Why, Lord, Why?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_fe_st/odd_canada_large_family

Medal of Honor, Pt. 3 (end)

There was a deafening, rumbling elevated train overhead and nowhere to play soccer. It rained every other day during June. Neighborhood kids were strange and degenerate. Even the stray dogs and cats outside seemed hungry and ruthless, so unlike the kind animals back home. America was the land of moldy honey and near-expired milk—the kind in Aunt Zena’s pantry, served with disdain to us while her kids stealthily munched on Dannon Yogurt and Pop Tarts. And to top it all off, there was no medal to look at or think about while slurping down the soggy store-brand cornflakes. There was no game to play aside from some Milton Bradley soap opera trivia hand-me-down from my second cousins…

…There was only languor without dreams—a Nintendo without a cartridge. Certain it would turn up, I made a halfhearted attempt to look for my long-cherished sentimental keepsake, historical artifact, and future Halloween trimming, rummaging through my parents’ wooden chest of valuables, soon to be pronounced useless crap. Cheap costume jewelry, several faded fanny packs, tube upon tube of expired Soviet laxatives, ’60s books about American society and culture were all that greeted my chagrin.

I was starting to get worried. Missing was OK—possibly gone wasn’t. Not a soul—Grandma included, knew about the medal—or cared, since the beginning of our tumultuous departure from Russia and through our tempestuous beginning here. Yet here I was: in an increasingly fraught and frantic search amid a hopeless clutter of immigrant filtrate. From room to room (and there were only three) I ran, under and around my cousins, blind to my aunt’s rebuke, deaf to my uncle’s parroted words of castigation. Turning the house upside down for no good reason and incurring my parents’ wrath was one thing. Not finding the medal—that…that was unthinkable.

Running out of places to triple-check and domestic order to upset, I decided to take the last resort. “Grandma…” I asked. The look on her face, strangely, failed to shift from sanguine to suspicious. Grandma, so often the public face of our family—the one whose sterling reputation and demeanor swore integrity to those that would doubt ours—now looked, I could’ve sworn, less than completely candid. She shrugged her left shoulder, I queried again; she shrugged her right and left for the kitchen, where a pretext awaited her.

Suddenly, I felt like the time my parents took away our cancer-stricken cat to a feline clinic—one I’d never been able to find in all my later research—without granting me a proper goodbye. It was a moment of full-blown paranoia that penetrated the credulous walls of childhood trust. Luckily, it was only a moment, because in the next my grandpa strolled through the door, his hands laden with crumpled cellophane Thank You bags.

He flashed me a quick, noncommittal glance and continued in his firm, disciplined stride to the kitchen, where my grandmother was frying potatoes in a 2-inch pool of vegetable oil. “Gramps’, Gramps’!” I beseeched. In a stern voice, he advised I would have to wait, and make myself useful by peeling my cousins off the stairwell for dinner. But in my excitement, I couldn’t wait. “Grandpa, Grandpa, have you seen my medal?—Uncle Seva’s medal?”

In that instant, when I knew I would get no more than a cold shrug, Grandpa showed all his cards—which, in their literal form, were a wrinkled pair of kids’ Wrangler jeans, a brown Bugle Boy short-sleeve, and a shelf-worn 3-pack of briefs made by some unidentifiable Mexican company.

“What’s this for?”

“School starts soon. You have to look nice on first day.”

“Oh, thank you…” Instinctively, I assumed dull-birthday-gift mode. Grandpa fixed his gaze expectantly, as if waiting for the next question. “Thank you, Grandpa. This is nice,” I repeated, suffocating in my words’ inadequacy, as reflected on Grandpa’s screwed-up face.

“You are a big boy, so you understand.” It wasn’t a question. This took a few moments for me to process; it was an answer…

It didn’t matter that Grandma debunked every myth concerning the medal: ...never used it to marry Sveta…never even earned it…purchased, along with a certificate, by Seva’s father from a corrupt general to speed Seva’s return from service… Full disclosure was the last thing I wanted—the first and only was that hunk of metal previously occupying the empty box in my hands.

