Russ

In May of 2000 I worked at the Pier in Ardmore with a college student named Audra, who I was friends with at the time. One afternoon she stopped at work with the adorable little boy she was nannying for who had recently been adopted from Russia. He was probably about two years old and his birth name was Ruslan, but we all called him Russ. I had to meet Audra out back of the shop because she couldn't get him out of the car seat and she was clearly frazzled since he really needed to be changed. I offered to give it a try and stuck my head in the back seat. There was the sweetest, saddest little boy ever. And quiet. In the short time I knew Russ he never spoke and never really cried. I felt terrible thinking that this poor kid is in a foreign environment surrounded by strangers speaking a strange incoherent language and now he's trapped in a car seat with a diaper full of poo. Now another strange woman, this one with weird hair, was in his face and furiously trying to pry him from the seat he was strapped in. "Я вас люблю" I said to him with a smile, "Я вас люблю".  It was the only Russian I knew (thanks to Charles Bronson in The Great Escape) and as I finally got the god damn seat unbuckled and managed to unstrap him, Russ reached his little arms out towards me and as I scooped his stinky little body out of the car seat, he gently laid his head on my shoulder and wouldn't let go. Audra was agog. I'm not sure if it was that I finally got him out of the seat or that he was actually hugging me. To this day I still wonder what became of that little Russian cutie.