this too shall pass

Adrienne called me tonight. She was sobbing again, and there was nothing I could do. The doctors removed her father's left lung; they said that all the cancer was gone and that he could start the recovery process. He was released from the hospital within a week of the surgery, and he moved in with her in Princeton. She felt as though a burden had been lifted, that there was hope again and the worst of it had passed.

Today she noticed that his leg wouldn't stop shaking, almost like the jerks and spasms of Parkinson's. She thought perhaps his epidural had hit a nerve and that was the cause of the spasms; the home health nurse agreed it was likely.

She found out tonight that the cancer has spread to his brain.

I don't know what to say. She's all alone right now with her dying father, with no friends or family to support her. I checked online, but plane tickets from KC to Newark are ridiculously overpriced due to the Memorial Day holiday and I'm broke. I wish I could comfort her, but what do you say to someone who's suffering like this? How do you comfort someone who still has so much more pain ahead of them? In cases like this, you just want to wrap your arms around them and be silent... but we're a thousand miles apart.

When we talk, we reminisce a great deal about childhood and adolescence. To hear us, you'd think you were listening to a few nursing home residents in rocking chairs and bathrobes, not to a couple of 27 year old women.

meteorological metaphors

It's strange to be back in Kansas this spring... strange, and somehow comforting. I've never felt safer, even as "severe storms stalk the Midwest" and a 1.7 mile wide tornado decimates an entire town. I have the warm amniotic sensation of being untouchable, even as oddly cool southern winds stream down my curtains and shudder my blinds.

I'm watching thunderheads roll along either side of me, but I am safe in the eye of the storm.

Word of the day - sprachgefuhl

"sprachgefuhl \SHPRAHKH-guh-fuel\ noun: an intuitive sense of what is linguistically appropriate.

Example sentence: 'One review of the book praised the author's sprachgefuhl and her graceful, literary style.'

Did you know? 'Sprachgefuhl' was borrowed into English from German at the end of the 19th century and combines two German nouns, 'Sprache,' meaning 'language, speech,' and 'Gefühl,' meaning 'feeling.' We're quite certain that the quality of sprachgefuhl is common among our readers, but the word itself is rare, making only occasional appearances in our language."

I'm going to attempt to start dropping this word in literary discussions. And when I say it, I'm going to press my index finger to my lower lip and squint knowingly. I'll also dress in black from head to toe, in order to complete the "pretentious chode" thing that I'm obviously going for.

genocide and what-not

Evgenyi Yevtushenko's poetry taught me about the massive slaughter of Ukrainian Jews during World War II, so when Sara, Steve and I went to Kiev, I insisted we find Babi Yar (a ravine where 33,771 Jews were slaughtered over the course of 2 days in 1941). Sara agreed because, well, she's Jewish and she wanted to pay her respects.

It's so weird that no one knows about it, or at least that no one in Kiev seems to acknowledge it. It's located in a city park; some joggers pass through but that's about it. Maybe summertime is more lively, but I doubt it.

http://www.litera.ru/stixiya/authors/evtushenko/nad-babim-yarom.html

And in English: http://boppin.com/poets/yy_babiyar.htm

In his 1961 poem, Yevtushenko says there aren't any memorials around Babi Yar, but there are now. There's actually a little makeshift memorial on the edge of the ravine that I didn't know about. If we hadn't decided to wander aimlessly in the woods, we never would have found it. There was no path or anything, but we went straight there as if somehow guided. We just walked, faster and faster, until suddenly there emerged before us 3 black wrought-iron poles with little square plaques on them, 2 of which had been "erased" somehow. On the the third was handwritten: "Here they killed people in 1941, may God calm their souls." It felt much more personal than the huge menorah erected by the World Organization of Jewry on the outskirts of the park. For some reason, I had the urge to take a picture of the little handmade monuments. Of course it was out of the question, but I still really wanted to. The little plaques looked so fragile, so ephemeral, that I wanted to preserve them somehow. The only thing protecting them is the very fact that they're so hidden.

Anatoli Kuznetsov writes about the dam that was erected to prevent drainage from the enormous ravine/grave into the city of Kiev:

"On Monday, March 13, 1961, it collapsed. The spring rains had rushed down into the ravine and filled the lake to overflowing; the channels could not deal with the volume of water and it went right over the top of the dam.... At first the water flooded the roadway, so that trams and cars were halted; people were hurrying to work at the time, and crowds gathered on both sides of the road, unable to get across ... The engineers had overlooked an error in their calculations: the mud which they had been pumping in for so many years had not been hardening out. It had remained liquid, because it consisted for the most part of clay. The clay slopes of Babi Yar formed waterproof walls which kept the mud liquid. Babi Yar was thus turned into a bath of mud as monstrous as the idea which gave birth to it... The phrase 'Babi Yar takes its revenge' was much on people's lips."
-Kuznetsov, A.A. Babi Yar. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. New York, 1970. 399-401.

The author of this tell-all book, smuggled painstakingly out of the Soviet Union for publication in the West, "was murdered in London in 1979 by a shot to the neck with a poisoned ice pellet. It is thought that the KGB were involved in the slaying" (Wikipedia).

It seems too much... impossible. Like something out of a movie, too outrageous to be rooted in reality.

And now for something completely different...

I've been frantically re-researching my thesis and I have 10 pages of reading left. That's it. Just 10 pages. Granted, I want to get the first 2 sections written before going back to Vermont. Then I just need to concentrate on revisions, section 3, my conclusion, and my presentation.

Oh, the California State Department of Insurance upheld one of my liability decisions. The old Russian couple from San Francisco lodged a formal complaint against me. They've been harassing me, then my boss, then my boss's boss, and now finally the DOI. Awesome. But I got the DOI's response letter yesterday and actually laughed out loud. They declared that my liability decision was appropriate and supportable. Validation is the BEST! But I feel bad, because I wish the Gurvitses liked me. I feel like we should share some sort of bond - hey, you're Russian, I wasted 8 years of my life on Russian, let's be friends so I can practice my Russian with you! But no, they totally hate me. Sad.