Горячая-печь лига

Living in another language means constant work. The easy part of living is gone — I don’t mean modern conveniences or cable TV, but the native understanding of every cultural and social and linguistic message you receive, consciously and unconsciously. In another language, your brain has to devote a chunk of its time and energy to constantly translating those exhausting messages, and it goes like this: “Is he standing close to me on this train because it’s culturally appropriate or because he’s weird? If he’s weird, is he criminally weird or just a creep? Is that person looking at me because she can’t believe this guy is standing so close to me and she’s waiting for me to react, or because she’s trying to see the advertisement behind me? Do I say ‘excuse me’ when cutting in front of someone to get off the train, or ‘pardon me’? How long is it OK to stand and look at the map before I look like a tourist? If I get lost, who is it appropriate to talk to?”

That tiresome monologue is from 30 seconds during a ride on the Metro. It’s like a sump pump running quietly in a basement — it deals with an overflow of information and is always in danger of being swamped.

Hanging out with expats sometimes helped. Great friendships are born in the shared experience of living in Crazytown, and people I never would have known in the U.S. became like family through alcohol, fear and the shared experience. But spending all your time with other expats becomes incestuous — everyone wants to date each other, or at least drink too much and come on to each other, and after awhile you discover you’ve gone three or four days without speaking Russian, and that feels pointless.

English-language books were like water in the desert. We traded and loaned them out, and when new people arrived, we asked quickly what books they had brought. Reading abroad was more than enjoyment or even escape; it was a total immersion into something Not Here. I wallowed in easy, light books with warm, comfortable plots and bright writing (The Shell Seekers, Winter’s Tale), and charged my English with the restorative words of Possession. I read some books because there was nothing else to read, and in some cases that was good (Tale of Two Cities, White Swans, Name of the Father) and in some, not so good (an inexplicably huge batch of Clive Cussler novels brought by a newspaper consultant who advised laying off half the staff, and who dribbled out of his mouth at a lunch with the U.S. consul general).

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there. But the constant low-level grind of the possibility of being faced with a situation where you had absolutely no idea how to deal with it was so pervasive that it was a relief to take a break when one could.

It wasn’t just the people. St. Petersburg is built on rivers and canals. There are no parts of town built on a sensible grid. Even in the suburbs, the blocks are laid against the compass and I often found the sun rising in what I felt was my magnetic north. Near the top of the world, the sun rises at odd times anyway, and at strange places in the sky, adding to the general background confusion: “Is it OK that the sun is rising over there, or should I mention it to somebody? And I’m pretty sure that this road was running north-south last week — now that it’s east-west, is this a problem?”

There some parts of St. Petersburg where the buildings are made of red or tan brick. The roads in those parts of town are wide and empty. Even though these neighborhoods are near the center of the city, no trams and few buses run there. They are padding between the cultural downtown and the beautiful leafy first-ring suburbs, full of empty storefronts and communal apartments. Traffic is sporadic; it’s hard to find a car to drive you there, or pick you up when you’re done.

Because it is apparently useless, the neighborhood is full of surprises. A blank window might be, on the inside, a fully stocked pharmacy where one can buy contact solution and European tampons. A doorway could lead to an invitation-only restaurant. When I was there, it was also the home of the St. Petersburg Lions, the city’s professional baseball team.

It was little more than a back lot, but the grass was well-kept and the pitcher’s mound carefully raked. The road ran along the first-base side, then angled away down a canal. The third-base line was backed by the side of a brick building, about five stories high, dull red and pleasant against the green grass and blue sky. The outfield was lined with scrubby bushes and trees that the outfielders hunted through for balls at the end of scrimmages. There was a backstop, and a set of bleachers for girlfriends and skeptical passersby.

The Lions never played a regulation game there. They played their home games 500 miles away in Moscow because the team could not afford to pay for the improvements to bring their field up to regulation. Their colors were gold and green. They got no money for playing.

By the time I’d discovered the Lions, I wasn’t quite as homesick as I had been. It was my first summer in a city I had seen only in winter, and I had fallen in love with it. I had found some friends and gotten used to my job. When I went to the weekday games, I pretended I was reporting on the team, calling it to expat attention, and I did in fact write a couple of articles about it.

Since other teams didn’t come to St. Petersburg to play, the Lions had to make do with split-squad scrimmages against themselves or, if they were lucky, youth teams from the United States. They relied on the goodwill of these teams for equipment and uniforms, although sometimes they would scrape together enough cash to buy a case of balls from a European team.

