Another man came to the first class, then came back a second time and wordlessly handed my dad an enormous American flag. He had folded it, as if to honor my dad for a great service. My dad still has it. “I kind of cherish it,” he told me.

A week into the semester, the dilettantes would largely be shaken off, and my dad would be left with a far smaller, core group, many of whom had been sent to his class by their church mission-trip organizers or by globalization-minded employers. When you’re weird, people might be drawn to you out of curiosity. But there’s a point at which curiosity is no match for Russian’s six different noun forms.

Word of our ethnic origins spread through Sunday potlucks and Super Bowl parties. Midland was a God-loving oil town, and the locals were increasingly interested in forming bonds with resource-rich and Jesus-poor Russia. Local tycoons began hiring my dad as a sort of cultural attaché. His job on many of these gigs was not just to translate the dialogue of business deals and conversion missions, but to serve as a mediator, a kind of Slavic Boutros Boutros-Ghali. It fell to him to explain the ways of these historically godless, frequently intoxicated, newly entrepreneurial former Communists to the Midlanders, who were just their opposite in every way.

One day, an oil man named Bobby asked my dad to translate for a group of visiting Russian businessmen, to whom Bobby was trying to sell some equipment. (My dad calls Bobby a “big-jawed Anglo,” which I think just means he wasn’t Jewish.)

Bobby offered my dad a hundred dollars for the day, which my dad thought was going to be the easiest money he ever made. When my dad walked into the Russians-and-Bobby summit, Bobby was presiding before the room, his large mandible hovering over some blueprints that were spread across the conference table. The Russians sat around it, morose, or perhaps just hungover—it was hard to tell which. Bobby began whipping his index finger around the blueprint and firing a stream of equipment terms at them—words like “scrubber” and “pump” and “valve.” My dad, who trained as an electrical engineer and had never encountered such words before in either language, started translating them for the Russians the only way he knew how: in English but with an exaggerated Russian accent.

After two hours, my dad was drenched in sweat and the Russians had still not cracked a smile. Bobby said that next, they would all be going to Outback Steakhouse because he wanted to show them a real nice time.

The Russians anticipated a celebratory beez-ness lunch punctuated by brimming cups of vodka. This was not, alas, the scene at the Outback Steakhouse in Midland. The Russians’ faces deflated once again.