I stared at the box, fuming. Not one of her excuses released Grandpa from answering for what he’d done; none could unmake him the object of my scorn. I ran out of the house, to the Boardwalk, and scurried underneath—years before it was packed with sand to discourage bums and junkies from dwelling within its fetid folds—surrendering to a torrent of tears gushing from my quaking gut. Like a trucker barreling into a rest-stop bathroom, I found my release, against a damp stone pillar.

*****

After a deliberately silent night, I spied my moment. Emanating from the opposite corner of the room, his carefree, sonorous snore was my bugle for attack. Armed with the articles he’d selflessly acquired for me, I jumped on top of him, slapping him with the briefs and wrapping the jeans around his bristly face. Startled, Grandpa gasped for air and shrieked. I’d never heard my grandfather shriek. Shocked, in turn, I fell off the bed before he’d had a chance to fling me, sliding underneath my own cot, in leftover tears. In the next room, I heard Aunt Zena’s snarling, long-planned bark, muted no longer, “That is it—the end! Either them or me!”

Writhing under my meager shelter, scared out of my wits—but not of my imminent comeuppance, I reached inside the storage box and furiously felt around for it, groping, hoping that I had missed a spot...

Medal of Honor, Pt. 2

The stairwell and second-floor corridor smelled of fried fish and potatoes. My grandmother opened the door, revealing our halfway house—a 3-bedroom apartment. (My dad's cousin, his wife, and two kids temporarily, patiently occupied a single bedroom while my father, mother, brother, grandparents, and I split the rest of the digs.) She was wearing a ‘50s-era Russian apron with faded sunbeams radiating upon a dewy meadow, upon which she wiped the palms of her hands when I walked through the door, sweat beads lining her brow, taut as a clothesline. She waved me on, a bit more brusque than usual.

It was our eighth week in the apartment, and though I overheard my parents’ whispers, I dared not believe that my dear Uncle Lenny’s famous forbearance was wearing thin, his shrew wife engineering our eviction as they murmured in the dark foyer, pretending to check for a parcel. “This is what America does,” my mother hissed. But I didn’t share my mom’s rushed verdict. For one thing, it had Ninja Turtles. For another, 3 weeks and counting that my dad wasn’t called a kike by drunken subordinates.

One thing I did miss was friends. It was too early to seek initiation into one of the many street gangs that patrolled the Boardwalk with their water-guns and worn-out BMX bikes; too late to befriend the black kid downstairs my dad had shielded me from when he came over to say hello. It was another 2 hours until 5 PM and Ninja Turtles with nothing to do but attack the Victorian English workbook my mother had dug up for me with a friend in Moscow. So, it was time to polish the medal, daydreaming as I rubbed the engraving between my thumb and index finger. “Savour the flavour,” I enunciated.

Under my cot, my hands reached inside a plastic storage tub, ferreting through a jumble of Soviet coins, threads and needles, bubble gum comics, photos of friends left behind, cheap trinkets, Russian adventure books, laminated certifications of academic achievements, and a purloined airline sleeping kit. But there was only one item my hands were concerned with—the only item that was…wait…yes, gone!

Has Anyone Seen My Violin?

It's quite small. In fact, it's the world's tiniest violin.

Medal of Honor, Pt. I

At ten, nothing thrills a boy more than a veteran pinning a war decoration to your chest.

Uncle Seva was awarded a Medal for the Defense of Odessa in July 1943 after his submarine brought food, munitions, and gasoline to a besieged garrison off the coast of Odessa. It was a risky mission, and the medal spoke to that—with its gold-embossed print of two infantrymen intrepidly charging into battle, the back carrying the words For Our Soviet Fatherland. It was only the beginning of the adulation Odessa and its protectors would see as the status of Hero City was conferred upon the seaport town in 1945.

