Saying goodbye this morning to Andrei's 86 year old mother, whom I first met in 1979. She's a survivor of the 900 day blockade of Leningrad. People were reduced to making soup from wallpaper paste to stay alive, and worse. She told me it was actually rather tasty! Like many survivors, to this very day, she stores more food than she needs, "just in case." She gave Andrei 10 kilos of sugar to take back to Moscow with him. Over the years, she and her late husband were very kind and generous to me. In 1992, I spent six weeks studying at the Herzen Institute in Leningrad. Andrei's parents insisted that I stay with them, and they treated me like one of the family. When it was time for me to end my stay by visiting Andrei in Moscow, his parents accompanied me to the train station, where his father bought me a ticket with his senior citizen/veteran of the Great Patriotic War discount. It saved me a small fortune. When the conductor spotted me hanging around close by, he appeared skeptical and asked him exactly who the ticket was for. Andrei's Dad insisted it was for him, and he stayed on the train until the very last minute after the conductor had lost interest. Then he handed me the ticket and made a quick exit just as the train was pulling off. Both of them salt of the earth people! We had our "greatest generation," in the USA, but so did they in the Soviet Union. — at St. Petersburg, Russia.
— with Андрей Желнов in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
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