Finding Home Away from Home: Candace’s Journey of Living Abroad

00:04 Hi, my name is Karen Ghaddar Today is April 29, 2023, and I'm recording from Amherst, Massachusetts.

00:14 And I'm Candice Drimmer. And it's the same date, even though we're in different towns. And I'm recording from Northampton, Massachusetts.

00:27 Okay, I'd love to hear your story.

00:29 Well, as I told you when we first met, I am truly an accidental expatriate. I was born in Princeton, New Jersey in December of 1949. So it's always easy to know how old I am by what year it is, because I only during the last ten days of the year am I older. Age. It's very simple. I never have to wonder. Unfortunately, I was born to very bigoted parents who both corporally and verbally abused and beat on not only myself, the youngest, but my older brother, ten years older, and my older sister, 15 years older. But that's life. You don't always get to choose your parents. As a child, I always hoped that one day things would change. And then I remember very distinctly, standing in my bedroom was a tiny bedroom, but it had a big window and the light was pouring in and I was upset. And I remember thinking, okay, I was eight or 910 years old. I'm thinking, it's not going to change. It is just not going to change. But then I realized, because I had older siblings who had left home, but one day it will, because I'll leave home too, and I can change my life then. And that was important for me. So around when I was eleven, my parents moved us to, well, me to Houston, Texas. And that's where I grew up, which was a very conservative place, very different. I was trained to. Before I got there for a year, my mother was just banging on me that you have to say yes, ma'am and no, ma'am. And it was like I was going to a foreign country, which it felt like at times. Let's see, I got myself out of order figures, right? Hang on. I've got notes, but I've got notes my entire life.

02:36 It's okay, you can take your time.

02:38 That's okay. I did get admitted early to my college. It was Trinity University. And I was really lucky, I thought, because I was going to a good liberal arts school. But then my father said it was too expensive. But we negotiated that if I got a b and I kept a b grade, I could continue going there. Well, I kept my end of the deal, but he did not. In April of my freshman year, he pulled me out of school, saying the school was too expensive, and he did it three times in five years that it took me to get my degree because I was bouncing in and out, working in between, living with other people in my family in between. But he would each time demand that I had to come home and live with him and my mother, which meant he wanted me under his control. And each time I said no, he did teach me a very valuable lesson, though. He taught me that adults are often liars and parents are often liars, and that's just the way it is. So then at Trinity, I then later went to the University of Georgia, in part because my parents decided that I should major in journalism. And as an 18 year old, I actually had mononucleosis at the time. So I was very sick. And I just was like, yeah, whatever. And I got to Georgia and I looked at the things that you could take and it was like, oh, I will never have to take foreign language. Wonderful. I had not been a great foreign language student. It was 1969, and I met this guy through my friend Terry. He had the kindest eyes and he had a demeanor which a friend of mine in town here says he still has. He was very calm, but he was just very caring. And you felt like he was actually seeing you and hearing you. He originally had been from Long island. His father had been in the Schmatta trade, which means in the dressmaking trade if you don't know the terminal, very New York term. And his name was Gary Drimmer. His parents had moved when he was eleven to Peru, and he had gone to finished up middle school, gone to the equivalent of high school in Spanish by choice, because he wanted to learn the foreign language. Well, we dated some. It wasn't really serious, but there was some connection. And so when he left, he said, I'll write you. And I thought, right at that point in my life I'd learned that young men tend to lie a lot, too, and they might mean to do things, but they don't always. So we actually started writing. He was up in New York state, up in the North Brockport, at a Peace Corps college degree program. Very unusual thing that came up. And over the next three years, we wrote letters, over a thousand of them, which I've got, and I, on our 50th anniversary last year, put together in notebooks, so that all together, when you lay them down, they stack up this much. He still hasn't read them all. I went, ripped through them all while before he got around where he saw them. And, I mean, they were really the best way to get to know somebody because there was no interaction of, you know, sitting in the backseat of a car and what happens with that. So it was more what was in your head? I mean, he would talk about books he was reading. I would talk about issues I was having with my parents all the time, which just was constant. And over those three years, while he finished up college, he then went into the Peace Corps for a two year stint. And we wrote and wrote and wrote a. I ended up saving those letters, you have to realize, through 18 full moves during our 50 years, which is amazing to think of. He was shocked. But I had read through them partly probably 49 years ago, and then I put them in a bunch of bags and I just kept moving them. And I kept thinking, one day I'll look at these. Well, as you know, it came. Time came. Gary had always said when he was in the Peace Corps, he wanted to write a journal, but of course he didn't because he was busy. And writing's really not his forte. But what he did do is he had me writing. He wrote me. So he has the equivalent. We learned all sorts of things about each other that were more serious. Like, I was really upset when he wrote me a letter that he was four years young, four months younger, and that he was jewish. It was Jewish. Didn't bother me. The first boy I loved when fifth grade was jewish, course he didn't love me. Fifth grade is hard, but, you know, it was like. But you're four months younger. I felt like I was robbing the cradle, which, of course, was hardly that. But we continued to date each other during those two and a half of the three years until we decided, okay, we got together. He came back up to the States a couple of times. We got together then, and we said, okay, this is more serious than dating other people. And I know that the last date I had with somebody else was a law student who. All I did was talk with him about Gary. I was loving it. He was very kind. That's what I do remember. So after the peace Corps, Gary's father writes, and there's some. A lot of the letters are in there, and asks, negotiates with Gary to come down to Peru to help him with the business he has, which is failing. Peru's a mess. It's under a dictatorship. And had been. And Gary negotiated fine, but Candace has to come down with me, and we're going to live together in the same room because Gary was living in his parents house, which is the norm overseas, and we're going to. You can't be saying anything about, well, Gary's parents were very, very progressive. Let me put it this way. They smoked pot with Gary in Peru.

