Sergey's Dacha & a Bottle of Red
“Oh no,” I might once have thought, “it’s going to be a terrible day.” But I’m alive and Life Is Good, no terrible days in sight, and every day is a beautiful day especially from, in, and at 7H, and some series have an Oxford comma, some do not. Life makes no sense and I don’t understand anything and do not need to understand.
A wine aficionado I’ll never become at eighty, but at our Tuesday evening event, EfM alum gathering and dinner second Tuesday of every month September through May, I had a glass of red that was as it should be. This is not an endorsement, I just happened to like it, charcoal oaken barrel? IDK.
Took me back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, a week long visit to Melbourne, my hosts/clients took me for a long midday lunch to a rustic little cafe all by itself out in the boonies, the one with a wall of wine stacked to the ceiling, and they made the proprietor roll up a ladder, climb to the upper far corner ceiling and fetch a bottle of red that had been lying there sleeping with Old Father Time for GOK how many decades, whoof the thick layer of dust away, cut away the top foil, twist the corkscrew, and pour the tasting sip into my glass. It was the memorable glass of wine of my lifetime. Dark, strong, heavy Australian red, what? shiraz or maybe a cab. The day was cool but we had, in their Oz custom, duly taken off our jackets, folded them, and laid them neatly in the boot of the new Holden Commodore company car furnished to the MD of the aerospace mfg co pty ltd who were my clients those early years of my Navy retirement. My, but none of your, business.
Browsing the web. A current favorite, “Real Russia” is a totally naively neat series of walking and riding “vignettes” would be too elegant a word, fifteen to twenty minute camera vids by a young Russian man. We get to meet his mom at the daycare center where she works, and a ride in his stick shift Russian sedan out into the country, treated to him saying GD my gas tank is empty and on the way back GD it’s raining.
Most of his vids that I’ve watched so far he might have done on a beautiful day, but chose a chill day when he is bundled up walking through wet and slush as though that’s usual. Maybe it is. Maybe Russian summer is three hours one mid-August afternoon, IDK. Here’s one I especially liked, “Quick Walk by Old Arbat Street, Moscow.”
In the first video link above he drives us out into the countryside to see his family’s dacha. Naively charming beyond words. Sergey's English thick with Russian accent is delightful, and his vocabulary is extensive if so sailorishly laced with BS and GD that it occurs to me his English teacher may have been the son of an American fighter pilot.
Thursday 20160414 gathering as stormy and a beautiful, busy day.
DThos+ plugging along hopefully in +Time+