I have been anointed in oil
by the bus that
runs too close to
the sidewalk on Manto
Gatve not only
oil but also
rain and whatever
the rain washed off
blood
perfume
piss
beer
smoke
in New York City I
once watched a man
bend back his head and
close his eyes and
smile and
take the whole sky in his arms and
spin
he smelled like I do
now
all of life is an
anointing all of life
is atoms suspended
in air my professor
said there is always
a chance however
small that you could
walk through a wall
there is also a chance
that the curtain of water
will pass right
through you
it’s enough to draw
the tongue from out
the mouth like
a dagger enough
to split you inside
out to throw back
your wings drenched
in blessing and
dance
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Monday, 12 October 2009
Turgus Sriuba (otherwise know as Market Soup)
Every Sunday for 4 weeks now Scott and I have made a hearty pot of soup with whatever we can find at the Klaipeda market, which is still an endless source of fascination for me. The things one finds there! Outside, along the tables that stretch long-ways under the slanted roofs, there are mum fireworks exploding everywhere out of rusty, sawed-off plastic water bottles. Buckets upon grubby white buckets of orange mushrooms. Crates of raw red cranberries. Gnarled white parsnip fingers. Tumbling heaps of pink and green apples. Runty brown onions, peeling. Garlic in tubby ivory clumps. Wilting, lovesick bouquets of parsley, lovage, cilantro. Caveman clubs of green zucchini. The rare bell pepper, red or green or orange, small, often wrinkly, and deformed. And the people-the people! One man with a mouth like a rotten bathtub cut me a piece of pear, fondled the heft with his soiled hands, drew the knife across. In America, I would have run the other way screaming. As it was, I took the sample straight from his coal-black fingers, popped it in my mouth, and promptly bought a kilo. Best pears I’ve ever tasted.
Inside the market building you find the meats and eggs and cheeses. The ham section, for me, is like a car accident. I just stand there and stare until they try to sell me something, upon which point I get scared that I’m going to accidentally purchase Wilbur’s foot and move on. There are pig snouts and pig hooves stacked in piggy pyramids. Sawed-off piggy faces with the little piggy eyes, glazed over. Curling piggy ears, pink and alert. It’s like they would have just put the whole pig in there if they could have, but to make it fit, they simply chopped off the parts that stuck out and tossed them into separate piles. I wonder if they even killed the poor things first or if they just started lopping. As an American, I naturally feel that meat should be completely unrecognizable, even though I know that to wish this is to drown myself in falsehood.
Further on, there’s my chicken buddy who surprisingly hasn’t died of Salmonella even though she picks up the raw, rubbery pieces with her bare hands and does questionable things, like smear her fingers on her sticky apron or lick them thoughtfully to assist in separating plastic bags. One time I saw her drop a woman’s change onto a heap of raw flesh. My chicken buddy simply dug it out, wiped it on her grimy sleeve, and handed it over the counter. The woman looked almost as disgusted as I felt, which made me feel a little less foreign.
Then there’s the egg lady, whom I secretly fear, with a castle of blonde hair and lips like a two-year-old colored her with crayon. She will never allow me to buy less than 10 eggs at a time, even though I try obstinately to pretend I don’t understand her when she rejects, over and over, both my mini egg carton and my carefully rehearsed Lithuanian. “Sesi kiausinai, prasoum. Sesi kiausinai.” I’ve even tried calling her bluff by shaking my head and walking forlornly off with my empty container, but she is adamant. She knows she is the only egg lady at the market, and she uses it to her advantage. I’ve got to find another egg lady, one who understands that it would significantly raise our cholesterol if we had to eat 10 eggs before they went bad.
Once home, we pull out all the precious veggies and scrub off the thick clumps of dirt. Scott sets up shop at the dining room table with our only good knife and the cutting board while I boil water and fry up the chicken. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is cold here and there’s no heat yet, so cooking a big pot of soup serves not only as sustenance for days but also as a furnace of sorts. Pretty soon the windows fog up with the rolling steam and we toss the onions and garlic in with the chicken. The pot becomes a veritable rainbow. Red tomato skins, white and orange parsnip and carrot medallions, khaki potato cubes, translucent ribbons of onion. Then, the finale, a heap of fresh herbs that glow almost neon green for a glorious minute, then fade to the color of autumn grass.
Inside the market building you find the meats and eggs and cheeses. The ham section, for me, is like a car accident. I just stand there and stare until they try to sell me something, upon which point I get scared that I’m going to accidentally purchase Wilbur’s foot and move on. There are pig snouts and pig hooves stacked in piggy pyramids. Sawed-off piggy faces with the little piggy eyes, glazed over. Curling piggy ears, pink and alert. It’s like they would have just put the whole pig in there if they could have, but to make it fit, they simply chopped off the parts that stuck out and tossed them into separate piles. I wonder if they even killed the poor things first or if they just started lopping. As an American, I naturally feel that meat should be completely unrecognizable, even though I know that to wish this is to drown myself in falsehood.
