Flying to Portugal seems like an awfully long way to travel just to be insulted, and yet that seems to be the emerging theme of this particular trip.
For a long time now, my grandsons have all accused me of being silly, and, to be honest, it is a badge that I wear with pride. Riddled with insecurities, ‘silly’ is one thing I have dreaded being exposed as for most of my adult life, so it is tremendously liberating to be so labelled by grandsons who clearly regard it as an endearing trait rather than a flaw.
A less welcome development on this trip has been the constant admonishment that: “You’re old, Grandpa.” In fairness, it is a card that I play myself fairly regularly, so I can’t really complain.
However, today marked a further development. Bernice and I walked Tao to his Portuguese lesson at school. (Four days a week, all the non-native-speakers in the school learn Portuguese together in one class, and Tao, as a home-schooled pupil, is able to join them.) The school is, very conveniently, only a four-minute walk from the house. However, like 97% of Penamacor, it is downhill from the house, which means, of course, that the walk back is uphill, beginning with three flights of steps, about 25 in all. Ollie had come with us and, as we tackled the steps on the way back to the house, he was heard to declare: “Come on, Grandpa! You can do it!” My only solace is that he followed this with: “Come on, Nana! You can do it!”
Even more painful were the preparations for a game that didn’t actually materialise. Nana and Ollie were, he informed us, to be Mr Happy and Grandpa was to be Mr Miserable. Inexplicably, Bernice found this hilarious. Other opinions differed.
Life has, as you will doubtless have already realised, been very quiet since we left Lisbon nine days ago, on Sunday. Tao returned with a bug, which he then passed on to Micha’el, and Tslil has also not been firing on all cylinders. So last week was uneventful. Happily, everyone is more or less recovered now. Tao was well enough to enjoy a Hallowe’en party over the weekend, Hallowe’en being heartily celebrated in Portugal. For the last few days he has been leaping out at us in his vampire top hat and cape and gruesome face-distorting fangs, which tends to give his Nana what old people like me should probably call conniptions.
The weather has been very kind to us, with the exception of last Friday and Shabbat, when the rain bucketed down unabated for about forty hours. Today (Monday), in contrast, has been sunny and almost warm, so that the boys and Tslil and I were able to enjoy a morning stroll with Lua, which included boarding new fewer than three pirate ships, and Tao and I stayed on with the dog long enough to devise a system of simplified semaphore to enable us to communicate with each other from one mountaintop to another. And all before breakfast.
Supermarket shopping has been as mysterious as always. Two different supers offer a wide variety of bread flour, but both have run out of spelt flour. Is there a world shortage that nobody told me about? The fish counters are devoid of trout, which they always used to feature. Maybe there is some reason behind this, but it certainly eludes me.
Days here are more structured than they have been previously. Now that Tao is officially a home-schooled first-grader, he has a timetable that includes not only his Portuguese lessons at school, but also English, Hebrew, maths and a subject that I think I will translate as general studies, although the Portuguese word means ‘environment’. It includes elements of geography, history, science and civics, and is a core school subject throughout primary school. After 6th grade, pupils study each of these subjects separately.
The first-grade syllabus does not seem to be too demanding. In fact, Tao was already well ahead of the maths syllabus before he started studying formally. However, almost certainly the most important thing at this stage is that he is enjoying all of his studies, at home and in school.
One last school story. I took Tao to school yesterday for the first time. He had Portuguese for the first two lessons of the day. We walked through the playground and into the building, at which point a short, middle-aged lady in a yellow jacket – obviously an ancillary staff member – aggressively barred our entrance and started remonstrating with me in a stream of unintelligible Portuguese. I attempted to explain why we were there, but it was not easy, given that I still have no Portuguese at all. From her continued ranting, it seems I even failed to convey the fact that I do not speak Portuguese. I’m not sure which of us was more traumatised, Tao or myself.
After a couple of minutes, a member of the academic staff arrived, and calmed the situation. Another staff member – an older man who is, I believe, the co-ordinator of the home- schooling programme – also arrived, and everything was sorted out. I now realise that my crime was to come into the school before the bell had rung. We should have waited in the playground. When the bell rang, the children lined up in their year-groups, and Tao should then have joined the first-graders and gone into school only when they did.
Today, when Bernice and I took Tao again, the same yellow-jacketed woman – who is, incidentally, short of stature (just saying, Napoleon complex and all that) – came over to us as soon as we walked through the gate into the playground, and greeted me warmly with a broad smile and a stream of obviously welcoming Portuguese. Armed today with an explanation – ‘Aula de Português lingua no matera’, which as near as damn it is comprehensible as ‘a lesson in non-mother-tongue Portuguese’ – I was ready to have it out with her, but she was very warm and welcoming (‘simpering’ is a word that springs to mind) and left Bernice and myself with the distinct impression that she had, after yesterday’s encounter, been given a very stiff talking-to by the powers that be.
The other highlight of my week was on the sporting front. Last night, it fell to me to sit with the boys while they had their bath. Bath-time is a major attraction for the boys, and they take their time over their ablutions, which have more to do with bubbles, hydraulics and pouring than with carbolic soap, flannels and scouring. Yesterday, the boys had, in the bath, a sponge ball, and we worked up a very enjoyable game that owed its format, in more or less equal proportions, to the slip cradle of the playing fields of my youth, the squash court of my teaching years and the school brick wall of Bernice’s childhood. The game was a big hit with all concerned, and threatens to become a fixture of the bathtimes that fall to me.
And that’s, more or less, my week. Quite how such slight material can be sewn together into so meaningful a week is one of life’s mysteries, but there it is.