First Visit to Russia

Ever been floated on top of a mosh pit? Neither have I, but you could imagine the sensation: a complete lack of control, but undeniable trust in the people below you -- despite the fact that they have a combined BAC of .20 and have consumed enough pharmaceuticals to satisfy the demand of an AARP bus trip to Canada. That is the sensation of going to the interior of Russia for the first time...without any of the trust.

We were headed for Perm, an industrial city of about a million people -- 990,000 of whom had never encountered a foreigner. This place grew to be a military industrial powerhouse during World War II. Stalin needed a location to build weaponry that was out of reach of the Luftwaffe. Perm was already an industrial city, having been founded as a mining city during the reign of Peter The Great. The number of weapons required to beat Hitler into submission caused the area to grow exponentially. It is a potentially nice location -- in the Ural Mountains (hills, really...'Urals' is to 'mountainous' as 'Tom Cruise' is to 'hetero'), on the Kama river (Kama is obviously Russian for 'drinking spot'...come to think of it, all words in Russian can have dual meanings, one of which is always 'drinking spot').

Evil, thy name is Orbitz.

So this thing is already expensive (see It's Only Money post). We get only 10 days notice that we have to be in Russia. That means we're paying full fare for travel at a time when the price of a barrel of oil is approaching 80 trillion dollars (thank you, Dubya!) and it's high season in Russia. No, not that people are traveling to Perm...believe me, no one goes there because they want to. I said it was "high" season...trust me, these people are all stoned. So I'm searching the Internets for a fare that won't cause me to send my wife back out on the streets (Note: this is a joke...I wouldn't send my wife out to prostitute herself to fund the adoption. She's too old to land the Johns with real money now.) Orbitz comes up with the best fare -- $2800 for two of us, round trip from JFK to Perm. Expensive, but not earthshattering. When I get to the screen with the credit card information, I get a "system error...please click 'Purchase' again". Wanna guess what THAT does? Anyone? Bueller? It hits my creditcard for another $2800. The bank declines it. It takes me 30 minutes to get them (Orbitz) to call MBNA and explain that there are erroneous charges and they should come off. Once I finish this, I decide to have the rep on the phone help with the reservation (so as to not get that pesky system error message again...I'm in technology, but I only like dishing 'em out). The agent tells me it's a good idea because they've "been having systems issues all day". Once he gets the route booked, he quotes me $5100. Fifty one hundred simoleans! What happened to my $2800 fare? "No fares are guaranteed until booked, sir." I get that, but your system had an error, not mine. "No fares are guaranteed until booked, sir." This guy's good. Stays on message like a Republican Rove-bot. "I want you to honor the fare I had earlier...I have a screen print". "I'm sure you do, sir (uh, oh, he's heating up) but I can't honor that...and marriage is between a man and a woman" (alright, he probably didn't say that, but I'm glazing over at this point). I asked for the supervisor and I let her have it. "Wendy." My wife realized the futility of what I was doing, but I explained it thusly: I was so angry at Orbitz that I wanted Wendy to go home and have to drink to get over Angry Customer Muldoon and subsequently have a headache the next morning. That was all I could extract from Orbitz at this point, but it would be a form of justice, nonetheless.

What we have here is a failure to communicate!

It began on the plane in New York. Aeroflot was our only choice after Orbitz tried to rob me...and kidnap my pet bunny..


A Russian lady across the aisle from us had a small packet on her tray. My wife starts stewing: "they're not giving us nuts because we're not Russian". I hardly think that's the case, but she's certain. We're off to a bad start. Next the stewardess comes by and says "coffee, tea, milk, lemon". "I have no idea what she's saying...how are we going to do this? We'll have to have a translator with us 24-hours a day!" Honey, she's speaking English. Oh. Well, in my wife's defense, she doesn't do well with accents. We have to watch Benny Hill with closed captioning on. Really.

We land in Moscow and a smiling gentleman is there to greet us with a sign that says "Thompson". This is good. Jetlagged or not, we're likely to recognize our name. But seriously, my wife half expected to see this: Thompson. (this is what she thinks Cyrillic characters look like). The only problem with the smiling gentleman is that he was supposed to be a smiling lady. And the smiling. You know this move, particularly if you're American. You don't speak the language of the people you must communicate with, so you smile. It's a facial contortion that says "you're too stupid to learn the language of the country you're trying to navigate so now you're under my complete and total control...I should make you suck your thumb while I make your wife take off her top".

Russian Adoption Journal

The Quest for Andre
This all started in 1975 when I was 13 years old sitting with my father at a Phillies game. No, really. I was very close to my parents, but knew there were at least some differences from our family to others. My mother had no "birth" stories. There were no complaints about my size (she's "four feet, ten and three quarters inches tall"...anyone who feels a compulsion to include that 3/4 inch is reaching, quite literally); no time-of-birth recollection; no reminisces about where President Kennedy was when I shot out. And all of those comments about how much I looked like my father seemed as obligatory as the "are you losing weight?" platitude my mother's friends passed around like a big fatty. He has a chiseled face that is Mount Rushmore-worthy and I looked like Little Ricky Ricardo with the mumps.

So I figured it out -- Dave Cash was leading off, Jon Matlack was about to get him to ground out, the Philadelphia horde was poised to boo the best infielder they'd had since Granny Hamner and I was having a revelation:

I was adopted.

So what? I felt quite "normal", even though I was geekier than most of my friends (reading the World Book encyclopedia for recreation, then using the volumes to build an Egyptian tomb will earn you this label). My parents loved me. I had a lot of first cousins (36 at the time), many of whom I felt very close to. So what did it matter that I arrived in this family differently than others arrived in theirs?

For one thing, no one ever talked about it. My first theory would have to wait -- Bowa walked and now Michael Jack Schmidt was up with a man on base...double play. As soon as the leather-lung next to me stopped threatening the future hall-of-famer, I'd surmised that they were protecting my birth mother (my family, not the Phillies). Maybe she was ashamed. After all, look what she gave up! I read encyclopedias, dammit! Now I was getting angry. Would I have read encyclopediae if she'd kept me...how would I have come to know Eero Saarinen, whose architectural accomplishments meant nothing to me, but whose first name would come to be invaluable in completing the New York Times Crossword puzzle...or, worse, what would've happened had I wound up in an orphanage? I didn't really understand the possibilities at all, but clearly something bad could've been in the works for me. I had new respect for my adoptive parents (a phrase I wouldn't come to know for another two decades -- throughout the '70s and '80s, they were my real parents). I was chosen and given a good life, unlike some of my friends who fell into theirs by genetic sfortunato. I would respect their decision to keep the facts silent, no matter how odd it seemed to me.

This lead to an inevitable wave of guilt (I was raised Catholic, after all...the group that taught you to do an act of contrition if you found a nickel on the sidewalk -- there are children starving in Biafra, after all). I was on the plus-side of the ledger. Actually, that's an anachronism -- I wouldn't be exposed to the mind-numbing cruelty of accounting until 1977. I probably thought of myself as batting .400. I would make it my life's goal to use all of those hits to drive in some runs for someone else. I didn't know how yet -- adoption into my own family seemed a bit distant since I hadn't yet hit my stride with women (editor's note: the author is hoping for that occurrence before the Democrats win their next national election...Vegas odds are favoring the Dems) and the combination of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court and some non-threatening sitcom characters made adoption by single (read: gay) parents fashionable were 30 years off -- but I would do something beneficial for orphans.