LETTING GO
Yesterday, like every day before this trip I thought of the practical things that I have to do before I go. That is an issue probably for everyone who is going away for awhile. All the things that you have been putting off for months suddenly have to be done before you go. For Kathe the house had to be entirely straightened up, even though no one would be here while were gone and it wouldn‘t matter if the house looked lived in when we came back.
Almost everything you don‘t get done before a trip can be done just as well after you come back. In fact, when you come back most things won‘t seem pressing at all and you can put them off again for months.
But there are some things that I do have to get done and I worked on several of them yesterday. I‘ve already visited Kathe‘s credit union several times to have her account be closed and to put the money into my name so that if I need to access to her savings account in Greece or in Germany, I can. So I went to Self Help Credit Union and talked for a long time with Pat Funicello, the banker who sits in the lobby and solves people‘s banking problems. We got around to closing Kathe‘s account, but first we talked for a long time about death and how she would face death if her husband died and how I am facing it after the death of Kathe. Kathe and I liked visiting with Pat when we went into Self Help together and Pat remembers us and the way Kathe smiled, another one of the many small things that have brought back memories of Kathe and remind me of her absence. I took $500 out of Kathe‘s savings account to pay for Susie‘s week at Penland last week, during which Susie had a wonderful time. Kathe would have insisted Susie have the money. The $500 I have in an envelope in my pocket is a gift from Kathe, still very much present, to Susie and I am only the intermediary.
Then I want to Bank of America to get some euros, but even more to finally remove a hold that had been put on half of the money in our checking account because the bank hadn‘t made sure years ago that they had a signature card for Kathe. But the process of removing the hold involved a call to an estates office somewhere, Inna didn‘t know where, and we were put on hold for a long period of time and so we began talking. Inna Clamser, the banker, in her early thirties, had to go to the Ukraine (part of the euros conversation) when her mother died of complications from diabetes at the age of 53 in January. Inna‘s parents were Ukranian, had emigrated to the United States, had four daughters here, and then had returned to the Ukraine. Inna, who spoke American English without an accent had returned with them and gone to school and college in the Ukraine. Then the whole family came back here again, but once again her parents moved back to the Western part of Ukraine, far from the fighting by the Russian Ukrainians living in eastern Ukraine who want to be part of Russia. The four daughters, now all married to Americans with three having children, all live here in the United States, three of them in North Carolina.
Inna speaks Ukrainian and Russian (very similar) and a little Spanish as well as flawless English. She is teaching her six year old son Ukrainian and we talked about the benefits of teaching your child another language. Kathe woudln‘t do it even though at one point Susie and Tom spoke perfect German and played with each other in German after a year in both Germany and months in a German school in India. Kathe thought double language learning would hinder them in school if we spoke German at home because her sister in England had spoken German in the home with her German husband and felt that it hindered her children in school.
Finally, it seemed that the Estates office was never going to pick up the phone so after about 40 minutes I felt it was time to let Inna get back to work and so I came home.
So today I had long conversations with two women strangers about life and death and children and education. Both of the conversations touched me deeply. When Pat learned how easy it was for me to travel and how cheaply I could do it I gave her the name of Scott‘s Cheap Flights and encouraged her to go for it. She won‘t, because her husband is reluctant to take chances. But perhaps I kindled some little spark. And my talk with Inna turned out to be a cross cultural experience, as rich as visiting Greece, right here in my hometown national Bank of America. I learned a good deal about the real Ukraine and not the Ukraine of the news reports. But most of all in both cases I connected with another person and was touched deeply by that person, and in a bank of all places. So those were my travel events of the day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 