my texan mother in armenia

My mom is going to hate me for putting up a picture of her without her hair done. But besides just being joyful, this picture is proof of love, that she would give up a multi-decade, never-missed hairdryer habit for me. You're beautiful, Mom.

Most of the past week I think I’ll save for my novel/memoir/perpetually-put-off-piece-of-literature.  That is both a artistic decision, and a way of avoiding the impossibility of putting into words this past week with me, Mom, and Armenia. But, despite the length, consider this a taste.

I saw her at first down the hallway, behind the glass partition, my mother looking much skinnier, a little lost, and washed over with anticipation.  She saw me jumping up above the crowd, waving one arm and holding a bouquet of flowers in the other, this little collection of green, white and lavender, a message to my mom that despite the craziness of her first trip abroad, there is beauty, simplicity, joy and calm ahead.

Of course, directly after the bouquet presentation and tearful hugs came a walk through a dark, cement parking garage guided by a less-than-polished, self-proclaimed taxi driver.  In between waves of joy and disbelief that she was actually here, our hands holding each others hands, my mother said, “This doesn’t feel safe.  Are you sure we’re going to a taxi?”

“Yes, Mom, don’t worry.  I’ve got you.”  I was not 100% sure that this man was legitimate, but I was sure that I was so full of love right then that I would have crushed this little man into crumpled nothingness should he even try to threaten the joy.  Plus my friend Chris was recording her arrival, walking behind us with a HD camcorder.  If the taxi driver took us out, my mother and I would be recorded as innocents, full of life and love, and the taxi driver would be immortalized as a love-killing, evil monster.

We did however end up at the prearranged hostel room, both of us too excited not to walk around Yerevan, taking in the joy which the city wind whisked around us.  We ate falafel at Habibi then walked to the Cafe Rich and drank cafe glazses.  Our conversations circled around a few subjects but always came back to this:

Me: “Mom, I just can’t believe you’re right here.  Right here.  Flesh. Bones. Smile even.  My mom!”

Mom:  “I know.  I know!”

There were, of course, updates on everyone from my sister’s boyfriend to a high school friend’s mom.  I can still see her sitting right there in the outdoor cafe, across the table from me, holding a swirl of coffee and ice cream, framed on one side by a tv playing Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and on the other side by the artificial Swan Pond reflecting the street lights with Armenian lovers and families and friends circling it.  I imagined their conversations, unique and mundane, all of us sharing the same air while my mom and I sat and enjoyed a dream of mine coming true.

I know this may feel dramatic.  It’s a mom; it’s a visit.  I can try to explain.  Growing up, I thought everyone had the same life I had, going to little brick elementary schools, escaping to the toy aisle in Wal-Mart while my parents shopped, carrying cartoon-inspired lunchboxes, watching flat highways roll by through minivan windows on the way to our grandparents’ house.  High school mission trips to Mexico broke the bubble, and all the sudden the world opened.

The young traveler’s epiphany: for every unique fingerprint there comes an entire unique life with as many variations to it as there are drops of water in the sea.

I told my mother I’d like to spend my first college summer abroad.  She told me, “If you can find the money, go ahead.”  She would later confide that she didn’t think I’d be able to, and was surprised and even a bit worried when I told her I’d spend my summer working for a church in Auckland, New Zealand.

I spent a collective year of my four in college living and traveling through other countries, full of wonder and joy at each new life I got to know and love.  I changed; I saw the world.

It didn’t stop after college, with 5 months in Kolkata, 3 in Panama, and a year working in refugee resettlement in West Texas.  And now I have lived 16 months in Armenia.  What has changed, or what has intensified I should say, is my desire to share these experiences with family.  Let’s bypass for now my hope to find someone who wants to build a family around this kind of world-chasing life.  Since those first trips to Mexico I have wanted to visit these places with my mom, my dad, my sisters, and with my brother’s family.

It has torn at my soul, this feeling of being in love with people all over the world, being pulled to La Laguna, Mexico, missing my Indian family, and being so far away from my Texas loves.  After a short collection of months, I’ll be a mess of collected memories, current tears, and full full full of joy and love for my Armenian home and the friends I cherish here.

And so, here for just this brief, bright week, my mother did what I’ve dreamed someone in my family would one day want to do and make it happen.  My mother visited a distant country I love, experienced every place I love, met souls I’ve fallen in love with and fell in love with them herself.