08:51 Oh, wow.

08:52 I know when Gary was probably about 1516, so that, I mean, they're dead. Nobody can yell at them now. But I said, oh, my God, this is great. So we decided in late 71, I was going to go down to Peru. After I finished college in May at the University of Georgia, I got my first passport. I went to the library and got a bunch of books on Peru, started reading about history, and I told my parents I was moving to Peru. Well, they couldn't stop me. I was 21 and turned 22 around the same time. They tried to bribe me. They offered me a trip for two weeks to the United Kingdom, to London. Basically, it was something I'd always wanted to do. I'm much. I'm a great anglophile, which is ironic. I have a daughter that lives there now 20 something years and have two English. Well, they have four passports, but two english grandsons who can do american accents or others. And so I looked at my parents and I thought, would you trust these people? And in my head said, no. Well, years later, my daughter heard this story, and she goes, well, why didn't you take the trip and then come back and go to Peru? And I said, jenny, are you crazy? Remember my parents? These are not people you would trust with your life. No, no, no. There's no way. I knew I wouldn't depend on them. And it never dawned on me. It seemed dishonest. It just never was my thing to lie like that. Lying is one thing, but that's really too serious. So in June of 1972, I left the United States with a passport in one hand and no idea what was going to happen in the other. My father said, you're going to hell, and I won't drive you to the airport. And I didn't have enough money to take a taxi. So finally my mother kind of sidled up to me and said, I'll take you to the airport, but don't tell your father. It's like, he'll know. But okay, whatever. My friends thought I was insane. How do you know this guy? What do you know of this guy? That cout. I felt I was doing the right thing. It was just like the rampage into the round hold. I knew where I was, and this felt right. I'd met Gary's parents when they were up in the United States visiting a daughter in Houston. I'd have long conversation with him. His mother had gone to visit my mother at one point where they ended up in tears in each other's arms. And Gary and I had been in the same country during the seventies and 71 72. So it was like, what's the deal? I got to Peru very early in the morning after a long airline flight on a prop plane that we had to stop in Panama to fill up with airline fuel. Gary's parents picked me up because Gary wasn't there. He was in Guayaquil. No, he must have been in Quito. He couldn't have been Guayaquil. Quito, getting his peruvian visa to work legally done. And I had my first lesson and realized, you can't get a visa in a country that you're going to work in while in that country, have to be in the other country. So my expatriate life had begun. The traffic lights were out, so people's horns were going, and they'd bang on the side of the door trying to get through traffic at intersections. Yankee, go home. Yankeera. It was all over. The walls of the country was beige. The air was beige. From the dust. Everything just looked beige. It was really third world from my viewpoint. We got to his parents home, and up on the tops of the roofs in the neighborhood were dogs that were the guardians. So they would be up on the top of the roof barking at anybody that came in the neighborhood. They weren't pets. I was told to take a nap, so I went upstairs. I was exhausted. It'd been an all night flight, and I'd been up with nerves, too. And I found an audio tape from Gary, which eased my mind. I listened to it, and I knew again that I'd made the right choice for me, not for other people. So I went to sleep like bink. I woke up very gradually hearing a what I thought was, like music in the street, horns going, somebody going, bells going, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And I looked out and people were calling lenguado, which is the type of fish they were announcing. I've got these wares, like in Oliver in the movie. Bells were ringing, the fresh bread cellar whistles from the knife sharpener who used his bicycle to sharpen your knives. There was the used bottle sales guy who would come by and buy whatever bottles you had, because if you wanted a beer, you had to take a bottle that was empty to the store, and in exchange, you would get given a bottle of beer and pay for it. So the maids would be out there doing the business, flirting, telling them who was at the house, what's going on, things like that. Six months later, we got married in a civil ceremony because my parents refused to come to the religious one. And I was in the process of converting to Judaism with the only rabbi in the country who was a super, uber, super conservative ortho. I mean, he was just like, you've got to have a whole, you know, three guys come in, three rabbis. They talk to you, they ask you questions. I'm like, okay, okay. But there's only three rabbis in the entire South America. I'm thinking, going, well, I'll worry about that later. So, in Peru, my french was not helpful, so I started learning Spanish. I took a superintensivo class for one month and a half. Then I got a job at the american school, Roosevelt, as a. They needed a yearbook teacher because the yearbook had gone into debt in 1971 for $1,000, had been bailed out by the american embassy. So I was brought in also as a journalism teacher, which was ironic because I had done radio, tv, film, not written journalism. I took the book home every night, read the chapter, and taught it the next day. And also drama, which was my passion and still is. So it was hard to learn Spanish at 22. Languages need to be learned young, otherwise your brain just doesn't take it in. I learned present tense, and I would always start with people in saying, in Spanish, the only verb tense I know is present. Sorry. But my vocabulary was. Why? Because I had it all around me. So as we went back to the states, Gary got a master's. He went into international business. He worked mostly with a multinational grain company. They did not send people