Alumni Connections Through the Years

by David Emrich

Before I headed to England to meet my study abroad classmates in London, I spent a month travelling on the continent with another Buff. We were, relatively speaking, not the perfect travel mates. There was a time about two weeks into our travels that we had a disagreement about where to go next. I remember sitting alone in a restaurant someplace in Germany. The young waitress came up and asked me if I were an American student (I’m sure it was pretty obvious). It turned out that she had just spent a year in America as an exchange student. We talked a bit and I mentioned that I really didn’t know what I was doing there. I wasn’t having a great time and I was thinking about heading home instead of going to Lancaster. Her advice was pretty succinct. She said, “Stay.” I responded that she didn’t understand, that it hadn’t really been my lifelong dream to do this, that… She said, “Stay.” Needless to say, it was great advice, a great single word. I went on to spend the best year of my life (well, 11 months) in Lancaster and travelling Europe.
 
I lived in Boland College, sharing a kitchen with 13 other first year guys. There were a couple my age, 20, but the rest were fresh from living at home: 18, 17, even 16-year olds. One of those older guys in the group, who lived across the hall from me, was Paul Markwell. Nearly forty years on, this friendship remains one of the strongest in my life. It’s the kind of friendship that, even though at times we haven’t talked to or seen each other for a year, when we do talk, it feels like it has only been a few days.
 
That year we spent a lot of time talking, seeing movies, listening to music and going to one of the bars on campus for a pint. During the second half of Spring Break, Paul picked me up in Wales with a couple of other JYA’s (junior year abroad exchange students) after we had spent 10 days in Ireland. We spent two weeks driving to Penzance in Southwest England and then all the way to Durness at the north tip of Scotland’s mainland. That’s the kind of adventure we had that year.
 
Paul surprised me that next Winter Break and came to Colorado for a week. Since that year, we’ve always talked (or Skyped now of course). We got into the habit of sending cassettes of the music we were listening to to each other (life’s a bit easier today to share such things.) We didn’t make it to each other’s weddings, but our wives joined us in this great friendship. We’ve travelled there 4 or 5 times over the years (including Christmas 2017) and met them in Spain, and England, of course. They’ve come to Colorado and we’ve travelled together in California.
 
Paul became a Vice President of Marketing for steel manufactures in the Midlands. I came back to Colorado, where 25 years ago I built a film-then-video-then-digital media business. I’ve been to the Emmys and the Oscars, editing a doc that won the Golden boy at the latter. But my year as a JYA, and my friendship with Paul and his wife Christine remains one of the most special part of my life.
 
I can honestly say that my year abroad made me who I am today. My confidence in myself and my abilities in dealing with adversity were developed in that year. When backpacking across multiple cultures and languages, things happen that make you have to work outside of your comfort zone. I think about that difficult day in Germany a lot. With one word, I was convinced to stay. And out of that, I had the most important year of my life and a friendship that spans two-thirds of my life. Now my daughter has committed to go to Boulder next fall, a third generation Buff. It will be interesting to see if she goes abroad…