We traveled by rickety marshutka to my old host family, that summer home of mine.  Within the first five minutes, sitting in my family’s general store, neighbors gifted us with a plastic bag full of live crawfish.  Later my mom cried giving a toast at the feast they set out for us, already full to the brim with the love they showed us.  I watched her during our morning hike, wondering at the dry yellows and silvers and light blues rolling through the valley.  I named the surrounding villages, speaking for her the unfamiliar sounds of a language she’d never heard.

She spent five days in my valley town.  We feasted on khorovats, danced at her birthday party, hiked to my favorite spot in town.  Every morning she’d shower and then head over to my land mom’s porch for a cup of Armenian coffee.  She couldn’t use her low-voltage hair dryer here which led to the blessing of my land mom doing her hair.   She fell in love with my friends at work, visiting their homes for so many cups of coffee and tastes of Armenian life.  At night she came home to more coffee with the landfamily and finally, long talks with me in my little cottage, with cups of tea and desperate attempts to stay awake to treasure the fact that here we sat in Armenia together.

She even tried to learn some of the language, finally mastering shnorakalutsyun but leaving without mastering the french ‘r’ in deghts.  I translated for her, feeling the blossom of new friendship open through me as she sat and talked with the clooker, with my coworkers, with my tiny little landsisters.

She brought a smorgasbord of gifts for me: Rosita’s refried beans, 80 ounces of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, 9 pounds of brown suger, and my loving Aunt’s hand-tossed Puppy Chow.  She filled my spice cabinet to overflowing and brought more Hanes socks and underwear to try to outlast the wear-and-tear of handwashing.  And she brought so many gifts for my Armenian friends that she was wrapping the last handmade bit of jewelery around my friend Gayane’s wrist while we walked to our marshutka on the way out of town.  A volunteer from our office had accompanied us and without a pre-planned gift, my mom dug into her make-up bag and pulled out eye-shadow, telling her that with such beautiful eyes she should could easily pull of some wild blue and shocking pink.  Gayane, one of the Armenians who fell in love back, waved to my mom and me through the marshutka window as we rolled out of the parking lot and back to Yerevan.

The last two days were a mix of stress and the coming departure.  My mom recalled a Kolkata story of mine, quoting my little Indian brother, who upon seeing the white curb lines that signaled the coming airport entrance, sat back in the bus seat next to me, sighed and said, “Oh, no.”

“What is it, Martin?” I asked, confused as to the change in mood right after a series of goofy-face pictures we’d taken.

He looked out the window again. “This is where the missing starts.”

We stressed each other out shopping in the Vernassage, her wanting to bring back some worthy gifts to our family in Texas, and me at the end of my ability to calmly translate Armenian to English and dollars to dram.  But the moments I’ll remember most about that last day in Yerevan are my mom insisting that we sit with Zeena, our homestay host, while she told us about growing up in Soviet Armenia, about running from Turkey in 1915, about her life hosting Americans with her sister in their home, about her sister’s recent passing, about her brilliant father, about her own career working with the early, room-filling super computers.

And there my mother sat, soaking up all the good, radiating compassion, looking at that old, amazing soul with love and wonder.

At the airport we put off goodbye with two cups of coffee and an apple crumble.  We sat on uncomfortable chairs, holding hands and talking about simple things like my sister’s percussion lessons and her making Armenian coffee for my dad.  We hugged each other some twenty times before she finally walked through through to security.  I watched her through the crack in the glass partition, and when she turned around to catch a glimpse of me, I jumped up above the glass and waved.

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the one that got away

I have regrettable news to relate, but next to the people I see on the street everyday, you are the one(s) who keep(s) up with the Chicken.  But don’t worry, she didn’t die.

She moved.  That’s right, we got a divorce.  Me and Spring Chicken are no longer together.  It was an amiable split, I think.  She’d long ago stopped smearing her poop on me.  We were getting along really well in fact.  It was the neighbors who ultimately prompted the final severance.  For months they’ve been calling my landdad, telling him that their baby can’t sleep because my dog is crying.  The neighbors’ calls, the barking and the fecal minefield the Chicken was daily constructing around the raspberry patch (whoa, what!? The word raspberry has a “p” in it!?) were enough to get my landfamily to consistently give me a hard time about what a pain the dog was for them.

