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Earlier this summer I was visited by a young Latvian-American man who was about to graduate from West Point. Graduating from West Point is an exclusive and prestigious accomplishment for any American, but it is especially rare for a Latvian.

It would be much easier to choose fanfares and polished tones, but this time I don't want to. This time I don't want to speak in a pathetic, elevated and patriotic tone; I also don't want to preach. But I can invite you simply and directly, without any qualms or excessive pleading, to spend the 13th of September usefully, cleaning up your country.

Do we even need a clean and green country? One can get the most varied responses to that question on the autumn of Latvia's 90th Anniversary. Some think: Let those who mess up the fields, forest roadsides and riverbanks clean them up. Others consider that only the government and the councils should deal with this and that the honest citizen shouldn't have to be involved in it.

So, in my previous blog I already mentioned the name of Kalupe's boarding school director, Alexander Gorodinsky. One of the many Latvian orphanages was hiding in the 80's in Kalupe under the innocent name of a boarding school. Having come there for the first time during Poetry Days I opened a completely new world for myself - orphans with living parents. Children, whose mothers and fathers were denied parental rights due to their immoral ways of living. Society knew nothing at all about them since in the press, on radio and television official authorities assured us that Soviet children were the happiest children in the world. And all of a sudden I find out that fifteen orphan first grader girls have only two dols in their bedrooms, so they have to take turns sleeping with a doll...

In Latvian, the word saimnieks has multiple meanings. Saimnieks - is both an owner and a man who is responsible for his land, a hardworking and loyal worker, who can be trusted. It is a very honorable title that has to be earned. Only hardworking and honest people with an open heart can be called by this wonderful name - Saimnieks! The right intonation is important when pronouncing this word, because it is not meant for everybody.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have been known as the Baltic States for 90 years. Each of our countries has a language, culture and history of its own, yet in the world at large we are usually grouped together. We have ourselves to blame for that, because we tend to experience major historical events around the same time. We all founded our republics in 1918, we were occupied by the Soviets in 1940, restored our independence in 1991 and joined NATO and the EU in 2004. In headlines announcing all these events, we were always identified as the Baltic States, and only later as separate countries.

For decades September in Latvia in my mind has associated with Poetry days. During the Soviet time, when any meetings or demonstrations were prohibited, except for the "voluntary mandatory" marches of May 1st and November 7th, Poetry days served as rehearsals and the messengers of the mass manifestations which in the end of the 80's were held by the People's Front. Of course, travelling to meet audiences in the far corners of Latvia in the seventies, writers did not think of any such People's Front. In the overcrowded halls or on open-air stages they simply read their works, among them those ones that due to censorship concerns careful newspaper or magazine editors did not accept for publication, but ones that people listened to attentively, learning the ABC's of Aesop language and thankfully drowning authors in piles of autumn flowers.

Traditionally when we celebrate a nation's birthday we look back at all the people who helped create it, protect it and preserve it. For Latvia, that's a lot of people in the last 90 years.

September, 1st is not far away. In the lives of each one of us this day at some point became the threshold, where a certain period of childhood ended and a new school life began. I personally got to start first grade in an all-girls school in the far-away 1952. Yes, as strange as it may sound today there existed an all-girls school in Rīga during the post-war years. Actually, this elite school exists today, too, under the same Nr 10, but for fifty plus years girls and boys study there together. But in the far-away 1952 the school was practically a noble ladies school and I got in through sheer circumstances - since this was the area of town where I was registered as living.

There was a time when the world's most popular board game, Monopoly, was banned in Latvia. I don't know if the Soviets actually had a law that made this classic capitalist game taboo, but you couldn't buy it in stores. Like rock and roll records, foreign books and TIME magazine, Monopoly was a hot commodity in the black market, and a popular item to be smuggled in by relatives visiting from the decadent West. Really enterprising Latvians made the game themselves out of pieces of cardboard, drew their own board and cards, and gave all the properties Latvian names. On weekends Monopoly ‘dissidents' would secretly gather in dimly lit apartments and clandestinely engage in the subversive activity of buying and selling American-named properties like New York Ave. and Marvin Gardens..