Change of Name and Direction

Studying abroad is supposed to change your life--everyone says so. It’s become for me almost a cliché by now, but it’s something that I’ve taken seriously. I had planned to study abroad since I was in high school, I was frustrated with the limitations of learning Spanish in school and I thought the best way to learn Spanish would be to go away for a year and just speak Spanish all the time.

And then two weeks before I was supposed to leave—ten days to be exact, my father suffered a fatal heart attack in his office. Most of you probably already know this of course, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for some time, but I seem to have put off addressing it. Part of the reason for that is because it’s such an enormous thing—and I’ve always put off writing about things that feel really important. However it would be dishonest not to include this event in writing about my study abroad experience, an event which surely has been, and will be, a life changing one.

It seems to me at this juncture, that if I were writing about my life it would inevitably be broken into two chapters. Part I ended on February 5, 2009.

And part II? I don’t know yet. During many of those ten days I spent in Cleveland after dad died and before I left, I was very unsure as to what I was going to do. When Mom first came into the hospital waiting room and was talking to some of the other people there I remember overhearing her say “and Stephen was going to go to study abroad in two weeks”. Was. She didn’t know what was going to happen really and I wasn’t sure either. Dr. Seidel, a long-time friend and colleague of my father’s was in the waiting room when I first got there and I remember him saying “You should do the study abroad. It’s what your father would have wanted.” I remember wondering what it matters what a dead man would have wanted.

I finally decided to go. Partly I left because I really wanted to get out of the house, and because I dreaded the idea of staying in Cleveland for the rest of the semester without the possibility of taking classes or keeping myself occupied in any way. I think that would have driven me insane. But more importantly, I thought of how Dad always wanted me to grow up, wanted me to figure out how to take care of myself and, as cliché as it may sound, to be a man. It was as if by his death he was telling me that I had to grow up and couldn’t rely on him any longer. It was even something he told me explicitly back when I was a teenager, “when I was your age, I didn’t have a father. You won’t always have me around to take care of you”.

It’s a goal that energizes me and excites me at times, but it can also depress me. It feels as though (and of course everyone tells me) that now is a very important time in my life, for my growth as a person. It feels like this is monumental or that it ought to be. And yet now that I’m here, I keep expecting something to happen that isn’t happening.

Of course, I’ve only been here for about two weeks—it would actually be rather ridiculous to think that I could undergo some kind of incredible personal growth on vacation. Because that’s what it feels like right now. I still don’t have a sense of the permanency of these changes. That I live (although temporarily) here in Buenos Aires, that I’ll be here for a year, or that I’ll never see my dad again.

But as my dad stressed vehemently in one particularly important drive, “I’m not paying for you to go on vacation”. And when I think about the matter a little more soberly, it’s clear that I do have the opportunity to make this more than a vacation.

Still, it won’t happen on its own, which is something I fully intend to keep on mind. I get the distinct sense that a journey like this is what you make of it. And though I don’t have any idea where I’m going to end up, I know the direction I want to head and I have an idea of the balance I have to strike, between school and fun, between having American friends and making Argentine ones, between maintaining old relationships and building new ones.

For this reason I have changed the name of this blog to better fit what I am trying to do. A Gringo-Chapin in Argentina was for me my clever way of saying who I am and where I’m going to be. But this doesn’t mean that I’m going anywhere. Mi Odisea Argentina, my Argentine Odyssey seems more appropriate for reasons that should be clear by now.