It was like any town-ball team. Sometimes players couldn’t make it because their car had broken down or they had to work. Some were obviously more dedicated than others. Some had found, whether learned or felt, that easy grace that comes to natural ballplayers more than other athletes. They played at single-A level, but with flashes of intuition. If boys in Russia are raised on any sport, they are raised on hockey, and the cultural understanding of baseball — the leisure, the connotations of a fleeting summer, the trite and true coming-of-age undertones that run through the game — are absent from the players here.

But ballplayers in Russian are like ballplayers anywhere. Zhenya was a grinning, easygoing catcher who chatted up the infield and was almost always screwing around. Behind the mask he kept up a stream of jokes and insults, and after awhile the outfielders would yell at him to knock it off.

Sasha was a silent, lonely, hulking figure at first base. He rarely smiled but took the throws for the outs patiently and with ease. His range wasn’t outstanding but he could scoop them up. It was understood that his wife was sick and money was especially tight for him, and he missed practice more than the others because he couldn’t afford to take time off work. When he played, you could see it was his escape.

Sergei, more often Seryoga, carried himself like an officer and laid down bunts with military precision. He played center field in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were his duty to be an outfielder, and the other players deferred to him — when he told Zhenya to shut up, Zhenya shut up.

I made friends with Dmitry, the shortstop. He was in his early 20s and had played hockey all his life. He was short, bandy-legged, and one of the more effortless shortstops I’ve ever seen. He didn’t have the speed or quickness to make it in any league, but he played the game like he was born to it. “I played goalie, so I’m not afraid of the ball,” he told me once, and it was a good enough quote I used it in a story. “Some guys, when the ball is hit, they’re afraid of it, and they jump away or close their eyes. But me? I’m used to it.”

He would walk me to the Metro station (or, if I’d been playing hooky, back to work) after games, and he would call me at home to talk about baseball. Once, during a game, he came off the bench to sit with me and discuss strategy; he almost missed his at-bat, earning a snarl from the coach.

One afternoon Dmitry called me at home to talk about a bat a visiting team had brought. “It was made for me,” he said, as if he’d come straight out of “The Natural.” “You know how sometimes you put on a pair of jeans, and you KNOW they were made for you? That’s how this bat was. It was beautiful. Oh, Katya, I can’t even tell you. There are no words.”

The overheated sump pump at the bottom of my mind slowed and quieted when I watched their practices and games. The pitcher’s mound was 18.45 meters from home, and the bases were 27.5 meters apart, but it was closer than translation — it was simply a different measurement of the same thing. Watching baseball in Russia was like running into a dead friend in a dream — it filled me with delight even as I knew it was not quite how it was supposed to be, and then sadness came when I realized it would soon be over.

Because every game must end, of course. And when it did, it ended like it does in America: You are sitting under the summer sun, heckling the players and drinking a beer and there are no demands on you, nothing you have to do until the good-natured regret of lengthening shadows and a full scorecard begins to wash through the afternoon. The sump pump kicked into gear again. I was brought back to where the baseball cap I wore almost everywhere was cause for strangers to stare and openly mock, where only one of my few expat friends was an American, and anyway, he was a hockey freak.

Rawr Means I Love You In Ice Montster Language

I keep telling myself that someday, some sunny winter day, I'll take some time and take gorgeous pictures of the ice on the rocks up and down Highway 61 and people will be inspired to give me a lot of money for them. This would be a great idea if many other people hadn't done it already (and this goes for pictures of lupine and lakeshore sunrises, as well). In any case, I should do it for my own satisfaction, but I just haven't gotten around to it. When I think of it, it's not a sunny day, or it's too warm and the ice is gone, or something.

A couple weeks ago John had a hockey tournament up the shore. The ice was really beautiful that day, and it was sunny, and the sun was behind us and the sky was bright blue, and I had left the camera at home. Of course! But the next day I brought it, even though it was cloudy and damp, and not a very photogenic day. I brought it because this ice formation had caught my eye the day before:

Why? Because it's going to eat us all, that's why!

Trainspotting

Before Matt started working on the railroad, we were interested in trains. We took a trip from Minneapolis to Duluth on the 261, and learned why people wore travel clothes during the era of steam travel. Steam travel is really dirty. Our clothes and hair were full of cinders at the end of the journey, and while we had kind of snerked at the people who came on the train wearing goggles, we agreed that if we were ever to do this again, goggles were the way to go.

I had fond memories of railroads from my childhood (BN and UP), and so did Matt (DM&IR), and seriously, who doesn't like trains to at least some extent? But when we visited the Depot in Duluth, or slowed down to be "caught" by a train at a crossing so we could watch it instead of trying to beat it, we didn't know about the huge subculture of train lovers that's out there.

