Manic Bookstore Cafe

At last, queuing has come to my small Ohio town. It's Saturday morning, and I sit here in my study, listening to the birds and the lawnmowers, feeling shock and awe at the merging of two worlds. Not often do my Soviet experiences translate into my American life. I remember when I first arrived in the Soviet Union as a 21-year-old, and people asked me: "what did you expect to find? bears wandering the streets?" I would simply reply: "nothing. I had no expectations. I came to find whatever was here." And it was a rich and sometimes bewildering experience. Recently my daughter wrote a graphic novel for history class about me. She needed a person to interview who had lived through a "historic event," so we chose perestroika and the demise of the Soviet system. Certainly my stories seemed exotic to her -- standing in line, being chastised on the street by grandmothers who thought I should be wearing a warmer hat, standing in line, having my mail arri...

It's almost the last day of May, and it finally feels like May. This winter was a tough one for many in central Ohio (and in other places across the world). As a writer and educator, I'm always in favor of new vocabulary words, but "polar vortex" was one I could have done without. Even more bitter, then, that it snowed through mid-April and that the first half of May was colder and wetter than usual. On May 17 there were still few leaves on the trees, and I stood in the cold rain at my daughter's conference track meet watching hail bounce off the track. The cold winter echoed the feeling of cold war that emerged in the weeks after the Russian Olympics. I can barely remember my concerns about the dangers of terrorist attacks in Sochi, given what has transpired in Crimea and eastern Ukraine since then. Yesterday I heard the song "Get Lucky" in a shop in my town and was transported back to the week in February when I watched the Russian Police Ch...

When I was in middle school, I enrolled in French class. We were permitted to choose our own names, and for some reason I was reborn as Vivienne (in 7th grade). And then  Annick (in 8th). And eventually Angelique (in high school). We learned the usual stuff: J'habite à Paris.   C'est mon frère. Où est le Louvre? But we also learned that language and culture can be imbibed through food. Yours truly, fourth from left, in 1979 Mme. Sandburg told us tales of her year in Paris, when she had very little money and would often buy a can of peaches to eat on a park bench, pretending that the drunk on the next bench wasn't drooling in his sleep and that her near-starvation was somehow romantic rather than debilitating. She coached us on our irregular verbs and introduced a couple of different tenses, and she brought us to triumph on a National French Exam, where as I recall I scored about 7th in the country in knowledge of 1st year French language. So I was clearly imbib...