Our First Christmases after the War

 Our First Christmases after the

We had Christmas in the refugee camps in Germany after the war.  I don’t remember them, of course.  I was just a baby and a toddler then.  But we had Christmas.  I know because somewhere my parents found someone who had a camera, and they took pictures of our Christmases in the camps.  In one of them, I’m a naked baby, lying on my tummy underneath a ragged Christmas tree and smiling a big beautiful baby smile. The following year, my parents took a photo of my sister Danusha and me sitting in front of a tree holding what looks like a rubber ball.  In the last photo I have from that time, I’m sitting on a rocking horse my dad made for me on my third Christmas.  I’m looking very very pleased.

My fourth Christmas wasn’t as happy.  It took place on a farm outside of Buffalo, New York, where my parents were working to pay off their passage to America from the refugee camps.  There’s not much I remember about that Christmas, only the cold and the snow and my mother’s complaints about both of them.  She hated the cold.  It reminded her of the winters in Germany during the war when she was a slave laborer.  She said that their winters broke the souls of old people and left children frozen like wheat stalks in the fields, hollow reeds that the winds and ice blew through.  The cold in Buffalo was just as bad, she said.  She talked about the wooden shoes she wore in the work camps in Germany and how cold the frozen ground was on her skin as she dug for beets. She knew nothing about America but thought that maybe farther west in Chicago there wouldn’t be so much snow.

She was wrong about the snow in Chicago.  That first winter in Chicago, I remember standing on a street corner on Milwaukee Avenue with my father.  We watched cars struggling in the street to get around a green bus that was sunk into white hill as tall as a cow.  

But the snow and cold in Chicago really didn’t matter that much because my parents found Polish friends there who we could celebrate Christmas with just as they did in Poland.  I remember that first Christmas in Chicago.  We were living in a small apartment near the Congress Theater on Christmas Eve, and my parents were preparing us for bed when they heard a knock on the door.  My father opened it and laughed and shouted to my sister Danusha and me to come quickly. There was someone there to see us.  

We ran to the door and there was a big man with a white beard and a fat belly and a red stocking cap on his head, and across his shoulder and down his back was an enormous blue bag filled with presents.  

And that wasn’t all.

Behind him were laughing children and their smiling parents carrying pots and bowls of food and a dish with oplatek on it.

Somehow Poland had found us in America.

—

This was my column this week in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/nasze-pierwsze-swieta-w-ameryce-our-first-christmases-in-america/

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My Life After the Pandemic

 My Life after the Pandemic

This morning, I was sitting around watching the news shows, and all the news about the pandemic was bad, really bad. The scientists — who I trust although I know many don’t — were talking about how this COVID pandemic was just going to get worse in the next couple of months. They also said that probably the pandemic was going to be around with us for at least another year, maybe two.

It got me thinking about all the things I miss and all the things I would love to be doing if I didn’t have to stay quarantined in my house and practicing social distancing, and I suddenly had a dream, a vision you might call it, of what my first day of non-pandemic life would be like.

And here’s what that vision looked like.

After living with the pandemic since March of 2020, I woke up on the first post-pandemic morning and started singing and dancing and visiting the people I loved and the people I hated.

And then I ate enormous meals at three of my favorite restaurants and paid all the waiters and waitresses in kisses and paid the chefs in gold, and I hugged all the folks who were eating and asked them all to dance the bossa nova with me.

And then I went back home just for a minute and ate and drank and smoked and laughed and kept holy the Lord’s Day all in the same breath even though it wasn’t Sunday, and then I hopped on a subway and whistled at every single stop for no reason whatsoever.

And then I found some kid’s blue angelic tricycle right there in the street, and I rode it like I was riding to glory because I was, and I even stopped at one point to pick up a newspaper lying there in the street telling me the pandemic was over at last, and I tore it up and threw its little-bitty pieces into the street and into the wind.

And then I went to a Super Walmart and pretended to sell magic sparrows to all the people walking and dancing through the store that they had been dreaming about like me for so so long.

And then I put on my best strawberry-colored hat and wandered through midday downtown Chicago humming “the St. Louis blues” and passing out bouquets of flowers to everyone wandering the street with me.

And finally, I turned to the big old sun smiling down at me and everyone else and said, “Honey I’m yours.”

—

This piece originally appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.  

