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Have a musical memory that you’d like to share? Throughout the month we will post listener submitted recollections here and share a few on MPBN’s Facebook page. Send your memory to us at music@mpbn.net.CLICK HERE to hear a musical memory aired on Maine Public Radio and Maine Public ClassicalCLICK HERE to learn more about MPBN’s instrument donation projectOur listeners’ favorite music recollections:

Kent H. Redford, Portland

My dream

Armadillos don’t like the rain. So when it started to rain sometime soon after midnight Paulo, his dog, and I found refuge in a culvert to wait out the downpour.

I had met Paulo through Father Eric, a priest at the Benedictine Monastery in the small western Brazilian town of Mineiros. Father Eric, a lanky farm boy from the American Midwest, combined ministering with agricultural outreach in western Brazil. He also took a shine to me and pledged to help me on my PhD research on armadillos and anteaters.

Armadillos include not only the nine-banded kind found in the US, the nine-banded variety but a rainbow of other types from the pink fairy armadillo, the size of a hamster to the giant armadillo, the size of a pit bull. But it was the nine-banded that was the target of our hunting that rainy night. The animals come out of their burrows at night to forage on insects and anything else tasty they can find, and that is where dogs can scent them and chase them into their burrows where Paulo and I were set to dig them out.

But it still rained and curled in the sand in the shallow culvert we listened to the rain, which gradually put me to sleep. Paulo wakened me when the rain stopped and as we followed the dog into the rain-freshened night he asked me what “my dream” was? Startled I asked him why he asked me that and he replied that I had sung a couple of lines from the then-popular Brazilian song “Sonho Meu” or “my dream.”

This beautiful dong written by Dona Ivonne Lara and Délicio Carvalho was recorded by the famous, and fabulous Brazilian singer Maria Bethânia. I had a tape of her latest album and this was my favorite song. Clearly it had worked its way deep into my mind, to be released by the nighttime nap in the culvert.

We didn’t get any nine-banded armadillos that night but we did get a yellow armadillo. About 2 am when we got back to Paulo’s house his wife woke up and cooked the armadillo liver with manioc flour, a dish we washed down with cachaça ? cane liquor that Paulo distilled himself. I returned in the pre-dawn hours to the Monastery where I was saying, the tape player blasting “Sonho Meu.”