Further on, there’s my chicken buddy who surprisingly hasn’t died of Salmonella even though she picks up the raw, rubbery pieces with her bare hands and does questionable things, like smear her fingers on her sticky apron or lick them thoughtfully to assist in separating plastic bags. One time I saw her drop a woman’s change onto a heap of raw flesh. My chicken buddy simply dug it out, wiped it on her grimy sleeve, and handed it over the counter. The woman looked almost as disgusted as I felt, which made me feel a little less foreign.
Then there’s the egg lady, whom I secretly fear, with a castle of blonde hair and lips like a two-year-old colored her with crayon. She will never allow me to buy less than 10 eggs at a time, even though I try obstinately to pretend I don’t understand her when she rejects, over and over, both my mini egg carton and my carefully rehearsed Lithuanian. “Sesi kiausinai, prasoum. Sesi kiausinai.” I’ve even tried calling her bluff by shaking my head and walking forlornly off with my empty container, but she is adamant. She knows she is the only egg lady at the market, and she uses it to her advantage. I’ve got to find another egg lady, one who understands that it would significantly raise our cholesterol if we had to eat 10 eggs before they went bad.
Once home, we pull out all the precious veggies and scrub off the thick clumps of dirt. Scott sets up shop at the dining room table with our only good knife and the cutting board while I boil water and fry up the chicken. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is cold here and there’s no heat yet, so cooking a big pot of soup serves not only as sustenance for days but also as a furnace of sorts. Pretty soon the windows fog up with the rolling steam and we toss the onions and garlic in with the chicken. The pot becomes a veritable rainbow. Red tomato skins, white and orange parsnip and carrot medallions, khaki potato cubes, translucent ribbons of onion. Then, the finale, a heap of fresh herbs that glow almost neon green for a glorious minute, then fade to the color of autumn grass.
Sunday, 4 October 2009
The Nineteenth Fall in a Free Lithuania
Fall has always been my favorite season. I adore wearing warm boots and thick, oversized sweaters. I luxuriate in harvest food and get a bubbly feeling in my stomach whenever I roast squash or sip cider or smell pumpkin pie. But the biggest reason is because I’ve always been a melancholy fool, even before I had much reason to be. Fall has always faithfully furnished me with plenty of opportunities to gaze out my window, wherever I am, and plunge myself into some vague delicious anguish while reciting poems from whatever poet I’ve been reading, especially poems about thwarted love, the passing of time, and, of course, death. This was most pronounced in high school after my 11th grade English teacher had introduced us to Alfred Lord Tennyson. I would sit out behind my parents’ garage on a fallen tree gazing abjectly out across the golden fields, smoking the secret cigarettes I had tucked carefully into my sock and imagining myself a modern-day Emily Dickinson. Oh, how the dying leaves wept as I recited!
“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise from the heart and gather to the eyes
In looking on the happy autumn fields
and thinking of the days that are no more”
Of course, this anguish was paradoxically a delight, and I wallowed in it. As I have grown older, I have found enough in this world to make me sad without extra assistance. Though I still revel in poetry, I have read less and less to the changing leaves. I have come to realize that pain is not a rich and languorous passion. Quite frankly, it’s real and it sucks.
Here in Lithuania the autumn seems more ominous. It brings us warnings on the wind of the short gray days to come, warnings of entire months of half-lit darkness striped with the freezing streaks of Klaipeda’s incessant horizontal rain. The dying leaves here are not like the Michigan leaves that drop to the ground engorged with a furious blood. Most simply turn brown and crispy and unceremoniously fall. Here it is already cold and windy and wet. As I write this, I’m bundled up in thermal pajamas, two blankets, and duck down slippers because unseen forces control the housing temperatures, and it has to get really cold for a consecutive number of days before those forces finally cave in and turn on the heat. Already, it would be difficult to survive if you had to live on the street.
Before the weather plummeted even more, Scott and I decided to visit the capital city of Vilnius. It takes about 4 hours to get there by train, a train with compartments that delightfully resemble the Hogwarts Express. We arrived late Friday night and ambled through Old Town to reach our bed and breakfast. The next morning we visited a few ancient, breathtaking cathedrals and then arrived at the Genocide Museum, also known as the KGB Museum, as it is located in the building where both the Gestapo and the KGB used to operate.
Lithuania, as you can probably guess, has had a very volatile history. After the first Russian occupation, it celebrated about 20 years of independence until it was invaded by the Germans during the Second World War. During that time, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews were massacred. About 1941, due to a secret treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, Lithuania was handed over to the Russians, and what would become a 50-year occupation began, not ending until 1991-not even two decades ago.
