BOSSA NOVA AND A LOVE STORY

“Olha que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graca, e ela menina que vem e que passa, num doce balanco, caminho do mar …” A Garota Ipanema

The first recording of Girl From Ipanema, with Joao and Astrud Gilberto singing, Joao also on guitar, Stan Getz on tenor sax and Antonio Carlos Jobim on the piano is purely, absolutely luminous. A song turned iconic in its perfection.

I am trying to learn it in Portuguese.  It sounds so beautiful in its original language.

I love Bossa Nova because the music caresses your ears.  Fills your soul with yearning.  Makes you wish you could fall asleep with a smile on your face, wrapped in someone’s arms, protected from all pain.

I love it for more than that.

Bossa Nova reminds me of my childhood.  And of my parents when they were young and full of dreams, long long before the bitterness set in.

I will never forgot the story my father told me once … about hearing Girl From Ipanema for the first time and thinking of my mother. 

He met my mother in 1964. 

She was, to him, gorgeous and unknowable.  She with the beautiful oval face, the perfect legs, the long straight hair (and no, I don’t look at all like her).  She with the six brothers, the very strict parents, the plan to enter a convent. 

She thought my father was arrogant and talked too much. She especially didn’t like that he tapped her shoulder the first time they met, as if they were already intimate.  “How fresh!” she still remembers thinking!

It was the opposite of love at first sight. 

So when my father heard Girl From Ipanema, a new release in that era, it became his theme song for her:

“Oh but he watches so sadly. How can he tell her he loves her?  Yes, he would give his heart gladly.  But each day when she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead not at him …”

“Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking and when she passes, he smiles, but she doesn’t see …”  

It took a whole year before she finally, really saw him.  In 1965, he was elected President of the National Union of Students of the Philippines and she became Secretary — they were both heads of their respective schools’ student councils. 

 

Forced to work together, it dawned on her that beneath his overbearing presence, was a sensitive and very cultured man.  Something I am eternally grateful for, or I would not be here writing this today. 

So more than 40 years after it was first recorded, I listen to this very first version of Girl From Ipanema and tear up.  Think of my parents falling in love, think of how their dreams were once as limitless as mine, think of my childhood home filled with so much music and laughter.    

Think of the time when my father played at the chess olympiad in Argentina and a South American he befriended on the plane sent him a box of Bossa Nova records.  After this, Stan Getz and Jobim and Sergio Mendes were perennial staples on our household playlist. 

I love this music, though it sometimes makes me ache. 

I listen and start wishing again for a love that will last the rest of my life …  a man I’ll still want to talk with for hours and hours when we’ve known one another for years, a man who will share his dreams and fears and strange but maybe brilliant ideas,  who will sing to me when he wakes up happy in the morning, who will hug me when I’m sad, whose books will fill our combined shelves till they almost break from the weight, who will want to study Portuguese with me or cooking or sailing or art history or whatever it is we feel like learning, who will gladly jump on a plane with me at the spur of the moment, who will seek the adventure and the misadventure and appreciate all the characters we meet along the way, who will make me forget I always feared commitment, who will someday be the father of my child, a man I will never fall out of love with …

Even if right now it seems impossible …  

I want to believe I have a soulmate out there, waiting for me.