UruguayLiving.com

I think that this year March and April decided to switch with each other.  Last year, March was absolutely lovely: it was sunny and warm, with the temperature very gradually slipping into the cool range.  This year March was like a foreshadowing of an ugly winter: cold, wet, windy, and just generally miserable.  It was so bad that I had despaired of seeing the autumn at all this year.

Then came April.  At first I thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke perpetrated by the cosmic weather powers–it was just too nice.  But now halfway through the month I realize that this year, March has come in April.  I’m not exactly sure how that works, but I guess I’ll just add that to the list of Southern Hemisphere phenomena that are beyond me.  (Those who spent their lives researching the secrets of the Bermuda triangle should take on something really challenging like explaining how the laws of nature and science work in the southern hemisphere.)

The anomaly having been noted, I cannot help but enjoy the beauty of the day: a blue sky filled with puffy cotton ball clouds; gentle breezes wafting in from the river; and a temperature of 23C/74F with low humidity.

Whenever the weather is nice, Uruguayans are outside.

The local football team is practicing in the park in front of my house, the sidewalk along the Rambla is slowly increasing in the number of runners, walkers and bikers taking advantage of its magnificent vistas, and the professional dog walkers are unloading their jostling packs of canines from their pickup trucks for a romp through the park.

All in all, it is a fine day to be in Montevideo, Uruguay; and I for one and glad to be alive.

I know many of you have been wondering exactly what was going on: whether I had abandoned this project, or was injured, or ill, occupied, or perhaps even imprisoned.  The short answer is: ill and occupied.

As many of you know, I am handicapped and have had to undergo a goodly number of physical challenges, not the least of which has been a six-year-old Staphylococcus infection, which has done its damnedest to kill me.  The good news is, that God-willing, the infection appears to finally be beaten.  The bad news is that it has left me with a left leg ravaged as if I had third-degree burns.  My particular version of the infection was the kind known as “the flesh eater”, and it did a fine job of living up to its name.  Because of this, the healing process is extremely painful and I cannot promise you, at least for the next few months, how productive I’ll be.  I can promise you that I will do as much as I can as often as I can, and that under no circumstances will I give up.

Every time I feel like giving up I remember a section in C. S. Lewis’s book “Screwtape Letters”, in which Screwtape tells his nephew that there is no greater joy in Hell than when someone gives up just before they would’ve succeeded–I have no intention of giving Screwtape, Wormwood, or Lucifer himself that joy.

In the words of Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, “never, never, never, never give in, except to convictions of honor, or of good sense”.

Posted by The Southron on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 13:11.