Funny thing was, when I started mentioning that I was looking for a new home for her, I had three immediate offers.  Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks she’s quite a catch.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I helped her move to her new home on the other side of town.  Her new family comes complete with a spindly, quirky grandmother, a jovial dad, a spunky mom, and a full-of-life young boy who invited all the neighborhood kids over to see the new dog immediately upon her arrival.  I left her in the back yard with a pile of bones and haven’t heard from her since.  The spunky mom said she’s been a great dog already, quiet at night and playful with the young boy.

I left her there the day before I left on a 10 day jaunt around the country from which I have recently returned.  The great thing about the Chicken’s new home is that her owners are already friends of mine who new her for months of her stay with me.  They were thrilled to adopt her.  They started calling her Cheeko within minutes.  And they have invited me to take her on walks and hikes whenever I’d like.

All this of course does not diminish the hole I feel after giving her up.  Dog-lovers, eye-roll away, but the truth is that no matter how much I enjoyed our walks and the lap-naps and the loving  how’s-your-dog questions from townspeople on the street, she just didn’t fit.  Having crossed over my Peace-Corps-service halfway mark, I took a long ponder at how I want the rest of my time here to look, and I don’t want a year of my landfamily giving me a hard time about the dog they didn’t really want to live in their yard, a year of trying to get my coworkers to like her, a year of people telling me to keep her away because a dog hair might get into their mouths and kill them.  I’m not sure I want to continue my inevitable years of moving around with a dog in tow.  I got into the Dog Deal not really knowing if it would be a good fit for me, and despite both of our attempts to love on each other, it wasn’t. So I found her a good home, and I accept the stomach knots that creep up when I go out into a puppyless yard in the morning.

A fellow PCV, John, surprised me last night when I told him about it.  He said, “Well, she’s not dead.” I raised an eyebrow. “Really, Brent, with your track record, she’s lucky to have lived with you and then ended up in a new home.  She didn’t die like most of your pets.  She’s the one that got away.”

“Oh my gosh, you’re right,” I said.  I hate to say it, but she’s the only pet I’ve ever owned that left me unscathed.  Call it self-acquittal if you want, but when John said that, all I felt was a huge sense of relief.  I’m glad she’s got a good family, and while I have some real regrets (something akin to but opposite of buyer’s remorse) I feel like she’s going to have a good life.  We’re both going to be better off now because I took the chance to adopt her then.

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in which a homeless man thinks that i am also a homeless man

So, after you spend time thinking your neighborhood might explode while you stare at beached whales (please see last post), life gives you a little less bitter perspective.

I know I’ve said that my town is fairly cool and all, but it’s startling how cool it is compared to Yerevan which is a mere two hours away.  It tends to be twenty degrees warmer there, and yesterday, at about 3pm the capital had surely surpassed the 100 degree mark.  After searching for the right road for a blistering hour, I, of course, fresh from yesterday’s puke-time, had to hike with my backpack up a 70 degree slope for 700 yards or so to find the vet’s house where in Spring Chicken was waiting with her worms.

I wish she didn’t have her lady parts anymore, but apparently she’s puting up a fight.  I bet she ate some feces on purpose, just to throw me off the ovary-scooping trail.

The two of us sweat our way back down for another hour or so to the center of town where we collapsed under the shade of tree, laying on the grass only a couple yards from a fake pond.

There we were approached by Gago.  Clad in baggy black duds, he offered the last bits from his plastic bag of popcorn to the Chicken who devoured them immediately.  I, barely waking from my nap, rolled over to see the Chicken scarfing and the tall man grinning down at me through a grey, crudely braided beard.

Maybe I threw him off with my groggy shnorakal enk (we’re grateful) because he immediately turned around and went and brought another bag of popcorn which he spread on the grass and from which the three of us ate.

“You’re hungry?” he asked.

“I’m ok, thanks, ” I said, “but I think she loves you now.”

Gago grinned and reclined and brought out a small bottle of vodka which he offered me.  I declined which didn’t stop him from guzzling.  He never directly asked me if I was homeless.

“Drink some vodka?” he asked.

“No, thanks.  I’m waiting on someone who is taking me to my town”

“You live on the grass up there?” he asked.

