Hasta Siempre, Lisandro

It's Memorial Day, the traditional start of summer.

I celebrated by mowing grass, cleaning my patio and clipping hedges. Yesterday, I bought hamburgers, chips, buns and Lawson's chip dip (it's an Ohio thing.) But my heart isn't really into it.

As readers of this blog already know from my post two weeks ago, I bid farewell to my Argentine "brother" this week. At the beginning of June, he and his family are moving to Delaware. Perhaps we will stay in touch; perhaps we won't. Sometimes people come into your life for a finite period, enriching it immensely in the process, and then move on.

The song "For Good" from the musical "Wicked" starts with a verse sung by the "good" witch Glinda to her friend, Elphaba, the "wicked" witch that goes like this:

"I've heard it said that people come into our lives
for a reason, bringing something we must learn
and we are led to those who help us most grow
if we let them and we help them in return..."

I guess that captures my mood, in a way. Lisandro brought such joy, spontaneity and intelligence to my life. I couldn't let that contribution pass un documented, so I pulled together a scrapbook of the last five years and presented it to him as a parting gift.

(An aside: creating the scrapbook definitely taught me that I don't need another hobby. It's expensive and time-consuming. I have to admit, I was really proud of the result, though. I literally finished it at 2:30 a.m. the day I gave it to him. Later, as we sat at the bar having our last beer together with other friends, he sat hugging the book. That imagine alone was worth the effort that went into creating the book.)

Lisandro taught me a Spanish phrase that is stuck in my head, "hasta siempre." It doesn't translate very well into English, but it basically means "until always." That's how long my life will be enriched by knowing Lisandro.

Here's the photo I put in the little window on the front cover of the scrapbook: