Authors Electric

Jobim, 1981 Águas de Março, Tom Jobim's poetic, meditative, 1971 Bossa Nova gem celebrating southern Brazil's rainy month of March, has been playing in my head as we free-fall into 2021. Back in the 1980s, I memorized the lyrics so I could strum to it with my Goya, Spanish guitar. The song - about endings, beginnings and timeless flow, Zen and the beauty of common things - helped me through a rough patch. I can neither recite nor strum it from memory now, as this new year begins in which we all hope to emerge from a rough patch. But it's there, still flowing. "A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush... ... It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope"  - The Waters of March , Antonio Carlos ...

My daughter Alicia with her 'Nonna' Alba at Easter 1963 at the L.A. house I used to rent. Funny how, over the years, you remember some minor happenings in a crisis so much more vividly than momentous ones. It's as if time slowed down and magnified the minutia. For example, I'll never forget stopping at a hardware outlet on my way to work one crisp, deceptively sunny October morning in 1962. I needed some extra strong, fast-drying glue to repair a fractured slat on my then little daughter Alicia's white wooden crib, and I knew I'd work too late that night to buy any on way home. My daughter had turned an energetic 2 years old just six weeks earlier, and liked to run gleefully about our rented suburban house testing, rattling and sometimes breaking things – and of course, saying no a lot. That particular day I doubted she would make it to 3, or, indeed, whether any of us would be around much longer. We had all seen a somber President John F. Kenne...