Death

When did you start thinking about death? 

Me?

I’ve always been thinking about it.  

When I was a kid, I loved to read novels and history books and watch movies about wars and combat.  My interest probably came to me from my parents.  They had both been slave laborers in Germany during World War II.  My mom didn’t talk much about her experiences and the deaths she saw, but my dad did.  During the 5 years he spent in Buchenwald concentration camp, he saw  friends starved to death, beaten to death, worked to death, and frozen to death. He wasn’t shy about sharing these experiences.  I remember listening to him tell me these stories when I was 6 years old.  

But when I was a kid, these stories about death didn’t bother me.  They were just like the deaths in the movies I loved.  It was different for my dad.  Telling me these stories, he’d often weep. But I didn’t.  Death was just a story to me.  I sat there listening to these stories and trying to picture them just like I watched war movies like All’s Quiet on the Western Front and John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima.  These stories about death and dying were gripping and engaging, but they didn’t touch me emotionally the way my dad was touched by the stories he shared with me about the war. 

And then it all changed.  As I got older and older, death became more than a story someone told me.  Death became something that pressed against me, something that knocked on my door, something that wanted to spend more and more time with me, and not in a good way. Death became death.

I’m really not sure, but I think I started to feel death more as something real when my dad, the person who first told me about death, died.  He was diagnosed with Stage 4 liver cancer and died about two weeks after the diagnosis.  His death was terrible.  He had tremendous pain in his abdomen and his back, and the pain was so bad that it made him groan and try to crawl out of the bed and escape from the hospital.   The doctors gave him morphine to relieve the pain, but it just brought back so many memories of the terrible things he experienced in the war.   Holding his hand, weeping with him, trying to comfort him by singing the songs he loved to sing, I sat there sharing his misery for two weeks until he died. 

Death had never before been real to me.  It had always just been a story people told  to warn you about where life will take you, but it was always just that, a story in a book that you could close whenever you wanted to and just walk away from it.  

Now death started to be something much more than just a story.  Every death I’ve seen since my dad died has brought death closer to me.  I was with my mother when she was dying.  I was with my wife’s Uncle Charlie when he was dying.  I was with my wife’s mother Mabel when she was dying. And  there have been deaths I didn’t see, the deaths of so many of my life-long friends.  

All of those deaths have taught me one thing about death.  

Death is not just a story about misery and grief and loss and suffering you can walk away from.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America. 

DON’T!

 

DON’T!

I went to St. Fidelis, a Catholic grade school in Chicago, for 8 years from 1955 to 1962.  The school was run almost exclusively by nuns.  There was only one non-nun teacher.  Her name was Miss Hardman.  That’s right, Miss Hardman.  All of the kids thought her name was funny because all of the nuns were hard on us. 

The sisters were always telling us what to and what not to do.  They were always telling us not to sin, of course, but there were bunches of other things they were telling us not to do.  They told us not to talk unless you were asked to speak, not to comb your hair in class, not to sit near a girl if you were a boy, not to sit near a boy if you were a girl, not to laugh in class, not to take your eyes of the altar when you were in church, not to turn around and look behind you, not to chew gum in class, not to slouch when you were standing in line, not to lower your hands when you were praying, not to put your hands in your pockets when you were sitting in your seat, not to cry when the sisters spanked you, and never ever get into arguments with other kids in the class.

That was all a long long time ago, but sometimes I feel my world is becoming more and more like the world the sisters felt they needed to control.

Two recent occurrences got me thinking about this.

The first was an article I read from the Harvard Medical School.  It said that we shouldn’t shower daily because doing so affects our health, breaks down our immune system!  I’ve been showering daily probably for 40 years!  I was told for years that keeping the body clean improved my health.  Now I’m being told that’s a lie.

The next thing I read shook me up even more.  I read that drinking any amount of alcohol is bad for you.  I’ve been enjoying a couple of glasses of wine almost every night for 30 some years.  I was encouraged to do so by my doctors and just about everybody else.  They told me that doing so would help me live longer by protecting me from cancer, reducing my chance of heart attacks, and improving my mental health.

Now the World Health Organization is saying that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.” Alcohol is now being classified as a Group 1 carcinogen.  This puts alcohol in the same group of cancer-causing elements as asbestos, radiation, and tobacco.  Alcohol, the WHO says, causes at least seven types of cancer!  Not only does alcohol cause cancer, it also shrinks your brain!

When I read about how showering too much isn’t good for you, I thought I’d cut back on my showering.  No problem.  A shower every other day seemed doable.  However, when I read about how I should stop drinking wine, I was flabbergasted! I love having a couple of glasses of wine every night, but now I’m being told doing so will kill me! 

Reading about that shook me bad, but that wasn’t the end of it!

