Love is a Happy Place

They don’t have blue jeans in Russia. And the price of chocolate and cigarettes is outrageous, Mrs. Real told us. She also said, “to be mindful” of those things when writing our letters. I don’t know what that meant. To be mindful. That day we would get the names of pen pals from Lithuania and we would write a monthly letter, the first we would take to the post office on a class field trip. That is what I was excited about. Seeing the back of the post office where they put all the letters. All I knew of the place before then was the huge painting in the lobby of a field of bright yellow flowers and the large glass bowl of Dum-Dum suckers, free for kids.

At the time, Lithuania was still part of the USSR, which we understood as our enemy for reasons none of us really knew. “Why we writing to them if we don’t like them?” a boy asked. Because, one day, maybe we can, Mrs. Real replied. “What should we say?” squeaked a girl. Say whatever comes to mind. Talk about your life, your family, and your school. Your interests. Your pets. “What about music? Can I talk about Michael Jackson?” another boy interjected. They don’t have Michael Jackson in Russia, she answered grimly.

We looked at each other. What godforsaken place was this? No blue jeans, chocolate, or Michael Jackson. I wondered if they had Dum-Dum suckers, but I didn’t say anything. If I knew the word fuck I would have used it then. It is the only word there is for that exasperated feeling. I don’t know what I used instead of it. Maybe, gosh. I wasn't even to damn yet.

We huddled around the desktop globe on recess. It was snowing outside and someone lost the Sorry! game pieces so we had nothing to do besides write our letters, draw pictures, read, or look at the globe, which tilted on a plastic-gold axis that squealed as we spun it. All of us kids liked to spin it. I don’t know why, or what I thought looking at it, but I didn’t feel as though I were on it, or that it was at all possible. My young mind was blown to smithereens thinking that I was but an invisible speck the way they told us in Science that we have invisible specks all over us called germs. And that not all germs are bad. I thought, for some reason, of Russians as germs and I had to reprogram myself to think that despite Hollywood and the rhetoric of elected despots, like germs, not all Russians were bad. The ocean of that globe was blue, most of the land was green. But the USSR was a barren-shade of brown, blotched with white in all others. It looked molted.

Mrs. Real pulled down the vinyl map that hung on a roll in front of the chalkboard. Someone had drawn a naked woman in permanent marker on the state map some time ago, so she was mindful of which she pulled, pulling slowly and peeking as she went. The naked woman had yet to be replaced, but inevitably would be. It wasn’t much of a naked woman really, but you could definitely see all the right parts and she smiled, unlike Mrs. Real, who never smiled. Most kids called her a battle-axe, which was an elementary school precursor to bitch in those days. Kids these days just say bitch. My older brother said she ate children, but in all my 6 years of school, I had yet to meet a teacher who ate anyone, so I didn’t believe a word of it. Nonetheless, I entered the year cautiously, and didn’t say anything for about six weeks, unless prompted to speak. I’ve never been one to cause waves, or to go out of my way to be eaten.

Every day before lunch, Mrs. Real read us chapters of a novel in a multi-book series, one of which was called Dicey’s Song. Dicey was the eldest sibling and she and her younger siblings were left in a grocery store parking lot by their mom who went to a psychiatric hospital and later died. Through many travails, the kids ended up living with their grandmother. It was depressing, but a testament to the human spirit and very popular, she told us. It won an award. I wondered when they would get to her song, but they never did. I became leery of grocery store parking lots and worried of abandonment. I was introduced to human suffering and part of my innocence was lost with Mrs. Real’s caustic words, peeled from my soul paragraph by paragraph. The naked woman on the state map, crude as the image was, also looted something from inside me I’d never get back. I never wanted to grow up. I wanted to be with my mom and never leave home. Across town was a considerable distance. Lithuania seemed mythical. And to the post office was all the further I ever wanted to go.

When it came time to dole out names, I was last to choose because my seat was on the far right side of the room and Mrs. Real started on the left near her desk. The names were in a large heart-shaped tissue box left over from Valentine’s Day. The tissues had been used up. Boys were to choose only baby blue paper. Girls were to choose only the pink. The box made its way around slowly and apprehensively I peered down into the oval tissue hole. There was just one piece of paper left to be birthed and it was pink.

