Isaac

Yes, well.. Ignoring, for the moment, all subsequent events...

Since i find myself in a government office, and, like most people in such places have absurd amounts of time on my hands...let's catch up on this Buffalo thing, shall we?

Buffalo, Buffalo, Buffalo... lets see... besides eating wings, drinking coffee and sitting under trees, what did i go to Buffalo for? Ah, yes. A wedding. weddings, celebrations, visits, people. Isaac's wedding. Isaac. I don't suppose his wedding can be terribly significant unless one knows something about who he is.

About halfway through my time at "the mission" in Buffalo, Isaac's family arrived. Isaac and his siblings had spent the last fifteen years in Taiwan, and spent more of their lives speaking Chinese than English. It was their parents that were on staff, but living, as i was, alone in a building with seven women, the teenage brothers at least offered escape from the overwhelming female-ness, and i found myself frequently resorting to their company. At night we would escape across the tracks to the indelible Nickel City, the local truckstop diner, whose many virtues included 24 hour service, spectacularily hot wings, and, (possibly their economic undoing) unlimited coffee refills without the necessity of buying a meal. During our endless late-night, caffeine-fuelled rambles, i found a rare kindred spirit in Isaac, despite his youth. He was pleased to inform me, upon having persistently harrassed me into taking the test, that we shared the same psychological personality type. We both felt out of place in our worlds - though he had far more obvious reasons for this. We were both oddities to our families. We shared a preference for objectivity, detachment, calmness. Isaac was, in a word, mellow. He viewed life with the subdued wonder of an explorer, an outside observer to worlds, and lives. Studying. Just passing through.
And if that sounds a shade overdone, then I liked him because he had a car. And liked coffee.
Our relationship changed slightly when the kids joined our Korean/English Youth Group. I had to balance my appreciation for their friendship with the need to at least create the illusion of a responsible, teaching adult example. Though i was never very good at looking convincingly "together", and in the end, i think my transparency made the bigger impression.
For me, it was a relief of sorts when that period ended, and Isaac gained "official" adulthood. I could view him as what he'd always felt like - a sort of brother. Though, I never really lost the feeling of responsibility over him, his brother and sister, or any of those kids, really. I suppose i was closer to Isaac than any of the others. I was there for part of the tragedy that was his parents' marriage, for his doomed almost-romance with a Korean preacher's daughter. Through the miracle of email, when he was in Taiwan and i in China, i watched him get engaged, and watched him get dissapointed. I visited him in Taiwan and we talked as equals about hopes, disspointments, plans and futures, between knuckle-whitening motorcyle excursions through Taipei traffic. Eventually, we returned to our respective "homes" in North America, assumed something like normal lives, and lost touch.
And now he's getting married. Actually, he is married. I can't deny i felt a bit of parent-like pride.

Isaac picked me up early for the bachelor party. We drove familar streets by the old UB south campus.I waited in the mess of furniture and unopened boxes in what was to be the young couple's apartment, in old brick building above a luggage shop. I played peek-a-boo with someone's ill-behaved, tuxedo clad child while he tried on his gear. We had barely an hour of personal conversation before he would be swallowed again by the matrimonial whirlwind.

These are interesting sorts of conversations. With no time for small talk, jokes and rambling, one cuts straight to matters of greatest concern, the biggest questions, the sort of things that normally wait until late at night, after at least a few drinks and a thoughtful pause. So minutes after my getting in the car, seeing each other for the first time in four years, we were disscussing his doubts and certainties about marriage and/or his bride, and my near total loss of faith.

Isaac is a good kid.

I suppose, now that he's married, i should stop calling him "kid".

I'm probably not going to, though.