You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

The Middy can frequently be empty.

Woman to woman, or man to woman greeting AND farewell.

Trying to learn how to properly greet someone in a different culture is always embarrassingly fun. Looking back on my time in Chile, I remember my host mom mentioning how cold Americans were in their interactions with one another in greeting or saying goodbye. Indeed, we offer a mere handshake and – if it’s someone we’d invite to watch a game with or would want at our wedding – a gesture as warm as a hug could be seen. In Colombia, as well as in Chile and, I imagine, in many other parts of Latin America and the wider wild world, the two meeting bodies are brought closer together. If you are meeting someone for the first time, whether the two parties are of the same gender or not, a handshake will probably suffice. But afterwards, if you run into that person at school, work, a party, or in passing, a more in-depth salutation is expected. These are split into gender and familiarity categories. 

Man to man greeting AND farewell.

So, if a woman greets another woman, they do what I’d call a mock kiss, which is to say, they touch their right cheek to each other and make a kissing sound without actually kissing each other (this also is expected when a man and woman are greeting each other). If the women in this half-baked instructional are very close, bffs, sistas, or similar, this mock kiss is either accompanied or replaced by a simple bear hug. Pretty universal there. If a man greets another man after they’ve already met, they can shake hands. However, it’s more common to clap your right hands together, locking thumbs with the rest of your fingers around the wrist of the other person. If you know this dude, but you aren’t besties, you can slide your hand away from each other and progress to pound it. If you consider this dude a real berraco, parcero, or amigo, instead of sliding your hands away from each other, you can bring each other in for a less intimate hug, holding on to their hand and give their back a good dab or two. So now that this mediocre cultural interpretation has gone on too long, this was my extended introduction in saying that I got a reprieve from all of those rules when I went north of Trump’s future wall to visit my fellow wildlings in Minnesota.

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 My school’s semester break is only three weeks – since we have around two months off for Christmas – and I spent just about all of it back home in little Collegeville. It started out by surprising my parents. I had told them I wouldn’t be able to get home until the night after Father’s Day, so they were a bit surprised – or, about as surprised as we stoic Roskes can be – when I showed up to their door for Father’s Day brunch with my brother, Ben, and his wife, Ellory, who had picked me up from the airport that morning. I even had to send them a fake itinerary beforehand to keep my mother’s keen eyes occupied until I was found waiting for her on the front porch.

I went into my three-week vacation thinking I’d have some time to finish an overdue lesson plan for my seventh grade class. But I was wrong, a phenomenon with a frequency that is shamelessly increasing.

The 2016 Camp Sunshine crew: Dan, Brian, Jake,
JJ, Ari, Matt.

After spending Father’s Day catching up with family that was out at the cabin in Cold Spring, I got reacquainted with my house real quick when I had to prepare a Boundary Waters trip in two days. Every summer for the last five years (except the summer of 2013 when I was on crutches post-knee surgery) I have taken a group of close friends up to one of my favorite places in the world, the north woods of Minnesota. This year involved reuniting with my freshman year roommate, Jake Park, a silly Korean dude who left SJU after our sophomore year to fulfill his country’s two-year military requirement, and whom I hadn’t seen in three years. As the group was formed over the course of a few days – Ari and Brian meeting Jake and I at my house to help pack, driving up to Matt’s house in Duluth, waiting for Dan on the dock of Snowbank Lake to take him to our campsite for the night – it felt like the soundtrack to The Boys are Back in Town should have been playing throughout, as everyone had their characteristic entrance. We spent the following four days in near pure bliss, laughing because of and in spite of everything we saw and did, enjoying the lakes, wildlife, and especially trees of that magical place most Minnesotans take for granted.

But reading the Dao, watching the orange moon rise over the mirrored lake while struggling to keep our balance mesmerized on the cliff, jousting our canoes, having a tree fall on the path right after I had come back from the latrine, Ari asking if we can bring a third canoe to carry the weights, serenading each other with the ukulele, Jake failing to find the bathroom and utilizing the path instead, were all experiences that seemed to shoot past as if someone had taken out the cassette tape of my time back home and twisted their finger forward four days and put it back in the player. I blinked, and we had left Dan in Ely, Matt in Duluth, and Brian had taken Ari down to the airport to fly back to North Hollywood. Where our meetings had been glorious and exciting, our farewells were short and anxious, not knowing when we’d see each other next, but glad we had made another unlikely adventure possible.   