Matt sees it, now, almost every day: The guys (almost always guys) standing at crossings or along sidings with cameras on tripods, ready to film him as he drives by. There are thousands of videos on YouTube of trains going through crossings, engine switchings, coming down or going up hills, and so on. There are fewer now on the DM&IR lines because the CN engines aren't as pretty (or maintained as well) as the old engines were, but they're still there. They are known as foamers, for foaming-at-the-mouth enthusiasm they have for trains.

We've poked around foamer photography sites and found trains that Matt was working on. It's funny to watch some of the videos, although some of them are quite well done. You can buy videos of trains doing just about anything, and we get vaguely naughty come-ons from the the main seller (which has the kind-of tee-hee name Pentrex) for DVDs such as "Trains At Speed!" On the other hand, Matt says it's kind of odd to work a job that people love to photograph and tape.

Today, I joined the ranks of foamers. I knew Matt was taking a train up soon after I dropped the kids off. I got into position at the crossing and was ready. I made some amateur errors -- you can hear my hazard lights clicking; I started filming way too early (it doesn't get interesting until about a minute into it); and because I didn't get out of the car (I was still in my kid-drop-off pajama pants), the pan across the crossing gets a little awkward. In all, I think it's a pretty good first effort. If you watch carefully, you can see the engineer put his hand out the window and give a tiny wave just as the train is crossing. Yay Matt!

That Whole Decade Thing

A friend of mine is hugely into pop culture in a way I'm just not comfortable with. It's specifically TV, movies and music, and the musical literacy is something that makes me look at my own progress in a harsh light. He made a list of his favorite singles of the decade, and while I recognized most of the artists and song names, I had to listen to most of them online and hadn't heard the majority of them. So then I started thinking, did I buy ANY music in the last decade? And as it turns out, I did, but not much -- and not all of it new:

Bought in 2000

Jill Scott, "Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1" (2000). I got this after hearing "A Long Walk" and listened to it so much that John, at age 2, was singing along, which was pretty funny. I feel like this is one of my first grown-up music purchases, because it was so unlike anything else I listened to regularly. I still listen to some of the songs, after putting it away for a while because it reminded me of when I was dealing with a mild case of depression.

Bought in 2002

Missy Elliott, "Under Construction" (2002). I think I saw a couple videos on MTV from Missy Elliott and I was so impressed I went right out and picked up "Under Construction" and loved it. This one was harder to listen to in the car with kids, though. I bought it at a time when I was going through a lot of difficulty with local politics and I used to crank it in the car on the way to DFL meetings. It also hugely boosted my rap cred, which until then had consisted of the Beastie Boys and House of Pain.

Bought in 2005

The White Stripes, "Get Behind Me Satan" (2005). After writing the White Stripes off when I saw their first video, and then warming up to them with their second, I didn't pay any attention to them until Matt told me about this fantastic new song he had heard and thought was a legitimate contender for New Music We Might Like. We bought the album and listened to it during a drive around Carlton County, when we looked at the house we were pretty sure we were going to buy IF ONLY OUR OTHER HOUSE WOULD SELL, FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY, and familiarizing ourselves with our soon-to-be-new-home. Our house didn't sell, our offer for the Carlton County house expired, and it was months before we moved into the house we are in now. Despite all that, I can still listen to this album with affection.


Iron and Wine, "Woman King" (2005). Working the night shift in Duluth and then driving home for 30 minutes gave me a good chance to listen to KUWS' excellent college radio programs and introduced me to Iron and Wine. These dark yet peaceful songs made a great soundtrack to heading up the North Shore under the northern lights.

Bought in 2006 (and 2009)

Neko Case, "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" (2006) and "Middle Cyclone" (2009). Neko Case was another discovery from KUWS. "Fox Confessor" is outstanding. "Middle Cyclone" is not.

Bought in 2008

The Byrds, "The Fifth Dimension" (1966). I like jangly guitars and think "Eight Miles High" is one of the best songs evah and decided I should hear the rest of the album. I bought it and listened to the whole thing on a drive to the Iron Range and back just after I resigned from the newspaper; listening to it now makes me feel strong and competent, like I did on that sunny fall day.

Bought in 2009

Meat Puppets, "Sewn Together" (2009). This sounds just like their 1984 album which I got in 1994. Listening to it creates a sense of false nostalgia, but it's a good false nostalgia.


Drag the River, "You Can't Live This Way" (2008). Someone on a message board I participate in once in awhile posted a song from this album and just said, "Listen to this." Within three minutes this band went from completely unknown to me to one of my favorites. It's not a challenge: They sit firmly between the Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo and nod warmly across the table at the Carpetbaggers, but there are worse things a band could do.

