With Alisa

With Alisa. The way we each look here, sitting together with her friends. That's Alisa alongside, smiling, in repose. A Russian girl (it's more complicated, actually!) from St. Petersburg. She'd mastered the piano as a teenager, studied painting in high school--quite accomplished, in that very Russian way. Always a question of method--of métier, so we had something to talk about. Work with. And in any case, I liked her immediately.

She made a first painting for Songs & Places--a marshland scene in Bielorussia, or maybe the northern Ukraine. Autumn. Beautiful sense of connection, which let her open up. She had that inside. The song was Down in the Valley. I think I'd asked them to do something from home--maybe with Alisa in mind? Yes, it was a place she knew--or maybe a place she wanted to know. Forgotten, or not yet visited?

There was also the drawing of the shoe--she brought it in, pinned it up. A big shoe, high-topped, with a hole in the toe. And I immediately said, bashmaki! Sang the line from a song--Shalandy Polnye Kefali...  We were both astonished--this immediate connection--and that I knew even the photo she'd worked from! 

I always felt close to Alisa in this way. Again, almost a landsman. (At least in our imagined land.) She'd spent the first two years here in San Diego, of all places. On her own--her parents were still in St. Petersberg! Independent that way. Came to Berkeley in Molecular Biology, she's now at Johns Hopkins. Always the best...

Her parents came to visit once--maybe 2016. We went to the tapas place on Solano. As I walked in, Alisa's father dashed down the stairs to greet me--his arms wide open. A wonderful evening. Box of Russian chocolates...

But the way I like to think of Alisa is in the twin-photo below. I made it for her. The man along side is Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, an Argentine writer who had lived in an isolated town on the pampa while writing his most important book. They say he loved the sparrows there. Like a Chekhov story, I'm thinking now. On the Steppe...

.