To enter the KGB museum, you walk along a sidewalk that looks like any other sidewalk. Then you notice the memorial. That very sidewalk is where the KGB used to dump the dead bodies of Lithuanian resistors whom they had shot and killed inside the building. From small windows in the basement rooms, guards would watch civilians walk past. If anyone passing the dead bodies showed signs of recognition or remorse, the guards would make a note of it, and the passer-by would be hunted down and taken to the basement of that very building, which was a high-security prison.
Our tour of the basement prison was enough to bring me to tears. English audio guides informed us of the atrocities committed there, of how 20 people would be kept in one room, not allowed to stand within 50 centimeters of the walls and never allowed to sit. We witnessed the padded cell furnished with the actual straight jacket interrogators had used, the long black ribbons of sleeves flayed out like bats’ wings. We stood inside the solitary-confinement room where prisoners were kept for weeks on end in order to break down their sanity. We peered through windows into the water rooms where prisoners had to stand naked on a stool for several days. When they drifted off to sleep, they would fall into the water. In the winter, they sometimes filled the rooms with jagged chunks of ice. Finally, at the end of the snaking corridors, we saw a collage of photographs, the dead bodies of men and women that the KGB had carted around town and propped up in different places in order to provoke the natural human emotions of other resistors and family members. Their clothing soaked in blood. Their faces almost comical, dazed. Their mouths half-opened, eyes rotting. This is where I thought about all those I love-about Scott and about all of you-thought about what that would do to me, to anyone, and I lost it.
Upstairs, on the 2nd floor, there was a different exhibition about the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians-the elderly, the dashing young men, the pregnant women, the newborn babies- who had been shipped off in cattle carts to Siberia for years of hard labor in work camps. I was strangely reminded of Dr. Suess’s story about how the Grinch stole Christmas. Remember that? All the Whos down in Whoville lost everything: their Christmas presents, their Christmas lights, their food, even the logs for their fires. But the next morning, the Grinch heard singing-singing! They had nothing, yet they still held hands and rejoiced. In Siberia, Lithuanians made prayer books out of birch bark, rosaries out of thread. They made wedding cakes out of boiled potatoes. They gathered for Christmas Eve “feasts”, Easter “feasts”. They crocheted pillow cases. They wrote poetry. They played busted accordions. They danced! They hooked their arms around each other’s waists and smiled-smiled!-for pictures. One picture showed several women, some younger than me, wearing sheepskin coats and jumbles of thick headscarves. Snow whirled around them, the white flecks pelting their raw faces. They held heavy tools in their mittened hands. But they had all locked arms, and they were smiling. All of that, all of that, and still they were smiling.
To see that, to see what humans can do to one another, and then to see how that very same fucked-up creation can react is, itself, miraculous. The tendency when I hear such stories is to vilify one side and bestow the other with sainthood. The Soviets were evil, the Lithuanians were good. To do this is to miss the material point.
I had assigned my class to write a paragraph on an experience that changed their lives. One student, who is from Russia, wrote about a Russian friend of hers who had been caught in the middle of the recent Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia. In America, we cursed those damned Russians and cheered on the underdog, the Georgians. But it was Georgian soldiers who changed my student’s life by shooting and killing her young friend. Whatever our intentions, war comes down to killing.
Now almost 20 falls here have passed free of Soviet occupation. Remarkably enough, the Soviets finally understood the Lithuanians to be serious about independence when Lithuanians from all over the country gathered in Vilnius around the Parliament building and the Television Tower on a frozen January evening in 1991 and held hands and sang. They sang patriotic songs, Roman Catholic songs. The Russians cut the city’s electricity, and the tanks rolled in. Still the Lithuanians stood and sang. In the dark, the tanks rolled silently, some over legs, arms, torsos. The swinging guns knocked protestors down and threw them under the rolling treads. The singing continued. With the whole world watching, it would have been folly to fire. After killing 14 people and injuring hundreds, the tanks withdrew. Finally, the Soviets packed up and left.
Now I see elderly men and women who never make eye contact and I finally understand why, because they have lived through that hell, through that fear. Now I climb the stairs to our apartment, an old Soviet building, and the concrete walls are the same dirty sea-green color as the walls of the prison, and I shiver and wish there were more light. But now I also teach students from Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, students who have just graduated from high school. I am teaching the first generation of college students here who has never, even in their earliest years, known Soviet rule.
We are here, and we are free and alive. Life itself has triumphed.
It’s enough to make you want to grab someone else’s hand and break out singing.
