Andy HoffmanSáo Paulo, at sixteen million inhabitants the largest city in the southern hemisphere, boasts a rumbling liveliness that competes favorably with every other large city I’ve ever visited. The business center of Brazil, it pulses with commercial activity, from international banks to corner bars, and from high-rise apartment buildings growing like bamboo to grocery stores and feira – pop-up produce markets – to feed all the people. I like New York, but it takes so much out of everyone there, residents and visitors alike, that I hardly ever go. But I would go to Sáo Paulo every chance I get. New York has the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Central Park. Sáo Paulo has the equivalent Ibirapuera. Sáo Paulo is also Deb’s hometown, and where her parents live.
We’re in Sáo Paulo to see her parents. More precisely, to check in on them. Michael, a lively 88 year old rabbi, walks the city with the remarkable comfort of a lifer, though he was in fact born in Germany, transported as a toddler to Rio to escape the Holocaust, and lived in New York, Boston, Brasilia, Bern, and who knows where else. He speaks seven languages and is interesting in all of them. Fabia, five years her husband’s junior, only speaks five languages and has lost some spriteliness, but she makes up for these deficits by continuing to write and publish books. She recently published her first adult novel; she mostly has written for children and young adults. As you can imagine, these busy lives made them distracted parents, and it has taken Deb many years to come to terms with her upbringing. By now, she’s almost completely recovered. (Read Deb’s take here.)
I met Michael and Fabia peculiarly early in our relationship. Meeting your partner’s parents can lead to jitters, even at our advanced ages. But also at our ages, Deb and I made a snap decision that we were better together than alone. Not only that, we make one another better people. We met over breakfast one cold early November morning, She went to her brother David’s for Thanksgiving a few weeks later. Michael and Fabia have an apartment in Middletown, CT, near Wesleyan University, where David works, and they were visiting. I drove to Middletown to pick Deb up and therefore met her parents perhaps 20 days after meeting her. When you know, you know.
Michael and Fabia have been married more than 60 years, a period that might – but does not in this case – correspond to a complete alignment of hearts. They have reached a plateau of love and understanding, one I will die before I reach, upon which they agree to disagree, on most everything. Still, they choose to face their last years together, powered by mutual respect for one another and for tradition, and that’s a kind of love. Deb and I have a different sort of love, where we prize the feeling of a single heart between us.
So this trip to Sáo Paulo has little to do with meeting the parents and – for me at least – no tension. While not technically a son-in-law, I relate to Deb’s parents as one. Sometimes I believe I feel more comfortable with Deb’s parents than Deb does herself. Just inside Ibirapuera’s Gate 6 we found a 3 Coracoes café nestled beside a dog run. As in the US, Brazilians acquired dogs during the pandemic, and on this Sunday morning dog-owning Paulistas crowded the Ibirapuera café. We enjoyed our simple, traditional Brazilian breakfast: coffee – 3 Coracoes is a solid national coffee brand – fruit salad, and grilled buttered bread. The city flowed around us as we embraced our three hearts, Michael’s, Fabia’s, and the one Deb and I share, in most beautiful corner of beautiful Sáo Paulo. That morning, I could believe there’s no better place in the world.