I’m a liar and a thief, a deceiver and a cheat. I steal precious goods with one hand and give back an inferior product with the other, drawing a profit from the difference. I make a living peddling mere shadows of the truth, spend my days practicing the fine art of deception. I translate texts from Latvian into English.

To translate is to engage willfully in deceit, to misrepresent the fundamental meaning of a language to unsuspecting readers who don’t share your coveted access to the source. When translating a text, you rob the original of its living essence and palm it off in diluted form, intermingled with your own subjectively biased interpretation. Perhaps this is why people rarely plan to enter the profession; they’re sort of forced into it by a mixture of circumstance and necessity. Yet another way in which translation is like a life of petty crime.

After moving to Rīga, many foreigners with even a minimal understanding of Latvian work as translators for a while, to pay the bills until they find more gainful employment. Translation is the perfect occupational manifestation of an in-between state, a transitional mode of existence: you have one foot dangling back in the mother tongue and the other stretched forward precariously into the language of your new home. I often feel like I’m the only American unsteady enough to keep at it full time, while everyone else puts their feet firmly together on the ground and ascends the ranks at law firms, corporations, international organizations and chambers of commerce, getting rich in the process. I’ve wanted to get out of the trade for years, to find a real job, though I can’t seem to shift my weight enough to catch my balance.

Of course, the translation racket doesn’t come without its incentives. If anything, being a translator endows you with an ear for comparisons, a tendency to think in terms of the “as if” and the “like.” This is because there is no such thing as a pure translation; words and sentences have only near approximations in other languages. There is no meta-system binding two tongues together, no Venn diagram highlighting areas of easy overlap. Even a cursory glance at the contents of the Tilde or Letonika dictionaries—the trusty tools of the trade—proves this to be the case.

I like to exercise my translation skills by strolling through the streets of Rīga and interpreting the city around me, removing the phenomena from their immediate context and dropping them into a foreign web of meaning, rendering them from Latvia back to America. This helps me try to bridge the gap between the two isolated linguistic units—Latvian and English—engaged in constant combat up in my brain. But my efforts never quite bear fruit, and the object of my exercise always slips from my grasp, resisting translation. I get the sense of falling short, reaching out but not quite catching it, of being perpetually stuck in the “almost,” the “not quite.”

For example, I’ll think, the Maskačka district of Rīga is sort of like the Lower East Side of Manhattan or Wicker Park in Chicago, and might someday share the fate of those areas—formerly rundown havens for drugs and crime transformed into trendy neighborhoods. Or when I take a walk across the Daugava River, I’ll muse, Pārdaugava is sort of like certain parts of Brooklyn, or the entire city of Philadelphia: the place you move to in search of cheaper rents, more space and a tighter sense of community.

But I know these translations aren’t quite right. Latvia doesn’t have a strong class of young urban professionals with that crucial combination of ample free time, educated tastes, and disposal income needed to support the renewal of a derelict neighborhood. And the notion of a close-knit neighborhood is completely foreign for this land of staunch individualists, who historically resided on small isolated farms in the hardscrabble countryside. You’ll get the same impassive frowns and cold stares in the districts of wooden houses across the river as you do in the art nouveau center of town. Plus, these days, property all over the city is cheap no matter what the size, if you’re lucky enough to have a job to pay your rent.

Sometimes, when I go to concerts in the abandoned machine shops around the former industrial port, or in the 19th century brick warehouses by the Central Market, I’ll observe that the hipsters look as if they were transplanted from those converted factories on the Williamsburg waterfront. But, of course, this interpretation doesn’t quite work either. The Rīga hipster is a very different breed from his New York counterpart—more DIY than MFA. This means you can’t have a conversation with him about Lacan or Bataille, but if you need to install, say, new windows in your apartment, you can call up a few guys who will appear at your door in skinny jeans and ironic T-shirts, wielding power drills and soldering irons. The same ascendancy of praxis over theory also holds true for young women. The Latvian hipster chick wearing clunky plastic glasses and a neon jumpsuit on a Friday night will probably spend the next morning pedaling her fixed-gear bike to a nearby forest, to pick berries for making jam or wild mushrooms to preserve for winter, instead of packing her iPod with lectures by Žižek. At a bar, they’re all more likely to order hot mugs of chamomile tea than frosty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, especially if it’s hot outside. 

