What I meant to say...

Fellow Fulbrighter Stephan Clark is just back from his stint in Ukraine, and in fine writerly style, is perfectly content to set aside the What-Does-It-All-Mean burden that was dogging my consciousness two posts ago, and lay out a few simple weirdnesses of re-entry. Show, don't tell, etc.

I agree with him emphatically, especially about the bread. I do miss sticking half my torso into the small bakery window off the street, feeling the blast of hot, yeasty air, squinting into the subterannean pit where stocky men tend the round beehive oven below me, and emerging with long flat loaves of fresh bread for abot 35 cents a pop.

(Incidentally, Stephan's blog is well worth a read in entirety. He's a fiction writer who spent the year investigating Ukraine's bustling mail-order bride indstry, and perhaps all the talk of nuptials went to his head because he came out of the deal with his own blushing bride. [Not an agency perk, an actual girlfriend of some lengthy courtship.] Best of all, in the quest for an immigrant visa for his Russian wife, is his discovery of an Embassy job I never would have fathomed. The person inhabiting this position is no petty government bureaucrat but a sage, an oracle, for he is tasked by mandate of the U.S. Government with divining from a sheaf of dog-eared photographs and stacks of evidentiary emails whether love is true.)