Perpetual Change

The Travels of the Toothpick

This is no ordinary toothpick, this is a Finnish toothpick, and indeed it looks like it was crafted from the rib of a great ocean schooner… which would be fitting because this toothpick has come home to live the rest of its days with me after a long journey. It will never serve the purpose that it was created for, but in my eyes has transcended to a much greater ideal.

You see, my sister [and perhaps she can elaborate a bit more in a comment] had some conversation with my parents in Helsinki, a land of culturally and linguistically distinctive people with no remotely close relatives or neighbors (they are NOT Scandinavian, I found out). The outcome of this conversation, I believe at breakfast on the first day of their journey, was that Catherine would not be capable of delivering this toothpick to me intact. Well from there they departed for the Russian border by bus. Successfully across, and with many stories to tell, they spent several days seeing the sites of St. Petersburg, and then several days in Moscow. At this point, they were to pick up tickets at the airport and fly to Lviv where I would meet them, and this is where the story gets really interesting.

My Ukrainian coordinator’s daughter lives in Moscow, and they had managed to meet my parents for dinner the night before. The dinner was lovely, they said, except for when Mom found out that the delicious salad she was enjoying was made of bull’s heart. When my coordinator, Natalia, and her daughter, Vika, learned that my family was going to the airport the next day, they insisted on driving them. Driving in private automobiles, although more common in Moscow from what I understand, is quite a luxury for us here. Well the trip was about an hour, and upon arriving at the airport, in typical Ukrainian fashion, the hosts insisted on seeing them off to the last possible step. I will be eternally grateful that they did, because my greatest fear, unbeknownst to me who was waiting in the Lviv airport, was about to come true. The ticket guy insisted that my parents needed visas to enter Ukraine, which has not been necessary for American tourists for a year, and this was a Ukrainian air carrier, not a Russian one. In Russia visas are still a must, and not easy to come by. This event also elicited the typical Ukrainian response from my parents’ hosts - a bartering/yelling match meant to intimidate the other side. After an hour of my dad, my coordinator’s daughter, and this man in a back office discussing - in alternatively heated and then silent exchanges - he eventually gave over the tickets, without any money exchanging hands (this was the part that surprised me the most). If my parents had not made it to Ukraine for this reason, I would never have stopped kicking myself. Thank you, Natalia and Vika, from the bottom of my heart.

The flight was another interesting comedy of errors, but 4 hours after I expected them, and an hour after I had given up hope, they came walking into the airport lobby. There isn’t much more to the Lviv airport than the lobby. I almost cried I was so happy, …as did they.

From there we spent several days in Lviv and my nearby town. We toured many churches, town halls, towers, museums, and mineral waters. We made Varenyky with my host family (a dish my father fondly remembers from his highschool girlfriends’ mothers’ kitchen), and had cake with some of my colleagues and neighbors. We even got to listen to the 2 am screaming after Ukraine won another of the World Cup games. Have you forgotten the toothpick? Somewhere in this period, my sister remembered it, and it was passed to my pocket, completely intact.

The irony is, that I then promptly forgot about it, and I happened to carry it off on the next stage of our adventures. From my town we went on to visit my first host family, and my very pregnant host sister-in-law near Kyiv, and then a few days of sight seeing in Kyiv. We had a wonderful time together, and saw many interesting sights and met many interesting people, but their vacation was coming to an end. I regretfully saw them off at the airport in Kyiv. I however wasn’t returning home, and neither, I re-discovered, was the toothpick.

I went on to 2 conferences, a 7 day camp, a Ukrainian/American wedding, a couple of days with the host family and friends again, and then home. Three weeks later, as I was unpacking, I found the toothpick again. It was still intact, but its little plastic wrapper had worn right off, and it was a bit dirtied. However, its being from such a strong explorer culture, and having so many journeys already under its belt, will certainly guarantee my loyalty to it. As a symbol of friends and family, far and near, the little toothpick has a special place of respect in my heart and will certainly make the great journey over the pond on my final return home.

posted by jjs @ 8:12 AM