Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

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On October 8, during the elections, I had to sign a declaration before they would let me vote. Then this Mindaugas, a Harvey Keitel look-alike temporarily working on the voting commission, figured out that I had been left off the regular list because I’d voted in Chicago during the Seimas election in 1996. In Lithuania, your own people can start to feel like strangers very quickly, and it takes a long time to make a stranger one’s own again. A few years back, when I realized I could spend the rest of my life in America, it was fall. Silky ducks embroidered with green and brown threads swam in the Vilnel River. Next to the Church of the Holy Mother of God in Užupis, the burdock from the Lithuanian writer Jurgis Kuninas’s 1983 novel Tla was in bloom. To change one’s circumstances (home is only one of them) is no great feat for a modern, rational person. You check the exchange rate. Have your cavities filled. Rent out your apartment. Compare ticket prices at LOT, SAS, and Lufthansa, and their respective menus as well — are vegetarian meals available? Before departing, you tell all your relatives what they already know: “I’m leaving all the worst things in my life behind in Lithuania.” (I heard precisely this several years ago, in Chicago, from a roofer in the suburbs. In Vilnius he had graduated from the Academy of Art.)

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