Remembrance of Things Past

Part Two: The Dinkytowners

Have I told you how magnificent Minnesota winter was the first time I experienced it?

The night air was so cold; you could taste crispy ice on your dry lips. The northern wind howled eerily at times, as if mocking the natural beauty of the gloomiest season. Stars of varying intensity mapped onto the black midnight canvas were so persistent; you could see short-tailed comets passing by and finally dying into the dimness of the near clear sky on a naked eye. The wet squishy sound your shoes made as they grind against the coarse, brittle snowflakes drowned the late night humor your roommates lashed at you as you walked across the snow-covered field. Your heavy breaths became clouds of white moist gas that rise past your line of sight and into your easily fogged up glasses - oh how you used to hate that each time you get into a building after running near blind against the cats-and-dogs of morning.

The sound of your reluctant laughter and the sound of your worried breathing echoing against the walls of thick snow and the layers of cold soil, and later fading away into the silent background noise of the night, just as similar as the sight of pedestrians in their multi-layered winter clothing, whom individual identity is a matter of how well you cover the skin from the reach of the season's elements - oh how can anyone not love winter. The feeling that the naked skin has as the gentle, light snowflakes rub against it while falling from the heavens the first day of winter, and the sweet smell of the early morning air and the tickling sensation it does to the insides of your nose with its moist fresh scent of the midnight dew - oh how could that not make you happier that you're still young and beautiful.



"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.



Whatever it is in this world that makes you sad to the bone, winter will always be the reliable one to tell you that nothing is more depressing than its gloomy white beauty. For some of us, winter is the sad face of joyous summer, but to a certain many, and to all who are wise, winter is nothing but the essential rest hour after a year-long rat race. Animals return to hibernate, trees morph into calmness and mankind reflect on their past doings. Winter is the time to look back and evaluate, and the coldness and the quietness of it are there merely to facilitate those who know well enough how to appreciate the grand presence of the ending season for all seasons; whereas summer is when life heightens, winter is when life subdues, and to a beginning, an ending is just a chance at a fresh start.

Like remembering the image of the one you call your lover, of whose face is nothing but the most beautiful figment of your intense desires for her, the day the Dinkytowners first came into their apartment was nothing short of happy nostalgia and memorable novelty. Everything that we saw was screaming to us to be introduced and made acquaintance. The apartment itself was no different; the exciting new smell of freedom from our parents, the comforting warmth of a personal space to be called home, and the sincere sense of relief that all that was worrying in the past had now been laid in front of your eyes, in perfect order, as were expected and filled with hope. How do we start this new student life of ours, thousands and thousands of miles away from the daily elements that we are familiar with; the culture, the religion, the weather, the community, the language - oh only God knows, we moaned.

Today, looking back and into ourselves, and seeing the roads taken and the ones that were not, and the forks on the road that started it all and brought all of us here together - a handful of the luckiest few sons of bastards from all over the nooks and crannies of our beloved motherland, thrown together into this unplanned mix with nothing but a common academic responsibility - how far and long have we traveled shoulder-to-shoulder in times of good and bad, and how much more of us have we got before this journey finally ends, and the ever stronger invisible bond that clearly ties us close to each other, regardless of how funny to our minds or disgusting to our lips to acknowledge its existence in the open. Such is the awkward and elusive nature of the unfamiliar ground of male-male bonding.

Here at last, in the same boat, are those who, in the end, you will call comrades.