What Memories May Come, Part 2
The road on which everyone knew me, for whom the bells stay silent, and the good-bye that never was
I’ve waxed on plenty about pandemic issues and technocratic dystopian scenarios so I hope my readers accept the occasional personal blogs. Some of these words are lifted directly from my journals and some are my commentary in retrospect. A bit of what you’ll read in the next few posts would be considered heretical by some, and a bit would be considered personal and intimate. Either way, I find it necessary to scribe it because ultimately it’s about this grand ol’ adventure we call life. My trip in Bulgaria lasted from June 14th ‘til August 3rd, 2023, but the memories it yields span some generations deep.
For whom the bells stay silent
I could really write a whole long post about every single one of the following adventures. The more time passes, the more profound some of the experiences this last summer in Bulgaria seem. Especially with the broken-down-worn-off flats of post plandemic scenery pullied clumsily in the background. So, where were we… stray cats, nary a mask in sight, and a series of characters I was starting to introduce you in Part 1 of this nostalgic travelogue series, which I will wrap up as neatly as I can in this post.
Although we did a fair amount of beaching and exploring of my old stomping grounds, the time gears began moving faster once Nick arrived. The twins and I decided to leave a day early and enjoy a day trip before picking him at the airport in Sofia with a rental which we were going to have for two full weeks. Having wheels was a game changer. We set our eyes on visiting an old monument from a bygone socialist era created by then Head of the State Commission for Science, Culture and Art (who also happened to be the daughter of the then Communist Party leader) Lyudmila Zhivkova. There’s much controversy about this figure, but we didn’t know that then. The little we knew can be seen in our little 4 min vlog from that day:
It wasn’t until I did some shallow background research on Zhivkova which had Wikipedia, The New York Times, and her biography all listing a different cause of death for her premature demise at 38. That’s when things got real interesting. The more sources I looked at, the more mystery shrouded her death and explanations ranged from “a brief illness” (NYT), to brain tumor (Wikipedia), to sudden cerebral hemorrhage due to a previous almost fatal car accident (encyclopedia.com), to suicide (according to her bodyguard), to cold war CIA infiltration, to KGB assassination... There’s even a theory that her death is due to a curse brought on by her embarking on the expedition to the Sanctuary of the Goddess Bastet, itself a mysterious site, as it was only discovered because an antique scroll found in the 1980s had Baba Vanga, the blind Bulgaria mystic, claim it was the map to the burial site where the origin of the universe is carved out in stone. (You now know where I’ll be headed to next summer: the Bulgaria-Turkey border for a closer look! Isaac, up for an adventure?) The death of Zhivkova sealed the fate of the site too because it got filled with concrete to bar re-entry. No one has spoken a word about what they discovered there, not then and not now. But when I asked my mum what she remembers was the official cause of Zhivkova’s death declared by the Politburo, she said they were told it was “exhaustion” but that everyone knew she had really been poisoned. All the controversy that had plagued Lyudmila in life continues posthumously and I must admit, I was fascinated to go down her rabbit hole. For one, she was openly friends with famed blind seer Vanga; she insisted on art, culture, and spirituality being the road to progress; she held parties for intelligentsia whilst being an asceticist herself. It was the Cold War, the Soviet empire breathed down Bulgaria’s neck, but the daughter of the head of the Communist Party wore turbans and practiced yoga. Perhaps the most interesting data point would have gone completely over my head if it wasn’t for Mathew Crawford writing a post about an unknown to me word that now appeared in Lyudmla’s bios: Theosophy. She was a Theosophist.
Zhivkova’s cultural politics reveal clearly several sets of contradictory components of the Bulgarian national character and in some cases challenge the conventional wisdoms about Bulgarians. These sets are the quest for cultural achievements versus limited state resources; excessive national pride versus “shameful national identity”; Russophobes versus Russophiles; East versus West or how to escape the geopolitical trap; and mysticism versus atheism.
Ivanka Nedeva Atanasova1
Lyudmila was a walking paradox: while maintaining homogeneous political façade, she practiced heretical ideology. And her politics ended up being the catafalque of her beliefs. In short, and you can call me a conspiracy theorist all you like, me thinks the Commies just took care of their own embarrassment. But oh, how the occult intrigues me and I wish this lady could still be alive today and speak her secrets!
