wyka

Whenever I see a four letter word with a y in it, it grabs my attention. Usually, the word is my name, but every once in a while it’s something else like Myra, Kyra, lyric, lycra (okay so those last two have 5 letters)…

Denis and I had just finished cleaning up from dinner when I spotted a foreign object in our kitchen. A new cookbook! But, unfortunately, it was written in jibberish. I mean Russian.

I started to flip through it with the wonder and fascination of the equally goofy 5 year old I must have been. I opened up immediately to a page with something called “wyka.” (The w is actually a Russian letter that looks a little different and doesn’t exist in our alphabet). It’s a fish dish. I asked him how to pronounce it. “Shooka.”

I started laughing. And as laughing, like yawning, is highly contagious, Denis started to chuckle, but his raised eyebrows revealed his complete and utter confusion.

I started to explain: “Well, it’s kind of funny that the first page I open up to has a word that slightly resembles my name (enough that it would grab my eye), that it’s a fish dish (I like anything marine), and that the pronunciation was one of my first words: shooka is what I used to call music.”

We shared a “life is weird” eye squint, and went on talking about Russian and how they conjugate nouns.