Blind Luck in BA

Feeling kind of like the blind pig and the truffle. Sorting through apartment rental options on line back in New York, picked this place, not having the slightest idea where it was located, and it turns out to be one block over and three blocks down from the two locations -- both torn down and rebuilt -- where Borges was born and where he came back to live in the 20´s. While there he wrote,

This city that I believed was my past,
Is my future, my present;
The years I have spent in Europe are an illusion,
I always was (and will be) in Buenos Aires.

The Rough Guide -- aside from that Borges quote and info -- is also quite good in general on Palermo Viejo. Cortazar´s Hopscotch was set -- to the extent Hopscotch could be set -- here, and he is remembered, sort of, with the Plazoleta Julio Cortazar, where Honduras and Serrano (before it is renamed Jorge Luis Borges) converge. But, says the Rough Guide, and sadly to my way of thinking, no one calls it Plaza Cortazar (though he´s only been dead 22 years), but Plaza Serrano. It is ringed by the inevitable street artesania sellers, mostly colorful schlock. Some semi-precious stones jewelry. In the ¨which U.S. punk bank is commemorated on the most T-shirts¨competition, the Ramones win in a landslide. Che is more seen for sale than worn; that´s one mythology -- unlike Cortazar´s creations -- to which I would say good riddance.

On their first day here I was watching Sebastian and Colin play on the seesaw in Plazoleta Cortazar. One evening back in 1984 before the family arrived I was walking along Avenida Corrientes late at night and saw the shocking headline that Cortazar had died -- nearly 70 but still too soon for his work -- in Paris. And 22 years later watching my grandchildren in the plaza named for him, grown-up player that he was. Connecting those two life snapshots feels both incomprehensible and fitting.