“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise from the heart and gather to the eyes
In looking on the happy autumn fields
and thinking of the days that are no more”
Of course, this anguish was paradoxically a delight, and I wallowed in it. As I have grown older, I have found enough in this world to make me sad without extra assistance. Though I still revel in poetry, I have read less and less to the changing leaves. I have come to realize that pain is not a rich and languorous passion. Quite frankly, it’s real and it sucks.
Here in Lithuania the autumn seems more ominous. It brings us warnings on the wind of the short gray days to come, warnings of entire months of half-lit darkness striped with the freezing streaks of Klaipeda’s incessant horizontal rain. The dying leaves here are not like the Michigan leaves that drop to the ground engorged with a furious blood. Most simply turn brown and crispy and unceremoniously fall. Here it is already cold and windy and wet. As I write this, I’m bundled up in thermal pajamas, two blankets, and duck down slippers because unseen forces control the housing temperatures, and it has to get really cold for a consecutive number of days before those forces finally cave in and turn on the heat. Already, it would be difficult to survive if you had to live on the street.
Before the weather plummeted even more, Scott and I decided to visit the capital city of Vilnius. It takes about 4 hours to get there by train, a train with compartments that delightfully resemble the Hogwarts Express. We arrived late Friday night and ambled through Old Town to reach our bed and breakfast. The next morning we visited a few ancient, breathtaking cathedrals and then arrived at the Genocide Museum, also known as the KGB Museum, as it is located in the building where both the Gestapo and the KGB used to operate.
Lithuania, as you can probably guess, has had a very volatile history. After the first Russian occupation, it celebrated about 20 years of independence until it was invaded by the Germans during the Second World War. During that time, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews were massacred. About 1941, due to a secret treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, Lithuania was handed over to the Russians, and what would become a 50-year occupation began, not ending until 1991-not even two decades ago.
To enter the KGB museum, you walk along a sidewalk that looks like any other sidewalk. Then you notice the memorial. That very sidewalk is where the KGB used to dump the dead bodies of Lithuanian resistors whom they had shot and killed inside the building. From small windows in the basement rooms, guards would watch civilians walk past. If anyone passing the dead bodies showed signs of recognition or remorse, the guards would make a note of it, and the passer-by would be hunted down and taken to the basement of that very building, which was a high-security prison.
Our tour of the basement prison was enough to bring me to tears. English audio guides informed us of the atrocities committed there, of how 20 people would be kept in one room, not allowed to stand within 50 centimeters of the walls and never allowed to sit. We witnessed the padded cell furnished with the actual straight jacket interrogators had used, the long black ribbons of sleeves flayed out like bats’ wings. We stood inside the solitary-confinement room where prisoners were kept for weeks on end in order to break down their sanity. We peered through windows into the water rooms where prisoners had to stand naked on a stool for several days. When they drifted off to sleep, they would fall into the water. In the winter, they sometimes filled the rooms with jagged chunks of ice. Finally, at the end of the snaking corridors, we saw a collage of photographs, the dead bodies of men and women that the KGB had carted around town and propped up in different places in order to provoke the natural human emotions of other resistors and family members. Their clothing soaked in blood. Their faces almost comical, dazed. Their mouths half-opened, eyes rotting. This is where I thought about all those I love-about Scott and about all of you-thought about what that would do to me, to anyone, and I lost it.
Upstairs, on the 2nd floor, there was a different exhibition about the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians-the elderly, the dashing young men, the pregnant women, the newborn babies- who had been shipped off in cattle carts to Siberia for years of hard labor in work camps. I was strangely reminded of Dr. Suess’s story about how the Grinch stole Christmas. Remember that? All the Whos down in Whoville lost everything: their Christmas presents, their Christmas lights, their food, even the logs for their fires. But the next morning, the Grinch heard singing-singing! They had nothing, yet they still held hands and rejoiced. In Siberia, Lithuanians made prayer books out of birch bark, rosaries out of thread. They made wedding cakes out of boiled potatoes. They gathered for Christmas Eve “feasts”, Easter “feasts”. They crocheted pillow cases. They wrote poetry. They played busted accordions. They danced! They hooked their arms around each other’s waists and smiled-smiled!-for pictures. One picture showed several women, some younger than me, wearing sheepskin coats and jumbles of thick headscarves. Snow whirled around them, the white flecks pelting their raw faces. They held heavy tools in their mittened hands. But they had all locked arms, and they were smiling. All of that, all of that, and still they were smiling.
To see that, to see what humans can do to one another, and then to see how that very same fucked-up creation can react is, itself, miraculous. The tendency when I hear such stories is to vilify one side and bestow the other with sainthood. The Soviets were evil, the Lithuanians were good. To do this is to miss the material point.
