A tiny one-room studio apartment with a microscopic kitchen and barely a window. Mykola made dinner for three guests. We huddled around a tiny table and used every possible surface to sit or to hold food and drink. The meal had many courses. The recipes were complex and delicious. Beverages were also in abundance. Valera picked me up and drove me home.
Now:
село Гореничі 1.5 км з Житомерської Траси
As soon as I called him, Mykola invited me over. We agreed to meet on Tuesday afternoon and have dinner. His son, Dima, is a bit older than my daughters, but we agreed to come over so the kids could play in the yards as Mykola and I caught up. Valera arranged a driver to pick us up at the apartment. After making it through cross-town, rush hour traffic in Kyiv, we turned of the main highway, onto a jughandle that would make NJ DOT proud and rode past a big sign that said Гореничі. The road shifted from asphalt to loose gravel.
Mykola's driver came out to navigate us to his house. We met him at the side of the road with a big field on the left. We turned right, onto a road that was paved even less that the one before it. Past a few rural homes, that were hanging together with cinder block and mortar.
Around the free range chickens, past a few cows, down a steep decline and onto a perfectly manicured plaza of bricks. Laid out in a nice pattern, so we could park and face a house that sat far back, on the other side of a large lawn. Mykola strolled off his second floor patio and came out to great us. A big dog beat him to the gate.
A few years ago, Mykola decided to leave his television career. He told me that he 'put it on a shelf' and started to build residential buildings full-time. As we walked me around his home, I saw that he not only put his TV career on a shelf, but he built himself a shelf to hold mementos of that career. (Actually, he built several shelves in his home to showcase the trophies, certificates, photos with famous people, and microphones that he has used.)
To walk around Mykola's house right now is a very different experience from walking around his old apartment. First of all, you can't see the whole place the minute you set foot across the door. Second of all, everything is clean and crisp. The walls are straight. The paint is white. The crumbling hodge-podge of patchwork linoleum floors and flowery wallpaper patterns composed of 'whatever was available at the time' is gone.
Mykola still loves to cook and he has designed his kitchen to make it easy to prepare and to serve food. It's big enough for an eat-in kitchen, and it opens out onto a covered terrace that has a table and chairs. The day I came over, Mykola made some simple dishes for the kids to eat on the lawn, while he and I had a simple pan fried fish steak with fresh green salad on his terrace. All the greens were from his garden. Fresh-picked berries were desert. 
The living room flows from the kitchen. It is interesting in what is *not* in it. There is no table that can double up as a dining room table. There is no single overbearing well-unit that houses books, clothes, sheets, and pillows. It's a room for sitting. There is a working fire place. The windows are large so there is lots of natural light. In the States, it'd be called a 'living room.'
Dima is in elementary school. His room (he has a room!) is also light and airy. The square footage is definitely generous by Manhattan standards. His room has toys, a bed and a desk. My kids figured out how to play with the train sets pretty quickly. Dima is a student at the British International School in the center of Kyiv. He gets a ride there every day. When we visited he skipped his weekly tennis lesson so that he could entertain my daughters. I could have been having a conversation with a neighbor in the West Village.
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