Sweet Dot

Dear Friends,

An American traveler was backpacking his way through Europe. He was somewhere in Ukraine one day, not quite sure where, and needed to stop to ask for the nearest toilet. Being an erudite young man (and wanting to hold at bay the familiar prototype of the ignorant American traveler), using Ukrainian, he stopped to ask two old men for some direction. "Where is the nearest toilet?" he inquired in his best Ukrainian. The two men said nothing. I'll try another language, thought the young man. "Pardon me, where is the nearest toilet?" This time in Russian. Only vacant stares from the old men. The young man had studied German in college, so in his clearest Deutsch, he tried again, "Where is the nearest toilet, please?" Visages unmoved, the old men only continued to stare. Neither spoke a word. One more desperate attempt from the young traveler (this time in English -- for what could he do?) proved futile. Frustrated, the young man wandered on his way.

When the boy was out of sight, one old man turned to the other and said, "Quite impressive what young people know these days." The other nodded slowly one time as a sheepish grin spread across his weathered face. The strand of grass he'd been chewing fell to the ground. "Yes it is," he agreed. "But look how far it got 'im."

I've walked a road or two in that backpacker's shoes. I know something of the sweet balm of a toilet in view, and I've tasted the frustration of muddled language caught in my throat. I've faced my fair share of blank stares. I guess at this point in the journey, it's fair to raise the question, How far has it all gotten me?

The short answer is to the Czech Republic via Ukraine.

Eleven days ago I boarded the Ecolines bus headed from Riga to Lviv, Ukraine. The twenty hour drive came to a happy finale in the warm welcome of my friend Liliya and her husband Nazar. Liliya and I were chorus mates and friends at Illinois College where she studied in 1998 and 1999. Both Dr. Liliya and Dr. Nazar are university professors in Lviv these days; he, in fact, is a former Fulbright professor. Under their thoughtful tuteledge, I found Lviv to be a vibrant, beautiful city: another easy addition to my growing list of "Best-Kept Secret Wonderful Cities in the World; or Cities Americans Would Expect to be Gray, Glum, and Ugly But That's Only Because We Like Shiny Places Like Branson."

Another familiar, recurring theme in my travels is that it's the people that make the places; not the other way around. A friend is worth more than a shelf full of travel books. This is not shocking news, I know, but I firmly stand by it. And, yep, it was at a dinner party in Ukraine I heard the quip I retold above. It was also at the same party I met Linda, a fellow American Fulbrighter. Like me, she's preparing to pack her bags, sorting out stuff both tangible and intangible: what to take, what to pitch, what to pass along. This is all part of the mourning process. "I'm grieving," Linda admitted.

Good grief will take up a good corner or two of my big suitcase. Good thing it doesn't weight anything; the penalty for overweight luggage is growing more expensive by the day.

Rev. Calitis at St. Saviours in Riga says we should measure love by its elasticity. I'll give you a moment to absorb the profundity of that statement... In that sense, after a year abroad, my heart is sized to fill a XXXL. (Insert joke here, non-American readers.) This year has shown me that my heart and my head are capable of carrying more than I ever thought possible.

It's not that I was looking to fill the space inside either. I wasn't running from an emptiness of any sort. Nothing was broken back home. I didn't come to Europe to mend a shattered heart like Elizabeth Gilbert, who chronicles her year abroad in the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Eat Pray Love. I read her book recently, and it's obvious in the midst of all of that eating, praying, and loving, and traveling, she honed her gifts as a writer. Gilbert's narrative non-fiction (known as particularism, for all of you English majors out there) is compelling and fluid. Much like her voluble contemporaries Anne Lamott and David Sedaris, Gilbert's prose is tell-all with flair. Okay, so I didn't really need to know about her first night in bed with her boyfriend, but if the voice of the book is my friend (which I've been primed to believe it is), I'm obliged to listen and to peek a little bit.

Gilbert set out on her journey -- first to Italy -- to flee the falling shrapnel of a couple broken relationships. Forgive me for spoiling the ending, but I think it will come as no surprise to you that in the end, she finds love again. Different, but again.

As I've revisited my earlier writings on this blog and in my private journal, I too keep finding love. Traces of grace. No, oceans of grace. And such love. It's a cinch to sniff out the meaning from the fluff, the honesty from the wordiness, the road from the wilderness. It's no wonder that we only sense The Plan in retrospect. Yes, objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear.

I didn't leave home, like Friedrich Engels, for moral reasons. I didn't feel stifled. (That's right: Engels, as in Engels and Marx. No summer reading list is complete without The Communist Manifesto!) In his scholarly introduction to the Manifesto, Gareth Stedman Jones writes of Engels' youth, "It was also his first chance to get away from his small-town upbringing and savour life in a large city free from the moral surveillance of elders." You might know I laughed out loud when I read this. A good hearty youth group leader guffaw.