I had assigned my class to write a paragraph on an experience that changed their lives. One student, who is from Russia, wrote about a Russian friend of hers who had been caught in the middle of the recent Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia. In America, we cursed those damned Russians and cheered on the underdog, the Georgians. But it was Georgian soldiers who changed my student’s life by shooting and killing her young friend. Whatever our intentions, war comes down to killing.
Now almost 20 falls here have passed free of Soviet occupation. Remarkably enough, the Soviets finally understood the Lithuanians to be serious about independence when Lithuanians from all over the country gathered in Vilnius around the Parliament building and the Television Tower on a frozen January evening in 1991 and held hands and sang. They sang patriotic songs, Roman Catholic songs. The Russians cut the city’s electricity, and the tanks rolled in. Still the Lithuanians stood and sang. In the dark, the tanks rolled silently, some over legs, arms, torsos. The swinging guns knocked protestors down and threw them under the rolling treads. The singing continued. With the whole world watching, it would have been folly to fire. After killing 14 people and injuring hundreds, the tanks withdrew. Finally, the Soviets packed up and left.
Now I see elderly men and women who never make eye contact and I finally understand why, because they have lived through that hell, through that fear. Now I climb the stairs to our apartment, an old Soviet building, and the concrete walls are the same dirty sea-green color as the walls of the prison, and I shiver and wish there were more light. But now I also teach students from Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, students who have just graduated from high school. I am teaching the first generation of college students here who has never, even in their earliest years, known Soviet rule.
We are here, and we are free and alive. Life itself has triumphed.
It’s enough to make you want to grab someone else’s hand and break out singing.
Monday, 28 September 2009
Me No Spleen
I had my first cold, which was drippy and exhausting enough to land my sniffly butt in the doctor’s office while I should have been teaching. I had unsuccessfully searched for the word “spleen” in my English-Lithuanian dictionary, as I don’t have one and felt the need to warn the doctor of this. Not finding the word increased my trepidation as I had already heard horror stories about the Lithuanian healthcare system. One of my friends told me that when he had stomach pains they’d folded him up in the fetal position and placed a wooden block in his mouth. It turns out that the block was actually just to assist in slipping a tube down his throat, not to prevent him from biting off his tongue in a paroxysm of pain while they amputated an unsuspecting limb or probed cold, pointy metal instruments into orifices unmentionable, but it sounded barbaric enough to scare the hell out of me.
Luckily, a friend who speaks a good deal of Lithuanian picked me up and drove me. She signed me up for my appointment, then took me upstairs to find our door. Here you sign up as early as you can, wait in a long line and then shove your way in as soon as the preceding patient exits. In this way it is similar to lines anywhere in Lithuania: at the grocery store, for example, or the public toilet. Had my friend not taken me, I would not have known that the Lithuanian woman with the grimacing underbite who followed us in wasn’t shouting “I’m going to bite you,” but was instead yelling “I’m next, you American idiots!” Nor would I have known that it’s normal for the doctor to have only one room with the door always opening and closing, and that it was apparently perfectly acceptable for the audience of sickos waiting in line behind us to get several fleeting glimpses of my bare, hunched back. Had she not been there, I might have mistaken my doctor’s visit for another of my messed up dreams.
The doctor “spoke English,” which I shouldn’t sarcastically put in quotes because she definitely had more English than I have Lithuanian. My friend still had to translate her English for me. Only after Robin had dropped me off at my apartment did I realize that the doctor had been telling me to “drink liters tea” and “lay bed long time.”
Somehow the lack of language increased my sense of the barbarity, as though we were pointing and grunting and gesturing with clubs. The cave-woman speaking match came to a climax when I tried desperately to communicate my lack of spleen.
“I have a stomach. I have a liver. I have kidneys. I don’t have a spleen.”
At least I didn’t switch completely over to Tarzan mode. “Me no spleen. Me sick no good.”
Now, ironically, thanks to “drinking liters tea,” “laying bed long time,” and “eating two pill day,” I am back to teaching students valuable lessons about prepositions and word choice. I am also back in my Introductory Lithuanian class, where I have happily resumed clubbing their language to death.
Luckily, a friend who speaks a good deal of Lithuanian picked me up and drove me. She signed me up for my appointment, then took me upstairs to find our door. Here you sign up as early as you can, wait in a long line and then shove your way in as soon as the preceding patient exits. In this way it is similar to lines anywhere in Lithuania: at the grocery store, for example, or the public toilet. Had my friend not taken me, I would not have known that the Lithuanian woman with the grimacing underbite who followed us in wasn’t shouting “I’m going to bite you,” but was instead yelling “I’m next, you American idiots!” Nor would I have known that it’s normal for the doctor to have only one room with the door always opening and closing, and that it was apparently perfectly acceptable for the audience of sickos waiting in line behind us to get several fleeting glimpses of my bare, hunched back. Had she not been there, I might have mistaken my doctor’s visit for another of my messed up dreams.
