New Years Resolutions

 New Year’s Resolutions

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been making Resolutions for most of my life.

I don’t remember when I started making them or why I did. It wasn’t something my parents did. I know that for a fact. New Year’s Eve they were always too busy partying with their friends to sit down and make a list of changes they would like to make in their lives. But like I said, I’ve been making Resolutions for a long time.

Recently, I looked over my New Year’s Resolutions for the last 10 years, and they are pretty much the same from year to year.

Here they are:

I will lose 25 pounds.

I will spend more time playing with my granddaughter Lulu.

I will ride my bike on good weather days.

I will be a better friend to my friends.

I will read 50 novels this year.

I will write 2 hours a day.

I will do yoga or Pilates every other day.

I will clean up my book shelves.

I will keep track of my wife’s earrings.

I will not make any mistakes!

It’s an interesting list, and the fact that I have pretty much the same list year after year tells you something pretty obvious about my ability to hold to these resolutions. For the most part, I can’t. To be honest with you all, I’ve only accomplished two of the resolutions this year.

First, I’ve managed to clean up my bookshelves. But I had little choice. We moved recently, and I had to box and move my totally chaotic 10,000 book library. (I should also add that some members of my immediate family like my wife, my daughter, and my granddaughter think my bookshelves still need pruning).

Second, I managed to lose 25 pounds. But before you start applauding me, let me explain I lost them because of a health emergency that hit me in September. I came down with the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a tick-borne disease that kills your appetite.

But the other stuff? Nope. Nada. Nothing.

Reading a novel a week? Not even close. I think I started reading a novel a month ago but I’ve lost it.

Writing 2 hours a day? I’ve come close. I was doing really well with the fourth novel in my Hank and Marvin mystery series, and then we had to move into the new house. Prepping for that and then actually moving ate up a lot of time. Then there was our London vacation! You can’t write if you’re wandering around London.

Yoga and Pilates? Nope. In fact the only exercise I have been doing is for my bum knee.

Bike riding? I look at my terrific bike every time I go into the garage and I think about how much I loved biking and how my bum knee has screwed up that love.

Be a better friend to my friends? Hard to do when most of the time you spend with your friends is on Facebook

So what am I going to do with these resolutions?

I think I’m going to scrap them and come up with a whole new New Year’s Resolution this year that has less to do with me and more to do with the people I love and the world I love.

So here’s my Resolution for this year:

I’m going to love the people I love, and let them love me, and I’m going to work to make sure the world I love stays safe from the people who want to change it.

—

An old column I wrote for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, Chicago’s Polish Daily News.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/guzlowski/noworoczne-postanowienia/

Christmas Trees!

CHRISTMAS TREES!

I was talking to a friend yesterday about putting up Christmas decorations.  She was complaining about the time involved in the whole process. She talked about how hard it was putting the artificial tree together and then dragging the boxes of lights and ornaments out of the attic and then trying to track down the little statues of Santa and Mrs. Claus that she thought she had put in the basement but hadn’t.   My friend said that the whole operation took about 5 hours, even with her husband helping her put the Christmas lights on the bushes outside the house. 

5 hours to decorate the house for Christmas?  Is that all?

Let me tell you what it was like when I was a kid growing up in the fifties in the Polish neighborhood just east of Humboldt Park.    

The biggest problem was finding a tree.  It wasn’t like you could go down to Adolf and Rosita’s Grocery on the corner and buy a tree.  Trees were sold in weird places that you wouldn’t expect to be selling trees.  

Let me give you one example.  Taverns.

For some reason, taverns in the area sold trees.  They would have a dozen or so trees leaning against their front windows. Picking out a tree at a tavern sounds easy.  But it wasn’t.  A lot of times these trees were ragged with broken branches or needles that were turning brown.  What you had to do then was find another bar and another bar and another bar until you found one with a perfect tree.

My parents were picky when it came to trees.  They had both grown up near forests in rural Poland, and they knew a great tree when they saw one.  So when they checked out the trees at these taverns, they knew what they were looking for.  They were looking for the  best Christmas tree in Chicago.

What made this search especially difficult was the fact that my parents didn’t own a car.  We would, therefore, have to walk from tavern to tavern.  We’d walk from a tavern on the corner of California and Division to one on the corner of Western and North Ave to one on the corner of Kedzie and Armitage.  And of course, what made this search for the perfect Christmas tree even more difficult was the weather.  Once we had found the perfect tree we would often have to carry it home through the falling snow on ice-covered sidewalks.  This whole journey of finding the perfect Christmas tree would often take an entire Saturday afternoon.

And of course, that was just the beginning of the process of decorating our house for the holidays.  I knew that as soon as my dad carried the tree home, he’d drag his hand saw out of the basement and get to work on trimming that tree’s trunk and branches to make it the perfect tree — like the Christmas trees he loved in Poland as a boy before the war. 

—

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

THE DEATH OF THE POLISH CAPTAIN

The Death of the Polish Captain

When I was a little kid back in the 1950s, we lived in an apartment building east of Humboldt Park. The building wasn’t much: three units, each with four tiny rooms, and no central heating! But we had some great neighbors, and probably the most interesting was Pan Kaminski.

Like us, he was a Polish Displaced Person, a refugee, but he was like no one else in the neighborhood. He knew everything. While most of us struggled with English and living in America, he understood English and America perfectly. When neighbors had questions about America, they would bring them to him.

One of the things I personally loved about Pan Kaminski was that he had been a captain in the Polish cavalry during World War II and had fought at Monte Cassino. Whenever I saw him, I would salute him.

Like I said, I knew this man when I was a kid, but I didn’t know what happened to him or his wife and his family. So one day years later, while visiting my mother, I asked about Pan Kaminski.

What she told me became the following poem in my book about my parents, Echoes of Tattered Tongues:

The Death of the Polish Captain of Lancers

His wife loved the captain for his wounds,

The red shrapnel scars across his chest,

The fingers broken by the Germans,

The way he looked down at his hands

As he listened to Chopin or talked of those

Who died around him at Monte Cassino

When the Poles finally moved toward

The abbey’s fallen bricks and ruined walls.