“No, I live near a family in their small house in their garden.”

Later on, he asked, “In America, you live on the grass?”

“No, no.  I live with my family,” I said.

Whenever my hand was empty, he gathered kernals of popcorn from the grass and dumped them into my palm.  Perhaps it was my I’ve-been-puking-in-a-sweltering-apartment hairdo, or maybe it was my dirty clothes, or my heedless sprawl on the park grass, but this was surely the first time that a homeless man assumed that I was also homeless.

He offered Spring Chicken a palm full of vodka, which to my relief, she seemed to hate.  We talked about his cat, about Yerevan, about the heat, about music.  Grinning, we stumbled through “Hotel California” together, his phonetic rendering all the more marred by his vodka guzzles.    He kissed Spring Chicken on the mouth and wrestled with her.  He seemed very interested in her teeth, opening her mouth to study them while she wagged her tail.

When people passed he sometimes asked them for khmelu pogh, for drinking money.  But when the taxi came, he didn’t ask me for a penny.  He shook my hand and told me what a pleasure it was to meet me.  He hugged my dog.  He waved to me.

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you know those times i’m talking about

You know those times when everything seems to go wrong.  It’s not just a day, but whole weeks at a time.  Those sections of the year where things happen one-after-another, like you miss a flight and pay an of-course-highly-unfair price for a new ticket then you return home to find a mouse has eaten through all your clothes and you go to meet your friends for dinner but your tire is flat so you call them and have a not horrible but mostly inedible meal at a restaurant you wouldn’t have chosen all the while watching as two of your friends (one of whom you were just starting to think liked you) display body language that clearly shows they’re already hooking up so you go home.  The next day you spend thirty minutes looking for your keys only to find that at some point yesterday they slipped through the mouse-chewed hole in your pocket.  You spend another thirty minutes looking for that extra house key which you find in a cardboard box next to a sleeping rattlesnake which takes a dive at you right before you pin it down with your foot.  Heart pumping, you contemplate the sweat which seems to have been released in deluge proportions and think about how you’ll have no time for a shower before work.  Having nothing like shovel or ax handy, and needing to keep all of your body weight on the neck of the rattler, you spy a butter knife on a near shelf and go about a far-to-nasty snake beheading while praying for forgiveness for everything.

Later that day your boss scolds you for being late to work and breathes fire that singes your hair to nubs and sets three weeks of file organization ablaze.  Thinking you’re just about over it, you decide to take a bus home but the bus has been rigged by a terrorist or Dennis Hopper or somebody and has to go above 50 mph or it will explode.  You take the wheel after the driver’s been shot and you figure at least you’ll have a love interest to guide you through the ordeal but it turns out to just be Keanu Reeves who looks at you with the same scowl over and over because apparently someone somewhere told him that was reassuring.

After the bus thing has been resolved you figure you’ll write about it on your blog but the internet is out so there you are alone in your house with nothing to do but sort through your mouse-hole clothes.  You take a box of totally demolished shirts and pants out to the curb and just as you’re setting it down by the trashcans a plane engine crashes into the roof of your house totally demolishing the east side along with your neighbors row of freshly planted lilies and possibly their dog as well which may now be under the dog house which is also under the plane engine.

Your neighbors run out of their house screaming about a broken gas line and the whole neighborhood starts scattering.  A few of you end up running all the way to the beach where you find a row of beached sperm whales each with a small group of children next to it, crying and singing to the ocean beasts.  One of the kids is bald and has leukemia.  The whole scene is suddenly backlit when your neighborhood explodes.

You tell all of this to your friend, who once you’ve finished says, “You live by a beach?!”

___________________

Ok… my weeks haven’t been so bad.  And I won’t bore you with the minutia, but I will say that on the third of July I traveled with my dog to the capital to have her spayed.  I then went to a town by the lake to celebrate the Fourth with friends.  However, I ended up with a stomach flu that kept me in bed while they had their lake times.  And I called the vet who was supposed to scoop out the puppy ovaries who instead told me that no scooping could be done on account of the colony of worms living in the puppy’s abdomen (despite the many worm treatments I’ve given her).  So, plagued with wormy guilt, I now have to take her back home, forget the weekend that went totally wrong and figure out when the heck I can make the multi-day trip back to the capital for puppy scooping, a trip that will inevitably involve me cancelling plans and praying pleasejesus don’t let her go into heat any time soon.

