Kazakhstan reunion ------ still Sunday

In all the excitement of the music, I'd forgotten to mention another exciting happening:
One of the difficult things about the times I've spent overseas is that I never again (so far) see the friends I make in other countries. And I'm such an atrocious correspondent that I tend to lose touch with people, even if I really resolve to maintain contact. There are a very few people that I write and hear from sporadically (on the order of maybe once a year), and each time it's a miracle that contact information has remained enough the same that communication attempts are successful. My friend Murat is on this shortlist. He was one of my closest friends the summer I spent in Kazakhstan, and over the past four and a half years (I was there in the summer of 2000) we've managed somehow not to lose each other completely. I had an email from him last Wednesday night that said he was in the U.S., in Houston, for a training seminar (he's a petroleum engineer), and he wanted my phone number so that we could at least talk, since it wouldn't be an international call. He had no idea I was living in Houston, since the last he heard I was back in Oklahoma and thinking of returning to school there. So I was very pleased to be able to write him back and not only give him my phone numbers but also let him know I was living in the same city. He called on Thursday evening, and we talked for the first time in more than four years. That was a great feeling. My travels have too often left me feeling very disconnected-- the life I build somewhere else, even if only for a summer, is necessarily so different from life in the U.S., and I very rarely have people around me with whom I've shared those other lives. Murat will be in Houston for almost two more months, and I'm really looking forward to spending time with him. I told him I'd call as soon as I got back in town from my exuberant weekend of music in Dallas.