Vic Socotra

30 August 2008

Ying Yang

I was swimming with the Doc and Ludmilla, a tag team event that worked just fine to keep the boredom of the dying day at bay. Start of a three-ay weekend, the unofficial end of Summer, and the Dog and I were at loose ends.

He thought he would be working on the proposals that are due on Tuesday, and I was committed to taking him for walks in between. Despite the Governments last-minute attempts to confound us, all the writing had been done, and the minor tweaks to the business details were over by mid-afternoon.

The Dog told me he was looking forward to a little down-time, or perhaps it was the other way around. It has been awfully confusing of late.

The Doc kept me going through the first half of the work-out. We talked about tenderloins and the relative merits of20yams. And about the young governor from the Great State of Alaska who is now the prospective running mate for Senator McCain.

The Doc is a feminist of the middle stripe, since she is a Boomer like me and Hillary. She had to deal with society as it was as she had her kids and career. Things seem to have sorted themselves out, while we were doing something else. She seems to think Senator McCain’s selection was a good thing, generally, though it blew the hell out of the experience card that Old John has been playing.

I said that the selection of Slow Joe Biden blew the hell out of the notion that Senat or Obama was an agent of change. We agreed that things were certainly more muddled than they had been, with a certain ying-yang balance to the two tickets. Two old white guys, two history-makers, one raised in an activist tradition and the other a hockey mom who high-sticked the oil companies and was a life-long member of the National Rifle Association.

The Doc left to prepare the pork, and I watched her go with resignation. I had twenty minutes left on the clock, and if I stared at the relentless second hand, time would drag.

Turning a slow 360 in the water, I saw Chris, the new tenant who has moved into Mardy Two’s place. She was cleaning like crazy, perched on the radiators clinging like a spider against the glass to reach with paper towels to the very top of the tall windows. There is strength in Windex, and the prospect of new beginnings.

Across the canyon, Ludmilla was on her balcony. I squinted in the darkness, vision fading. I called out to encourage her to come down to the pool. She did, and after a cautious entry into the darkening water, paddled next to me, talking of Munster cheese and crackers and love.

First, the gossip. Her irresolute suitor suddenly stiffened in resolve, driving from New York to arrive at 0300 with a new attitude and a poem. It seemed awfully romantic, and kind of sweet. I for one do not answer the phone at 0300, and would answer a frantic pounding on the door with the Remington Wingmaster 12-guage.

But those are the seasons of life, like the Psalms tell us, a place for everything in their time. Thank goodness it is so, and love is not always answered with suspicion and shotguns.

A friend of mine had dinner at one of the Red Lobsters down in Tidewater the other night. The waitress had an accent, thick enough to betray the fact that English was a second language to her. Proficiency is a slidi ng scale.

Ludmilla came to America young enough that the Ukraine is just a gentle softness to her vowels, and a slight upward inflection at the end of her sentences.

The waitress at the Red Lobster was at the blunter end of the spectrum, where Jakob the Czech lifeguard resides. For him, the language is a wrestling match, a constant search for synonyms of meaning. Perhaps that accounted for the waitress’s reaction to my friend’s question.

“Do you come from the place near the recent…um…troubles?”

My friend was a little bewildered by the vehemence of the response.

“Russia did not do anything different than America in Iraq. It is over. Done.” She slapped the bottomless platter of shrimp, which of course had one, on the table, and stormed off with the admoni tion trailing behind her that the world needed to move on and remember that America killed every day.

In my friend’s mind, the notion of moral equivalency was troubling. Was the angry young Russian correct? Was this all about the exercise of raw and naked power?

I pondered her note as I toweled off in the darkness. There was the UN mandate, of course, and some pleasant fig leaves that went along with the incursion into Iraq. There were some high-minded platitudes about clear-and-present danger, but the Russians claimed that their citizens were being abused.

It was nonsense, of course, but the problem with unilateral action is that it opens you up to assertions of moral equivalency. The Georgians had been right there in Iraq, right up until the invasion, part of the multi-national force that has dwindled over the years. The Russians did not feel the need to cloak themselves in their invasion.

Seven days including the long holiday and two weekends and the pool is closed. Ludmilla slithered into her red hoody and sweats. Then she floated off in her ethereal way and Jakob and I were alone in the darkness.

As a Czech, he knew the exercise of force by the Great Powers, and had he the vocabulary, might have expressed cautious support for the NATO alliance that stands, however tenuously, as a bulwark against the predations of the strong against the weak.

If I had the language skills I might know for sure.

He is a young man, and the storms that raged over his country are distant now. For the young Russian, the conflict in Georgia may be the resolution of a great national humiliation that has lasted her whole life.

It is also possible that Jakob would shrug, and say it is all circular part of the great wheel, and that the wind blows where it will.

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