(I will add some photos to this post when I can.)
Aberdeen.
It's a place name that meant something to me from my earliest childhood, long before I first stepped foot on the campus of Aberdeen University as a college junior the fall of 1988.
My father's roots were in Aberdeen, South Dakota. It is where my family drove in the summertime for a visit to my grandparents.
The warm feelings and familiarity with the name "Aberdeen" undoubtedly played a role in making Scotland first choice among the study abroad options available to me.
(My shyness and lack of foreign language study outside of high school Latin and a year of faltering French at Wabash had already limited my choices to English-speaking countries.)
It was a strange sensation to be back in Aberdeen for the first time in 36 years. The campus of the University of Aberdeen, like the rest of the city, is constructed of stone - primarily granite - so there is much that has not changed.
And that aids in my recollections of my year in Scotland.
I can remember the names and faces of a few friends I made through Bible studies on campus. I can vaguely picture one professor as well as the arrogant Englishman who was the campus liaison for all of the American students. I recall trips to the corner grocery store to buy cookies and weekly calls home from the pay phones in a dark hallway just off my dorm's lobby. I vaguely remember taking a bus into the heart of the city on Sunday mornings and then walking up long, wide steps to attend a church with two friends from the Shetland Islands.
I was thinking of all these things last night as Melissa and I walked through the center of campus.
Unfortunately, even surrounded by the granite, my memory failed to resurrect most details of my daily life in Aberdeen those 9 months. They have been lost.
This might sound strange, but I have long hoped that one of the blessings of the afterlife will be the restoration of our memories to perfection.
I think it would be fascinating to look back over each stage of my life to see what words, thoughts, and events shaped me into the person I am.
For the next 24 hours, I know I will be chewing on this mystery: who was I before coming to Aberdeen, Scotland and how did the Granite City shape me?
P.S. In one of those sad ironies of life, my brother Ryan called on Monday to say that our Uncle Spencer had passed away. He was a sweet, loving, and all-around good-natured man. I am saddened to not be able to travel to South Dakota for his funeral. My 3 brothers will all be pallbearers and Spencer will be buried Monday ... in a cemetery in Aberdeen, South Dakota.