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Yahrzeit

“It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.”

My grandmother departed this life about a month short of her 102^nd birthday. Whenever anyone says that I have “good genes” and can expect a similarly lengthy tenure this side of paradise, I immediately rush to correct them. First, she was an outlier; we do not have longevity in my family, and my father did not make it to 75. Second, her long, long, LONG life was nowhere near a blessing that people imagine it to be, not to herself and not to her immediate family.

Grandmother lived life with an unshakeable belief that her way was always right. She tolerated no challenges to her authority, even in little things[1]. I would maybe concede that there might be something to this, being myself a person prone to doubts, regrets, and second-guessing, had any of it given her any joy. She often repeated her life’s philosophy: you have to hate yourself, and that will inspire you to be a better person. But even as a child, I suspected that deriving inspiration from self-hatred is not going to be my path in life. Years later, I came to the conclusion that her inflexibility was simply the result of lack of introspection, fear of the unknown and the unknowable, and an absence of curiosity.

She had a hard life, but that is neither an excuse nor an explanation. A lot of people have had hard lives. She lost her father as a teenager—but as far as losing fathers, I can certainly do her better. She lived through the wars—yes, plural, because she would always mention the Russo-Finnish War of 1939 in the same breath as The Great Patriotic War. I once read a book on history’s dumbest wars[2], and was delighted to recognize the Winter War as “Grandma’s War”. But again, the number of people who were affected by wars in their lifetime does not necessarily equal the number of people who permanently lose their joie de vivre. While I suspect that the privations and fear of the dark decade of the 1930s in the Soviet Union were not helped by one of history’s most stupid wars, our family did not lose anyone to it, or even to the massive devastation that followed, and did not live in a territory that was occupied by anyone since the Tatars-Mongols came to town in the 13^th century. And even my grandmother was not old enough to remember that. All of my friends had grandparents (and some even parents) who lived through The War, yet most of them were not forced to wage their private battle for independence against their own families.

A nephew drowned in the 1950s, which seemed to affect grandmother more than the young man’s own mother, my grandfather’s older sister. Grandmother drew the following conclusions from his accidental death: (1) water must be feared, and learning to swim can only lead to trouble (which made my growing up on a river and spending all the summers of my childhood at the seaside that much less pleasurable), (2) a tragedy is sure to befall your children as soon as you look away (despite the fact that the beloved nephew was an adult when he died—it truly was just an accident, a tragic accident that can happen to anyone who is living a life and doing things in the world), and (3) daring to enjoy life after bad things happen to loved ones makes you a bad person. The strongest condemnation that grandmother voiced about her sister in law who survived the death of a son was that “she must have loved herself too much”—too much for what? For going on living? Yes, that was indeed the implication, for loving oneself was the greatest character flaw she could imagine.

To be fair—though fairness has never entered into our relationship—the world has changed quite a bit from the time she was taking life lessons from her own mother in the 1920s to the time she was attempting to impart these instructions to me half a century later, and more drastically still to the present day. Looking back, I have trouble recalling any words of wisdom from her which I have stored away or applied to any situation in my life. There was always a lot about decorum, much of it so embarrassing that my hand does not rise to share it here. There was quite a bit about appearances, equally outdated and, not surprisingly, heavy on body shaming. But nowhere did she stand out quite like she did in teaching me basic homemaking skills: plucking chickens[3], scrubbing floors (on hands and knees—never make it easy by using a mop), darning socks, etc. Maybe the last one is not entirely useless—but that is mostly because I enjoy the needle and thread crafts. Still, her point was that no one will marry a girl who could not do these things. Despite my reasonable and consistent academic success, she labeled me quite early on as a potential failure in life due to my lack of enthusiasm for cleaning supplies over books, and for my unswerving commitment to learn how to enjoy life rather than endure it.

Food was the biggest and, in retrospect, the only language of love that she spoke. Talking about anything beyond the basic needs was simply not done. Are you hungry? If yes, have some bread with either salt or sugar. If not, go play outside. God, she was so tough when she was raising me, and in the era when it was no longer really necessary! She was always wearing an apron, always stirring a pot—no, literally, an apron was a part of her “uniform”. In her later years, when she would come to my house, she would bring an apron to wear around. Later still, she would bring a change of work clothes, an old dress that was no longer fit to be seen in public. My house was never clean enough for her.

