In the increasingly-surreal progression events that are my life (not that things are bad–far from it–but they are surreal), I reached something of a peak last weekend.
Context: some friends and I are helping to build a small house for a lady we know. The house will store the heat from incoming sunlight in its massive rammed-earth walls and therefore will not require a furnace. As the lady now lives in a trailer out in the bush up north and shivers through the winter with only a dog, an electric heater, and gargantuan electric bills for company, this will be a huge improvement.
There is increasing interest in these houses. The owners of a small B&B not too far away from the work site have become quite involved, and have let us volunteers shower there after a hard weekend of moving dirt, raising walls, and pouring concrete.
So…
Last weekend was the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday. The weather was superb and beautiful. The owners of the B&B invited us for Thanksgiving dinner. Most of the work crew declined the invitation, as they were returning to Toronto or Ottawa or Kingston for their own families’ Thanksgiving dinners. But there were three of us left.
After we worked on the house (walls almost up!), we went over to the B&B to clean up and have dinner. At dinner, we sat with the actual guests of the B&B: the parents of one of the owners, and another couple. The other couple turned out to be an almost-retired executive and his Russian wife. I’ll call them Norm and Tanya; those aren’t their real names.
There were three of us who had been working on the house. We were talking about all sorts of things, and converstation turned to what we were doing. We described the house and how it worked. We must have done a good sales job, because Norm and Tanya bacame interested and wanted to see more.
We said that the next day, we were going to visit our friends Sam and Deb (not real names again–let’s just assume none of these names are real fropm now on) who had built the original example in Ontario of the type of house we were working on. We could check and see whether they’d mind a couple of visitors. (We did not anticipate a problem, as Sam and Deb had had over 6000 people visit their house in the past ten years, many of them volunteers such as myself who helped build it. Newspaper articles have been written about the house and documentaries have been filmed about it. But that’s another thread…)
Eventually dinner was over and I left the table for a moment. When I sat down again, I mentioned that I was feeling a little sunburned. It was true; my face and the top of my head felt like they were glowing with heat. So what does Tanya do? She offers me some soothing cream for the sunburn, and applies it to my face and head, there at the table. It was a little surprising, but no-one seemed to mind, and the cream was indeed soothing.
Eventually, the converstation ended and we headed to our separate beds, the guests at the B&B and us elsewhere.
The next morning, we three volunteers were invited for breakfast.
We arrived and had more interesting conversation with Norm and Tanya, and also Joyce, an expat American marketing professor from a university in Australia. Joyce was traveling the world researching the subject of “respect” as it appeared (or didn’t appear) in marketing relationships.
I was able to give her one example right off the bat: just before I left Toronto to go up north, I picked up a message on the answering machine. The message went someting like this: “Please don’t hang up. This is not a sales call. Please hold for…” At that moment I deleted the message.
If you are calling me, it is extremely disrespectful to expect me to wait on you. And I didn’t believe the line about it not being a sales call for a moment. Yes, the machine had caught it, but if I had answered in person, it would have been me waiting. Sorry. That wasn’t going to happen.
I mentioned other telemarketers such as the infamous Toronto-area “Boris the Mover” who’d at least had the relative courtesy to simply give their spiels on my machine. I started to say more, but then Tanya interrupted.
Tanya said that they’d lived in Toronto at one point and that they had had a bad experience with Boris the Mover… and that Russians were not to be trusted in business. They were great people on a one-to-one basis, but doing business was another thing entirely.
This was more than a little eye-opening since Tanya herself was Russian. I mean, one hears the jokes about the Russian Mafia buying ultra-expensive mansions on the Bridle Path in Toronto and such, but still… to condemn an entire nation? I work with several Russians and have had no problems.
Eventually breakfast ended and we headed out the door, down to Sam and Deb’s. Norm called Deb and confirmed that visiting their house was okay. They followed us down the highway, and my friend fretted about having to drive slowly so the others could keep up. (He’s a race-car driver and his car is a Honda fitted with performance gear and interior roll bars. And it’s covered with sponsors’ logos. Gets all kinds of interesting looks, especially up north in the bush.)
We arrived at Sam and Deb’s and made it up their driveway (pretty easy, except for one nasty hill). Sam and Deb showed Norm and Tanya around the semipublic parts of the house, took out the photo albums and the books on solar design, explained the little house-model Deb’s daughter had made, and everyone generally had a good time. Norm and Tanya were fascinated. I hung around for a bit and then left to do something else.
When I came back, Norm and Tanya were already gone. Deb came up to me and said, “Don’t ever say I never do anything for you. Tanya has a 32-year-old daughter who is emigrating to Canada and wants some practice with her English.
She’s in import-export. Here’s her name and email address. You were looking for a wife, weren’t you?” She handed me a piece of paper.
I blinked in surprise, but accepted the paper. I don’t remember what I said in reply, probably something like, “Yes, maybe, but…”
So now I have this name and email address. I know nothing about this woman, Tanya’s daughter, except what Deb said.
I had actually looked into the idea of searching for an East European/Russian wife, but after reading an excellent website on the subject a couple of years ago, decided against it. The resources required of the searcher were simply too great for me at the time: around $20,000 for travel to Russia, hotels, etc, etc. Having some extra money in my PayPal account, I did order a book off the website that gave the stories of its founders and explained how to go about searching.
But the most important thing I gleaned from the book wasn’t a set of tricks to make myself look good to women from far away or anything, it was this: “Be yourself. But be the best of all your selves.” Make yourself into the best man you can be, one a woman will want to marry.
I’ve been working on that for many years, though I did not think of it that way for a long time. I thought it was just putting myself back together after family tragedy; it may have started out that way, but it branced into learning about oneself and about communicating with others and socal skills and all of that fuzzy stuff I’d never known how to do.
The second-most-important thing I gleaned was to make a list of the qualities that are mandatory in the woman you seek, and another list of the ones that are desireable but optional, and another of the ones that are absolutely not wanted. This will make it easier to find a women compatible with your values, and you won’t be as distracted by pretty faces.
I made such a list, and ended up with things like “Must not smoke” and “Must not be a religious proselytiser” and “Must not be afraid of math” and so on.
But then certain family affairs intervened. I shelved the whole wife-search. After the family affairs were settled a few months ago, I got into the building courses I am taking, and the volunteer house-building, and such. I hoped to meet and click with an unattached female volunteer, but no such luck. The wife-search remained shelved.
But this…! An email address supplied by her mother!
I’m half inclined to send a message, even though the vast probability is that nothing would click. I might help a struggling immigrant or even make a friend. But then there’s that whole “don’t trust the Russians” vibe going on.
Do I send a message or not?
