Fifth Meeting With Pedro

It had become apparent to me, over the course of our many conversations and awkward rushed handshakes on-campus, that Pedro and I were different from most conversational partners. His grasp on English was tentative, but the way he spoke made him sound as though he had lived here a long time and only spoke Portuguese with his mother and father at home. In many cases, it was disconcerting – here I’d been expecting to speak slowly and enunciate every word I’d said, and Pedro was colloquially cursing like a sailor with more and more proficiency with each passing visit. Brazil and America were different, but I’d realized that really the differences were negligible. You could say that the USA was more developed, and that (perhaps to Pedro’s eyes, I wouldn’t really know) the girls were prettier here. But for the most part, I came into my fifth meeting with the awareness that what we both had to offer was similar. We were two edges of the same Westernized sword. The only difference was I’d been tempered with living at the root. I was pure spring water, and he was tap water drawn through a Brita filter.

In short, we had recognized in each other some semblance of ourselves.

We met at the coffee shop, I in my usual band t-shirt and jeans and he in his usual muted pastel polo. He gave me a handshake and I returned it, but we both knew this was just a formality. After our routine discussion of the weather, the monotony of which almost seemed hyphenated (so-how-about-that-weather-really-hot-isn’t-it yeah-it’s-just-ridiculous-it-must-be-in-the-thirties [insert mental math to convert Celsius degrees into Fahrenheit coupled with a pithy proverb about how we’re all suffering under the same sun]), it was time to get down to business.

There was less to discuss than there had been before Spring Break, really. It was unexpected – neither of us had seen each other since mid-march, and yet we sat there for minutes on end in complete silence. Intermittently my phone would vibrate and I knew I’d have to check it: it’d be one of the probationary members for my fraternity trying to schedule a meeting. I respected them, but I also respected Pedro’s time.

The bus passed by, imperceptibly, and a thought popped into my head. “How long does it take you to get here, on the bus?” I asked.

Pedro smiled and nodded, his facial expression warm yet stoic. I was given the impression of the old mountain sage with the wisdom of eternity being posed a question that could have been answered by Google. He responded “About an hour, usually. The bus stops a lot.”
            That I hadn’t expected. “Jeez! An hour, round-trip?”

“What is round-trip?” Pedro asked. I explained it to him and he shook his head no. “Each time, is two hours.”

He takes two and a half hours out of his day to come and visit…and I thought I was pressed for time.

I dwelled on that and he asked me about my road-trip I’d taken for Spring Break with my roommates. I gave him the details – how we’d taken two days of nonstop driving to get there, the time we’d spent at Disney World, the novelty amusement park we’d stopped at on the recommendation of the manager of my favorite band, how the storm passing over Mississippi and Alabama cut into our drive time so badly that we had to take an extra day on our journey home. I showed him the photos we’d taken, the memories we’d shared.

Apparently that was all he needed. He looked at the photos, said “Good,” and rose to leave. I checked my watch – 30 minutes had already passed.

I shook his hand, almost numb. What sacrifices had I made for him?

And just like that, he was gone, carried on the breeze out the door. And I knew I shouldn’t call after him, knew that my schedule wouldn’t permit it, knew I wouldn’t have time to talk any longer. But as the door shut, I blurted out “Wait.”
            He didn’t hear me.