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/moje-zycie-po-pandemii/

Election Year?

 Election Year?

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but this is an election year, a presidential election year. I post a lot on Facebook and Twitter about the election, and I get a lot of responses. All of them are adamant. The Biden supports are trashing Trump, and the Trump supporters are trashing Biden. This has been going on for about 4 years, and I expect it to go on for another four years, regardless of who wins.

For me, one of the interesting things about this whole Trash Fest is that when I was growing up I heard almost nothing about politics and elections.

My parents were largely uninterested in politics. They came over to America after World War II as Polish refugees, Displaced Persons. And as refugees, they took as much interest in American politics as they did in American sports or comic books. My mom and dad, like a lot of the DPs in my neighborhood, were too busy trying to figure out how to survive in this new world to put much time into reading up about Republicans or Democrats.

Don’t get me wrong. My parents knew there were elections and who the candidates were, and sometimes they even voiced an opinion. They liked Eisenhower a lot because he was the general who led the army that freed them from the German concentration and slave labor camps. They also liked John F. Kennedy because he was a Catholic, and that was something they shared with him. But other than that, my mom and dad weren’t interested in politics. I remember asking my dad once why he didn’t apply for US citizenship. He looked at me like I was a nutcase, and he said, “I was born a Polish citizen, and I will die a Polish citizen.” My mom, on the other hand, was a little more flexible about her politics. After I became a naturalized citizen in 1967, she asked me to help her become one too. I reminded her of what my dad was always saying about being born Polish and staying Polish, and I then asked her why she wanted to become a US citizen. She shrugged and just said, “I’ve been in this country for 19 years, and it’s time I become a citizen.”

I’m not sure why she ever became a citizen. She never took an interest in politics after she was naturalized. I remember asking her who she was going to vote for in local elections and in the national elections, and she’d just shrug again and say, “I’ll decide the day I go to the polling place.”

Me and politics?

I’m just the opposite of my parents. After being naturalized in 1967, I’ve voted in every single election I could. I not only voted, I also tried to encourage other people to vote. I’ve volunteered to work on voting phone banks, and I’ve gone door to door reminding people to vote, and I’ve stood outside supermarkets and walmarts handing out leaflets.

I feel it’s the absolute responsibility of every citizen to vote. As Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson once suggested, we should all vote early and often.

—

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

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/rok-wyborow/

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August 14, 2020 — 134th Day in Quarantine

August 14, 2020 — 134th Day in Quarantine 

It’s been raining for about 80 days.  I look out my window and see the gray wetness on the street, on the leaves on the trees, on my car sitting parked in the driveway.  The sky is gray too.  The only blue I see is in the shirt I wear most days and the cup I put my coffee in.  It’s summer and soon it will be fall, but all I can do is sit here waiting for the rain to stop falling.  I can’t mow, can’t walk in my garden, can’t sit on the back porch and drink wine.  The sun has left and gone to some other part of the solar system.  

My 11-year-old granddaughter Lulu who lives with us is tired of the rain too.  She’s built herself a fortress in the rec room downstairs out of some old card tables and blankets.  Days, she sits in her fortress and plays with her stuffed animals or reads to them from a Harry Potter book.  Nights, she tries to sleep down there.  She’s put a sleeping bag on the floor of the rec room and lies down. Lying there, she can hear the rain falling outside.  A lot of nights, it keeps her awake. She pulls her stuffed animals closer and prays for it to stop.  It doesn’t. 

My daughter Lillian, her mom, pretends she doesn’t hear the rain.  Most days and evenings, she’s on her computer, zooming with the people she works with.  They talk about the work they have to do now because the rain is falling and falling. Like my daughter, they pretend they don’t hear the rain either, but I know they do.  I can see it in the way they lean into their laptops for their zooms.  Sometimes, my daughter or one of her co-workers will laugh about something, but I know they’re just laughing to cover up the sound of the rain falling against the windows.

My wife Linda hears the rain too.  She knows it’s been falling for as long as it’s been falling, but she’s not like me.  She thinks it will stop falling someday.  Maybe not soon, but someday.  Someday it will stop.  She’s planning for that day.  She sits in her easy chair with her laptop looking for vacations to the beaches in Virginia and North Carolina, cruises to the Bahamas, and weekends in New York City. She’s waiting for the day the rain stops, and she can drive up to Connecticut to bring her parents back here to visit.  She knows the rain has been falling there too.

