After several days of multi-lingual navigation, I showed this to mom, and she about fell over laughing.  For the rest of the week, she would only have to barely even think of this and she’d bust a gut all over again.  She even imagined me doing this to a police officer in Lithuania if I got pulled over.  (I didn’t, thankfully.)

Catherine Tate is amazing.

In the west of the country, inside current-day Žemaitija National Park, the Soviets secretly constructed a nuclear missile launch base in the early 1960s with enough capacity to take out much of western Europe.  According to the museum guide, they trucked in Estonian labor for the construction so as to keep its purpose a secret from Lithuanians.  The facility probably also made Lithuania a big fat target in cold-war nuclear counterstrike planning.  Joy.

It was sobering to remember that we once had enough capacity ready and aimed at one another to kill us all 100 times over.  Now that that’s over, I guess we’ll just have to enjoy the slower-moving Armageddon that is climate change.

So, thanks to Ancestry.com and the genealogy efforts of 2nd cousin Patricia Tift of Fresno, CA,  I have immigration documents for two of the four of mom’s grandparents (surnames Mardosa and Kupčinskaitė) that list Lithuanian home towns.  I don’t, however, have as much information on her mother’s people, Anthony Repinskas and Mary Kriaučeliūnaitė (I think that must have been the Lithuanian name — it was never written even close to correctly on U.S. census forms).

[Yes, both sets of grandparents are Anthony and Mary, and they named many other women in the family Mary, too.  Peter Mardosa’s mother, sister, and wife were all Mary, and the last two went by “May” just to keep things extra confusing.  Mom’s middle name was Mary before she changed it, something I only recently learned.]

Mom doesn’t think that Anthony and Mary Repinskas ever became U.S. citizens, so there’s unlikely to be immigration forms available.  They came to Brooklyn for a while (all the Lithuanians appear to have landed there) before decamping to Herrin, Illinois for several years.  Curiously, they lived just a town or two over from my dad’s people, also in southern Illinois, but these two families were not to meet until the late 1960s.  The Repinsky clan moved to New Jersey around 1930, which is where they were when my grandmother and her sister, Mildred, both got married and moved to their respective households in Queens, NY.

Somewhere in Lithuania there are probably Repinskas and Kriaučeliūnas cousins, but I’m not sure we’ll ever find them.  If you’re reading this, cousins, drop me a line!

Give me coffee, ice cream, and lots of flowers to look at and nobody gets hurt!  In Palanga.

I’ve gotten a range of reactions when I told people I’d be spending 9 days traveling internationally with my mother.  They fell primarily into two buckets:

“That’s so nice.”  Or,

“I could never do that.  We’d kill each other.”

Here’s what I knew before.  This woman likes coffee.  I mean really likes coffee.  We learned how to order it in Lithuanian before we left, “Prašom juoda kava,” and we’ve used that phrase probably the most.   Hotels with coffee makers in the room meet with enthusiastic approval.  The good news is that Lithuania seems to have at least as much a coffee culture as Seattle.

What I didn’t know is that her latest addiction is ice cream.  I mean, every time there was a little ice cream stand anywhere (and the Lithuanians put them lots of places) mom wanted one.  She was like a little puppy, hanging back and pulling toward the thing she wants.  And she was super impressed that they sell cones here where the ice cream goes all the way to the bottom of the cone.  Score, Lietuva!

And flowers.  She could look at flowers all day and not get tired.

I think I’ve been more of a grumpypuss on this trip than she was.  Dan saw this coming.  The last thing he said to me at the airport was “Be nice to your motina.”

Thanks for your patience with me, mamytė.  We’ve been getting along mostly well.  Except when I needed a nap.  Which is probably very familiar for her.