School closures across Ukraine begin their third week tomorrow.  And it is a quarantine that, if nothing else, has done wonders for my embroidery skills.  As I sit here, sipping a glass of birch juice and trying to figure out how to incorporate my name into the bunch of pears I’ve cross-stiched for my host Mom’s birthday, I realize how much I like this place.  How much I’d like to call out and say, “Hey, you. Yea you, Ukraine! Just in case you were wondering – flu or no flu- you are OK in my book.”  And then maybe we’d link pinkies and go and get a plastic cup of Nescafe at the kiosk next to the bus stop. Or something like that.

If I were sitting in a chair during Russian class last Thursday, I would have fallen out of it.  But we tend to spenda lot of time cross-legged on the floor, making up dialgues about our visits to the post office and how to fix a leaking faucet.  We shuffle seats- alternating between one long couch covered with a Persian rug and two similarly adorned chairs along the window.  There’s a mandarin tree in the corner and the landlord comes over every other day to tend to it.  He fills up an empty Kvas cola bottle and waters with the kind of self-importance that is usually reserved for the signers of treaties, presidents, andFacebook profiles.  COme to think of it, we should really try to incorporate him (and his all-gold teeth or “golden smile”) into a dialogue one of these days.

So, anyway I was saved form the fall because I was already on the carpet.  You see, until recently, I wsa a case virgin.  Yes, I’d fuss over a preposition until the cows came home, but I couldn’t name a case for the life of me.  In the languages that I had struggled through,nouns and adjectives did not decline.  There was no talk of tails or suffices or “running” letters. But you are probably much brighter than I n such matters.  You likely know that the Vocative case refers to the way you change the ending of a nount to identify that it is to this noun you are addressing your statement or question.  But I couldn’t ven say that sentence without getting confused.  And I was stuck trying to figure out just why case delcensions were so imortant in the first place.

But wait – a bit of background.

My parents have lived in the same house for nearly twenty years.  I haven’t started measuring my life in decades yet and so, to me, this is a long time.  It’s a regular-sized house in a town that anyone would be happy to call their own.  It’s no Grover’s Corners but who wants a bunch of talking corpses in their cemetaries anyway.  Over the years, we’ve had a lot of different neighbors.  All sizes, all sorts, al creeds.  For most of my younger years, we lived next to a Russian family who had a son named Simon.  Simon was a few years yonger than my brother and me but we all played together.  It was that kind of street.  And whenever Simon wanted my brother and me to play at his house, he’d call over, “Samant, come to my home!”

“SamanTHA,” I’d try to correct him, “My name is Sa-man-THA.” (And if you know me, you can only imagine the way I said this at seven.)

No dice. A good patch of mud brewing in Simon’s backyard and it was, “Samant,come to my home!”

“Samant!” (An especially large colony of pill bugs under a rock beside the hydrangea.)

“Samant!’ (Fresh cookies. Russian cartoons. Tonka trucks.)

 Even after Simon’s family moved to a different part of town, I was called Samant every once in a while.  Mom got a kick out of it but I was less entrhalled by the bastardization of my good name.  And this is the perspective I carried with me until last Thursday when, as mentioned,conversation fell to the vocative case.

“You get it,” a fellow classmate said, “like if I were addressing YOU and I wanted to make sure that you knew it, I’d say- Samant, have a biscuit.

And then, suddenly for the first time in two months, I feel like I understand Russian completely.  It is awesome and, almost instantly, I want to know where Putin is because I have a few questions to ask him about that Siberian tiger he took down last August and, well, if not now…

WHen my excitment settled, I realized that what I had so eruditely identified at seven as a foreigner’s mistake was actually a rather impressive use of Old Russian grammar.  It wasn’t a funny accent that had my five-year old neighbor  calling at me in disyllabic urgency but the vocative case.  Simon wasn’t confused about my name; he was simply emphasizing that he was talking to me- Samant.  I spent the rest of class in a state of extreme satisfaction akin to fitting the last piece of pizza into a Tupperware, zipping closed an overstuffed suitcase, or successfully stamping your foot into a ski boot.

I have since gotten into the habit of thinking myself something of an expert on the vocative case. (Perhaps there is more of that misinformed seven year-old grammarian in me than I’d like to admit.) And as I sit on a bed across from the baking oven in a small Ukrainian kitchen and hear my host Dad call out “MA!” from the other room, I just smile and shake my head.

And then, as if I’ve always known, I watch babushka pick up the chicken to bring into the other room and I sigh, “Oh, there’s that old Vocative again.” And then we all sit down to lunch where, just in case I’m feeling too confident about my language skills, the Ukrainian starts up again and I’m lost entirely.

So, I stick with what I know and, looking down at my plate, shrug and whisper, “Well, Chick, I guess it’s just you and me.”