These days I'm savouring life in Vojkovice, Czech Republic, a stone's throw away from the Slovak border. But you'd have to throw that stone pretty high because the mountains surrounding this village would present a formidable obstacle. I'm staying with Ali and her parents in their summer cottage. My upstairs room in the converted attic is paneled floor to ceiling. If I stand on the balcony and reach just far enough, I might be able to pick a red cherry off the nearby branches. In this bucolic setting I'm doing a lot of what I like to do: eat, pray, love.

And just a word about the eating. Czechs have this marvelous phrase for dessert: sladka tecka. Literally in English it means "sweet dot." If dinner is a sentence -- or, here, more like a paragraph when the wines, cheeses, appetizers, and aperitifs are taken into consideration -- If dinner is a sentence, then dessert is the sweet dot at the end. A period to please the pallet. A full stop of fulfillment.

I expect this last month to be sprinkled with sweet dots. I am looking for them; I am collecting them. Rereading Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis, I encountered the magnificent line from Abraham Joshua Heschel: "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder." That's all any one of us could ask for. That, and a handful of sweet dots.

Yours,
Tim

The Polite-Aggressive Days of Summer

Dear Friends,

Paul Theroux begins his essays on traveling through the Pacific with these unexpected words: "Writing is hell." Surprising words coming from a writer. He goes on, "Especially in Hawaii, where it tends to turn paradise into purgatory." I'm not going to go as far as claiming the same thing for me in Riga. In spite of the ongoing days of sunshine -- we're going on two weeks of no rain! -- and the fact that darkness only counts for about four hours of the 24, the water in the Gulf of Riga remains chilly. I have yet to see surfboards strapped on to the tops of the Maseratis that speed through the city streets. And only a few souls in the city are stepping out in flip-flops. (And you can bet they're tourists.)

Though the seasonal swell of tourists is apparent here in Riga, I recently read tourism in Latvia is down 4% compared to this time last year -- another crack in Latvia's fragile existence. (For comparison, Hawaii's tourism industry continues to rise like a Haleakala wave, having crested well over the $1 billion mark.)

This morning on our walk to the indoor pool, I asked my friend Andris about the shrinking number of visitors in Latvia. "Well, that's easy to understand," he reported, naming the handful of Fulbrighters preparing for take-off like me. "Out of the 100 tourists we have here, there are about four of you leaving. You see, tourism is falling 4%."

Like many of the Latvians I've met, Andris maintains a great sense of humor about his country and his place in it: he'll be the first to joke about Latvia's small size (physically, the size of West Virginia) and the interconnected nature of its inhabitants, yet he'll be the first to defend the country's honor. Proving just how small a population of 2.25 million really is, consider this: when Andris broke his arm boxing five years ago, he was attended to by the highly-lauded Latvian surgeon, Dr. Valdis Zatlers. Due to questionable treatments from previous surgeons, Dr. Zatlers graciously performed Andris's surgery for free. Today, Dr. Zatlers is the president of Latvia. He met with George Bush just under a month ago in Washington, DC.

In spite of the integrated island feel, Latvia isn't Hawaii after all, and though it would be an egregiously false stretch to define my present days here as purgatorial, I can say the urge to sit in my (sunny, yes) apartment, at the reworked Singer sewing table that is my desk, on the stripped wooden chair, in the corner of my living room and write has ever so slightly been diminished. I'm finding Summertime to be a full-time job.

Take yesterday, for instance. I awoke at the ungodly hour of quarter past nine, put my church clothes on and trotted to the Anglican church with some friends. We shared an outdoor luncheon following worship in the Art Noveau section of Riga. (Any place to avoid the tourists!) Now, the first commandment of European dining is Your server will not be rushed, the beautiful flip-side of this being, Neither will you. A table is your table until next Tuesday, for all anyone cares. This is lovely, of course, and perfectly conducive to a slow-eater like me. But the slowness of yesterday's lunch nearly put a major dent in our afternoon plans, the ones of utmost importance: Ultimate Frisbee.

We arrived at the frisbee game in the park across the river just in time to substitute in for a few weary players and proceeded to play a total of three games. Sure, the playing is always fun: the competition is friendly and the motion is just enough to make you feel breathless, which is to say, "athletic." But there's always time to catch your breath. The three games are interspersed with cushy breaks, though it's probably more apt to say just the opposite: the games are really the half-time breaks in conversation.

Conversation! Nothing against the opportunities for conversation at home, but tell me, where in the States would you find fifteen people from approximately eight countries gathered to fling a plastic disk in the shadow of a Soviet victory monument? Forget about the monument (most Latvians have). What grounds me like a frisbee caught in a wind rush is the richness and diversity and common ground found in any given conversation abroad. I know I will miss this aspect, just as a friend who spent a year outside of the States told me one of the saddest parts of her return was being at parties stateside and hearing only one language spoken, as opposed to the shockingly seamless gliding in and out and between several languages by any number of gathered chatterers in Europe.

