winter

Shopping in Moscow

I lived in Moscow, Russia for nine years in the 1990’s. It was a brief moment in Russian history that will probably never come again. 

In February 1994, on a Saturday, I went to the grocery store to do the weekly shopping with my backpack and a cloth bag. In Moscow you always had to have your own bag. I took the metro as usual. I walked about half a mile from my apartment to the nearest metro station and rode it for five stops. February in Moscow is cold and often snowy and usually messy. The metro floors are wet with everybody’s boots tracking in dirt and snow and ice. My metro station was one of my favorites, Novoslobodskaya. It has thirty-two stained glass panels designed by a Latvian artist. When it was empty, I enjoyed sitting down and taking them all in. 

Once at the store, I found pretty much everything I was looking for which didn’t happen that often. The store wasn’t too crowded, so everything was looking pretty good. I was thinking how great it was that so much stuff had fit into the backpack, and I only had to carry a couple of light things in my hands. As I approached the entrance to the metro, I felt the pack shifting as if something was not quite right. At the station I pushed my way through a huge crowd to get past the turnstiles and decided I should take the pack off and check it before I got onto the escalator. As I was taking it off it opened wide and everything fell out onto the muddy wet floor of the station. I dropped everything and chased a can as it rolled away from me and managed to gather everything into a pile. I hurriedly crammed my sugar, flour, juice and tomato sauce back into the backpack. The cheese and sour cream had been in a separate plastic bag, so I just shoved that into my cloth bag and proceeded to the escalator. Through all this, people were stepping over me and around me and somebody actually stepped on my sour cream, so it was smeared all over the inside of the plastic bag. Nobody had missed a step to even think about offering me any help. My bags were filthy from lying in the muck on the floor and my hands were also filthy from gathering everything up off the muck on the floor. I was cursing the metro, the Russian people, the Russian Federation, my husband and anybody else I could think of and I plotted all the way home that I would just pack my bags and get the next flight out of this god forsaken place.

When I got to my apartment building and entered the elevator that rarely worked properly, a woman followed me in with her dog who she had just been walking. After establishing which floors we were going to she commented on the fact the elevator was in such poor working order. I agreed wholeheartedly. She went on to say that I should really wear a hat because I might catch the flu in this cold weather. I said it really wasn’t that cold.  As she got off, she smiled and wished me well.  Continuing up the elevator all I could think of was what a country filled with contradictions.

I managed to salvage everything but the sour cream by transferring things into non-muddy containers. I set the backpack and cloth bag aside to be dealt with later and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom and washed all the floors. I felt much better when I was done.

Dark and Light

When I lived in Russia I liked to call it the Land of Dark. The winters were overcast and the sun only came up briefly. Now that I am in Minnesota, I am thinking, land of dark. I have had every light in the house on for days. It is depressing. I read an article in the New York Times this morning by Mary Pipher called Finding Light in Winter. It was lyrical and hopeful. She has a book out called Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence. I am totally going to read it. She lives in Nebraska so also is experiencing dark days. But she finds light in nature, family, friends, young children, poetry, music, a painting by Monet, and memories of people no longer present.

A friend of mine needed to go to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for some tests, so I went along. It was a nice break. Rochester is a fairly small city (population 122,000), and is the home of Mayo Clinic. Apparently 1.3 million patients go to Mayo every year, from all 50 states and 140 countries. There are like 20 Mayo facilities in Rochester. Plus Rochester has a branch of the University of Minnesota and a State Community College. For such a small town, it has a lot going on.

We stayed right downtown and were able to walk to everyplace we needed to go. Some interesting old buildings were among the glittering new ones. There was a warren of underground tunnels throughout the Mayo complex downtown so you could spend your day in spacious beautiful new buildings and never go outside. The cafeteria even had robots working to deliver food.

Besides being light and airy, the buildings were full of interesting artwork.