I am sorry, but while the boy-to-girl ratio between our classes was very comparable, it wasn’t perfect. You will have to have the name you picked because they are waiting on our letters to determine who their pen pals are, Mrs. Real informed me decisively. Perhaps, she saw the look of terror on my face in that I would be writing to a girl. A germy Russian girl. What had I to say to a Russian girl? I hadn’t even peeped but two words to an American girl up to then. I might have said excuse me once. Or thank you. I thought, at first, I would be absent the day we wrote our letters, and absent for the field trip to the post office, depriving myself the opportunity to see the back where the letters went. That was my calculated sixth grade plan. The best I could do. I looked at the name on the paper with dread. In perfect English print it read: Lana Kaminskas.  

When my brothers found out they were merciless, as to be expected. I confessed to my mom and she said it was a sweet thing, which made it worse. She said that writing to a girl would be much easier than writing to a boy because boys are mostly illiterate and stubborn. “Would you like your brothers for pen pals?” she asked me plainly. She always had a way of putting things as though when I was in utero she developed a subconscious understanding of me that scientific theory cannot hope to explain. They snickered because I was writing to a girl and they said I could tell her all about my Barbie dolls and my collection of My Little Ponies, and maybe we could share panties. I didn’t have either. Nor did I wear panties. They told me to sniff the letters and send plenty of Xs and Os. I was the Queer in Smear-The-Queer for a whole month straight. I didn’t know what a queer was, or how a queer was ever rationalized to be someone who liked girls, or who was forced to communicate with them by letter. But those were the eighties and I was a kid.

I abandoned my plan of being absent on either day. My perfect attendance pin was on the line. And more important to me than ridicule or embarrassment, was admiration in my principal’s eyes. Other boys at school didn’t seem to care I was writing a girl. They didn’t seem to care much for the letters at all and most dreaded the prospect of writing, so talking about it would only serve to remind them of their dread. I was told by one of the kids though, who seemed to like to write as much as me, that President Reagan was going to blow up Russia with a nuke. He drew a picture on notebook paper of an olive-green plane dropping a large bomb over what appeared to be St. Peter’s Cathedral. He said he was sending it to his pen pal, Sergei Petrov. I was envious. I would never be able to send war drawings or make other subliminal threats to annihilate my pen pal’s country if push came to shove.

We watched a documentary on the Soviet Union the next day. I liked the art, and Rasputin seemed cool, though he looked like the most villainous person I had ever seen. One of those dirty guys from the biker bar near my house, but scarier. He would haunt my dreams through junior high. I felt badly for the Czar and his family who were killed by the Bolsheviks, though I admired Lenin and the communists for wanting to give power to the people, as they said, and their furry hats. But the documentary took a decidedly dower turn when they spoke of Stalin and poverty and Siberia and the gulags and The Berlin Wall and their boycott of the 84 Summer Olympics in L.A., and most recent to then, Chernobyl. It felt like the narrator, whose voice was as buttery as Orson Wells, was trying to sell us something. It felt as though that at any minute, the Soviet Union would explode in a giant mushroom cloud. How could anyone live in such a miserable place? Do they even have pizza?

I wrote the first line in class, our allotted “writing day.” We were to at least write a full-page, but mercifully we were permitted to skip lines. I felt sufficient after four quick ones that I wasn’t able to stretch over the entirety of the page. I felt I had accomplished all that I needed to accomplish. It went as follows:

Hello, Lana,

My name is David Buss. I am 10 years old. I like to draw and read. I like to write. I like robots and football. I like tigers and Rambo.

And there I stopped. Mrs. Real came around looking at my paper. She gave me the angry look that likely had earned her the reputation of a battle-axe, or an eater of children. She ordered me to write more. She told me to ask her some questions, or ask what she is interested in so she has something to say when she writes back. So, I continued.

Have you ever seen a Siberian tiger? Do any live near you? Have you been to Siberia? Have you been to St. Peter’s Cathedral? How tall are the ceilings? Do you like school? What is your favorite subject? Does Russia have blue jeans? Do you like Coke or Pepsi? Is Michael Jackson really not there? Do you think about nuclear war? Do you –

Mrs. Real came back around in time to stop me from filling the rest of the page with questions. My handwriting was large at the top, but decreased in size towards the middle when I thought I wouldn’t have room to sign my name if I didn’t. I never imagined writing on the backside. “Don’t ask too many questions,” she said. “Give her a chance to tell you a little about herself in her own words. It’s not a questionnaire, David.” I erased the last do you, but let the others stand where they were. I finished the letter as follows:

We watched a documentary on the U.S.S.R. It looks like a bad place. I do not think I would ever want to go there. I could not go there if they do not have pizza. Have you seen E.T.? My parents got a VCR and I watch it all the time. I might send the tape to you if you have not seen it. If you have a VCR. It is snowing here. I am watching it out the window. I like to sled ride. Do you?