The doctor “spoke English,” which I shouldn’t sarcastically put in quotes because she definitely had more English than I have Lithuanian. My friend still had to translate her English for me. Only after Robin had dropped me off at my apartment did I realize that the doctor had been telling me to “drink liters tea” and “lay bed long time.”
Somehow the lack of language increased my sense of the barbarity, as though we were pointing and grunting and gesturing with clubs. The cave-woman speaking match came to a climax when I tried desperately to communicate my lack of spleen.
“I have a stomach. I have a liver. I have kidneys. I don’t have a spleen.”
At least I didn’t switch completely over to Tarzan mode. “Me no spleen. Me sick no good.”
Now, ironically, thanks to “drinking liters tea,” “laying bed long time,” and “eating two pill day,” I am back to teaching students valuable lessons about prepositions and word choice. I am also back in my Introductory Lithuanian class, where I have happily resumed clubbing their language to death.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
29 Is a Prime Number
I know that this is ridiculous, but 29 sounds a lot older than 28. And yet, my 29th birthday passed happily enough. Scott and I figured out how to hop a minibus and visit Palanga, the equivalent, it turns out, of a runty Eastern European Cedar Point. I was disappointed to find out that the rides were only for children; however, I was thankful that I realized this before embarrassing myself with the broken Lithuanian dialogue I’d been planning:
“How much game? Want one, please.”
“How much game? Want one, please.”
For the dinner portion of my Lithuanian birthday, we decided to sample some more traditional Lithuanian food. At the restaurant, after two warm half cups of Lithuanian-style Coca Cola (no ice and no refills), I had my first cepelinai, which is a strangely translucent potato dumpling shaped like a UFO, stuffed with meat and orbiting the plate in a mystery cream sauce. It tastes quite good until it lands in the very bottom of your stomach like a boulder and makes it difficult to walk. Scott also ate another traditional edible boulder: a deep fried pancake stuffed, you guessed it, with meat.
After much groaning and belly rubbing, we dragged ourselves out of our seats and down the Palanga boardwalk to the Baltic Sea, where we walked out on the pier and then barefoot across the sand, all the while thinking wistful thoughts about age and eternity appropriate to the sea and the day.
Of course, there was really only one thought circling around and around my head: “I am 29. I am 29.” Now, I know that 29 is not old, and I know that many of you are going to read this and say “Michelle, honestly, wait until you at least have kids and age spots before you wax eloquent on aging.” That’s probably good advice, but I’m going to go ahead anyway.
In the United States, I’ve always been conscious of how much the culture worships the appearance of youth at the expense of reality and of how a woman is not considered truly successful unless she is also hot, regardless of her age. I’ve known women who’ve spent the best years of their lives in front of department store mirrors, cursing their tiniest flaws and all the while thinking of new, painful ways to punish themselves into a more socially acceptable shape.
But in the U.S., there is also the I-don’t-give-a-damn-so-you-can-shove-it constituent, the women who just let their hair go gray when it goes gray, who do not curse their bodies for growing slightly softer and rounder with age, who wear comfortable shoes even though they may not be the cutest style, who think a lot more about whether their buying practices are supporting child labor than whether the pieces are the most modern or the most flattering.
I have always admired these women, women like my mother who approach life with a healthy balance of stylish sense and graceful acceptance. Women who embody Anne Lammott’s longing to, as they age, earn a face of kindness and integrity. This is the kind of woman I want to be, and, up until recently, I had plenty of role models for that.
But if the superficial forces are still alive and well in the US of A, they’ve totally taken over the women of Lithuania.
I walk to and from the university each day, and each day I feel as though I am wearing a giant cardboard placard that reads: “I, Michelle Webster-Hein, have given up.” Mostly this has to do with my shoes. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to traverse 35 minutes to and fro in my cute teaching flats, so each morning I stab my vanity within an inch of its life by donning my beat-up sneakers over my tights and making the trek. One day last week I was wearing a pair of striped capris. With tennis-shoes.
“I look like a clown,” I told Scott as I gazed into the full-length mirror that morning. I was hoping that he would contradict me. He responded by humming the carnival tune and dancing around like a drunken marionette.
But it’s not just the shoes. It’s the whole damn thing: the make-up, the perfectly-styled hair, the matching handbags. The overwhelming number of stick-thin women who seriously look like they just stepped out of a Vogue advertisement. It makes me feel like I used to in high school shuffling back and forth between classes in my marching band sweatshirt. Only here it’s worse because here no one else even considered joining marching band.
I shared my observations with a friend who is slightly older and much wiser than me. She told me about her own Feminist-Marxist interpretation as to why Lithuanian women dress the way they do. Basically, they don’t have as many opportunities here as they do on our side of the pond, so they have to boost their “assets”. Fair enough. Another friend of mine claimed that they dress that way because, due to alcoholism and lack of male role models, the pickings are slim, and, as a result, the competition is high. Another valid point.
