#ladymama

This is the last Latvia journal entry. I can finally retire this notebook! I wish the writing were more inspired, but it's a journal.

It was a leisurely day. I  woke up at 11, unaffected by the ending to my dream (I probably escaped and the Indian doctor surely saved that girl), and had a small breakfast followed immediately with a beer on the beach. Inese and the neighbor girls came with, and we kicked around in the water for a while.

The wind was strong and the seaweed was gone. In its place were tire tracks. People had come to harvest it as a beauty product. It's nice to be in a country where people are paid for something absurd like that, rather than the one where people pay for it.

Lunch was home-grown, home-cooked potatoes, salad and spiced tomatoes. It was insanely delicious, but I feel like they didn't like it as much as I did. They went for the ground cutlet patties. Ladymama kept saying things like "you know, they feed them milk, so the meat is delicious" and "you don't know what you're missing" and "this is the natural stuff - no hormones or..." and I was getting irate.

I did my best not to be mean, but I did remind her that she had promised to not say any more like that.

At 4, Ivars took me to the Jahtsklub, but it was a bum deal. All the rowers and trainers (but one) were in Belgium for a race. I was not allowed to row without a trainer, and she was busy training people, and no one had any clothes to trade or sell, so I left completely unsatisfied.

When I got back there was a sad grandma awaiting me. She'd heard the news and took it harder than I did.

I put on beach stuff and Inese, neighbor girl, Ladymama and I went out, through we were still warned not to swim due to undertow.

Instead of swimming I made mud balls and sculptures. I threw one of the mud balls at Inese and it splashed up at her. I smeared sand on my face as a sign of diplomacy and she accepted.

When I went to wash the mud off, I dipped my hair in the water. I laughed because it made a significant splash noise when it fell in. I realized a few minutes later that I had been wearing my sunglasses and now they were gone.

We stood in the water for another 20 minutes or so and I balanced a mud ball on a mud tower and we left.

We took the bus into Vecriga today with Inese and her mother and we went souvenir shopping. I bought a cool shirt with Latvian colors and the flag on the chest, and looked at mittens and hats, which cost about 10 Lats, or $20, so I didn't buy any.

To say what we did next was wandering would be an incomplete truth. Since we were with Inese and Ivars, the way it worked was they would ask what I wanted to do, and they would take a bee-line for the nearest place it could be done. This is convenient when you actually have things to do, otherwise it can be mentally exhausting for me and physically challenging for the 81 year old birthday girl, and it actually makes things more difficult overall. Still, I appreciate the sentiment.

We ate lunch - correction: I ate lunch, they watched - at an outdoor cafe, because we had given up on finding post cards at the post office. Ladymama immediately joined an old, bear-looking fellow named Berzinž, who was 20 years her junior. While they chatted, I watched a lady (~65 years old) in a magenta dress spin in circles for the entire time we were there.

She performed her demented dance while playing "The Final Countdown", some German techno, something that was clearly inspiration for Electric Six, some polka, and I htink I even heard some banjo. It was so bizarre that I wound up laughing repeatedly.

While waiting for food, I noticed a display behind the lady containing hundreds of postcards. Proof positive that wandering is a more efficient operation over long periods of time than directed movement, but, since our hosts appeared irritated with how little we had done, I didn't mention it, I just bought my post cards.

After paying our beautiful waitress, we bee-lined it for the corner where we would meet the mother. On the way, though, Ladymama broke off to look at the same amber stands we'd seen a thousand times. I regretted showing interest in mittens and hats earlier, because she kept looking through those. When I told her she had officially scrutinized every piece of amber the country had to offer, she pretended to understand, but replied "not yet, I haven't."

Standing on the corner watching people pass by was fun, until a large, friendly, camera-wielding gentleman sallied up to my grandma and started asking her questions. [In my paper journal I have the quotation: "I wish you a healthy imagination and for it to be realized and for you to find pleasure in it."] He showed her a picture of when he'd met Madeleine Albright, and I went across the street to a clothing store named Gerkens.

When I came back, we left for the bus stop, now having traded Ivars for his mother. I went into a store called DressMann and expressed a little interest in a black dress shirt, but did not buy it. The bus came and so concluded my last day in Vecriga.

