The End of the World

The End of the World

My father used to say this all the time.  As a joke. He had seen the world end once before with his own eyes.  He had been in Buchenwald concentration camp for 4 years during World War II.  There he had seen his friends crucified, hanged, frozen to death. After the war, he had spent 6 years in a refugee camp in Germany, waiting for some country to welcome him and our family in.

And still he joked that the world was ending. Whenever anybody complained about anything, he’d start in joking about how it was the end of the world.

As a kid, if I lost my favorite cats-eye marble or my oldest baseball, I’d get teary-eyed.  And that’s when my dad would start. He would shake his head, put on a pretend frown, and say in Polish, “świat się kończy.”

The world is ending.

What could I do with the sorrow I felt? I shrugged like he did and said the same thing he said, “świat się kończy.”  

I’d say that and move on to the next bit of life I needed to live even if I couldn’t find my favorite marble or that special baseball.

Sometimes while watching the stuff about the coronavirus pandemic on the news, I feel like I’m hearing over and over that our world is ending.  In fact, journalists and commentators and even politicians are actually saying this. They’re saying that the world we now know and live in is coming to an end and it will never ever be the same, not in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our kids and our grandkids.

Is the world ending? 

I don’t know.  

What I do know is that I took a walk this morning with my granddaughter Lulu.  It sure didn’t feel like the world was ending. The spring sun was there, brighter and warmer than it’s been in months, and I heard sparrows and finches chattering about what they were eating.  Up the street, four kids were balancing themselves on a curb and seeing who could walk the longest without falling. A moment later, a mother and her toddler walked past us on the other side of the street.  The mom was holding her daughter’s hand, and her daughter was pointing at some yellow flowers that had just started blooming.  

świat się kończy?

Self-Quarantined

Self-Quarantined

That’s me.  I’m self-quarantined. 

I was pretty much there already given the health problems I’ve had during the last year: three  months of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, the Norovirus, the Epstein Barr virus, “dangerous” blood clots swelling up my legs, and most recently a strep infection.  If you’ve been following my Facebook page, you’ve probably seen my periodic health updates and you’re probably thinking to yourself “when’s he going to stop with this whining?” Let me tell you, my whining isn’t going to stop anytime soon.  Even if I self-quarantine.

Before the strep showed up, I was only going outside a little because of my health concerns.  I’d take the trash out, walk to the cul de sac down the road and back, or take my grandaughter Lulu to the school-bus stop in the morning.  That kind of stuff.  If I was feeling really adventurous, I’d go with my wife Linda to the Kroger Supermarket and help her shop.  I liked getting out whether it was to the supermarket or to the curb where the trash cans were sitting.  I’d run into my neighbors or clerks I knew at the store, and we’d chew the fat for a minute or two.  I love complaining and all these health problems have given me a boat load of complaint topics.

All that has pretty much stopped.  The strep infection is part of it.  It’s scary.  I don’t want it, and I definitely don’t want to spread it around.  But what’s worse of course is the Coronavirus.  My fear of it keeps me in doors like nothing else.  If you look at any CDC list of who is most susceptible to this disease, you’ll find my name is prominently featured on that list.  I’m almost 72 years old, and I’ve got a history of heart failure and auto-immune problems that go way way back. I figure the Coronavirus is just waiting for me to peak out the window.

Every half hour or so, I go to a Coronavirus website and track where the disease is in Virginia where I now live.  Last week, it was only in Fairfax, 169 miles away, but every day it’s crept closer. To Richmond, Spotsylvania, and Harrisonburg.  And just today two cases were confirmed in Charlottesville, just about 60 miles up the road from where I live. 

I figure tomorrow morning when I get up, the Coronavirus will be here in Lynchburg. 

Lynchburg!

I don’t expect this story to have a happy ending — no matter how self-quarantined I am.

My Mother and Her Wheelchair

My mother couldn’t walk for the last five years of her life. She had terrible arthritis in her back, and she couldn’t stand up straight enough to walk or do much of anything.

But my mom got around — somehow — in an old rubber-tired wheelchair that she got from some charitable organization in Sun City, Arizona, where she retired to. She would shuttle around her small apartment in that wheelchair, move from the bedroom to the kitchen, and spin from there to the living. If she had to run an errand to the bank or the supermarket, she’d had a local volunteer service pick her and her wheelchair up in their van and take her where she needed to go. Once there, she would push her wheelchair where she wanted.

Every time I would visit her in Sun City, Arizona, I would always watch a lot of TV with her, and we would see these commercials for electric wheelchairs. Scooters they called them, I think.

I would say, “Mom, you should get one of those things, one of those scooters. It would make your life a whole lot easier. You could go out on the sidewalk and ride up and down the street. You could talk to your neighbors, get some sun. You could even go to church on Sunday mornings. It might take you a while to drive your electric wheelchair there, but you could do it. Imagine church. You haven’t been there in 2 or 3 years because you’re embarrassed by your old, rickety wheelchair, but one of these electric babies would have you smiling and gliding through life.”

She would listen to me going on and on like that about these electric wheelchairs, and she would just shrug.

She was Polish, born in what she called the old world, and she figured that electric-powered wheelchairs were just another modern con job, like that super spiffy can opener the people bought because it was shiny and advertised on TV and had moving parts.

She spent four, long years pushing those cracked and broken rubber wheels of her old-style wheelchair with her hands, and when her hands in that last year of her life got too tired to move her along, she just sat there at her front window, looking down at the street and dreaming about walking.

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This is my latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish Daily in America.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/moja-mama-i-jej-wozek-inwalidzki-my-mom-and-her-wheelchair/
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