Instilling wisdom in children’s heads is never-ending process. As long as the institution of parenting exists, parents will have the strong desire to offer knowledge to their kids, and the kids will have the burning desire to resist. It doesn’t matter how old the child is. There’s always room for improvement.

Optimally, the parents will implant in them a manual for all the possible twists and turns of life.

But life itself is the best teacher. It gives you lessons you can’t ignore.

My mom expressed her wisdom in a nice poetic way. The most difficult concept to teach children is the concept of time. You cannot point to ticking clock and simply explain, “It’s time. It runs away so fast.”

I understand the frustration between kids and adults when a child says, “I want it now,” and the adult responds, “We can do/buy/eat it later.” Later does not exist for a child.

My mom tried to explain the concept of time in a vivid way. Her main point was, “Do not waste time. You will turn around and find it’s gone.” She would sing:

When we were young
We talked about nonsense
Fountains were blue
And roses bloomed red

She would quote the dogmatic wisdom of Pushkin:

Blessed is he who in youth stays young
Who only ripens when he’s ready.

“Youth is only a moment,” she told me.

From her constant reminders, I got the idea that within five years of finishing school, I would have to have all aspects of my life, professional and personal, settled. I should have found myself, and I should complete. To be an adult means to be a whole person and know yourself well, making the right choices and finding elegant solutions for life’s dilemmas. It means to find the answer to the question, Who are you?

My mom had a more practical vision for me, though. She felt that the question, What do you do? is more important in real life that the question, Who are you? Mom wanted me to play the piano in a kindergarten. She thought it would be the perfect job for me to entertain kindergarteners for half the day, and then to go home and take care about my own children.

I asked mom how I could be a musician if I didn’t have a musical ear. I’m tone deaf, or as we say in Russian, “A bear has danced on my ear.”

But mom explained to me that talent is only 1% of success, and hard work is the other 99%. “And by the way,” mom added, “that bear who stepped on your ear was trained to dance in a circle. If a bear can learn to dance from hard work and effort, you can play the piano without an ear for music.”

Mom envisioned me with a career in music; I imagined myself in medicine.

My parents knew for a fact that Jewish people could not get into medical school without strong connections—in chemical terms, we could call them covalent bonds. My parents explained to me about our lack of connections.

I was thinking about the poor wild bear who could dance, and how I could get into medical school despite the obstacles.

I was really surprised, when I did get accepted into medical school, to see a lot of people with the same curly hair, deep sad eyes, and sharp sense of humor— and the perseverance and stubbornness that have been genetically implanted in us over the centuries.

I had set the first part of my plan in motion, and without wasting time I set out to fulfill the second.

Love will enlighten the meaningfulness of a profession. Love will make me complete. It will be the kind of love described in the Russian classics, except with a happy ending.

My time in middle school and high school provided me with romantic meetings as pre-training. But medical school is no joke: romance here is final, for a lifetime.

The internet and social media have changed the meaning of chance connections. At that time, instead of typing and scrolling, I was searching—on buses, trams, and trolleys. Subway escalators were the most exciting place to search. I was going up the stairs, and other people were going down. Maybe my destiny was just passing by like that. People’s expressions were sad and concerned. Many shades of grey were reflected on their faces and clothing. They were thinking about food. At that time, in 90s, you could buy sugar with special ration cards. For other necessary gourmet item such as vegetables, meat, and dairy, you had to compete with other hungry citizens. Not so romantic.

I started to explore the area around my alma mater. Next, the central diner. All major social interactions took place in that square. It had a name: Piatak.

I believed that if you think about an object hard enough, it will materialize at some point.

Here he is. A school celebrity. He was performing in the medical school shows.

He approached me and said:

The sun shines in the summer
But in the winter you are shivering from the cold
Illuminated by the same sun
Let’s celebrate the earnest capriciousness of our hearts

Just like that Veni, vidi, vici: I came, I saw, I conquered.

Not the gray faces from the subway, but a bright light. This was exactly what the romantic fairy tales from my childhood had promised me. It was the

Fountains were blue
And roses were blooming red

from my mom’s poetic rhetoric. The fact that it was winter outside did not make any difference. My soul was singing.