—- 

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/uncategorized/14-sierpnia-2020-roku-134-dzien-kwarantanny-august-14-2020-134th-day-in-quarantine/

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Great News!

The New York Times reviewed my new mystery Little Altar Boy, the 2nd Hank and Marvin mystery, and they liked it!

Here’s what reviewer Marilyn Stasio says,

STABBED IN THE CONVENT

In his novels, John Guzlowski — the son of Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany — reimagines the 1950s Chicago neighborhood he was raised in, a place shaped by immigrants and strivers. LITTLE ALTAR BOY (Kasva Press, 323 pp., paper, $14.95) once again features Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz, the two veteran cops whom we met in “Suitcase Charlie” and are happy to see again.

This time out Guzlowski is taking on pedophilia among the clergy, and it’s not pretty. Sister Mary Philomena, a nun at St. Fidelis Parish, shows up at Purcell’s home one snowy winter night. “I need your help,” she tells him. “There’s something terrible happening. I saw it today … and it stopped me like a death.” What she witnessed was a priest molesting an altar boy, a terrified sixth grader.

A few days later, the nun is found stabbed to death in the cellar of the convent. In the classic procedural that follows, the cops choke down their own cynicism (“People don’t take that kind of accusation against priests seriously. Never have, never will”) to investigate a crime that officially doesn’t exist.

____

The book is available at Amazon as a Kindle or a paperback. Just click here.

The Neighborhood Division: Stories by Jeff Vande Zande

The Neighborhood Division: Stories by Jeff Vande Zande is the best book of fiction I’ve read in a long long time.  

 

I’ve been a serious reader of novels and short story collection for pretty much my entire adult life (55 years at least) but I haven’t read a book as good as this one in probably about 5 years, not since Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.

 

Vande Zande’s got what Donna Tartt’s got, an incredible sense of language, an ability to understand people, and a gift for creative narrative.  In each of the stories in this volume, Vande Zande writes of people facing real problems that separate them from the people in their communities.  In an early story called "The Long Run," for instance, he writes of a person lost while running in a new neighborhood.  His simple story of being lost quickly evolves into a metaphor for his relationship to his wife and his father and the person the main character understands or doesn’t understand himself to be.  Every other story in this collection is just as strong, just as satisfying.

 

I found this collection especially important in this time of pandemic because so many of the stories deal with isolation, real isolation and psychological isolation, and people trying to understand how they can make sense of the lives they are no longer connected to.  Reading the book was like getting live reports from the pandemic world around me.

 

Jeff Vande Zande is one great writer, and I’m going to read another of his books tomorrow.

 

Here's a piece of the story "The Long Run" that I mentioned earlier:

 

He kept running.

 

A block ahead, an old man turned out of a driveway toward him, moving meticulously behind a walking stick. Andy stopped a few feet in front of him.

“Do you know where this road goes?” he asked, pointing. The old man turned and looked down the street. “Well--”

“I’m just wondering if there’s a back way into the Alpine neighborhood.”

 

The man turned back toward Andy. He put both hands on his stick and leaned. “Which Alpine?”

“Terrace.”

 

He looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure where that one--”

 

The sweat on Andy’s upper lip began to cool. “It’s where the old boy scout camp used to

 

be.”

 

The old man smiled. “Okay. I know where you mean, now. I was a part of that camp when I was a kid.” His forehead furrowed. “There’s a back way, but you gotta know your way around. Better off just sticking to--”

 

 

Andy told him that he wanted to make a circle so he didn’t have to backtrack. “You said there’s a way?”

“There’s a way.” He turned again and pointed into the distance. “Just stay on Third. It’s going to twist you through some neighborhoods, but you’ll come out on Lee. Take a right on Lee and go past East Ridge. When you come to West Ridge, turn in there and follow it around to Maltby. Take Maltby to Hamburg and that should get you there, but--”

“Lee to West Ridge, West Ridge to Maltby and Maltby to Hamburg,” Andy recited.

 

The old man nodded, dabbing his fingertips at the snow in his eyebrows. “What do you think of our April weather?”

Andy launched back into his run. “It’s not too bad,” he called back over his shoulder.