abroad, except they sent a few. And we were the ones that they started sending because we were one of the few people that could go abroad and not go crazy. The children wouldn't, you know, go, oh, no, I miss my friends and all. I mean, there was one couple that had gone to Puerto Rico, and their kids couldn't handle living in Puerto Rico because it was too foreign. So, yeah, it's part of the United States people. We moved to Canada twice. Then when we moved to ascension, Paraguay, with a two year old daughter under another dictator, Stroessner, the locals were really loath to get to know us. We were. We could have been security police that were going to, you know, scream. And people were paranoid. With good reason. They threw people in jails. People were disappearing in Argentina. It probably happened in Paraguay. So I learned it was very lonely to be on your own. But I also learned I'm good at reaching out to people, and I learned to network with people. I would. If somebody invited me over for a cup of tea. I might stay as long as they would let me stay in their house and pump their brain and try to get to know them and think, would this be somebody I want to be friends with? And what else is going on here? I had a Kiwi New Zealander friend who was married, was a mixed marriage. She was married to an Australian. That's what they always said was mixed. That was a good friend. She was a nurse. So when my daughter got a cop on the head, I wasn't sure if it was a concussion. And she told. Talked me through it. But my biggest help was the american embassy couple we met. He was in charge of the warehouse with goods, household goods for Americans that would move down there for the embassy who needed things until. Cause they didn't move all their stuff. So he had refrigerators, beds, you name it. And what did he do? He lent us all those things until all our stuff in Canada made it down, which took almost six months to Paraguay. In fact, by the time it moved down there, we were turning around and starting to sell it to move up to the United States. So they were absolutely, though, wonderful. I mean, bless their hearts. Getting mail was a rarity. I got a few pieces of junk mail, but I couldn't get the mailman to give me any mail unless I paid him the equivalent of us, $0.70. So you had to bribe the mailman to get mail. That was just the way it was. But there was an upside to this, I believe, and it's in my journals, that it was $25 us for each of us to get our driver's licenses. We went at lunch. You just drift in there. He basically talks to you. Okay. If you pass the hearing test, he says, can you see this? What color is that? Red. Okay, you passed the site test. And he doesn't ask about driving because that's a detail. He figures if you, you know, you're a gringo and you've got a foreign license, whatever, he can't read it. You could have given the credit card and he probably wouldn't have known. But that, that was an upside. We were legal there, but we never had a work visa the whole time we were there. It was very weird. Or Gary didn't. I'm always the. And other. So the next post abroad was Curacao, Desert island, about 35 miles by seven and a half. Literally not much. It was not with the beautiful pine, you know, the trees, the palm trees of other kind places, but. And the goats were roaming freely. It was kind of like free range goats. Because people all had their goats. But there was a large jewish community which was very handy. So right into there latched onto a bunch of people who were extraordinarily helpful. Because I had a toddler then and a five year old. I really insinuated my life self into people's lives. I do remember things that I did. And it's almost embarrassing. But at the same time, nobody ever said, can't you get out of my house? They understood. They'd all been new. At one point, somebody told me about uht milk. Which comes in that package that sits on the shelf. No, it doesn't go bad, and it doesn't taste horrible. In fact, my 40 something year old son still prefers Uhd. I think by the taste. Because he literally grew up on it. Um, but at the same time, uht, anything else that was on a shelf could disappear. You go to the grocery store, the broccoli would be brown. You try to think, how brown is it? Can I cut off enough that I can use it? Because it would sit there for a few days or weeks more. Your face is funny. My daughter went to dance classes at the one studio in the place. And the studio, the teacher smoked like this the entire class. So Jenny would come home with curly hair with all the smoke smell. It was very ironic and funny. But I did things I never would have gotten an opportunity to do. I helped one friend who was in the jewish burial society. Wash the dead females who had died while we were there. She needed somebody to be with her. The person who had been helping her was always off the island. She had a business, so she traveled a lot. And we would do this at the morgue. And it was not something I would say, gee, let me do that again. But when your closest friend on an island asks your help, as I say, just like they helped me, I helped them. But of course, the same person then called me once and said, I've got an appointment at Campo Allegre. You want to go? Well, Campo Legre was the prostitution house right near the airport. And everybody knew it was. But and it was illegal. But it was like a lot of things in Curtiss now. It was illegal, but nobody bothered it, as far as I know, a lot of. And we went we had a long talk with the manager. It was fascinating. I've never been able to know how people end up there and why. But it was for very good financial reasons. To get married and better their lives in Venezuela, Colombia. There were all sorts of places in a lot of the islands. I did a lot of freelance writing work. When I was abroad, I wrote for a South north news service that was out of some place in New Hampshire. They contacted me, asked me if I wanted to do this, and it was like, sure, I'm here and I could write. And I got an essay into an American Airlines and flight magazine, which once I was looking for a job and as an assistant to somebody, and I put it in my pile when