Picture it: 1984. The year in which George Orwell’s dystopian novel is supposed to have taken place. In real life, the Cold War is still hot; Ronald Reagan is in the White House; Konstantin Chernenko occupies the Kremlin . . . well, for a few more months, anyway.

And I — now an empty-nester — decide it might be fun to spend my evenings studying Russian.

“Really?!! Why would anyone . . . ?” I hear you ask.

Truthfully, I’m still not 100% sure. I knew I wanted to learn a second language — I worked with a number of bi- and multi-lingual people and really admired their ability to switch languages so effortlessly. And I didn’t want anything simple or “common,” like Spanish or French; I wanted a challenge. All of my grandparents had emigrated from Russia (well, Ukraine actually, but it was all still part of Russia when they left in 1905), so that just seemed like the obvious choice. It certainly met the criterion for difficulty. I set out in search of a Russian language class, and finally found one in the fall of 1984 at the community college near my home. It was convenient, and the tuition was low for in-state residents, so I wouldn’t be losing much in case I decided it wasn’t for me, or I found I couldn’t decipher the alphabet or wrap my tongue around all those consonants. So I enrolled.

Little did I know that that one simple decision would alter the course of the rest of my life. But if you’ve been following my blog, you already know about that. Today’s story concerns just one little incident that, to me, was so amusing it has stuck firmly in my memory for nearly 40 years. It’s a story of patience vs. anger . . . reason vs. impulse . . . clever vs. stupid. And as we all know, you can’t fix stupid.

*. *. *

It was around 1985 or ‘86, and I’d been happily immersed in my Russian studies for a year or two. I was living in the northern Virginia suburbs just south of Washington, D.C., commuting daily to my job in the city. On this particular sunny Saturday, I was engaged in my usual local errand-running, and was headed to my dry cleaner’s store in a strip mall a couple of miles from home.

About a half mile from my destination, I was stopped at a red light behind one other car, waiting to turn left. I could see the driver — a man — turned around to talk to someone in the rear seat when the left-turn arrow for our lane turned green. He obviously didn’t see it, so I gave him a single, polite beep of my car horn. Not a blast. Not a series of honks. Just a beep to call the other driver’s attention to the fact that he could make his left turn now.

And he flipped out. Looking in his mirror and shaking his fist at me, he peeled out, burning a few centimeters of rubber off of his tires; squealed around the corner; pulled over to the curb; and stopped. I didn’t know why he had stopped, but I just kept going right past him. And then I found out. He began following me.

When I got to the little shopping area a couple of minutes later, I headed for a spot close to my dry cleaner’s shop, and backed in, leaving my motor running in case I needed to make a quick exit. This jerk . . . er, man . . . backed into a space directly across from mine, so that we were facing each other across the driveway. I rolled up my windows and made sure my doors were locked, and waited.

I could now see that he had a young boy — presumably his son — around 8 or 10 years old, in the back seat of the car. I could also see that dear old Dad was not having a good day.

Leaving the boy in the car, he got out and stomped — yes, literally stomped — across to my car, where I sat with a well-rehearsed, innocent expression frozen on my face. He stood by my driver’s-side window, yelling about women trying to tell him how to drive and what to do, tossing a few expletives around to prove his masculinity, and turning progressively redder and redder from the neck up. When he finally paused for breath, I took advantage of the lull to answer him — in Russian!

I began babbling about nonsense. As I recall, I told him that my favorite author was Dostoevsky, and asked if he had ever read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, or — and I highly recommended this one to him — The Idiot. I called him a few well-chosen names, also in Russian, and all with the most pleasant attitude. And as I watched his anger turn to complete bafflement, it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud.

Finally, he seemed to realize that he hadn’t understood a word of what I was saying, and angrily shouted through the glass, “What did you say? I can’t hear you!” So I rolled the window down a couple of inches, and began repeating myself . . . still, of course, in my very best Russian. I even threw in a few gestures, pointing at my car horn and beeping it once as I had done back at the traffic light, all the while jabbering about how stupid he was. And he was completely gobsmacked. He had at last realized that I was speaking a whole other language . . . and it may as well have been Martian, for all he knew.

At that point, I knew I had him. Finally, he sputtered a bit, shook his head slowly from side to side, waved a hand dismissively in the air, and grumbled, “G*ddamn foreigners! They let ‘em into the country and they can’t even speak English!” . . . as he slunk back to his car, where he no doubt explained to his son that “That’s how you treat a woman who tries to tell you what to do.”

My favorite part of the whole scenario is that it never occurred to old shit-for-brains that, for someone who allegedly did not speak English, I had had no problem understanding that I needed to roll the window down when he said he couldn’t hear me.

Genius.

*. *. *

I sometimes think about the fact that that man must be well into his 70s by now (if someone hasn’t knocked his block off), and the boy would be middle-aged; and I wonder whether they remember that day as I do. Probably not. But I do know that if I were to find myself in a similar situation today, I would drive to the nearest police or fire station rather than a dry cleaner’s shop, because that pissed-off driver would most likely pull out a gun and shoot me between the eyes, instead of simply acting like a jackass.

I do so miss the good old days.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
6/28/24