The first story I remember my mother telling me had to do with a family of bears. I don’t remember much about the bears, but they were clearly Lithuanian bears because the story was told in Lithuanian. Karta gyveno mesku seima. Once there lived a family of bears. The bears were brown and had cute little ears. That’s all I remember. My first book in Lithuanian, a long poem titled Meskiukas Rudnosiukas, was about a little bear with a brown nose. Sliumpu pumpu, sliumpu pumpu went the refrain, a rhyme that suggested the somewhat lumbering steps Rudnosiukas took to get to the hundred beehives he planned to visit during the day. At night he listened to the stories of his mother.

Years later my first husband ruined the charming sliumpu pumpu refrain by using it to refer to sex.

“Let’s sliumpu pumpu,” he’d say.

Now that I think of it, my ex had committed other grave bear offenses. During our contentious divorce, he threw away not only my collection of feminist theory books (I was in graduate school), but also the first toy given to me by my immigrant parents, a teddy bear, a Steiff they had bought at Marshall Field’s soon after I was born. In those days children didn’t have a roomful of stuffed animals fighting for attention. The nameless bear had been my only toy for years.

My father’s nickname was Meskis, or Big Bear. He had a bear-like way about him—he was stocky and strong and not very graceful–though at 5’8” he wasn’t very tall.

“Mano Meskis,” my mother would say.  My Big Bear.

On camping and fishing trips to Canada, we’d sometimes visit a garbage dump deep in some now forgotten woods to watch a family of bears rummage through the trash for food. We were safely ensconced in our blue Ford station wagon, and we certainly weren’t the only family there. The scene looked like some absurd drive-in theater where the movie never changed. Some people even brought pop corn.

My friend Teresa sent me a short clip about bears today, thus all of the reminiscing.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE691oZSVrg&feature=autofb

Just came back from the English Department’s start of the year party at Dana and Rene’s lovely house. I’m not a big party person. Perhaps some part of me associates parties with drinking (and drinking with passing out), even after twenty years of sobriety. And I’m afraid of silences, scared that I won’t have anything to say to people and they’ll think I’m stupid, or that I’ll blather on about something and they’ll think I’m shallow. Mostly, though, I prefer to stay home and read or knit.

I had a good time. I was already in a happy mood, having won all of my games at Scrabble. I beat John F., who gives me a hard time, and I got vengies on Scott from the last time we played. Bingoed with crepiest to lock down the game. Played a phony against Ranji—bilane. Was a tad annoyed that although Marty showed my book to everyone at Scrabble (without me asking, bless his heart) and everyone said, “Oh, that’s great!” and “Congrats!,” no one said, “Well, where can I get a copy of this?” I am too self-centered, I think. Or maybe this is just part of the process—getting used to the idea that the people who are going to buy my books are either friends or Lithuanians or individuals who enjoy reading memoirs. I probably wouldn’t buy a heavy metal CD unless the person hawking it was a very very good friend.

At the party, my boss, after introducing the new people in the department, said some very nice words about my book.  I felt great. I talked to Dagni and Mary and Ruth and Joe, who kept reminding me that the White Sox are totally out of it. Felt depressed briefly, because of Joe’s needless remarks. Roxanne, one of the new people in the department and an editor of Pank, gave me some advice about marketing the book and also encouraged me to keep writing in the blog. She is a youngin’ and thus knows much more about computers and blogs than I do.  I played with Terri and Matt’s very cute baby for a while. Tesla was enamored of my yellow amber beads. I would like to extend my knitting skills by making some baby booties for her, but I’m afraid the end result might be Big Foot baby booties. I still can’t knit tightly, even with smaller needles.

A good day.

I’m not an optimistic person by nature. I agree with the lyrics of my favorite REM song: “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”  (Except I don’t feel fine.)  I think BP stands not for British Petrol, but for Bye-Bye Planet. Perhaps my lack of a positive outlook comes from historical circumstances rather than personality. Both of my parents left war-torn Lithuania when the Communists took over. They lost relatives and friends to both Stalin and Hitler, and arrived in the U.S. penniless, having to start all over again. My father, the more optimistic of the two, was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer at 66 and died a month later, just a few years into what he thought would be a long and happy retirement.

Although I’m not an optimist, I’m a grateful person, at least I try to be. I find that focusing on the things in my life that are good, beautiful, even amazing, brings me back to a state of fairly calm acceptance, even happiness. I could have grown up in a Lithuania where people were locked up for expressing opinions that differed from the party line. I could have drunk myself to death in my twenties. I could have entered adulthood thinking the Cubs are a really great baseball team.

I was in a bit of a funk today, not sure why. Maybe because it’s Labor Day. I already get Mondays off (except for a few office hours), but I have colleagues who teach Mondays but not  Tuesdays—they don’t have to come in tomorrow AND they got today off! I shouldn’t have to come in tomorrow and teach! So maybe I was bitter. Or maybe I was feeling blue because my book is coming out and I was anticipating all the angry Lithuanians who will write and tell me that I didn’t focus enough on the country’s bloody past and will also excoriate me for using the word “fuck” twice in the book.

I got out of the funk by taking a walk to the CVS pharmacy to get some under-eye concealer. It was a beautiful evening. I had my iPod with me. Mendelson’s Hebrides Overture came on; I’d forgotten I had downloaded it.  It’s one of my favorite pieces of music. A young deer crossed University Avenue slowly and I thought Well, okay, so I have dark circles under my eyes and I can’t spell Mendelson (or can I?) and the Lithuanians at my first reading of the book will all whisper to each other about how much weight I’ve gained, but I have a great husband, a job I mostly love, and the best friends in the world.

And no one ran over the deer.