She listened with her fingers across her lips

When he told her who the fallen men were,

The orphan from Poznan who loved Poland

As if it were his mother. The mandolin player,

Older than the others, who played the songs

A boy from Beaumont, Texas taught him,

The corporal who left Poland before the war

And came back because everything was lost,

And the others, men who needed to take

Monte Cassino the way hungry men dreamed

Of bread and needed to feel it in their hands.

She listened to the stories a hundred times,

Every time he’d come home from the bars

On Division street where Poles would still

Sing the song the survivors sang about the battle.

The song’s words were simple, about red poppies

Growing among the fallen walls and bricks

Getting their blood from the blood of those

Who fell where crosses would later stand.

She loved the captain for the way he always

Cried for Poland, but she didn’t love the drinking,

The cognac he’d take straight from the bottle

When he thought nothing could make him sadder

And he needed it more than some needed bread.

And finally when she found him drunk

And crying and singing about the poppies

Growing red with the blood of Polish boys

She forced the bottle into his mouth, saying

“If you want to drink so much, drink” and held

That position until he choked to death.

—

My latest column from Chicago’s Polish Daily News

Stay Home Part 2

  STAY HOME! Part 2

A couple weeks ago, I told you about the rotten cruise we had at the beginning of this November.  I told you about the Hurricane that came rumbling up toward the ship, how the ship fled north toward Baltimore, how we missed two great ports we were supposed to visit, how the Hurricane ruined the food and wine on the cruise and the entertainment we dreamt of seeing on it.

But I didn’t tell you about my COVID.

Three days into the cruise, my nose started running.  At first I thought I was just having a temporary allergic reaction to the pillows in our stateroom, but my running nose got worse.  It kept running constantly, and then I developed a cough, constant headaches, and body pain, and I started sneezing constantly.

My wife Linda finally said, “Maybe you have COVID.”

I said, “No way.” I reminded her that we had both just received our third COVID booster and tested negative before getting on the ship and that we had had a bad case of COVID at the beginning of the year that probably created a lot of anti-COVID antibodies in us.  

She wouldn’t listen, and so we both took a COVID test in our stateroom. Hers was negative.  Mine was of course positive. I had COVID.  

I did what any responsible passenger would do.  I picked up my stateroom phone and called the ship’s medical team.  We expected a quick and forceful response from them.  I was wrong.

The nurse I spoke to said he wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do but that he would get back in touch with me after he asked around.  Then he hung up.

I looked at my wife.  We were both surprised by the nurse’s apparent confusion.

After about an hour, there was a knock on our stateroom door and a doctor came in.  She was wearing a mask and carrying a bag of medical supplies.  I expected her to give me another COVID test, but she didn’t.  Instead, she took my temperature and my blood pressure, and she handed me some cough drops for my sore throat and some pills to control my runny nose.  She also told me that I was quarantined in my room until the end of the cruise.  

My wife said, “What about me?”  

The doctor told her she wasn’t quarantined. She was free to wander around the ship and enjoy herself.  

“But shouldn’t I be quarantined?” my wife asked. “ I’m sharing a room with a person who’s got COVID.  Aren’t you afraid I’ll contaminate people on the ship?”

The doctor shook her head and said, “It’s entirely up to you.”

My wife and I felt this was a strange and rather frivolous response.  The medical team was ignoring the possibility that I had infected my wife and that she might infect other passengers.  

The doctor assumed that since my wife tested negative she was negative. In fact, my wife took a test when we got back home and she tested positive for COVID.

I guess the moral of all this is that people who should be taking COVID seriously aren’t and that the responsibility falls back on people like you and me to protect ourselves and others.

So remember to stay home!

—

I wrote this column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

Thanksgiving Day Memories

My mom loved Thanksgiving.  She loved getting up early Thanksgiving morning and stuffing the turkey and putting it in the oven and basting it over and over again.  She always said that it reminded her of when she was a girl back in Poland before the war.  She came from a big family -- a mom and dad and 8 brothers and sisters -- and every meal was a production that would take hours of loving labor.

And every meal would bring the family together.  I think that’s what she loved most about Thanksgiving.  The way it brought family together.  

When we first came to America, of course, we had no family here. It was just my mom and dad and my sister and me.  We had no one else to share Thanksgiving Dinner with.  My dad came from a small family, but only his brother survived the war, and he went back to Poland after he was freed from the slave labor camps.  My mom was from a big family, but her story was similar.  Of her 8 brothers and sisters, only 3 survived the war.  And of those 3, one was sent to Siberia by the Russians at the end of the war and died there.

This all changed as my sister and I got older and we started our own families.  The small family Thanksgiving Dinner of 4 got bigger and bigger.

Soon my sister was bringing her husband and her three daughters to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, and then I was bringing my wife and daughter to my parents for Thanksgiving.  

I remember how much my parents loved those enormous family dinners.  But it wasn’t ever about the food.  It was about watching the little kids crawling around and laughing and playing with their dolls.  It was about sitting with my sister’s husband and hearing him complain year after year about how badly the Chicago Bears were doing that year.  It was about listening to my sister talk about how her in-laws were doing with their new place in the suburbs after a lifetime of living near the corner of California and Division.  It was about my wife Linda talking to my mom about what her Thanksgiving Dinners were like in Brooklyn when she was a kid and about my mom nodding and smiling the happiest, biggest smile ever. 

It was all about family coming together and being the loving family we all need.  

—

Originally appeared in the Dziennik Związkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

Stay Home! Part 1

Stay Home!

My wife Linda and I love to cruise.  We started cruising about 30 years ago, and we only stopped when the pandemic showed up and blocked all cruising for 2 whole years.  You can imagine how happy we were when cruising finally came back.

We had a great 8-day cruise from Baltimore to the Bahamas scheduled for the beginning of November.  We were supposed to go to always luscious Nassau and then to a private island called Coco Cay, full of great beaches and swimming ponds and free restaurants and all that stuff.  But we didn’t go.

On the third day of the cruise, as we were leaving Port Canaveral, FL, for Nassau, Hurricane Nicole showed up just south of the Bahamas.

