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Summer is my favorite time of the year, it is the time that I find time to connect with myself and to be with the people that I care the most about, which is my family. Some people may know, but I have two little brothers named Alek and Dima that are ten and three years old. You can ask any of my friends and know that despite our large age differences I am immensely close with my parents. During the school year, I try to see them as much as I can and visit every other weekend if possibly. However, life gets in the way of plans and that is why summer is so important to me. Every year, since I was twelve years old we have been going to Cocoa Beach every summer for a month; some people have asked me if I miss not being around my friends for so long. As much as I love spending time with my friends, I treasure my summers with my family more than I ever have because my brothers seem to grow with the blink of an eye. This past summer was even more important because it was probably the last time where I could spend the full month with them.
Many of my favorite memories are from my time at Cocoa Beach. I have seen dolphins diving into the ocean, watched NASA launch rockets on the beach, swam in the middle of a storm, woke up to watch the sunrise, spent time with my long distance best friend, and so many more. However, I think this one has a particular memory that will stay with my family’s heart for the rest of our lives. We have been renting from the same apartment complex for the past eight years, and in the process became friends with many of the tenets. However, this was the year that we met our friends Alejandro and Sylvia, and their two sons Matthew and Massimo who happened to be around the same age as my brothers. Just like us, they were staying for the summer to spend some quality time with their family. The boys quickly became friends as young boys do, and I was grateful to see my brothers have some friends their age, since they had been so isolated from children their age these past couple of years due to the pandemic. As a result, we began to spend every day with them on the beach, and with each moment we became closer friends; almost as if we had known each other for many years. Alejandro and Sylvia are Argentinian and Dominican, so we had many dinner nights where they shared many things about their culture, and in turn, we shared our Russian and Armenian traditions. Surprisingly, despite the differences in our respective cultures, we had very similar morals which helped us become such close friends.
Fast forward, a couple of days before we had to leave to go back to Kentucky. My brother Alek went into the ocean to swim and saw a bottle floating in the ocean and it had some letters inside, he brought it to shore to show the whole group of us. It turned out that Alejandro had saved the message in a bottle as a special surprise for the boys to find. Their family had found the bottle last year when they went to Cocoa Beach and had decided to wait a whole year to open it and they were kind enough to have my family have the experience as well. Everyone was beyond excited to see what it had inside, so they decided that the morning before we left we would all open the bottle and see what the letter said. That morning, my dad and Alek went to Alejandro and Sylvia’s apartment and helped break the bottle open; inside was a letter written in Spanish so Alejandro translated what it said for all of us. It turned out that it was a letter from a group of environmental scientists from Madrid; they had sent the message in a bottle on a sampling cruise off the coast of North Brazil and were looking forward to seeing where it ended up. At the end of the letter, they wrote down all of their emails and signatures attached so whoever found the bottle could contact them. I added pictures of the letter below. Alek was jumping up and down with excitement because his dream in the future is to be a scientist, and seeing how happy Alek was, Alejandro and his sons decided to give the bottle to Alek. At first, we did not want to accept such a generous gift since they were the ones that originally found it, but they said that they wanted someone who would make sure that we wrote back to the scientists, and that it was fair since Alek had been the one to find it first when Alejandro put it back in the ocean the previous week.
Flash forward a couple of weeks, and Alek had asked my father’s assistant to help him translate the letter and write a letter back to them in Spanish. I spent some time with my mom deciphering the multiple written emails on the back of the letters because the paper had become somewhat illegible with time. Thankfully, the scientists predicted this and also sent a laminated copy of the letter so we would be able to get their accurate contact information. My mother sent the email on September 3rd and after patiently waiting for a response back, we heard back from the scientists over the weekend. They were overjoyed to see that their bottle had made it so far along the Atlantic Ocean and that someone had managed to find it; hearing that the person that found it was a ten year old boy who loves science made them more ecstatic. I was copied on the email thread since I wanted to see when we would hear back, and shortly we got three responses from scientists that were a part of this project. One of the environmental scientists named Nuria, wrote back to us and said that they published the stories on their Twitter account (@gen_bgc_group) and that it had reached some media in Spain. Soon after, a journalist named Oriol Soler Pablo from Barcelona contacted my family and asked if we could send them a video telling them how we found the bottle, and our reaction to the event.
I decided to look at the twitter thread that the environmental scientists had written and at the end they said “and that’s it, amazing things happen and scientific curiosity always takes us to beautiful places and amazing connections across the oceans and seas”. This resonated with me because this whole experience happened due to one summer at the beach with my family, and this would not have occurred without the friendships we made. Over the course of two months, we became close friends with people that we would not have met in our normal day to day lives, and now Alejandro and Sylvia are now life-long friends that we keep in touch with. SO close that they invited my parents to their wedding ceremony in Buenos Aires during November. To us, these types of memories are what make life worth truly living, and spending meaningful time with the people I love most in this world is what matters most to me. We have created long lasting memories and friendships that persevere in spite of long distances across the ocean. Now, I will always be able to tell the story about the message in the bottle that has left a sentimental memory in my family’s heart for the rest of our lives.
