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