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bill nye for adults, daisies, more puppy photos, etc.

You know when you email someone you haven’t seen in a while, and you have one million things to say.  You end up writing something that sounds so disjointed but filled with all the things you would try to bring up in conversation when you saw them.  This is one of those kinds of emails, to you.

1. The Clooker should NOT hack up a lougie in front of my window. So we’re clear.

2. I just read/listened to this interview done by an Armenian newsite with one of my fellow PCV’s. It’s wonderful and makes me wonder what I would say about living in my little town.  But if you read this often, you know that interview would likely include the landfamily, the water schedule, head-cheese, Sanity and the Chicken, and something on chocolate-chip cookies.

3. I’ve been cooking. Not only am I eating so many bean burritos I could shoot myself to the moon (too much?), but I am perfecting a pasta sauce that is currently ranking “Fairly Delicious”.  I’m hoping to reach “Damn Good” by the end of the summer.

4. I’ve been hiking. I told you this already, actually, but I say it again to say that I’ve got some killer pics of the surprisingly-photogenic Spring Chicken.  Once you finish reading, feel free to slide into a that-is-just-too-adorable trance.

5. I’ve been listening to Radiolab. Y’all, this is Bill Nye, the Science Guy for adults.  I generally clean or cook while listening to this podcast, and almost always have to stop and collect my jaw that’s  dropped on the floor.  I just finished the latest “Famous Tumors” and despite being totally freaked out by the Tasmanian devil face tumor that is a CONTAGIOUS CANCER, I kept listening and almost wept by the end of the tumor story that led to all-together touching moment with the daughter of Henrietta Lacks, the woman who’s tumor cells provided the basis of a cure for polio, the first cell cloning, and an unbelievable amount of research into EVERY DISEASE EVER.   When you can start by totally grossing/freaking me out and end with me having to sit down to collect my emotions, you are one of my favorite things.  (If you really do check this out, please listen to “Lucy”.  Blew. My. Mind.)

6. I’ve been taking pictures. See:

From left: SC, Gita (landsister), Kristi (neighbor), Meri (landsister)
All of the above: adorable.  And the youngest, Gita, is the least afraid of the puppy.  She carts her around, reminiscent of a tiny cousin of mine.

From left: Davit, Liana, Arman
All of the above: coworkers, counterparts and three major reasons why my life in Armenia is awesome.

The beginning of a good hike. Please note the abandoned bus of that previous hiking post (linked above).

And now, what you’ve really been wanting, the puppy photos, because really, Spring Chicken bounding through daisies at dusk = GOLD.

The Chicken surveys the area.  (Please note: I have never seen so many daisies in my entire life.)

The Chicken bounds.

The Chicken bounds again.  And stretches out her tongue some more.

The Chicken is tuckered out.

The Chicken contemplates life.  Also daisies.

The Chicken wants you to know she loves you.

Uvsyo.

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in full up-swing

If you’re keeping up with my ol’ blog, you may have noticed some roller-coastering.  Well, folks, we are in full upswing now!  Clearly there was the I Can Make Refried Beans Discovery.  And really, there’s so much more.  Observe:

It’s Sunday afternoon. I clip Spring Chicken onto the leash and walk out under a blue sky and a full-on summer sun.  Back in Texas, leaving the house at 2pm on a June day means hopping from one air-conditioned building to the next.  But here in North Armenia, 2pm is perfect, a balmy 76 degrees.

I meet a couple of friends in the center of town, a single woman and her daughter who recently spent her senior year in an American school in Jersey.  She packs her Northface backpack with camera, fruit and water, adding similar contents to my bag, and we head away from the center.

We walk to the very corner of town, a neighborhood where the daughter grew up.  She recalls playing king of the mountain on a small mound on which now rests an old bucket and the skeleton of a gas-powered oven.   We head out to a dilapidated bus that sits rusting at the beginning of a field; we take pictures where the driver’s seat used to be, happy to be headed no where in particular.

We cross a large water pipe, walking along its length.  I fall, sliding off into the mud.  We laugh and then notice a rainbow in a rupture’s spray.

