A friend and I were texting today about age, about our inability sometimes to remember how old we are; especially when we both have been fortunate enough to have parents live into their nineties. When I first went to Russia in the early nineties, an orthodox nun asked me to kneel next to her and she prayed for me for ten minutes at the Shrine of St Xenia, one of the patron saints of St.
Then she gave me a piece of bread from the top of the sarcophagus and asked if I liked it. I wanted to ask a cab driver where I could find a bathroom but ended up saying I like to drink dark beer from a toilet. I turned to a friend with me at the bar and said wow, the service here is phenomenal. I wanted to tell a room full of students to listen, but instead I told them to get their suitcases. A priest friend of mine stationed in the city wanted to tell a waitress he would like some mayonnaise but ended up saying I love to masturbate.
Some friends went to buy coffee and asked me how to ask for sugar. I told them. I could go on but more or less by screwing up I learned to fit in, pick up the nuances of accent and syllables, which brought down prices at the flea market, brought out their best Georgian wine, and opened gates to closed graveyards and monasteries. My mistakes are some of my best memories.
Even the ones which broke my heart, left me penniless, crushed my ambition. I can honestly look back at certain moments in my life—no matter how sure I was of my decision at the time—and say, definitively, I screwed up.
But we move on and hope we are forgiven; we keep going and learn to forgive ourselves. She seemed confused and we talked a bit—slowly of course. Her mother had been the secretary of the church before the revolution seventy-five years earlier.
