Hable con ella

I wish I could remember who shared this with me initially, so I could give proper credit - Oleh perhaps...? Thanks to whomever. No, it was Mari. Thanks to Mari.

Films and songs and art and artists come into our lives - like they never could before the internet. Like they never could before Facebook. These jewels come into our lives and we are richer for it.

It's not tango, but it's so good I must share. Hell, 90% of this blog is not tango related. The video is a clip from the film Hable con ella by Pedro Almodóvar [2002]. It's Caetano Veloso singing Cucurrucucu Paloma in the clip.

Beautiful and haunting and sad- the song, this particular performance of it, and this clip from the film adding to the poignancy of the song. I can't stop watching and listening. Yesterday, I was listening to it after purchasing the song on iTunes. I had just talked to my daughter on the phone, catching up with her after being incommunicado for about a week.

She was telling me about her Easter visit with her uncle - my first ex's eldest brother - who has brain cancer. The docs gave him a month to live - but that was five or six years ago. The cancer recently came back - and they performed one last surgery not too long ago. She told me that he didn't want the surgery - that he wanted to let things run their course. But his wife and kids wanted "more time" with him. Understandable yet incomprehensible. The docs had to remove more of one of his frontal lobes than they had anticipated. He had been mildly impaired before from previous surgeries, but now the effects are dramatic, my daughter told me.

He can longer carry on a conversation because the words escape him. She told me he knows the word he wants to use, but the connections are broken for him to identify it and use it in conversation. He's frustrated by this, she said. I'm sure there are other cognitive effects that he's dealing with now. She said he is easily overwhelmed by the interactions of too many people at family gatherings. My daughter accompanied him on a walk to get some fresh air. I'm so proud of my boo - dealing with someone she loves and is dying - dealing with such pain head on. She's not my little boo anymore - she'll be going off to Law School after next year, possibly in Ann Arbor, Michigan - International Law, she told me yesterday.

She said he was able to verbalize this: "Everything is different now, and I don't like it."

Anyway, I was listening to the song on iTunes and started crying. Crying and thinking about my ex brother-in-law, my daughter's uncle. He is a good man and a gentle soul and I hate to see (or hear of) him going through this. I can only imagine.

And now I am crying again.

We all need more music, and more singing in our lives. More love. More laughter. More hugs. More smiles. More family and friends. More play. More working with our hands and our hearts. More dancing. More art. More beauty. More of the stuff that counts, and much less of the stuff that doesn't.

Because life is just too damned short, and too damned beautiful, to have it any other way.







I've queued this one up on NetFlix and moved it to the #1 position in order to watch it this weekend.

Here's the synopsis:

Pedro Almodóvar's Oscar-winning drama explores the bond forged between two men under tragic circumstances. When a bullfighting accident sends his girlfriend, Lydia (Rosario Flores), into a coma, Marco (Darío Grandinetti) visits her in a clinic where he befriends nurse Benigno (Javier Cámara). Shy and a bit strange, Benigno tirelessly tends to another patient, Alicia (Leonor Watling), a comatose ballet dancer and the object of his obsession.