As I read about not showering and not drinking, I ran into a lot of articles about other things I shouldn’t do.  

What are those other things?

Don’t eat processed food!

Don’t eat late at night!

Don’t spend too much time sitting!

Don’t sleep at the wrong time of the day!

Don’t neglect your relationships with your friends and family members!

Don’t track storms more than four times a day!

Don’t spend too much time watching the news!

Don’t bite your fingernails!

When I came across the article about why I shouldn’t bite my fingernails, I stopped looking for articles about what I shouldn’t do.  I felt that each one was taking me deeper and deeper into the world of the sisters of St. Fidelis back in the 50s and early 60s, and that world was definitely not one I ever wanted to reenter.  

So what am I going to do about all of these people who are telling me what I should be doing?

I’m going to ignore them.

Somehow I’ve made it past my 76th birthday doing all the stuff I like to do.  

Hopefully, I’ll make it through a couple more, even if I bite my fingernails.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

If you want to read more of these columns, I’ve got a book of them available on Amazon!  Check it out.  

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Does Michelle Obama Know Poverty?

 Does Michelle Obama Know Poverty?

I was talking to my friend David yesterday, and he said that Michelle Obama didn’t have any right to talk about poverty and income inequality at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

I was surprised by this and asked him why he thought this.

He laughed and said, “She’s got no right because she owns at least three mansions and a yacht and flies in private jets and helicopters. She’s a millionaire! She’s worth 70 million dollars!”

I laughed right back at him and said I had money too, not a lot like Michelle Obama but still some, and I think you can be a millionaire and still know a lot about poverty.

I know about poverty because I grew up in Chicago as a refugee after World War II. We came to America with nothing but a suitcase that my dad made of boards he took from a wall in Buchenwald concentration camp, the camp he spent 5 years at as a prisoner of the Nazis. When we came to Chicago, we lived for a while in a shed behind a tavern. Then we moved into a 4 room apartment with 3 other families. We didn’t have beds. We slept on the floor. My father worked double shifts in a factory to make some money. My mom worked in a factory too.

How did I get to be worth as much as I’m worth? I went to college and then grad school and then spent a lifetime teaching, and I married a woman who did the same.

Michelle Obama photo by Peter Serocki

Does Michelle Obama know poverty?

Probably not as well as I do, but I bet she knows it.

She grew up in Chicago where her dad was a city water plant worker and her mom was a secretary before she had her children. Michelle’s parents were working-class people living in a lower middle-class area on the southside that was predominantly black.

And growing up on the southside of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, Michelle Obama saw poverty. It was impossible to miss back then, just as it’s impossible to miss even now if you live in certain areas of Chicago. She saw crime, she saw limited job opportunities, she saw limited access to health care and education, she saw poor housing conditions.

She was fortunate to be able to work her way out of this world, but even when you work your way out of it, you never forget it.

It’s always there in your memory.

So when a Trump supporting friend tells me that Michelle Obama has no right to talk about poverty and income inequality, I have to wonder why my friend doesn’t know more about her and also doesn’t know more about Trump, a millionaire from birth who’s never experienced any kind of poverty.

Trump is the guy we ought to be questioning.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

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Trump Shooting and the United States of Violence

Trump Shooting and the United States of Violence

Last Saturday afternoon, my wife’s mom called us up.  

She’s 99 years old, and she’s lived through a lot of bad stuff, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.   She remembers a lot of other bad stuff.  She remembers what she was doing when John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated.  She even remembers when someone tried to assassinate Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and Gerald Ford (twice) and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

She was calling us up because she knew what bad stuff, really bad stuff, was like, and she wanted to tell us that someone had tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. 

I don’t know if she’s a Trump supporter or not.  She doesn’t like to talk about politics and presidents and their policies.  She feels that that kind of stuff should remain private.  Talking about it, especially when you’re talking about it with people who may disagree with you, she feels is just something that is best avoided.

She was calling to tell us about the shooting, not to talk about whether she will vote for Biden or vote for Trump.

She knew that a bad, bad thing had happened and that, if we didn’t know it had happened, we would want to know.

She was right.

My wife Linda and I had seen a lot of bad things happen in America too, and we wanted to know about this one.  We turned on the news and started watching.

The shooting itself didn’t surprise me.  On March 23, 2024, I wrote a column for the Dziennik Związkowy entitled “Bloodbath” about the rhetoric of violence in this election.  The column began by talking about something Trump said at a rally in Ohio: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” 

That quote and similar violent quotes from Trump over the years suggest to me that he understands America, understands America probably better than Joe Biden.

After the attempt to assassinate Trump, Joe Biden appeared on TV and made a statement. He said, “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick.”

The statement from Biden suggests that he doesn’t understand what America is.  My wife’s 99 year-old mother seems to understand America better.  If you ask her, she’ll tell you that the United States is a land of violence.  

