bom dia

I was thinking about grandparents yesterday. I mostly didn’t have any – my father’s parents had died before I was born, and my mother’s mother. My mother’s father was around for a while in my early childhood, though he only spoke Portuguese, and was sort of scary. At least to little me. He had remarried, I think his wife only spoke Portuguese too. I really don’t remember. My grandfather’s last name was Costa. My mother was Irene Mercedes Costa. I now have a cat made of fabric named Merecedes Marie Hong. Last name honoring the writer Maxine Hong Kingston. Point of information.

My grandfather – my sister Nancy would know his name – had a printing press in a small, separate building at the edge of his property, from which he published the first Portuguese-language newspaper in the United States. My father, Win Cushman, was a photographer, reporter, columnist, and editor for my hometown’s weekly newspaper – The Wareham Courier. Later he was a writer and columnist for the daily New Bedford Standard Times. It’s probably not much of an accident you find me here – faithful blogger.

At the Sunday morning Zen Koan salon yesterday, John Tarrant Roshi quoted an ancestor from way back in Chan China, on the Silk Road – “The nation has perished. Mountains and Rivers remain.”

There was also this – “All things fall under the law of not knowing.”

I was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which at one time had the second-largest Portuguese-speaking population in the world, outside of Lisbon. Second point of information – my grandfather lived in Fairhaven, less than a mile from New Bedford, and from where my mother graduated high school.