Sincerest,

Davey David Buss

My eraser was shot by the end, so I had to cross-out. It was more appropriate to write our full name, at least in the first letter, Mrs. Real told us. I had to look up sincere in the dictionary because I couldn’t remember how to spell it. I didn’t know sincerely was a word. I blew the eraser crumbles off the page and they fell to the linoleum floor which I stomped on as I submitted my letter to Mrs. Real for quick approval.

She nodded and then gave me the envelope to put it in. She showed me how to fold it and stuff it inside properly. After that, I licked the adhesive and sealed it. That was everyone’s favorite part. Licking the adhesive. She nixed the other boy’s apocalyptical nuclear bomb picture. She said we weren’t trying to start WWIII. We went to the post office on Friday with our letters in hand. We got to lick stamps and put them on our letters and watch them get placed in a tote on a conveyor belt for international mail. Then they were loaded on a truck and driven to another city where, we were told, they would be loaded on an airplane. It gave me a sense of finality, that my words were spoken and were magically in flight to her ears, or eyes, however slow.

A month passed and I got a letter back. I cannot say that I wasn’t excited. It was my first letter from anyone. My first piece of mail. My first direct communication to another human-being in a different country on this Earth that was reciprocated in kind. It smelled of lilacs and like Monopoly money. Lana wrote that she was happy with my letter and it made her smile. She wrote beautifully in English, which made me feel stupid for I could neither read nor write in Russian. I learned later that she didn’t really speak Russian, but rather, Lithuanian, French and English. She could though, she added. She said there were Christian missionaries from Missouri in her town that had taught English to anyone who wanted to learn it. She said she was a Christian and she liked going to Church. She said she loved ballet and dance. Enclosed at the bottom was her home address and she said I could write her if I wanted to, whenever I wanted to. She said she had a few friends and a pet rabbit. She also wrote, What is this Rambo?

What hesitation that was inside me, what reluctance I had, completely dissolved and I was happy I had written her. Happy that when that box came to me it had but one name left in it and it was on pink paper. I was a proud queer, if that is what I was. Like my mom said, it was good that I picked a girl. Everyone read their letters in class and the boy’s letters were dull and grim. I hoped my letter to her hadn’t sounded that way and I wondered if she read my letter in her class. I tried not to smile, or read too excitedly when it was my turn. I pretended, fairly well, to loathe it. I mumbled her words at times and like a gifted actor, I pretended that she did not interest me so much so that Mrs. Real had to say, “Speak up, David!”

I wrote Lana a letter that night and enclosed my address. I wrote another less than a week later when I realized I had forgotten to ask her something of great importance - the name of her rabbit. A week had passed since I sent her the first letter from home and I wondered if I would hear from her again. I was heartsick when a week more passed. Worried that I said something wrong. But then, at last, another letter came. The second letter. More imaginative and more beautiful than the first. Twice as long. Two full pages. She said it was good to write because it helped her practice her English, which made me sad until she said she liked writing to me because she likes me. Her rabbit’s name, she wrote, was Anastasia.

Then they came more often, always one per week, sometimes two. I asked her if she had difficulty getting money for postage and offered to send her a share of my allowance because I knew things were hard in Russia. She declined and said she worked at her grandfather’s store for the money to pay for letters to her “American friend.” I raked leaves before they fell. Cut grass before it grew. Washed cars before they got dirty. And I shoveled snow like I was a human snowplow. I always bought the special stamps because she said she liked collecting them. The Elvis was her favorite.

I soon learned that she did not consider herself Russian, rather, she was Lithuanian and there was a difference. All I knew was the brown mass on the globe. She wasn’t interested in dolls, or Barbie’s, and she had never seen “this My Little Pony.” She said it sounded silly to her. I was educated on the history of her country week by week until I was so full of knowledge I could practically write a book. I did a report on Lithuania in social studies and got an easy A+. It was like I lived there in another life and sometimes at night, when I didn't have bad dreams about Rasputin, I dreamed of the beautiful things she wrote, but surely, they didn’t exist like I had dreamed for my dreams were bright and extravagant, and Russia was none of that, we Americans knew.

