Dear Will:
I wouldn’t be the man I am today were it not for the navel orange. Or should I say, one navel orange in particular.
As a nineteen-year-old, I moved to Uruguay to begin a two-year stint as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was ill-prepared but full of youthful swagger—quite literally, as it turns out, because the locals told me they could tell I was an American simply by the way I walked. When I first heard this (and I heard it more than once), I found it kind of funny, failing to see the caution in the commentary.
I began my assignment in the capital city of Montevideo, home to about half of the nation’s three million citizens at the time. I lived in the historic Ciudad Vieja with another missionary, Elder Carlos Vaz, an uruguayo with whom I did not get along. He was a decent fellow, but I found him wholly inadequate to the job. I should emphasize here that as a brand new missionary in an unfamiliar land, I had no clue what I was doing. Nevertheless, in my view Vaz worked neither hard enough nor smart enough for my taste. Consequently, I often found myself “following from in front” (as I called it) in order to try to get him to pick up the pace. (Feel free to cringe with me for a moment.) Needless to say, I sometimes found myself halfway down the block before realizing that I was supposed to have turned at the previous intersection.
Isn’t it great when life gives you metaphors? But I digress. . . .
Elder Vaz and I took our midday meals in the home of Roque Vega and his wife, who lived in a small apartment just up the street from ours. One day, Hermana Vega served oranges alongside our mondongo, and I (literally) dug right in, jabbing my thumbs into the rind and tearing the outer flesh of the fruit into large chunks of broken skin. Elder Vaz watched with concern, finally informing me that I was doing it wrong. As he took out his knife and meticulously pared away the peel to demonstrate, I responded with condescension and defiance. I’m certain I did not yet have the Spanish vocabulary to fully express my feelings, but I can tell you for sure what I thought and wanted to say: “Hey, pal. I grew up in California surrounded by orange groves. I’ve eaten more of these things in my life than you have ever seen. Don’t tell me how to peel an orange!”
A more circumspect individual—one with just trace amounts of humility—might have paused in that moment to consider Elder Vaz’s alternative point of view. But at nineteen, I was certainly not that guy. It was only much later that it occurred to me—in one of those “how did I miss that?” moments of clarity—that during lunch that day, maybe what Elder Vaz was trying to say was that tearing apart an orange with your bare hands in Uruguay is inappropriate or maybe even rude. In language I could barely understand (both literally and figuratively), perhaps he was trying to let me know that while seated at the table in someone else’s home, I was behaving like a barbarian.
That would not be the last time during my two years in South America that I displayed a barbaric lack of cultural sensitivity and awareness. But fortunately, over time I came to learn the truly powerful lesson that as a fresh-off-the-boat American was then beyond my comprehension: MY way of doing things is merely ONE way of doing things. One way out of many, you could say. Not necessarily better or worse—just different.
There’s no question that these things become easier to see and feel when you venture out from your own neighborhood and take a look at how other people live. If the only point-of-view you know is your own, how can you possibly see things differently? Or to put it another way, if you are determined to “follow from in front,” how can anyone else possibly show you the way? Different is OK, is what I’m saying, even if you ultimately decide never to serve mondongo to your own children. There is, after all, more than one way to peel an orange, even if these days I do prefer to peel mine with a knife.
It’s true. How’s the saying go? “When life gives you oranges, make . . . (um) . . . metaphors.”
PW
Letters to Will 