Wednesday, 12 August 2009

• I'm back.

  So I was on xanga two years ago...and I took a break. Now I'm back. Like anyone cares but anyway. I'm still in Ukraine as a peace corps volunteer. Check out http://www.reporterherald.com/blogs/blog.asp?bid=10902 to read what I've been up to the last two years. From here on out, this will be a duplicate of that blog so you won't need to keep going on over there. :)
  
  My parents just came to visit me in Ukraine. That was awesome. However, it's possible that Ukraine wasn’t ready for the friendliness of Mom.
  
  My parents were here two weeks. They left last Friday. I didn’t post these blogs earlier because I’ve been a sobbing heap of loneliness.
  
  Maybe not quite, but their absence definitely left me sad.
  
  So anyway, Americans are friendly as rule. I’m pretty friendly. I like to experiment at softening grim salesclerks up with a smiley, cheerful “thank you!” after transactions to see if they’ll return a kind look. I make eye contact and tend to give people on the streets half smiles as we pass when the norm is just going-your-own-way,-non-smiles,-simply-walking-here unless you know someone.
  
  Mom’s the person that will go to the DMV and make new friends in line. They’ll exchange numbers, find something in common, and get together later to scrapbook.
  
  She’ll see a kid on the street with a sign that says, “Will work” and that afternoon he and his friend will be picking raspberries in our garden and mowing the lawn.
  
  It’s not uncommon for us to share Thanksgiving with random individuals because she met them in the supermarket and discovered that they were alone this holiday season. (I never get how the conversations occurred in the first place. How did she manage to say hello, get to the root of the problem so quickly, and have the chap pouring his heart out?)
  
  When my sister and I were in high school, Mom was our “color guard mom.” (We marched with the marching band and did routines while spinning flags). She traveled with us to our competitions and football games. She was our biggest fan and we began to expect cheese on crackers and baskets of fruit while we waited to perform at halftime.
  
  She is the type of person who will march up to two Americans in a Malaysian McDonald’s just because she heard them speaking in English, get to know their personal histories including the fact they’re traveling with Semester at Sea (which my sister and I never forgot and eventually did ourselves), and invite them to Easter Sunday.
  
  She’s the mom who will take in four foster kids for a summer because a friend is having a hard time.
  
  I didn’t mean to unleash her on the poor unsuspecting, grim, like-to-mind-their-own-business people of Ukraine. I thought she was coming to visit me. I was simply unaware that her charms work internationally. Often on people who don’t speak her language.
  
  Somehow, Mom made friends with two gentlemen in a bus on the way to the Ukrainian airport when we went to the Czech Republic. They study in Kyiv, live in Vinnytsia, and were on the verge of giving me their phone numbers if I ever needed help. She got to know the national rowing team of Ukraine while we waited in line to check in back to Ukraine. They were returning from a championship. She couldn’t believe her luck. She met some people in line on our return journey while we waited in the custom line to get back into Ukraine. Then, while we waited over two hours for our two missing bags that never made it on that airplane with us back from Czech, she continued to commiserate with two members of the Ukrainian rowing team by frequently asking me to ‘translate’. “I think those were the guys we met earlier!” she whispered excitedly. “Ask them if they are on that rowing team!” Since I don’t know the word for “row,” I ignored her. So instead, she looked at them with wide eyes and animated face and said, “row?” while making actions of the rowing sort. “Yes, row,” they responded, nodding and returning the smile. And when we took a walk in my town so I could show them where I live, some guys outside a café said, “hello!” and she responded and enthusiastically tried to start up a conversation with them, asking them if they knew me. The only word they knew was ‘hello.’ I’m pretty sure they were also intoxicated.
  
  Now, while she went about the business of befriending everyone from the sweet lady who looked for our lost luggage to impatient taxi drivers, she also did a good job of bonding with all my favorite people. My second family in the village and in Kyiv, my counterpart, my English club of eleventh formers,  my “host family” of  my current town, my teachers, my best friends. That’s why Ukraine needed to meet her.

   

   

  And as soon as I put something down, it got put on a hook somewhere.

  
  

  “Dad, where’s my sweater?”  

  
  

  “I hung it up.”

  
  

  “Where’s my purse?”

  
  

  “I hung it up.”

  
  

  “Where’s my keys?”

  
  

  “I hung them up.”

  
  

  Exasperated laugh when I look and find everything hanging in a neat row.

  
  

  I pointed out my coat hanger to dad when they entered my Ukrainian apartment for the first time: a piece of board with five hooks nailed to it that has been sitting in the rafters above my front hall for the last two years. He bought some nails, installed it above my hall cabinet, and made great use of it by whisking all my belongings out from under me as soon as I’d set them in places I’d deemed suitable.

  
  

  So… DAD. Same thing he’s done to us since we were young. At home, purses go in the hall closet. I usually just throw mine wherever I’ve settled… couch, bed, kitchen table. Later, when I can’t find it, after I’ve turned over everything in my room, I remember to look in the hall closet because its tiny legs have walked it there… or dad’s nimble fingers.

  
  

  And not only to us kids. I think maybe, possibly, he finds evil glee in this activity as it completely, utterly, unfailingly drives the CRAP out of mom.

  
  

  At home, I mean. Here, it drove me nuts. Plus, my mess of wire and plugs to computer, printer, phone, camera, video camera, head phones, microphone, external lap top camera? All neatly coiled and lines up in neat rows on my table. I promised him that wouldn’t last a second past the moment he exited my house for the last time. And it hasn’t. Although, Dad, it’s not back to the snarl it was before. So thank you. :)

  
  

  Aside from the tidying, he fixed my saggy bed. Possibly for selfish reasons more than anything. My aging futon dips in the middle because… well… old things tend to stoop, and after one night on the floor, dad charged out and bought boards and nails and fixed it.

  
  

  Although “charged” is maybe strong. I accompanied him to three shops to “translate.” That’s in quotes because I have not learned the vocabulary of construction and I went to hardware stores asking for ‘trees’, not ‘plywood’ because my computer translator had told me that this was an acceptable word. The man in the first shop openly smirked at me and beyond that, barely spared me a glance. Although I’m sure later he was relating the story of the American Girl to everyone he knows.

  
  

  At last, we did find what we needed and dad bought a hand saw to cut the boards. And now? My bed is flat. FLAT. I love that guy.

  
  

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