She always made sure that I was well fed and clothed, and my physical needs were always met. She never said I looked nice without adding that something was off in my appearance. She never told me I did something well without mentioning that someone else did it better. She often lamented that I was not living the life that she felt I should be living in order to make her proud. I never tried hard enough, and I never measured up. I lived with her until I was almost 13, and it was possibly the greatest disappointment of her life that there came a day when she lost control of mine.

To many, she was a good friend, loyal, present, and generous. She never forgot a birthday and never refused a request for help. She kept in touch with several generations of acquaintances, neighbors, and distant relatives. Her tirelessness, which did not flag until her 90s, was remarkable, and I continue to hope that I inherited a sufficient fraction of it.

She outlived all her friends and most relatives, including some who were much younger. Only a handful of people remain who really knew her. There were some good times; I am deeply sad that there were not more.

[1] There was one thing—she did not monitor what I read, either among the books we had at home or the books I would pick up from the various libraries I frequented. Her loss of vigilance on this front was my saving grace, although she did think that I spent too much time reading and not enough outdoors.

[2] Stupid Wars: A Citizen’s Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions, by Ed Strosser and Michael Prince

[3] Did my aversion to poultry start in childhood? Over the past few decades, I worked my way from observing grandma burning feathers off chickens with a blowtorch to experiencing mild nausea at so much as a sight of a cooked chicken breast. It seems to be socially acceptable to be teased about this; I am happy to provide this cheap laugh.

Grandma’s teiglach. I have never tasted it anywhere else, and I do not make it nearly as well as she did.

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Tooth Fairy

Last year, I lost my favorite tooth. I mean, I did not misplace it, nor did it fall out. It was surgically removed. This tooth, #6, was my first root canal and my first crown. My own grandfather put the crown on it, made from a melted down earring, and it lasted for decades. Eventually, the crown wore out, and then the tooth itself. There was even another root canal in the mix, so suffice it to say, #6 and I were bonded by hardship. On the day when #6 and I finally parted ways, the nurse offered me nitrous oxide and oxygen, and how could I say no? I welcome any option that results in less or no pain for me.

Jubilee Square. Motorbuilders Palace is on the left. The clinic is on the right.

As I was dutifully breathing in and out, an unbidden memory came to me, of me and my classmates trooping down Lenin Avenue to the Jubilee Square (the one with the Motorbuilders Palace [https://oldladywriting.com/2020/08/18/valor-and-glory-of-the-motorbuilders/]. In my mind’s eye, I saw the golden Russian autumn sung by poets, maple leaves everywhere, the only melancholy season of an ever-sunshiny year. The school year has begun long ago enough to be a bore and a burden, and the time has come for one of the most unpleasant organized events of the Soviet school system—the dental checkup. It is about a mile from the school to the clinic—the longest mile. If ever I felt like a lamb to the slaughter, this was most certainly the time. Usually, I got some kind of exemption, being raised by dentists and being dragged to the children’s dental clinic by my grandmother on my own free time, but that day, I was all out of aces. It is also possible that this was shortly after my grandmother took me to the clinic and I escaped, bolting out of the torture chair and making it halfway through Jubilee Square before I was captured (traffic in those days was unimpressive, but not nonexistent—I was absolutely in danger of being struck by a bus, a fate still preferable to any dental procedure). I have to add, individual cabinets are a Western luxury. In Soviet Russia, an army of Orin Scrivello clones with their whirring drills were leaning over screaming kids in one big room in a fog of ether.

I have a lot to say about growing up in an apartment where our kitchen doubled as the prosthodontist’s office, but that is another story for another time. But one thing I know is true, and that is that our home never smelled of ether. Maybe grandpa had no access to it. Maybe the smells of grandma’s cooking overwhelmed. Regardless, the scents of home were not medicinal. And I know this because had I been immune to these odors, I would not have been so jolted into panic each time I entered a Soviet dental clinic and been positively engulfed by that distinct piercing stench. A mere whiff was enough to activate the fight-or-flight instinct. It was always flight, because fighting presumes staying, and there are no fools. Flee, always flee.

The unintended consequence of my recurrent, determined, and frantic rejections of the most feared dental procedures was that my grandmother gave up (a precursor of things to come—a scythe came upon a stone, as in, she met her match when it comes to wills of iron), leaving me at the mercy of the school system. And so began the long march.

