Ainars

So the flooring’s in, the refrigerator is also plugged in, and we’ve got 6 dishes, 4 mugs, a handful of silver wear, and a couple of pans all sitting either in the sink or on the stove or in the new fridge. We needed some cabinets. If I’m remembering those days in 1994 correctly, our friend Ainars helped us out with this.

Ainars was a character from another place and time. Aluksne was very much a backwater town in the northeast corner of Latvia about 30 km from each border (Estonian and Russian). If you’ve ever met anyone a little off and wondered what rock they’d been living under for so long, it was probably under the rock of Aluksne. At this time, I would say life here was very much like a teeny, remote town in Middle America during the depression. People were poor, not educated, isolated, very simple and usually drunk. Many folks had never even ventured the 300 km to the capitol city of Riga, but instead always stayed right there in Aluksne.

That place was quite a study, and although Ainars had lived there for his whole life as far as I knew, Ainars broke the mold of Aluksneians. He certainly didn’t live under the Rock of Aluksne because he was probably too busy chiseling it. A monument builder by trade (yes, mostly tombstones), Ainars knew a little bit about just about everything, and I think could craft almost anything with his thick, meaty hands. He was a sweet and generous man, and really liked practicing his English on us. He was an artist, maybe a bit of an intellectual, and his house and yard looked like Fred Flintstone’s quarry. Think Owen Meany but much bigger and with a normal man’s voice. I don’t really know how old Ainars was, he was neither very old nor very young, but we got to know him through a mutual friend and he ended up taking good care of us in Aluksne.

Anyway, Aluksne was actually known for a few good and interesting things, and one of them was the old Soviet VEF radio cabinet shop. Others can recite the history better than I, but no one was buying big, wooden VEF radios anymore, so the once famous (?) cabinet shop, full of carpenters and craftsmen was just trying to get by making whatever. Ainars, an unusually creative thinker given his personal history, knew one of these guys and talked him into putting a few cabinets put together for us. I think three pieces in all—it was all our tiny kitchen could hold. They weren’t fancy, but made from clear pine or aspen, and honestly I don’t even remember what the counter top was. Something highly lacquered, I’m sure. If I was cleverer back then, I would have gotten Ainers to fabricate granite counters for us. All I remember for sure, though, was that there wasn’t much choice in the matter. But again, I didn’t really care. It was all a matter of necessity and function, and I was grateful for Ainars.