Change is like the wind?

I’ve changed my plans and decide not to go up North due to bad weather… a chance of rain, which would put a damper on the flying. I’ve got a ton of work to do here anyways and need to get started with burning my photos to DVD for backup. If the computer or hard drives go, I’m hosed.

Of course I can’t stay away from Samantha and we end up hanging out again on Saturday night. She comes over and then we head across town to the Museo de Artes Hispanoamericano to see this Edward Curtis Photography Exhibit of turn-of-the-century portraits of native North American Indians. I’d already been once but really wanted to go again, with Samantha, herself mostly of ‘native’ blood, from the Tucuman Indians in the north of Argentina. Curtis made his prints with large format camera on glass plate negatives that he mixed chemicals for by hand from the back of a covered wagon. Samantha loved the pictures and even more so the historic location, something like four hundred years old.

We ate at a café called Che Buenos Aires that I had kept passing by in either a taxi or the bus, right there on Libertador on the corner. Dinner was good and we kept each other in good company, laughing and talking right the way through. She had to get back home (on a Saturday night, yeah right) and I was going to continue working. Our first night as friends… we walk to the bus and head towards Retiro to go our perspective ways. God she is so beautiful… difficult, but beautiful. Pausing out front of the main entrance to the Retiro train station, beautiful in of itself, I begin to play with her hair, covering her eyes with it, her eyes hidden behind the veil of a pirate, telling her that, unlike the tango songs she likes to sing to me, there ISN’T any love or affection, there ARE NO KISSES! “Well… you sure just missed a good opportunity just now, didn’t you?” she rhetorically flirts. The next four hours are complete bliss and not since high school can I remember making out for so long… for hours, below the English clock tower across from Retiro.

Completely lost in the moment and totally oblivious to the world on this foggy grey morning, four younger-looking kids approach us asking for money. Before I knew what happened and as Samantha is reaching in her purse for some change, I reach for my camera bag at the same moment one of the kids does and I realize they are trying to rob us. The next thing I see is the gleam of light from the blade of a knife pressed tightly up against Samantha’s neck. I’m now standing on top of the park bench waving the umbrella at them and I somehow strangely feel like Peter Sellers in ‘Being There’, but have no idea what I’m going do. The guy with the knife motions at my camera bag and tells me that he’s going to kill her, stabbing twice in the air at her too close to her heart. Suddenly Samantha is free from him… some type of ninja-tango move, a complete escape. The guy with the knife bolts along with the other three with all of Samantha’s bags. There’s no way I can chase them with the camera bag around my shoulder.

Samantha is unharmed and we end up recovering most of her things, minus two cell phones, a disc man and her plata – money. We crash out at my pad for a couple of hours and then she whisks away back home where her dad will no doubt be waiting. Chao.