ripples

Everything I know about Mary Gordon fits into a single paragraph. Maiden name? Left a small village near Ukraine, somewhere outside St. Petersburg when the Jews were swept from Russia. Settled a couple hours from Pittsburgh. Mt. Pleasant, Penn. How do Russian Jews end up in Appalachia? Her older sister was planning a wedding and when the fiance backed out, Mary wrote an appeal so stunning he did marry her sister. (I hear it was a crappy marriage) When he showed his best friend the letter, my great-grandfather became crazed to meet the writer. Meshuganah Mary, Crazy Mary. Don't know what my great-grandmother said, or if there was really a letter. If that record of family history ever existed, she probably burned in the bon fire of her journals and poems. Her husband was 10-years-younger, a closely kept secret. She had three girls and a boy and taught her self English reading the dictionary; but wrote and wrote wrote in Russian. Every word of it up in flames.

~ ~ ~ ~

Eight months pregnant with Amelia even water gives me heartburn. Her head is shoved way up into my left side, knocking against the little ribs, squishing my stomach to nothing. At 37 weeks, it takes several rounds of moxibustion - heating the pressure points on my pinky toes - to flip her, At 42 weeks it takes acupuncture and two Castor Oil-Root Beer floats to drive her out. The pre-natal prologue to every school morning. She comes in whole, exactly who s he is. For weeks while I wait, I chew Tums and Papaya Eczyms as the rest of the world sleeps. Wait for the 4 a.m. East Coast news feed

"From Moscow, CTV Bureau Chief Ellen Pinchuk." Stop surfing, caught on the name, Ellen Pinchuk. Ellen Pinchuk? My cousin Ellen? Has to be. Don't know her well. She's a third cousin from L.A. who I met every few years when her family visited Youngstown. Our grandmothers were sisters, Mary Gordon's two oldest girls.

I watch a web broadcast of Ellen in Baghdad, an American Jewish Woman covering the war. I see her sign off from Siberia, Moscow, Afghanistan, Jerusalem - and then this. There's my cousin sitting with Vladimir Putin in the Presidential Palace - one of them anyway - for an exclusive before the G8. What you don't see is her chatting with him in Russian about just stuff.

Not a fan of the man. But, if we are truly affecting seven generations in both directions while we are here, I'm thinking the great granddaughter of a peasant who was booted from the country sitting down with the President in his palace a century later???

Got to be sending some crazy ripples up and down our lines.