Where is the stamp?

I arrived at Oxford Mississippi in the month of August of the year 1981. A close friend of mine had already graduated with a bachelor degree in chemistry and decided to tag along to see if he could learn enough English during my first semester attending the University of Mississippi to then apply and be admitted into their chemistry graduate program. He had two friends which also decided to join the adventure, both also held undergraduate degrees in chemistry. In a sense, at my young age of 19 years old, I almost felt responsible for these three older guys that had suddenly decided to embark in the strange path of leaving Puerto Rico in hopes of all obtaining higher degrees in their fields, not because I was any more mature than they were, but instead because of the four of us I was the only one that had ever lived outside of our beautiful island for any significant amount of time.

From Puerto Rico to the United States is not that great of a cultural shock since our island has become so Americanized with its associated state of government. However, for some strange reason, to them almost everything seemed foreign. From the food and language to the customs and weather, all three of them were trying to adjust to what for me was a thing of habit since my father had been in the U.S. Air Force for 18 years and my family and I had already lived in so many different places that change came much easier. After only a few weeks in this new strange land it became obvious to me that each one of these older than me guys needed me a heck of a lot more than I needed them. The good news was that the cards were definitely stacked in their favor since all three of them were extremely bright young men with an incredible desire to learn and get ahead in life. By the time I graduated with an engineering degree three years later, one of them had returned back home to start working in his field, one had moved on to Boston to get married and finish his graduate school studies there, and the remaining guy had moved his wife and two children with him and obtained a fellowship at the University of Mississippi teaching in his field while completing his graduate studies. Amazing, to think that just three years earlier his English was so poor and broken that I remember the totally confused face on the local pharmacy cashier as he eagerly questioned her in his typically loud voice asking "where is the stamp?" while pounding his right thumb on the palm of his left hand trying to communicate to her that he needed a postal stamp to send a letter to his wife.

The first semester was probably the toughest. Between all four of us we rented an apartment which was located off campus about two and a half miles distance from the nearest classroom for which I would be attending school. We did not have a car, so originally we all walked everywhere we needed to go. In the mornings, the most dedicated of the other three and the only one to eventually enroll at the University of Mississippi would walk with me on my way to my first class. On our way, he would anxiously ask me to translate words for him that he figured that he would need to learn as soon as possible in order to establish first contact with the natives. One day after another he would every day learn more words until eventually we progressed into making sentences with the basic words he had learned. I would say a few words, he would have the job of creating a sentence with them. What I found fascinating was the two sided paradox contained in this process, since I could not understand how it was that this immensely bright young man had managed to graduate with a bachelor's degree in chemistry with a 4.0 grade point average, and not have learned enough English to communicate verbally while most of the books he had to study from where obviously all published in English in the first place! One thing was for sure, the guy was persistent in his will to learn and get ahead, so it never did surprise me when he was admitted into the graduate program the next semester.

Getting in was not really that easy. In an interview the admittance personnel had challenged his ability to succeed in such an advanced program with so little grasp of the English language, and requested he take the foreign student language proficiency test in order for him to be admitted. The problem was that being from Puerto Rico he was not really a foreign student, so the university had no grounds to force him to take the test, which he would of most definitely not passed at the time. I remember translating a letter he had written to the university where he eloquently explained in his native tongue how important it was for him to be able to continue his studies and bring his family with him. Amazingly he was given the chance to prove himself, which he obviously did by getting the highest scores of his class on every test he took that semester. In fact, the next semester they offered him a fellowship and he started torturing his own students with his broken English by teaching chemistry labs. Soon he was doing research and on his way to achieving his dreams.

Oh, I guess I have not mentioned some of the things that have inspired me to write about my dear friend today. He came from a very poor and huge family and by the time he was born they could not afford him so his parents had given him up to an orphanage as a little boy. A renowned person from his hometown in the island, Isabel La Negra and the proprietor of what was a then a brothel, adopted him and raised him. During our first semester in Oxford and while we lived in the apartment with the other two chemists, I taught him how to swim, since he had never had a chance to learn as a boy. He also had never ridden a bicycle, so this too I tried to teach him before I headed home for the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately, by the time I got back from my family gathering I found him wearing a cast because he had fallen off the bike and broken an arm.

This was no ordinary man, and in fact we came to know each other so well that I can safely say that weaved in between all of his challenges, limitations, accomplishments, and failures too, exists an amazing individual. I cannot remember the exact number of brothers and sisters he once told me he had, but the number was somewhere above 14 which always left me dumbfounded as I tried to grasp the image of any parent deciding to have one more child while living in poverty and then giving it up. To the naked eye it could be interpreted that life was never perfect for my college friend, not in his childhood, not during college, and certainly not afterwards during his divorce. Yet as I now reflect on our experiences together and I look at him from my eyes as an adult, a much different image begins to come into focus in my mind. Some say that a man is measured by what he does with his life, what he accomplishes, and the legacy that he leaves behind. I have learned with all that I have experienced so far that very few people have the right to measure any man at all. To do so would be futile since a man's life is only lived by himself and the measures are unique to his own existence. The units on my ruler are pretty much like a foreign language to most other people. What might seem confusing to you as a strange little man loudly demanding "where is the stamp?" at the counter of the local drugstore, to him it is just a desperate attempt to get you to see his need to send a letter back home to his loving bride.

Dad