Lord Help the Mister

If we assume that every recognizable tune carries a valuable secret message, then what precisely does Shostakovich mean when, in his intense Second Cello Concerto, he quotes an Odessan jingle called "Pretzels, Buy My Pretzels?"

At the market yesterday, I saw a birdcage stuffed with parakeets, just jam-packed with them. Sparrows, free for the time-being, would land on the cage and eat the seed through the bars. The image struck me with the strength of metaphor.

Though I was taking it quite slowly, Tashkent was blurring by. It's a large, beautiful city. Not as compactly walkable as Bishkek but with an easy charm and the signs of "progress," everywhere. It kind of felt like Baku's country cousin.

It looked like they were giving it a shot, but it's hard for a rising tide to lift all ships in a landlocked country,

It doesn't have "destination" landmarks like some of the other cities, which I appreciated. There are some famous mosques, but the rest of this trip is going to be mosquepalooza, and I didn't want to get burned out. My time here was designed to recharge and to sketch an outline for the remaining time. Two weeks left, and the itinerary is open with really only a vague idea of seeing Khiva at some point and an absolute hard deadline of being back in Istanbul on a specific date to catch my flight back home.

Which I miss. Home. I have a beautiful life there and many people who I love and who love me. I took this trip because I was inspired to, and I had a window to, but there have been times when I've felt like it was too long and too far. And that's an important lesson to learn as well. What does your heart need? What's the "right" balance between comfort and adventure? What do I want? When will I write? Because that, ultimately, is what I want to do.

Why do I always have one foot in the stirrup?

I lay in bed thinking about the imprisoned birds and how the birds just slightly above them in the literal pecking order were exploiting their situation, and remembered with a sudden mental thud I had forgotten about Peace Park. How had I let it slip? I'm like one of those people who leave their infant strapped in the back of the car.

Tashkent and Seattle are "sister cities." There's a Tashkent park in Seattle and a tiny Uzbek community, and the cities have been in communication and collaboration since the 1970s. That was, of course, (one of the) dark ages of the Soviet years, so the idea that Seattle was even allowed to speak to someone from Uzbekistan was revolutionary in itself.

The Russians always have two things in mind: Will this be good propaganda, and will this make money. They figured having two super-remote places have a relationship they could oversee and smooth over and control would make them look "open" and, the clincher, they figured it would help them start a business relationship with Boeing.

Russia doesn't make anything. They used to, but the experts they didn't kill ran away, so for the last fifty years they've relied on other countries' tech to keep their machines running. Economic sanctions and a bad reputation keep them down, so they run a million schemes. One of which is currently badly disrupting the United States.

However... sometimes something good comes out of their bullshit, and from what I've read this sister-city program was run by people on both sides who really cared. It was the very first such program between an American and Soviet city. They established Peace Parks in both cities to commemorate it.

Seeing if the park was still here had been a major thing on my list of things to do in Tashkent, and it was my last day here, and I had completely forgotten about it. The sparrows of distraction had stolen the seed from the cage of my desires! Or something! I got dressed and headed in that general direction. It did not appear on any map. Old websites showed where it might be. But.. the current map wasn't even green in that area. Had the park been bulldozed for condos?

I kind of used the shape of the streets to figure out where it could possibly be. The last information I had was ten years old, a group of Seattle people had come here to check it out in 2008. A lot can happen in that period of time. Seattle itself is almost unrecognizable from that time. There was no metro station near where I thought I needed to be, so I was denied the pleasure of the ride.

Can't be overstated how amazing the metro is here. I'm probably repeating myself, but it's the most beautiful in the world. I had been led to expect it, and I was not led astray. The stations are museums.

But no stops near the park's ghost, so I ate pickles and cherry tomatoes from a cup while I walked.

I wasn't sure I was there until I was. Sounding out a Cyrillic sign gave me See-eht-luh. I had found it. I had dove into the surf where it foamed the wildest and was flooded with the sense of a quest fulfilled! My nostrils quivered in the wind! It felt so good to discover it this way.

Past that sign was a cafe called Seattle written in English (or the Latin alphabet, anyway) and I headed toward it, only to quickly turn around. It was open, but it was very dark and didn't smell right to my quivering nostrils. I read later it was housed in an old granary, but it may be older than they knew.