So why should this make me angry? Can’t I just chalk it up to cultural/personal differences and let it go?
Not yet, not until I say this and remind myself that I believe it: Society’s ideals of beauty keep women down. They keep us down because they are always asking of us the impossible, the impossible into which, to make others happy, we end up pouring so much of our precious time and our precious resources, all, ultimately, to no avail.
And, though sometimes I feel these young years slipping past too quickly, though sometimes I want with all of my heart to be that grand and ageless turner of heads, I will not be a part of it. I will seek true beauty, and the rest I will let go.
So now I am 29, a number divisible by nothing save one and itself. A number that makes no neat set of rows. A number that only fits into something as wild and wide and yielding as the sea around my fingers and the sand around my feet.
Monday, 7 September 2009
Lithuania is great; on the other hand, ...
Ok. Since I don’t have as much time anymore, I’ll give you the abbreviated version of the witty-yet-tender, pulitzer-prize-worthy entry I wrote earlier and accidentally deleted.
My students have been working on conjunctive adverbs (therefore, in addition, nevertheless, etc.), and I asked them to write 5 sentences, one using the connector “on the other hand.” One student came up with this:
“He’s a great boss; on the other hand, he’s a brutal dictator.”
Ah, duplicity. Which leads me to the title of my post.
Lithuania is great; on the other hand…
1) I ordered fish-eel soup (my own fault), in which were drifting fins and long bits of bone.
2) Scott has come down with a feverish cold and been out sick for three days. Poor guy. He’s feeling better now, but I think his two jobs are putting a major strain on his natural resources. I tell him to consider cutting back his hours, but he is dedicated to both endeavors and won’t hear of it.
3) Because Scott was sick, I went grocery shopping alone and got stuck in the rain dragging 40 pounds of food and cleaning products 10 blocks home along the already-muddy sidewalk. (This is actually a valuable lesson which also explains why people go shopping every day here, or at least every couple of days.)
4) Anyone who is reading this is most likely not here.
Yes, Lithuania is the experience of a lifetime, and we haven't once regretted our decision to come here. Still, sometimes even the shadows move differently across my ceiling at night, and, although I have propped up my chin with an unbreakable stick, I miss all of you. I miss my home.
My students have been working on conjunctive adverbs (therefore, in addition, nevertheless, etc.), and I asked them to write 5 sentences, one using the connector “on the other hand.” One student came up with this:
“He’s a great boss; on the other hand, he’s a brutal dictator.”
Ah, duplicity. Which leads me to the title of my post.
Lithuania is great; on the other hand…
1) I ordered fish-eel soup (my own fault), in which were drifting fins and long bits of bone.
2) Scott has come down with a feverish cold and been out sick for three days. Poor guy. He’s feeling better now, but I think his two jobs are putting a major strain on his natural resources. I tell him to consider cutting back his hours, but he is dedicated to both endeavors and won’t hear of it.
3) Because Scott was sick, I went grocery shopping alone and got stuck in the rain dragging 40 pounds of food and cleaning products 10 blocks home along the already-muddy sidewalk. (This is actually a valuable lesson which also explains why people go shopping every day here, or at least every couple of days.)
4) Anyone who is reading this is most likely not here.
Yes, Lithuania is the experience of a lifetime, and we haven't once regretted our decision to come here. Still, sometimes even the shadows move differently across my ceiling at night, and, although I have propped up my chin with an unbreakable stick, I miss all of you. I miss my home.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
First Days
September 1st, unless it lands on a weekend, is always the first day of school in Lithuania and, as such, it’s also a national holiday. The students all wear starched and pressed uniforms and carry handfuls of flowers to their teachers. Lithuanian folk dancers in traditional clothing spin out their patterned skirts in the public squares. The mayor gives a well-attended oration, and everybody cheers. It feels the way the first day of school was always supposed to feel had there been no bullies or puberty, just a promising year full of good books and good work and, at least for that day, the infinite possibility of knowledge taking you wherever you wanted to go.
All that possibility felt nearly palpable this morning as I crossed the bridge over the green-gold river and passed the men with their bristle brooms and reflective jackets spot-cleaning the sidewalks, the women with their kerchiefs and puckered faces setting out the wooden crates of pears and plums and, today, flowers at the roadside stands and, of course, the children, even a teenage boy with dirty sneakers and greasy hair but also with a crisp green blazer and arms full of roses.
It was in that wash of excitement and apprehension that I arrived at the school well before 8 o’clock and promptly set up shop in the lecture hall, about 30 minutes early.
