Winter, interrupted

We spotted this cardinal near the southern shore of the Lake in Prospect Park.

Photo: Il'ya Nikhamin

The end

If I owned those famous red-soled shoes, would the pier still run out? If I talked less, would the sand still seep out of the hourglass?

Appleseed

When a piece of debris caught in her eye, he said, "I am the apple of your eye. Have I shed a seed?"

Bikers

We were riding down the Ocean Parkway service road. Some kids yelled at us from the upper stories of an apartment building: "Bikers, start walking!"

"At least they didn't tell us to drive,"  I said.

New York Ear and Eye Infirmary

On the way home from the Palace, something fell into her eye, and stayed there. It happened while she was waiting at the red light on the corner of Cortelyou and East 7th. She got off her bicycle and walked the balance of the way home. "You were talking too much," her husband told her. "That's how it got in." She tried to cry to wash it out, but for once, she could not summon any tears.

The next morning she went to the New York Ear and Eye Infirmary. The peanut gallery in the waiting room held its own theories. "You shoulda worn goggles," said one woman. "You weren't thinking, were you." Later she thought of a comeback. She should've asked, "Do you wear goggles when you walk?"

But by then the doctor had already taken the black speck of road out from under her eyelid. He showed it to her on the swab: a devil on the head of a pin. It seemed unlikely that something so tiny had caused so much grief. She did not ask to keep the speck. Instead she told the doctor that his name, Nezgoda, means "discord" in Polish. "No, it doesn't," he joked. He'd heard that before. He was missing some instrument. "You take your eyes off something for a minute and it disappears," he said. "Isn't that the truth," she said.

Spring in Moskva

During Dmitrii Petrovich's lecture on contemporary Russian literature, I gazed out the window and followed the crows' nest-building ritual. For Dmitrii Petrovich himself had said in the first class, "We will never learn all the functions of our phones - let alone read all the books in the world." When a classmate returned after a week's absence, and asked me what he'd missed, I said, "The crowlings were born."

Later, walking from the University to the garden about the Opera, I saw a frying pan lying face down on the sidewalk of the Садовое Кольцо - the Garden Ring Road. Someone had burned the egg that broke the camel's back.

In the train to Kiev, some man made a fresh remark to a woman about carrying her to bed. "Where else can a man carry a woman," he said. "По магазинам - around the shops," I interrupted in a New York deadpan. He threw up his hands in horror. So many times I said America when I meant New York.

In the church frescoes, Judas always faces away, because no one wanted to serve as the model for him.

Question and answer

"Do you need help or are you enjoying the music," asked the proprietor of the wine shop.

"You've set up quite the dichotomy, there," she answered. "Actually I don't need help, but I am enjoying the music."

Three sisters

k: "I really recommend West with the night."

a: "Netflix it."

k: "It's a book."

m: "Maybe they should have a digital library!"

k: "There are Kindles."

a: "But you can't rent books!"

k: "There are libraries! They are free!"

Distinguishing

"The difference between you and me," she said, "is that when things get weird, I stay."

Visiting

He slung a Mariage Frères Casablanca tea satchel over his broad swathe of shoulder, by the string.

"Look," he said, "it's journey tea."

The psychic and the banker

I heard a psychic explain to a banker in the Tribeca Whole Foods that time goes faster in the year two-thousand-ten, than it ever did before. "You know those days you wake up and you wonder what happened to yesterday?" He nodded. "There's a lot of research behind this," she said, "I won't even begin to trouble you with it." He took a polite sip of tea and burned his tongue. He had showed her how to turn off her new Blackberry. "I'm about to meet a client for a session," she'd said, "and I'd be embarrassed if this thing went off in the middle. You saved my life," she'd said. "Oh, it was easy," he'd said, but she already had him then. She was hanging about his table. "I'll tell you what," she said, "I'll give you a session for half price. Because everything is speeding up."

One table over - on the verge of my twenty-fifth birthday - I am slowing things down. I am dreaming about flying in rose red heels, like a woman of Chagall, and not losing them to the fields below. When I land, the grass is wondrous soft.

Tonight the Astroturf in Columbus Park is strewn with youths who have seen the coming of spring. They are trampling out the vintage.

Favorite rapper

We waited a long time for the train. You stood at the edge of the platform and peered into the distance. "Do you know what this is?" you asked in exasperation. "This is the name of my favorite rapper."

You gave me a moment to think before you sputtered, "It's ludicrous!"

Arbat

A man on the Arbat told us an aphorism. "Just when you think you have hit bottom," he said, "you notice a knocking from below."

A letter to time

Sveta dictated, for translation: “I write a letter to time, asking about time, asking for more time, and time writes back saying there is no time.”

We asked each other constantly, "У тебя есть достаточно места?" - "Do you have enough room?" It was unclear how that joke arose. Sveta called us her hooligans.

Bears

 "When does a bear first get sleepy," he asked. "Immediately upon waking up," she said.

"When a bear hits the buttons," he said, "the elevator stops at all the floors."

"And how do bears fingerpaint," he asked. "Not at all," she said.

Street and garden

In Housing Works on Crosby, she saw a paperback edition of Fanon's The wretched of the earth. It rested nonchalantly next to a heavy reference volume called "The Home Gardener's Problem Solver." She caught the eye of every staffer, trying to discern who had arranged the books so soundly.

It distressed her, on the other hand, to walk down the street on the eve of garbage collection day, especially at the end of the month, when people moved. She thought there oughta be a warehouse somewhere for all the discarded furniture. "What would you have them do with it," he asked. "Take it apart," she said, and "build another ark."