Her cultural monument remains pretty deserted these days. When we visited, there was only one other couple, who, not being kids themselves, honored the ‘children can only ring the bells’ rule. We made a ruckus but no one was there to reprimand us, so my children swung every tongue they could. Long after we left and during the long hike back, the light rain drizzle peeter-pattered on the leaves, and the distant traffic honked on the busy Sofia streets, but the bells stayed silent.
The arrival of Nick for Frankie’s 4th birthday
The following morning, we picked up Nick from the airport and drove back to the province, ahem, my seaside home town.
It took us twice as long to get into the capital because the main road was closed off all because this dummy was visiting to ask for military assistance. From Bulgaria. 😂:
It had been three weeks without their dad and as you can guess, the boys were over the moon to see him. We couldn’t wait to show him all the special places, order all the best food, and introduce him to Aqua, the stray cat that shared her food with the stray kittens from one yard over.
July 8th, 2023
Well, Nick is officially here. As frustrating as our relationship is, I’m really glad to have the DuDorova clan [this isn’t our actual family name, just a mash-up of our last names] all together again. We ate out at a restaurant and even brought home leftovers for Aqua who is now nowhere to be found. Of course! Can’t ever rely on them strays! She usually perches on the stairs waiting for someone to open the door, but neither her nor the other stray cat, the one that Calvin called Hungary, are anywhere to be seen. In the meantime, there is some loud music coming from the square and instead of crashing out, Nick and the twins went to investigate.
A few minutes later, I got a text from them with photos from a music festival they stumbled onto:
First order of business after the jet lag had somewhat subsided was celebrating Frankie’s 4th birthday which was slightly postponed due to the rental car breakdown. With credit going to the agency who came out within an hour on a Sunday to swap the cars out, we were on our way to Nesebar for a day at a small water park where our children pruned up accordingly. A few days later, the twins, Nick, and I took a trip to some historical sites, but I’ll save the divine for last, so here’s just a photo to tease you proper:
Among the outdoor paintball excursion, carnivals, the Fish Village, the Illusion Museum, sand sculptures, all the different beaches, and a visit to another aqua park which hails itself as the biggest in Europe, the sweetest highlight was having our friends Alžan and Tijana visit us from Serbia. Alžan is Nick’s best bud all the way back from the college days and I often tease Nick that he can’t get away from us, Balkan folk. It took no time for us to pack our guitars and ukes and head to the beach. Below is a sample of the whirlwind of fun activities we did manage while melting under the hot sun if you want to invest 7 minutes looking at a big family photo album.
A space you’ve been in doesn’t forget you
Do you ever have the feeling that when you’ve been to some place, even if you don’t quite remember, perhaps because you were too young, you leave some of your energy behind which kind of tingles if it is reunited with the being that is you at a later time? When we first arrived at this hidden beach, known only to a few locals, I had a feeling that I’d been there before. I felt the tingles.
My mum, whose memories would have been more intact than the usual amnesia that befalls every child, dismissed my gnawing feeling that I had been here before. Sand and water look the same anywhere, she said. And maybe it was so, because in my murky memory, I held this image of a dead tree that we used to sit by. I remember the adults cooking freshly caught mussels on a tin sheet on a crudely made fire and us kids using the dead tree as a bench. But as I laid there on the beach watching my kids play, the area was pretty deserted. No people, no dead trees. It wasn’t until I went into the water, swam out and I turned to look towards the land when just a few yards away from our beach vantage point, I spotted it.
As if 30 some odd years were a blink and a yawn.
July 14th, 2023
There is little respite from the heat. The mosquitoes are ravenous and it’s starting to smell like hot garbage in the backyard. At first I thought it was stray cat feces, but it’s been a few days and the smell won’t go away. Anyway with Aqua and Hungary gone, I don’t think any cats are coming to poop in the backyard. I might have to borrow a lawn mower and try and do something about the weeds in the backyard. At least to curb the mosquito issue.