She wrote some lines in her native language and left me to wonder what they said. I couldn’t find anyone who knew Lithuanian in my small town. She said she was too shy to say what she wrote, but assured me they were all nice things. Very nice things. But there were enough nice things in English for me to enjoy, so I was happily placated. She liked purple more than pink, and rain more than sunshine. She had a clear umbrella with pigs on it. And pigs were her favorite animal. She was a vegetarian. She liked snow more than sun, and winter more than summer, but adored spring the most and the flowers, wild yellow Coreopsis, in particular. But anything yellow, she added. Snapdragons, yellow Irises, Dutch Hyacinth. She told me her grandfather said she was a bee in another life. Her grandfather’s shop sold flowers because she told him she loved flowers.

What else did they sell? Postage, pens and lots and lots of envelopes, also at my request, she replied with a smiley face. I drew her a picture of a bee. I sent her pressed flowers that I found growing wild in fields. She said her grandfather drove her to town to mail the letters when he had orders to pick up for his shop. How she enjoyed those rides, she went on. The post office was like a cathedral made of white stone and pillars too fat for her and her grandfather to get their joined arms around. And high ceilings. She wasn’t sure how high, but higher than any ceiling she had seen before. I watch for the blue mail truck endlessly, she wrote. Please don’t stop writing me.

Everything she wrote was so beautiful and I absorbed it all so recklessly. When you are a kid, you don’t consider the inevitable ends of life. Everything will last forever. Nothing will ever end. Childhood is eternal, a kid thinks. She told me about a place called The Hill of Crosses. For over a hundred years, she said, people have gone to this hill in a town near her and left crosses. She said it was the site of a fort that Lithuanians used who rebelled against the Russian Empire. No fort remains. Many of their bodies were never found, so people put crosses on the hill in their memory. She wrote so sorrowfully, but there was beauty even in her sorrow. She said if I were to see one thing in Lithuania, she wished it would be this. I said I wished it would be her.

Our weekly letters continued across three years. Never once did I begrudgingly write. I was always excited to write her a letter, seal it, stamp it, and drop it in a mailbox. The fact that a painting of yellow flowers hung in our post office wasn’t lost on me and I took a picture of it and sent it to her and she wrote back and said they were Dutch Holland Tulips, which she loved. She said that is how God speaks and I believed her. I believed everything she said.

In the third year, we started writing a little less. I got into baseball and played in two leagues and practiced in what time I had outside of school. She told me she was in a ballet academy and hoped one day to dance professionally and internationally. I bought a music box with a porcelain ballerina dancing in it and sent it to her on our second Christmas. I bought another one and kept it for myself. And once in a while I opened it and I watched her dance.

I kept her letters in a shoebox under my bed. I read them often, but after a few years, I seemed to read them less. It comforted me that they were there though, that the music box was there, and eventually that was enough. She once asked me if I felt the distance was fair, and I said no, it’s not, but it is there regardless of how we feel about it, which probably sounded a little harsh. She asked if I ever would visit Lithuania. I didn’t reply. She sounded sad to read, and I knew there was nothing I could do to make her happy in a letter. I had a photograph of her and her grandfather on my bedroom mirror, but eventually with time, its corners curled, the tape lost its grip, and it fell. I never hung it back up.

I wondered if she kept the picture of me I had sent her. It was a baseball picture. My face was sunburnt, but I always liked how I looked with a tan and in a hat. I felt odd without either. I told her I would like to build a treehouse and pick flowers with her in the last letter I wrote. It was brief. One paragraph. She never replied to my letter and I never heard from her again. It broke my heart because I wanted to rekindle what had slowly faded. I was convinced that I could wash cars for a summer and earn enough money to visit her, but I knew I had wrecked myself then on the optimism and false hope of love. I knew my childhood was ending and that everything ends.

They replaced the painting of the yellow Dutch Holland Tulips in the post office with one of my small town when it was new. I asked someone what had happened to the painting, but no one I asked knew, nor did they seem to care. It hardly mattered. It wasn’t as though I could have hung it in my house. But I wanted to know. It was also then that I realized that I was too old to take a free Dum-Dum sucker from the glass dish. But I took one anyway.