The Captain announced that because of the threat caused by Nicole we had to return to Baltimore.  So we turned around and started back to our home port.  We not only sailed away from two beautiful ports, we sailed into bad weather.  

The bright sun suddenly disappeared, the temperature dropped from 80 degrees to 50, the wind picked up to 30 miles an hour, and the sea started rolling and rocking.  The ship’s stewards placed vomit bags on all the staircases because the Captain knew what a rolling sea can do to a person’s stomach.

We were stuck inside the ship.  We couldn’t walk around on the decks, couldn’t sit and drink a beer at the pool bar, couldn’t go swimming in any of the 3 pools.  

But that wasn’t the worst of it.  Usually, the ships pick up food at each of the ports.  Since we weren’t docking at two of them, we were missing the food we would have been picking up.  So the chefs had to abandon the super menus they had planned and fell back on food they could make.  Tacos!  Risotto!  Mashed potatoes and Mac and Cheese!  Forget about dessert! 

And it got worse!  The ship started running out of wine!  First, they ran out of our favorite cruise wine, Andrew Peace cabernet!  Then they ran out of Robert Mondavi’s cabernet! Then Kendall Jackson’s cab was gone.

And then it got even worse.  They ran out of entertainment!  The featured entertainers usually get on at one port and off at the next, so they can entertain on a number of ships.  Because we were not stopping at fresh ports, we were not picking up fresh entertainers.  The last good entertainer got off at Port Canaveral and his replacement was stuck in Nassau.  

Instead of great shows featuring headliners, the ship had to fall back on the guys and gals from the chorus singing and dancing their hearts out. They tried, but it wasn’t enough!  So the cruise director started showing movies in place of live entertainment.  The movies were good films, a new Thor movie and a new Jurassic Park movie.  The problem was that they showed these films repeatedly on the pool deck where it was cold and raining and the wind was howling!

And if we turned on the TV?  We’d only get bad news about the elections because the midpoint of the cruise was Election Day, November 8.

 But that wasn’t the worst of it. 

Then I got COVID.

__

My latest article for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America!

ROACHES!

Yesterday, I was reading an article online about the benefits of eating ants and other insects.  The piece talked about how insects are a good source of protein and how the cultivation of insects as a source of protein is more environmentally sustainable than our current reliance on cattle and pigs. Recent studies have also shown that eating insects has at least two major health advantages.  First, Insects supposedly contain antioxidants that help people fight off the threat of cancer, and second, eating bugs makes for a healthier heart by lowering bad cholesterol while providing more good cholesterol.

The article gave me pause, and I started thinking about what eating insects would be like. 

I’ve only eaten bugs once. My sister Donna gave me a gag gift for my 13th birthday of a box of chocolate-covered ants and snails and spiders.  She didn’t think I would eat them, but I did.  In fact, I have to admit I enjoyed them. The dark chocolate was great, and the bugs were thoroughly crunchy.  

But I’m not sure I’d eat any more insects because when I think of insects now, mostly what I remember are the roaches that plagued us when I was a kid.  

As Polish refugees after World War II, we lived in some dumpy places in Chicago.  In most of them, we had some ants and spiders and worms, but mainly what we had were cockroaches.  They were everywhere.

I remember one time going into the kitchen at 2 in the morning for a drink of water.  When I turned on the light, I saw the ceiling was covered in roaches. I ran into the bathroom then to get some roach spray, and the bathroom was full of roaches too. They were on the ceiling and the walls and the floor.  There were some even crawling around the toilet bowl! I immediately started spraying and sprayed for an hour, and then I spent another hour sweeping the roaches up and cleaning the walls and ceiling.

The next day, they were back.

—-

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

The Hardest Working Man in America

 

LABOR DAY

Here's an old column I wrote for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy. It's about my Polish father and how hard he worked when he came to America as a Displaced Person in 1951.

THE HARDEST WORKING MAN IN AMERICA

My father was probably the hardest working man I knew.

When I was a kid he would work double shifts, 2 8-hour shifts a days, and some years he wouldn’t take the scheduled one or two week vacations because the bosses at the factory where he worked would pay him double time if he worked through his vacations. That’s right. The bosses would give my dad his vacation pay, and then they would give him the week’s salary on top of that. They would tell him he was being paid double time.

Double time. It was one of the first phrases he learned when we came to Chicago from the DP camps in Germany in 1951. He loved earning double time. He’d laugh and say it was one of the best things about America. Like getting something for nothing.

It hadn’t always been that way, of course. He had spent 4 and a half years in Germany as a slave laborer working 16 or 18 hours a day in the German fields and factories. Even though he was working those kinds of hours, he would never get paid a nickel. Once, when he complained about the work, the guard clubbed him unconscious. When my dad woke up, he was blind in one eye.

When my dad wasn’t working at the factory in Chicago, he was working around the house. Five years after coming to America, my parents bought a 5-unit apartment building on Potomac Avenue, just east of Humboldt Park. It wasn’t any kind of great place, but my dad and mom both were proud to be able to say they were landlords. And 9 years after coming to America, they sold that one and bought a bigger and better apartment building a couple blocks away on Evergreen Street.

My dad–and my mom–were always working on these buildings to maintain them and spruce them up. They plastered ceilings, painted walls, and stripped and varnished floors. When he wasn’t doing that kind of work, he would be outside chopping wood to feed the massive furnace we had in the basement, or he’d be in one of the apartments with his pliers and hammer working on a leak. He didn’t know a thing about pipes, but he was sure that sweat and hard work could fix anything. He was always like this.

Toward the end of his life, after he retired to Sun City, Arizona, he was always hauling new orange trees — with their roots bundled up in burlap — into the back yard and trying to plant them. Even when he knew he was dying of cancer, he was still working like this.

But sometimes, he just couldn’t do the work anymore. He didn’t have the strength to stand up, and he would ask me to help. He’d sit on a chair in the backyard, struggling to breathe and pointing to a spot where he had lugged the orange tree. ”Plant it there, Johnny,” he’d say in Polish. „Plant it there.”

Sometimes, he’d have so little breath that the words would be a whisper.

