Popcorn

Mel is in his Russian lesson as I write this afternoon. I was in the kitchen washing up the dishes from last night. We had company and watched a movie after dinner. By the time we got to the dishes, the water pressure was too low to run the kalunka, so I put them off until today. I knew that doing anything in the living room would be “out” since Mel and Yuri study there. That gave me a good reason to spend time in the kitchen and/or the office working.

Toward the end of the dish washing session, I put two large metal bowls in the wash water. These are the two bowls that Mel uses when he makes popcorn for more people than just we two. I wondered idly where he had stashed last night’s leftover popped popcorn and then remembered how it seemed that half the popcorn ended up on the floor last night for some unknown reason (possibly because I was having a hard time with hand-mouth coordination…). Another memory popped into my mind on the heels of the first.

We brought popcorn with us when we first came to Ukraine. Popped popcorn was occasionally available but was very expensive and usually stale. Unpopped corn was impossible to find. After we had used up the bag or two we’d brought, I asked my parents to send us some more in one of the boxes they shipped the next time. Imagine my surprise when the delivery man stumbled up three flights of stairs with a very heavy box that turned out to be a 50 pound bag of popcorn! My first thought was, “What are we going to do with all this popcorn???” Well, we ended up sharing it with a couple of people, a liter or two here or there. Over the next three years, though, we used that bag up serving popcorn during our movie nights with friends and snacking on it ourselves a couple times a week.

One of the people I shared with was my tutor, Lyudmilla. She had eaten popped corn before, but had never seen just the seeds. She asked me if she could have some to fix for her mother. I said “Sure!” and gave her a liter jar of popcorn, explaining approximately how much corn to use with how much oil.

Imagine my surprise the next week when she came in and said, “Cindie! You never told me I had to put a LID on the pan when I popped the corn!”

I couldn’t help it – I started laughing. She went on to tell me that she had tried to pop it in a skillet. She was stirring it when suddenly it started exploding all over her kitchen. Lyudmilla said they found popcorn everywhere over the course of the following days. I apologized profusely and then explained that it was better to put it in a big pan, covered with a lid and shake it the whole time it was cooking, until there was no more sounds of kernels exploding.

Living here in Ukraine I have discovered that we all take a lot of things for granted about where and how we live. People here never tell us about important things we should know because, of course, everyone knows that already! It never once crossed my mind that Lyudmilla had never seen corn being popped. The typical American has seen it being popped at the movie theater, in advertisements on television, at home on the stove or in the microwave.

So, while washing up the popcorn bowls today I started laughing out loud. I caught myself before the guys in the living room could ask why I was laughing, and just giggled silently for a few minutes.

After Yuri leaves, I’ll go around the living room again and make sure I really did get all the popcorn from last night picked up from everywhere.