We walk for a half a mile in a field of daisies.  Spring Chicken bounds along causing ripples in the flowers as her blond body bobs among them.  The mother shows me a small growth of thyme hidden on the edge of an old stream bed.

We hit the edge of a ravine which coincides with the forest’s last slide down the mountain.  The sudden height and shade of pine trees signals a crossing over.  The daughter finds a small path, a critter’s run into the undergrowth, and we make our way along it pushing away branches and leaves.  Just when we can hear the quiet rush of stream water, the daughter hits a fork, deciding finally to take a small muddy leap instead of scratching her way through brush.  The mother decides on the thick brush route.  Just as I pack Spring Chicken into my back pack, preparing to climb down over steep mud, both mother and daughter encounter patches of banjar, stinging nettles.  The daughter, sitting mostly in mud, methodically picks away at the nettles before her.  The mother decides to continue on through the brush onomanopoetically.  Her cries reinforce my decision to jump to the mud, and I encounter only a bit of banjar.  The daughter says the stinging is “good for you”.

The girls take a moment to remove their socks and dip their re-shod feet into the stream.  We walk in the water, the girls lauding it for it’s clarity and drinkability.  I remove Spring Chicken from the bag, hoping she’ll enjoy the cool and wet.  She doesn’t, clinging doggedly to the muddy edges before finally falling in and dashing to the other side.

We finally take up a steep grassy incline.  We sit down among flowers and short grass, warming with the sun on our backs.  Spring Chicken disappears to chew on her find, an old bone.  We take out a bag of strawberries and eat until our fingertips and lips are fully red with juice.  I write some in my journal.  We lay in the sun.

We walk home along a dirt road.  The mother teaches me how to spot patches of wild herbs, and we fill a gallon-size ziplock bag with forest mint and thyme.  We’re greeted at the edge of town by sun-thrilled boys running along a stream, half naked and full of summer.  An old man carrying some long branches tells us a story I don’t understand; I laugh anyway.

When we get home, we set out our shoes to dry in the sun and lay out the herbs on tourist maps of our town.  The heat under my skin feels like my whole body smiling.  I eat slowly, a plate of pasta and Lori cheese, a cucumber, herb and tomato salad, some thyme tea.

I sleep so very well at night.

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summer summer summer summer summer!

Summer is really here, y’all.  I know most of you are totally aware of this, but really, it wasn’t until last week that I finally gave up carrying a sweater with me just in case Ol’ Lady Winter was still hanging around to throw a chilly gust my way.  It seems she’s taken leave, and with Summer fully in charge around here, check out what she’s brought my way:

1. Chaco tan! I have one again!  I got my first pair of Chacos as a gift from my parents back in 2007.  I wore them as often as possible, which, when Texas often gives you 70 degree weeks in January, was a lot.  Last fall I retired them earlier than I would have liked, and given their wear after sporting them every day almost all of three years, my parents sent me the newest pair.  And finally, I see the white stripes and tan triangles that mean I am outside, that summer air passes over the tops of my feet, that I’m warm!

2. Bell peppers, tomatoes, baby radishes, strawberries, cherries, green plums, etc! Fruits!  Vegetables!  I’m so happy.  I’ve been chomping bell peppers like apples.  I am mixing some killer salsas.  I’m snacking on coriander, tomato, and house cheese sandwiches.  I can’t eat enough cucumbers.  I saw a friend post on Facebook recently that he and a friend were headed out to a farmer’s market; I couldn’t help but smile, realizing that I live in a farmers market, that my streets are lined with tasty goodness.

3. Porch-sitting! I tend to take Spring Chicken on long walks around town.  Half of the interactions we have are with stray and kept dogs who bark and growl and make to challenge the Chicken.  However, the other half are porch-sitters.  There’s a group of men on a corner who always end up asking me for money, somehow in a charming way.  There’s an older woman who I usually catch during chores, who is always concerned about The Chicken after the disappearance of my Sanity.   There’s a man I’ve run into a few times, a smiler with a hunched back who pushes a tiny girl around the roads by my house.  The girl has down-syndrome; she stares in wonder at the potholes they dodge.
This general outside-ness is a wonderful thing about summer here, one we don’t have nearly as much in so-hot-it-hurts Texas.  I’m in love with sitting outside with the pup and a book; I’m thrilled by the recent move of my landfather’s and my nightly nardi games to the front porch.

