Byron went to Estonia for a conference, and we tagged along because Tallinn sounded interesting. Byron was away all day and most evenings with his colleagues, and the rest of us huddled in a hotel room avoiding the rain. The children watched Nickolodeon shows dubbed into Russian, I walked around fetching groceries, and we read a lot of books.
One evening I caught up with Byron in the market square, and met an Italian man who lives in Iowa City.
Cesare was surprised – he said me that he heard me speaking on NPR without knowing that I was married to one of his friends.
The observation that our world is excessively small still holds, even so far from home.
Tallinn is in fact beautiful – splendid even – with an old town center that has not been developed into a boring homogenous shopping mall. I took a great deal of pleasure in my walk up and down Toompea and through All-Linn in search of comestibles.
We went to the oldest functioning pharmacy in Europe, and a marzipan museum, where we bought a kitty to take pride of place on the girl’s birthday cake. But because I couldn’t find a cake she wasn’t allergic to, the kitty was destined to go home with us and make an appearance on an organic cake – and because she was gracious about the whole thing I knew that I would end up throwing not one but three parties. My daughter is now fifteen years old.
This is perplexing, but nonetheless true. She likes us, which is an honor.
Her birthday also marks the mysterious moment when Byron and I decided that we didn’t in fact hate each other, and despite (or because) of the scandal it caused, we’ve been together since that day twelve years ago.
When he was finished with his conference and work dinners we left the kids at the hotel and walked around the old city pretending that we were on dates. I’ve never been on real dates, and I’m not sure that he has either; but we persevered.
Byron took one day off and we rode the high-speed ferry over to Helsinki to visit his friend Vappu, a girl who attended the same alternative high school as an exchange student. She showed us around the market, and her apartment, and it was eerie to be in a place where people wandering the streets look just like my relatives.
I didn’t see myself reflected in the population, but I did see dead ringers for all of my aunts and half of my cousins. My charismatic elder child exerted her charm on our hosts, the boy fell asleep on a tram, and we bought paper doll books before waving goodbye. The border guard on the Finnish side attempted to banter with me, which was less painful than normal because we were both equally awkward and slow in our quips.
On the last day we went back to the beach and the boys built sandcastles with ferocious intensity. I went wading in the Baltic in the shadow of an abandoned Soviet watchtower, clutching my skirts as high as possible. Then my daughter and I sat hunched against the wind, watching the engineers of the family exerting serious effort to build a canal.