At some point we discovered that Hungary was still around but was getting regularly fed by the neighbors so he had stopped coming to our yard. But the fact that Aqua was still missing bothered me. No longer did I open up my door for my morning coffee to find her sitting there, patiently waiting for her grub. We started throwing leftovers away.
July 15th, 2023
Dad still refuses to see me. It’s now mid July and the opportunity to see him while I’m here gets slimmer with each day. He says he doesn’t want me to see him sick, but what if he doesn’t get better? I don’t care what he looks like, or sounds like, or smells like. He is my dad. I realize that his family probably doesn’t want me around; that this is an intimate time for them. But would letting me have an hour before I go back to the States be that terrible? What if he doesn’t make it by the time I come back next summer?
On an even more morbid thought, we discovered the source of the smell in the backyard. It’s a dead, half-decomposed cat. Its face is contorted in a painful expression, forever frozen in the terror that befell it before it died. It’s markings are the same as most any stray cats out here, the same as Aqua’s, and I’m stupidly staring into the sky grieving for a stupid cat that I hardly even knew. Nick and Alžan disposed of it in a trash bag and I just really think that maybe Aqua deserves a more dignified burial.
The road on which everyone knew me
My kids often ask me to compare Bulgaria in size to what they know in America. I often defer to saying that Bulgaria is smaller than the state of Illinois and its population is less than the city of New York. You tend to bump into people you know. Since having access to a rental car with unlimited kilometer clause, I racked up a few numbers on the ol’ gauge whilst we saw this and that, after all, nothing was further than a few hours long road trip. So how can I miss an opportunity to meet in person someone who had become an online friend, someone from my very cherished Operation Uplift crew who resides in Texas but was (by some perfectly serendipitous cosmic chance) in tiny quietly shy Bulgaria for a biker convention (!!!), someone who my kids upon meeting immediately began referring to as my ‘badass friend’ Rebecca?!?
Not only was Rebecca an American in Bulgaria and I got to see her eyeballs with my eyeballs, not only does she give the warmest of hugs, but she also introduced me to the most wondrous place, nothing you’d find on site seeing maps, a place where bikers from all over the world would congregate to share stories and have a friendly exchange over a bonfire and a drink.
MotoCamp is located in a tiny little crumbling village in central Bulgaria called Idilevo (yes, it means ‘idylic’ and to my eyes, even with some dilapidated structures, it would be a place I would love to end up, especially if that apocalypse ever makes an appearance). MotoCamp reminded me if what it was like when twelve of my best buds and I went on tour and got stuck living with each other for four months. (Definitely a tale worth telling at some other point in time.) MotoCamp was a magical place. Run by Polly, a Bulgarian, and her partner Doug (an American), both - bike connoisseurs, it had drawn the interest of ex-pats and foreigners alike who were breathing fresh new air into Idilevo’s lungs. So, on our way back home after dropping Nick off at the airport, the twins and I set our GPS tracking devices to Idilevo and we headed Rebecca’s way.
It is a customary experience when one is in Bulgaria that if you spot a police trap, you warn the opposing cars once you pass the cops by blinking your headlights so they can reduce their speed and not get a violation. It is considered highly illegal and you can get in a lot of trouble if you get caught, but everyone does it because no one likes the wily violation-giving-bribe-implying police; there are lots of blinking headlights on the back roads of the Balkans. The incoming cars, in turn, blink back or wave a grateful hello from their open windows. My children, not knowing this unspoken custom, at first puzzled at the stream of blinking and waving, finally inquired as to why we were being acknowledged so often. I told them everyone on the way to Idilevo knew me. They were so impressed. Sometimes we have to create our own legacy, ya know?
Also, interestingly, any one thing that you can ride on, goes, on the roads in Bulgaria. When I say any one thing, I mean, on the expressway, we saw it all, not only cars and trucks. Motorbikes and mopeds? Of course. Horses pulling carriages, but sometimes, also not carriages, just the shell of cars on wheeled platforms? Yup. Tractors? You betcha. An electric wheelchair? Whatever you have to do, I guess. A lawnmower? My god, how fast do these things go?!? Yes, someone was riding their lawnmower from one town to the next… because he didn’t have a car?
