International Event

Some months ago, when I was looking at the Google counter device that I wrote about yesterday, I noticed that there was an abrupt up-tick in South African visitors. Somebody/somebodies in Pretoria were reading a lot of my blog pages, somebody who had made no such a visit in all the previous existence of the blog. I can’t imagine how visitors from other countries, in particular, stumble upon the blog. It does not (something of an understatement here) have a particularly large presence on the World Wide Web, as we used to call it before it just morphed into ‘the net.’ I do know people who live in other countries—mostly England and France. On the other hand, I definitely know no one in South Africa.

Then, maybe a month or so into the South African presence on the counter, there appeared a comment writer who said that she and her husband were planning to move to Point Roberts from South Africa and were so pleased to be getting all this information. Mystery solved…sort of. At least I knew why she might be interested in P.R. But I certainly couldn’t imagine why somebody in Pretoria would ever think to move here. Nothing against either place…but it just seemed an even bigger jump than usual for the ‘how did you get to Point Roberts?’ sweepstakes questionnaire.

Eventually, she emailed me (my email address is on the blog in the 'profile'), I wrote back, and got to know her a little. And this past week, she and her husband appeared on our doorstop for lunch (with an invitation, of course) and I got to know them both a little better yet. My grandmother, who was born in 1888, and lived to see the space program (and all the technological and cultural changes in between) used to talk about how all this change made her breathless if she thought about it too much. I feel a little the same way about this visit: how did we get to the place where this kind of thing happens so easily? And, if it happens to me, it must happen to lots of people. In fact, one of the Point quilters is expecting a previously-unknown visitor from Israel this coming week. The Israeli lady googled ‘Point Roberts’ and ‘quilts’ and my friend’s web page came up. Emails were interchanged, and now the Israeli is visiting Vancouver and would like to come see Point Roberts and my friend. So, how’s that for social networking?

My South Africans, it turns out have an adult child living in Vancouver and another one in Atlanta, Georgia, and have obtained green cards to live and work in the U.S. So they will be bringing their sail boat to Point Roberts one of these days, building a house on their lot, and joining the endless festivities that make up Point Roberts, at home and at the border. After spending an afternoon with them, I’m pretty sure they’ll fit right in. Like me, she’s a charter member of the Society of English majors and also a gardener; like Ed, he’ll add to the stock of engineers around as well as to the boat people. And like everybody here, they're attracted by the strangeness of it all.

They arrived bearing a jar of ‘Merula Jellie’ for me, in honor of my interest in elephants. As they explained, every American they have ever met has seen the movie ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy,’ and in that director’s second film, 'Animals Are Beautiful People,' the elephants get into the merula fruit (a kind of loquat-like fruit) and when it ferments in their stomachs, they all become tipsy. Today we are dining on the deliciously delicate merula jelly and bread; tomorrow, we’ll be seeing the movie. International influence...makes me a little tipsy.