Boy From Almaty Meets Girl From Pavlodar

Boy From Almaty Meets Girl From Pavlodar
Originally uploaded by jakeyd.

Stayed up late last night with CD, drinking beer and vodka and taking turns with a future writing project, went to bed around 1:30. Otis woke up at 5:45 this morning, which is unusual for him; he has been sleeping to 7:00 or 8:00 since last Sunday, sometimes even later. I struggled into partial wakefulness, gave him a bottle of formula and hoped he would go back down quickly, no such luck. I had a brief and unpleasant conversation with CD (she’s very cranky when woken from sound sleep) during which I became awake enough to notice that he was chewing on his gums rather hard. I got some Ora-Gel Nighttime and rubbed it on his gums and he went out after about a minute. Candace and I growled at each other and went back to sleep. At 6:45, my cell phone rang, it was Steve, Ralph and Drew calling from Steve’s bakery at the pier. I had semi-lucid conversations with all three of them; I seem to recall Ralph telling me he re-injured his foot and Drew saying he was going to drink up all the hoppy beer in Brooklyn before our return. I hung up with them and my cell phone rang again, it was Scott calling to say goodbye before he and Eileen and their baby boy Sullivan moved to Texas; we’ll miss you guys. Went back to bed again and Otis woke up at 7:45. As Drew would say, “Get used to it, Big Daddy.”

We had invited all the people who had helped us in Almaty to lunch at 2:00 today at Zheriyuk, the Kazakh restaurant we went to celebrate CD’s b-day and our petition to adopt Otis being granted. We also invited Tony & Cathy, our friends from Brooklyn, who arrived with their daughter Lizzie from Pavlodar on Thursday. Sasha and Max had other commitments but Galina, Sagat, Zoya and her daughters, and Tony, Cathy & Lizzie accepted. We had thank you gifts for all the Kazakhstanis - Remy Martin for Sagat (he had mentioned it was his favorite cognac), a Lalique glass fish for Galina, and a Russian-English Medical dictionary and flowers for Zoya. Sagat and Galina picked us up to take us to Zheriyuk and informed us that they had to work so would not be able to have lunch with us. We gave them their gifts; Sagat gave me a kiss upon receiving the Remy.

CD: A brief aside – a total non sequitur – we are now trying to squeeze in all the stories we’ve forgotten to tell - the last time we were at Zheriyuk, Galina, Zoya and I started talking “then and now;” I can’t remember why. Zoya said that things had been much easier in the Soviet times… I’m almost quoting now… that you didn’t have to think about what you were going to do; the government just told you, and, in return, took care of you…. Galina was politely shocked and said that, as far as she was concerned, the new system was much better. Entirely consistent with our takes on both of them (good and bad), but so very hard for an American to understand Zoya’s point of view. We told Tony this story tonight (see below), and he said something like, “Some people are going to thrive in this transition; others will not.” Doubtless true.

DJ: Tony and Cathy called at 2:15 to say that Lizzie had been sleeping since noon and they didn’t want to wake her so they were taking a pass on lunch as well. So we had a very nice lunch with Zoya and her two daughters, a 17-year old and a ten-year old. Otis slept for thirty or forty minutes and then woke up, had a bottle of juice and tried to drink CD’s beer. CD: One more note – The older girl is a stunning Kazakh beauty; she apparently favors her father, who was working and could not join us for lunch. We gather he is some sort of senior blue collar worker for an oil company, a pipeline equipment mechanic, we think. The little girl is cute as a button and favors her mother. Like a “real Kazakh,” she ordered a giant plate of shashlik, polished it off (notwithstanding some very funny bug eyes when first being presented with the plate, then had ice cream (her first hot fudge sundae, a bit nonplussed by the hot sauce), and then finished the left over horsemeat sausage. Horse for dessert, hmm.

Back to DJ: We left at 4:00; Cathy called to ask us if we wanted to check out an artist friend of Max’s dad who has a gallery around 5:00 or so. I said sure; give us a call in half an hour. They didn’t call, and Otis and I took a nap together, CD says we looked very cute. He’s in the beginning stages of crawling: he’s figured out how to move backwards. Otis woke me up at 6:00, dinner time. While CD was feeding him, Tony called to say they had decided to go to Zheriyuk to eat something and could they come over at 7:00 and maybe we could go out for coffee. They arrived a little after 7:00 and we took photos and videos of Otis and Lizzie meeting each other. They’re almost exactly the same age, born about a week apart; watching them play together was a lot of fun. We talked about our shared and different experiences. T&C are very happy to be in Almaty after six weeks in Pavlodar; Cathy said after Pavlodar, Almaty is like being in New York City. I said that in some ways, not many, I envied their experience, not the giant mosquitoes and the blistering heat but getting to experience a less cosmopolitan part of the country. Otis started his grim march towards sleep, and, after a while, Lizzie whose sleep pattern has been messed up by the flight from Pavlodar started her own grim march. I put them in a cab and went to get more beer. Two years ago we didn’t know Tony & Cathy; now we have shared an experience that will bond us for a lifetime, as someone from Freehold once said, “Life’s funny that way.”

A week from when I write this, Otis will have been a US citizen for about an hour.