I also try to translate Rīga for my 2-year-old son, explaining the place to him in a way that is inescapably my own faulty interpretation of what I see. But I haven’t had much luck there, either. My son already understands this city better than I do, and knows how to distinguish a bad translation from the real thing. As I push him on his scooter through the park near the Orthodox cathedral, I’ll whisper, “Watch out for those guys in track suits and leather jackets. They’re gypsies.” But my son just laughs off my warning and practically runs over their pointy leather shoes. He’s right: These aren’t the gypsies you read about in fairy tales, who steal children in the middle of the night. They’re čigāni, who have been here for ages and have no need for extra children, since most of them are grandfathers by the time they turn 30. They make a living picking blueberries in roadside forests, not roaming the countryside in wagons, and the most aggressive thing they’ll do is stub out a cigarette on the dial of a watch they’re trying to sell you, presumably to show you it’s made of real glass.

Local phenomena aren’t the only things that resist translation. Some Latvian words and expressions are so deeply ensconced in language’s tight weft of associations that they can’t be coaxed out of hiding. For instance, how to render the old colloquial phrase patriekt ar sūdainu mietu? How do you convey the good humor inherent in the shit-covered object—that there are piles of shit everywhere in the countryside, left by roaming dogs and grazing cows, and not much malice is required to procure a smearable sample? Or how do you show that the vexation apparent in the original phrase, patriekt ar sūdainu koku, has, in this case, been intensified by the replacement of a simple wooden stick by a solid metal rod, a miets, to chase away the offending party with the fetid threat of defilement?

Latvian grammar also has some tricks up her sleeve to help resist English-based understanding or translation. For example, if you’re lucky enough to be served a traditional Latvian country meal of kidney beans and sour cream, you will be urged to piedzert klāt kefīru, that is, to intersperse your bites of bean with sips of kefir, in order to spare a sudden affliction with gas. Afterward, you’ll probably be treated to some rich and creamy dessert, and then asked if you want to uzdzert kafiju, top it off with coffee to wash it all down. Following the meal, of course, you’ll all stay in the kitchen and someone will sing out, Iedzersim pa glāzei!—let’s have a drink, pure and simple, with the inevitable possibility of more. If you do stick around for another couple glasses, you’ll begin to iedzīvoties, start to feel at home. Perhaps the neighbors will come over and you’ll all uzdzīvo—live it up. But come the wee hours of the morning, you might begin to sense that you have aizdzīvojies, stayed a little too long, perhaps even begun to feel piedzēries, drunk (piedzerties not to be confused with piedzert). In short, piedzert, uzdzert, iedzert; iedzīvoties, uzdzīvot, aizdzīvoties; piedzerties—the story of many a Latvian evening, easily compacted into two basic root words (dzert, dzīvot) and the cunning alteration of four short prefixes (pie, uz, ie, aiz), each of which gives a crucially variant meaning and has no readily available counterpart in English.

Nevertheless, I feel most at home in Latvia when I turn off the translation application in my head and let the place reveal itself for what it is, when I stop trying to interpret—to compare and approximate—and simply allow the country to flourish before my eyes.