I sent it to her. And she goes, you wrote this? I mean, I read this when it was, it came out on the airline. I remember this. And I'm going, yeah, I wrote you and I'm going, going, that's my name. Yes. It's really fun. My name is not common. By the time we moved, oh, yes, we did move from there. But at the end of my time in the island, I had volunteered, never volunteer with a group to write, update their 15 or something year old how to live on Curacao. And even Curacao. Things had changed and I thought it would keep me busy in the beginning. Well, but when I handed it over to them, they didn't like the name of the title. They basically told me they weren't going to publish it and they stopped talking to me. So a friend of mine asked me, is it not published? And we basically, she had a contacted Price waterhouse, we desktop published it, which means they just printed it off on a printer. Staple. Staple. And she got it into the local because she was, had contacts, the local bookstores, it ended up going to Holland. And that's why, if you google my name, you'll find one Amazon book is listed. And that's the book. Wow. Yes. The money that we made, which was five nafles, which the local version of a guilder went to the international school. So I didn't get a nickel out of it. And she monitored it until she left many years later. By the time we went to Guayaquil, Ecuador, which felt like a step up because the people were friendly in Guayaquil, not in Curacao. I was a professional at moving. I felt like I acted through plays, I did freelance. I helped a friend start. She was peruvian. She'd been at my wedding in Peru. Didn't remember it. I barely remembered her because she was the younger daughter, but she was the best her fan. Her father and mother were best friends with my in laws. So when we met, we met accidentally at a back to school night at our school, kids school. We both had a kid in the same grade and she became a best friend. And she had been a dancer. Her mother had a dance studio, so she started with my daughter. That was the beginning of her dance studio in Ecuador. And she ended up with 250 students. And finally sold the studio and moved on. Then there was the day that I was getting a manicure pedicure in my home. And a rat came out of the toilet and ran right in front of me. And I couldn't remember the name for rat. All I could say was Mickey Mouse. She was close enough, because the manicurist is looking at my face, going and behind it. Then all of a sudden, the rat comes back and jumps down the toilet. And my husband and the dog are behind it. I immediately reached out to everyone I met. I would say, hello, my name is Candice Drimmer How do you keep a rat coming out of the toilet? And finally one person told me, you take old Mulder oil and you pour about a cup of it down each toilet. Flush it, and it greases the foothole and it won't come out. And I did that at the first house we rented, and the second. And it worked okay. It's not green, but if you have rats coming out your toilet, believe me, you do anything, too. And, well, then I had even written, hence to Helloise, which was a column in a magazine. Good house gaming, ladies journal, one of those ones. Women's magazines. I thought maybe they would have an idea. I think they didn't believe me. I never heard back from them in Mexico. It was more writing. Writing, writing guidebooks, the american society. I said, they might need somebody to help them with some of their copy editing. And they said, you want to do it? And I had a job, though only half legally. I got to pay taxes. I didn't get the other part. Mexico is more complicated. And I helped edit a woman's book who. She was writing a bilingual book in Spanish and English. And I did the english editing. Despite my husband being a so called top guy in the office. And it was a big office, despite all that. He couldn't get a peso mexican credit card. So he tried everything. I went to an anthropology talk at the museum. Through my newcomer organization. There are a bunch of women. They were going to go get coffee, some were going to get food. I thought, I want to go home. But I thought, no, go sit down, have a cup of coffee or whatever and just sit and listen. See if anybody looks interesting. Meeting new friends is like dating, but it's like speed dating because you know pretty easily if it works or not. And one of them started talking about her husband working at Citibank. And, oh, my gosh, he's in charge of credit cards. And with the devaluation, it's been so difficult. And I'm sitting there going, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. So when she was done, I told her the story about, that's really interesting. We can't get a credit. Get it? So she said, oh, here's my husband's number. Have your husband call my husband. Within a week, we had a credit card. No problem. It was done. So I've got to say, I loved living abroad. I also hated it at times. It was the biggest challenge. It grew me. It gave me the strength that I wasn't raised with. It taught me I have more resources than I ever thought. And I love expats, even the ones that I wouldn't have spoken to for more than five minutes in the states because there was such a diversity of opinions, viewpoints. Lunch should be at 1130. No, 03:00 in the afternoon's early enough. Are you kidding? I mean, the world was just different. So I've got to say, all these stories I've got, I used to write a blog for probably ten or twelve years. The Chicago Tribune had contacted a bunch of people, including me, when they started up a blog under them. And I used a lot of these because I still am going abroad. I go abroad when I visit my grandchildren and my daughter in England, and I feel like I go abroad when you go into Brooklyn, I mean, frankly. So I just think the world is so much more than what most americans see. And no, going for a visit is a start. But that's like dating when you get there and live there and you have to have rats running around and cockroaches. I mean, life is just a little more complicated and you appreciate what you have when you come back, I can tell you. So that's my story. That's why I'm an retired expat now.

