Richard Jernigan -> RE: Vive la France (Dec. 1 2015 18:37:22)
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Since I brought Larisa's name into this, maybe I should say a little more about her. She was born in Kiev. Her mother was Ukrainian, her father Russian. Her mother was an aeronautical engineer, her father a mechanical engineer. They briefly took a voluntary assignment in Siberia, but returned to Kiev. Larisa's Ukrainian grandparents were kulaks: landowners, but not nobility. They barely escaped with their lives from the intentional famines instituted by Stalin, overseen by Khruschev, and denounced by Ruphus's father, as I have just now learned. The famines were instituted by Stalin to force farmland and farmers into collectivization. We don't know whether her grandparents resisted, or whether they were just caught up in the maelstrom of creating the "new socialist man." Larisa's father was gone by the time she was four. Although her mother was a degreed engineer she had to work two jobs to support the two of them. Last Spring Larisa and I dropped in on one of my old motorcycling buddies who has put together a few hundred acres as a farm southeast of Austin. Willie's farm runs almost entirely on solar energy, and he sells his products in the local farmer's markets. When he heard that Larisa grew up in the Soviet Union, he asked about her life there. She told of standing in sub-freezing cold while it snowed for three hours after school, in line to buy some chicken necks so she could make stew for her mother to eat between jobs. "So how old were you then?" asked Willie. "I was six," she replied. I had never heard the story before. Larisa doesn't dwell on the past. When she was eight they lost their apartment because a neighbor envied it, and denounced them falsely to the secret police. I had heard that one before, and how they nearly froze to death in the aftermath, before they could find another place to live. When Larisa was 13 in 1991, the Soviet Union was at an end, and so were her mother's jobs as a government employee. Her mother married an American medical doctor. They moved to Rochester, New York. The marriage soon failed. Her mother found work and supported them, but not very prosperously. Larisa finished high school, and worked as a waitress while she started courses at community college, but after finishing her first semester she joined the U.S. Air Force. When I asked her why she joined the Air Force, she said she had two reasons. She wanted to get away from Rochester, and she wanted to give back something to the country that had done so much for her. During her second enlistment she was the lead avionics technician in a U.S. F-16 fighter squadron at Aviano, Italy, north of Venice. That's where she learned fluent Italian and made the Italian friends I have enjoyed so much. She and her motorcycle buddies rode all over Italy, and parts of Switzerland and Austria. She earned a bachelor's degree while she was in the Air Force. After the Air Force, she decided on an adventure at Kwajalein. She was a technician in the Optics division of the test range, operating and maintaining optical and infrared cameras mounted in the big tracking telescopes, living on the island of Kwajalein at the south end of the world's largest coral atoll. She took up with a young M.I.T. PhD, who dumped her unceremoniously when it was time for him to return to the USA. She moved to Roi-Namur fifty miles away at the north end of the atoll to work at the radars where I did. During the last contract turnover I had left management and returned to the technical side. I was suspicious of the new management, and didn't want to be part of it. Larisa and I were colleagues, not boss and employee. Larisa is an enthusiastic scuba diver, and enjoyed that part of life on Roi-Namur, but she felt socially isolated within the small island community. We became friends. She would sometime drop by my apartment for a glass of wine and a chat. She, an Austrian woman in her sixties, and I were the only ones on the island who shared a cultural background of theater, literature, art and classical music. Unhappy with the social isolation on Roi-Namur, sometimes she would recite reasons she should be glad to be there. Once she said, "No drive-by shootings!" I said, "You're kidding." "No. In Rochester, people brought guns and knives to the school I went to. There were gang wars." "I thought you said you were grateful for what America had done for you." "Oh, yes. We had plenty to eat, a warm place to live, and most of all, freedom. You could say whatever you wanted to, your vote was actually counted, your envious neighbor was not going to denounce you to the secret police...and eventually my mother got me enrolled in a high school for the arts. She wanted me to be an engineer...but it wasn't for me, not then." Larisa's mother passed away while we lived on Roi-Namur. She learned of it in the morning and told me, but said little more until evening. Finally she turned to me and said, "I'm an orphan. I'm alone in the world." I said, "No, you're not." Since then we have been family. But on her own she has earned a masters degree and is financially independent. Now when we travel people usually see us as father and daughter rather than as a romantic couple--reasonably so, since I am just two months short of being 40 years older than she is. My age shows more than it did nine years ago. And it is an honor to sometimes fill the role of the father she never had. I trust her judgment and value her opinions. That's why I bring up her name at times. RNJ
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