Something else I learned, concretely, in the ballroom of the Mayflower: I hold beliefs and understandings that are in tension with each other. Despite my best efforts at coherence and integration, it turns out I too am lost to emotional contradiction. Because my every instinct tells me that what I felt at the Lithuanian Independence Day celebration on Thursday night isn't possible, that God, or the cosmos, doesn't move people or nations toward or away from each other, doesn't designate fates. Such is not to say that there cannot be a great, even ultimate force of causality in the universe. Only that if there is one, it must be infinitely richer, more complex than we can come to understand by trying to follow the illusory logic of our own experiences.
But that's what I think. The question is what did I feel? What did I feel? Something new and frightening and very, very hard: connection.
At this event, in this magnificent ballroom that has hosted inaugural celebrations for a dozen presidents, a young Lithuanian-American director presented his film about the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team, titled The Other Dream Team. A fine film about a great story, the tough little tribe of Balts busting out, desperate, heroic, even a little hilarious, wearing their donated tie-dye all over Barcelona.
Well. The thing is... I remember this. I remember this. And while that may not sound like shattering news, you have to understand--in Lincoln, Nebraska, where nobody even knew the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union, or cared that the latter no longer existed; in 1992, almost 15 years before I would become a Fulbright grantee to the country and live there for seven months, and 20 years before I would find myself sitting next to Lithuanian friends, speaking (badly) the country's secretive, mathematical language amidst the resplendence of official Washington--I was watching these guys, amazed, and rooting for them. Basketball was my thing, and I was curious about the world, and here were these guys from this incredible, complicated place, playing my game. I was fascinated by their names and worked hard to pronounce them appropriately: Marčiulonis, Sabonis, Chomičius. These were my guys a lifetime ago.
Why? I don't know. Coincidence is implicated, but that too is facile. Rather, there must be a relationship, indescribable, somewhere down in the gears and mystery of human intention, between what surprises and attracts us, and what we're later able to attain. There must be something in the long process of learning about ourselves that leads to a build-up of personal history in a place or with a people, a build-up of associations, references, experiences, images. But where is the spark? Where and why does this movement toward connection begin?
It's not 1992 anymore, I'm not a kid. I still romanticize wildly in my life, but I've endured as well all the usual disillusionments. Perhaps with respect to no topic have I been more comprehensively disillusioned (though I can already imagine myself having to recant this, several years hence) than my potential usefulness to or in the nation of Lithuania. I see pictures now of Kaunas, and I remember nothing but my own folly, paralysis, doubt and ignominious retreat from the place five years ago.
And yet...connection. Maybe that's what connection is, a history of disillusionment. Maybe that's the difference between the first inexplicable flicker of interest in a place or person, and the deeper, more challenging mutual knowledge that constitutes real commitment. Put another way, the connection I felt Thursday night at the Mayflower was not a fated connection, but something far more sacred: it was the true measure of the last 20 years, and of the distance between Lincoln and Washington and Vilnius.
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