Though I wasn’t born in Latvia, and certainly don’t share in the collective consciousness of people who have lived here all their lives, something clicks in my brain when I encounter certain scenes in the surrounding landscape. It is almost as if these tiny elements hidden deep inside the phenomenal world are the thing itself—Latvia the noumenon—basking in the glory and fullness of its being. A triangular birch hayrick leaning against a craggy apple tree. The deep, coffin-like cold emanating from the boarded-up windows of an abandoned brick building on a hot summer day, interlaced with the caustic stench of Soviet-era construction materials. Those perfectly straight paths cut through the meadow grass from house to woodshed, well to garden. The sharp angle of a barn roof on a misty morning. Two bulbous-nosed drunks dressed in ratty slacks and blazers, shuffling arm-in-arm to a musty basement beer bar in the middle of the afternoon. “Miglā asaro logs” belted out at three in the morning on a rainy Vecrīga street. The infinite net of associations ignited by these presences stretches out into oblivion, and cannot be corralled back into the closed circle of a hermetic translation.

Perhaps you’re better equipped to intuit these noumena if your engagement with Latvia is impartial and disinterested, untainted by some deep inner need, a desire to have it a certain way or make the country conform to your expectations. (A friend of mine, an American who lived here for a year back in the mid-1990s, recently wrote on her Twitter page, “Whenever I dream of being lost in Latvia, I wake up with the faint taste of biezpiens and strawberry soup in my mouth.”) Or maybe you have to live here for a while in order to plow through all the sauerkraut and sausage and get to the underlying, subtly flavored soul of the thing: the strawberries and cream. I’m not sure if you should avoid being a translator, a dissembler, a stealer of meaning; or, conversely, if perhaps a brief foray into a life of crime—translation—is exactly what you need to understand the futility of interpreting Latvia, the sheer beauty in letting the thing itself come out of hiding and speak its untranslatable truth.

In Latvia, there are no big mountains that scrape the clouds and tall waves do not crash into rocky shores. The sun does not burn in the sky and the fallen snow quickly turns to slush and then ice. There is no teeming metropolis, no famous landmark, no single defining national character trait. There are no large, striking features that might lend themselves to easy translation. It’s hard to get a purchase on Latvia, difficult to secure a grip. It is elusive, evasive, recalcitrant—resistant to appropriation as well as to occupation. In the time it takes to translate, to steal its meaning, to plunder its depths, to invent some mendacious interpretation, to lie about its honest words, it has already slipped from your greedy fingers and sunk back into the cool coastal night.

I first heard the term “LL” sometime in the early 1990s, not long after Latvia regained its independence. Back then the label simply indicated a fact of provenance and was yet to become a slur—a ghost yet to become spook. Latvijas latvietis: a Latvian from Latvia. A Latvian Latvian. A Latvian squared.

The LLs initially appeared as guest counselors at our summer camp in the Catskills of upstate New York, wearing thin gray socks with grandpa sandals, crudely cut-off jeans and flimsy short-sleeved button-down shirts—a full decade before the look became trendy on the hipster streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They acted pretty strangely, too. I recall one burly buzz-cut LL, with a penchant for sleeveless undershirts and shiny track pants, telling us why he never brushed his teeth. He hadn’t begun brushing them as a child, he explained, and since it was the act of scraping layers of plaque off your teeth that made all the difference, there was no way of making up for lost time. (I ran into this fuzzy logician years later at a bar in Rīga. He was working for the Ministry of Economics. Read into this as much as you like.)

These LLs seemed like an odd bunch to us, no doubt, and we took great pleasure in laughing about their foreign ways. But I know they got an equally big kick out of us campers. They enjoyed our funny and seemingly incongruous attempts to speak Latvian: es iešu apsēdēties and es tev redzēšu vēlāk and beidz pirdēt! They snickered at our sugary adolescent diets, founded on bags of chewy Starburst, packets of crackling Fizz Wiz and tins of orange powdered Tang. And since most of them hailed from the Latvian countryside, they were surely amused by our suburban American attempts to “get back to nature”: sitting around a campfire just yards from our cabins, obsessively spraying our sweatshirts with Off! and toasting jumbo marshmallows while bemoaning the horrible lack of chocolate and graham crackers. There was, as yet, no antagonism, merely a mutual feeling of good humor at the other’s expense—a force that has held together entire communities for millennia (see Strasbourg, France; Brussels, Belgium; Queens, New York) .