30:13 Thank you so much for sharing that story with me. That was amazing, and it was so great to hear, honestly.

30:19 Thank you.

30:19 It's amazing to hear how much you pulled through and how much you know, you made the best version of yourself through growing up, especially growing up with, like, a different childhood than you're living now. It's amazing to hear how much you worked on yourself. Got to see different parts of life other than what people see here. Yes, it's amazing. So when you woke up in Peru, the first day after you got there, when you woke up, you were hearing all the people selling the bread, selling fish. How did that feel? Like, were you exciting?

30:57 It was the adventure that I'd always wanted. I wanted adventure. I knew that. So, I mean, when I met somebody who was living in Peru, and then, you know, I could go there and live there, every time I got. Had a nerve, you know, nervous break, then every time I had an emotional moment where I was like, I want to leave, Gary would say, oh, but your passports at this ministerial, getting this stamp and, oh, but I can't get your passport, you know, and it was like, he doesn't remember this, but I remember it. I don't. I'm assuming they really were, because passports are very complicated and they're important and the visas and all this stuff. But mostly I found it a big struggle the first year, very hard, because I was also learning to live with somebody else, and I was also changing religions, changing languages, and on those scales where they talk about when you're really under stress, I hit really high marks, but I'm a stubborn, stubborn person. And if I decide to do something, I have said for years, my daughter is five foot. No, six. Yeah, five foot one and a half. And I've always said if she wanted to be taller, she would have done it. So I'm a little taller than her, and I have the same, obviously, strength of mind, so that's the way that is. But I loved it. I really did. It was music.

32:25 During the first year of struggles, did you have any regrets about moving, or were you still did that excitement?