There was a system in the colleges and universities at the time: you had lectures and classes all semester long, but at the end you had a month of exams based on those classes.

It was very fortunate that we met exactly at that time. I studied all day and saw him at night. Every night. It felt so good and right: the beautiful buildings of St. Petersburg, the dancing snowflakes, the creaking of our steps on the snow-covered paths.

By my second examination he proposed. We were standing next to a curved bridge. Snow was falling and disappearing in the heavy black water of the Neva River.

I was not surprised by how quickly it had all happened. If it’s love and it’s clearly forever, why wait? Every single cell of my body was filled with dopamine.

The utter and absolute understanding between two souls can make you fly. Looking into his blue eyes, I was a uniquely complete person.

He, for some noble reason, felt that he should inform me about his previous relationship. He had had a long-term relationship in school with a girl named Lena. She was older than him, and they had agreed to go to medical school together. But every boy in the Soviet Union, when he turns eighteen, has to serve two years in the military. While he was in the army, she had found someone else. She now lived in the same dorm building as him.

One detail about her stood out in his mind: she cooked “herring in a fur coat.” It was amazing!

I did not pay much attention to that dish. I didn’t even know the recipe, or how to cook in general. Why would you think about food when you’ve been touched by eternity? We were in love.

I returned back home very happy. I decided not to overexcite my parents that night. I explained to them in the morning about my life changes: I was planning to get married, and I was going to meet his parents after exams. My fiancé was from another small town four hours by bus from St. Petersburg.

My mom completely failed to understand. She looked at my love story with very pragmatic eyes. She said that he just wanted to move into our very small apartment of 800 square feet. He was just tired of living in a dorm, she said.

I tried to explain to mom that you can’t encompass the enormousness of love with pragmatic eyes. This is the kind of love you only find once, and I would never come across it ever again. Remember Cinderella and her glass slipper? But my mom did not want to explore my situation from the point of view of glass slippers. Literally speaking, she said, it was not possible to find room for such a life-changing passion in our small apartment.

My mom made my future very clear. “If you want to get married,” she told me, “you will have to move to his dorm. We have no room at our place for your future family.”

Mom mentioned as well that I would have to start learning how to cook in spite of the absence of ingredients in stores. “You will have to magically find at least the basics for the dinner table,” she told me, “and prepare meals for your adorable future husband. In short,” she said, “I don’t see how you’re going to combine medical school and the challenge of family-life duties. And by the way—what about money to support your family?”

I was trying to explain that this was a once-in-a-lifetime type of love, and no practical worries about the future could ever overwhelm it.

“Forget about love. Just learn to cook for now.” My mom was trying to bring me back down to earth from the sky. I had no interest in cooking or in the domestic arts in general.

My mom sarcastically asked what meal I would use to charm my future husband. I knew how to boil potatoes. Mom did not believe in the seductive power of that dish for sure.

I helped at home with some very basic chores: wash the dishes. Polish the shoes every Saturday to a mirror shine for the whole family. Wash the disposable plastic bags (there was a shortage of those as well).

As a strong foundation for my future family, mom selected the frying of thin crepes. I had to beat the eggs with a fork, add milk and flour. Mom was focused on the little details. Specifically, she wanted me to beat the small lumps into a smooth mixture. She felt that lumps would not be appealing to my future husband.

Those constant conversations about housekeeping made me cry. My tears were dropping into the lumpy crepe batter, creating a unique dish: dreams-and-reality flavored crepes.

The next meal I was offered to explore was chicken. The usual name for this gourmet item was “blue bird.” I cannot imagine the terrible life those poor chickens had, but they always presented themselves as blue and with some short white hair on the body, remnants of their feathers. The whole physique of the “blue bird” made me think about long-distance runners, but it was still a rare treat in Soviet stores.

Mom used fire from the stove to burn off the remains of the feathers, and the smell of burning hair filled our apartment for days. “Blue bird” and my floating-in-the-air love: I did not understand how those entities could coexist.

We continued to meet every night and walk through the dark, intriguing streets of St. Petersburg, occasionally stopping at coffee shops. I started to introduce black drops of reality into our conversations about happily ever after.