Backed out and saw how it bordered a park, surely the Peace Park itself. A large, locked gate and block-long fence kept me out, but I saw two women inside. So, though I had walked some way already, I pushed on looking for bent bars I could slide through or an opening somewhere. Made it to the end of the block with no luck. Why was it so closed off?

Tested the perimeter and poked around until, behind a Korean restaurant and next to a dumpster full of kimchi fly-mansions, I found an access road that appeared to lead in. I walked down it figuring if I were stopped I could show my driver's license and say, "Seattle. See? No beat on, Seattle me."

Nobody was around, and I entered without impediment.

It was quiet, a little cold, and a perfect postcard of "autumn." Brown leaves crunching under my boots, yellow leaves stuck to the front of my boots. Keats was on my side, my hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind! By a cyder-press with patient look, I watched the last oozings hour by hour! 

A group of tree planters were decorated with tiles. I had read about these as well. In the late 80's, as the Soviet Union was crumbling/opening, Seattle school children painted and decorated over a thousand tiles and sent them here to beautify the park. Some were even allowed to come here and help assemble the structures. Seeing them, I was completely overcome and burst into tears, an ugly, joyful cry with twisted face and snot-filled nose.

It seemed so pure and beautiful to me. It was. Their little naive messages of friendship and sisterhood and peace. Was it fully the sentiment, or was it homesickness that triggered the raw emotion? It was objectively a beautiful project, but... it was also subjective. There was the Space Needle, there was a seahawk, there was the word Seattle. My home. I thought about the children in my life (Milo, Amber's daughter, Jerrica's children) and how this would have been their project had then been now.  I thought about Meg and Mark, Seattle natives, and how this could have been their project at a different age. It felt very personal, and I wondered what it meant to the people who grew up with it here. Did it mean anything to them?

I sat on a small bench near a weird statue of, like, peasant children toasting with bottles of milk (?) and finished the Zwieg memoir. I was shocked by the afterward saying Zwieg and his wife killed themselves when he finished writing it. I hadn't known when or how he'd died. Surprise. The power of the diary. You get to know someone by their own words, and you feel close to them, and you are affected by their fate.

Sorry, I forgot the spoiler warning.

So... I was just Little Miss Emotional in the Peace Park. I didn't have a napkin, so I just blew my nose on an advertisement for Kyrgyzstani cell phones I had been using as a bookmark. I wouldn't need it anymore.

Sober, inspired walk home. Or, that was the intent, but I was feeling so good I decided to instead walk to the train station to get my ticket to Samarkand. That way I would see more of the city, and I wouldn't have to worry about it being sold out in the morning or some shit.

Long, choppy walk across wide, wide six-to-eight lane roads, sometimes using pedestrian underpasses, sometimes racing over the yellow-and-white crosswalks with my leaf-wet boots. This became a less suburban part of the city, and the businesses were all places to get wifi routers and washing machines.

Took a chance and tried an ATM. There had been so much trouble getting money upon arrival, I was starting to worry about having enough to make it to the end. I was running pretty low on physical US dollars, and while everything has been dirt cheap... there will doubtless be some bill or situation that requires more than I had.

I struck out at the first few machines, which is typical on these trips. The bank swears up and down they know I'm there and I expect to be able to use my card, but... their word is as good as the soldier at the border who told me the bus would wait for me.

In this case, however, I had been using some kind of Uzbek-only "union card" machine. I thiiink it's for people to access their unemployment checks. They're everywhere, these machines. Eventually, something that was very clearly an ATM made the sound of a sparrow's wings as it steals the seed from a caged parakeet, and I had a gazillion som.

The train station was a mad scene. You can't just get a ticket. You have to get a ticket to be allowed access to the ticket counter. It took over an hour in a not-very-interesting building. My god, is this what the children of Seattle labored over those tiles for? To preserve a sluggish railway bureaucracy? Is this what the children of Seattle fought and died for?

But... my turn came, and I got what I needed. It was touch-and-go for a moment... I was supposed to show my passport, but I didn't have it with me. But I DID have a photograph of it on my phone, and they accepted that without question. That's a little trick I picked up... somewhere.

There WAS a metro station here, so I got another ride in its flawless, heaving mass-transportation bosom.  Went home, packed, spent some time deciding which book I would read next. Ate more tomatoes and pickles, then went out for a fish sandwich.

I wrote for the rest of the evening. It had been a beautiful day full of emotion and meaning. I went to bed early to preserve it.