The kids love to go to the new playground a quarter mile from our house. There are no other children there – we don't see any on the streets. Our kids don't have any company except each other.
They do pretty well with that. Zoriana swings Marianna and plays on the slide with Eddie. Marianna is content to wander all over the playground by herself, improving those little toddler legs. Nobody is bothered by the distant bombing.
I resolved today to capture the sounds of war. As I write this, I have put my movie camera out on the balcony. It will record the two hours between now and noon. If the last couple of days are any guide, we should hear a couple of fairly good explosions in that time. Several miles off, but loud enough that the camera will certainly pick them up. Hmmm. Luckily not today. Stay tuned. But I learned something - need to eliminate wind noise.
What you won't appreciate in listening is the blessed silence in between the booms. There is no traffic noise. There are no airplanes. The trains that we usually hear about every 10 minutes are exceedingly rare. There aren't any powerboats down on the river or motorcycles peeling out on the main drag.
For those of you who are new, I did an analysis about two weeks back to figure out how loud the bangs have to be before they are close enough to be dangerous. My rule of thumb would be that worry begins when missile and bomb explosions are loud enough to be painful to your ears. Small arms are another story. When I think we hear rifle shots, we stay inside. The walls of the house are probably adequate to slow down bullets fired from any appreciable distance. So far we haven’t seen or heard any bullets hit.
Yesterday we visited the house of Eddie's former headmistress and then his former school where one of the teachers also lives. By an amazing coincidence, the school is in the house that Oksana and I rented from March 2012 until this house was completed in August 2013. We know it pretty well.
At any rate, the families are in Western Ukraine and Poland. They asked us to water their plants and pick up their notebooks for safeguarding. I, perhaps like you, scratched my head when I heard about notebooks. When we got there it became clear that they were talking about laptop computers. The problems of language.
Returning home with the food and computers, we had to pass a militia checkpoint. Although they know us, they nonetheless gave us and what we were carrying a bit of scrutiny. I'm glad they do that to everybody. The Western press is shocked that Ukrainians are taking harsh measures with looters. Yes, to maintain civil order during wartime you sometimes have to be tough. That's what the martial means in martial law. It could be worse than public shaming. The United States abandoned Marquis of Queensberry rules pretty quickly in the Second World War. They let draft dodgers, war profiteers and others know of their displeasure.
While we had them on the phone from Western Ukraine, we asked about the food that was left in the icebox. There was some unexpired milk and yogurt, some beets and some onions. We took everything that would've spoiled in the next week, as well as some stuff we needed such as sugar. That gave me an opportunity to reflect on what life must be like as an exile, the topic of Bob Homans' article a couple of days back. Becoming a refugee is more of a question than simple physical safety. It also involves adjusting to a different and more constrained way of life.
This is a time to appreciate our privileged position as pensioners. A good many of the refugees will not have a source of income; they may not have had much of a financial cushion to start with. My Social Security will keep coming and keep us in food for as long as the dollar is still worth something. That recalls another Bill Malden cartoon.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where this war has done what all wars seem to do. It has gone on longer than anybody expected and taken on a life of its own. The strong men and good-looking women alike are glad to be in their own home, growing accustomed to the sounds of war and grateful that they are not coming closer. The children are wondering if this is the New Normal they had been hearing about and not experienced yet to any great degree under Covid. What next does the Davos crowd have been mind for us?