By the time we arrived at MotoCamp, it was dusk. I managed only a few photos before the dark settled and we spend a few precious moments with badass Rebecca, Polly (who told us over dinner that her late father had been the last mayor of Idilevo, current population ~200), and the stragglers from the convention. We ate delicious local ‘sach’ before the twins and I decided to try and make our way out of the village in the dark, with no signs, no one to ask for directions, through a tunnel of bent over trees, and with a GPS that couldn’t get a signal. I’m not going to lie and sound brave, it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my trip, even if I couldn’t let the children know how scary it was. I couldn’t wreck my legacy, ya know? It wasn’t until we hit a road that was paved, which I instinctively took in an unknown direction figuring a paved road would lead somewhere that I finally saw lights in the distance that turned out to be the ticket. Though only a small part of our travels, MotoCamp has remained a meaningful and cherished adventure and it will be our destination for a stayover as a family next summer.
Incidentally, I traversed this part of the country a few times as a lot of the historical sightseeing is in the central valley of Stara Planina (Old Mountain). When Nick was still around, we left Frankie to do his toddler thing with my ma while the rest of us visited the fortress of the last Bulgarian Kingdom in Veliko Turnovo:
Tsarevetz Castle fell to the Turks in 1393 which ended the second Bulgarian Empire and saw the beginning of 500 years of Ottoman rule.
We stayed with my mother’s cousin who I hadn’t seen in 33 years and whose daughter, three years my senior, was now only known to me through her obit picture on her mother’s door:
This part of the country was also where my mum and I fled to when we needed a respite from the kids and left Nick to fend for himself back in Burgas. We took a stroll through the Etar, the Archeological-Ethnographic Complex:
In addition to seeing lots of ethnic utility, there were several crafters busy at their stations making wares based on traditions from days of yore.
We also revisited a place which last saw us 40 years ago, when I was a toddler myself, and my grandmother had just died. It was a place where we had to go so my mum can fill her grief with something else besides despair. It was cold and snowy that last visit, but this time it was sunny and bright and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
I can’t say for sure if my childhood amnesia had a lapse, or the energy I had left behind four decades prior was tingling again, but I have glimpses of memory on this bridge, totally iced over, my young and beautiful mother trying to hold me up as I slipped and slid in my winter boots whose lack of grip control was astounding, doing my best not to bring my mum down with me while she laughed. The way you laugh only when you have spent a long time crying.
There’s one other road trip I want to tell you about before I close this post with a divine cave experience. It was an unscheduled adventure. It was after we had already returned the extended car rental and were running too low on funds to plan any touristy things. On the last Wednesday of our BG summer, it was 106°, and without air conditioning and many options to escape to with a loud, rambunctious, unruly toddler, I decided to rent a car for just the day. The kids, my ma and I piled in and cranked up the AC. Whew! Instant relief. Where to? Well, the destination was decided on the walk to the car: my grandfather’s birth place, where my ma remembers her aunt owning a big aristocratic house, and somewhere, in one of that city’s parks, there’s a bust of our relative Peter Ivanov; the city of Popovo. “Why is there a statue?”, you may ask, but the details are murky. He was maybe some kind of Communist partisan, but was also beloved by the people of Popovo enough to have them build him a statue. Not that anyone there currently knows who he is which didn’t help in our completely sprung up and unprepared for search. All I really knew about him was that he was a genius electrician and one day his arch competitor, some Russian guy, convinced him to go inside a high voltage room to fix some coils and then turned on the power with my relative inside, melting him to nothing. Awful way to go. The other thing I knew about Peter was that my friend Andy was hid doppelgänger but of course that didn’t help us any either.
We had only been out for an hour or so, fruitlessly asking locals (especially the older folk) if they had heard of the name and/or the statue, but the rubber on our shoes was melting from the heat and it was starting to look like our search for the bust was a bust. My mum did spot my ant’s old house though, or rather what was left of it, and I snapped a quick photo.
