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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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Love and fists



On a quiet back street, a woman approaches us. She is short, her long coat like a frayed purple tube around her stout body. There is a giant gap between her front teeth. All at once I recognize her. It is Lubov (literally "Love") E's old kindergarten teacher. She is all smiles, coughing that thick smoker's cough as she leans forward to touch E on the shoulder.

We have that common conversation, about how E is bigger, about her good grades, about how Lubov misses her. It could be the same talk I have with an old teacher from the farm days in a supermarket parking lot.

E's chin digs into her chest. She does not want to say much.

I remember dragging her to school, her clinging to me, not wanting to go in. One morning I brought her late and Lubov met us downstairs. E was in tears. Lubov kneeled down to her, and wiggled the fingers of her hand in the air.
"This is you." She told E, folding her thumb  into her palm.
"This is your Papa." She said, folding another.
"This is me." She said, another on top then wrapping her fingers into a tight fist. "We are all together."
E was nodding.
Lubov shook her fist in the air, driving the point home. E was four then, maybe five at the most. She was ripe to believe.
I kissed the top of her head and left her with the other children.
I can remember walking around in the snow, restless, imagining her a crying mess hoping I was wrong.









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