At this point, it would probably be helpful to explain what exactly I’m doing here. I am one of the two instructors in the Intensive English Program, which is only one year old. We have a total of 30 students whose English is not yet high enough for university study. Our job is, in nine months, to get each student’s English to that point. My workload is pretty heavy for a professor: I have 16 teaching hours per week, and one of them is a writing class (6 assignments with 2-3 drafts of each!), not exactly a light prep. Although I will surely get tired and discouraged, right now I am head-over-heels in love with the challenge and all of the surprises in store. As evidenced by my showing up half an hour before class was supposed to start.
So, back in the lecture hall, I occupied myself by turning on and off the speakers (just to make sure they were working), turning on and off the projector, moving the whiteboard to the middle of the stage and then back and then somewhere in the middle, rereading my lesson plans, and reapplying my chapstick.
Despite fueling all of my neuroses, when the students finally started showing up, I behaved like a normal human being: I smiled, said “Welcome!”, and played selections from Bach’s Cello Suites over the speakers, partly to make sure the speakers were still working and partly to infuse the sense of calm, purpose, and poise I wanted so desperately to feel.
Though I worry myself into a blind panic whenever I have to stand in front of a classroom for the first time, I think that teaching will always be a part of my life no matter what I end up ultimately doing. As my students file into their rows with their new notebooks and planners and pens, their bashful glances, some of the boys in ties-one in a full suit!-I am overcome by this strange mixture of maternal adoration and concern for their well-being. I have always had this feeling when it comes to new students, and I have yet to decide whether or not it’s healthy. All I know is that I want to try my damnedest to 1) give them the best opportunities possible and 2) not look like an obsequious fool.
In this spirit of joy and quiet concern, my classes slid smoothly by. I found the teaching zone and stayed there. By the end of the day, I learned everyone’s names and, I hope, imparted a sense of purpose, hope, and goodwill. In other words, LCC was not my old high school, I did not get lost, my lesson plans were not covered in cartoon characters, my students were not students whom I’d failed before, and I lost no crucial pieces of clothing. And so, I believe I can, compared to my dreams at least, declare my first day teaching at LCC a success.
All that possibility felt nearly palpable this morning as I crossed the bridge over the green-gold river and passed the men with their bristle brooms and reflective jackets spot-cleaning the sidewalks, the women with their kerchiefs and puckered faces setting out the wooden crates of pears and plums and, today, flowers at the roadside stands and, of course, the children, even a teenage boy with dirty sneakers and greasy hair but also with a crisp green blazer and arms full of roses.
It was in that wash of excitement and apprehension that I arrived at the school well before 8 o’clock and promptly set up shop in the lecture hall, about 30 minutes early.
At this point, it would probably be helpful to explain what exactly I’m doing here. I am one of the two instructors in the Intensive English Program, which is only one year old. We have a total of 30 students whose English is not yet high enough for university study. Our job is, in nine months, to get each student’s English to that point. My workload is pretty heavy for a professor: I have 16 teaching hours per week, and one of them is a writing class (6 assignments with 2-3 drafts of each!), not exactly a light prep. Although I will surely get tired and discouraged, right now I am head-over-heels in love with the challenge and all of the surprises in store. As evidenced by my showing up half an hour before class was supposed to start.
So, back in the lecture hall, I occupied myself by turning on and off the speakers (just to make sure they were working), turning on and off the projector, moving the whiteboard to the middle of the stage and then back and then somewhere in the middle, rereading my lesson plans, and reapplying my chapstick.
Despite fueling all of my neuroses, when the students finally started showing up, I behaved like a normal human being: I smiled, said “Welcome!”, and played selections from Bach’s Cello Suites over the speakers, partly to make sure the speakers were still working and partly to infuse the sense of calm, purpose, and poise I wanted so desperately to feel.
Though I worry myself into a blind panic whenever I have to stand in front of a classroom for the first time, I think that teaching will always be a part of my life no matter what I end up ultimately doing. As my students file into their rows with their new notebooks and planners and pens, their bashful glances, some of the boys in ties-one in a full suit!-I am overcome by this strange mixture of maternal adoration and concern for their well-being. I have always had this feeling when it comes to new students, and I have yet to decide whether or not it’s healthy. All I know is that I want to try my damnedest to 1) give them the best opportunities possible and 2) not look like an obsequious fool.
In this spirit of joy and quiet concern, my classes slid smoothly by. I found the teaching zone and stayed there. By the end of the day, I learned everyone’s names and, I hope, imparted a sense of purpose, hope, and goodwill. In other words, LCC was not my old high school, I did not get lost, my lesson plans were not covered in cartoon characters, my students were not students whom I’d failed before, and I lost no crucial pieces of clothing. And so, I believe I can, compared to my dreams at least, declare my first day teaching at LCC a success.
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