I’d been on the ground in Colombia for less than a week. It was a Thursday, my first full day in Medellín, the “City of Eternal Spring.” While Portland was having winter storm warnings, I was sweating in near 90-degree weather. Apparently, spring is a relative term.
My main reason for being in South America is to gain fluency in Spanish. Why? It’s been on my life list for decades, in large part because of a simple love of language. It began with German in high school, but a computer science degree led me on a detour. Fortran, Pascal, RPG, and other coding languages became my focus. At the age of 23, that same degree took me to Stockholm where, after 10-hour days conversing with a computer, I squeezed in a night class to learn Swedish. I showed up for the first session and sat down next to a German girl who was working as an Au Pair for an affluent Swedish family. We spent the next 8 months getting to know each other over coffee and cake. We spoke English.
My dad died while I was abroad, and it dramatically changed the trajectory of my own life. I returned to The States, quit my job, lost touch with the German girl (we’d rekindle the relationship three decades later, but that’s a story for another time), and I began to question my purpose in life, a question I’ve returned to again and again.
Over the next several years, I searched. I devoted two years to studying Russian language, history, and politics. It was during Gorbachev’s presidency and the reform movement “perestroika.” I made a half-hearted attempt to pursue a degree in international relations, but was thrown off track after receiving a rejection letter from the only program I bothered to apply to. I was offered an assignment with the Peace Corps to teach math and science in Malawi. English would be the main language spoken. I turned it down. I helped start a nonprofit to address homelessness in Portland (it still thrives today, while homelessness has only worsened).
My path also led me deep into Catholicism, the faith I’d been born into. I was perparing to spend a year at the novitiate of the Paulist Fathers in “discernment of a call” to the priesthood, but at the last minute, I chose sex over celibacy. I had been secretly dating the woman who would become my wife. Two years later on our honeymoon, we discovered we were pregnant and I found myself back in front of a computer with a “real job” earning real money. Life unfolds in ways we cannot foresee, and the path is more of a spiral staircase than a straight line.
Now in Medellín, I set out on foot to get a lay of the land with the intention of making stops at the two Spanish schools I’d researched online. While meandering through the neighborhood, I spotted a sign - Blink Spanish. The door was open, so I entered and climbed the steep staircase to the second floor where I found a young woman sitting behind a glass partition. Mercifully, her English was better than my Spanish. I asked about the school and got a good vibe from what she had to say. It seemed I’d been led here, a chance encounter rather than a carefully constructed plan. In that moment, I lay down the $22 deposit for the following week, and as I exited the building, I felt I’d crossed a significant threshold.
What a grand experience and how wonderful you are able to pursue your dream.
P. S. I had to look up the definition of peripatetic.