Back from the abyssal silences

If only temporarily...

I'm in Fairmont, West Virginia, wherein one finds the wi-fi-enabled coffee shop that represents the publicly available high-speed internet access closest to Clarksburg, a half hour to the south. Since Book and Bean was closed for Christmas Eve and Christmas, and our family of ten has been traveling across the country from Texas to West Virginia via Oklahoma City since Thursday morning, this represents my first chance to get on-line in five days. Oy, the e-mail backlog!

No snow yet because West Virginia is having an unseasonably warm winter. This is a cruel disappointment to the kids, and, let it honestly be said, to their father, whose many reasons to hate living in Katy include the utter absence of anything that a reasonable person could refer to as "winter."

Before I go any further: Merry Christmas to my Christian friends, с новым годом to the Russians and Kazakhs, happy holidays to everybody else who isn't fiercely anti-religion, and happy end-of-year vacation to militant atheist buddies.

My cell phone is finally operational; so if you've being trying to reach me on it in vain you now have hope. I had switched to a new phone bought on e-bay, but Sprint couldn't get it activated. It turns out that the previous owner had left an unpaid balance on it and Sprint's software wouldn't release it from the old number to assign it to my number, until the previous guy had paid up. I suppose if any of you are thinking of buying a Sprint phone on e-bay, you should learn from my experience and get a guarantee from the seller that he's paid his bill. Two weeks without a cell phone was a bloody killer, I'm tellin' you. I knew I depended on that thing but I had no idea how much.

I wish you could see how well my eight children get along with my parents, including (perhaps especially, this year) Anya and Kinya. And I wish you could have seen the look on Anya's and Kinya's faces...well, let me just share some dialogue with you, after we have ridden up the side of my parents' mountain property in the back of their little 4x4 pick-up truck. I habitually refer to that property as "their farm," but it's really my dad's playground -- certainly no crops are being raised there. So Anya and Kinya, on the way out, asked me curiously (in Russian as always but I'll just translate): "Papa, is Granddaddy's farm really a farm?"

"No," I answered with a smile, "it's where Granddaddy and Grandmother go to play, especially Granddaddy."

"To play?" Obviously this made no sense to them.

I grinned. "You'll understand when we get there."

So we get there, and we pile out of the van and into the back of the pickup (well, I confess that I seized the opportunity to truck-surf from a position of standing on the bumper, but I made the kids sit safely down in the back). Granddaddy rockets up the side of the mountain, muddy after a couple of days of rain; he deliberately fish-tails around the corners in a successful attempt to elicit screams from the feminine contingent. Rusty, to the surprise of none, "accidentally" loses his grip on the rope and rolls around the truck bed like a bowling ball. We reach the giant toolshed / miniature barn that's three hundred yards or so up the slope and Granddaddy stops the pickup, gets out, and expresses disappointment that he didn't manage to throw mud on anybody with the tires. Anya and Kinya's eyes and grins are equally wide, their faces flushed from exhileration and mock terror; Sally and Rusty are bouncing up and down on the muddy hillside in uncontrollable excitement; even Sean and Kegan are grinning, while Merry and Kasia wear the broad but demure smiles of old hands who've seen it all before but still choose to enjoy it.

Anya and Kinya look around and giggle with delight, and Kinya asks whether she really has to go back home to Texas when the rest of us do. (This is actually a serious question; we are allowing Kasia to take a break from the brutal and IMHO largely unnecessary and unproductive stress of the Katy high schools to go spend a semester with her grandmother in Fredericksburg -- to the envy of all the rest of us who are still going to have to live in Katy. And Anya and Kinya both terribly miss winter and both miss the hills that surround Osakarovka, and like everybody else in our family except Dessie would move to West Virginia in less than a heartbeat if I could find a decent job here. So Kinya would like to spend at least a couple of months up here in West Virginia with my parents -- and if my parents decide they would like for her to do so, then I'll talk it over very seriously with Dessie, because there actually would be some major advantages to having Kinya go spend a couple of months where nobody at all speaks even the tiniest bit of Russian, and where she has to function without depending so heavily on Anya. But of course there are arguments against it...and this digression has gotten far too long. That's too bad for you guys because I don't have time to do anything but post a first and unrevised draft of this post.)

My narrative, before I went all Tristam Shandy on y'all, had reached the point where Anya and Kinya had started to catch their breath and return to mere ordinary excitement rather than shrieking exhileration. And then their Granddaddy slid open the door to the shed...and they saw the tractor.

