes.

Okay, here’s where I draw the line. First, I’m not sure if I could even eat an orange hot dog, but I’m sure that I can’t eat one covered in green peas. So while the rest of the brave people downed a hot dog, I waited for our next stop – the ice cream shop. Only to my dismay, the flavors of the ice cream are also like the hot dogs. Anyone eat ice cream that tastes like sweet corn before? You can in Bebedouro. I stuck with more familiar flavors – chocolate smothered with the ubiquitous sweetened condensed milk.

My third stop on this journey is a beach – this particular beach doesn’t need a name because they are all over the place a hundred miles or so east of Sao Paulo. Some are coves, some are jetties, some are white sand and some are rocky. But they have a few things in common – they are full of people and they have young men who wait on your every need.

It's best to get there early so you can pick out the best spot, which is in front of the food and beverage cabana. Here you want someone who speaks Portuguese to set up a tab for you and your group. If they know you are American, you’ll probably end up paying too much. But if your name is Claudiney or Guilherme, they’ll treat you right.

So at the end of the day after devouring high octane sodas, mixed drinks over the rocks and a host of foods on a stick, it’s time to pay the bill. Generally, our little group averages about eight to 10 of us. The Brazilian dollar is known as real (pronounced HAY-eye). For every American dollar, you can get somewhere between three and four reals. So it’s a good thing to be an American.

Rather than splitting up the bill eight ways, the young men who have kept our drinks fresh and fried our food on a stick to perfection, would just as soon that one person pay the bill in full and leave them a tip. This is where Belinda comes in. She hands them a credit card. Any translation is done by our daughter-in-law who speaks fluent English and Portuguese. In an instant, the bill is paid and our credit card shows that we paid one-fourth of what the bill actually was.

Because of the amazing exchange rate, we are what is known as Brazilianaires…just average run of the mill Americans who can pay a fraction of what someone from Brazil would pay. It’s a great system…for us and our relatives.

But the real cherry on top is that the vendors like the arrangement so much that they are more than happy to give Belinda a free drink…the proverbial one for the road. It’s a concoction of fresh fruit, ice, wine and the ever present sweetened condensed milk.

So while we haven’t swam with piranhas, we have had our share of Brazilian adventures. Hopefully, next year, we can add to the list.

Lessons we learned from Grandpa

The phrase “teachable moment” comes to mind, but can an elderly man with Alzheimer’s really teach his children and grandchildren? That’s the question we’ll explore today.

Willis came to live with us in 2006 upon the death of his wife. He brought with him his clothes, his cat and the start of dementia…something that would slowly progress over the remaining eight years of his life.

Grandpa with his grandsons Scott and Derek in 2011. 

Despite his disease, the World War II veteran could still light up the room and his love for his family knew no bounds. He went by different names. To me he was dad but to our sons, he was Grandpa. 

He taught us that you are never too old to help someone. It was a cold winter’s afternoon and after eating a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup for lunch, he dressed warm and went for his daily two-block walk. Even though he had Alzheimer’s, we never worried about him wandering off. He had made this trek so many times, he could do it without much thought. And our neighbors along the two block walk always kept an eye out for Grandpa.

On this particular day, we were surprised when he brought back an elderly gal with him. She was our neighbor – Maggie. She didn’t have her teeth in and she wasn’t wearing a coat. Maggie also suffered from dementia. So once she got in our house and warmed up, she told us that she had gone outside for a minute and locked herself out of her home. Our hero came to her rescue and brought her to our house. Since we knew Maggie’s daughter, we called her and she came over to unlock the door…only to find that the door wasn’t locked in the first place.

Thus is the life of living with people who suffer from memory loss. But as Maggie bundled up in a coat to leave our house with her daughter, Grandpa made one of his pronouncements that will stand the test of time, “Women have a harder time growing old than men do.”

Seriously, I thought. Both of you have Alzheimer’s. Both of you require children to survive, but dad spoke so eloquently, it just seemed like the words should be carved in stone. But I think what he really meant was, you are never too old to help someone in need, and in this case he did.

A second lesson he taught us – you don’t need to know their names to be proud of your family. As dad approached his 90^th birthday, the only person whose name he could remember was his grandson’s Scott. All the rest of us were something else. I was forever introduced to him as “this is my son.” My wife was the “woman in the kitchen.” This phrase was only necessary when the woman in the kitchen wasn’t in the kitchen about 15 minutes before Grandpa expected to eat….which was 7 a.m., noon and 6 p.m.