I can only imagine how it felt to have all her memories from 60 years ago brush off their spiderwebs, dust themselves off, and take her back on that journey. Especially because, whilst corralling the kids and looking for a direction to head, she glimpsed an old playground through the park trees, one that had the original paint peeling, the metal rusting (and yes, of course we thought it would be a good idea for the kids to play there!) and my mum instantly knew she had played there as a kid as well.
And then the most remarkable thing happened. There, inbetwixt the trees, unassuming and covered in pigeon shit, was the statue of Peter Ivanov. Actually finding it was so unexpected that my ma and I giggled like school girls, much to the bemusement of the kids.
It must have seemed weird af to the old people sitting on nearby benches why a family of English speaking strangers were taking pictures with this old unremarkable statue. But pictures we took. My mum was so happy she even high fived the statue one plot over.
As it is with most unusually hot days, storms were on the horizon, so we headed just in time for the really menacing clouds to drift into my rearview mirror. On the way back, we made fun of the names given to some of the old villages (Shishkovtsi and Torbaluzhite (FatMen and BagsOfLies, respectively)) and briefly stopped in Tzarevo which, incidentally, just experiences a massive flood (lots of natural disasters lately, but I promised I’d be off my conspiracy stuff for this post) and below are the comparison photos of before and after the math got done mathing (I stole this phrase from somewhere but now I can’t remember who originated it, so sorry for not tipping my hat in the right direction).
The good-bye that never was
July 27th, 2023
Last week was dad’s birthday. Born on the Pisces cusp, my dad not only shares his astrological birth sign with my youngest, he shares a very similar physiognomy, down to the dimples. Since Nick’s dad suddenly died months after Frankie was born, I’m really wanting Frankie to be able to meet at least one of his grandfathers. My own grandfather [‘The Captain’. Did I mention I come from a line of nautical people?] meant the world to me. It would be nice if Frankie had more than a digital interaction with his. His older brothers already have a special bond with their “diado.” When I texted him the other day to wish him happy birthday and to say the twins are thinking about him, his reply was that he wished diado can think about anything else but the pain. I am worried time is seeping out through a larger sieve; that I will leave without getting the chance to see him one last time.
Our summer in Bulgaria was wrapping up. I wanted to do a lot more writing, but that proved difficult with not having enough quiet solo time. My sporadic journal entries weren’t going to add up to too much but I was hopeful the plethora of photos I took would jolt my memories. The morning I wrote my last journal entry, I had gone outside with my coffee and banitza (yum yum) to enjoy the screeching of the seagulls when I stopped dead in my tracks.
July 28th, 2023
Aqua is back! She is alive! Aqua is alive! It’s a feline miracle! That dead cat must have been some other stray. Not that a dead cat isn’t a dead cat. But I mourned quite a bit for the wrong dead cat. Aqua isn’t dead at all. Don’t know where she’s been, don’t care. Whoever she was with has fattened her up and now she has returned to my backyard where feta cheese is coming her way for the next five days straight!
There are peculiarities about my home country, especially flora and fauna related, and I do embrace the stray cats, and the gulls, and the most delicious figs you can just pick off walking down any city street, but then someone also has to explain to me why Bulgarians love planting cacti at the foot of trees on common sidewalks where summertime sees lots of flip-flops and, I’m assuming, goudgie-ouchies.
There is only one last adventure I must regale you with, thank you for sticking around for a very long post. It’s the type of experience that starts of as touristy and then it gets touched by the divine, so I saved it for the end. Being a tourist in Bulgaria is a lot easier than being one in, say, Rome or somewhere where you have to pay crazy amounts and have security checks and be blasted by relentless souvie sellers. When we drove our car right up to the entrance of the Prohodna Peshtera, there were no restrictions of where to park, no one patting us down, no crowds... There were only three souvie booths there. Two were selling magnets, et al, and one of those booths was what Nick lovingly called ‘the gypsies.’
