Life

  • Life

    Visa Application

    For a long time after the American Embassy in Moscow denied her request for a visa, I thought about getting my fiancé (somehow) to Mexico and then crossing the southern border into Texas — um, legally — illegally — I didn’t care. Only because I didn’t know. Really! Then we could get married and everything would be perfect. I don’t know how I would have gotten her to Mexico. I don’t think I gave it a lot of thought. I had fallen in love with my translator and had asked her to marry me that same year at a place that was close to my heart, a place where I had lived when I was four…

  • Life

    The Race to a Better Matchstick

    A long time ago, I went to Russia. I met, fell in love with, and married my translator. Not long after we got married my Russian bride and I were at home just getting to know each other. For some reason, she really wanted to know the location of military outposts nearby. Crazy, right? One day, she was trying to light a candle with a little book of American-made matches, which she didn’t know how to operate. Really. To be fair, she had never seen a book of paper matches in her life. She grew up in Northern Russia and they just didn’t have paper matches, only superior wood matchsticks.…

  • Life

    Living on Russian Time

    Ivan Ivanov (not his real name) was a pretty important person in his little town in Russia and was involved in a lot of building projects. I’m not sure if his work included the statue of Lenin near the airport (or the one at just about every street corner in town). This project was to be completed by the end of the calendar year. Which sounds reasonable. Unless there just isn’t enough time to complete said project by the end of the year. Then, there could be problems. The government was making an addition to the hospital and it was crucial that the project must be completed before December 31.…

  • Life

    The Russian Lesson

    In the next room, I hear the unmistakable chatter of a foreign language. Actually, I hear my bride, Inna, speaking Russian, which is not all that unusual as she was born and raised in the land of matryoshkas (see picture), permafrost (be thankful you don’t have it), and, well, more snow. Inna is teaching Russian to one of my daughter’s friends, who wants to be a translator. Although she can speak a few sentences, they’re starting with the alphabet. Which of course, is a great place to begin. My youngest is also sitting in. But she has an unfair advantage. She’s heard Russian from her mother and grandparents since the…

  • Life

    Lame Claim to Fame

    To successfully navigate the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, one must have a sponsor to steer the drunk from continuing on his or her destructive path. My dad had just such a sponsor. He is the guy in the photo. I’ve listened to my dad, through smoke-filled rooms, give testimony to his life with and without alcohol. I preferred without. Thankfully, he did too. After sitting through more than a few AA meetings, I’m convinced that all alcoholics really just trade alcohol for coffee and cigarettes. In our little town in South Alabama, there was a house on the banks of a small river. In this house, converted to a…

  • Life

    The Useless Microphone

    I‘m sitting in an audience, straining to hear the speaker. “Why?” you ask. I’ll tell you. The microphone is too far away from the dude’s mouth. All he needed to do was move closer to the microphone, and, BAM, his little voice would be amplified, and we’d hear him. But he doesn’t. Why do rational people refuse to use microphones? Why do they believe that the conversation level of their voices will carry through a large room? I once sat in a large meeting room in San Antonio, Texas, that could hold 500 people. An Army JAG Colonel was talking about career progression in the JAG Corps. I was interested,…

  • Life

    Congratulations, you’re pregnant

    There are a few things that professors will tell you not to do when you are in law school: don’t get married, don’t have a baby, or don’t rob banks. Crazy, right? I mean, how are we supposed to live? Thankfully, my experience in these endeavors is limited. And the statute of limitations hasn’t run yet, so… I’ll just stick to my story here. At the tender age of 33, I went back to college. Before that, I’d been preaching for small churches and wanted to get away from all the legalism I had encountered. So, I went to law school… Anyway, my bride and I found ourselves at the…

  • Life

    Tunnel Vision

    There were no signs warning me not to drive into the tunnel with an empty gas tank. I was driving my mom’s Ford Focus, which was embarrassing enough. The next embarrassing thing was that the gas needle was on “empty.” There were no signs necessary because the state highway department assumed that I had the intelligence to fill up my gas tank on occasion. While the last thing the highway department wanted was to have some punk teenager run out of gas right in the middle of the busy tunnel and stop eastbound traffic, the state department of Transportation did not care about my automotive fuel needs. Running out of…

  • Life

    Russian Sweet Tea

    “You’re doing this wrong.” Don’t you get tired of these stupid headlines? I do! You’re Eating Apples All Wrong You’re Making Beans All Wrong You’re Eating Pizza All Wrong You’re Cooking Meth the Wrong Way I could go on. Regardless, let me share why it’s important that you make sweet tea the right way. You’re welcome! Once, I was in Russia and I wanted sweet tea. That’s all. As it turns out, they don’t drink cold sweet tea in Russia, or pretty much anywhere else in the world. I don’t know why, because sweet tea done right is awesome. We stayed in a dormitory in a college town in the…

  • Life

    Chapter Endings

    Also: One day at a time… At the time, I thought the years (actually only six weeks) that I had spent in basic military training at lovely Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio were the worst. But the next day after graduation (and after having been awarded honor graduate for my “skills” as guidon during honor flight competition) I stepped onto a chartered Greyhound bus headed north for Wichita Falls, TX (which conveniently was a mere 9,990 miles away) I contemplated the past six weeks. The past six weeks? They really weren’t that bad, I thought. I got into great physical shape after having gained a great deal of…