An Easterly Adventurer

Well, you know, without adventure, I am less.

It's always hard to imagine a stranger twist in life's strangely twisted road. But still, the twists just keep on coming.

One day he's a guy growing up in an America where McCarthy rails against the Red Menace posed by some imaginary Fellow Travelers; where gradeschool teachers supervise duck-and-cover drills and send their charges home with schematics for backyard bomb shelters; where, not much later, Kennedy paces and postures during the blood-runs-cold moments of a showdown in the Florida Straits; where, still later, Reagan goes all-in with a small straight on the last hand of a high-stakes poker game 'with the Evil Empire.

Then, in a flash, this child of the Cold War took up residence slightly south of the centre of the Warsaw Pact and a stone's throw east of the mother of all Nazi death camps, in a modest (and oddly persimmon-flavoured) Kraków attic with an equally modest (but less persimmonish) view of the Wawel Castle.

Then, with a start, he realizes the flashes are far from finished.

Soon he's in the throes of, as some might say, getting his affairs in order, in order to migrate (only semi-temporarily, as it turns out -- but that's later in the tale) even further east...even further into the mysterious world where for centuries Turks and Tartars and Slavs and various misfits mixed up a history coloured in turns by art, bloodshed, darkness and light.

Off he goes, not entirely in tune with his own best judgement, to Kyiv (or Kiev, or Kiew, or Kijów, depending on one's linguistic preference). Historic older brother of Moscow. Latter-day nutritional lynchpin of the USSR. A city where, even with a law dictating the official use of Ukrainian, three-quarters of the population speak Russian routinely.

And there, right in the middle of it, wanders a guy who grew up in America through the development and demise of the Cold War.

It's hard to imagine a stranger twist in life's strangely twisted road.

But imagination will, once again, prove to be a wholly inadequate predictor of life as we know it.

To be continued...

((133-70)/6)4
[email protected]

...temporarily absent from an attic flat in Kraków
with an almost-view of the Wawel Castle.

...currently dancing with dreams along the Dnipro
from a haunt in central Kyiv.

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