32:32 Only for short moments, you know, short moments when I would get sick because I have a primary immune deficiency that wasn't diagnosed because we were abroad so much and moved so much until I moved here. But my doctor says I've had it all my life and it's why I got sick all the time. But if you're going to be sick, it's nice to have somebody in the house that's cleaning it up and can do things and answer doors and, you know, get the garbage out and all the things that you're going to happen. So it could have been a worse place to be, but it worked in long term as we all learned to adjust.

33:07 That sounds great, honestly. And with your parents always, like at the time, dragging you down and not wanting you to be out there, how did you maintain that, like, motivation that you had?

33:22 I had. When I was in high school, I read, maybe early high school, I read Helen Keller's by autobiography, and in the back was the manual Alphabet, and I taught myself the manual Alphabet, and I would curse at my parents with my hand at my side and I would write shit. Damn. I didn't have a wide vocabulary, of course, words then. I'm much more fluent now. But I would just do it. And I still find myself occasionally doing it when I am in a group of people that I might not care to be in a group of people with. Which never happens here, thankfully. But yeah, it was hard. I had an internal monologue going on telling them what I thought of them.

34:11 Yeah, I can imagine. Also with moving around a lot because I've moved quite a lot, moving to different countries. How were you able to stay true to yourself?

34:24 That's an interesting question. I don't know. I think that by that time, especially after Peru. Peru is the hard one. Hardest the ones. But by the time I hit Curacao and even Canada, the two canadian voyages, I didn't put those in because they're foreign. And living in Canada is not like living in states, just for the record. But it's actually better in some ways. And the health care was excellent. National healthcare in Canada. Thumbs up. But I think what it is, is I knew if I was going off the road where I should be, I could feel it in my gut. I'm still like that. I know when something's wrong. I had cancer, as I told you. And my two oncologists that I was consulting with said they didn't think I had it. They thought I was a false type problem on my ovary or my fallopian tube. But I think I thought I had cancer and I had no symptoms that are considered. I found since some of them might have been, but they were so small they could be 5000 other things. So I think that I have such an. I think because of my childhood, it was a very lonely childhood. I learned to feel my internal self listen to it much earlier than most people in my age group.

35:59 That's amazing. That's great. And kind of adding on to that in a time of loneliness, especially now after the COVID pandemic people are a lot more lonely now. It's definitely hard to connect with other people. What is one piece of advice you'd give to someone or to a child who is dealing with loneliness?

36:19 To a child I would say reach out to anybody who you feel comfortable just being around because if you feel comfortable just standing next to them at school you're going to be comfortable when they start talking with you. And if they don't start, you start just saying hi. It's a simple word. If they don't respond, they may be having a bad day. It may not be you. They may be having, like me, abusive parents or grandmother who's ill or something that's happening to them. They might be deaf on that side. We had a friend like that once. One side was deaf, so don't think it's you. Humans want connection. We are born to be connected. We need it. If it's an older person, if it's somebody your age, I would say if you are feeling lonely, then you initiate something. You go meet your friends especially. It may be drizzling gray out there today, but it's warmer than it's been. I've sat outside when it's 50 degrees in a heavy coat, hat, gloves, just to talk to somebody face to face with pandemic. So, you know, go for a walk with somebody, get out in nature. Even if you. I'm not the go to stand in the forest type, but I am the stand in a garden. Even if the garden is, what, about 5ft by 5ft? That's my garden. That's my baby. So, you know, do what makes. Reach out to people. People want to have your connection and those that don't, there's more people. There's lots of people out there.

38:02 Very true.

38:04 And when you feel miserable, I can tell you they do too. And people need that. And if you're feeling good, you're just like, I don't know, a wonderful bomb to their misery sometimes. And if they say, you know, if you ask them how you're doing and they just look at you blank, there's something going on and you might want to just ask them, can I help? Can I do anything? You know, there's nothing. But sometimes just listening to somebody will help.

38:35 That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your story with me. That was literally.

38:40 It's a pleasure to talk.

38:41 That was an amazing story. So thank you so much for being. Thank you so much for talking to me today.

38:46 You're welcome. I look forward to hearing yours. Yeah.

38:50 I love the little life lessons that you gave through the story.

38:54 I mean, I don't want to be preachy. I don't know how to. One size doesn't fit at all. If living abroad doesn't teach you that, you missed the lesson of that. But there's a lot of similarities in humans. We love our families, we love the people that love us. We love our pets. If we're lucky, if we don't love pets, I don't really hang out with you. Even if you can't have a dog, you've got to at least a parakeet or whatever.

39:24 Thank you so much for all of that.

39:27 Well, thank you, Karen. Your pleasure.