I was interested in what money we would live on. He said we would get money from school, the small scholarships we used to get every month.

I replied it was not enough to cover transportation, not to mention eating out, as we both enjoyed doing. That was our time for the most inspiring heart-to-heart conversations.

But he said, “We will not eat out. You will cook. We will start working in addition to school.” I guessed he had the same ideas about that disgusting but necessary “blue bird” in his head, just like my mom’s.

I felt traumatized by his down-to-earth practicality.

After the exams I decided to explore my future living quarters. The dorm of my medical school used to be stables. Only one change had been made from 100 years ago to transform stables into a dorm: the horses had been removed. Very basic bunk beds were put in their place.

There were no concerns about comfort and coziness. If horses could live there, medical students would survive.

We had students from Arab countries and Africa. They used to bring food and other necessities from abroad. It was not possible to buy rugs, kitchen utensils, or linens at that time in the stores in the Soviet Union, except if you had connections or in special stores for foreigners. Students from other countries magically transformed their parts of the stable into cozy living quarters. But there was still only one toilet and shower for the whole floor—for 150 human souls.

There was a schedule for the students to clean the facilities. Some people fulfilled their responsibilities, and some obnoxious individuals just skipped them.

It was a bouquet of unpleasant smells. Small pieces of dirty black soap were hanging from the grey porcelain of the sink. The absence of a curtain completely eliminated any privacy in the shower. The stone floor was cold and scary—very different from my small but clean and cozy apartment.

There were three other boys in my future husband’s room. There were high ceilings and bunk beds. One of the boys had a girlfriend, and every night, in the shared room, they would discuss their approach to sex.

I checked out the kitchen. One stove, dark green. Mice. Dirty and ugly. I imagined myself making family borscht there, and crepes without any flour lumps. The kitchen was at the end of a long hallway of stables. You had to make the meal and bring it to your room—a five-minute walk with a soup pot or hot pan in your hands. Voilà! Dinner is ready.

I was invited to the room of some students from Yemen, my future husband’s friends, a brother and sister. The adaptability of foreigners to any conditions gave me tremendous respect for them and the strength of the human spirit. They were studying the difficult science of medicine in a foreign language, navigating the specifics of Russian culture.

I asked the Yemeni sister about her secret for looking so good and well groomed in such terrible conditions. She said: “I buy bread, but sunflower oil and zaatar I bring from home—a Middle-Eastern spice. Put it together, that’s your dinner. You don’t have to use that kitchen.”

I tried that snack. It was delicious and had a Middle-Eastern aroma, salty and spicy at the same time. Just like dorm life.

After that impressive visit I was brought back to the planet Earth. Just like the subjects of a Mark Chagall painting, I did not feel the wind that raised me up above the tree tops and houses.

Life went on. We continued to communicate. He used to call me in the evening from his dorm phone booth using two kopecks to pay for our conversation.

One evening he didn’t call. I wanted to know why. He explained in a very straight-forward way, “I had to get a book from Lena.” I was shocked: “Why is Lena here? We are getting married. You said it was over.”

He replied: “Please do not worry. We have to talk.”

We met in the same cafe where we used to have our heart-to-heart conversations about our happily-ever-after life. My future husband explained: “I have only loved two women in my life: you and Lena. Once you visited the dorm, Lena found out and asked me to lend her the book. She prepared my favorite ‘herring in a fur coat.’ I told you she makes it so well.”

I was walking back through the snowy streets of St. Petersburg by myself. Snow creaked gently under my shoes. Fountain were not blue, roses were not red anymore for me.

My little apartment no longer needed to contain my larger-than-life passion. Or most likely it had not love at all, but only dreams about love.

My mom had been right about the real way to a man’s heart. This is one of the possible navigable routes.

“Herring in a fur coat”

Chop into small pieces
Boiled potatoes
Beets
Hard-boiled eggs
Fresh onion
Apple
Salty herring
Layer the potatoes with mayonnaise, onion, beets, herring, apple, and eggs.

Your cake is ready to wait for the event in the fridge. Chill for three hours and enjoy.

Find your way to the heart of your destiny…