My grandmother often spoke in proverbs that I didn’t understand. I was used to tuning them out. Now it occurred to me that, if this had been a “foreign” country—if it had been Russia—I would have been trying to learn the proverbs. I started writing them down. Some featured my old friend, the fakir. “The fakir chicken lays eggs one at a time”: that was about not being in a hurry, and seemed somehow directed at me. Another saying, “The egg didn’t like its shell,” was used for people who tried to distance themselves from where they came from, or who disrespected their parents.