I started this column talking about the violence aimed at political figures here in the United States, but the violence, of course, doesn’t stop there.

According to a 2022 study, 7 of the 50 most violent cities in the world with the highest number of homicides are in the United States: New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.

And the violence goes on.  In 2023, there were 346 school shootings in the US, the highest number since 1966.  That same year 43,163 people died in the US from gun-related injuries. And according to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 290 mass shootings have occurred in the US so far this year in the US.  More than 300 people have died in these mass shootings and 1,275 people have been injured.  

Yes, Biden is right.  The violence here is “sick.” In fact, I would say that there’s a plague of violence here, and it’s been here for a long time, and it just seems to be getting worse and worse.

How are we going to stop it?  

Biden can’t tell you, and neither can Trump.  No president can stop this violence.

As my wife’s mother likes to say, America is the United States of Violence.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

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My Books

I saw an article this morning about the ten things that guys like to collect.  It was an interesting list because – for the most part – it was stuff I never considered collecting.  Here’s the list: Sports cards, coins, tools, knives, stamps, alcohol, car miniatures, figurines (stuff like action figures and pop icons), watches, and vinyl records.  

Some of these things I did collect for short periods in my life.  When I was a kid back in the 50s, I collected baseball cards one summer.  I also collected pennies for a while.  I tried to get one example of every penny minted between 1900 and 1962.  I was pretty successful.  I think I tracked down about 99 of the 150 different pennies minted in the US during those years.  I don’t know what happened to my baseball cards and the pennies.  Probably my mom swept them out of the house with a lot of the other stuff I dragged in.  

What I really love collecting are books! I’m 76 this year, and I’ve probably been collecting books for 69 years.  I’ve still got comic books I bought at Mandel’s soda shop and toy store on the corner of Potomac and Washtenaw back in 1957.  And those aren’t the only books I’ve still got.  

In my early teens, I became a crazy fan of science fiction novels, reading a sci fi book every couple of days, and then a little later I became a crazy fan of hard-boiled detective novels by writers like Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald, and then I became a crazier fan of the Beat writers like Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and then I became a crazy fan of crazy postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, and then I became the biggest fan of great Polish writers like Milosz and Sienkiewicz and Szymborska and Isaac Bashevis Singer and so many others.

I not only read these authors I collected their books!

At one point, I had more than 4,000 books.

Some of these books I’ve been hauling around for almost 70 years.  I’ve still got books I bought in my teens and twenties at the Maxwell Street flea market, at dumpy book stores that were here today and gone tomorrow, at down and out second-hand stores in Chicago run by failed rabbis and fired university professors.  

Since I left Chicago in 1975 to go to graduate school in Indiana, I've hauled these books to 20 different apartments and houses my wife Linda and I have lived in.  I’ve hauled the books from Chicago to Lafayette, Indiana, to Normal, Illinois, to Charleston, Illinois, to Mobile, Alabama, to Peoria, Illinois, then back to Charleston, Illinois, and from there to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Valdosta, Georgia to Danville, Virginia, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia.  

Let me tell you, moving these books wasn’t ever easy.  One time when we moved from Mobile to Peoria we decided it was cheaper to mail the boxes of books rather than to rent a U-Haul truck that the 133 boxes of book would fit in.  This was back in the late 1980s and shipping a box of books cost about a buck fifty. 

At one point, just before we moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my wife Linda got a job as the director of the writing program at Western Kentucky University, she persuaded me to start downsizing my collection of books.  

I hated to do it, but I did it anyway.  At least a little.  

And what did I do with the books?

I gave a lot of my books to my students.  Every two or three days, I would fill a couple of boxes with books that I figured I would never read or need again, and I placed the books outside my office door.  By the next day, the boxes were empty.  I also gave boxes and boxes of the books by Polish writers along with the  academic journals I had collected over the years to my university library.   At one point, I even sold some of the rarer books on Amazon and Ebay. 

Despite all of this, I still have too many books today, enough to fill 8, 6-foot tall bookcases. I’ve dropped from 133 boxes of books down to about 30.  

Mostly, the books I have left are the ones that meant the most to me, the books by authors who reflected who I was and shaped who I have become.   And I walk past these books every day, and I stop and sit in the room the bookcases are in, and I read a chapter or two from one of the books that have shaped me and remember how important these books are to me,  and I wonder what will happen to them when I’m gone.  

I know my wife and my daughter and granddaughter know how much these books mean to me, but I also know keeping them and cherishing them because of how they shaped me so many years ago isn’t going to happen.  Perhaps my wife and my daughter and granddaughter will each take a book or two, but the rest will go where old books go.

To libraries or garage sales or Goodwill industries.