 

He guessed that the houses along Third represented the older part of the town – what it used to be before all of the Alpine Terraces, Vistas, Ridges, and Views began to spring up. The homes around him were small, neat, and not separated by acres of lawn. A few men were on a roof pitching shingles into a dumpster in the driveway. A plastic Santa Claus was still tied to the chimney.

Andy’s sweat held a skin of warmth around him. The cold and snow in the air did nothing. Starting to climb a hill at the end of Third, he checked his watch. Twenty minutes. His thighs burned against the hill’s incline. He clapped his hands a few times, encouraging himself. “Come on,” he whispered, smiling.

Just past the crest of the hill the road came to a T intersection. Must be Lee, he thought, but the sign had too many letters. The words came into focus. Meadow Valley Lane.

 

 

Andy stopped and caught his breath. Meadow Valley Lane curved to the right on his left and curved to the left on his right. It was flanked in both directions by newer builds that had probably gone up within the last five years.

Where was Lee? Andy shivered. He’d stood still too long. Turning to the right, he started running again.

______

 

Here's a link to the Amazon site about The Neighborhood Division.  Just click here. 

Life in the Pandemic

My pandemic poem Life in the Pandemic appears in New Verse News, a great online journal of poems about the news.

Life in the Pandemic

Things are slowing down.

It takes me 2 days to drink a cup of coffee,
A week to read a book,
A month to water the bushes we re-planted in June.

I move from one room to another
looking for shoes I haven’t worn in 2 months.
If I come across my car keys
I won’t recognize them.

I’ve stopped listening to the news
Stopped looking out the window
Stopped wondering what tomorrow
Will be like.

I started this poem in March
Maybe I’ll finish it
By Christmas.

https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2020/07/life-in-pandemic.html

Review of Little Altar Boy from Crime Fiction Lovers

John Guzlowski’s riveting new police procedural takes you back to the time before sustained pressure on the Catholic Church brought to light its widespread and systemic problem of child sexual abuse. The victims’ quest for justice has taken years to play out and is ongoing, paralleled by revelations about how powerful men (mostly) continue to take sexual and psychological advantage of those on the wrong side of the power differential.

It’s the late 1960s, in the post-Christmas dark night of winter, and Chicago police detective Hank Purcell is at home, waiting for his 19-year-old daughter Margaret to appear. She has new friends, new habits and new attitudes, none of which make him happy. He thinks she’s doing drugs – smoking marijuana and maybe more. His vigil is interrupted by a rare visit from Sister Mary Philomena, a nun who’d helped him with a case some 10 years before. Short, plump, formidable. She’s a grade six teacher at the local Catholic School, Saint Fidelis – an ironic name there – and she’s troubled.

She tells him she’s seen the parish’s popular young priest, Father Bachleda, with an altar boy, appearing to fiddle with his pants. Whatever, it isn’t right. She doesn’t want Hank to make an arrest, just give a warning. When he finds out about the nun’s visit, Hank’s partner, Marvin Bondarowicz, would prefer to string Father Bachleda up, no questions asked, but Hank had promised the nun a warning only, which he and Marvin deliver. A day or two later, Sister Mary Philomena has been brutally murdered, with even worse to come.

Author John Guzlowski does an excellent job describing how Hank and Marvin move forward on the case, navigating all its ramifications, personal and political. These actions are balanced with their attempts to locate Hank’s daughter, Margaret, who has gone missing. It appears she has hooked up with exactly the kind of people Hank spends his life trying to take off the streets. Any parent will understand the helplessness and desperation Hank and his wife Hazel feel as Margaret slips inexorably from their grasp. Hazel counsels understanding, but Hank has seen the results of this downward slide too many times to take the warning signs lightly.

Hank and Marvin have been partners for many years and, in any situation, the relationship between them settles into established grooves. Both suffer the PTSD-like effects of their military service and their years in the Chicago Police Department. Marvin drinks on the job and tends to be violent, and Hank isn’t a by-the-book cop either. Their relationship is believable and nuanced and, at times, humourous. They aren’t surprised when the powers-that-be try to put a lid on their investigation.

The pair are trying to resolve not one, but two compelling dilemmas: they’re clearly outraged by the evidence of child abuse among the clergy, but, while they’re trying to save the world’s altar boys, what about Hank’s own child, beset by a whole different class of predator? Hank’s wife Hazel is a useful foil for the two detectives, pressing for handling Margaret’s situation differently. But it seems there are no right answers; each course of action threatens consequences more chilling than the wind blasting off Lake Michigan.