At the apartment I packed up my stuff and we headed east, according to the sun. I knew this was the wrong direction, but I said nothing. A half hour later, we were at a gigantic mall. They took us upstairs and asked "where would you like to go?" I instantly knew what was going on. The bee-lining was not over. We were on a mission to find me a black shirt. I cried on the inside.

In a half hour I bought nothing because it was all to expensive, so we went to the grocery store downstairs to load up on food and Absinthe.

Next came Lida. This time was more comfortable and I think I managed to put together a decently healthful meal.

At home I went swimming with Inese and the neighbor, who wore and inappropriate bathing suit. We came in, I went for a run on the beach. When I got back the sun was setting and I went for a swim again. The neighbor was there to make sure I didn't drown, I guess.

We had another road trip today. It's not all bad, though, because they give me lots of time to kill, which I usually spend filling the previous day's journal entries.

We drove through a lot of nowhere in particular, eventually turning left, driving some more and stopping at a small store. To say this store sold bread would be an understatement. They sold every kind of Latvian bread I've never heard of. They sold garlic toasted rupjmais, and garlic toasted other stuff. They had 20kg loaves for sale. It was equal parts cool and gross. At least we got some of the garlic toast we'd had at the restaurant the day before.

The bag was cracked open and in ten minutes I'd had enough for the week.

The next trip was a memorial. [The church in the back was severely pocked by bullet holes.] It was a large field of gravestones lining strips of grass. They area was enclosed by a marble wall, half of which was gray marble covered in names. I found "Karelis Imants," but continued on, thinking that it couldn't be him, because he didn't die in battle, and that's not exactly his last name. Later, though, when Ladymama pointed to a different Karelis, she said they added the 'i' to make it more Latvian. I told her that I'd seen Imants Karelis, so we immediately went back to it. She said the date matched the one they'd mistakenly marked his date of death before. The government was unaware that he had left rather than be executed by Russians, so they marked him killed.

We left the memorial and drove further into nowhere. We stopped at a house tucked away 500m from the already tucked-away road, where we met a man with a silly mustache. He took us to a house that was tucked away to meet an old lady who was the keeper of information about the region, which, apparently contained three houses.

The third house, on the first road, had a 30 year old pregnant woman pushing a stroller as watchman. A small, hyperbolically scruffy dog barked at us until he was tired, at which point he urinated on the barn and waddled to the shade under one of the cars. Ladymama spoke with the old lady of the house for a few minutes and we left.

When we crossed a nearby bridge, she mentioned that this area had been in contention, because of the bridge, and that at night the soldiers would sleep at those houses (maybe.. she was unclear on this point). She said something about how both Russians and Latvians did whatever they did. I made a connection to an earlier story: during fighting, there was an unwritten rule that if you encountered the enemy while on a bathroom break, you did not shoot.

We collectively decided, in Latvian, that we should head home. I was informed of this a half hour later, as we began to see sand dunes frozen in time by the trees that grew in them. We were back at Jurmala with another 30 minutes to go. We pulled over for food, and two of the family went in to ask if they had vegetarian options. Unfortunately they didn't ask what they were: two kinds of thick potato pancake, fries with four different sides, and fried smiley face potatoes. Being desperate for salad, I ordered the fries with salad (and kečups), hoping for the best.

Salad here means a pickle, some cucumber and a couple beets. I finished the plate while the family, led by Ladymama, became more and more concerned for my health, saying I needed more. I told them I was full and didn't want more, so they ordered me a slice of fudge cake, which I nibbled. I told Ladymama that I was clearly dying of starvation, because I was wasting away. Just look at me!

She did not find the irony, so I picked her up in her chair and threw her as far as I could, which was 20 feet, including sliding distance.

Five minutes from home we went to Rimi Hypermarket. Ivars finally found a tape cleaner, and I bought stuff for my own salad - lettuce, orange pepper, carrots. When I got home and made it, they laughed at me and joked "bon appetit." I couldn't believe it, so I decided to eat happily.

Ladymama, my pseudo-defender, and I went to catch the sunset, which was ugly, and she scratched my back while I fell asleep.