The clinic where my grandmother worked. The was not just dentistry here, but other tortures as well. To be continued…

I always think of that BBC commercial, “They say one’s cows are mad, they say one’s dentistry is diabolical” when I think of the dentists of my childhood. My grandfather did not work with children and was overwhelmingly busy with his relentless stream of patients, and my grandmother—well, I did not trust her. More specifically, I did not trust in her not taking care to not inflict pain. (Well, that was a lot of “nots”—also emblematic of my childhood).

That day, which my classmates and I anticipated with varying degree of fear but with unanimous distaste, was the source of much scheming. While most of them were fairly resigned to this grim fate, I had one accomplice whose fear of the dentist actually exceeded my own. His name was Max, and he was a freethinker. I am told he eventually became an alcoholic, a fate not only unsurprising but entirely predictable given both his environment and spirit (no pun intended). But when I knew him, ages seven to 12, he was a shrewd kid with a profound dislike of conformity and authority. He was non-confrontational but steadfast in his avoidance of anything extra. He was the epitome of “quiet quitting” decades ahead of its time. One of his catchphrases was “And the lesson is going on”, whispered to me whenever a teacher would get distracted and go off on a tangent, meaning that while time is getting wasted, no work gets done, and that is its own reward. Max never got any exemptions from attending mandatory events, and yet he never attended them. He just did not show up. He was reprimanded, chastised, shamed, and accused of being an “individualist”. He gave zero you-know-well-whats. He was, of course, a member of my Link. [https://oldladywriting.com/2023/11/11/scrap-metal-fiasco/]

Max and I conferred and confirmed that we were not going to the dentist, with the class or without. Ever. We did not have the audacity to just not show up to school that day—that seemed just too brazen, and we were not hooligans. We were conscientious objectors. And so, as the column of the condemned dragged itself along that familiar tree-lined alley, led by our fearsome homeroom teacher, the grammatically and socially challenged instructor of algebra and geometry, the two of us simply ducked into the labyrinth of yards off Lenin Avenue. Without any regard for consequences, we ran for our lives. We were not good friends, merely coconspirators. We quickly went our own way, but for one brief shiny moment, we were bound by the shared taste of complete and utter freedom.

Lenin Ave. We escaped between those yellow buildings on the left. Photo taken in January; alas, I have no autumnal images to share.

And all these many years later, in a dental surgery under the calming influence of gas, it all came back to me, the sepia colors and the smell of fall leaves, the voices of my young comrades, the distinct flavor of childhood of unlimited future and potential, and the feeling of my long ago and far away home deep in my bones. It never ceases to amaze me how memories can be summoned by the most unlikely agents and at the most unlikely times. And how joy can be found even in the middle of pain.

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Scrap Metal Fiasco

“Nothing that happens to us after we are twelve matters very much.” J.M. Barrie

I must preface the following with a disclaimer. I have told this story so often that I am pretty certain I have already written it, so if you have already heard or read it, please let me know (and like it anyway).

I was six years old when I cautioned myself to beware, for I was surrounded by people who were not smarter than me. It might have been a devastating realization to a child that young. Instead, it was an inspiration to rally and rely on myself—the old “trust but verify” (which is, in fact, a Russian proverb), minus the trust. I proceeded to have an eventful childhood full of hijinks, camaraderie, and a singular focus on defying authority. Almost half a century later, I stand by every shenanigan, and only wish I had made more mischief. “Forget regret or life is yours to miss”—Jonathan Larson was also right.

In some late years of the seemingly never-ending stagnation of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, I was a Young Pioneer. Surrounded by like-minded and like-spirited delinquents-in-training, I vacillated between apathy and active defiance, usually settling on an attitude of passive aggression. My class of just under thirty pupils[1] was divided into three “links”, similar to a coed Cub Scout den without parents. In the most disorganized, wild, and irresponsible class, I predictably belonged to the laziest and most undisciplined link. There were eight of us, if memory serves, which included a core group of restless and adventurous girlfriends, and a couple of unpopular boys. To snatch defeat out of the jaws of any potential victory was almost a point of honor for me and my young comrades. To be fair, we usually started out doing what we were supposed to, and proceeded to fail in an epic manner. None illustrates this better than the one time we collected scrap metal. So unmitigated was this disaster that our entire school was banned from this time-honored activity for my remaining time back in the USSR.