Guzlowski is an award-winning author who has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes and five Pushcart literary prizes for work published in small presses. No surprise, then, that the writing of this book is especially fine. First, there’s the grounding in real events. (In a Q&A provided by the book publicist, Guzlowski says, “In my parish when I was a child, there were five priests. Three were pedophiles.”) He arrived in the United States in 1951, the son of Polish slave labourers in Nazi Germany. They relocated to Chicago, and his evocation of the city, which long clung to its strong ethnic neighborhoods, is spot-on.

Little Altar Boy is a book that never takes the easy way out, and Guzlowski doesn’t arrange events for a tidy, Hollywood-style ending. Instead, what he writes is true to his characters in a way that will draw you in, tight.

Happy Birthday to Me

Happy Birthday to Me

There's an old cliche that I hear more and more as I grow older. Supposedly it started with the American actress Bette Davis, but I'm pretty sure the cliche was around long before that. People are always telling me that "Growing old ain't for sissies."

Like with most cliches, there's definitely some truth to it.

I remember the first time I became aware of what it must be like being old. I was twelve years old. My parents had invited a friend of theirs over for dinner. My mom and dad had known this guy ever since we came to America as DPs after the war. He was our neighbor, a Polish American who emigrated here just before the First World War. The night I remember when I first became aware of old age, he was in his late 60s, and after dinner he and my parents were sitting in the living room talking about old times. At some point, he excused himself and tried to stand up to go to the bathroom, but he couldn't stand up. His knees for some reason had given out, and he needed a hand from my dad and me to help him out of his chair.

I couldn't believe it. I had known this guy for years, and he always struck me as a bull of a man, large and strong and tough. In fact in his early twenties he had been a boxer, a fighter. He loved to talk about the fights he fought, the punishment to his body he overcame over and over. And suddenly, there he was, sitting in an easy chair in our living room and struggling to lift himself up.

I remember afterwards asking my dad why his friend couldn't stand up, and I remember my dad saying in Polish, "That's what happens when you get old."

I've just turned 72, and I'm beginning at last to understand what my dad meant.

My left knee is busted. My hearing aids hear more than I do. My blurry eyes can't focus. My feet are floppy. My heart is ruined. My sex drive only runs in reverse. My sense of balance is unbalanced. My sleep is broken up every night by 3 or 4 toilet trips. My voice goes in and out. My memory doesn't remember yesterday. My face is my father's. Finally, I'm an old man!

But there are things at 72 that I can still do. I can still sing the songs I love. I can still read. I can still swim and argue and joke. I can still hug and kiss the people I truly love, my wife, my daughter, and my granddaughter. And I can still do the things I love: I can eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, look at the clouds, and dream about tomorrow.

——
My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

Protests and Riots

Growing up in Chicago in the late 1960s, I felt that the world was always on the edge of protests and riots.  

This feeling started in 1966 when I was 18 years old and living just east of Humboldt Park.  One day early in June, Mayor Richard J. Daley announced there was going to be a week-long celebration of Puerto Rican culture and people.  It turned into a riot on Division Street that lasted 3 days.  I remember squad cars and sirens everywhere and cops threatening to beat us if we didn’t stay in our homes.  

Less than two years later, Martin Luther King’s assasination sparked a series of riots on the Southside that resulted in 11 deaths, 500 injuries, and more than 2,100 arrests in two days of rioting.  Five months later, there were the Democratic Convention riots, and two years after that the Kent State killings where the National Guard’s killing of four students fueled riots on college campuses all over the city.  These, of course, weren’t the only protests and riots in Chicago.  These were just the big ones.

I was involved with some of these protests.  Starting in 1966, I actively protested against the Vietnam War.  I marched and picketed, and once I even rioted.  

Most of the time, these protests were peaceful.  We would gather at Grant Park and listen to speakers telling us how wrong the war was, or we would march up State Street with signs that said no more war.  But sometimes the protests became violent.  

