There's a Stranger in Mommy's Bed

Sometimes Mommy gets really tired. She says that working mothers reach proportions of exhaustion that exceed the imagination. In such cases, what they say and do have little resemblance to common sense. I guess that must be right, if I judge by my Mommy.

For example, let me tell you what happened to her one weekend. Friday evening after a long and frustrating, to say nothing of exhausting, week at work, she fell asleep on the living room sofa. (She does that a lot. She says she is going to watch television, but she never does. She just stares at the screen for a few minutes, then topples over. I have never seen her watch a whole television show, like I do.)
Anyway, she did her frequent act of screen staring and toppling over on the Friday evening I am talking about. My Daddy, of course, could not wake her up; he never can when she topples over asleep. So, my sister found her asleep on the couch on Saturday morning.

"Mom, wake up!" she said.

"Huh?" Mommy struggled to bring herself back into the world of the living. It really is not very easy to wake up Mommy.

"Mom, Mom! You're on the couch! Why aren't you in bed?"

Mommy tried groggily to recall where she was and why. "Oh, because when I tried to go to bed, there was someone in my bed," Mommy mumbled and turned over to go back to sleep.

That was a scary thought! My sister crept cautiously into Mommy's bedroom to see who or what was in the bed.

"Mom, Mom!" My sister had come back and was shaking Mommy, trying to get her to wake up. It is very, very hard to wake up Mommy.

"That's Dad in the bed!" my sister told her.

"Oh," Mommy mumbled and turned over to go back to sleep again.

"Mom," my sister asked with a tone of great surprise. "If you thought there was a stranger in your bed, why didn't you call the police, instead of just simply choosing another place to sleep?"

Conclusion: Some Mommies get very, very tired!
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This story is excerpted from a collection of vignettes that I helped Doah, my severely mentally challenged youngest son, to write and publish several years ago (copyright 2003). It was my attempt to help him understand literacy and the purpose of writing and reading.

Lost Ticket

Eight years after spending wintry days in Akademgorodok, home to the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences, where, as a doctoral candidate, I researched Siberian dialects under the tutelage of the director of the Institute of Philology, I found myself in Krasnoyarsk, another Siberian city, lecturing to administrators and teachers at the request of the Siberian Ministry of Education, which hoped to make some radical changes in its educational system. Krasnoyarsk, an industrialized city with a population of one million people, located an hour south of the famous Divnegorsk hydroelectric dam on the Yeneisei River, east of the Ob, and in the northern taiga, contrasted vividly with the 8-block town of Akademgorodok. The people, though, were the same sort of warm, kind, and supportive colleagues, and I was able to establish a working bond that lasted over a period of several years of come-and-go lecturing (and more) there.

At one point, I was given a choice of conducting a seminar in Krasnoyarsk, St. Petersburg, or Moscow. I chose Krasnoyarsk, and when I arrived there in the middle of the winter without gloves, having forgotten about the tens-of-degrees-below-zero temperatures, one of my friends who met me at the airport pulled the mittens of her hands and handed them to me, saying, “We knew you would choose Siberia. Your heart is here.”

Of course, she was right — and why not? Any Siberian I know will hand you the mittens off his or her hands in the middle of the winter!

More frequently than with any other institution in Russia, I worked with Universe School. Headed by Dr. Isak Frumin, now a leader in the Moscow branch of the World Bank and an unusually innovative school principal, Universe School was a K-12 laboratory school for the University of Krasnoyarsk, overseen by the Department of Educational Psychology, where I had upon occasion lectured to the faculty.