You know what I mean.

(You can read more about my parents in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues -- available at Amazon.)

83rd anniversary of the start of WWII

 

The 83rd Anniversary of the Start of World War II 

My mother didn’t like to talk about the war. When I was a kid, I would ask her, and she would just wave me away. If I kept asking, she would only say, “If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run away.” 

She would say this, and then she would walk away. It wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that she started to share her experiences in the war with me.

One of the first stories she told me was about the day German soldiers came to her village in eastern Poland in the fall of 1942. The story was brutal, and my mother told it staring into my eyes and talking slowly as if she wanted to make sure I understood every word she said. 

She told me of the day the soldiers came to my grandmother’s house. They shot my grandmother in the face, and then they kicked my mother’s sister’s baby to death. When they saw my mother, they didn’t care that she was just a teenager. They raped her so she couldn’t stand up, couldn’t talk. They broke her teeth when they shoved her dress into her mouth to stop her crying. 

When they were done, they dragged my mother into a boxcar that was filled with other young people from her village that were being taken to Germany to be slave laborers. The trip to Germany took a week. 

My mother cried all that week, first in the boxcars then in the camps. Her friends said, “Tekla, don’t cry, the Germans will shoot you and leave you in the field,” but my mother couldn’t stop. Even when she had no more tears, she cried, cried the way a dog will gulp for air when it’s choking on a stick or some bone it’s dug up in a garden and swallowed. 

 My mother finally stopped crying when the woman guard in charge gave her a cold look and knocked my mother down with her fist, and then told her if she didn’t stop crying she would shoot her. 

 My mother never thought she’d survive that first winter in the slave labor camp. She had no coat, no hat, no gloves, just what she was wearing when the Germans came to her house and killed my grandmother and took my mom to the camps. A soldier saved her life there. He saw her struggling to dig beets in the frozen earth with her hands, and he asked her if she could milk a cow. She nodded, “Yes,” and he took her to the barn where the cows were kept and raped her. Later, the cows kept her from freezing and gave her milk to drink.

Two and a half years later, the war ended, but it didn’t really end, not for her. The war was always with her. For my mother, like for so many of the Poles who survived, the war never ended. It was always with them.

Jan. 6: Insurrection or Picnic?

 Jan. 6: Insurrection or Picnic

Let me say right off the bat that I think the January 6th events in Washington D.C. were an insurrection. Trump, I feel, tried to overturn the results of a legitimate election so he could be the first illegitimate President of the United States.

Having said that, let me tell you why this column is here today.

Many of us are watching the January 6th hearings or at least interested in knowing what’s going on.  The polls say that 60% of Americans are aware of the hearings and follow them. I’m assuming that the other 40% are busy playing with their video games or watching people on TV drive golf balls.

But what’s interesting to me is that those of us watching the hearings don’t actually agree on what we’re seeing.

Let me tell you about a conversation I had with a friend.  This guy is smart, clever, and successful as an actor and director.  Talking to him is always a pleasure and an education.

Yesterday, I mentioned to him that I’ve been watching the January 6th hearings and that I felt Trump should take responsibility for the attempted insurrection, just the way Hitler and Charlie Manson and Osama bin Laden should have taken full responsibility for the crimes they encouraged people to commit.

My friend – I’ll call him Alex – laughed and said that comparing Trump to Hitler and these other villains was ridiculous and showed a lack of understanding on my part.  Trump, Alex said, is no fascist.  

I responded by saying that if Trump isn’t a fascist, why does he keep talking about the election being rigged as a justification for overturning the election?

Alex answered by suggesting that Trump may or may not believe that the election was rigged.  Trump is often just delusional and megalomaniacal.  Even though he repeatedly says it was rigged, this doesn’t necessarily indicate he believes it.  He may just be echoing all the conspiracy theorists who say it was rigged.  Alex also tried to make the point that even though Trump encouraged people to stage this riot, that’s not necessarily a criminal act.  Besides, Alex said, the rioters who were misled are not bad people.  They were innocent folks acting in good faith.  Sure, there was some vandalism, some broken windows, and the people who broke those windows should be punished for their vandalism, but finally all of this liberal outrage against these people who rioted is unhealthy.

I was surprised by his downplaying the attack on the Capitol, and I mentioned the 5 people who died and the 140 police officers who were injured. Alex said, “What’s the big deal?  The injuries were accidental, people pushing against each other.” He said he didn’t see any kind of vicious intentional violence or killing.  Things, he felt, just got a little out of hand.

I realized then that nothing Alex would see or hear would make him feel that what Trump did was intentional and that what his followers did was wrong.  I realized there was no point in talking to Alex any longer about this.  

In his mind, January 6 was more a picnic than an insurrection.

—

This column first appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish paper in America. 

Me and Thoreau and My Dad

 

On Henry David Thoreau’s 205th birthday 

ME AND THOREAU AND MY DAD

Thoreau is an author I love. 

When my daughter was a kid, I would reel out these Thoreau quotes on every occasion whether we were making vegetable soup or going to a funeral.  I would have a quote, and I always acknowledged my quotes.  "Like Thoreau used to say ..."

I thought I was giving her gospel that would help her in all circumstances.  It would be the universal clock that Melville writes about somewhere--right in all longitudes and latitudes.

I was wrong--but have never learned how wrong.

I taught Thoreau’s book Walden for years and expected students to say, "Yeah, this makes sense." They never said that.

Students hated him. Hated it.

He goes so much against their grain, and against the grain of any practical person. 

I was reading a review in the New Yorker about some book from Oxford U Press about technology in the 19th century, and the reviewer points out that Thoreau was the anti-modern.  The whole world wants to go forward into the 20 century and then the 21 century--except Thoreau.  He wants to take us all back to the 18th century!

People don't want to be farmers--lead simple lives.

Let me tell you a story and then I'll stop.

My father grew up on a farm in Poland--my mother did too.  My dad then spent 5 years in Germany as a Slave Laborer, and 6 years as a refugee.  When he and my mom finally came to America, they were offered the opportunity to work on a farm in upstate New York, make a living and settle there.  They stayed on the farm there long enough to pay off their passage over from Germany.  

