Duck Sauce People

This summer I got a package full of duck sauce in the mail. I didn’t order it, there was no return address, and weirdly enough it was addressed to ‘Nordaj Pelavin.’ It came in a beat up box covered in ‘fragile’ stickers, and contained no note. But I knew where it was from, and it made me smile more than anything I’d seen in a long time.

I was on the phone with my mom yesterday talking about how I’m trying very very hard to find my crowd here at Salisbury. Making friends is hard, and the first few weeks are always awkward. My mother, like most mothers, seems to always know what to say. She reassured me that "You'll find your people. You'll find the duck sauce people."

I don’t quite remember how the duck sauce joke got started. I think it was towards the end of my freshman year, when a whole bunch of theatre kids were sitting in the lounge in the dorm eating Chinese food and talking. Someone, I can’t remember who, chucked a packet of duck sauce at someone else, making some kind of goofy pun about having to duck. And it stuck, and it’s been a thing ever since. You could search my friend’s rooms up at Hiram and find a few stray packets of duck sauce just tucked away, just in case.

But, ultimately, it’s not about the duck sauce.  It’s about friends who will do something goofy and weird just to make you smile. It’s about people who love you more then they care about what the people at the post office think of them when they go to mail a box full of hundreds of packets of duck sauce. And I have some duck sauce people. I may have left some in Hiram, but they aren’t gone from my life. And, I hope, I’ll find some more. There are good people everywhere, and I happen to really like Chinese food.