Where There is a Bucket, There May Be a River

... It was July 1966 when I watched my first FIFA World Cup. My father, introducing me to the world of football said: “England and West Germany practice with the Mount Olympus football gods—it cannot get better than this!”

Three FIFA World Cup ago, I repeated that sentence to my son, replacing England by Spain, and West Germany by Brasil.  He said “But isn’t Mount Olympus in Greece?”

… I am watching the World Cup again, and cannot dissociate my thoughts from the Amazon River.  In the past 25 years I have seen two of the longest rivers in the world, the Nile and the Amazon. I have taken pictures of families in Paraguay living on small wooden boats on the Rio Paraguay, a tributary of Rio Parana which originates in the Sao Vincente Mountains of Brasil. I have seen the Nile muddy and then in clear waters in Cairo; I have admired the Amazon reflecting the jungle in Peru.

And yet, these majestic rivers have stayed in my memories not because of their waters and size, but for what they represented to the people depending on their waters, silt, inundations, and symbolism.

I was near the Rio Paraguay with an Argentinean colleague. We bought beautifully sewn leather backpacks from the indigenous Guarani and were offered Maté tea. The man pouring the tea said “See, Rio Paraguay is huge, and yet for us it is the drops of water that it gives to our corn that counts. A big river means nothing if it does not care for the little people around it.”

… The drops of water from a large river. The few memories from a life Heraclitus symbolized as a river in which one does not step twice. I watched my first FIFA World Cup in Black and White, on a 1960 21” RCA TV that ran on a vacuum tube, and I thought “it cannot get better than this”.

But it got better. And it got worse. It became life as it is for everyone who likes football or not. I learned that color-screened TVs do not have as many shades of mystery in their pictures; that rivers run South except a very few; and that whenever I stepped in the same waters of a river, it was the river that had changed, not its waters.

And, thinking about the Nile, I continue to smile at Mark Twain’s statement:

                                             Denial ain't just a river in Egypt

June 19, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014