Reflecting On My Life

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Taking a second look at my life’s strange quilt, now in retrospect I see many patches coming into a sharper focus bit by bit, taking on a deeper symbolic meaning. In a way, reminding me of an exposed, latent paper print in a tray of developer as it slowly “comes to life”, first faintly, somewhat blurry, then quickly emerging to its full range of an pre-visualized by it’s maker image with all it’s needed shades and nuances.

Reflecting on major events of my life a pattern emerges defying relegation to mere chance. I like to think that providence and fate perhaps had something to do with it. That’s why I would like to refocus on some of the post-seventies events that have moved me to the core and continue to impact and enrich my life to this very moment.

As I stated at the beginning of my story, the reason for the loss of contact with our relatives in Russia was due to the fact, that any contact with people in the West and especially with people in Germany or the USA meant incarceration, exile or worse for them. Stalin’s KGB sent millions of their citizens to Siberian hard labor camps or to eternal banishment for lesser “crimes” than having contact with the free world.

For this reason, while living in Russia, our family had always been suspect, due to our mother’s German origin, our father graduating from a German Theological Seminary, marrying a German subject, having two of their sons living in Germany plus maintaining contact with wife’s relatives outside of Soviet Union. Imagine! Anyway, were it not for that coincidental/providential meeting with M.P. Kulakov in 1970 my life would not have come full circle and I personally would not have been enriched by special people and events that followed.

It actually bega...

... middle of paper ...

...o longer a distant “twinkling star” in the East, becomes the object of my esteem here and now. She in turn responds by choosing me to be a godparent to her soon to be born daughter. Then on November 17, 1995 as I witness the miracle of Alexa’s birth, my life takes on a still richer, fuller meaning, when I, at that life-changing moment become her godfather, she my namesake, my baby “princess” a gifted, loving copy of her mother, whose debut this side of heaven occurred in 1970, the year my life’s missing puzzle-pieces finally fell into their respective places. That mysterious, twinkling object from afar no longer just a figment of my imagination becomes reality indeed. Thus even the “strangest” among the patches in my “quilt of life” - a mystery no more. Having found their proper place; they are exactly where they rightfully belong. The “Quilt” is now complete!

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