On July 23, 1993, exactly 50 years after Seva was awarded the medal, I took it out of my wallet. It was time to restore the luster. To that end, I took a small rag given me by my dad and a bottle of solution by my brother. Propping myself up against the paint-chipped wall in the cramped two-room suite that housed my grandparents and me, I started to scrub…

*****

In preparing to depart the former Soviet Union, people received the strangest of advice on what to bring to the New World—whether Israel, Australia, Germany, or the U.S. In our family’s case, it was a veritable hodgepodge of the unsellable and the undesirable: Cold War-era spy kits for young sleuths; commemorative china featuring the architectural highlights of Odessa and its environs; vial upon vial of green mystery potion used on minor cuts and major scrapes that left thick jade splotches on our palms, ankles, and foreheads; and, our prize possessions—two ghastly, poorly rendered paintings depicting the beheading of John the Baptist by a bloody red sickle and the Godmother as a skanked-out meth addict, respectively. It was only later learned that my father’s painter friend, Kolya, might not have been the connoisseur we’d all thought.

My dad, furrowing his thick, austere brows, instructed us to bring only the bare necessities, or, stuff of value that would fetch some ready cash. The idea was to sell our wares upon arrival at his cousin’s apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, just until we got on our feet. This excluded my hobby railroad and collection of rare toy Red Army soldiers, which were to be distributed among left-behind relatives, neighbors, and friends; UFO clippings I’d been collected with my brother’s help since I was 5; and the collection of young reader fiction occupying our bulky bookshelves. It included my bulky scratchy wool sweaters, passport that stated Jew, and a little drawing of zoo animals playing soccer that had graced my wall since birth.

Still, I’d managed to sneak the medal into my kid-size leather wallet, sent as a gift from one of my distant aunt’s friends in America. Now, as I studied the bronze-colored coin, I wondered what exactly Seva did for it—I only knew what it did for him. Aunt Sveta told me the story herself—how Seva, the snot-nosed kid just back from the front in 1945, one of a morbidly popular group of men known as “male deficit,” had proposed to her with the medal after 3 months of courtship, too poor to put a thimble round her slender finger. What I didn’t know—and what I always wanted from Seva—was the account, full of gore and glory, of the gallant exploits that netted him the precious lump of metal.

Although so called, Seva wasn’t truly my uncle—he was Grandma’s second maternal cousin—ordained as father figure when hers was claimed by the German war machine. Our friendship was a quirk of my parents’ busy schedule—and my reticence among peers. So it was that Seva, childless himself, became a multigenerational surrogate dad—a Father Emeritus. We spent days in his woodshop—a rarity in any Soviet apartment; nights going through photo albums and listening to the bombastic, patriotic records of his youth.

I would not only eat, but sleep at Seva and Sveta’s much coveted three-room, park-side apartment. My toys were wood and saw; my playmates, Seva and his neighbor, Alec the cobbler, who taught me bridge and solitaire, much to my parents’ chagrin. There I spent many Friday nights, until, at 1100 hours sharp Saturday, Grandpa came to get me.

Grandpa never passed his medical test and spent the war making plane parts in a munitions factory. He was a tall, stout man, probably head and shoulders above his diminutive, malnourished coworkers, drawing attention and questions—why was this vigorous lad making planes, not flying them? His favorite mode of conversation was censure; he enjoyed delivering short, impersonal homilies. He knew no games and played no records. I visited him, but always briefly, since he had lost Grandma. When asked about the war, he had little to say.

When I asked Seva about the war, a vague excitement knotted my throat and swelled my eyelids. I stared directly at him with affected gravity, the way I saw adults do in movies when they asked veterans the ever-important question: “What was it like?” But he just turned away and lamented our soccer team’s woes, or polluted water at the Lanzheron beach. The almost scripted silence sent my mind ambling in the romantic vortex of unfinished sentences and meaningful looks.

It was these reveries through the battlefields—fed by Seva’s silence, nourished by scores of war films—that possessed me every time I removed the medal from its case, a French candy tin I found under a seat in the international lounge of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. It was this reverie I would retreat to when I returned to our temporary digs after losing both my quarters—one to the Ninja Turtles game and one to the teenage pickpocket—at the video store downstairs.

NPR has a story on LATINA'S FOR MCCAIN

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92426941

Here's a short summary: Obama is a lying Muslim.

rock out!

i want to do this. 

Everybody Nazi

Quite a week in Nazi news. First, Hitler gets decapitated...just kidding, I meant the wax Hitler, 60 years later...now the racing head can't even get it on with some hookers. If this guy gets off on SS guards delicing him and he's got the money to make it happen, I say, so be it!