Bought in 2010

Les Negresses Vertes, "Mlah" (1988). So this is my first foreign-language music purchase. Wait, no -- I have a bunch of Russian rock. And I suppose Enya isn't always in English, either. This is my first all-French music purchase. I know. I KNOW! This is another bulletin board "listen to this!" purchase...I heard the song, liked it, tried out the others and found that I edit to them almost better than to "Check Your Head," and decided to take the plunge. I should get it tomorrow.

Back to the Kitchen

I wish Matt would blog. He has learned so many interesting things on the railroad; every day he comes home and tells me something new and I wish he would write it down so that knowledge isn't lost. It's not big-deal stuff: tall tales, histories of nicknames (everyone has a nickname on the railroad), hints and tricks and what things mean. Sometimes you tell who's running the train by how he blows the whistle at crossings. You can figure out what mine the train filled up at by how the taconite is loaded into the cars. Hand signals are their own language, and while you can learn the vocabulary, it takes years to be fluent and develop your own accent.

Working in what is essentially an 19th-century-style job (see also: newspapers) is such an unusual opportunity and I'm glad both of us have had the chance to do just that. (Matt's job is so old, OSHA doesn't apply to railroad workers!) While the schedule is a pain in the ass, I'm proud of the work he does and of him for making the switch to this in the first place.

The problem is, I've been slacking.

I talk a lot about how one of these days I'll take a whole day and make a big mess o' pasties for him to take to work, like a real engineer should. I work at home, right? I should have the time and gumption to do something like that. But I haven't. During fall and winter, I think I do a pretty good job of making big batches of soup, stew, pot pies, roasts, and so on, so he can bring home-cooked food for supper. The problem is, if he is on a road job (as opposed to shuttling cars around in the yard), he doesn't have access to a microwave. There is a radiator in the train he can put his food on to warm up, but it would melt the Tupperware pieces we store leftovers in. We're looking into stainless food storage, but in the meantime, if he has a road job, he either packs a sandwich and a bunch of fresh fruit or vegetables, or brings along soup or ravioli in a pull-top can and puts it on the radiator to heat up.

So.

The other day, he was working a road job with a new conductor, a young, earnest guy, former military, Catholic, nice wife with two kids and another on the way, really likes his new job. The two of them hit it off and found they felt the same way about a lot of things, such as what this job should entail, and what role the union should play, and so on. They pulled out their meals and started eating their lunches. The new guy had some leftover pot roast and potatoes and (IIRC) some homemade pie in a nice lunch box. Matt put his canned Progresso on the radiator to warm up and started peeling a clementine. The new guy looked at the leftover plastic grocery bag Matt had brought his food in, then at the forlorn can on the radiator, then at Matt, and said politely, "I thought you said your wife was at home?"

Busted.

Well Hello There!

When I was working in Russia, we had a Russian freelancer who liked to write about the history of art and opera in St. Petersburg and didn't do it very well. She looked like a pre-revolutionary (the 1917 one) throwback: long fur coat, slightly menacing hat with a feather, thick glasses that did scary things to her gaze. She would come into the office when we had the least time to talk about pitches with her, and my co-editor and I were almost reduced to playing rock-paper-scissors right in front of her to see who would be the one to talk to her that time.

Her merits included good connections, stories that landed when she said they would, and useable photos. To her credit, she often swooped in when we needed something to fill a page, and seemed to know when we were stuck for an evergreen feature. Our newsroom was in a long room at the top of the building, but when you came up the stairs to get there, you actually had to climb the stairs up to the attic room (where the reception area was), and then emerge at the top of a set of stairs near the ceiling of the long room, and descend into the newsroom. It's hard to describe, but I will never forget the effect of seeing Yevgenia at the top of the stairs, terrifying and resplendent in her ancient coat and hat, as she peered down into the newsroom, trying to spot an editor before we ran out for smoke breaks or picked up the phone to make a fake call.

Yevgenia is on my mind because it is her I think of as I jump-start this blog in the new year. Her spoken English was good; she dropped the high falsetto she used in Russian and used an unnerving, viola-tuned governess voice to articulate her careful BBC accent. She had a habit of prefacing almost every single thing she said with "Hm. Yes. Well. You know. Now."

What have I been doing this last month? Thinking about blogging, especially about John's discovery of dialectical Marxism. But thinking isn't doing, and the point is, I need to follow Ruth Whitman's advice to "Write first." December is such an easy month to do everything else but write -- prepare for Christmas, chauffeur for hockey, some editing, some cleaning, and so on. I'm also working on a super-secret writing project that I started in November, put aside a little bit in December, and will jump back into this month. In the meantime, I need to keep blogging, if only to clear out the chaff and stay limber. And so that's what this post is today, a throat-clearing: Hm. Yes. Well. You know. Now.

