Home is where the hearth is
The young man pops up on my Facebook feed once in a while, his angular face framed by a head-to-chin mane of red hair. He writes some of his posts in Bulgarian language; others show whimsical photos of him and his wife at beautiful locations around the world. He roots for the environment and the underdog, is vegetarian, and does performance art in parks. His middle name is Holiday, which fits.
I met him once, in 2011, at the airport in Santiago, Chile. I was on a layover, on my way home from visiting the farmer in Argentina. I commandeered a table near a coffee kiosk and spread out with my laptop to do some writing. He approached to ask for the wifi code, a brief exchange that turned into one of the more fascinating conversations I’ve ever had.
He was living in Portugal at the time, and was on his way from South American travel to visit his mother in Washington, D.C. He showed me a picture of her, gushing about her beauty and intelligence. It was an actual paper snapshot, a bit creased and wilted from being in his wallet.
Sometimes, the sharing of a photo is the spark that starts a connection. As a journalist, I am known to ask a lot of questions. Those closest to me have called me on this, saying it can be intrusive.
He didn’t mind my questions. He was studying linguistics and etymology – learning how language starts and how at the beginning, words sounded like what they meant. This interests me, and soon enough, Holiday found that he had a rapt audience.
He told me the word home started out as the word hearth. He offered many other examples, but that one has stayed with me all these years. He spoke quickly, and in complete sentences, the ideas flowing out one after another. Here was a young man in his early 20s, whose imagination had been set afire by a gnawing desire to understand that home really means the same thing as hearth, and how that happened.
Most of us journalists are generalists, skilled at getting up to speed on a topic in a short amount of time. The quick and daily deadlines of TV reporting forced me to be very good at that, starting with a blank slate of a topic at 9 a.m. and knowing just enough about it to be accurate on the evening news. I don’t know if that has made me an interesting person, but it has made me an interested person.
For two hours, Holiday and I drank coffee and chatted. I mostly listened as he talked about why some languages sound warm and seductive and why others sound harsh. He talked about Portugal, interrupting himself here and there to delve into the origins of a word he had just said.
In my work and my travels, I’ve had impromptu conversations with hundreds of strangers. But that conversation remains vivid in my memory, perhaps because as a writer I share his love of words and perhaps, too, because it’s not often you connect with a person who is that darn bright – young or old.
I friended him on Facebook that day. I’ve never messaged him there and I doubt he would remember our meeting. We are not friends in the true sense, but I still like him.
We gathered up our things and headed to our gates. I said goodbye in my iffy Spanish and wished him a safe trip home. Home. Thanks to him, I understood the word a little better.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.