Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I’ve said this here before, but I’m trans. Trump says I don’t exist; that there can only be this or that. But I’m trans lots of things, like transnational. I’m an American; born in America and subject to American law; raised on American pie. But I can feel and identify with other things, too, like being Russian, for instance.

Culley Jane and I met a young Russian couple while walking in the park this week. The sun was warm. The sky was clear enough to see the snow-capped Rockies in the distance, just like on cans of Coors beer. They were pushing a baby in a carriage.

I have a thing about accents. Whenever I hear accented speech, I have to know where the speaker is from, especially if it’s a foreign language.  It’s like a compulsion. I have to know. Maybe psychiatrists have a name for it. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It’s led to many interesting conversations over the years. Like Kerouac said, the essence of Zen is knowing as many people as possible.

As the young couple approached us on the path, I heard them speaking in a foreign language. We all smiled and nodded as we passed by one another, but then I had to stop, turn, and call back to them: “Hey, where you from?”

They turned. I would not have blamed them had they been a little suspicious. My compulsion is not exactly normal. Maybe I was a Neo-con, a Bircher, an anti-communist fanatic, a Russophobe, and wanted to call them names. But I figured Culley Jane and I, an elderly couple out for a walk, would appear harmless enough and I was right.

They smiled at us and said “Russia.” Then came closer.

“Where in Russia?”

“St. Petersburg.”

“I know about St. Petersburg,” I said. “I’ve never been there, but I learned about it in a biography I read about Peter the Great, the 17^th century Czar. He had invited Leibniz, a German, into his inner circles as an advisor. Leibniz said Russia needed a port on the Baltic to better interact with the world, to build its trade and grow stronger. The Czar listened and built St. Petersburg.”

The young couple seemed intrigued that I should know something about their home town that even they didn’t know. They said they’d never heard of Leibniz.

“Leibniz was an Irenicist,” I said, “like today what we’d call a peacenik. Europe had just gone through its 30 Years War. He said there could only be peace between neighbors when everybody was healthy, prosperous and strong. The Germans have a saying: ‘Hat der Bauer Geld, hat’s die ganze Welt’ — when the peasant has money, everybody does.’ He told the Czar that Russia needed industry and infrastructure and a national scientific academy to train the builders of tomorrow. Leibniz had already founded such an academy in Berlin. He said Russia needed one too and the Russian Academy of Sciences was born.”

Our new acquaintances were, of course, aware of and proud of the world famous Russian Academy, but had never heard of my version of the story of its birth in the mind of Leibniz; that the best way to get along with your neighbor is to help your neighbor prosper.

Culley Jane told them that her father had been a professor of Russian history; that he had traveled to Russia during the 1950s and that they often entertained visiting Russian academics in their American home. So, she said, she had always been suspicious of the mainstream “Russia, Bad” narrative pushed in all the news as we were growing up during the Cold War.

Our new friends told us their story of growing up in Russia during the difficult years there in the 90s, going to college, getting married and first coming to America about 8 years ago on academic fellowships. The U.S. government welcomed them to stay because they would obviously be a national asset. They would strengthen us.

They didn’t seem shocked, but merely curious when I told them I was trans — transnational; that I felt like I was a Russian, too. I explained that it was our shared history, like the special bond of cross-identity shared by soldiers who’d faced a common enemy.

The enemy was an idea… the idea that we can prosper by weakening our neighbor. It’s what guided England’s foreign policy in the heyday of its Empire. Historians refer to it as the British Great Game. During the 19^th century, Russia and America were seen as threats to the sprawling British Empire’s global ambitions. According to the logic of Empire, threats must be weakened by breaking apart the Union that binds people into nations, a sum greater that its parts.

I told our new friends that I had just written a column in the Westphalia Periodic News about how Russia helped save the Union during our Civil War. They were not familiar with that story — how the Czar had sent his warships into American ports as a warning to England to stay out of it. England’s working classes overwhelming supported the North, mainly because of the slavery issue, but the ruling classes, invested in the Empire, had plotted with and supported the South, breaking apart and weakening their neighbor for personal reasons that are hard to imagine. New Yorkers threw parades for the Russian sailors. Lincoln invited the ships’ captains to a state dinner.

Getting ready to continue on our separate ways along the same path in the park, the young parents said they would be interested in reading the column. I got their email and said I’d send it to them and put them on our growing mailing list. I told them to look for it first thing every Thursday morning. I told them I might write a column about our meeting in the park. Maybe they’ll send it to family and old friends back in Russia and they will want to join Westphalia’s mailing list, which I think of as like Franklin’s Junto.

Westphalia, by the way, is trans, too. And some say it doesn’t exist, like some said Franklin’s Junto didn’t exist either when all of a sudden it was 1776.