The day of scrap metal collection, Link One and Three departed post haste in search thereof. We members of Link Two briefly lingered in class. Our Link Leader, an earnest, sweet girl who stood alone in our entire class as a follower of the prevailing ideology, made a short motivational speech along the lines of, do not attempt to evade your Young Pioneer duty. This motivated the rest of us to want to bail on the whole thing, but someone yelled “Construction”, and we rallied.

There used to be a small park next to my school with a couple of see-saws and slides. I used to come there on field trips with my daycare, and it was still there when I was in first grade. However, by the start of second grade, the little friendly playground was demolished and taken over by construction of the regional archives. Five years later, the site of the stalled construction was the school’s perpetual grim neighbor[2]. There was a crane which never seemed to move, and the more daring of us enjoyed crawling through the hole in the fence and all over what looked like the ruins of an old fortress[3].

And so of course construction (and we called it just that, as in “let’s go and find some metal at the construction”) became our first target. Several of us filed through the habitual hole in the fence, but were dismayed to find that the site was picked over. The better organized and more ideologically focused Links One and Three already raided it and carried off all the spare metal! As I say, my little gang was always a day late and a ruble short. We took a couple of abandoned hammers and managed to detach a piece of pipe we determined to be nonessential, but it was not nearly enough. (Surprisingly, no one thought to cut the fence down for scraps).

My school was located in a residential urban area, surrounded by apartment buildings. It was an older, more established area of the city, though not quite the prestigious historic center. Raiding the surrounding courtyards, we added a couple of unattended shovels and rakes to our bounty. It was a bit of a task to stop the boys from hitting each other with the shovels, but I do not recall any significant injuries during this escapade.

In one of the courtyards, we spotted a child playing with a toy metal wagon and attempted to negotiate surrender, but his vigilant grandma chased us off with a broom. We also kept losing link members with every encounter, kind of like when Three Musketeers started off for England in search of the queen’s diamonds. Getting distracted, losing interest, and entirely changing course was typical behavior for me and my friends during any school-sanctioned undertaking.

Still, five intrepid girls persevered, and fortune really smiled on us when we encountered a clearly abandoned metal bed frame in one of the courtyards—with wheels, and even a mattress to boot! Never questioning why a bed would be parked near an apartment building entrance, we immediately threw off the unnecessary ballast of a mattress, situated our rakes, shovels, and hammers on the springs, and proceeded to move the bed on out. It was a swift and stealthy getaway, several middle-schoolers in school uniforms[4] earnestly pushing a bed along a lively avenue. Some passers-by stared, some wondered, none dared to stop the purposeful Young Pioneers.

Not the image of that actual bed. It is surprising how a search for “metal bed with wheels” only comes up with images of hospital beds…

What should have been the long-sought success not just for our merry band of misfits but for the entire class went decidedly pear shaped, for the owners of the all this paraphernalia (neighbors in the process of moving, careless gardeners, construction supervisor) eventually found their way to our school and claimed their belongings. The worst part was that the bulk of our bounty, the bed and garden tools, was easily returned with apologies because—private property, so a “remnant of the past”, in the ideology of the times. It was the looting of the construction site—“plunder of state property”—that was the real offense, and our couple of hammers and the piece of nonessential pipe were the least of it. The more proactive students got there before us and in their zeal carried off everything that was not nailed down, and some things that were, including the nails themselves. I never got the opportunity to participate in collecting scrap metal again, but I will never forget our glorious entry into the school courtyard, riding on a bed, wielding a rake—Young Pioneer triumphant!

[1] In the Soviet Union, and I believe in today’s Russia as well, you moved from grade 1 to 8 with the same group of 30 or so students, took the same classes, and had the same teachers. In my school, there were 3 classes to a “parallel”. After grade 8, a third of the students who did not pass the high school entrance exams would go on to trade and vocational schools, and the rest were reshuffled into 2 classes. My school, which housed grades 1 to 10 (and later, the added 11^th grade), would graduate about 60 students from high school.

[2] First, not a uniquely Soviet issue. Second, when I visited in 2018, I saw the unimpressive final product. I did not even take a picture of it. (I found this on GoogleMaps)

[3] If this is not a classic example of “attractive nuisance”, I do not know what is. What we thought we were getting versus what we got (not actual photos).

[4] Brown woolen dresses with black aprons.