 

beer-lovin, bike-ridin', ass haulin' eco crowd.

When you call an ambulance
because your friend dislocated
his shoulder. Again.

The next week was a tug of war between Collegeville and the Twin Cities, first down for a Motion City Soundtrack concert with my brother, up for my post-BVC monastic stay reuniting with Spanish – excuse me, Catalonian, Craig, down for an evening with my fellow eco freaks, up for a night of debauchery in St. Joe with Brian and Jake – darts and Startree included, down for a high school reunion with Joe, Kuehne and Ben and a day in hapnin’ Uptown, before finally coming back up for Joetown Rocks and the Fourth spent with the majority of the Roske clan who was also around for our grandparents 65^th wedding anniversary.

I was able to connect with some of my favorite professors who, whether they know it or not, made tangible and irreplaceable impacts on my life and how I approach it. I managed to scrape together lunch dates with my advisor, Troy Knight, and a writing professor, Matt Callahan, who’s life trajectory is something I’m trying to scrape together to follow in my own way, and our conversations always turn north towards the woods, rivers, and lakes we both find essential to living. 

4th of July parading. Convinced Brian and Jake to join.

In order to squeeze myself into the agenda of Aric Putnam, a Communications professor whose class I had the fortune of finding myself in in one of my two open class options in four years of undergrad, I walked in the Fourth of the July parade with him and his posse to support his campaign for the Minnesota House of Representatives, catching up with him while waving and cheesing our way down West Minnesota Street.

Uptown with the gang. Some new friends, some old.

Overall, it was a joyous and exhausting three-week tour of nostalgic places and cherished faces. I got to canoe the Sag, run to the chapel, bike the Wobegon, play darts and pool until 3am at the Middy, bike the streets of Downtown, play spikeball on the shores of Lake Calhoun in Uptown. The list is infinite, the memories they brought back even more so.

If there were anything to win out against time spent with friends, it would have been the moments shared with family. While I’m honing in on my identity speaking Spanish in Colombia, my English personality and how it fits within the fabric of those I grew up with has never been tighter. Time away from it, to reflect and appreciate, has only made it more treasured to me. Each of us play an integral part of the whole, and we were fortunate enough to have that whole together for at least a few days, clicking on all cylinders.  

Ben, Michaela, Momma, Pops, goof, Molly.

To be sure, coming and going raises more questions than most are comfortable with confronting. Will my dog, Shadow, now forget me completely? Will my time here outlive my grandfather, Tom, whose farewell ended in a tearful “I love you too, J bird” with his stoic gaze locked on the wall where I had been sitting moments before? Who will still be interested in my life when it’s becoming harder and harder, through distance and time, to show them I still care deeply about theirs?

I’ll never forget my last conversation with my parents before getting on the plane. Since my return date is unknown, my dad simply said we’ll support you in whatever you decide, while my mom and I managed to keep tears yet inside their pooling eye sockets as she said we’ll see you when we see you. Not knowing can be painful.

Sometimes I feel like I’m riding this exhilarating and freeing wave, while at other times I can feel caught in some nasty storms. I guess the waters just get rougher the further from shore you go, and you really have no choice but to let the sails out - keep the hair long - pour the rum, and enjoy the ride.

 

O'hana.

Song in my head lately: I’ll be the first to admit hating the same droning songs on the radio. More often, I simply play music on my phone sitting in the cupholder. But in my many hours of driving whilst in Minnesota, I heard a new one (for me. Not sure how longs it’s been out. Just checked, it’s been out for more than seven months. So I’m a bit out of the radio game, okay??) by Ruth B. called Lost Boy. Anyways, she sings about being able to find a home in an imaginary place where before she felt alone. While I can’t relate with her on the latter, I feel like I’ve been able to find a home in two different places in my life now.

Spanish word of the day: This might be the most meaningless Spanish lesson of them all. When we want to explain something further, or in a different way, in English we’d say something like “rather” or “that is to say”. In Spanish you can say es decir (that is to say), but it’s pretty formal. More informally, you can say – and will hear more often in the streets – o sea (pronounced “oh say-ah”). An example would be “Vienen a pie, o sea que van a tardar media hora en llegar. (They’re coming on foot, which is to say that they won’t be here for another half an hour).