Why did they become violent?  Sometimes, they became violent as a response to cops being violent.  One time, we were picketing the University of Illinois’ ROTC building at the corner of Halsted and Roosevelt, and the cops there started breaking windows on the first floor of the building with their billy clubs. Some of the protesters ran to safety, others started throwing rocks and bricks at the cops, breaking even more windows.  

I'm not saying the cops are always to blame.  I also saw protesters become rioters without any kind of provocation, breaking windows, throwing rocks, starting fires.  Why did they become rioters?  I think they were people who wanted violence.  I knew some of these rioters.  The protest was just an excuse to be violent for them.  

After the 1968 Martin Luther King riots, the City of Chicago set up a committee to look into the riots.  One of the things they determined was that one of the causes of the riots was “a spontaneous overflow of pent-up aggressions.”

That statement comes close to summing up what I learned from my years of protesting.  I learned the majority of the protesters and a majority of the police officers understood why they were there.  The protestors wanted you to know that something in our society is not right, and the police officers wanted the protesters to know that protesting is okay up to a certain point.  I learned also that there’s a minority of protesters and police officers who wanted to express their “pent-up aggression.”  They wanted to throw bricks and burn things and bust heads and shoot tear gas because it made them feel alive.

These are the people we need to watch out for.

Little Altar Boy Reviewed in the WSJ!

First Major Review of Little Altar Boy!

The Wall Street Journal loved it!

Here’s what they said:

John Guzlowski’s powerful “Little Altar Boy” (Kasva Press, 323 pages, $14.95) centers on the fatal stabbing of a Chicago nun. Set in 1967, Mr. Guzlowski’s latest takes place a decade after events in his equally memorable “Suitcase Charlie,” which also featured Windy City detective Hank Purcell and his partner Marvin Bondarowicz.

The victim was beloved—saintly, some say. She had made a recent secret visit to Purcell’s home to alert him to the pedophiliac conduct of a parish priest. Did that confidential revelation prompt her murder? The priest in question seems to have a solid alibi, as does everyone else in the nun’s circumscribed world.

As he sorts out the nun’s killing, Hank is beyond distracted by the recent disappearance of his 19-year-old daughter, who had fallen into bad company. All this takes place right after Christmas, as snowfall covers Chicago with a sort of spiritual malaise. “He needed a miracle—maybe a few of them at once,” Hank thinks. What he gets instead is another dead body.

As Hank and his partner Marvin drive from one neighborhood to another, seeking information in rectories and blues clubs and drug dealers’ pads, Hank admits to himself: “He felt like a failure and a fool, like a man drowning in his own weakness and inadequacy.” But it’s also Hank’s habit to see a mission through to its end, however dire the consequences, cold the comfort, and irrevocable the harm to his family life and psychic health.

—

Here’s a link to the book’s amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Altar-Boy-John-Guzlowski/dp/1948403153/

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My Mother and Her Ukrainian Neighbors

My Mother and Her Ukrainian Neighbors

Tens of thousands of Poles in Eastern Poland were killed between 1943 and 1944 by Ukrainian Nationalists working with the Germans.  July 11 was the day of the worst killing, a day when the Ukrainian Nationalists attacked 100 or so villages.  That was seventy-six years ago.

Much of my mother’s family was killed during this period by her Ukrainian neighbors.  Her mother was murdered, her sister was raped and killed, her sister's baby kicked to death.  My mother, a girl of 19 at the time, was able to survive by breaking through a window and running into a forest to hide.  She was found a couple days later by German soldiers.  They put my mother and a lot of the surviving Poles from her village in boxcars and shipped them to slave labor camps in Germany.  She spent the next 2 years in those camps.  After the war she was afraid to go back to her village. 

She was afraid that what happened to her brother who survived the war would happen to her.  When the war ended, he went back on a United Nations sponsored train to that section of Poland that had been taken over by the Russians and made a part of the Ukraine, and when he got off the train, there were Russian soldiers there who arrested him and put him on another train and sent him to a prison camp in Siberia.  He died there.

My mom and my dad made a trip to Poland in 1988.  They went back to her village to see if they could find the graves of her mom and sister and the sister's baby.  There were no graves.  The men who did the killing didn't take the time to dig graves and put up crosses or markers.  They probably just threw the Polish dead into a pit and shoveled dirt over them

During that trip, my mom actually made it to her old house, the one where the killing took place.  She knocked on the door and when someone answered her knocking, she introduced herself and told them that she had lived in this house when she was a girl, before the killings.