The extreme emotional intensity of these moments compounded on the lack of preparation I had for them made this vacation all the more surreal. The only other place I commonly find casual shopping followed by soul rending personal exposure and total destruction of expectations is in a dream.

In Smiltene they were having a summer festival in what may be described as the town center. (A woman was singing jazz, like So danco samba, and attempting to scat in her thick accent.) [It was very strange.] We wandered around and saw the building where Ladymama's home was. We walked past the pond where they went ice skating, adn the hill from where they threw horse shit at pedestrians. The slopes were extremely steep and she said that to traverse them in winter, they would crawl. She pointed the the building in which she was born, noting especially how it was separate from the hospital.

We swung around the other side, up the hill, and saw "the creepy house" (my name), that children were afraid of approaching. Once at the top, we entered the hospital grounds, which put America to shame. At the front of the hospital was about a half acre of parkland, with tall, welcoming trees providing shade and a nice approach to the front door.

In the lobby there was a display with pictures and writings about the history of the hospital. Ladymama pointed to one picture and said "that is my father."

Our host family had broken off from us here, and we were made more mobile, so we explored. One patient, who was apparently intimately familiar with the place, directed us to the back, saying it had been converted into the ICU.

We headed back into town and had some coffee an dice cream. A drunk man was too discombobulated to pick up his beer (2 liters) that he'd dropped, so I grabbed it for him when he looked at me and summoned the word "help."

We were about 400m from her old house, at town center, and within sight were the locations (no longer there) of the candy store, her high school, the church where she was confirmed, the fire station. She recounted a story of when she saw a man who was shoveling snow from the candy store roof fall in an avalanche two or three stories to the ground. He was fine, she said.

On the way out of town she bought a huge bag of the terrible candy my mom warned me about. She pointed at a soccer field, lined by birches, and said that it was all birches before, and in school they had to plant three trees every year, and that the nearby woods was "a good place for a rendezvous."

On the way back, we stopped in Cesis for another castle ruins, but were surprised by a mass of people. It turned out they were having their 800 year anniversary, so we took a couple photos, including one which accidentally captured the souls of two from the same group of students we'd run into.

Back at home, I saw parts of the festival on TV. It was enormous. I specifically remember one dancer (of many) named Liene. [This is only time in my life that that name belonged to someone other than my mother.]

Ivars said that after the festival's dancing, music and fireworks, disco night would begin. Disco night meant live performances by Right Said Fred and Lou Bega.

I've read (or at least I have a notion that I think came from reading) that the field of science is about building a web of mutually-supporting theses. In that way, a successful theory is one that is supported by evidence and by the body of knowledge in place around it. (I'm thinking Dawkins.)

(Lurking Jesus

Looming Buddha)

"Wake up, Alex! We're leaving!"

Having learned my lesson from the previous day, I asked "unnh. To where?"

"Smiltene!"

Her home town! How exciting! Exciting enough that I forgot all the content of my bizarre, spectacular dreams except for a naked Courtney Cox demanding similar behavior from me, and a skyline viewed at nighttime from the multi-story church including simultaneously Amsterdam, bathed in a red-magenta glow and Berlin or Munich in blue-aquamarine.

On the way we stopped several times looking for a tape head cleaner, once at a second-hand clothing store, where one rack out of three floors was for men.

The next stop was at a castle named Turaide in Sigulda. I was confused, as always, because no one informs me of the plans except so far as we've executed them, so I asked Ladymama if she recognized it. After a few minutes of hearing about how she used to run and ski here, I deduced that we were not at her hometown. This is when I found out we were at a castle. Moments later I saw it.

We explored some of the ruins and saw some students touristing. Two of the girls were harmonizing in the top of the watch tower.

The next stop was the out-of-season bobsled course. For 4 Lats, you can ride down (with a pilot) on a sled with rubber tires. We decided instead to just look down from the top.

Leaving the area, I bought some hand-picked wild strawberries - about a pint for 1.50. I continued to snack on them for the rest of the day - they were wholly delicious.

We stopped for food at a straw-roofed place we'd seen the previous day, and, while there, we saw the same group of students from the castle. the vegetarian portion of the menu was three items long, and I got the fried cheese. The plate was covered - the cheese, some french fries, beets, shredded veggies - and at the end I was stuffed. To add to the problem, we ordered some garlic-toast, which came on the very dark rucksmais I've seen so much of. I was blown away.