Disaster

For about the last six months, Maia has been telling me almost daily what she would like her birthday cake to look like. I am not a hugely artistic person, but I can draw a little bit with frosting, and the kids get cakes with their favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! character or a unicorn on it.

"Mama," she would say, "for my birthday I want a ooey-gooey butter cake for the family party, and I want a white cake with chocolate frosting and a pink, you know, around the edges, and pink polka dots, for the party when my friends come over."

Seriously, it was almost daily. Until it got to the point where I asked her to stop telling me that unless she changed what she wanted, because it wasn't likely that I would forget what she did want.

On her birthday, I made the butter cake as requested, and because we had no birthday candles (NICE, MOM), I stuck a match in it for her to blow out. Which, yeah, is a little sad. But she didn't seem to mind.

Maia's birthday-party-for-friends was scheduled for Halloween day. The flu was raging around here in a major way last week, and on one day 20 percent of the students were absent from the elementary school. Figuring some kids would call in sick, we invited a few more than usual, and of course everyone was healthy. TEN KIDS were coming over for her party. TEN!

On Friday, I cleaned through one of the worse head colds I've had in a while. My last chore of the evening was to get her cake out of the oven and into the fridge for thorough chilling before I decorated it in the morning. Maia was malingering on the couch in a funk born of a Halloween party at school gaining possibly more attention than her on her birthday, and also battling a head cold. I got up to check the cake in the oven, opened the door, smelled it, and came back to the couch to sit with her, and I said, "Aaahhhh....doesn't that cake smell good?"

"Mama?" she said in a small voice. "Did you make a chocolate cake?"

"Yup," I replied.

"Because..." and here her voice got all Cindy Lou Who and her eyes had violet shadows because of the cold, "...because, Mama, I had wanted a white cake. With chocolate frosting."

Of course she had. Of course she had. I knew that. Obviously I knew that, because she had been telling me EVERY DAY for MONTHS. And I made a chocolate cake from scratch anyway. What the hell was I thinking?

"Is there any way" -- I spoke slowly, because I knew what the answer was going to be -- "that a chocolate cake would work? A chocolate cake, with white frosting?"

"Well," she said, honestly considering for a moment, "......no. I'd really, really like a white cake."

I got up early the next morning -- yes, the day of the party! -- to make a white cake with chocolate frosting. I put the chocolate cake in a Ziploc bag in the freezer for some other day. And I decided to save time and make the white cake out of a box.

I have an egg allergy, so if I want to eat some of my children's birthday cake, I have to make it from scratch without eggs (and there are good recipes to be had). But this was too much; I would sacrifice my cake-eating to convenience and make a cake from a box with eggs in it.

The problem is, either I completely forgot how tender a cake with eggs in it is, or cake-mix-makers assume you're going to be lazy and put it in a 9"x13" pan. I mixed up the mix and baked it and it smelled fantastic as I was finishing up the cleaning and game prep and the worrying. I got it out of the oven and cooled it thoroughly. I took one cake out of the 9" round pan, and put it flat side down on the cake plate and frosted the curved top. I took the other one out and put it curved side down on top of the other cake, which is what I learned from Mom and 4-H in order to make a nice, flat-topped cake.

But the cake began to break.

I'd never seen anything quite like it before. As I started to -- gently! -- frost the top cake, it uncannily broke into quarters, thusly:

What the? Here's a view from the top. I starting to panic a little bit here.I tried to prop it up with toothpicks, but it was so tender and moist it just slid back down again. Did it rise too high? Is this how eggy cakes act? Why was it doing this?

Get ready to say "oh no you di'n't" so I can say "HELL YES I DID": I decided to turn that bad boy over and put the misbehaving cake on the bottom where it couldn't cause any more damage. I scraped off the frosting I had already put on, then flipped the whole thing. The new top cake started the break a little bit too, but some extensive and fervent swearing on my part put a stop to that in a hurry:

This, I knew now, was going to be an ugly cake. It was already and ugly cake and it wasn't going to get much better. I stuck it in the fridge, where I felt like it was lurking at me every time I opened the door:

After the chocolate frosting had cooled and set a bit, it was time to "decorate" the cake. I put "decorate" in quotes because there is nothing I could do to make that cake look good except maybe attach $100 bills to it with pink frosting. So I gamely put the "pink, you know" around the edge and polka dots all over it, and decided a giant lucky 7 down the middle would be just the thing to cover the gaping rift down the cake's prime meridian.

It was not my proudest cake moment. But it was covered with frosting and that was good enough for the kids.