On family history, parenting, education, social issues and more
Author: Hettie D.
My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996.
I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future.
I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life.
As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.
That was one of the few days for a very long time when I didn’t have any obligations after work: no volunteering, no visits to my mom, and nothing urgent to write about. And I had plans just for myself. The plan was:
Finally, visit the newly reopened Pret on Monroe
I should mention that Halloween was the coldest day of this fall so far. It was freeing and it was snowing for the good part of the day:
From the office window
However, by the end of the workday, the snow stopped and the sun came out:
After Pret, I walked towards the Starbucks Reserve Roastery on North Michigan Avenue. I rarely walk in this direction these days, and I enjoyed every minute of that walk.
My friend from Saint Petersburg told me this horror story. She was talking to her friend in Germany on her landline (there is some huge discount on landline calls from Germany, as she explained). Since it was almost free for her friend, they talked for a long time – over forty minutes. While they were still talking, she heard the buzzer from downstairs: Open, police!
Frightened, she buzzed them in, and two policemen in full gear entered her apartment. They asked her whom she was talking to, and whether she was sure it was her friend, not a scummer, and what city she was calling from. They said that they “wanted to protect her” from possible scum(?!). All looked like they came to arrest my friend, and it took her a while to talk them into leaving her alone.
Later, she started to question her other friends, and it turned out that others had similar situations (all conversations were on landlines and calls coming from Germany).
Last week, my granddaughters asked me at what age their mom started to cook and at what age I started to cook. I could not remember when Anna started, although I remember that by the age of nine, both Vlad and Anna were cooking on a regular basis, and we had a schedule of who was making dinner each day.
As for me, the biggest problem was that in order to cook, I had to turn on a gas burner on the stove, and the burners didn’t have ignition. To start the burner, you had to strike a match, turn a gas knob up and move a burning match close to the burner. The scariest part for me was lighting a match. I was scared to scratch the head of the match with a force enough to produce sparkles. My mom was teaching me, and these lessons would end up with me crying and with her yelling at me. I do not remember why and how I overcame this fear, but it was definitely after I turned eight.
Even warming up the food was not that easy because microwaves didn’t exist (at least in our lives), so I needed to use our gas stove to warm up my food after I was back from school. The food would be most often “cutlets” (now I call them “Russian meatballs”) with potatoes or pasta, and I had to warm it up on a skillet, adding some butter so that it wouldn’t get burned and stirring constantly. I remember that for a period of time, my mom left one burner on (on “low”) in the morning so that I could turn it on “high” when I came home from school and warm up my meal. (There were other adults at home, so I do not know what was the deal and why others could not help me). This was supposedly “dinner,” but all this meal naming was a separate story.
Back to cooking. My help in the kitchen while I was limited to some low-skill level tasks. One of the things I was often assigned (and I hated it!) was to “watch the milk.” The unpasteurized milk from the barrel had to be brought to boil, and I had to stay by the stove and watch, and when it started boiling, I had to turn it off. Otherwise, it would “run away.” Of course, I would look aside precisely at the moment when it happened! Another chore was making mannaya kasha, which pretty much meant stirring non-stop, making sure it was not burned. And another one was potato peeling. It was always done with a knife, and the quality of my work was judged by how cleanly I peeled potatoes and how thin the peel layer was so that the waste would be minimized. More than fifty years later, I am still a potato peeling champion.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
Baba Ania’s birthday was on Sunday. When I went to Mom for our traditional afternoon Sunday coffee, I also took a small bottle of liquor with me, and we drank in memory of Baba Ania (for some reason, my mom was surprised I remembered the day (?!)).
Unfortunately, I can’t get any new information from my mom in addition to what I already know. Maybe I will be able to fill in the gaps later – I made some recordings of mom’s stories when she first came to the US, but now I need to find and decipher them.
I know that Baba Ania was “from a village”; however, the photograph below shows a group that could be anybody but peasants. These are four Grigoriev brothers; the first from the left, Petr, is Baba Ania’s father.
According to mom’s notes, Petr was either the second or the third of the brothers, next is Stepan, the fifth (the youngest) next is FIlipp (either the second or the third) next – Alexey, the fourth child, and last one is the oldest brother, Nikolay. Unfortunately, no information about when this photo was taken.