MURDERTOWN

Last week, I received some great news.  My third Hank and Marvin mystery novel was finally published and became available in bookstores and on Amazon.  This made me very happy because I love writing the Hank and Marvin novels.

Why do I love writing this mystery series set in a Polish American neighborhood in Chicago?

The answer is easy.

I taught creative writing at Eastern Illinois University for almost 30 years, and when I taught it, I always told my students that the first and principle requirement of all good writing is that what the student writes has to be important to him.  It has to be so personal that every word the writer writes is a word that means something to him.

I feel this way about the Hank and Marvin mysteries.  I don’t appear in these mysteries, but pieces of my life do.  The houses we lived in appear in the novels, the stores and restaurants I grew up around appear in them, my school and my parish and the park I loved playing in all appear in the novels, and my friends and neighbors and family members (even my mom and dad) appear in the novels.  Writing these novels is like visiting the past, like a vacation in the world I lived in in  my teens.

But mystery novels are more than just a vacation in the world I lived in in my teens.  There’s got to be something to those novels, some crimes at the center of those novels, and crimes there are, plenty of them, and they’re crimes I knew as I was growing up in my Polish-American neighborhood in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Let me give you a few examples.  

The first Hank and Marvin mystery is entitled Suitcase Charlie, and it’s about the fear I felt as an 8 year old because of some murders that happened in Chicago.  Three young boys were coming home from the movies when they were kidnapped and murdered.  Their bodies were found naked and dumped in a ditch.  The murderer who did this wasn’t captured until decades later. The fear I felt of someone doing this to me or my friends is central to Suitcase Charlie, a novel about a series of brutally murdered children showing up in suitcases on street corners in Chicago.

The crime that’s at the heart of Little Altar Boy is also one that’s central to my life.  The novel deals with a pedophile priest in a Polish-American parish near Humboldt Park and a series of crimes that develop around him.  Much of the novel takes place in and around St. Fidelis Parish, my parish for a long long time. It had two priests who were pedophiles, sexually abusing children in my grade school.  I didn’t know this at the time.  I found out years later when one of my friends told me about how he was abused by one of the priests.  When he told me this, I started writing the novel.

Murdertown, the most recent of my mysteries, is probably the most personal.  My family lived east of Humboldt Park for more than two decades.  We loved the area.  The park was always beautiful, and the neighborhood was a community that always spoke to us.  It was full of Polish-Americans like us, people who survived the concentration and slave labor camps in Germany and came to Chicago after spending years in the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany.  When my dad went down Wasthenaw for a beer, he knew he’d see people who had struggled for years to survive the camps.  When my mom went shopping on Division Street, she always ran into women in the bakeries and butcher shops who, like her, had seen their families killed by the Germans.

We loved the neighborhood and then something happened that made that love impossible.  Gangs moved into the neighborhood, and the crime rate exploded.  I saw friends beaten so often that going outside the house was considered dangerous, but that wasn’t the  worst of it.  There were also murders.  A grade-school friend of mine was murdered, one of the tenants in our apartment building was murdered, one of my parents’ oldest friends was murdered in a bar on Division Street.

Then houses in the neighborhood started being set on fire.  The house my parents loved and lived in for 17 years was burned down completely.  The houses on either side of our house – houses my friends lived in – were also destroyed by fire.

The search for who caused all of this violence and chaos and brutality is at the center of my novel Murdertown.

Like I said earlier, writing these novels is like taking a vacation into the past, but sometimes even the best vacations have their dark moments. 

FIRST AMAZON REVIEW OF MURDERTOWN

First Amazon Review of Murdertown -- the 3rd Hank and Marvin mystery 

Review of my novel is by David Rabin, award winning mystery novelists

5 STARS -- A Lyrically Written, Absorbing, and Deeply Affecting Police Procedural

In 1975 Chicago, police detectives Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz are up to their ears in homicides in the rapidly deteriorating neighborhood of Humboldt Park—a small-time gangster, a child walking home from a grocery store, an elderly Polish war hero and many more. Are these murders random? Or are they connected by some inexplicable motive? In this third installment of the Hank and Marvin series, Guzlowski paints a vivid picture of urban decay, political machinations, and the efforts of decent people to carry on amid the senseless violence surrounding them.

The investigation of the crimes will keep you quickly turning the pages, but it’s only part of the story. This book transcends the events that propel the plot by showing us how the crimes affect the people who investigate them. Guzlowski takes us into the psyches of Hank and Marvin, who, after three decades of police work, are struggling to retain their humanity and empathy despite the understandable urge to surrender entirely to cynicism. Every day brings additional reinforcement of the knowledge that brutal crimes will plague innocent people no matter how hard and long the detectives work, and the central theme of the book is why they continue in the face of futility. Guzlowski ultimately answers this question with a metaphor that gives us hope for humanity.

Amazon Link