Ancient Church

Some of you may remember that earlier this summer Olga and I concocted a brilliant scheme, designed to get her moved to California to start grad school, while at the same time making it as excruciating as possible so that everyone would be happy with the immense geographical distance between us. As originally conceived, it involved driving cross country, but eventually it became clear that was too ambitious even for us, so we substituted another, almost equally irrational plan, in its place. Under this scheme, she and I would fly to San Francisco, loiter there briefly, and then drive some 300 odd miles to her new home in Santa Barbara. We would then drive an indeterminate distance to visit my father somewhere east of Los Angeles, then return to Santa Barbara to tie up loose ends before I fly out of Los Angeles Saturday morning. Friday night, of course, I will go clubbing with celebrities.

This plan was settled upon, and finally yesterday we began to implement it. After a Deacon’s service Sunday morning, my wife and Marina deposited the two of us at the Atlanta airport, and the great unbonding had begun. At this point, on Monday evening, I can offer some initial observations.

First, Sunday of Labor Day weekend is a great day to fly. The lines at security in Atlanta were negligible, and on both of our flights Olga and I had a three seat row to ourselves. I say both flights, since in my obsessive drive to be as cheap as possible, I booked flights through Minneapolis, thence to San Francisco. That was the cheapest route available. Neither Olga nor I had ever been in Minnesota before, so we will be able to add a state to our Facebook maps. I’ll confess, though, that it felt odd to be there when the city had suffered such a disaster just a few weeks ago.

Second, it is great to be back in San Francisco. Honestly, this is my favorite US city. Just descending over the Bay last night as we came in to land put a smile on my face. There are a lot of reasons to like San Francisco. St. John Maximovitich is here for starters, along with a vibrant Orthodox community. The city itself is just full of energy, and within the space of a few blocks you can often feel that you have traveled from one country to another, possibly passing through a third along the way. The variety of people is amazing. An illustration: last night Olga and I went to dinner after we got in. It was nine or so local time, which meant it was midnight to us, so we didn’t want to go far. We wandered down the street from the hotel about a block to a place called Gullivers. It was a fairly impressive re-creation of an English tavern. The women servers wore period dresses, and the men wore knee breeches and tri-corner hats. For all of that detail, the only omission seemed to be that there were no Englishmen. The host was Chinese, our waitress was Russian, the bartender was Salvadoran and the pianist was Japanese. It was both amusing and oddly edifying.

This morning, we rode BART into town and bounced around for a while. It was great fun, but then we decided we needed to get serious. We had to go to Palo Alto to Ikea, and obtain a bed for Olga. I wanted her to bring her bed from home, but it wouldn’t fit in the overhead bin on the plane. Ikea was suggested, by a person who will remain nameless. It was a sad mistake.

Many people are unaware of this, but Ikea is very much an agent of the anti-Christ, or at least we agreed on that once we escaped from the store. Maybe it was because every incoming student at Stanford was there, but the place was completely mobbed. We slowly wound our way through the place, wrestled Olga’s bed onto a cart, and finally escaped. It is hard to describe precisely what an unpleasant experience it was. Never. Again.

Even with that terrible experience, though, we have not yet unbonded, probably because we both agree that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be riding horses provided by Ikea. In any event, that ordeal behind us, tomorrow morning we leave, Swedish bed in tow, for the 300 mile trip to Santa Barbara. This time tomorrow, I’ll be assembling the bed that the evil Ikeans sold us. We will see how things stand then vis a vis un-bonding.