Robin Whetstone

WTH? Athens: Meat Sales and Butt Smears

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"Your receptionist tells me you don't experiment on any of the meat you sell to the public."

"Well, sometimes we do," he replies.

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Red Ticket: Searching for Dmitri Orlov

From 2008 In 1991, I was a junior at the University of Florida, majoring in Russian and religion. That summer, I spent 6 weeks in Moscow with 20 of my fellow students. They had flown over as a group, but I was very fortunate to have been able to spend several weeks in Europe before going to Russia. So, instead of flying as part of my school group, I took a train from London to Moscow when it was time for the program to start. This meant that at the end of our stay, I had to take a train back to London, to catch my flight home. I was dreading the 3-day train ride. I had never taken a train anywhere before this trip, much less to a Communist country, and had no idea what to expect. No one told me to bring my own food, for example, and if it hadn't been for the two Kazakh women I shared a compartment with, I would have gone hungry. At least this time I had packed food for the return journey back to London. I waved to my classmates as their bus to the airport pulled away, an...

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A Bad Week to Be a Parent

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I tried to make a new mom friend. Here is what happened.

When you're a mom, it seems like you'd have a lot in common with other moms. You're both exhausted. You both can change a diaper while eating a hamburger while making a doctor's appointment while driving a car. She has spit-up on her shoulder? Yeah, well you have Goldfish in your hair. But it's surprisingly hard to make mom friends. Go to any park or playground, and you'll see lots of Lone Moms dotting the landscape, swiping at their smartphones while their children play. I don't know why this is, but it's always kind of bothered me. Raising children can be a terribly isolating endeavor. You are busy, but also bored, since most of the tasks required of you are mundane, repetitive ones like loading the dishwasher, cooking food, and extinguishing the dog. You are surrounded by people all day, but these people are mostly pre-verbal, so you end up feeling lonely a lot of the time. I would think that moms would flock to each other like toddlers flock...

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It Was the Small Things

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Losing My Place in the Book of My Life

One Wednesday night in 2009, I had just finished washing my face in the bathroom sink. I was drying my face in the towel hanging from the shower curtain bar when I heard a voice say, very clearly, "Your mother is going to email you and tell you that your grandmother has died." My face was totally buried in the towel when whoever it was announced this. I knew I was alone in the house, but still, I stepped back and looked all around the small bathroom. Who said that? It was a male voice, and a bland one. Not deep, or scratchy, or anything, and no particular inflection. Just a very neutral statement from a very neutral voice that definitely wasn't my own. I walked into my room and sat down on the bed. Looked at the clock. It said 9:55 pm. I thought things over. My grandmother was in her 80s, and lived 200 miles away, in the same city as my mom and stepfather. She'd recently moved to a retirement home, where she'd promptly started a residents' committee and been e...

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Soviet Cheese The man looked like trouble, with his long black coat and pinched face. I should have just kept walking. I had walked up to the metro station to buy bread from the back of what was not technically a bread truck. The man in the coat approached as I walked away from the cluster of customers, clutching my oval-shaped loaf of frozen brown bread. He blocked my way and opened one side of his trench coat, exactly the way they do in movies. Tied to the inside lining of his coat was a long tube of plastic-wrapped something. “Pssst, devushka,” he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes darting around nervously, “Hochesh seer?” "Hey girl. Do you want cheese?" That’s it? Cheese? Not drugs, or jewelry, or counterfeit money? How ignominious for this poor man, the first black-market cheese-pusher I had ever encountered. His children would never be able to grow up and write a memoir, or a country song. “Daddy Sold Black-Market Cheese” just didn’t grip the im...

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