The meaning of the name

My brother and I

I was born in September of 1953. My mom, Violeta and my dad Kurt already had a baby. A boy called Ricardo, my only brother. As I told you before, my dad was Austrian and my grandparents (on my dad's side) were part of our lives. They lived in a small town not far from us, and we visited them often. As they visited us.

Well, my brother and I grew up listening to my dad and grandparents chat in German every time they were together. They would, though, change to Portuguese any time my mom was present, because she could not speak their language.

I still miss the sound of the Austrian dialect that I do not speak but recognise pretty well. It sounds so neat to me. It takes me back home. They spoke both the dialect and the "Hoch Deutch" (I think that's how it is spelled), which is the "pure" German from Germany.

As kids, we were always hanging around. And, at that time, children did not interfere with the conversations. Kids were not the center of everything, as well as not spoiled as many of the children are today. We talked when the grownups were silent, when they asked us questions and so on. You must know what I mean, if you are over 40  50 years old. I guess.

But we did try sometimes. We tried to understand some conversations that had nothing to do with us, and, maybe, were not for us to understand anyway. And, when this happened, either my dad or my grandparents would reply in a long sentence in German that sounded like this:

"Ne....gerigeletsh....tem....poit".

And they would laugh for a long time. It was not aggressive, it did not hurt us, or made us feel embarrassed. In fact, we used to butt into their conversations just to have one of them say it again. We used to laugh also. And, whenever we asked what that meant, the only answer was "The curious cat dies early" or better yet "Curiosity killed the cat", something to this effect. And they would laugh again.

I do believe, with all my heart, that the whole sentence was created by them and had no meaning at all. It was just funny and kept us from understanding things that were not appropriate for us.

My mom and my dad were our best friends, and we had amazing times together. I miss them with all my heart.

Because of this, I decided to use the sentence that made us laugh so many times, as the title of my blog.

Curiosity does NOT kill the cat. They actually taught us that curiosity is healthy. The whole thing was just a joke.