Happy Unthanksgiving and Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Unthanksgiving and Happy Thanksgiving 

You’ve heard this before, and you’ll probably hear it another hundred times this Thanksgiving Holiday. It’s the one thing people tell you about Thanksgiving besides how much they like turkey. What you’ve heard is that Thanksgiving traditionally is a time when we all talk about the things we’re most thankful for.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m not the kind of person who likes to talk about the stuff that makes me Thankful or happy or sad or excited or bored. I keep that sort of stuff pretty much to myself. Maybe it’s just a guy thing. Guys, in my experience, like to play it pretty close to the vest.

This year, however, I’m going to give into the question about what makes me thankful and tell you what makes me thankful.

Before I tell you that, however, I want to tell you something else about myself, something related to my thankfulness. I’m going to tell you what doesn’t make me thankful. Don’t worry. I’ll try to keep this part short.

I’m not thankful for how divided America seems right now. Growing up as a Polish refugee here, I always admired how Americans seemed to work together through crises. That seems gone. I’m also not thankful for the pandemic. I want COVID to just leave, disappear. I’ve had enough of living in the pandemic with its endless spikes in COVID cases and its arguments about vaccinations and masks. I’m also not thankful for climate change. I read this morning that penguins are disappearing because the Antarctic is warming up. I don’t want penguins or elephants or pandas or people to disappear because of climate change. I want my 12-year old granddaughter to be able to tell her kids and grandkids about how much she loves those animals and how they should love them too!

Okay, I’m done talking about what I’m not thankful for. There’s probably a lot more, but I don’t have a lot of space here to yak on and on about it.

So here’s what I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful for my wife Linda whose love has kept me happy and focused for the last 46 years. When I met her I was an alcoholic, drug-taking hippie trying to escape from a life that was completely screwed up. She pointed me in the right direction and helped me become the guy I am. She also gave me a great daughter Lillian and a great granddaughter Lucy. We all live together, and it’s a life that is fun and loving and creative.

What else am I thankful for?

I’m thankful for my writing, my breathing, the trees in my backyard, the way the deer slowly wander through those trees. I’m thankful too for crunchy granola cereal in the morning, wine in the evening, and a granddaughter who loves to practice her ballet everywhere.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy 

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A Visit to the ER

A Visit to the Emergency Room

Stabbing pains in my right hip woke me up that Monday morning. I couldn’t stand or walk. I’ve had some pain there before caused by my autoimmune problems and some weird condition called undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy. But the pain I had this morning was 100 times worse. I knew I had to go to the emergency room.

My wife Linda helped me up and got my shoes on. It was too painful to change out of my pajamas, so I left them on, and then she helped me to our car. Every step was painful. At one point, I thought I would pass out from the pain.

I’ve been to ERs before, but this one was the worst. As they wheeled me in in a wheelchair, I saw a woman at the counter weeping. She was saying she had waited too long, that she was in too much pain, that she couldn’t wait any longer for a doctor. The receptionist tried to quiet her, but she couldn’t stop pleading and weeping. Finally, a security guard came and took her away.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Across the aisle from us, a boy sat shaking and groaning. A few feet from him, a woman kept vomiting into a pink dishpan.

Linda and I sat there for 3 hours. Finally we got moved inside, out of the waiting area. Inside, it was worse.

Because the emergency area is so small, we sat in a narrow hallway for another hour. We heard nurses and doctors talking to people about their heart attacks, their drug overdoses, their insurance policies and why they wouldn’t cover anything. In the room across from us, a little girl screamed over and over.

Finally, I saw a doctor. He ordered blood tests and CT scans for me. He hoped they would explain the stabbing pain in my hip. They didn’t. After 5 hours of waiting for the results, we were told I didn’t have cancer, broken bones, or a kidney failure, but the tests didn’t explain my stabbing pain.

I said to the doctor, “What can I do?” He told me to make an appointment to see my doctor. When I said it would take weeks, he shrugged. I asked him if he could give me something for the pain, and he suggested oxycodone. I said I’ve had it before, and it didn’t work for my pain. He nodded and said it didn’t work for his pain either. He said he’d write a prescription for something else that might help.

When I left the ER, I understood why the woman was screaming when I first came in. I wanted to start screaming too. After 8 hours in the ER, I was going home. The stabbing pain was less stabbing. Sitting around for those 8 hours must have helped.

Watching TV shows about doctors, you start believing they can fix all the medical problems in the world. But the reality is different. Sometimes doctors can fix problems, and sometimes they can’t. The last thing the ER doctor said to me was that about 40% of the patients he sees come because of some kind of terrible pain. And of that 40%, only about a fourth find their problems solved.

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This column recently appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.  

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/wizyta-na-szpitalnym-oddziale-ratunkowym/

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All Souls’ Day

When I was a kid in the 50s growing up in Chicago, All Souls Day – the day set aside to commemorate the faithful who’ve died — wasn’t a big deal. 

I went to St. Fidelis, a Catholic parish near Humboldt Park, and even though the parish was pretty much made up of Poles and Polish Americans, All Souls Day didn’t seem like it was anything special. A mass was said that day that all the school kids had to go to, but we had to go to mass every school day. Sure, the priest would mention the dead at the service on All Souls Day, but beyond that there wasn’t anything different. Not that I could see.

But in Poland it was apparently different.  At least that’s what my parents used to say.  They would tell me stories about what it was like All Souls Day in Poland when they were kids.

People, my mother would tell me, would first have a really special dinner. There would be kasza and other ceremonial foods, and there would even be special plates set aside for the family members who had died. Then, the family would walk to the cemetery where their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers, were buried. Candles would be lit there by the graves. I asked my mom once why they did that. She told me the people who lit the candles hoped the light from them would lead the souls of the departed back to their families and homes here among the living. Sometimes at night, there would be so many candles burning on and near the graves that you could see the light shining above the cemeteries as you walked back home, even if your home was far away.

But we didn’t do that in America. We were immigrants, Displaced Persons and refugees, and all our dead were buried far away in Poland and the parts of Poland that are now the Ukraine. My mother didn’t even know where her mother and her sister and her sister’s baby were buried. The men who killed them put my mother on a boxcar and sent her to the slave labor camps in Germany before she could bury her family. When my mom returned to her hometown west of Lwow 40 years after the war, no one could even tell her where her mom and her sister and the baby were buried.

Growing up, I didn’t hear much about my mom’s dead or my dad’s dead. We didn’t commemorate them. Maybe the past and those who died in it was just filled with too much sorrow for my parents to try to commemorate.

A little while ago, the Polish poet Oriana Ivy now living in California — author of the books April Snow and From the New World — sent me a poem about the fog in Warsaw and how she imagines it’s the war dead coming back. She writes, “Warsaw has a lot of fog, especially in autumn — which is very ‘atmospheric,’ as we used to say — lyrical, poetic — and of course all those plaques marking the places of mass executions — you could say that it’s a haunted city.”

Here’s the poem:

All Souls 

Sometimes I think Warsaw fog

is the dead, coming back

to seek their old homes –

wanting to touch even the walls.

But they cannot find those walls,

so they embrace the trees instead,

lindens and enduring chestnuts.

They embrace the whole city, lay

their arms around the bridges

and the droplet-beaded street lamps;

they pray in the Square of Three Crosses,

kneel among the candles and flowers

under bronze plaques that say

On this spot, 100 people were shot –

they bow, they kiss

even the railroad tracks –

they do not complain, only hold

what they can, in unraveling white.

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

http://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/guzlowski/wszystkich-swietych/

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