Of course, the ability to fluently converse in what has become the world's lingua franca doesn't hurt my chances of communicating (though I do envy those who can switch from one language to another as effortlessly as flicking a light switch). And I will say that it is rare to find myself in a conversation of "mixed" speakers that reaches the depths of a conversation spoken solely in English -- American English.

"Tim, what are you doing now that school is out?" That from Katri, a Finn, and fellow frisbee thrower. We were sitting in the grass between games, stretching and relaxing, with Latvian Janis and Liechtensteiner Barbara.

I've always bemoaned the observation that everyone in the world seems to know nearly everything about the field of education -- about teaching -- because everyone has been to school. This kernel of knowledge carried by those who have only sat on the student's side of the desk crumbles like chalk dust when examined from the vantage point of one who's stood on the other side. A former student does not a teacher make.

Everyone may know (or think she knows) something about a teacher's life nine months of the year, but what really trips people up -- what really must be gray -- is what the heck teachers do with their three months off. For many, the mystery is as pronounced and unresolved and fascinating as the Shroud of Turin. Come June, teachers sail off into the Bermuda Triangle, only to return at the ding of the first bell in September.

I have faced and fielded the "what are you doing this summer" question for seven years now. I can't fault people for asking, you know. I realize, to most of the working world, summertime is as elusive and far gone as braces, bubble gum, and pigtails. And I understand that the general population doesn't understand, in the words of my inimitable cooperating teacher, that a teacher's year is twelve months rolled into nine.

When she asked me the question, Katri was only trying to make conversation.

"Well, I'm relaxing here a few weeks," I responded. "But I'm heading out of Riga for awhile in a week or so... Ukraine, Czech Republic..."

"Oh, that's nice." That was Janis. He's a journalist. He and the others looked at me as if I were about to announce the results of the Euro Vision contest. Part anticipation; part dread.

"And, so in the mean time I'm just reading and exercising..."

Barbara from Lichtenstein, an architect, gurgled tribally.

"Swimming... choir practices... drinking lots of coffee and wine--"

"SHUT UP!" Katri burst. She's a professional translator. Her Finnish frustration coming to a head, in English in this case.

We all laughed, but I saw new glimmers of contemptuous disdain in their toiling eyes when again we resumed play.

I've come to like this Frisbee crew. There's Sherwin from California, the youngest-looking forty year old I know, who organizes the games. His love for frisbee is only out rivaled by his love for his wife; when he married Karina a few years ago, each wedding guest received a printed frisbee, commemorating the union.

There's Egils, a Latvian-American, who's my age. He's one of the best players on the field, and actually thought to base one of his original plays off of me. When he gets the frisbee (which he's good at), I run as fast as I can toward the end zone (which I'm good at), and he bellows, "Tiiiimmmmm!" He throws; I catch. Usually. This play has become known as "The Tim."

Baiba from Riga is one of my favorite players. When she runs, she prances like an animated Santa reindeer preparing for take-off, but don't be deceived by her lithe composure. The girl can wrangle a frisbee out of a man's hands like no other. Last week, when our team was broaching a panicky state of hopelessness (the other team was up 7-2), we decided team cheers would be in order. Putting our hands in the circle, Baiba suggested we shout, "Polite Aggressive!" just as you might utter, "Goooooooo Team!" so it really came out sounding like, "Poooliiiiiiiiite Aggressive!!" Yeah, probably not going to be adopted by the National Cheerleading Federation.

But, you know what? That mantra, that mindset, those words -- polite aggressive -- whatever they meant, were just right for us. Collectively, we tightened our shoe laces, wiped our sweaty brows, threw some more weight into our high-fives and butt-slaps, and... maybe won the game.

I don't remember now.

**********

I've been given this year in Latvia. God knows why -- guess He's always known -- but I'm only beginning to see. To see the game plans in retrospect. The patterns. The pick-ups of hope and tosses of faith.

I've got a week or so here now, before the blissful storm of bus stops and old friends, boats and familial visitors commences. There's hardly anything on my calendar this week: an opera, a movie, a dinner or two. Paradise.

But across the small box devoted to June 2 (today), I've scribbled the words "Polite Aggressive." Yep, that's how I'm going to spend these first few days of summer. Aggressive leisure which, if done right, should lead to quiet reflection.

And when the barista brings me my tab -- that is, if she brings me my tab -- you bet I'll be as polite as can be.

Yours,

Tim

It's not all fun and games. Here's me a few moments after crossing the finishline of the Riga Marathon. Like the majority of participants, I ran the 5K portion of the race. There were over 4,500 runners from the around the world -- quite a jump from the 800 or so who ran last year. Good news for a slightly sagging tourism market.