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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching undertow
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an expat holiday


Every holiday that is not celebrated here is an invitation to surrender, to forgo. There are even a few people back in New York ordering takeout Chinese today. We could be the same, taking E to school in the darkness but then I am struggling to find chestnuts to roast for stuffing, yes there are sweet potatoes somehow and the turkey hunting became no problem after nine years in this place. It takes a certain energy to wake up on a normal day in Moscow and bake pies, brine great birds, roast, chop, reduce, saute.

It isn't the freezing rain snapping in my face that makes me want to retreat. It isn't the everyday sluggishness that overwhelms. It is the faces staring back at me that are not celebrating anything, the faces that will boil some potatoes tonight, nothing special while we are feasting, our bellies swollen with second helpings, our improvised sloppy toasts a mishmash of simple phrases repeated every year. And now V is in her chair to join us, apple sauce and porridge slathered across her cheeks her eyes bright as we whoop and coo and laugh with our heads flung back.

E is asking for more stuffing, always more stuffing.
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old swimmer said…
Lovely! And I wish you the joy of the season, no matter what's going on outside!
God bless.
November 30, 2015 at 10:44 PM
liv said…
Never forgo, always celebrate, it's what keeps you in your "place".

I can only imagine that the banquet on your table was one of the most delicious anywhere, Moscow to Manhattan, the long way 'round.

Tell E that my very, most favorite is the stuffing too. I eat it the next day and the next day until it all gone and then I wait patiently for the next 362 days. And I don't think the day is properly celebrated without bellies stuffed to the full.
December 1, 2015 at 11:44 AM
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