Then, they moved to Chicago (3 million people, coal dust in the air, not a cow in sight [they have some now at Lincoln Park Zoo]).  My parents worked in factories, double shifts, never took vacations.  There was nothing rural/bucolic about their lives there.  I once asked them, "Why didn't you stay on the farm in Upstate New York?  The trees the cows the quiet"

My mother said, "Are you kidding?"

Working a shift and a half everyday in a factory where melting plastic burnt their arms and chemicals scarred their lungs was better than working on a farm.

PS

I know I could never live on a farm.  Not now.  It's no country for old men.  I can barely keep track of the garden in my backyard, the leaves of grass in my front.  

But I know I can still read Thoreau, and dream about the forests beyond the garden in my backyard.  

____________

The photo is one I took of Walden Pond about 10 years ago on a Saturday afternoon in early September.

I Can’t Boogie Anymore!

 I Can’t Boogie Anymore!

On June 22, I will be 74 years old, and as you can imagine I’ve been thinking a lot about aging recently and about what I’ve learned over the years.

One of the things I’ve learned is that I can’t boogie any more no matter how hard I try, but you probably figured that out for yourself, so let me get down to what else I’ve learned.

One of those other things is that aging isn’t easy. My father used to say, “Aging isn’t for sissies.”

As I watched him age, I realized he was right. In his mid-70s, he barely had the strength to lift a gallon of milk because of his breathing problems. My mom’s aging was much worse. I watched her drag herself through two cancers, chemo, several strokes, major heart trouble, and more. I haven’t had the health problems they had so far, and I’m thankful for that.

Something else I learned from my parents about aging is never to give up hope. When my dad was dying of liver cancer, he tried to climb out of the hospital bed repeatedly and go home. My mom was the same. Even when she had the final stroke that left her almost completely paralyzed, she still made it clear to me that she wanted to live, that she didn’t want the doctors to give her the drugs that would just let her die peacefully without a struggle. My mom used to say that “Hope is our mother,” and I’ve learned over the years that she was right.

Another thing that I’ve learned is the importance of family. As I look at my life now, I realize that the best thing that happened to me is that I married a person who was the best person for me. My wife Linda and I have been married for 47 years. Our marriage and the family we’ve made has given me more happiness than my years as a professor and the books I’ve written and continue to write.

I’ve learned a lot of other stuff, but I just want to mention one other thing I’ve learned.

I’m 74 now, and what I’ve learned about life’s changes is that we change the way the great glaciers change. Slowly.

One year we melt a little. The next we freeze a little. A wind comes from some place then and shines up our northern walls. The following year the wind is a little stronger or weaker. We don’t change the way people in books change. Today’s hero, tomorrow’s fool.

Our future—a patient grandmother with a toddler in hand—comes slowly.

—

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy 

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/nie-moge-juz-tanczyc-i-cant-boogie-anymore/

-

DO WE LEARN ANYTHING FROM HISTORY?

Do we learn from history? 

As my mother – a woman who lived through a lot of history – would say, "That's the question."  

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because of what’s been happening in the news.  First, there is all that terrible news about the Russian war against Ukraine.  It seems to go on and on and makes me think of all the wars I’ve known during my 74 years.  Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, we’ve started hearing a flood of news about the war in the United States against the children and the good people here.  So far there have been 232 mass shootings in our country since the beginning of the year.  I seem to go to sleep every night hearing about one mass shooting, and I seem to wake up every morning hearing about a different mass shooting.  

I read about all this and hear about it repeatedly on the news, and I ask myself repeatedly “Don’t we learn anything from history?”

Apparently not.  The wars and the killings that are happening today will also be happening tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. The politicians who could change things are too busy appearing on the news shows to tell us why they can’t do a thing.

So what does history teach us?

Maybe what history teaches us is that the only good we can ever have is that SUV, that Lexus or Infiniti or Mercedes Benz we dream of.

Forget trying to stop the wars that are affecting so many.  Forget trying to prevent the deaths of school children. Forget trying to get justice for this or that person.  Forget trying to convince some murderous fool to appreciate the sanctity of other people’s lives. Forget trying to make the world a better place.

All there is -- all that we can really hope for -- is that shiny Lexus supercar or that chrome Samsung refrigerator or that brand new Apple iPhone with direct access to a world of games like Wordle and sudoku because grace, justice, brotherhood, love, the age of aquarius, harmony and understanding are all lies.

You don’t think so?

Here's something Saul Bellow, a guy from my old neighborhood in Chicago who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, said:

"You think history is the history of loving hearts?  You fool!  Look at these millions of dead.  Can you pity them? Feel for them?  You can do nothing!  There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers.  History is the history of cruelty, not love."

 I’ve known big-time history professors and sociologists who wonder about stuff like: What can history teach us?  But most people aren’t asking this question. It seems like most of the 7 billion people on earth are  asking, "Where can I get a good price on a Toyota Highlander?"

And why do they want to get that Toyota Highlander?  

Because they know if they don't get it now before the next horde comes down from the mountains or the next ice age descends on us or the next war starts or the next killer shows up at the Walmart down the street, they'll never get that Toyota Highlander, never touch something that once for a couple of minutes gave them the illusion that things were looking up.

 —

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy 

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/czy-przeszlosc-czegos-nas-nauczylaczy-wyciagamy-wnioski-z-historii/

-

THIS IS NOT NORMAL

 THIS IS NOT NORMAL

My daughter Lillian is an elementary school principal.  She wrote something a couple days ago in response to the school shooting in Texas that left 19 children and 2 teachers dead. The piece was published today in the Polish Daily News in Chicago.

Here's what she wrote:

I’ve been in public education for 18 years. Ten years as a high school English teacher and eight years as an administrator. I am currently finishing my second year as an elementary school principal. I’ve been in lockdowns and lockdown drills.

I’ve had to plan what I would do in my classroom to protect myself and my students. My last year teaching, I had a couple of filing cabinets which probably seemed awkwardly placed to the casual visitor, but which I had put there deliberately to create a blind corner you couldn’t see from the door or the windows. I also figured the thick metal and folders stuffed with exams and essays could help slow bullets. I was hoping to save my students by offering their drafts of college application essays as collateral damage.