Isak turned out to be a lifesaver. On my first trip to Krasnoyarsk, which I made jointly with a colleague, I ended up in Moscow with two huge boxes of books and handouts for the seminars that a colleague and I were to conduct there. At Domodedovo Airport, the domestic airport serving Siberia and the southern cities of the former Soviet Union, I found to my horror that nowhere did I have my ticket to Krasnoyarsk. It had either been left at the counter when I checked in for the Moscow flight in London or I had forgotten it at home. Computerization of ticketing was not a feature of airlines in Moscow at the time. Since I had no way to prove I had a ticket, I would have to purchase a new ticket, as well as pay overweight charges for the books. The total amount was high. My colleague and I put our resources together. It was enough either to purchase a round-trip ticket or to pay for the books and purchase a one-way ticket. My colleague wanted to leave the books behind. I was comfortable with taking my chances on being able to get out of Siberia. I chose the second option. We took the books, and I went to Siberia on a one-way ticket.

(I seemed to make a habit of going to Siberia on one-way tickets. The research stay described above had been the result of my accepting a one-way ticket -- with Lizzie in tow -- to Siberia, confident that I would somehow be able to get a return ticket although I had been told none were available at the time; they weren't available later, either, so, oops!, I had to overstay my visa. A few years after my trip to Krasnoyarsk, I was at a conference in Kemerovo, a Siberian mining town, with Lizzie’s younger brother, Shane, and was quite pleased to have a round-trip ticket for each of us in hand. When we got to the Kemerovo Airport, I bragged to Shane, “This is the first time I have been in Siberia on a round-trip ticket.”

A stickler for details, 15-year-old Shane looked carefully at our tickets, then up at me. “Don’t be so sure, Mom,” he said. “This ticket is for yesterday.”

As usual, Someone watched over us, and we made it out of Kemerovo even though we did not have everything we needed in our possession. In this case, because there was a child involved, the airline waived its rules and let us fly space available on the next plane out. Even officials in Russia make special cases when children are involved.)

In Krasnoyarsk, the only “child” involved was a rather large and rather old one — me. Nonetheless, as anticipated, I was rescued. When Isak learned of the situation, he purchased a return ticket for me with Universe School funds. That was not quite fair in my mind, and so I made a deal. Instead of returning the ruble or dollar amount of the ticket later, I would find an equivalent amount of hard-to-acquire Western books that he needed for the school library and send them to him. This was definitely a win-win situation, especially since I found many of the books at library sales and was able to purchase nearly ten times the value of the ticket in books for an amount equivalent to the cost of the ticket. More than that, when people heard what I was doing, neighbors, colleagues, friends, and even libraries donated books, resulting in a treasure trove for Universe School. Seeing how so many people benefited — the school children from the books and the donors from a sense of contributing to a worthy cause — how lucky I was to have lost that ticket!

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

Honored Guests

Sometimes people called bigwigs visit Mommy. Usually these are very nice people, and they look just like my friends and me, only bigger. So I know why they are called big. Most, however, have very nice hair. In fact, none of them, as far as I can tell, wear wigs. (At least, I’m pretty sure they don’t because I pulled one’s hair once, and the hair stayed on his head.) Oh, well, maybe they just wear their big wigs on special occasions. I keep hoping to see them sometime, though, since other people seem to think they are pretty special things.

My brother says my mommy is not a very good entertainer because she has not bought much furniture. I guess he thinks that bigwigs need special chairs. Perhaps they do if they have their wigs on, but when they are with us—without their wigs—they seem to fit into our chairs just fine.

I will give you an example. On one occasion, Mommy entertained several bigwigs—all without their wigs. They sat around our dining room table on the fun chairs that my brothers and sisters and I use.

One settled into a desk chair that we rolled in from the office. (Mommy moves furniture from one place to another all the time; she calls it all-purpose furniture.) This bigwig must have been having a fun time with our desk chair because he kept rolling up to and away from the table. Mommy did not say anything to him about this bad behavior. That was unfair. She never lets me play that way.
Bigwig #2 sat in one of our lawn chairs. The chair was low, and the table was high. His chin was at the level of the table. My brother thought he should have some pillows, but our guest said he was okay. Clearly, he was. His mouth was closer to his plate than anyone else’s was. That meant that it would be easier not to spill food so that Mommy would not get mad at him.