I wrote her twice more after that last letter and received no reply. I wrote again and apologized for being so short over the past year and to explain why and to ask about her ballet academy, her grandfather’s health, and their shop. I admitted that I was upset because I felt I could never come to Lithuania because my family was poor and we could hardly afford our bills. A pizza was a luxury to us. So were new blue jeans and Michael Jackson records. The factory where my father worked closed and he took a job pouring concrete that paid much less. I got a paper route to help with groceries and there hardly ever seemed to be any time to write a letter. I never told her before then that we were poor because I was ashamed. But I promised her I would wash cars this summer and save enough money to come visit if I heard back from her. I never did.

Twenty-five years passed. I am 38. Age is but a kind of soup now. Life has gone from a series of never-ending days to a matter of what will end next. It has stopped giving, and has started taking. I never threw out that shoebox full of Lana’s letters. Or the music box. They have always been somewhere close to me. A jealous girlfriend once told me to throw them out, or she would dump me. So, I took the dumping. I was married and had two children, then divorced eight years later. My daughter accidentally broke the arm off the porcelain ballerina in the music box. I set it aside and told myself I would glue it when I had time.

I didn’t want to be divorced, but life hadn’t gone well after thirty for me. I battled with depression, which I had never admitted to. It often wouldn’t relent and my doctor said it was hereditary and a matter of brain chemicals and chemistry. I refused to take the pills he prescribed me. I stood at the pharmacy and watched the pretty lady count someone else’s pills and when it was my turn I walked away as she asked me if she could help me. I put the script in my pocket. It wasn’t the way for me. My mother died of a broken heart after my brother was killed in a car accident. He was reckless and drunk and ran off Chicken Coop Road and into an Elm Tree. Thank God he hadn’t killed anyone but himself.


But my mom’s heart was never really whole. She was a human sheet of thin ice, especially after dad left her for another woman. She was medicated most of life and never as close to God as she said she wanted to be. Her pills didn't seem to work. I realize that I know no person who is close to God and depressed, just as I know no person who is happy and distant from God. I almost got kicked out of a bar for saying so. I was further from God than I was from Lana.

I had a reasonably good job and built up a good amount of savings in a retirement account. But the company I worked for moved to Mexico and I was out of work temporarily. The phrase "hitting rock bottom," occurred to me. I felt like human algae. My kids are mostly grown and went on vacation with my ex-wife and her new husband. I find a bar and drink down some of my savings across a couple of days like my father had done before me when his factory closed on him. Unexpectedly, someone who I went to elementary school with, who is having dinner with his family, tells me that the old battle-axe, Mrs. Real, passed away earlier this month. He asks if I saw the obituary. No, I say. I feel bad, though I don’t know why. I was never close to her. It is one more thing life took from me. And then I realize that I am being selfish in my gloom.  

He was the boy who had drawn Ronald Reagan nuking St. Peter’s Cathedral. Russia is hosting the winter Olympics in Sochi, which plays on the TV above the bar. I ask him if he remembers his pen pal and he thinks about it, but says he doesn’t remember him at all, but adds he recalls having one. They traded two letters, he says. He says it was nice to see me and goes back to his family and I wonder if Lana is watching the Olympics, as a free Lithuanian since 1993. I wonder if she thinks of me at all, twenty-five years later, maybe when an American medals, or when she sees my first name in movie credits. Or when someone speaks of E.T., or Rambo. I doubt it because I doubt everything. I have no God inside me and my soul is as barren as Russia on that globe. But having no God, means there is God to be had. So, I pray, and driving home I ask Jesus Christ to come into my life as sincerely as I have ever asked for anything.

I am drunk as I dig out her letters from my closet, well after the bar closed. They are in the same shoebox buried under the few baseball cards I kept. The ones that are worth money. I sit down at my kitchen table and write her a letter. I probably wouldn’t have done so had I been sober, but drunk and religious is another matter entirely. I open the music box and tell myself to buy superglue for her arm because there isn't any in my junk drawers. But then I realize I have lost her arm over time. She still dances though, and music still plays as she does.

I drive to an all-night grocery that sells stamps and affix more than enough postage to get it there. The letter is simple. I had written several drafts that were elongated explanations of my feelings and circumstances, woe is me kind of stuff. But I wasn’t satisfied with any of them and didn’t want to depress her in my past personal despair. I didn’t want there to be any reflection of insecurity in my words. I wanted them to be like they were when I was 12. So, the letter reads simply, “I still think of you.”