Three Columns, Cast Glass – Libensky and Brychtova
Man and Freedom, Ivan Mestrovic
Blown glass, Dale Chihuly
Blown glass, Sonja Blomdahl
Blown Glass, Dale Chihuly
Four Houses, Jennifer Bartlett

On the way back to the Twin Cities, we stopped at Frontenac State Park overlooking Lake Pepin. It started out kind of gloomy but amazingly, it cleared up to be a beautiful day. Light!!

Fall is in the Air

My photos look a little out of focus today. Kind of psychedelic. Or is it just me? The sky is an odd color. A rainy, dark day. But color starting as the trees adjust to winter.

I actually got a story published this week. No money but think of the fame! The notoriety!

Today is also gloomy and rainy. But that’s okay. We need rain. Rain is good. Winter is coming.

I read today that scientists think mammals will die out in 250 million years. All the land masses will collide, the sun will get brighter, and carbon dioxide will rise. We will suffocate and melt. I wonder if we will really last that long. Will we morph into something else? Will another species thrive on the new atmosphere? Will we build bio-domes like our science fiction writers predict? It is hard to imagine what 250 million years looks like. The dinosaurs roamed the earth for 165 million years and then all blew up about 65 million years ago. Mammals showed up about 225 million years ago. So we are almost half way through our time here. On the other hand the earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. We are but blips in time. It’s like democracy in Russia. A nanosecond. Apparently Earth has another 4 billion years to go. Don’t think I’ll be around to see it.

I’m reading Isabel Allende’s memoirs and in it she mentions the filming of The House of Spirits. I never knew it was made into a movie so I watched it last night. It was star studded, Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Antonio Banderas, Winona Ryder, and a million other people. Of Love and Shadows is another one of her books that was made into a movie. I haven’t read that one but looks interesting.

I read that people who are optimistic and have positive thoughts on aging tend to live longer. I’m feeling positive I am aging.

A friend just found out he is going to Burundi for work. The poorest nation in the world. The most unhappy nation in the world. I first heard about Burundi during the Hutu-Tutsi genocide of the 1990’s. So I have been trying to find positive things about it. It is in the African Great Lakes region bordering on Lake Tanganyika. This is what I found.

They make pretty sisal baskets.

https://basketsofafrica.com/product-category/burundi-baskets/

They have pretty birds.

Image: Michael Gwyther-Jones

Nice landscape.

Image: Dave Proffer

Drums are important.

Lake Tanganyika is big. It has hippos.

See, positive, positive, positive.

wall bricks

Rock Ballet

Yesterday we went to see Pink Floyd The Wall: A Rock Ballet presented by the Twin Cities Ballet Company. I am kind of a ballet snob so my expectations were not super high but I thought it might be interesting. The last time they performed this ballet they got some good reviews. The music was performed live by a local band as well (Momentary Lapse of Floyd).

The Fitzgerald Theater is a fairly small theater built in 1910 originally called  the Sam S. Shubert Theater. It has gone through several iterations and was renamed in 1994, after native son F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

The story of The Wall is kind of a sad one. The boy named Pink loses his father at a very young age and his mother becomes over protective, symbolized by bricks in a wall used to shelter him from the world. School is a bad experience with abusive teachers and it pushes him to drugs and it is down hill from there. 

The musicians were on a raised platform at the back of the stage and the dancers performed between them and the audience. The only ‘set’ were a bunch of large styrofoam painted ‘bricks’ that the dancers carried around with them and built walls.

I would say overall it was interesting and there were some good dance moves. I noticed early on that the whole dance troupe was white and mostly tall blond white. Yes, we are in Minnesota, Dorothy. The band was way too loud for the venue and made it uncomfortable. I wished I had earplugs. Maybe I’m just old but I sat with my fingers over my ears most of the time. And we left at intermission.

We went home and put The Wall on YouTube and Don performed interpretive dance around the living room. Very entertaining.

Then we drove to Como Lake and took some pictures.

It is snowing again, of course. have a good week!