September 4. We’ve got a group of Americans here going around to various orphanages – spending time with the kids, basically. Today we run into a little friend of mine that got transferred from another home – when the kids hit seven, they get transferred from the preschool homes and into the school-age homes for seven- to 18-year-olds. As you can imagine, this is not an ideal situation, especially since the preschool homes are usually very friendly, clean and loving places overflowing with cute, and the older homes – and this one especially – aren’t. I was less than pleased by this – especially as she was leaving behind a younger sister and brother. As it turns out, though, she had another sister already in this home – I knew her by sight, but never in a million years would I have put them together. My little friend – an adorable pale-blonde girl with eyes the size of saucers – was carrying around a three-centimetre-thick stick almost as tall as she was, and whenever she thought that another of the kids was getting a little too demanding of me, she would swat at them with the stick yelling: “No! He’s mine!” So cute! I showed her an old trick with crayons: draw or write in bright colours, scribble over it with black (or dark blue), and then scrape it with a coin – you get the original drawing, looking all smooth and shiny, on a black background. She loved it, and I wound up doing it for a couple dozen kids over several homes. Funny thing was, the other adults (American and Bulgarian) were as fascinated as the kids, and I had to show several of them how to do it, too.
September 14. Today I agreed to help a family buy a quarter-sized violin for their daughter, as they don’t speak Bulgarian and I know something about violins. We agreed to meet at the Nevski at 11am – I got a late start (10.30am), partially my fault and partially not, so I had to take a taxi, which I wasn’t happy about. Of course the stoplights weren’t working, and at 10.50am we’re still sitting at the second stoplight from my house. I had no way to contact them – they eventually called me and I explained the situation. The taxi to the Nevski took an hour, and cost almost 10 leva. I can walk there in about an hour and 10 minutes – the day was off on the wrong foot, where it pretty much stayed. There weren’t any quarter-sized violins at the Nevski market, we couldn’t find the shop I had been told about because I had been told a non-existent street name and when we finally got the violin we had to take the bow to have the hairs remounted. They invited me out to lunch, mentioning that they had a doctor’s appointment over near where I live, which meant I got a ride home – a little good news to brighten up the day. Long story short, I was in my first-ever car wreck. No one was hurt and there was no damage to the jeep that the Americans were driving, but the bumper of said jeep went right through the headlight and on into the radiator of the guy we reversed into. Then of course I had to stick around and translate for the police, who took forever arriving, and when they finally came it took me forever to fill out the forms because everything – and I do mean everything – on those forms is an acronym, and I had to ask the policeman what they all stood for. Doubleplusungood.
September 16. I find myself on a Kubric binge of late: The Shining led to Dr. Strangelove led to A Clockwork Orange. About 45 minutes into the last film, I had a revelation (I mean besides “I hate the protagonist” – that one took about 10 seconds): “Wait a minute – he just said ‘I vidi-ed’ something. There’s like, random Russian stuff thrown into the dialogue – oh THAT’s what’s wrong with it!” Yes, I sat through 45 minutes of the film without realising that the “futuristic slang” sounds funny because it has a bunch of Slavic words mixed in. I guess I just understood what he was saying and didn’t stop to think about it.
September 19. Sometimes, as a writer, you get an inspiration and you just have to go with it. Sometimes, this occurs at two in the morning and lasts for the next five hours and you just have to keep going: if you stop, it will be gone, and if you don’t get it down NOW then you’ll never get it back. An occupational hazard – that, and carpal tunnel: my wrists friggin’ hurt!
September 20. In preparation for a container that was to arrive the next day, we drove down several of the older “kids” (all in their 20s) from a home in Berkovitsa for mentally handicapped to have them help prepare our “warehouse” to have a whole container unloaded into it. They’re hard workers – everything was done by mid-afternoon and we took them to Arena. The escalators were a source of much wonder and of course they all liked Shrek 3. I was somewhat ambivalent about the movie itself and was largely unsatisfied with the translation and dubbed voices, but when the helpless princesses decide to stand up for themselves and, in a montage to this effect, set a bra on fire, I cracked up laughing for the next 10 minutes.
September 21. The container is finally here, on this the ... sixth? seventh? promised arrival date. Seriously. Also: you never truly appreciate how much stuff is on one of those containers until you unload it by hand. But we got it done and it didn’t rain on us in the meantime.
