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.

“Happiness Falls” – A Book review

Recently, I returned or deleted several books in my audio library that were bought impulsively or by mistake. When I started listening to them, I soon realized I didn’t want to continue. That being said when I started to listen to Happiness Falls, I thought that this book would end up in the same virtual dumpster. To my surprise, I realized that I wanted to keep reading! Moreover, I used each and every single free minute to keep listening until I finished the book. 

I was especially surprised that I ended up liking it so much because one of the main themes of the book resonates with the central theme of Everything is f*cted, the book which I didn’t like at all. The idea is that happiness is relative, and the higher the “base level,” the more difficult it is to reach a high level of happiness. Sure, the objective measuring of happiness is a separate issue, but at least subjectively, many (if not most) people agree. 

I do not like this idea because, for many years, inspired by my mom’s attitude, I was always super anxious for this very reason. When I wanted something to happen, or I was anticipating something good coming/happening soon, I tried to lower my expectations so that I wouldn’t be disappointed. This way of thinking evolved quickly into experiencing severe anxiety before these potentially good events. I imagined all sorts of things that would prevent good things from happening. Likewise, I was never fully immersed in being happy, always thinking that “there will be consequences.” 

It took years after I moved to the US (which meant being away from my mom and also observing a very different attitude to life) until I started to realize that I was harming both myself and my loved ones and that I started to learn to think and live differently. It took a while, but I made this change, possibly because, by nature, I am a happy person, and I was a happy child until I was taught to be unhappy. 

The most important thing I loved about this book is another theme: reflections about how a non-verbal person is judged in our society as mentally incapable. The author draws a parallel between being a foreigner who does not know the language of their new country and a person with motor skills deficiencies that prevent them from using spoken language. 

Language (and accent)-wise, I’ve written about it so often that I do not want to repeat it. I had it both ways: being a subject of “those who speak with an accent think with an accent” and subconsciously having the same attitude toward others. I am deeply ashamed of the latter, but I can’t deny that I had that attitude at some point in my life. 

Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about one Russian family whom I have known for many years, where the mother discovered a similar way to communicate with her son with severe cerebral palsy. I remember both her struggles and disbelief and denial from the doctors and general public, all the accusations of “faking” her son’s communications with others. I could not stop thinking about them all the time I was listening to this book. 

What I Liked About My Night Out

Same as my last weekend, I liked that I didn’t have to rush through the evening. My workdays are such that I am completely focused on what I am doing, and I often need to literally solve several problems in parallel. I love the excitement of chasing the problem and fixing it, and I also like these intense sessions of design when you go through several solutions, try one, go through code building, find design flaws, discard and start over. However, this leaves you completely drained even if you do not work long hours.

I like to fit a lot in my day, but it also takes an ingenuity to take a day (or night) as it goes, having an agenda, but not necessarily a timeline.

The last weekend was good, and the week that followed was also good, but now I am facing a challenge of making it through the rest of the year without a crisis.

Halloween For Myself

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.
Continue reading “Halloween For Myself” →

No Title…

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).

I don’t know what else to add…

Helping In The Kitchen

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.

The Earliest Christmas Present Ever:)

More Family Photos

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.

Baked Apple Pancake

Baked Apple Pancake

Jarvis Family Full Moon Fest

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.

The Great Lake

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!