AUGUST 27, 2019 – A few of us of the 7.2 billion who inhabit earth are emerging from an extraordinary experience in friendship. Our younger son and his wife wanted to host at our family’s northwoods retreat, a big celebration of their marriage earlier in New York City and more recently in Portugal. Their friends from around the world gathered for a week of festivities, culminating with a ceremony in our lakeside woods. Wind and weather smiled by day, and billions of stars shone by night.
To be inclusive in my formal greeting of the assembled crowd, I said “Welcome!” in no fewer than six languages. Though all of our international guests were at least bi-lingual, a number of them were tri-lingual. None spoke six languages, which is what the electrician’s assistant spoke—all wholly fluently.
(Yes, the electrician’s assistant. To accommodate our power needs, we had had to call upon the services of a local electrician, who appeared in the morning of the day before the big bash. In classic northwoods apparel, including a camou-baseball cap sporting a front patch that read, “I Hunt Deer,” or something very close to that, the power man hopped out of his pick-up and spoke Spanish to his assistant. That surprised me—people of Latino/Hispanic origin are extremely rare in this neck of the woods. I said immediately that we had Portuguese guests who understood Spanish, whereupon the electrician’s assistant said, “I speak Portuguese too.” I soon learned—in perfectly spoken English—that he knew French, Italian and Hebrew (!)—just as well.
As it turned out, this “good-will ambassador” was born and educated in Mexico and had worked for years in international tourism. He now lives in Chicago and was visiting his friend the electrician. The two had met years ago when the electrician—a Wisconsin native—had lived in Arizona.)
A post 10 times the length of this one could not accommodate the briefest summary of all the extraordinary conversations I enjoyed with people over the past week—including the electrician and his assistant. People full of vitality with insatiable appetites for life, learning, traveling, and making connections, filled me with hope for the future of humanity’s home. Their accomplishments thus far in life give substance to that hope.
In assisting my spouse in her Amazonian production—the minutest detail refined, the largest task executed to perfection—I found energy to align my life with the hope-filled trajectory set by our guests. Acutely aware of the issues we all face, our friends do not wallow in disagreeable despair. Such is the nature of well-traveled, well-educated youth over-flowing with good-will and curiosity. However creaky my bones, my sights have been lifted to the possibilities in an optimistic outlook.
Before departing this place, our guests planted seedlings in a clearing on the “back 40” of our family’s land. It was my son’s idea. In the decades ahead, may those trees—as well as the lives of our guests and the life of our planet—thrive in abundance.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
