We were on our way to the hospital this morning, and I was sitting in the back seat of my BIL’s car. My MIL was next to me. We were having the usual chit-chat, exacerbated by the anxiety-provoking fact that we were all on our way to drop my wife off at the birthing center (tomorrow is the big day). I could have stayed there all day, but I have “important” stuff to do at the office . Anyhow, I can’t really recall how the conversation came up, but my mother-in-law asked me, straight up: Are you a Spy?

Of course, playing it up, I refused to directly answer the question. For the record, I am not a spy, in any sense of the word. Nevertheless, I got a kick out of being questioned. There’s no escaping that it is/was a reality here: there were/are spies around. These people grew up with the notion of spies trickling through everyday culture. This is in contrast, at least in my naive sense of reality, to my experiences growing up in California. People here are not exactly trusting of the government. KGB/SBU do follow people. I can only imagine what it used to actually be like, 20+ years ago in the USSR days. The government wants/wanted to know who is where, when, and why they were there. Oh yeah… and how they got there, and where they came from is also quite important, not to mention where they are planning on going. And perhaps, what are they doing, who are they meeting, which kinds of food do they like, what books do they read, who do they work for, and how many times do they wear their underwear before washing, etc…

Hmmmm… the more I thought about it, the more I could see (sorta) why she might consider the possibility that her son-in-law was actually an American Spy – in Kiev. I just had to laugh, because I’m so far from a spy that it’s not even funny. So, I chuckled while staring out of the moving car at the new “higher speed railway” that’s being built – and I made a mental note to write about me, being a spy   !

I think the closest I got to a spy (knowingly) was meeting this guy. I knew his son, Sean, in high school (yep, Beverly).