Visitors

03-07-06
Visitors

Three Germans, Mira, Birgit, and Till came out to Sighnaghi overnight to help with the house. Unfortunately we didn’t get too much work done. We went for walks in the afternoon because the weather is sunny and sixty degrees here already. Then we went to the restaurant with Shergil, discovered it was his twenty-fourth birthday, invited all his friends down, and all got drunk on village wine. The next day we were all hung-over, though it was strange that I had a headache because that doesn’t usually happen for me when I’m drinking the pure village wine.

So mostly we just lazed around, poked through the yard, etc. Late at night, after they had gone back to Tbilisi on the marshutka, I took out a big window in the kitchen that I need to resize to be able to fit a sink counter in there. But now, the wind comes streaming right through the house! Which is not so good.

Shergil came up though, and helped me cut some glass panes to fit into the inside room doors, so the heat from my little woodstove wouldn’t escape into the rest of the house, which is now cold cold at night! But I’m snug in my room. I went to bed early, woke late, and worked like crazy all day on the garage roof, repairing a rotten beam, then in the yard digging out concrete, then in the house cleaning. Good stuff!

But I realize that I’m not in Georgia to do construction work, that’s what I do in the States. But I enjoy destroying old walls! Taking things down! Demolition crew forever!

I’m organizing a bunch of tours, so I spent a lot of time late-night stoking the woodstove, and then sitting around trying to think up fancy ways to describe this town of Sighnaghi that I love so much. Will people come on my tours I wonder? I have no idea. But I think they will come, this place is so exquisite, mysterious, so beautiful. The sounds are village sounds: dogs, roosters, the axe hitting wood, someone banging on something metal in the distance, someone calling out to a neighbor… It captures everyone’s heart. And I have such an interesting tour planned, how can they not come? Remember in that movie Field of Dreams, when he plows his cornfield under to build a baseball field? And he wonders, now that I’ve been so crazy, and done all this work, will they come? They do.

And the chant-book… Luarsab says he is almost finished translating. We are in negotiations with a really good publisher, and there is a chance that we won’t even have to fund the book because we have interest in the project from big businessmen over here.

And then graduate school… will I be able to study again? The challenge is frightening me a little bit.

Luarsab’s father had an operation, and he was telling me it made him a little depressed to realize that we get old. That we feel young and vital, but that this cannot last. To see our parents grow old is to feel and know that our lives will change, and that we will also one day grow old. I didn’t have any trouble understanding these feelings, and Dad’s whole physical struggle at the end came rushing back to me. How embarrassed he was that his pants couldn’t fit his distorted body anymore. He didn’t want to go out into public, and he didn’t want to stay at home either. He would say to me, what am I supposed to do now? What is my purpose, what do I have to give? What job will I have? What is worth living for now?

And I was embarrassed not that his pants didn’t fit or that he couldn’t go outside, or that he would never work a job again… but that somehow his self-esteem was robbed from him and he could no longer die a warrior in the emotional sense of the word.