Although they didn’t look like gypsies to me, with their blue eyes and perfectly spoken Bulgarian, they just knew the gypsy ways. They knew of things that were cosmic in nature and about long lost Bulgarian history, and about healing herbs no one speaks of, and they had striking features and presence. If they were gypsies, they had me wrapped in their spell, admittedly. I was riveted with all the things they spoke of. They sold crystals and geo formations and books about Bulgarian mysteries and mysticism. When I had to cut our conversation short because I could feel the impatience of my family, I told them my family isn’t into woo woo like me. “Except for your son with the long hair,” they said, “he was born already in it.” I don’t quite know exactly what they meant by “in it”, but they did point to the son who enjoys recreational walks in cemeteries and talks about death, spirits, and miracles the way other kids enjoy talking about Fortnite. And then one of the ladies asked me to choose a geo formation from the table, not to buy it, only to see which one I’d be drawn to. I took my time as the rocks were all so interesting and beautiful, but ended up pointing to a large cracked one that had both common quartz and pyrite (fool’s gold) in it. They asked me what about that formation I was drawn to and I replied it wasn’t so much the crystals, but the granite which had a long pink line that looked like a vein running on its smooth side. At my answer, the two ladies (They might have been sisters or friends, but doubtful they were gypsies, really) sharply and suddenly looked at each other and exchanged some silent meaning not imparted to me. Then they proceeded to tell me that through a different opening in the cave, there was a passage that leads out into a ravine that has a pond with unusually tinted turquoise waters with healing properties; that those of ill health, if they can make it through the journey and submerge themselves entirely in the pond, they will come away without disease. The gypsies (I’m going to continue to endearingly call them that as shorthand) had stumbled onto the place when their dog had gotten lost and they went searching for it. The fact that their dog was lame and probably took great pains to get to the water where his humans found him was not lost on me. And since then, the gypsies had taken many locals there and they could show me the way. Now that’s some woo woo, you say, and fine, but my curiosity was most definitely piqued. I looked at one of the cave entrances which had an iron gate and a sign that read “this way leads to a cave grave”. Ominous.
I looked at my family petting their lame dog. Spiritual. Felines, canines, and miracles, ya know?
And it could have been all lies, a ploy to get me to buy something, as Nick teased me, but it made me think of my dad nonetheless, and, anyway, couldn’t we all just use a miracle? My wandering thoughts were interrupted by one of the ladies telling me that my family was waiting for me. “I’m sorry, I have to go,” I said. “You’ll be back,” the blue eyes pierced as she spoke the words.
But what of the actual cave? Well, I just have to expose you to another one of our travel vlogs because I want to paint this canvas as detailed for you as possible. I want to take you to a place where as you enter, you expand with reverence; a place where divinity and the sublime gently embrace. The colloquially known Eyes of God cave features two large holes on its ceiling, shaped like ocular orifices.
When it rains, gentle waterfalls gush out of the opening and people often try to go during rainstorms to watch God cry. It was not as cold as other caves I’ve explored and we broke quite the sweat climbing its rocky paths. The cavern, whose mouth returns echoes of your slightest whisper, was the perfect place to sing a Bulgarian folk song I had taught my kids dedicated to the forests that housed such wonder. There were coins and religious icons in many a crevice. The kids were astonished that no one ever took the money. They, by the way, said the cave was their favourite place we went to. And I hope that you can see why. When we were done singing, somewhere on the other side of the cave, we could hear another group singing along too. The bats flapped in accord. It all happened under the Eyes of God. Afterward, even Nick said he felt the significance of the moment. “Too bad it wasn’t the ‘Ears of God’,” he said jokingly, “We sounded pretty decent.” “Well, at least it wasn’t the ‘Nose of God’,” Calvin said, “I need a shower.”
Epilogue
I wish I can report that I went back to the gypsies and I carried my dad to the healing waters where he miraculously recovered from stage 4 turbo cancer (I told you guys I was gonna be off my conspiracy shit, so not now, ok?) but that’s not how the story ends. I had texted my dad offering to take him there but his delayed response let me know he was bedridden and in too much pain to go anywhere but chemo. My family and I returned to Chicago and immediately fell into the grind trap. Within a week, I found that I had lost some reliable financial support, my car broke down and was subsequently junked, while I was welcomed by large front and back lawns overgrown with Canadian Thistle which I’m sure made my neighbors less than ecstatic. Having to dig out alien looking roots of these taller-than-me prickly weeds ended up being meditative in the sense that it helped distract me. And distraction I needed because ten days after my arrival, I received a text from my half-sisters:
Tonika, today our dad left our side. He couldn’t overcome.
