Week 11: Lucky

In loving memory of Maria Helena Schneider Bastos Vieira

(21 May 1925 – 1 Jun 2023)

Originally published 15 Mar 2023.

Bingo!

My maternal grandmother Maria Helena ´is typically the one to shout it out first. Now aged 97, she has not been attending any social functions anymore, but she used to be active in many organizations such as my hometown’s Lions Club and several church groups, one of which promotes a great yearly bazaar where expertly crocheted doilies and table runners are sold, all proceeds to help people in need in the local community.

Grandma has been an organizer in several of these initiatives, and I grew up watching her embroider and crochet beautiful pieces. She taught me to make a basic chain stitch, but I sorely lack any skills for needlepoint work. She used to have a closet where she would collect, organize and price tag the handiwork of several of her group’s volunteers, each piece carefully ironed and starched, so they would make a good display at the bazaar. Not many went unsold, and those leftovers she would buy herself. They were highly coveted as Christmas presents for me and others in the family, and they are today treasured items in my home. You can never have enough kitchen towels with crocheted borders!

The house where she lives also has a couple of other nooks where other interesting items are stored: the many prizes she won on raffles and bingo games throughout her life. Silverware, porcelain tea sets, serving trays and dining table accents, she won several sets of housewares, to the point that some of her friends would playfully “withdraw” from the game whenever she went in. No cheating, no hijinks, Grandma is just very lucky. I don’t know if she has ever played the lottery, but since she is no millionaire, I would assume she hasn’t. There’s still time!

Grandma, or Vovó Lena as we call her, was born in Vitória on 21 May 1925, the firstborn child of Godofredo Schneider and Noêmia Travassos Serrano. At that time, her father was a public defender in Benevente, modern-day Anchieta, Esp´írito Santo, but the children were born in the state capital. In 1929, the family would move to Vila Velha, to be near Godofredo’s parents, on the place that is dearest to me, Inhoá, named for the rock upon which my father’s family home was built and where they have lived for over a century, starting with Bernardo Schneider and Maria Luiza Furtado (Aiquinha), my grandmother’s paternal grandparents.

My grandparents Maria Helena and Rinaldo got married on 14 Dec 1946, my father Rinaldo arrived nine months later, followed by my late uncle Orlando, who was my godfather, in 1949. My grandfather worked at a bank and the family moved to Santa Tereza, in my home state, then to Jaboticabal in São Paulo, where my aunt Ligia was born, the third child. They would be back to Vila Velha when grandma was expecting my youngest uncle, João. The house where she still lives was under construction, finished sometime around 1956, and she never moved again.

Vovó was a very active woman, intellectually and physically, and even as an almost-centenarian she still remembers entire poems, songs, historical facts and general trivia. She used to swim in the ocean and go horseback riding, she could write beautifully, speak eloquently in public, she could sew, she learned Orpheonic singing in school and up until not too long ago could hit impressive notes.

As another way to keep her mind sharp, she loved making lists of all kinds. Next to the recliner in front of the TV, where she also did her needlework, there was a small notepad. In my young years, spending a lot of time with her in that now empty den (she can’t use stairs anymore), she would have her aha moments and ask “let’s remember surnames that are also plant names”, or animal names, or songs named after women. Anything would do, she would jot down anything we came up with, the lists would go on for months. This is all from a pre-Google era, and after the world became a big digital beehive we still could not, or should not, pull out the cell phone to cheat. The same goes for anytime she is trying to remember anything, a movie or song title. The only search engine allowed is your brain, and she would likely beat you to it.

My grandparents’ house was my playground as a kid. The house sits on a pristine plot with native woods and a diverse fauna. I used to spend weekends there on sleepovers, hang out with her, go on walks after dinner to help with digestion as she would say, and on Sunday we would attend Mass together. Sometimes, during the rainy season when we have spectacular thunderstorms, the power would go out. Grandma would light a candle, and we would talk as the wind blew and made the wooden shutters moan and creak. I was a scared kid, but she would let me sleep either next to her, or in the bedroom right across the hallway, both of our doors open.

