Trying to love

That’s how I would describe my attempts to understand and like Mariya’s favorite band – Arctic Monkeys. She is not alone, the band is hugely popular, especially in UK. I think I know the answer now: Their music, though interesting, mostly irritates me not with aggression, loudness or something of that order. It’s the slightly off-key, or out of tune way Alex sings that bothers me the most. I was cooking my late breakfast, listening to Brianstorm, and suddenly it looked to me like wearing glasses with a wrong prescription lens. You constantlly have to make an effort to focus… I don’t do such things voluntarily, that’s why AM is not macupatea… Sorry. But generally speaking it explains how things evolve and progress. Tens of millions of Monkey fans cannot be wrong. They performed Come Together at the opening ceremony in London with the same ‘wrong prescription’ and people went ballistic. Obviously, it is us, sixty-seventy year old farts who miss something. Poor us. Oh, well, back to good old ‘No dark sarcasm in the classroom’…

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Refund

I remember the look in her eyes when she begged me to buy her that newly published book – the first in the Suzanne Collins series of Hunger Games. I was reluctant at first, shelling out the full price of a best selling hard copy teenager-oriented book didn’t seem like a wise buy. But something about Mariya’s attitude was unusual. She never pressed me to buy anything before, not openly at least. Not since the Build-A-Bear times. I succumbed, and am I glad I did. Years later it paid-off handsomely. My refund came in the form of online correspondence: In the last couple of days Mariya and I exchanged a few emails, which in my view was the best father-daughter ‘quality time’ in years!

I told her about my Netflix order of Hunger Games, she said she was thinking about me when she recently watched it (for the umpteenth time). After drying off tears of joy (she thinks about me!!!), I wrote to her a brief message in Russian, which Mariya understood in its entirety, and then… Then I watched the movie, frankly told her what I thought about it. After that she told me several stories related to the subject, which revealed to me a very familiar but at the same time very different girl, who lived at the end of my house. Where wi-fi signal was poor…

She finished her story about meeting the Hunger Games stars expressing hope that I liked it. I honestly think that reading my daughter’s ‘little novel’ was in many respects the best half-hour in my recent unrecorded history. She started writing books at the age of five, but then I was too busy to read all of them. I was also a bit skeptical when an eight-year old Mariya would lecture us using quotes from her writings. She used to say, “As XX in my recent book says…”

Well, now that I have more time, I am planning to read ALL her stories. She definitely is an excellent story teller, and her English is very good. Way better than mine.

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