I remember being the age when you could ride those beach kites like they were a mechanical bull, where you could snatch a plate of freshly steaming rice off a wall like it was an American apple pie balancing on the windowsill that you could then eat it in the fluttering air. You could see Charles Miller and Oscar Cox on kites of their own up there. That’s what Adelir Antônio de Carli told me all the time, and, for a time, I believed him. I tried to tell my girlfriend about this — that I knew that famous priest who literally disappeared on the wind, like some sort of Tropicália Gabo story — but she was off to organize a strike at the local bikini factory. I raised a glass to her leaving. Everaldo Marques invoked Vini’s name once again.