4. New Volunteers! Let’s not forget that this summer brings to Armenia a new group of Peace Corps Volunteers.  I’ve seen them all twice now.  They’ve only been here a little over a week, so they’re still well-groomed.  They’re clothes still look fresh.  I saw make-up and hair gel being worn.  Only a few greasy locks.  They’re chipper and excited.  And, maybe, just maybe, one of them may be coming to live in my town.  An American friend.  HERE.  IcanhardlycontainmyselfI’msofreakingexcitedaboutthat!  Of course, I’m not counting my chickens, but I am one of two of three PCV’s here who goes full months at a time before seeing another American.  Could be pretty dang neat to have one living in walking distance.

I’m not adding to this list Summer’s not so wonderful offerings like bugs and allergies I didn’t know I had.  Or the migration of a good friend’s husband indefinitely to Moscow.  It’s not all coming up bell peppers.  But the sun is getting up early every morning to let me know I should enjoy as much of the day as I can.

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marking some things

Stop reading this.  Go to your favorite plane ticket website.  Or maybe take a boat.  Teleport or just jump inside the shell of a giant snail with all your lingually gifted animal friends and get over here.  ‘CAUSE YOU AND I SHOULD BE CELEBRATING.

One. Year.

I, along with around 40 other beautiful souls, have completed one year of our Peace Corps commitment in Armenia.

I went this weekend with other current volunteers and PC staff to pick up new volunteers from the airport.  They made me feel a little like old fruit.  They were fresh and shiny and in new wrappers; we on the other hand are perhaps not so lustrous and have quite a bit more bruises.  Following this analogy, it should be said that my mother always told me bruises on bananas were really just compacted sugar.  [shrug]

After spending some time with them in sunny mid-country, I have eventually ended up in my cloudy Northern town, again.

… … … hmpf.

This was going to be a cheerful meta-post about what it means to have served in Peace Corps for one year.  But truth is, I’m channeling Eeyore again.  Because you’re not riding the snail over here anytime soon.  And there is no party for this one year anniversary.  And I’m not really going to be great friends with the new volunteers for at least a couple of months. And I’ve traded in hot float-in-the-pool afternoons for a gray, sweater-weather summer.  And the fact that I may not get a site-mate (another Peace Corps volunteer) in my town this summer, meaning another 15 months without an American to provide my regular social-crack fix, hangs over me like a bell that rings “WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS? …. WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS?…WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS?”

…

Aaaaaaaaaaand, exhale.  Really, I do love my life, but there is a give and take, a pull of tides, with every turn of my own little world.  I can love this life all I want; I still miss so many things about the kind of life I used to live.   Meeting 60 new people = a reminder of what sharing a cultural heartbeat is like.  And I’m pretty sure I now begrudge Middle Armenia all that sun, as if they were hogging it and not sharing it with the rest of the country.  The Missing is flaring up today.

The Missing, the clouds, the magnitude of a year away from home, the upset counterpart, the sad office-mate who’s husband left yesterday for an undetermined amount of time to work Moscow, it’s all a bit much.

I know I’ll be fine.  Until then, I think I’m going to go walk my dog.

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she lives

Before I get to business, look what I got for my birthday:

Yes, I do indeed consider those bright, little weeds early summer’s gift to me, but really though, check out my feet in new Chacos!  Mom and Dad, you are wonderful to me!

Now, the business.  If you read my last post, you have probably sat biting your nails, probably tossed and turned all night, wondering, hoping against hope that the wicked warlock/me has not thrown the poor defenseless Spring Chicken to the bottom of the town ravine.

Well, as many of my friend’s predicted, the sun came out, and my mood swung with it.   I decided not to toss her.  If someone had decided to toss me into the ravine after the millionth time I metaphorically smeared poop on them, well, I wouldn’t be writing this.  So, here she is, still-alive, poop-smearing, finger-biting, lap-napping, Popok-Chutik-Havik-Shash-Spring Chicken-Jan:

I did finally figure out that I love her and so does everyone else in my office and even people at home.  My parents sent her a cutesy, pink-camo leash, which I probably won’t get away with using here in my small town (surely it fits the Chicken, but I’m not so much a pink-camo guy, and neither are all the akhbers/teen-street-mongers who would accost me for using it).  They sent her tiny dog sized tennis balls which apparently were the key to unlocking Chicken’s fetching abilities (!).  And they sent a toy moose, which besides being hilarious to all my coworkers, has become the new love of my little pooch.  See; the poor ungulate (thanks GRE vocab cards!) never stood a chance:

And remember how I told you she was quite the model.  I seriously walked her over to a patch of dandelions, and she walked around a bit and just plopped down.