But then something changed. Perhaps it was because Latvians from Latvia began arriving in greater number, and their presence became too powerful to be appropriated by sheer mirth or bemused geniality. Or maybe it was because the Latvian-American community had not taken stock of how far it had come, or where it was going, and was unable to deal with the onslaught of people suddenly arriving from the lost homeland, which had not just been found, but was now totally in your face, looking for a job, a place to live and correcting your grammar. 

The change was that Latvians from Latvia became something to be feared. And, as everybody knows, the best way to deal with your fears is to demonize them. “LLs.” “Those goddamn LLs.” “LLs showed up at the camp and started drinking and getting in everyone’s face.” “LLs came up to Gaŗezers, punched some kid in the nose and started a brawl.” “LLs crashed the party and picked a fight with the Mexican wedding next door.” These things all happened, of course, and many LLs seemed intent on nothing else but provoking scorn from the Latvian-American community. However, the sheer contempt with which the new arrivals were treated seemed strangely reminiscent of something else: the antagonism reserved for the Communists back in the 1980s. It was almost like an aversion to the LLs had replaced the hatred for the Russians.

In fact, this wasn’t far from the truth. What seemed to be scorned most about the new arrivals was precisely their supposed lack of Latvianness and their total embrace of Russianness, or Sovietness. They cursed in Russian; they drank Russian vodka; they told jokes with Russian punch lines; they sang Russian songs when they got drunk; many of them looked like caricatures of Russian gangsters from the movies. Some even had Russian-sounding names, like Vitālijs and Igors and Oļegs. They weren’t like us—“real” Latvians. We had preserved the true Latvianness, whisked it away from the homeland during the war like the Holy Grail. These people were but fading shadows of a lost legacy. What had developed was the classic post-immigrant scenario, the “us vs. them” that signals a new phase in the life of every diaspora community, one that begins with the independence of the homeland and the inevitable meeting with the first wave of new emigrants.

Another reason for the ambivalent reception of Latvians from Latvia—one that lies deeper and, perhaps, closer to the truth—was that they didn’t conform to our idea of what Latvians should have been like. After fifty years of reading pastoral novels like Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš‘s Baltā grāmata and Edvarts Virza’s Straumēni, we half expected the Latvians to arrive straight from the idyllic pastures where they herded glossy brown cows with a switch of birch, clad in leather moccasins, billowing white cloaks and woven ethnographic belts whose intricate designs concealed the secrets of the universe. We wanted them to come and reaffirm our faith in the ancient wisdom of the four-line dainas, to remind us that the great throbbing power of Latvian nature—which streamed up through the oak trees, electrified the mist in the primeval forests, and made the mossy boulders vibrate with primordial energy—was still very much alive. Instead they made a beeline for Chinatown and stocked up on cheap electronics, bootleg cassettes and fake perfume. It just wasn’t what we had imagined.

Back then, I don’t remember spending much time engaged in LL-bashing. Perhaps I was too busy enjoying other aspects of being a Latvian-American: waking up in hotel bathtubs at congresses and song festivals; trying to figure out how to get a picnic table to float in a lake; and musing, with my friends, about what Latvian folksong we’d teach to Neil Young if we ever met him. The Latvian-American experience was rich and diverse enough to accommodate a wide range of activities, of which cultivating a loathing for LLs was merely one small element—a telling one, but nonetheless small.

Years later, when I moved to Rīga after college, I had forgotten all about the notion of the LL. But then something somebody said about avoiding soap at all costs, because it clogs the pores and isn’t as good for your skin as a bath of chamomile tea, recalled to me my earlier bemusement at the quaintly bizarre ways of Latvians from Latvia, so different from my own American habits.

“Oh, you LLs, with your herbal tea remedies and berry infusions and bandages made of weeds!” I’d say, chuckling. “What century do you think this is?”

We’d all laugh, my friends would call me a brand-worshipping, trend-obsessed AL, and the joke stuck. The term had been stripped of all contempt and once again stood for what it was: a initialism that merely denoted a difference between Latvians from Latvians and Amerikas latvieši, American Latvians. A friendly rivalry between two leagues: the LLs and the ALs. The great international Latvian all-star game.