As an administrator, I’ve had to plan for the worst case scenario. I’ve locked my buildings down. I’ve searched for weapons and bombs. I’ve worked on reunification plans. I’ve planned which classrooms and hallways would be for relieved parents and which for those who will never see their children alive again. I’ve had to remind my colleagues that if the worst happens we can’t expect all our faculty/staff to be able to help. Some of them will have their own children to search for.

I’m also a mom. My daughter is in middle school. She has grown up with lockdown drills. When she used to play school with her dolls and stuffies, practicing lockdowns was part of the lesson. Now that she is older, she knows that her phone has to be fully charged when she goes to school—it has to be on do not disturb, but it can never be turned off in case I need to find her. In case something happens.

There are lots of things I should worry about when I send my daughter to school in the morning—who she’ll sit with at lunch, whether she’ll do a good job on a presentation, whether she’ll get the part she wants in the school play. I shouldn’t have to worry about whether someone will enter her classroom and shoot at her or her friends. The parents who send their children to my school shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not their children will come home. My teachers shouldn’t have to worry about whether today will be the day they have to die shielding their students from a shooter.

Something has to change. We have to change. We can’t keep acting like this is normal.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/to-nie-jest-normalne-this-is-not-normal/

.

WHAT THE SISTERS TAUGHT ME

WHAT THE SISTERS TAUGHT US

I received a letter recently from a fellow who frequently reads my columns in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.  He was disappointed in some of my recent columns, especially the one defending Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a book about the Holocaust.  This reader thought my article was a waste of time and simply opened up a lot of unhealed wounds.  He suggested instead that I should write articles about Catholic schools in Chicago.  He feels they are losing students because they are under attack by atheism, LGBT culture, and the forces of Anti-Catholicism in America.

My first response to the letter was to just ignore it, but then I started thinking about how much going to a Catholic school changed my life.  

I started at St. Fidelis, a parochial school in Chicago, in 1954 when I was 6 years old.  I was a refugee and could barely speak English then.  The sisters at that school pretty much made me the person I am.  They prepared me to be the university professor I was for 35 years and the poet and novelist I am today.  Without my Catholic schooling by the nuns at St. Fidelis, I don’t know what I would have become.  

Thinking about all of this, I thought about the other students at St. Fidelis and how the sisters changed their lives.  I’m in a Facebook group devoted to St. Fidelis.  There are about 500 former students in the group, and I asked them what they learned from the sisters.  

Here’s what the other students who attended St. Fidelis told me.

Probably the most important lessons were in the area of basic skills: reading, writing, and mathematics.  Reading and writing were primary.  I felt that way myself.  I came from a working-class home where my parents had very little experience with either reading or writing, but by the time I was in second grade I had my own library card and was a frequent visitor at the Humboldt Branch of the Chicago Public Library.  The nuns were also committed to make us math champs.  Some of the former students talked about playing Baseball Math, a blackboard competition to see who could answer math questions the fastest.  I remembered Sister Xavier expecting us to define math terms as fast as we could.  She would shout out words like “minuend” and “subtrahend”  and expect us to shout back the definition without hesitation.  

These basic skills were supposed to prepare us for high school, and they did. Many of us found ourselves in college preparatory classes in high schools.

Today, looking back on all this, it seems remarkable. A number of students at the school were first generation Polish Americans or Displaced Persons who had come over from refugee camps after the war.  We were the children of moms and dads who spoke little or no English, and still we were transformed by the sisters at St. Fidelis into people who became college professors and doctors and medical researchers and scientists and army officers and journalists and writers.

Thanks to those sisters.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/czego-nauczyly-nas-zakonnice/

-

The War Goes On

THE WAR GOES ON 

Like you, I’m tired of hearing about Putin’s war against Ukraine.  It started two months ago on Monday, February 21, and everyone was sure that it would be over within a few days. Russia seemed unstoppable, a major world power with unlimited ability to destroy and kill, and Ukraine seemed ill-prepared and in a daze.  We all expected the war to be over by that weekend.

But the war didn’t stop, and there doesn’t seem any sign that it will stop any time soon.

Everyday, I open the paper and turn on the news and go on social media, and I hear about the Russian forces advancing here and pulling back there.  I hear about the Ukrainians doing the unbelievable, standing up to the Russians and pushing them back slowly to the borders of their country.  I hear about the Polish government issuing a 36-page guide telling Poles how they should prepare for a possible invasion of Poland and – what’s worse – a possible nuclear attack.

And I hear more than that.  I hear the news that I don’t want to hear.  I hear about the misery this war has caused for the Ukrainians. 

I hear about the buildings destroyed in Lviv and Mariupol and Kyiv and little towns no one outside of Ukraine has ever heard of.  I see footage of mothers carrying their babies through the rubble of destroyed streets, of grandmothers sitting in those streets weeping, of fathers pushing their struggling children into buses that will hopefully save them by taking them to Katowice or Lublin. 

I hear all of this, and I wonder what the people of Russia are thinking.  Are they being lied to by their government?  Are they being told there is no war?  That the Russian soldiers in Ukraine are simply on an extended picnic, and they will be back in their home towns before the first rose blooms this summer.  Or do the Russian people know the truth that there nation is a nation of murderers and rapist and killers of children and their moms and dads and grandparents. 

And I know that this war will not end even when it ends.   

For those that have been in a war, suffered its brutality, endured its grief or succumbed to that grief, war does not end.    

I know this because I saw it in my parents.  They were teenagers when the Germans invaded Poland and did the terrible things to the country and to my mother and father that they did, brutalizing and killing their families and sending them to the slave labor camps in Germany.  

My parents lived with these memories of the war all their lives.  There was never a day that they didn’t carry the psychological wounds of the war with them.  Fifty years after the war, the pain of the terrible things they experienced and saw was still with them.

And it will be like this for the Ukrainians and for those of us watching this war.

—

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

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/wojna-toczy-sie-nadal-the-war-goes-on/

.

