PEACE AND QUIET IN PEOR ES NADA, CHILE

Oh boy, oh boy. I am soooo excited. My friend Beena shared with me her latest painting! Isn’t it beautiful? I think it is beautiful and just looking at it makes my imagination fly. I thought I was going to have to wait a whole month to get the next painting from my friend Beena but she has such a big imagination that she was able to make an entire new painting for us in just one week. How about that!!

My imagination is flying!! And not only that, the first thing I noticed about this painting are the birds flying above the beautiful trees. Birds have always fascinated me. When I was a little boy growing up in Brasil, I used to have 4 birds – 2 parakeets and 2 birds we used to call mandarins. The parakeet couple was always very lovey dovie with each other but they NEVER laid any eggs and I REALLY wanted them to lay an egg and have baby birds, especially because one parakeet was blue and the other was yellow and so I wanted to see if the babies would come out green, haha. The mandarin couple basically ignored each other but for whatever reason they would lay eggs every few months. I don’t know why they did this because after they laid the eggs they would proceed to ignore them and so, again, no baby birdies ever came of it. Oh well, I guess that is just how it was and I managed to enjoy my birds as they were anyways. The birds lived in a cage in the back yard of our house. Now, I do not really like to see birds in cages (I much prefer them flying above trees like in the painting my friend Beena sent), so every week I would go out on a nice sunny day and I would let them out of their cages to fly around a bit. We had a tall wall around our back yard, so the birds were able to fly around without leaving the house and after a few hours I would catch them and put them back in their cages. I was never very good at interpreting bird expressions, but I imagine that they looked very sad when I put them back in their cages, wouldn’t you be??? Well, one day when I let the birds out of their cages, one of the mandarin birds was able to fly over the wall and escaped into the neighborhood. I was horrified and spend the rest of the afternoon chasing after him all over the neighborhood. Eventually, I thought I had him when he flew off a tree and down in my direction. But (are you ready for this? – it is not a good ending so stop reading right now if you do not like sad endings) as I was almost about to grab him a cat came out from under a car parked on the side of the street and swallowed him whole. I am not kidding you. This is a true story and it happened to me.

The other thing that I noticed about this painting is its name. Beena called it “Peace and Quiet in Peor es Nada”. Well, first of all, what kind of name is THAT, “Peor es Nada”??? Beena keeps coming up with funny names, but, again, this town really does exist and it exists in the country of Chile. You can look it up yourself on Google Maps!! Now, the other thing about this town’s name is that it is in Spanish and since I know Spanish I can translate it. “Peor es Nada” means “Worse is Nothing” in English. Now that is not a funny name anymore, it is just plain weird. Who would ever name a town Worse is Nothing? I guess nothing is probably worse than something and certainly nothing is worse than everything, but who would choose that name for their home town? Crazy, right? If you had to choose a name for your home town what name would you choose? I would choose a name like “Pura Vida”, which is also in Spanish and means “Pure Life” in English. Pura Vida, I like that name. Do you think we should change the name of the painting to “Peace and Quiet in Pura Vida”?

Ok, Ok, my imagination is getting tired. Now it is your turn. What story or memories do you see in this painting called “Peace and Quiet in Peor es Nada”? Think of it and then write it down. Oh, and then don’t forget to pass it on to a friend (even if the friend does NOT have a funny name) so we can come up with 1,000 stories for this painting, together.

See you next month (or maybe sooner than that if my friend Beena is fast with her next painting)!