At home, as part of our regular domestic banter, my Latvia-born wife and I fleshed out the image of the LL, which no longer simply stood for someone from Latvia but now indicated a special breed or species of local, as in “today I saw a bunch of big-time LLs down in Vecrīga.” LLs were the men in socks and sandals, black leather vests and mustaches. LLs were the guys who worn white linen pants, tight-fitting pastel t-shirts, flashy jewelry and pointy leather shoes, which they kicked out from side to side when they sauntered down the street, clutching the obligatory man-purse. LLs were the callers who spent hours on public radio chattering about how to clean your house with nothing but lemons, baking soda and vinegar; the amount of strawberries to eat every summer to amass enough iron for winter (four kilograms); and how rubbing cucumbers on your face was great for moisturizing your skin. LLs were the parents who packed their children into scarves and hats even in June, for fear of subjecting them to a killer breeze. It was all in good fun, and was often countered by my wife with jokes about the families of stereotypical ALs spotted coming out of downtown hotels (girls in flip-flops, pajama pants and bulky sweatshirts; boys in full-out college sports gear; fathers in blue blazers and khakis; mothers in amber jewelry).

But as the years went by, and my freelance work in Rīga seemed to falter both financially and professionally, my joking changed its tune. I wasn’t making much money, and felt that the people I did work for weren’t giving me the degree of respect I thought I deserved. Like most people in their late twenties, I began to question whether my career, or lack thereof, was going in the right direction. Unable to buck up the courage to pursue options that did seem like possible alternatives, I got frustrated. This frustration came to rest on the Latvians from Latvia whom I worked for, via e-mail, from my desk at home.

“These damn LLs,” I’d complain to my wife. “Why can’t they ever say ‘thank you’ or ‘good job’ when you work your ass off for them? Could they possibly be a little less cold and unappreciative, a little less LL?”

I had soon developed my own personal image of the LL, which I would loudly declaim to anyone unlucky enough to listen. Tellingly, the bulk of this conception centered on people who wouldn’t answer my e-mails, give me praise or pay me on time. I falsely believed that things like this never happened back in the States—land of the free compliments and home of the brave big check—and that only Latvia was hopelessly mired in an utter lack of tact and a total subservience to cronyism. This didn’t conform to what I imagined was true professionalism, which, I believed, was the defining feature of the adult world.

I now realize that becoming an adult is nothing like I imagined it to be, and professionalism is just an idyllic fantasy. You work hard, for inadequate pay, and get little respect from your peers―—that is what it means to be a grownup, no matter where you live. Perhaps these things are merely magnified in Latvia, where the layers of polish have been wiped off the surface of life and things are revealed for what they are. Luckily, I soon discovered the ancient panacea for the malaise of adulthood: having children. Now I don’t have time to harp on injuries and injustices, imagined or otherwise, nor do I care much anymore. The unanswered e-mails, the late payments, the terse responses—all of these simply fade into the din of Lightning McQueen roaring on the laptop in the other room.

On recent trips back to the States I haven’t hear much about the LLs. When I prompt my friends, the only information I get is that some work in the moving business upstate, and others are teachers at the local Latvian schools and daycare centers, which their own kids attend alongside children of parents born in the U.S. Many of them have lived in the U.S. for so long that they know less about life in Rīga than those Latvian-Americans who regularly travel back and forth. Others have married Americans and are now living quietly in the suburbs near where I grew up. In fact, the last time I drove through my old hometown, my wife heard the guy behind the counter at the local pizzeria speaking Russian. He was originally from Moscow. They struck up a conversation about the ways of the East and the ways of the West. He used the distinctions “we” and “you,” meaning “you Latvians”—my wife and I—and “we Americans”: the guys from Moscow who now owned the shop. I spent my childhood around the corner, scribbling “Ruck Fussia” in the margins of notebooks. Things are all mixed up now. Our old fantasies are fading. I guess we’re all growing up.

