One Chapter Ends and a New Dream Begins

Dreams and aspirations. Sometimes, I think that with all the disappointments and difficulties we face day to day, they are all that keeps us getting up the next morning. Dreams and aspirations.

Most everybody has at least one. Oh, it could be anything from owning a house or getting married to playing center field for the Dodgers, making a hit record or just hoping dad will rent that limo for the prom.

Me? I’m greedy, so I have lots of dreams. Winning the Lotto is one. Another is to sail around the world in a 41-foot, center-cockpit ketch with my best friend and two gorgeous women, one of them preferably my wife.

Unfortunately, that one is a few years off. I don’t own a boat and I don’t have a wife, but I’m hopeful. My more immediate dream has been to be a foreign correspondent. Yeah, that’s right, one of those people traipsing across distant continents and filing fascinating reports on life and death and the struggle for power in places most of us will never even visit.

I find the idea intriguing and challenging--different people, different culture, different language, different mores and different philosophies on life. To me, America is just one country in this huge, wonderful world. I’ve been here all my life. I’d like to see how the rest of the world lives.

I’ve been dreaming this dream for eight years now, and I’m finally going to get my chance.

*

Beginning June 13, I’m off for Rio de Janeiro, one of The Times 26 foreign bureaus. I’ll be there for four months covering a sundry of issues. Contrary to popular belief, Brazil is not all dental-floss bikinis, beautiful women, Carnaval and crime.

It’s a huge place. It has the largest African population outside of Africa. It has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. There are farms in Brazil bigger than all of Belgium.

My friends keep asking me what I’ll be doing. For one thing, they’ve got a presidential campaign coming up soon, which should prove pretty interesting stuff, considering that their first president after years of military dictatorship got booted out for corruption and everybody thinks the current guy is a stiff.

I’ll also be trying to figure out how they live with 8,000% inflation, which is mind-boggling to me. Then there’s the story about how many of the poor kids have adopted America’s gangster rap as their anthem, and another about Quilombos, these African villages set up by runaway slaves that exist even today.

There are stories about the rain forests, homeless children murdered by corrupt policemen hired by local businessmen as kid death squads, tourism, gold miners and hopefully a lot of quirky stuff that I don’t even know about yet.

*

Obviously, if I’m in Brazil, I won’t be writing a column about Los Angeles for a while. L.A. is a pretty tough town to cover from Rio. Actually, I’m going to miss writing this column. I never thought I’d say that. It was never a position to which I had aspired, but I have come to enjoy it.

So, since I won’t be here, I’d like to close out this chapter with these comments.

First, I’d like to say thanks and so long to all the people who read my column regularly, particularly Donovan’s mom, whom I have never met but who I understand reads me religiously. When my column is not in the paper, Donovan calls me for an explanation because his mother has already called him.

I think if it wasn’t for people like her, this job would be a lot harder. I’ve really appreciated the letters of support. I am sometimes amazed that some of you think my column really has something to say.

As for those readers who wish I would disappear permanently, I’m going to miss you too. Nothing like hate mail to brighten up a day. I just wish you would enclose a return address with your letters so I could write back. Now that would be really fun. Maybe we could even have lunch.

As for all of the bad people who I wanted to dump on before I left, I missed you this time. And for all the heroes and heroines who I’ve encountered, I applaud you, and I regret that I didn’t write more stories about you.

In general, I’d like to say thank you, thank you for taking time to listen to the ramblings of an often-crazed man.