In the past few weeks, I've been treated to quite an unusual correspondence with a Slovak friend of mine who is currently living in Trnava, Slovakia.
He has called me twice now, both times on Saturday afternoon, just to talk. He is somehow able to make the phone calls for free. Our conversations are somewhat difficult, not because of any language issues (he speaks good English), but because there is this echo effect over the phone. I hear every word I say about one second after I say it. He doesnt experience it from his end.
What I appreciate about it all, is that he chooses to call me even though I havent been the best communicator in the past couple years. (I knew him when I lived in Slovakia in early 2004).
This friend is 17 years old and is about to graduate high school, and is incredibly brilliant for his age. His grasp of literature, history, and philosophy is almost unfathomable to me considering I knew next to nothing about that stuff. We carried on a conversation about Kierkegaard's contrast of the ethical life with the aesthetic life, of Theodore Dreiser's "American Tragedy" and of its parallels to "Crime and Punishment," of Hemingway's love of Europe, of the Enlightenment, his love of Steinbeck, and of his own comparison of Socrates to the TV detective Columbo.
Ive got to keep tabs on this guy. He wants to study law, possibly at a British university. He has been to Chattanooga and to Covenant, and had a very good experience staying with some of my friends. Perhaps he could end up there.
Anyway, its a strange and unique blessing to know that you have friends all the way across the world and that they are willing to call you on a random Saturday afternoon to talk about Greek philosophy and Peter Falk.