Saviļņojums, ko mēs piedzīvojam Dziesmu svētkos, Kultūras dienās, Baltica festivālā un citos lielos latviešu tautas vienojošos pasākumos, ir nepieciešams katram latvietim, vienalga, kur viņš pasaulē mīt.

Vienalga, vai tu esi dalībnieks vai skatītājs, emocionālais pārdzīvojums, ko mēs piedzīvojam, ir kā zāļu deva, kas dod spēku turpināt. Turpināt iesākto “tautas druvā”, kas nu kuram ir tuvs un padodas. Un ne tikai lielie Dziesmu svētki Latvijā var dot tik ļoti vajadzīgo kopības sajūtu. Šo “elektrību” var gūt tikpat daudz Sidnejas decembra vasaras svelmē vai Losandželosas kalnu piekājē, kā Mežaparka lielajā estrādē.

Pasaule tik strauji globalizējas un piedāvā tik daudz šīs saviļņojuma sajūtas aizstājēju – gan reālā dzīvē, gan virtuāli, ka pretoties šīs globalizācijas vilinājumam prasa lielu apņēmību un stingru mugurkaulu. Mūsu ikdienas dzīves kļūst arvien vairāk virtuālas – informāciju esam pieraduši smelties no interneta un bieži vien dators un televīzija aizstāj kontaktus ar cilvēkiem. Sabiedriskus pasākumus aizstāj televīzijas pārraides vai dzīvās interneta pārraides. It kā varam būt lietas kursā par visu, neizejot no savām četrām sienām. Kļūstam par virtuālās informācijas ieguvējiem-uzzinām visu, bet šī informācija mums nāk caur kādu mediju. Bet vai šie mediji var aizstāt mūsu dabiskās izjūtas, ko piedzīvojam, dziedot vai klausoties tūkstošbalsīgu, vai pat vairāku simtu balsu kori, pašam klātesot? Vai internets var aizstāt kopības sajūtu, ko izjūtam, plecu pie pleca kopā dziedot Latvijas valsts himnu vai “Tev mūžam dzīvot, Latvija”? Vai “Gaismas pils” izklausās tikpat iespaidīgi kora Kamēr izpildījumā tavā dzīvojamā istabā, kā tas izklausās Kopkoru koncertā Hamiltonas Dziesmu svētkos? Uz vietas var izjust sajūtu, ka latvieši nav izolēti, ka latviešu tauta vēl ir dzīva, ka kopīgā dziesmā un dejā ir spēks.

Jo vairāk ir vajadzīga šī sajūta šogad, 2009. – ekonomiskās krīzes – gadā, kad Latvijai vairāk par citām valstīm ir nopietni jāpārdomā savas vērtības un tās tautai jāmācās būt vienotiem, gan politiskā sfērā, gan garīgā. Latvietis Latvijā šogad atkal, kā pirms 20 gadiem, jūtas nedrošs, neaizsargāts, nākotne ir miglā tīta. Ne tikai ekonomiskie apstākļi ir Latvijā krasi izmainījušies, bet politiskais klimats strauji mainās. Ir visu laiku jūtama krieviska dvaša pakausī un tā pieaug intensitātē. Latviešu tautai ir jāsmeļas spēku sevī un jāspēj visiem šiem procesiem pretoties. Tautas apziņas celšanas svētkiem šeit ir liela loma.