Bigwig #3 perched on top of my old, rickety high chair. It’s so old that it is called an “anteek.” It is a neat chair because it wobbles in lots of fun ways. Sometimes if you get it wobbling fast enough, it tips over. Wheee! Mommy does not like that. She does not let me sit on the high chair anymore. I do not think it is fair that she let our guest sit there. Fair or not, I tried to be nice. I pushed the high chair so that he could see how much fun the wobble was. That did not make Mommy happy. I guess my brother is right. She does not know how to entertain guests well.

Conclusion: Bigwigs without their wigs are just like you and me.


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This story is excerpted from a collection of vignettes that I helped Doah, my severely mentally challenged youngest son, to write and publish several years ago (copyright 2003). It was my attempt to help him understand literacy and the purpose of writing and reading.

Seventy-Five Kilometers on Nine Rubles

Working at the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Science (SO AN) is one of the most fascinating and rewarding things I have done. The academicians were stellar researchers, and I was in awe of their contributions to the field. When I finished my time there, I had to give a 45-minute report to the collective body of academicians and invited professors from the university. In presenting the research I had completed on their dialect, I found myself in an unnerving position in spite of all their kindnesses to me while I was working there. Their treatment of me like any junior Russian academician, a treatment that has little in common with the manner in which American academics relate to each other, made the awkwardness worse. My presentation was followed by questions from all those in attendance. The questions fell like pelting rain from a cloudburst, one after the other in rapid-fire order, some of them piercing, others insightful, few of them easy. That discussion was followed by a 45-minute very supportive public evaluation of my report by Aleksandr Ilich, who later sent me a written evaluation of my performance to pass along to my supervisor (not that I had a supervisor who could read it since it was written in Russian). If nothing else, the time there did much to help me build a bond with the people and land of Siberia and, equally important, improve my Russian language skills.

The need for speaking Russian saddened Aleksandr Ilich, the elderly and highly intelligent director of the Institute of Philolophy at SO AN. When we went to his home for lunch and dinner, nearly every day, he would spend our walking time chatting in English. He had learned English during WWII from reading technical manuals for the American airplanes he was flying as a navigator. Once at his home, of course, we spoke Russian with his wife, Natalya Timofeevna, herself a highly respected dialectologist and academician. At the Academy, we also spoke Russian even though all the academicians used English books in their research. Aleksandr Ilich would chide them on missing the opportunity of a lifetime: to speak English with a native speaker.

One of the senior academicians put the problem into clear perspective. “One native speaker in our lifetime shows up here, and you think we could possibly speak English to her? No, this is not only beyond my capacity but also beyond importance for once she leaves, we will not hear English again.” Such were the conditions of the Cold War that he was right. It would take the dissolution of the Soviet Union before Americans and other Westerners would begin to show up in Akademgorodok.

Akademgorodok turned out to be a breath of fresh air after constant KGB surveillance in Moscow. There, I often wished that there was some way for academics to play the game that military attachés had played for years, if not decades, with their KGB tails. An attaché would be very careful not to lose his tail—something that Lizzie and I never learned for we were very skilled at losing anyone following us, some of it through scatterbrained approaches to learning our way around the byways of Moscow and some of it through real skill when it was important that we not be followed for fear of getting a friend or a helpful colleague into trouble. In gratitude for always being able to follow the attaché without difficulty, the KGB agent would give the attaché an occasional “day off.” The day was designated by the attaché walking slowly along the street and when no one was looking, placing a bottle of vodka or cognac on the sidewalk. If the KGB agent picked up the bottle, the next day would be the day off. Each departing attaché would tell his replacement, and so the game continued, at least until the end of the Cold War.

So, when Lizzie and I first walked down Morskoi Prospect, the 6-block-long main street in Akademgorodok with which intersected Prospekt Lavrenteva, named after Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentyev, the first Chairman of the Siberian Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences (called, in short, SO RAN), and location of the Institute of Philology of SO RAN, we immediately felt the influence of Moscow. We saw, for example, the high-rise apartment buildings that were slanting slightly to the left or right, as the concrete slabs they had been built on absorbed the warmth of the typical 70-plus-degree heating of the apartments and melted the permafrost.

