![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_8.mp3]] ## A Lazy Afternoon After lunch at Mariana’s parents’ house, the day softened. Her mom had cooked for us—real home food, made with the kind of practiced confidence that doesn’t require explanation. Nothing announced itself. Nothing asked for praise. Plates appeared, were filled, were cleared. Conversation slowed naturally, like it didn’t feel the need to compete with anything else. Everyone’s energy dropped into that familiar post-meal lull where the world feels quieter and doing nothing starts to feel reasonable, even correct. I took a nap in Mariana’s old bedroom. There’s something different about sleeping in a room that used to belong to someone else’s childhood. The furniture feels settled. The walls feel patient. It doesn’t feel like a guest room designed for temporary occupancy—it feels like a place that once held routines, moods, growing pains. Even resting there felt like borrowing a rhythm that had already been worked out long before I arrived. While I slept, Laio and Mariana ran errands. When I woke up, the house still had that same unhurried momentum, like I had stepped out of a river for an hour and returned to find it flowing at the exact same pace. Nothing had accelerated. Nothing was waiting on me. There’s something uniquely restorative about that—resting without the feeling that you’re falling behind. After my nap, I spent some time with Mariana’s dad and Laio, watching the local news. I expected Brazilian politics, or regional events, or something that would remind me I was far from home. Instead, it kept circling back to American politics. I had flown all the way to Brazil, and somehow I was still hearing about Trump. It made me laugh at first—there was something absurd about it—but it also landed as a reminder: American culture has a kind of gravitational pull. You can leave the country and still find yourself in its orbit, still catching fragments of its drama reflected back at you through someone else’s television. It made the world feel smaller, but not necessarily simpler. At one point Mariana’s dad brought out a toy gun that shoots little gelatin balls and joked that it was like the kind of gun they have in Rio. I don’t remember his exact words—only how casually he said it, like it was just another small joke floating through the room. What stuck with me wasn’t that he was making light of violence. It was the way context changes emotional weight. When you carry certain headlines in your head, anything gun-shaped feels heavy immediately. But in that moment, in that house, it landed differently—more like a reference than a warning. It reminded me that familiarity can dull shock, and distance can amplify it. The same object can feel normal in one place and loaded in another, depending on what stories you’ve been trained to attach to it. Later we walked around Sorocaba—through downtown, through a park, and through that early-evening stretch where the day doesn’t ask much of you. We didn’t have a destination. We weren’t accomplishing anything. We were just wandering and talking, letting time pass without forcing it to become productive or memorable. It was, in the best sense of the phrase, a lazy afternoon. And then the sun started to drop. ## Little Paul’s That night we went to Little Paul’s Bar. Laio told us there would be live music and dancing. I remember feeling excited—and also quietly aware of something familiar: I don’t really have a dance history. For a long time, I told myself I was simply not a dancing person. That’s not a preference. That’s an identity claim. And once you make an identity claim like that, it starts quietly enforcing itself. You stop asking whether you _want_ to dance and start assuming you don’t belong anywhere dancing is happening. Little Paul’s didn’t feel like a place someone designed from scratch to be a bar. It felt like a place that had been something else first—a machine shop or an auto garage, repurposed instead of replaced. A big concrete room with very high ceilings. A large garage door at the entrance. Walls that went up twenty or thirty feet, completely covered in posters, instruments, art, stickers, and whatever else had accumulated organically over time. It had character in a way that you can’t buy. The kind of character that comes from reuse instead of optimization. When something is designed from the ground up to be “a bar,” it often ends up looking like every other bar. But when a space already exists and someone sees a different use for it, something unique emerges almost by accident. It’s cheaper, probably. Less polished, definitely. But it feels real. We got drinks. I drank what I drank constantly in Brazil: Cerveja Original. It’s a standard beer there—the way Budweiser is standard in the U.S.