A Century Since His Birth
The man I called Pai, whose quiet magic still lives through me
Yesterday would have been my father’s 100th birthday.
It’s been nine years since he passed, and yet I still feel him close. Not in some abstract, sentimental way—but woven into my thoughts, my instincts, my love of story, my worldview. He’s in the way I speak, the way I listen, the way I make sense of the world.
He was a larger-than-life presence—extroverted, warm, and endlessly curious. He could hold a room with a story, especially if it touched on world history, diplomacy, or the odd and wonderful quirks of culture. There was something magnetic in his eloquence. He didn’t try to impress you; he just carried knowledge and experience in a way that made you lean in.
He had rituals and quirks I remember so clearly: a sprinkle of cinnamon on dessert, rum raisin ice cream always in the freezer, tea before bed, and a hopeful request for zabaglione at any Italian restaurant—whether it was on the menu or not. “A meal,” he’d say, “is just an excuse for dessert.” Thin as a rail, he walked every day until his final month. His mind stayed razor-sharp, his wit intact.
Thanks to him, I lived in multiple countries by the time I was a teenager. I picked up several languages. Later, he encouraged me to study at one of the top business schools in the world. But more than achievements, he believed in friendships. He tended them like a garden, reaching out weekly, writing long, elegant letters by hand.
He was a diplomat for decades. A lawyer before that. And earlier still, an announcer for the BBC World Service, sending nighttime broadcasts from Europe to Brazil. He was born in Rio to a Portuguese photographer—my grandfather—who practiced a refined and rare craft at a time when cameras were still uncommon. In his twenties, during World War II, my father boarded a propeller plane and made the long, multi-stop journey from Rio to London. He was chasing something larger than comfort—perhaps purpose and the quiet certainty that his life was meant to stretch far beyond what he knew.
He lived that mission with grace. He was decorated by a dozen countries and fluent in five languages. But his true brilliance, I believe, wasn’t in his accolades. It was in how he made people feel: respected, valued, remembered.
I carry so much from him.
A deep respect for other cultures—no matter how foreign or unfamiliar. He taught me that difference is not something to be feared, but something to be deeply honored. From him I also inherited a reverence for history, and how its patterns ripple through time, how personalities shape events, and how events, in turn, shape entire generations.
He gave me a love for geography, for maps and place-names, for the earth’s contours and the stories carried by its landscapes. I’m grateful that, thanks to both of my parents, I had the chance to see so much of the world with my own eyes.
And yes, from him I also inherited an appreciation for ideas, for concepts, abstraction, the joy of intellectual play. It’s a mixed blessing. That kind of thinking gives me access to beauty and wonder, but it can also pull me too far into my head, away from intimacy and presence. My dad seemed to find his way back to his heart in his third age. That’s my conscious path as well.
And there’s something else I carry from him, something I didn’t recognize until much later. My love of myth, of magical realism, of the imaginal, might have been sparked by the world he exposed me to. His father was a committed Kardecist, a believer in spiritism. On his bookshelf, I discovered The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. He casually studied Sanskrit. His memory made history come alive like myth. His life itself often felt touched by the surreal, like he was walking through an enchanted layer of reality just beneath the visible one.
Without knowing it, he quietly opened the door to the way I understand life today. He helped plant the seeds of my idealism. My love for the unseen, my belief in a deeper symbolic order threading through it all. The mythopoetic side of me—the part that listens for the whisper beneath the words—was never far from his influence.
He still visits me in dreams. And often, I see him in the mirror of my own life: in how I teach, in the communities I gather, in my pursuit of a more compassionate, just, and kind world.
He shaped me. He still does.
Happy 100th to my dad. I called him Pai.
P.S.
Lately, I’ve been writing about the symbolic layers of life and the unseen threads that guide us, shape us, and live through us. My father’s memory reminds me how much of our mythopoetic inheritance is subtle, unspoken. Not always in what we’re taught, but in what we absorb through presence, through story, through witnessing someone live with conviction, ritual, and love.
I believe we carry our ancestors not just in blood, but in imagination. And that remembering, deep remembering, is an act of healing, of integration. Of re-enchanting the world.
This post is part of that remembering.
Beautiful. What a lucky son you are. I love hearing about your father’s experiences and talents. And how our ancestors shape our future though we may not be fully in tune with how this happens. You, however, are definitely in tune!