He would walk by the kitchen and if it was empty, he would ask whoever was around, “Where’s the woman in the kitchen?” Meals were important to dad, but so was family. He might not know your name, but he knew if you were a relative. If he did, he would say, “you belong to me.”

That was high praise from someone who couldn’t remember what he ate for breakfast, but he could remember that someone passing through town from Idaho to Maine “belonged to me.”

The third thing dad taught us was that an honest answer could also be mistaken as a person with an amazing wit.

If you didn’t know he had Alzheimer’s, and a lot of people didn’t, he could fool you easy enough. He was generally quiet, but he would say just enough to make an impact. For instance, one night we were attending a dinner and dad was introduced to the evening speaker. The guest of honor asked dad, “What did you do before you retired?”

Without a pause, dad said, “It’s been so long ago, I forgot.” The whole room erupted in laughter.  What a clever response, they thought. But if the truth was known, he had answered the question truthfully. The ever-present twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face made the audience believe that he was being clever.

Of course, he had forgotten that he was a coal miner, a rough neck and a pipeliner. He retired from Conoco in 1985…which was before either of our sons were born.

That was our life with dad. He was a pleasure to be around. He was always a gentlemen, he loved his family and he could light up a room with a smile and an answer that would delight us all. And he taught us that you are never too old to help, that family is your best friend and a well-spoken person is always a gem. 

The odd parallels between Belinda and Rosaline

If someone else noticed the weird coincidences between Belinda and her mother Rosaline, they never explained them to me.

But I certainly discovered them when reading Rosaline’s 1957 and 1958 diaries. I didn’t have to read Belinda’s diaries from 1986 and 1987 because I lived them.

Leo and Rosaline's wedding photo from June 1956.

In June 1956, Rosaline married Leo, who lived and worked in Glendive. So after their wedding Rosaline moved from her family’s farm near Mandan to a different state and to a city where she didn’t know anyone except her husband…or did she?

Why of course she did. Three of her dad’s sisters lived in Glendive. There was Aunt Rose Sterhan, Aunt Mary Pfau and, the youngest, Aunt Kathryn Rust.

There was also Leo’s sister Pat (Perpetua) and her husband Ray Hegel.

So in 1958 when Rosaline – who was the oldest child – had Belinda – also an oldest child – there was a built-in support system to ask questions, find a quick babysitter, etc.

Now jump ahead to 1985 when Belinda married me. Only this time Belinda moved from Glendive to Mandan…basically the opposite of her mother.  And in 1988 when Belinda had her oldest child, all of her questions could be answered by her grandmother. In fact, I think Grandma Frohlich took quite a bit of pleasure in being there for Belinda. It sort of made up for having her daughter move away nearly 30 years ago.

Belinda and my wedding photo from October 1985.

And it wasn’t like Belinda didn’t know anyone in Mandan. While Rosaline had three of her dad’s sisters, Belinda had four of her mom’s brothers – Johnny, Philip, Clifford and Herbie. She also had Rosaline’s mom. Grandma became a suitable substitute for Rosaline for Belinda. After all, they had more similarities than differences.

But if that wasn’t enough, there were also several of Leo’s sisters including Belinda’s Godmother, Clara Wetsch. Besides Aunt Clara, there was also Aunt Barbara and Aunt Alice.

Except for Philip, the rest had gotten married and had children, so Belinda also had lots of cousins…as did Rosaline in Glendive back in the 1950s.

So when Rosaline got married and was just starting to create a new life and depended on the friendship and generosity of her relatives, it was an easy story to understand because we had done the same things.

In fact when we moved to Mandan after Christmas in 1985, it was Philip, Clifford and Herbie who came over to help Leo and I unpack the U-haul during the coldest day of the winter.

Over the years, Rosaline came to rely on her aunts – especially Aunt Katy. Rosaline still sees her cousins Linda (Aunt Katy’s daughter) and Jeannette (Aunt Mary’s daughter).

In Mandan, we have had breakfast with Belinda’s uncles on Saturdays for probably 15 years or more. We also are friends with all of her cousins and see them at least once a year – at the Frohlich reunion.

So if you hear someone say that history repeats itself, indeed it does. And it’s much easier to understand how the previous generation survived when you see the same circumstances surround you as well.