My last message from him was on July 25th saying he was preparing for his chemo battle the next day. At that point I had resolved that it was very unlikely to see my dad alive ever again, a thought cemented in reality almost as soon as it was conjured. He didn’t get to meet Frankie nor will he meet my sister’s son due in October. He leaves behind a wife, three daughters, one grandaughter, and enough grandsons to fill up a soccer team.
On one of our last summer road trips, we stopped at a busy gas station. I told my mum it looked familiar and she confirmed it was the same gas station that we stopped in five years ago when dad drove us to the airport. And it came to me. Through the strange slats on the windows, I had captured a rare photograph of my parents together. It was, it would turn out, the last picture I was to take of my dad.
I am beyond grateful to my friends who offered prayers and healing meditations, and those who have checked up on me since. I held onto resentment for a few days because I selfishly thought that I was entitled to seeing him. He was my dad, ya know? But then, when thinking about it on a deeper level, I knew that this was an intimate moment between him and the family he grew old with, the family that took care of him in his final days. I reached out to my sisters to offer an ear whenever they needed someone to just listen who wasn’t gonna run away from the fear of the death tabbou. What else can I possibly offer but to listen? None of us ever know what to say anyway.
I imagined that if dad wanted to see me, he was hopefully gonna make it a point to visit me in my dreams. But he never came. Or at least, not during a time when I woke up from a dream remembered. Then a few days ago, my friend Jen from Reunion Island texted me to tell me she prayed for my dad to come in my dreams and have this closure with me, to help me move on. I didn’t know she had done it until I woke up the next morning to her text from an almost lucid sleeping experience. It was one of those dreams in which nothing weird happened, so it felt completely real, as if you were watching a movie of your life in a parallel dimension. In my dream, I was scrolling through Facebook and I had come across a post by someone named Jim Christofani. I don’t know such a person in real life and as far as I knew, my dad didn’t either. But in this parallel universe, Jim had posted a tribute for my dad’s death and tagged him in the post (my dad did not have a FB account, but in this other universe, he did) with +278 pictures. If there was anything strange about this dream, it was the fact that I remember the exact name of the OP and the count of photos he had posted. What felt perfectly explicit, was looking in real time, through tears, at every photo, every candid capture worth a story, every moment of every birthday I missed, every graduation of my two sisters, every birth of their kids, every soccer match that had him screaming at the tele, every BBQ where someone happened to catch him working his magic on the grill, every time he raised a glass of rakija to the health of everyone in his family, including the health of his far away daughter who left Bulgaria behind decades ago to seek a new life in the United States.
Assen Todorov
1947-2023
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Thank you for being a part of my journey!
Atanasova, I. N. (2004). Lyudmila Zhivkova and the Paradox of Ideology and Identity in Communist Bulgaria. East European Politics and Societies, 18(2), 278–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325404263413
This is lovely! You are an amazing and beautiful writer and I believe English is not even your first language? I'm so sorry about the loss of your father.
I'm overwhelmed, with so many thoughts and emotions your essay brought up for me. How you managed to put me in your pocket with you, and carry me on your journey so casually yet with so much deep wisdom, is a writing tour de force, Tonika.
I am so sad for the loss of your father and how you didn't share a proper goodbye with him. Yet your lucid dream... by god, the power of prayer and intention! May you continue to connect with him to close any part of that circle that remains open for you. And I'll add my prayers for his peace and your healing.
In no order whatsoever, more reactions: joy for Aqua (yes, joy -- I loved her reappearance almost as much as you, I think); laughter at those blisteringly honest town names; reverence for the Eyes of God (and for your video that took me directly into the magic); intrigue (lots and lots of that -- I want to go to Bulgaria and to ALL the mysterious places, esp. the ones the gypsies told you about); compassion for the slew of misfortune that greeted your arrival home in the US; admiration for your sense of adventure (though I've experience that before!); and gratitude for your eyes and your heart, which combine to take us on our own journey.
So glad to know you, and to now know you better. xox