WAR IS HELL

WAR IS HELL

You’ve probably heard that quote before a million times. You’ve probably been hearing it a lot recently on the news and from your friends because of the terrible things that the Russians are doing to mothers and fathers and children in the Ukraine.

The quote comes from William T. Sherman.  He was a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and he knew what he was talking about.  He commanded soldiers in some of the bloodiest conflicts in that war.  He saw soldiers and civilians die in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and North and South Carolinas.  The worst of the killing was probably in Georgia where he and the Union Army followed a “scorched earth” policy that resulted in the destruction of everything from Atlanta to Savannah.  As he marched to the sea, he destroyed military bases, industrial facilities, and civilian property.  

Let me give you another quote from Sherman: “War is cruelty.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sherman’s quotes recently. 

Starting in the morning and throughout the day, I watch the news about the war in Ukraine.  I see the people running from explosions.  I see hospitals and schools and hotels being blown up. I see masses of refugees in train stations struggling to find some way out of the hell that Ukraine has become.  I see mothers frightened, children weeping, fathers looking lost and hopeless.  I see them being killed too. 

War is hell and cruelty.

I watch this on the news and hear about it from my friends, and then I turn back to the things I usually do.  I have toast and cereal for breakfast, I step out into the garden and do some wedding, I go to the supermarket to buy some groceries that I’ll need for tomorrow and the day after. My life continues as it always does.  Putin’s war against Ukraine is just a momentary pause in my day.  Mostly I feel there’s nothing I can do about the terror and the destruction and the cruelty and the hell that the Russians have unleashed on the mother and fathers and children of Ukraine.

The war is constant for those people, and from what I know about how the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Russians affected my parents and the millions of Poles who survived that war, that suffering will never end.

War is hell for the victims of war.  For the rest of us who watch it on TV, it’s just a pause in our regular routines.  

We can talk about how terrible all this killing is.  We can send donations to Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross.  We can write to our government representatives to do something to stop this war.  We can pray for all this killing to end.

But none of that is enough.  

Nothing is enough. 

War is hell and cruelty.

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

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/wojna-to-pieklo-war-is-hell/

.

Pre-Post-Apocalyptic Blues

 Pre-Post-Apocalyptic Blues

Watching the news recently about Putin’s war against Ukraine,I can’t help feeling that we are all fascinated with the idea that the world may come to an end.  

This is nothing new, of course.  If you turn on your TV, you can binge any number of TV series about the end of the world.  It started with Walking Dead (2010) and continues through TV shows like The Last Ship, The Strain, Under the Dome, Extant, The Rain, Daybreak, Z Nation, Black Summer, Falling Skies, and so many, many more.  In fact, in preparing to write this column for the Polish Daily News, I googled “Best Apocalyptic TV series” and found a site that lists and describes the 100 best apocalyptic series.  I’m sure there’s another site that lists the 100 worst apocalyptic series.

And there doesn’t seem to be an end to these shows about the end of the world.  In fact, I’m really looking forward to HBO’s The Plot Against America, about American Alt-Right guys led by pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh trying to take over the land of the free and the home of the brave in the early 1940s. 

Watching these series, you see the world brought to an end by zombies, vampires, meteors, alien invasions, and diseases like the coronavirus.

And God maybe.

I just started watching Leftovers -- the HBO series about what the world is like after what appears to be the Rapture happens and Jesus comes back to earth to take the really holy to heaven while leaving you and me behind.

It’s not pretty.  God doesn't take prisoners.

 Of course, all of this gets me wondering why this fascination with the end of things?  Is it because the world suddenly feels really old, and when you get to feel really old you start thinking about how things will end?

Or maybe it's because the world has ended -- virtually.  We spend so much time inside our homes watching the World Come to An End on TV that we don't realize that there's a real world still out there, the one outside my window, a world free of zombies and dogs and cars -- and people.

Hmmm.  It suddenly occurred to me that nobody has passed my house in the last 30 minutes or so.  No walkers or runners, no drivers driving cars or trucks.  Nobody.

Has the world ended while I was writing this column?

I better turn on the TV and see if there's anything left.

——-

A slightly different version of this article appeared originally in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish Daily in America, founded in 1908

War and Peace

War and Peace

We’ve all been following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My 12 year-old granddaughter is following it, and my 97 year-old mother-in-law is following, and my best friend Bob who hasn’t followed the news since 1963 is following it. On the news this morning, I was told that even though only a third of Americans know where Ukraine is, 77% are anxiously following the war.

We all know the cause of the anxiety. We’re anxious that the Russian invasion will escalate into World War III.

This war started last week, and there doesn’t seem to be a quick stop to it coming up. I’m writing this column on Monday, February 28, and I just heard Belarus is preparing to send troops into Ukraine to support the Russians. Belarus also just issued a warning that all of this fighting may lead to World War III.

Hearing that, my anxiety grows as I’m sure yours does.

I was surprised, therefore, this morning when a friend sent me a copy of Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “The End and the Beginning.” I love her writing, and I very much admire this poem, but I feel its optimism doesn’t fully express what happens when a war ends. When I first read her poem, I sat down and wrote “War and Peace.”

Here is her poem. My response follows. I’ll let you judge which poem gives a more accurate sense of what happens when wars end.

Wisława Szymborska

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

John Guzlowski

WAR AND PEACE

War will kill you

and leave you

cold in the street

or in the fields,

broken in the rubble

of bombed buildings

But don’t worry:

peace will come

and bury you

and sit over you

weeping like your mother,

praying for you,

pleading for your return

She’ll whisper to you

like when you were

a boy in the stream

washing your hands and face

before breakfast

She will weep until

God brings a miracle:

you risen again

in golden rays

and singing birds

and then war

will return

and kill you

——

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

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/wojna-i-pokoj-war-and-peace/

.

Maus and Me

 Maus and Me

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about Art Spiegelman’s book Maus recently.  His graphic memoir about the Holocaust was banned in Tennessee, and as a result, many of my Polish and Polish American friends on social media have been talking about it.

I’ve been a fan of Spiegelman’s Maus for a long time.  I first read this memoir about his father and his experiences in the Holocaust in 1990.  