We especially quickly spied the elevated militia posts on poles at the beginning and end of the street, but they were unmanned. People talked freely about anything they desired. Surprised, I asked Aleksandr Ilich about this.

“What can the Soviet government do to us here in Akademgorodok?” he asked. “Exile us to Siberia? We are already here!”

Dear Aleksandr Ilich! He had helped us so much. He became our best friend in Siberia — my research advisor, father figure, and teacher. What I learned about Siberian language and culture had come first from his books, which I had read at Lenin Library. Then, in person, he filled in many missing pieces for me, providing a foundation that I would build on for years and am still building on.

He was like most Siberians that way. In a land where everyone has to fight against the harshness of the climate, being one’s brother’s keeper takes on a literal meaning—and action. Even strangers would help us out. One taxi driver, in particular, I remember with intense gratitude.

Lizzie and I had been in Akademgorodok for a while when I realized that we had better go the airport, the only place we could get a return ticket to Moscow. Our visas would run out soon, and we had come on those one-way tickets proffered by Inotdel. With the airport 75 kilometers away, we would have to go by bus. Of the two buses in town, one went to Novosibirsk, originally named Novonikolayevsk after Tsar Nicholas II, the third largest city in the Soviet Union. The other went to the Novosibirsk/Tolmachevo Airport. Both cost 75 kopecks for me and 25 kopecks for Lizzie, exactly one ruble all told. That was good. I had only 10 rubles left to my name. I had traveler’s checks, but the bank in Akademgorodok was unable to cash them. I was hoping that I would be able to do that at the airport since the airlines would take them for ticket purchase. I obtained the departure schedule for the bus and set off with Lizzie for the airport.

At the airport, getting the tickets was not as easy as I thought. All tickets to Moscow were sold out until after our visas expired, and there was no way to extend a visa while in Akademgorodok. Well, what we were to do? Purchase the tickets for the earliest day possible and worry about the visas later. (When we got back Aleksandr Ilich told us not to worry about the visas; no one would be checking—and besides, what would they do? Send us to Siberia? Like everyone else in Akademgorodok, we were already there! And so we overstayed our visas, with no questions ever asked.)

Once we had purchased the tickets, we returned to the bus stop. It was not there. The stand where the bus had pulled up earlier was a drop-off spot only. There was no pick up. I checked out all the other bus stops; at a tiny airport like Novosibirsk/Tolmachevo, there aren’t many. One bus driver noticed my obvious confusion and opened his door,

“Kuda khotite?” (Where are you looking to go?)

“V Akademgorodok.” (To Akademgorodok.)

“Akh, nu, avtobusa netu.” (I see, well, there is no bus.)

“Dolzhen byt’. My syuda na avtobuse iz Akademgorodka priekhali.” (There has to be! We came here by bus from Akademgorodok.)

“Da. Syuda priezhaet, no tuda ne vozvrashchaetsya.” (Yes, the bus comes here from there, but it does not return there.)

Along about that time, the driver of a taxi parked nearby came over and asked if he could help. I explained our dilemma: we had come to the airport on bus from Akademgorodok, never dreaming that there would not be a bus back. He offered to take us. I would have agreed with alacrity. However, all I had to my name was nine rubles. Certainly, a 75-kilometer-trip would cost at least 30. I hesitated, then explained my dilemma to him. He smiled and said that he would take us for nine rubles. (Obviously, I had forgotten about Lizzie being with me; most Russians will do anything to help children.)

Taking us to Akademgorodok along the road between Tolmachevo and Novosibirsk and then along the Ob River was a long trip in and of itself. When we came across unexpectedly derailed cars from the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which crossed the Ob two blocks from our dormitory at Novosibirsk State University then sped eastward across the open steppe, the trip became considerably longer. We had to turn around, go back to the airport, and find back roads to Akademgorodok. The trip wound through the woods and passed a Strategic Rocket Forces airbase that we were not supposed to know about, especially in the days of the Cold War, as we wended our way back to Akademgorodok for more than two hours.