The person who answered the door, a Ukrainian fellow about my mom's age, said that he had been living in the house all his life and he didn't know her and didn't know what she was talking about.

My mom left and never went back.

____

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

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/moja-mama-i-jej-ukrainscy-sasiedzi-my-mother-and-her-ukrainian-neighbors/

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A Letter to My Mother

A Letter to My Mother

Dear Mom,

I know you’ve been gone a long time now, almost 15 years, but I dreamt I was with you again last night.

It was in the old house in Chicago, the one on Potomac Avenue, the first one I remember the number for.

You planted flowers there in the backyard where there had never been flowers, watered them with the water that fell from the sky. The flowers were so red and yellow and blue that you loved to just sit on the porch and watch them.

You washed my hair with that water too. You said it would keep me young and help me grow tall and smart and loving. I was too young to know what all those words really meant, but I believed you.

Autumn came finally, and the rain fell grayer and harder, and then there was snow, so much snow, and you put the snow in a dishpan and melted it and washed my hair with it.

You said the water from snow was just as pure as the water from the rain.

Years later in your last house in Arizona, the one I still remember the number for, I washed your hair with water from the sink.  You didn’t complain.  You understood.  You knew that there was no rain in the desert, no snow either.

While you waited for your hair to dry, you told me stories you never told me before.  You told me about your sister and the time she visited Lvov, the candy she found on the seat of the train, about your pet pig Carolina and how much you loved just sitting with her in the forest and watching the leaves fall in the coolness that followed those long summers. You told me about the war too, about the day the Germans came to your home in the forest west of Lvov and killed your mother and your sister and your sister’s baby.  You told me too that the German soldiers did other things that you still could not tell me about even though I was a grown man and a university professor.

I listened to your stories that I had never heard before and knew you like I had never known you, and when you asked me again where the water came from, I told you that I had collected it from the clouds.

Alone

Alone

Here’s my most recent column for the Polish Daily News. It’s a piece on aloneness during the pandemic:

ALONE

This pandemic is like nothing I’ve ever experienced or seen before. I’ve lived through life in a refugee camp, blizzards, tornados, polio scares, hurricanes, atomic bomb drills, race riots, 9/11, blackouts that lasted for weeks, and the deaths of my parents and best friends. And none of that has prepared me for this.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been self-quarantined in my home here in Lynchburg, Virginia, with my wife and my daughter and my granddaughter. We’re all here waiting for something to end and not knowing really if it ever will.

And what do we do while we wait?

The number one thing is that we try to ignore that there is a pandemic.

We try to ignore the fact that the restaurants in town are closed except for curbside pickup, that the parks are closed or closing, that the churches and schools and libraries and museums are closed, that the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus rises here and throughout the US by about 20%, that people are dying here and across the world from some kind of virus that no one has any understanding of.

We try to ignore the fact that we haven’t seen any of our friends in three weeks, that the people we used to get together with every weekend for some laughs and some wine and some talk are suddenly so far away in their own confinement.

We try to ignore the fact that we are alone.

I’ve been alone in the past. In my 20s, I loved to go hitchhiking and camping alone. I’d pack a backpack and stand on the side of a highway until I got a ride to some wilderness in Montana or Idaho where I would be alone for a week or two weeks, but that aloneness was nothing like this aloneness. I knew that there were other people in the wilderness with me, and I knew too that all I had to do if the aloneness got to be too much for me was walk out of the wilderness and stick my thumb out and catch a ride back home to my home in Chicago. I was alone, but the aloneness was an aloneness that was temporary. It was an aloneness I could put an end to pretty easily. It was an aloneness I welcomed into my life, and it was an aloneness I could say. “so long to.”

This aloneness that I’m feeling in this pandemic is nothing like that. It’s an aloneness surrounded by a mystery, an aloneness in a wilderness we can’t just walk out of when we get tired of being alone.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/samotnosc-alone/
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Ta pandemia jest czymś, czego nigdy wcześniej nie doświadczyłem ani nie widziałem. Przeszedłem w swoim życiu przez obóz uchodźców

Ta pandemia jest czymś, czego nigdy wcześniej nie doświadczyłem ani nie widziałem. Przeszedłem w swoim życiu przez obóz uchodźców

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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