I take it to the mailbox at the post office because I am positive it will get picked up there, rather than from the one outside of the grocery which looks exactly the same. Though never in my life had I known of a letter I mailed to be lost or stolen that I dropped in another mailbox, it seemed more assured in this one. I regret not taking it into the post office the next morning after the door on the blue metal box slams shut and the letter falls to a pile of other common  and impersonal letters that lie within its bowels. But it was done. And so, I wait.


What are the chances she has kept the same address after all these years, I consider. Regardless, when you are depressed, as I have finally admitted that I am, you develop ways to keep dreams alive that make you happy thinking about them. It is self-sustaining. A matter of survival. And optimism is fuel that burns fast. There must be some possibility for something better than your depression, for if that door closes, you are in a dangerous game facing expiry. In football terms, that letter was my Hail Mary pass.

A month later, I receive a postcard in the mail. The picture is of The Hill of Crosses. I flip over to the backside where the writing is and it reads in good English what follows:

I apologize for reading the letter addressed to my daughter but felt it might require response, at last. Lana passed away in 1990 as result of the automobile accident that took her grandfather, my father, as well. Beloved to her were letters you wrote. They were placed with her in her final resting place. A picture of you she loved that we keep in our home next to her. Please love and keep her in your memory. Please be happy, not sad. Love, Victor.

Three weeks later, three weeks of God every Sunday and nightly prayers, after sitting through church and seeing the Easter lilies behind the pastor all service, I sell those baseball cards and buy a ticket for Lithuania. My Mickey Mantle is drunk and doesn't mind, and Pete Rose likes my odds. Roberto Clemente thinks the idea noble. And Jackie Robinson is happy to be out of my closet and hopes to be displayed properly.


I read the Bible on the plane drinking bourbon and ginger-ale. My heart, despite the obvious sorrow, is full and I am closer to God than I ever thought possible. What strikes me about Lithuania, was the lack of brown promised by the globe. I rent a car and drive it to Lana’s town and visit the post office where she mailed me the letters. I smile as I see the pillars she couldn’t get her arms around and the white stone and the tall ceilings. I drive to what I believe was her grandfather’s shop that still sells stationary and flowers. It is busy, so I decide to come back later.

Then, after some difficulty with directions, I find her house. A quaint and rustic home on a route leading out of town. I am pleased to see it is abundant with flowers. Lilacs, mostly. Daisies, Goldenrod, yellow Dutch Holland Tulips, and other late spring blooms. The Coneflowers and Susans have just begun their summer lives. There is an abundance of yellow and purple and I know that it is her work with the perennials, and kept in her memory by someone who loved her, which warms my heart. Perhaps, a husband that I am not jealous of, but envious. Maybe her children. Or her father, who sent me the card. A cobblestone walk leads to a stunning stone and wood home, two levels and narrow, under a strange but ornately beautiful roof of unrecognizable material. Ceramic, perhaps. Birds fly over the house and I knock anxiously on a strong wood door that is blood red. A black cross hangs on it and I have a while of staring at the cross before it finally opens.

I expected her father to be wearing a black ushanka who, after a few bourbons on the plane, I had imagined to be a tall, strong man, like Nikolai Volkoff, but a man of considerable kindness, nonetheless. He had taken the time to send me the postcard explaining Lana’s tragic death, after all. But the door opens and the man standing there is short and stout. He is balding and gray. He has a kind and care-worn face and dark, but clear eyes. He speaks a little English and tells me that he is Lana’s father and immediately that he knows who I am. He smiles. He says he recalls the “picture of me,” though he remembers “a boy wearing hat in picture,” and “a boy with darker face.” The eyes, he says, they do not lie. “They are same. As is soul.” He says this is Lana’s home and he, at first, eagerly invites me inside, but then hesitates and abruptly rescinds the invitation. He steps inside, grabs his hat and cane and says we should go somewhere. Of course, I agree because I had imposed and I imagine that he wants to take me to Lana’s grave, which is the purpose of my visit.

As I am driving, he tells me to go left then right, then left, then we drive down a road for a few minutes back towards the town. All the while he is on his cellphone and speaking fast in Lithuanian, I suppose, and I begin to worry that he is going to kill me. That he is paranoid and is Russian mafia and he hates Americans. The mind wonders, it does. But he laughs on the phone and pats my leg like I am an old friend and he points the directions as he continues to talk and laugh. I wish I knew what he was saying, but it hardly matters. We will get to where we are going.