In this picture, Petr should be the first person on the left in the second row from the bottom, according to mom’s notes:
Was it the beginning of WWI? I can’t tell. One more picture, judging by its quality, taken by some “official” photographer, also hints the wartime, but mom’s notes indicate that she could not locate Grandfather Petr in this picture:
No images of Baba Ania’s mother. No images of Baba Ania as a child. The pictures I showed in the previous post were the earliest Baba Ania pictures I have.
And here is the last one prior to her marriage to my grandfather. For her excellent work, she was promoted, and the picture below shows her among the employees of the Eliseyev store – the number one grocery/delicatessen store in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution and later in Leningrad. See this wiki article for details.
Can you find my grandmother? She is in the top row, second from the right.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
We had a family activities day at Jarvis Square on Saturday. It was the first time we had such a family-style celebration (the adult part followed after 8 PM). There was free face painting, and free s’mores, and trick-or-treating, and drumming, and Taro fortune telling. Most importantly, there were kids in costumes who had enormous fun! I walked there with my mom, and we walked around and made our s’mores over the fire, and then I got the butternut latte in the Charmer’s Cafe for myself and caramel cider for mom, and we sat there and watched the kids running around with the buckets, sitting for the face painting and drumming.
Mom was saying that it’s too bad we can’t take pictures, and then she added that it’s impossible to tell others how good it was because no words and no pictures can reflect the feeling and the atmosphere. That was one of the rare moments when she felt the way I hoped she would feel after moving here.
We saw Channel 5, and one kid yelled: Mom, we are on the news! The reported was interviewing one of the organizers, and I heard that she said that “it feels very safe,” which I couldn’t agree more.
While I was going through the pictures I took yesterday, I thought again about how much positive energy my Fort Sheridan trip gave me. I feel that I can make it through this week :). And the best thing at Fort Sheridan is undoubtedly the Lake. Seeing the Lake in a forest preserve is very different from seeing it chained in steel and granite. When I approach Lake Michigan from the forest or the prairie, I feel its wild greatness even more. I do not have the proper words to describe it:)
I ended up returning to the train station in between trains, and I didn’t feel like waiting for an hour and forty minutes, so I called Uber. When we were almost at my place (turning into Sheridan from Birchwood) the driver saw what was on the horizon and said: oh, you live so close to the sea! I replied: thank you! Thank you for calling it a sea!
I went to Fort Sheridan for the second time, and this time, I liked there even more. Yes, it’s not as close to me as Deer Grove was when I lived in Palatine, but when I am there, I feel so good! I am inhaling the feeling of being there, being united with Nature. Yes, I am a city girl, but I miss the forest and the prairie, and as it turned out that time, I miss the prairie the most!
Last time, it was my first exploration, and this time, I ventured into more different paths, and made a bigger loop, and walked and walked! I decided that I was not trying to “make” the next train, and I would stay there as much as I wanted, and if anything, there is always Uber.
Fort Sheridan has some similarities with Deer Grove – the prairie in the middle and the surrounding forest, but the presence of the Lake makes a gigantic difference! Also, I noticed that even though nature restoration is in the initial stage, there are way fewer invasives (I think it’s because there was never a farm! )
And now, I am done with talking and switching to the pictures showing!
Most likely, Saturday was my last escorting day in 2023. It became sharply colder overnight, and no matter how much I tried to prepare for the temperature drop, I was still not prepared and barely stayed till the end of the first shift. That, and all of the things that are coming up in November and December (Thanksgiving, Anna’s surgery, my conference, and Christmas:)) does not leave me any options.
Saturday’s highlight was police presence! Not like it used to be before, when they would come to protect the antis, or they would come responding to our call and leave. No, this time, seven (or more?) officers showed up before 7 AM, and they stayed till after 9 AM. They were exceptionally friendly and asked us many questions about how things looked like, and we explained to them all of the details and our fight for the quiet zone, etc. A couple of the female officers asked us about the abortion costs (we do not really know) and who pays for abortion (different options), and then our shift lead talked about the influx of patients after Dobbs. I mentioned that I am a MAC host and that now, most women do not need to travel that far, but it was a nightmare last summer. In the end, we got “Thank you for all you do!” which we often hear from the organization leaders and passers-by, but it was the first time I heard it from police officers!
Hettie's Reflections 