She still spends her nights in that same room. Her brain is a bit foggy these days, wandering in and out of the ten decades that span her life, remembering names, dates and people involved in events at any point in that lengthy timeline like they were just happened. Sometimes she mistakes a TV presenter from her favorite Catholic channel for someone she knows and strikes a conversation. It’s all good, she feels connected and strong in her faith, that’s what matters. Grandma is a religious woman and used to be very active in her parish until mobility became limited, keeping her from attending in-person services. She lives her faith in the ways that truly matter: she has helped countless people, she taught us not to judge others and to be purposeful and kind in our words and actions.

Her parish is Nossa Senhora do Rosário, the third oldest in the country, facing the small bay where the Portuguese settlers arrived to colonize the region in 1535. For a while she attended Mass at the little Navy School chapel next to her house, she was friends with the chaplain and with a good reason. His services were never dull, he was a funny man and celebrated two of my uncles’ weddings. We called him Padre Herbert, he passed away in 1994, shortly after receiving the honorific title of Monsignor Herbert Burns.

Even though she has lived almost her entire life in the same place, my grandmother got to travel many times. In the 1960s, when she and my grandpa were members of Lions Club, they traveled to events on the regional and national level. There is a shelving niche in her house displaying the many miniature plates and other souvenirs they brought from those trips. Every year, their local club would set up a stand selling refreshments as a fundraiser during Festa da Penha, a traditional religious festival honoring the patron saint of my home state, on the foothill of where there is a convent dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Penha, or Our Lady of the Rock on a free translation.

The festival happens, you guessed it, right where Grandma lives, the same area where we all revolve around. The local Lions Club had a food stand, and there she sold her famous hot dogs made with sliced franks cooked in a tomato and ground beef sauce, served on a bun. I know chopping up a hot dog sounds horrific to an American, but come to think of it, the whole thing is not too far from a chili dog. And yes, it was delicious and sold well. I was in charge of picking up the soda in the chest cooler and bringing it to the customers to help wash down the food.

Later in life, she traveled by herself, my grandfather was more of a homebody. Sometimes her brother, my great-uncle José Luiz and his wife Maria Carmen would accompany her. Grandma also came to the US a few times to be with my Aunt Ligia during the years she lived here from 1974 to about 1982. Grandma was present when both my cousins were born in Buffalo, NY and faced the weather with aplomb, for someone who tends to be cold at the slightest drop of temperature when the South winds turn in Vila Velha.

She was also a very important presence and part of the support team when my parents got divorced, also in the early 1980s, and throughout the following decades, until my siblings and I were on our own. Grandma drove a Fusca, as we call the VW Beetle, and that car took us everywhere. There were actually more than one, same model, same color. I do not know how many they actually were. She would come over and whisk me away to go to her place, for an ice cream treat, or for shopping trips at the co-op affiliated with the bank Grandpa worked for. At the time we did not have the newer bridge that goes from Vila Velha to Vitória, we had to go around the longer way, and that was a journey typically planned days in advance. The same trip today takes 20 minutes, and has none of the excitement anymore.

I have a lifetime of memories to share about my grandmother. As it was with the post about my mother, it feels strange to write about a living person. I am not eulogizing her, I just want to have some of my impressions out there, so a family history researcher coming from somewhere further down the space-time continuum can find her, find Inhoá, and by extension find all of us.

There is another way in which she is very lucky, and it must be shared: She had all of her three siblings up until she was 95 years old, when one of her sisters, great-aunt Carmita, born one year to the day after Grandma, passed away in 2021. José Luiz and Laurita are still around and in fairly good health. In keeping with the week’s theme, I should say we are the lucky ones to have them around for so long. How fortunate am I to have enjoyed her in my life for more than a century and counting? It is also monumental just to realize she is almost double my age. Hard to fathom, when I think about the span of my own lifetime, to think how much more she has seen, felt, lived.

Grandma always says we do not lose anything we age, we only accumulate all the experiences. There is no dismay in thinking that I will be 51 in a few weeks. If I can sail through the second half of my century with just a fraction of her wit, her memory and vitality, I can count myself as a very lucky person, though I hardly ever win any material prizes of any sort. I am, as we call it in Brazil, a “pé frio”, literally a cold foot, not very lucky on games or drawings. If you ever see me at the bingo, you do not need to do like Grandma’s friends. Pull up a chair, grab your card, you may have a shot at winning.