The Price of Admission

A neatly folded $20 bill lay on the ground at my feet as Martine and I walked up to Fort Mason. In front of us six foreign young men were just starting to jog up the hill. I showed her the bill, pocketed it, and we nodded to each other.

"Did any of you lose some money?"

They looked at each other, looked at us, frowned suspiciously.

"Do you speak English?"

At this point one of them said, with a slight accent, "Yes of course we do." 

I repeated my original question and one of them finally started fumbling in his pants pocket, to pull out an empty hand.

"Yes. I did!"

They must've decided we were not just looking to shake them up.

"What did you lose?"

When he confirmed it was a $20 bill, I gave it to him. We learned they were running to the bridge and he had their taxi fare home. They were extremely relieved and grateful.

Martine and I proceeded to walk to the bridge and of course the world returned the gift many-fold. The day grew more beautiful by the minute. The bridge was reflected in the calm bay; flower petal clouds danced overhead; the low, low tide invited our footprints onto the sand; and crabs looked for a lift to the water.

A pelican waited for us on the fishing dock as we approached the warming hut. It sat patiently as we posed with it, as if it had been paid for the session. Overhead, the California Brown Pelican seems like just a large brown bird. Up close he had a red chin, pale gold head, eyes inset in pink diamonds, and his gently striated beak ended with a small yellow hook. We worried that he might be injured, but the fisherman assured us he had shown up just before we did.

As we wrapped up our iPhone photo shoot, he flew off in front of us and joined the sea lions and grebes who were fishing nearby.

Really, entry to that walk was the best ticket in town yesterday. 

My Oldest Friend

I had dinner with my childhood friend Alek the other day. At one point he said, "You know Tania, other than your brother I may be the first person you ever saw and still know. For sure, you guys are my oldest friends."

Neither of us remembers that first time when our families crossed paths briefly in a refugee camp in Trieste in 1950. Alek and his family left for Venezuela long before any memories formed in my infant mind. My memory of Alek coming to America when I was around 10, however, couldn't be stronger.

"Oh, I bet you had a crush on him," said his friend Jane as we waited to be served, smiling fondly at us, as if imagining that possibility.

I glanced blankly at Alek, and then we both laughed. By the time we reached young adulthood, Alek was a handsome Olympic-quality swimmer with a PhD in math from Berkeley. But the 10-year-old child my Mama took in the summer that his own mother was still trapped in Venezuela would have been on my hit list for torture or worse. Certainly a crush was not in the range of possibilities.

"Why can't you be more like Alek?" is all I can remember Mama preaching to me that summer at Stanislavka, our name for the converted chicken coops we summered at on the Stanislaus River near Knight's Ferry. You would've thought the sun rose and set on this detested suck-up who was always polite and obedient—behavior unimaginable to me.

Alek's mother Olga eventually made it to America, and tried to teach me to play piano for several years before giving up in despair. Alek and my brother became best friends. By high school I learned to tolerate him, and we were friends in college. Years later I became the nominal godmother to his son Adrian, in a Russian Orthodox ceremony at our home that had to be kept secret from his wife Janet's Jewish parents. Cancer took our spouses within months of each other a few years ago. Now our most regular contact is his annual question about where to send his Christmas letter. And yet we know each other's deepest histories.

This summer we might walk across Slovenia together, with a remote relative of a distant young cousin of Alek's whom I helped find a job in America when he was fleeing the conflict that decimated Yugoslavia. Last summer when Sasha and I were traveling in Serbia, visiting our own distant relatives, we ran into this young man—now living and working in Silicon Valley—by completely insane happenstance in the town of Novi Sad, and set off the train of events leading to this walk. 

As I try to write this story in as few words as possible and still come up with anything that makes the slightest bit of sense, I see why my book about Mama's life gets longer and longer until I punch it back into obedience. Alek will probably not make it in, but perhaps there's another book here…

Endings and Beginnings

Yesterday I was working on the finishing touches of the book about my mother, Mother Tongue. The final words are in her language. They are: 

Ljubim te, Mama. Uvek. 

They mean - I love you, Mama. Always.

I launched into that book when I imagined a conversation between my maternal grandparents as they were being forced to leave their homeland around 1920. This scene had to do with grapes on hillsides, roughhewn stone houses, Turkish coffee. A man who loved his daughters. A woman about to give birth to my mother.

This morning, with little forethought, I launched into a book about my father. It has no title yet. It will be a long time before I figure out what it is about. The first scene was triggered by something I wrote about recently, having to do with Greek islands, refugees, and the coincidence of my father's family fleeing 100 years ago to the same islands being populated in similar circumstances today. 

The book begins with the family fleeing their homeland in 1920, as my father is three years old. Here's the first scene as it emerged from the fog of my mind this morning.

"God damn your mother. God damn all mothers in law. God damn the world. She can go back to Russia if she wants, she can go to hell if she wants," said Daria Pavlovna Romanova Amochaeva as her family stepped onto the bleak shore of Lemnos, an island in the Aegean Sea, a waypoint to an unknown destination, an end to a life as it had been lived for a thousand years. And her husband's mother still refused to get off the ship.

They say to write well you have to get in the minds of your character and just go for it. I doubt many people would get into their grandmother's mind and come up with that opening. But then, they didn't know my grandmother.

And I promise I did not orchestrate the weather pattern over San Francisco Bay for the last two days.