Connections

Hi!
Sudden insight: circles are lines that get
get connected! This is a WOW discovery
for me - something that, no doubt, every
good math student learns. (I'm a bit slow.)

Here I am meandering down the trail of life
and then I get to connect somehow with another
moment and then that line becomes a circle.

What is she talking about? Or are you already
clicking away from me? I must focus. What I'm
trying to share is how I got the spark -
the connection - for my novel,
The Kulak's Daughter.

We were sitting (sort of) around the dinner
table at Christmas. My three kids were hyper
and my mom was being her usual foreign, stiff,
old self. I was in the middle trying to keep
everyone happy.

Instead of harassing me about keeping my
kids more under control, my mom proceeded to
tell a story about how she misbehaved one Christmas
back when Christmas was banned. It wasn't
the banned Christmas that brought the spark - the
connection. I'd heard her ramble many times
about life back in the old country.

It was the idea of my mom being bad.
It was then that I saw the circle of life.

So this upcoming novel of mine might be set
back in the horrors of the former
Soviet Union - but it's really about childhood. It's
really about connecting the present with the past
and (hopefully) with the future.
Man, I better stop talking.

Here, as promised is a photograph of my
grandfather's signature. I got this from a former
KGB file in Zhitomir, Ukraine. It was forbidden
to take photos of these once top secret files.
But my grandfather was murdered and his body
thrown in a ditch along with thousands of
other kulak bodies. I deserve this photo of his
signature at the bottom of a forced confession.
(It's dated August, 1937)

And you know, if it wasn't for the internet, I'd
never have connected with this part of the past.
But that's another story.


Word of the Day:
connect: to become joined
from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary


Talk to you soon (and I hope we're connecting!)
gabe