—but what I remember most is the comfort of it. The label. The word ORIGINAL. The feeling of holding something that was simply _normal_ in the place I was standing. Traveling strips away your defaults, and you don’t realize how mentally taxing that is until you find one again. I loved having a default. Then we walked out back. The outdoor area sat lower than the inside, like stepping down into a contained courtyard. It was mostly concrete. The band was setting up on one side, and a big open space in front of them would become the dance floor. Plastic tables and chairs lined the edges. A few old cars sat around the perimeter—part decoration, part reminder that this space wasn’t trying to be polished. It didn’t feel curated. It felt lived in. As more people arrived, the room shifted from quiet to expectant. And when the band finally started playing, it didn’t feel like music filling the background. It felt like the night officially beginning. ## Counting the Beat The band that night was three people: an accordion, a zabumba, and a guitarist who sang. At the time I didn’t know what the drum was called. Later I learned it’s often a **zabumba**—a large bass drum worn with a strap and played in a way that anchors the rhythm of the music. The drummer hits it in time with the beat, giving you something physical to step into. The accordion carries the melody. The guitar and voice give the whole thing shape and texture—something you can latch onto even before you understand the structure. Together, they build something that doesn’t just fill the space. It _organizes_ it. Because forró isn’t only music you listen to. It’s music that tells your body where to go. Mariana started explaining the basic step. Forró has many styles and variations, but the beginner version she taught me that night was intentionally simple. It’s a four-count pattern, built around side-to-side weight shifts. You step to the right with your right foot. Then step to the right with your left. Then another step to the right with your right. Then bring your left foot in and tap. Then you reverse it and go back the other way. Over and over. Each beat matches a step, and the zabumba makes that beat impossible to miss. Once you feel it, you realize the dance isn’t asking you to invent movement—it’s asking you to respond. It sounds almost too simple when you write it down. But when you’re doing it for the first time—hands connected to another person’s hands, trying not to step on their feet, surrounded by people who move like they’ve been doing this their entire lives—simple is plenty. Mariana was very patient with me. She held my hands. She counted out loud. I almost stepped on her feet a few times. I had to imagine it wasn’t exactly thrilling for her to dance so far below her ability level, but she never showed frustration. She seemed genuinely happy just to be dancing with someone who was willing. For a while, I was completely in my head—tracking steps, timing, direction, trying to manage the fact that I was an American man learning a Brazilian dance in a Brazilian bar. Then something shifted. Not because I suddenly got good. Because the music finally synced with her counting. Once the rhythm landed in my body, it became easier to stop micromanaging and start _being inside the dance._ I stopped treating dancing like a problem to solve and started treating it like something to participate in. My shoulders dropped. My steps softened. I stopped watching my feet so much and started listening instead. ## The Edge of the Pool Standing there learning the basic step, I felt that old edge again—the place where you’re close enough to want in, but not sure you belong. It reminded me of a trip I had taken a little over a year earlier to New Orleans. New Orleans has this reputation for improvisation, for music that feels alive, and I remember walking down Frenchmen Street feeling sound spill out of doorways. Horns, drums, voices overlapping in a way that made the street itself feel like it was breathing. Like you weren’t just walking through a neighborhood—you were walking through an instrument. And I remember doing what I often did back then: staying on the perimeter. Watching. Trying to enjoy it without fully entering it. For a long time, live music felt like watching something through glass. Beautiful, entertaining, but separate—like being at an aquarium. You can appreciate it, but you’re not in the same element. New Orleans gave me a metaphor I didn’t know I needed. When you’re a kid and your friends are in the pool, you don’t stand there doing a cost-benefit analysis. You don’t ask whether you’re good enough at swimming. You don’t protect an identity. You just want to be where the laughter is, and you jump in—even if you can barely swim, even if you flail, even if you cling to the wall for a while just to stay afloat. Adults don’t do that. Adults stand at the edge and call it “not my thing.” We invent identities that keep us dry. We watch fun happen like it’s a performance instead of a place. That night in New Orleans, I felt the tension between those two versions of myself. One wanted to stay dry and composed forever. The other wanted to get wet, to enter the scene, to stop watching. A friend who was with us that night stepped into the space in front of the band without hesitation. She didn’t negotiate with herself. She didn’t wait for permission. She just moved, like the music didn’t need to be justified. Watching her didn’t make me think, _She’s impressive._ It made me think, _Why am I still standing here?