Malte!

Many people have come and gone in my life. That's just the way of it. Sometimes I wish I lived in the time before mass transportation when very few people ventured more than 20 miles from their hometown. That way I would never have to say goodbye or bother getting to know someone new. But if that were the case, I never would have met Malte.

Malte has been a great friend to both Ryan and I since he came to live with the Longs for our junior year of high school. He was there when Ryan and I first started talking, went on our first "date" (if Winter Formal counts), he was the best man in our wedding and over the weekend he came to Gyula to celebrate the birth of our daughter.

Whenever we're with Malte conversation comes easy and the everyday activities are vehicles for relationship building. While we watched the Germany versus Austria European Cup qualifying football match we had parallel conversations: historical differences between Germany and Austria and the Bundesliga. Malte explained to me how a war in Bavaria in the 1800's strengthened that German state's ties to Austria. Pause. Ryan commented how a German player did not perform as well this past season, and Malte agreed. Pause. I asked if Germany saw Austria as a little brother, Malte answered in the positive. Pause. Ryan and Malte talked about which teams were relegated this year. And so it continued. That evening Malte showed us pictures of his trip around the world (literally, around the world) and it was more than "I went to cool places and did cool stuff" and "Oh, that's nice". Even though we've never been to the places he traveled to, his descriptions and joy in telling his stories made us want to know more. It made our desire to continue traveling stronger and even made us want to go to a tropical island. Fiji is now on our "destinations" list.

During his stay we didn't do anything extraordinary, just ate a lot of ice cream, played with Audrey and talked. But that's the beauty of our relationship. We just have to be together. That assures us that our friendship will last, even though we may never live on the same continent again.