Along the way, Lizzie and I chatted in English. Surprised to hear a foreign language, the taxicab driver asked us, “Are you speaking Czech?”

We said no and admitted that we were Americans, speaking English. The trip immediately became more interesting to him. He had never met an American before and was full of questions — just as many questions as the Soviet media was at that time full of propaganda. The driver’s good deed turned out to be very educational for him. He turned back the meter to its starting point three times, and when we reached our dorm at Novosibirsk State University, he proudly announced that the meter read nine rubles. We handed him nine rubles, along with a pack of American cigarettes that we often carried as a bribe, Russian cigarettes being distasteful and unhealthily unfiltered. To that, we added American coins for his nephew and a few other pieces of Americana that we happened to have on us. He was pleased. We were pleased. The Russian Good Samaritan may have lost 20 rubles, but he gained much that day that he has probably never forgotten.

At the time, I told Lizzie that we were really lucky to come across this particular taxi driver. Now I wonder if we really owed our rescue only to Lady Luck leading us to one kind Siberian Samaritan.

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

The People of the Valley, Part I

In the earliest days of Abkhazia, known to the locals of the time as Abkhazeti, three millennia before the Common Era, a black-eyed girl of sweet countenance and swift feet lived in the Valley of Ard with her two sisters and their parents. Long before the Kartvelian Rose Revolution, before the existence of the Georgian Democratic Republic, before the appearance of modern-day Sukhumi, before the Russian Civil War, and before the Ottomon Empire; yea, before the Genoans built a trade center there, before the Roman emperor abandoned it as deserted, and even before the Greeks descended upon the Black Sea coast and built the first town, which they named Dioscuri after Castor and Pollux and used for the export of salt and Caucasian timber; indeed, before all of that, the People of the Great Cloud lived peacefully in Ard far from the mixing of the races and the turmoil of the clashes of swords and later, the barrage of bullets. In the old days, Abkhazeti was a quiet land where the Great Cloud united with Its people. Its son Ditya, a dark-complected child of about twelve years, walked on earth as one of the them, and Wispowill broke herself into a zillion pieces and took up residence in the souls of all those who would have her.

Not everyone loved the Great Cloud. Many could not see It or Wispowill, who was always with It and always present even when the Great Cloud seemed far away or emotionally distant. Some argued that there was no Great Cloud. More people in the Valley of Ard claimed to experience the great stillness that they knew as the Great Cloud than did people in the trade cities, who were busy plying their trade, acquiring money, drinking to excess, and worshipping a host of gods who seemed to help them not at all. Some of the people in the cities and even some of the People Not of the Cloud in the Valley of Ard built temples to the Narts, a legendary and magical people who lived in the high Caucasian Mountains. Of course, the People of the Great Cloud did not believe that the Narts existed. They thought that they were legendary gods and had been exposed as figments of local imagination when the Great Cloud came. They were like the angels that everyone talked about but no one had ever really seen, either.

They argued that Ditya was just a foreign child who had been abandoned by parents of unknown origin on the shores of the Black Sea, or perhaps he had wandered away from his parents down from the great mountains of Circassia and found his way to the Krubera Cave (the “Crow’s Cave), the deepest cave in all of the earth, for that is where the People of the Great Cloud found him, walking out of the Krubera Cave. All he ever could, or would, tell them is that the Great Cloud was his father and Wispowill his sister and that the three of them had been one being from before Time walked upon the Earth.

Ditya’s stories were difficult for the People of the Presence to understand and those Not of the Cloud did not try to understand them. Nonetheless, all the peoples of the Valley of Kartveli took care of Ditya for a child to them was always in need of care and a foreigner to them always in need of hospitality. Modern-day legend has it that when God was giving out land, the Abkhazeti missed out because they had guests and were plying them in Abkhazeti fashion with lavish hospitality. So God rewarded them by giving them Abkhazia, the one piece of land that God had reserved for the Godhead.

