Trekhprudny Lane

We had a golden Sunday morning, with EB at breakfast retelling the plot of a puppet show she attended this week, part of a "children's experimental theater festival." How wonderful is Moscow for hosting such things? (And it was a beautiful, whimsical performance by a trio of Estonians about sassy animals riding a little train; at one point even the trail of cotton-ball steam rising from the locomotive was naughty and refused blow the right way.) Then A. put on Miles Davis and lay down on the rug, signaling it was time for hop on pop. I felt a rush of love for our home and for this precious and brief time while the girls are very small.

In the afternoon we rode the metro out to a large park that had been touted in this week's newspaper as a lovely spot for walking, and found it did not quite live up to the hype (see pictures). It was overpoweringly depressing, actually, even for normally bubbly A. Weedy scrub and bald ground rather than grass. Trash literally everywhere. Power lines, corrugated metal fences, even barbed wire. Groups of men standing around incongruously in the parkland, smoking and drinking. Scowling women strolling slowly in exactly the same unforgiving get-up they wear on the city boulevards: big purses, patent leather bomber jackets, and high heels. More of the same three varieties of dog that one sees everywhere in Moscow: tiny purse-riders dressed in sweaters, rhinestones, and ribbons; muscular breeds with surgically altered ears and heavy choke-chains; and haggard but merry strays. 

It's puzzling, I was thinking today, how much attention is devoted to dressing up in Moscow, whether one (male or female) is headed for work, school, a concert, or the fruit stand, and how little attention is seemingly paid to the city environment itself -- the streets, the storefronts, the parks, the stations. Dress to the nines and go march through filth. Perhaps they find something gratifying in that very contrast: an exquisite person tiptoeing through muck, a jewel in a pigsty. It's a formula that fashion advertising certainly embraces, and of course that carries tremendous weight here. Me, though, I'd prefer the reverse: I'd rather be the eyesore, or at least have comfortable footwear, and and enjoy a lovely view. 

Perhaps also I'm feeling sour after seeing person after person visibly shrink away from EB on the metro in recent weeks, shielding themselves with their hands and leaning awaaaaay as she clambers up onto the next seat, for fear her boot might brush their coats or crumbs from her snack might fall their way. They always glance at me so indignantly as they're leaning over like the Pisa tower to avoid her touch, as if I'd brought a beast on the train, and I always want to ask, you have a problem with raindrops and pastry crumbs but not putrid underpasses, undrinkable water, and corrosive air pollution? Dirt is relative.