No 1. līdz 5. jūlijam Hamiltonā notika 13. Latviešu dziesmu svētki Kanādā. Varētu teikt – vieni no daudziem, kas tur īpašs? Īpašs bija daudz kas. Īpašs bija tas, ka vēl 2009. gadā var veiksmīgi uzrīkot tik vērienīgu pasākumu latvieši, kas dzīvo ārpus Latvijas. Īpašs bija tas, ka paši pieteicās piedalīties un arī ieradās prāvs skaits koru un tautas deju grupu no Latvijas un ka sadarbība ar “trimdas” sabiedrību bija veiksmīga. Īpašs ir tas, ka katrs šāds kopīgs pasākums, kur sadarbojas gan Latvijas, gan “ārzemju” latvieši, mazina atšķirtības sajūtu un aizpilda plaisas, kas bija radušās, tik ilgus gadus latviešiem dzīvojot atšķirtiem divās dažādās ideoloģiskās telpās. Īpašs ir tas, ka pirmoreiz Kanādā Dziesmu svētki notika ārpus Toronto – un rezultāts visus pārsteidza pozitīvi. Un visvairāk īpašs ir tas, ka dzīvojot Latvijā, latvietis var aizbraukt uz ārzemju latviešu pasākumu un smelties spēku un enerģiju turpmākam darbam – šis spēks nav tikai iegūstams tēvzemē, tas atrodas visur, kur pulcējas latvieši, kur garīgā enerģija vērsta Latvijas un latviešu tautas lepnuma celšanā.

Lielu pateicību pelnījusi rīcības komiteja ne tikai par organizatorisko priekšzīmību, bet gan par spēju iesaistīt visas paaudzes, kā arī vēlēšanos veidot tik daudzveidīgus pasākumus, ka katrai vecuma grupai bija pietiekoši daudz izvēļu, kur iesaistīties, kur baudīt svētku priekus. Iesākums visam jau bija Saules svētki Sidrabenē, kur 1 000 latviešu pulcējās Kanadas latviešu Sv. Andreja draudzes īpašumā ārpus Toronto. Visu dienu vairākās āra estrādēs varēja pamīšus baudīt latviešu koru un deju grupu sniegumus. Un ne tikai – Sidrabenē visu dienu darbojās tirdziņš, notika arī bērniem tautas deju sacensības, mazie varēja visu dienu dzīvoties pa baseinu vai spēļu laukumu, vienā īpašuma nostūrī varēja klausīties Laimu Muktupāvelu, kamēr citā nostūrī varēja pirkt desas ar štovētiem kāpostiem. Satikās sen neredzēti draugi un paziņas, iepazinās tautieši no visas pasaules. Ar tik vērienīgu pasākumu svētku noskaņa jau tika nodibināta pirmajās stundās. Galvenais, Saules svētki bija domāti visiem – maz ticams, ka Sidrabenē bija kāds, kas gribēja doties mājās, jo viņš garlaikojās. Ja svētkus var iesākt ar tik dinamisku programmu, kas pati jau jutās kā veseli Dziesmu svētki vienā dienā, tad pozitīvs noskaņojums pārējām dienām garantēts.

Vērts minēt dažus iespaidus, kas paliek atmiņā no svētkiem – mirkļi, kas deva šiem svētkiem īpašu sajūtu. Kopkora koncertā jaunās meitenes pirmajā rindā, kas ar lielu aizrautību izdziedāja visu koncerta repertuāru no A līdz Z. Šī paša koncerta noslēgums, kur pēc Latvijas dziesmu svētku tradicijām koristi turpināja dziedāt un negribēja iet mājās. Tautas deju lieluzvedumā bērnu iesaistīšana vairākās dejās, un šo bērnu spēja iemācīties un labi nodejot lielu deju variāciju. Šinī pašā uzvedumā meitenīte ratiņkrēslā, deju koncerta dalībniece – cik labs piemērs tam, ka deju svētkos var piedalīties visi! Čikāgas piecīšu koncertā Īrijas latviešu bērnu uzstāšanās kopā ar Piecīšiem un Toronto latviešu sestdienas skolas audzēkņiem. Piecīši veiksmīgi spējuši būvēt tiltus starp jauno un veco “diasporu” – paldies viņiem par to!

Nobeigumā – Čikāgas piecīšu pirms daudziem gadiem sarakstītās dziesmas “Latvju bērniem” vārdi labi raksturo šo burvīgo Dziesmu svētku noskaņu un sapni, kas tagad arī piepildījies-

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