Miracle

Nixon wondered if he could get canonized as the patron saint of offices. For he had exclaimed in a shrill voice - you might even say he shrieked - and turned on a light that had never shone before.

Clutch things.

In a shop in York some winters ago, a saleslady made an elaborate pitch for a clutch. "The stuff won't fall out," she said, "even after you've had a drink." There was no boyfriend chair in the shop. You said you would wait in the street.

I had a complicated dream in which you got married. You ran down the street with your bride. Her face kept changing. I was taking photos from the balcony. Later I tried to explain that it was all physics: you either knew the name of the bride, or the velocity at which she was moving, but not both.

"Happy new year," you called to me yesterday. You surprised me; I dropped everything. "Hold on to things," you called. Which was different from, "Don't drop things," which you've said before.

Russian Glossary: Part 3

Вешалка
The hook inside a coat by which a бабушка (babushka) hangs the coat in the гардероб (coat check), which by natural law exists in any theater, museum, or other respectable establishment. It is usually obligatory to use the coat check; otherwise, the theater, museum, or other respectable establishment begins to resemble a вокзал (train station). If your coat lacks a вешалка, the бабушка will often refuse to take the coat. She may hunt in vain beneath the care/wash instructions and on the other side of the collar, and stare at you in pity, wondering what villain sold you the thing. If she doesn’t keel over in disbelief, she may relent and let you get away with a reproachful grumble. However, the same бабушка will never do this twice, so you’ll soon find yourself turning down invitations to plays at certain theaters, because you’ve already made the acquaintance of all the бабушки (babushkas) employed there. Considering that бабушки gossip, within the space of three weeks all respectable establishments in the city will be closed to you. Therefore, sew on a вешалка with whatever thread, floss, or difficulty you’ve at hand!

Девчонки: girls
More often than not, the entire phrase occurs: наши девчонки (our girls). This concept is to Russian universities, what the Arab street is to American columnists. Наши девчонки are a tightly knit crowd that moves together from пара (period, as in class) to пара; they exist convened in an eternal pow-wow. Without them, the boys in any given группа (group of students who share a major/specialization, and therefore, schedule) would be lost. As far as homework and room changes are concerned, Если это есть у наших девчонок (if our girls collectively possess it), then all is well.

Russian Glossary: Part 2

Вы стоите?: Are you standing? 
Seemingly a rhetorical question, this is the most concise way to address someone at the tail-end of an очередь (line). Are they standing in wait, or are they milling and humming?

Интерьеры. Французские, английские, и другие: Interiors (in the sense of interior designs). French, English, and others. 
On sale all over Москва (Moscow), they also appear in nightmares literally, as additional rooms or space in the center of a house, concealed at first by walls and doors. For example, three couples move in. They figure there is more to the apartment than meets the eye. My host mother tells them matter of factly, Здесь нет никакого интерьера. (There isn’t any kind of interior here.) All despair. At least I’m beginning to dream in Russian.

Давай вечерком!: Let’s [talk] tonight!
Here, tonight (вечер) is given in the diminutive. Classic phrase of professors who answer their cell phones in class.

Russian Glossary: Part 1

Отправить [письмо]: to mail [a letter]
Mayhaps because of such sentences-precedents as Вини Пух отправился в лес за медом. (Winnie the Pooh set off into the forest to find honey.), the verb carries connotations of с бутербродами в карманах и песней на губах (with provisions in your pockets and a song on your lips), that the English equivalent does not muster.

Отпеть [кого-то]: to hold a funeral service [for someone]
Петь is to sing; taken with the prefix от, the verb means to sing someone off in the sense of seeing him or her off on a journey across the river Styx.

Поехали!: Let’s go [but not on foot]! 
The past tense is used in hopes of quickening the departure by referring to it as if it had already occurred. It is not uncommon for a woman to exclaim, Поехали!, upon discovering a run in her stockings.

The birds

Two common mynas form an honor guard to a red-crested cardinal strutting on the beach in Kailua, Oahu, where Obama had vacationed a fortnight earlier. You were out kayaking in a red life-vest while I kept the birds company on the shore. January 2009.

First walk

On our way to Prospect Park, we marvelled how, wherever we go, we notice so many things that are wrong, and try to fix them. "My question is, how did we find each other?" you said. "Well," I said, "maybe we saw something amiss in the other, and set out to right it."

In the Park we passed a little girl with her parents. "How many miles," she asked thoughtfully, "have I walked, ever?"

As we approached Avenue C on Ocean Parkway, I said, "Look, there's a man carrying a door." You said, "He's looking for a way in."

On the corner of 18th Avenue we oveheard an incredulous cluster of Hassidic men. They had paused on their way to Shabbat services. "What, you don't have HD!" one exclaimed. "How can you live without HD?" chimed in another.

We returned home without having opened the thermos of tea we'd brewed for the walk. We drank it in the kitchen.

First dream

I dreamt I was throwing seed to the birds from our window. The apartment building turned into an oceanliner tearing up the harbor; the birds could not keep up. I called you to say the ship was stuck at a light on Grand Army Plaza, and realized it was now a bus. Soon thereafter it became a bicycle and I was picking my way through back alleys lined with shops. I collapsed, unfolded, collapsed again the bicycle for some bystanders, who were impressed. Then I stepped out into the street with the folded bicycle on a leash, as if it were a dog. I stood a while gazing at the house across the street: the floor-to-ceiling window on the second floor was crowded with an enormous bedframe of dark wood.