That is, they saw the miniature Kubota bulldozer/front-end loader combination with which my father blissfully recreates those long-ago days when he was putting himself through college working on highway-building construction crews in the summertime...back when he could blade a roadbed as smooth as glass by steering the blade with his buttocks. (That is, since the blade goes up in the air whenever the wheels do, and down whenever the wheels do, and since the blade's going up and down puts waves in the road, you need to lower the blade as the wheels come up and lift it as they go down. But you can't see the ground in front of your wheels. So when you feel the seat start to push up against your butt you lower the blade, and when you feel the seat start to drop away from your but you raise the blade. And after a couple of passes, if you're good at your job, there are no bumps left in your perfect roadway.)

They looked at that little Kubota and their eyes widened right back out to maximum expansion, much to my and Kasia's amusement. Then Anya wheeled around to face me. "Papa, does that tractor really belong to Granddaddy?"

"Yes," I laughed, "it's really his. He bought it and he owns it. And now you understand what I mean when I say that Granddaddy comes out here to play."

Everybody, including Sally, got to drive the tractor, and while one kid was driving three others would be riding in the upraised blade, screaming in roller-coaster pretend terror as the tractor wavered back and forth from one side of the little roadway to the other. I got cellphone videotape of Kinya in her first time behind the wheel of the tractor, and then in my incompetence promptly deleted it irrecoverably. The videotape of Anya's first tractor-driving attempt survives but is of course largely unwatchable since I was walking backwards down a rocky and muddy West Virginia hillside in front of the tractor, and it's not exactly smooth tracking. Not much use as video but some decent still shots came out of it -- if I can just figure out how to download them onto my computer.

At any rate, a very merry Christmas indeed has been had by all, so far as I can tell, other than Dessie's having a migraine. Also Dessie composed and delivered a "reading" -- really a mini-homily, five minutes or so -- for the Christmas Eve service, and it was outstanding. But oh my Lord what a tough crowd...smiles but no laughs, despite some quite laugh-worthy lines. Still she delivered it well in spite of the lack of encouragement. I'll have to try to get her to let me post it here.

We did the trip from Oklahoma City to Clarksbug in a single go, by the way. I did all the driving and stopped in the wee hours to catch about an hour and a half of sleep, and counting stops for restroom breaks and meals and shopping for left-at-home necessities (I had left a computer power cord at home, while Kinya had brought no shoes other than flip-flops) we did the trip in 22 1/2 hours. Well, we did it, and the kids did a remarkably good job of staying even-tempered throughout. But still I think when you tack on the extra few hours of driving involved in Clarksburg-to-Houston rather than Oklahoma-City-to-Clarksburg, it's too much to ask the family to do in a single go, on the way home. So we'll leave West Virginia a day before we had planned and stop at a hotel halfway home.

One final Christmastime vignette. (You must understand, by the way, that I have been for the last couple of months trying to brush up on my neglected calculus skills, using my twenty-year-old college calculus textbook that is on the point of complete disintegration. Kasia and the other kids tried to pool their allowances to get me a new calculus book for my November birthday, but calculus textbooks are of course obscenely expensive and they couldn't get enough money together in time, much to Kasia's disappointment.)

My mother calls me to ask a question about what Dessie would like for Christmas. Now, I am one of the world's very worst gift-givers; gifts are completely unimportant to me and I have a terrible time figuring out what other people would like to receive. But Kasia is something of a gift person. So I take Kasia out to the front porch, explain to her what the conversation is about, switch to speakerphone, and tell my mom, "Here's Kasia, who should have a much better idea than I."

Kasia and my mom discuss Dessie's present and come to agreement on what would work well. Then my mom says, "Now, Kasia, your mom told me how you kids had tried to buy your dad a calculus book for his birthday. So I bought your dad a calculus book for Christmas, and if you kids would like me to I'll put your names on it along with mine."

Since my mother is very big on do-not-open-until-Christmas policies, I realized there had been a misunderstanding that I had best straighten out immediately. So I said hurriedly, "Um, Mom, you do realize that you're on speaker-phone and I'm standing here listening, right?"

I don't remember which Baptist-acceptable expletive my mother used, but what it lacked in natural expressive force was more than made up for by the richly disgusted frustration my mother poured into its utterance.

Fortunately I am ridiculously, sterotypically absent-minded. A week later on Christmas Day I started to open my parents' present to me. It was obviously a book, and I tried to guess what book it might be. My guess -- the earlier conversation having entirely slipped my mind -- was that it was something to do with baseball. So I managed to be agreeably surprised even though my mother had inadvertently told me what she was getting me for Christmas. I suppose no character trait, however undesirable, is utterly without its occasional advantages.