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These are the introductory paragraphs to my first attempt at a spiritual novel. The novel takes place in Abkhazeti, the land that is now known as (Soviet) Georgia. It is a place where I worked off and on for five years, helping the Ministry of Education write its equivalent of our SAT exams. I came to know and love the people, and I fell in love with the Nart legends, the only folklore of the region, as far as I know. Ironically, I was at Lake Pestovo, two hours from Moscow and without any telecommunications, the day the Russians invaded Georgia two years ago, and a Russian friend drove out from Moscow to tell me that our mutual Georgian friends had not been harmed. The story is of a young girl and her relationship with the Great Cloud, Ditya (Russian for child), Wispowill, and the Narts. I hope that readers will give me feedback as I go along. Posts will likely be sporadic since I am trying to finish Raising God's Rainbow Makers in the next couple of months, leaving little time for Angels of Abkhazeti, yet I work better when I multi-task.

Khshnaker

There once was a man named Samir who always pretended that he was well informed about everything.

"What do you know about the theory of gravity, Samir?"

And Samir would speak on and on about the theory of gravity that he knew nothing about.

"What do you know about Antarctica, Samir?"

And Samir would proceed to describe the tropical forest in Antarctica, which was, of course, located in Southeast Asia.

One day Samir's friends got tired of his boastful claims of knowledge and decided that the best way to silence him forever was to humiliate him in public. So, they invented a word that was a combination of the first letters of their names: Kh from Khalid, Sh from Sharif, N from Nabil, A from Ahmad, K from Karim, A from Ayman and R from Riyad–khshnakar!

They all went to meet Samir at the coffee shop he frequently visited. When he arrived, they gathered around him and one of them said, "Knowledgeable Samir, we have a question only you can answer. We heard someone speak of khshnakar, and we have no idea what it could possibly be."

Samir took his water pipe out of his mouth, blew smoke into the air, and with a very serious expression on his face began to speak, "Khshnakar, my brothers, is a very rare plant. Its original home is in the Sub-Saharan Desert. It has been shown to regenerate the growth of hair, improve sexual performance, and even cure the common cold, but it is funny that you would ask me about khshnakar when only last week I started planting it in my backyard."

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The above story is excerpted from a book, Metaphors of Islamic Humanism, by my dear friend, Dr. Omar Imady, copyright 2005.

The Burning House

I have written much here and in my other blogs about aspects of my brutal childhood at the hands of parents who should not have had children. My brother-in-law, William Smith, however, has described that childhood much more succinctly and eloquently than I. With his permission, I published his poem below in my book, Blest Atheist, and I have posted it permanently on the Clan of Mahlou blog that I maintain about family members and events. Perhaps readers of Mahlou Musings will enjoy it as well.

The Burning House

I dreamed a dream of a burning house
With brothers and sisters and a cold bitter spouse.
The halls were all crooked, the doors were ajar.
I heard all their cries from the road in my car.

I put on the brakes and came to a stop
While an old jackrabbit went hippity hop.
I looked back again, and the house was ablaze.
The people inside just looked in a daze.

The curtains were tattered, the roof was not straight.
The hinges were knocked off the broken front gate.
The paint was all weathered, and the shutters hung loose.
A shadow on the barn door looked like a noose.

A kid outside shouted, "There's a fire there, you see".
But Mama kept screaming, "Come back here to me".
"No, I cannot, ‘cause your house is on fire".
But nobody listened as the flames grew still higher.

Once in a while a child would run out,
But Mama and Papa would just scream and shout.
The kid in the yard would utter a scream
As a child ran back in as if in a dream.

Soon the house burned right to the ground.
The kid in the yard made not a sound.
I opened the door, and she sat on the seat.
She didn't look back because of the heat.

I stepped on the gas, and we sped away.
I opened my mouth, but what can you say?
"They had to go back," was her soft reply.
All of them chose their way to die.

I turned on the light; she was just seventeen.
She was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen.
I'll never forget the night I stopped there,
‘Cause I married that girl with the long, flowing hair.

- William Smith