(Breakfast and naptime - markers around campus w/monkey (swigs of 118 gold drink): rebuild overhead projector motor; Jono to row? Eiffel tower of sound. Escape from Ellen + Jenny's: 50 levels into basement on hand-moved elevator. Party w/drunk girl who liked my shirts/grabbed my ass. Schloff writing down people's drinks.)

Friday. Woke up to Ladymama bringing me fresh strawberries today. I ate a breakfast of toast with margarine and home-made cottage cheese and went right back to bed for a nap. I had many strange dreams, noted above.

After a few hours of milling about, including a walk on the beach to the ski-doo stand, Ladymama said "alright, let's go!" I started to pack and decided to fill my water bottle. I waited outside, scratching the dog until Inese and her mother pointed at the car, indicating that for the last ten or fifteen minutes, Ivars, his father and Ladymama had been waiting in the car for me. I had had no idea and felt like a fool.

We drove for a half hour or so with a stop at the Riga apartment to get dressed for "a memorial" and met up with a man named Roland. Ladymama told me that [he and Imants] had served together in the Latvian military and he had the stories to prove it. In the car on the way to meet him she told me that in the German training camp Imants and Roland were invited to be bodyguards for Hitler and Himmler respectively. They refused, but the only way was to be executed or to go to the frontline against Russia. They chose the frontline, to fight the Russians in Latvia again, pushing forward towards Leningrad.

Long before this, they fought as the Latvian military. It was revealed to me after our 2 hour road trip, for which I had been completely unprepared, that we were going to see the lines on which they had fought.

Two large memorials stood in the area and it was all surrounded by open fields with interspersed areas of dark tree cover. One of the memorials was behind a pond in an alcove in the trees. Roland took us off the brick path just a few meters into the woods. The trenches were still there, and in some places the woven sticks were still holding back the dirt. Following the trenches we found a bunker. Roland said this one had fallen apart, so they had rebuilt it for the sake of the visitors.

Looking across these trenches into the tree cover I imagined my grandfather, the most peaceful man I've ever met, fighting here. I withheld tears while we walked further into the woods. I helped Ladymama traverse the difficult ground that was obscured by the same brush as was there during the fighting. We followed behind Roland, who was still familiar with the area because he acts as a tour guide regularly. Occasionally he would lean over and pick a stem of a wild strawberry to give to Ladymama.

We arrived at an original bunker. The old timbers had collapsed and the metal wires were gnarled and rusted. Ladymama choked back her tears as she relayed the stories to me:

Around the entire area there was a natural moat, so the soviet tanks could only pass on the roads, which were set with mines.

In this place where the memorial was, and where Roland had been stationed, the tanks spotted a Latvian in the road and realized that they were approaching a line prepared for them. They couldn't advance through the trees, so they sent infantry through the trees, but the trees were also set with mines.

Because of the strength and quality of the fortifications, three rota of Latvians - 146 men each - were able to hold against two divisions of soviets - 1800 men each? - with tanks. [This was possible because of the laws of the soviet war machine, wherein a soldier would be shot by his commanding officer if he turned away from battle or did not advance toward the enemy.]

At one point, the line had fallen back and the soviets advanced, but Imants' rota mounted a counterattack and sent them back.

They fought for days at this location, often three times per night.

It was here, listening to Ladymama's stories between what Roland told, that I developed a theory for why she tells so many silly stories: she turned off her filter for what should and shouldn't be said, because when the air is full, it distracts her from her memories.

We went to the war museum, which is a house in the middle of a field near the trenches. They have one of the captured soviet tanks outside, and various weapons and medals inside. The stacks of weapons and helmets were all discovered in the area after the soviets had relinquished control. As the equipment was discovered, if there was also a body, the information was added to the registries.

We got back home at 10:30, and I emailed a few people about what I'd seen.

It's several years later and this day remains rooted in my memory. I believe it was in this place that I realized there are things I would die for and kill against, and a genocide meeting me at home is an easy yes. After this day I began to understand how a gentle man like my grandfather could shoot a gun at another human with intent.