He tells me to stop at a large hill and there are old stone steps that lead up to the top. Looking down a long stone walk, I recognize where he has taken me. It is The Hill of Crosses. Same as the picture on the postcard. Where Lana once told me to go. Where I intended to go after I saw her grave. I eagerly get out and help him because he has a pronounced limp, but he politely brushes me off with his cane and says to go. He says, “Go up. I wait. I am old man. You young.” He then tells me to “find Lana” and he smiles warmly and there is a God-like twinkle in his eyes that I admire and respect. God is with me, I know, because my soul warms.


And so, I go and make the walk and I can’t see him or the car and I wonder if I am taking too long, or if he has stolen my car, a thought that makes me laugh at myself. There is so much to see. It is overwhelming and immaculate. Thousands and thousands of crosses of varying sizes, colors, and distinctions. So many different materials and ages. Some worn. Some new. Statues of Mother Mary and Christ Jesus. In one glance, it is heartbreaking, but in another, it is heartwarming. It is everything at once and my heart and soul are suffused with a great flood of emotion.

I imagine that Victor meant for me to find her cross. Maybe they spread her ashes here and there is no grave. I would be remiss if I returned to him and have to say that I could not find her. There are only a few people milling about who disappear in the pathways, but I do not feel alone. I really don’t think I have felt less alone in my life. In any crowded room, or busy city street. At any concert, or bar, or baseball stadium. I turn a corner hoping to see something that reminds me of her, see her name on an engraved cross, maybe. Then I nearly run into a beautiful woman who is entering from the walk and she smiles at me through uncertain eyes. I lose my breath in recognition of her which came as easily as I recognized the hill. Somewhere in the dark of her deep brown eyes, in the waves of her chestnut-colored hair, there is a fountain of eternal optimism and the young beautiful girl in the picture I kept on my mirror for so many years. Tears well in her eyes and mine, soon to follow. A pronounced scar on her face and a limp like her father’s take nothing away from her striking gorgeousness, and that which pours profusely from her soul.

“My father,” she says, her feet stirring the pebbles beneath her, “set this all up. He is a fox. He called me on cellphone and told me to come. I was at shop. I tell him I can’t come because of customers, but he says I must come. I knew then, though he didn’t say. In here,” she covers her heart with her only hand. “And I come.” 

I couldn’t speak for a moment. I stood frozen until the words came to me. “But why did he write and tell me you passed?”

“I wrote. I told you I was him on my behalf. A lie. Forgive me. I have thought of you every day since school days. But also, that you done well and married and have children and happy life and forgot me. After the accident. The scars. My arm. I never danced ballet after. I have never been with anyone, and I live and run shop since my grandfather passed in the accident.” A sleeve is pinned to her shirt and I think of the superglue that I never bought and the porcelain arm I lost.

There is nothing missing where it matters. Nothing is out of place to me. No scar, no wound, no ailment at all, and none could take away from that which is. And feeling that she has the same feelings for me, despite all my years, I take her in my arms and swear to never let go. I tell her she has danced and she has never stopped dancing and she laughs as she cries and I hold her a while longer. Her father waits for us by the car and he is still smiling, euphoric in his clever deceit. And now he applauds. “Lovers,” he says. “Make love! Be happy now. Love is happy place.”

Love is a happy place. It is a Hill of Crosses. A pen pal, stationary and ink. A letter. A music box. A dream that doesn’t die. A postage stamp and an airline bourbon. It is drunk optimism. A field of yellow Coreopsis and purple lilac. It is good and bad germs. A painting in a post office. A bowl of Dum-Dums free for kids. It is Lithuania. It is a battle-axe teacher, a sad book, a naked woman in black marker. It is a pink piece of paper with a name in a Valentine’s tissue box.  It is a baseball card. A lost job and a divorce. Love is a Cold War. It is Rambo. It is a crumbled wall.

Life takes away, but it still gives to those that receive. We have dinner and her father invites me to stay. He likes to shake my hand a lot and pat my back as often as he is able. He tells dirty jokes and then apologizes after a good laugh for being crude. He likes American baseball, he tells me, but he invites me to teach him how it goes. We have drinks in the house and out by a fire-pit and relatives come to their beautiful home and bring food and I am introduced to everyone I should know. How long, I ask a while later, may I stay. Lana smiles beautifully and her father laughs and pats my back. Best joke yet, he says. Some questions, they needn’t answers.