And, well, you just don’t throw that kind of adorable into a ravine.

In other news, I recently went to a co-worker’s birthday party.  I haven’t been to an Armenian party in a few months.  I walked into the room and was flooded with joy.  What before would have been a wildly cross-cultural experience of toasts and strange foods and flying conversation in a bizarre language has now become an experience something like being at home.  There were bottles of wine, vodka and juice.  The table was covered in plates of salads, horovats/barbeque, cheeses, fruits, candies, lavash and bread.  We toasted to Tigo’s birthday, to his parents, to his new baby.  And I was surrounded by my people.  That’s right; I have “people” in Stepanavan.

I know that “feeling at home” sounds simple, but I have spent so many months here feeling like an outsider, so many parties sitting in my own mental space, daydreaming while everyone talked and laughed around me about things I couldn’t understand.  At last weeks party, I had MY PEOPLE.  I was as much a part of the laughter and joy as everyone else.  Consider this picture:

For you this may just be two people having a good laugh.  For me this is myself without language insecurities or cultural dissonace.  This is the clooker, a woman two generations and an entire culture removed from me.  And here we are, laughing not from humor but from a joy that we share.

We share.

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considering divorce

For the record, they are still dismembering trees around here.  Body parts are littering the streets.  I’ve stop quelling the burst of laughter triggered by someone telling me that it makes the trees more beautiful.  How can you call a few leaves growing on a 5 foot tall stump beautiful, unless you are referring to nature’s general Struggle To Survive Despite Us?

Speaking of struggling to survive, Spring Chicken and I are on the rocks.  A friend recently requested more pictures of the puppy here on my blog.  I didn’t know how to tell my friend that I’m currently considering divorce.  I told the Chicken yesterday.

“I want a divorce,” I said.  She raised a poop-caked paw and smeared it on my jeans.  Then she sprinted across the garden.  I don’t think that she understands that the way for us to grow closer is not to run away from me.  Certainly the poop and mud smears aren’t what a relationship counselor would recommend.  Of course, neither would one recommend locking up the offending party back in her cage.

I am just not a good person.  You may remember my pet track record.  I take little responsibility for all the squashed cats.  But you can’t get around a rabbit so starved that she had no eyeballs.  Granted, I learned my lesson and, pre-Peace Corps, haven’t had a pet since I was 13.   I thought I was ready.

But Sanity was possibly eaten.  Now I’m not sure if I can deal with a puppy who apparently lacks the critical skills necessary not to step in her own feces.  Because of rain and lack of running water inside, she always smells and always leaves mud on my hands, ankles and work clothes.  It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t always wet here, if I didn’t have to keep her outside, if maybe she was a cat.

I know the typical pet owner mantras:
-It’s not her fault.
-She’s your responsibility now, for better or worse.
-The joys of dog ownership outweigh the chores.
-Dog is man’s best friend.

These, however, are the phrases that repeat themselves in my head:
-When did I ask for so much mud ON ME?
-I don’t have the patience for all of this puppy frenzy.
-How would you like it if I threw my turd on YOU!?
-Who am I kidding?  You would probably eat it.

What?  I’m not a good person.  I know this.  I took her on a walk the other day and thought about plausible explanations for how she ended up “falling off the ravine bridge”.  In no scenario could I figure out a good reason for letting go of the leash, so the little trotter survived the brief consideration of canicide.

I’ve made my Google cry for help.  Searches for “please help me I hate my dog” have resulted in the following:
-”Good luck. Next time, DO YOUR HOMEWORK FIRST.”
-”I think just give the dog to a shelter, don’t let pee and excremant dominate your destiny.”
-”I’m not a violent person. Sometimes I want to punch the dog in the face, but I know that may only cause him to piss on my carpet again.”

Truth is, she’s a sweet puppy.  She just ended up with a terrible owner.  Someone, say something to get me to snap out of it.  Quick, dog whisper me over the internet or something!

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