Reasons I love Randy

When we were in St. Petersburg this past weekend we spent an afternoon with Polina. Polina had been my exchange student sophomore year of high school.  She came to Staten Island for a semester to stay with my family and I stayed with her family in St Petersburg for a semester. I haven’t seen her since. That’s 16 years ago for those of you that are counting!

We met Polina and her adorable daughter Maria (Masha) for lunch and during lunch Randy asked Polina what her experience had been in Staten Island 16 years ago.  Polina thought for a minute and answered that it had been stressful.  They hadn’t know much outside of the closed country they had grown up in and it wasn’t easy to be in a different high school for those four months where they were looked at as different.  She said by the end of her semester it had been much easier, but I guess her answer had stuck with Randy.

A couple days later when we were out for a walk, Randy brought up what Polina had said.  He said, he wishes he had appreciated these four students who just five years prior to that semester abroaad had experienced the fall of communism.  There was so much to learn from them and their differences that he hadn’t appreciated in high school. 

Randy doesn’t try to change people. He just appreciates every person he meets as an opportunity to learn from their differences. Every person he meets he listens to and learns from them and it makes him an even better person than he already is.