_ I didn’t learn dance steps in New Orleans. I loosened an identity. And that’s why the memory surfaced again at Little Paul’s. I was standing at the edge once more—but this time I wasn’t alone. I had a guide. I had a rhythm. And I was in a culture where dancing didn’t feel like a performance. It felt like a normal part of the night. ## One Song at a Time One of the most surprising parts of the night wasn’t the dance itself. It was the social structure around it. The partner-switching felt clean and uncomplicated. People would dance for a song, and when the song ended, the floor would empty almost completely—like the whole room exhaled. Everyone reset. Then the next song would start, and people would pair up again. It didn’t feel romanticized. It didn’t feel loaded. From what I could tell, people weren’t coming to “find someone.” They were coming to dance. That separation mattered more than I expected. If someone didn’t want to dance, it wasn’t a rejection of _you._ It was just a no to a three-minute activity. And if someone said yes, it wasn’t a promise. It was just a song. That made everything feel lighter. Safer. More communal. I remember feeling motivated—not just to keep dancing with Mariana, but to participate more fully in the room. To be able to ask someone else to dance for a song. To step into the flow the way everyone else seemed to. And that immediately connected to something practical: I would need Portuguese. Not fluency. Just enough. Enough to enter the room. Not because I wanted to become some impressive dancer—but because it looked like everyone was having real fun, the kind that lifts the whole space. It felt like standing at the edge of the pool watching your friends splash and laugh while pretending you’re fine staying dry. I can barely swim—but that’s not a reason to stay on the deck forever. ## Rafael, Amanda, and João Mid-set, Mariana’s brother Rafael arrived with his girlfriend at the time—Amanda—and his son João. Rafael had the kind of presence you can hear. A loud, joyful belly laugh that carried over music and conversation. If there was a party and he was at it, you always knew where he was. Amanda felt quieter by contrast, though I would learn the next day that she carried a deep and thoughtful backstory of her own. And João, at least at first, was shy. When they arrived, I introduced myself in broken Portuguese—first to Rafael and Amanda, then to João. _Eu sou Dominic… muito prazer._ My pronunciation was fine, but not quite natural. They seemed genuinely pleased. I got the sense they didn’t expect me to try at all, and the effort mattered. There’s a kind of respect embedded in speaking someone’s language on their soil, even imperfectly. Afterward, I tried introducing myself to João, but he didn't understand me. After a couple of tries, Rafael jumped in and interpreted for me. It reminded me of something I’d only known from the other side. As a native speaker, if you haven’t spent much time around non-native speakers, you don’t automatically fill in the gaps. Even if someone is close, your brain treats the missing piece like a wall. I’ve done that to people without meaning to. The first time I felt that from the other direction was years earlier in Honduras, trying to speak Spanish and watching someone’s face go blank—not from rudeness, but from disconnect. I remembered the small embarrassment of that moment, the feeling of being stranded mid-sentence. So I didn’t blame João. He was just a kid. I wasn’t offended. Later in the night, we found the right doorway. Animals. Dinosaurs. Rafael translated, and suddenly João wasn’t shy anymore. Facts spilled out—names, questions, details—like opening a closet that had been overstuffed for years. The kid wasn’t quiet. He was just waiting for the right key. ## Rhythm and Freedom By the end of the night, I still didn’t feel like I’d “learned forró.” But I understood why it’s so compelling. Forró is improvisation inside a constraint. There’s a simple base step that everyone shares. From there, the variations are almost endless—spins, turns, forward and backward movements, different hand positions, different distances between partners. The leader improvises, but always on the beat. The follower can relax into the structure, because the rhythm makes the next move legible. Freedom only works because structure is holding it. I’ve noticed that same balance everywhere. It’s how my best days work. I wake up at the same time. I go to the gym. I eat meals around consistent times. Those anchors give the day shape. Within them, I vary. Most days look similar, and sometimes I change things dramatically—like flying to Brazil—and then I come back. No rhythm becomes chaos. Only rhythm becomes stale. The magic is the balance. That night also made something else obvious. Mariana’s joy is simple and real. Music, dancing, singing, ice cream—these things light her up instantly. Laio told me he doesn’t really like to dance, but he does it anyway, because it matters to her. At one point, he and I even talked about taking turns dancing with her—just to keep her on the floor, to keep her smiling. We were already in the right place. We might as well give her as many reasons as possible to keep dancing. Later, she danced with other men there—people she didn’t know—and watching her really show her skill was impressive. Most of the dancers were clearly experienced. They moved in a way that looked almost choreographed, even though I knew it wasn’t. Everything was smooth, flowing, confident. Watching them felt like watching a language spoken fluently. By the end of the night, I wasn’t thinking about whether I was “a dancer.” I was thinking about rhythm—about the one I want in my life, and the freedom I want inside it. And I was thinking about how I want to come back here someday able to ask, in Portuguese, for one song. Continue to the next post: [[9. A Reservoir Afternoon]]