Moscow is a strange city. Like New York, it offers endless variety of people, most of them walking too fast to care about you and whether you’re staring at them or not. Yet it also has the Boulevard Ring around its center, where elderly dogs slowly lead their elderly owners forward – who knows where? This is the entirely different rhythm and reason.
It is so familiar – we lived there for three years between 1987 and 1990 – and yet so profoundly different. Imagine a house that you grew up in, and new owners remodeled it completely. Here and there you can recognize it, and know that underneath all the shiny covers, there is probably more things you could recognize.
The most unnerving thing is not the city itself, but my own eyes. I lost my old eyes; I see things differently now. Perhaps it is simply a function of age, perhaps of 22 years of emigrant existence. It is just difficult to find the one connection where what you’re looking at is the same, and your eyes are the same as before.
And yet, as I was exiting Polyanka subway station, the warm wind blew in my face just so, with the smell of railroad ties mixed in, and with the sound of the train leaving the station. Where my eyes fail, other senses come to rescue. Hello again, Moscow.
It is so familiar – we lived there for three years between 1987 and 1990 – and yet so profoundly different. Imagine a house that you grew up in, and new owners remodeled it completely. Here and there you can recognize it, and know that underneath all the shiny covers, there is probably more things you could recognize.
The most unnerving thing is not the city itself, but my own eyes. I lost my old eyes; I see things differently now. Perhaps it is simply a function of age, perhaps of 22 years of emigrant existence. It is just difficult to find the one connection where what you’re looking at is the same, and your eyes are the same as before.
And yet, as I was exiting Polyanka subway station, the warm wind blew in my face just so, with the smell of railroad ties mixed in, and with the sound of the train leaving the station. Where my eyes fail, other senses come to rescue. Hello again, Moscow.
Blessings to you, Sasha, and to your beautiful family as you begin new work, with new eyes to see possibilities!
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