My  connection with the book was almost instantaneous. Spiegelman and I shared so much. We both loved comic books for one thing. My great dream growing up was to write and draw comic books.  The dream never came true for me, but it became true for Spiegelman.  His graphic novel (i.e.  comic book) was the only one to ever win a Pulitzer Prize.  Another thing that connected us was that we both had Polish parents who were victims of the Germans.  My Catholic parents were sent to concentration and slave labor camps in Germany.  His Jewish parents went to Auschwitz. They all survived the war.  Finally, Art Spiegelman and I both wrote about our parents and the horrors they went through.  He wrote Maus and I wrote Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded. Like I said, I like Maus very much, and when I was still teaching I used to teach the book as often as I could.  

The Tennessee ban on Spiegelman’s book is pretty ridiculous.  The school board banned it – not for it’s portrayal of the Holocaust – but for its use of curse words and some nudity. 

What surprised me more was the reaction on social media.  Many Poles and Polish Americans attacked Maus for what they felt was its negative portrayal of Poles during World War II and the Holocaust. In the book people of different nationalities are seen as different animals.  Jews are mice, Poles are depicted as pigs, Germans as cats, etc.   That Poles are pigs is offensive to some readers, but the biggest complaint I hear is that the Poles are depicted as bad.

Are there negative portrayals of Poles in Spiegelman’s Maus?  Yes, there are.  For example, some Poles prisoners are seen assisting the Germans in Auschwitz, some Poles are seen betraying Jews, and some Poles are said to have killed Jews during the war.  

Is the portrayal of Poles entirely negative?  No.  Poles are also seen warning Jews that Germans are coming, Poles are seen being threatened by the Germans, Poles are seen treating Jews they know like family.  

What finally are we to make of this?

For me, it seems clear.  War and its chaos and infinite deaths creates a situation like nothing we have ever imagined.  Some of us – whether Polish or Jewish or German – turn against others, and some of us don’t.  

My mother spent 3 years in a slave labor camp.  She survived because one of the Germans guards at the camp took pity on her.  My mother used to say there were good Germans and bad Germans, and she forgave the good ones.  

For me, this is one of the lessons of Spiegelman’s Maus.  Forgive the good people.

——

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

Our First Year in Chicago

 Our First Year in Chicago

After working for a year on a farm outside of Buffalo, New York, to pay off our passage to America from the refugee camps in Germany, my family came to Chicago.  We were told that there was plenty of work there and that the work was easy.  We were told the work in Chicago was nothing like it had been in the slave labor camps in Germany or the farm outside of Buffalo. So my mom and dad and my sister Danusha and I took the Greyhound bus to Chicago.

That first year in Chicago, we were always moving from one place to another, from one kind of poverty to another kind of poverty that was a little easier on us.  When we first came to Chicago we had little money, so we had to live in the cheapest place.  It was a shed behind a bar on North Avenue.  Then as my parents found work we moved to another place and another place and another place.

We lived on Milwaukee Avenue, Hamilton Avenue, Belden Ave, North Avenue, Campbell Avenue, and Shakespeare Avenue.  We lived in Bucktown and Wicker Park and Humboldt Park.  We lived in sheds and two-room apartments and four-room apartments.  At one point, we even lived with four other Polish refugee families in one apartment and shared a bedroom with one of the families.  

In our first Chicago home, we slept on bare floors, and then when my parents made some money, we slept on mattresses on those bare floors, and then when my parents made more money, we slept in a small bedroom on two small mattress that were both too small, but still we somehow managed to sleep on them.  

No place was really home for much of that first year.  It was just someplace to gather and wait and hope as we looked around Chicago and tried to find the next place.  

And as we looked around we saw other Polish refugees just like us.  That was one of things that my parents loved about Chicago, the sense that we were here with so many people that had gone through the same experiences as we had, people who had lost their country and their families and their lives in the war, people who had the same dreams of finding new lives my family had.

My family loved that, and my family also loved the sense that there were no limits here to what we could dream and do.  For years my dad worked two shifts a week and my mom worked a midnight shift so that they could buy the home they dreamt of.  

Both of them had been ripped out of their homes by the Germans during the war and put in concentration and slave labor camps, and after the war they lived in a Displaced Persons camp for six years. and in all of those years they never felt that they had a home that was their own.  But Chicago with its jobs and opportunities gave them that chance to own a home.

Three years after coming to Chicago, they bought a three-story building on Potomac Ave.  Looking back on it now, I shake my head as I think about what a dump it was.  It had three small apartments and no central heating and a basement with a dirt floor, but still it was a home to my family, and my mom and dad felt like they had achieved a life that they never dreamed of in the camps during the war.  Now, they were landlords!

—

This article first appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

Looking for Fun in the Pandemic

 LOOKING FOR FUN IN THE PANDEMIC 

One of the things I hate most about the pandemic (besides the fact that it’s killed millions around the world) is that it’s made it hard for us to have fun. 

Remember the old, pre-pandemic days?  

Remember when we used to go maskless to restaurants and never think about how close we were to the others seated in the restaurant, never worried about whether they were vaccinated? Remember when we would just walk smiling into our favorite Italian restaurant, and the waitress who we’ve known for years would greet us and show us to our favorite table, and she was maskless and smiling too, and we all existed in a world where everybody was smiling and welcoming and warm.

If you went back to that restaurant today, probably everybody would be masked and anxious, and you might have to wait for a while to be seated because the restaurant is so short staffed.  Or what’s worse, the restaurant might have closed down a couple weeks ago – like my favorite restaurant just did – because people had stopped coming and COVID has taken out the staff.

And do you remember going to movie theaters and bars and libraries and museums and bowling alleys and churches?  Do you remember visiting friends?  Getting a hug when you came to their door? Sitting down on a couch with them?  Sitting so close – with no sense of social distancing – that you could actually put your hand out and pat them on the back when they said something really funny?

It’s been two years now since we first heard about the strange virus that was causing Wuhan in China to go into lockdown.  And the news hasn’t gotten better. The Delta variant and the Omicron variant have seen to that.  As of this afternoon, there have been 66.5 million cases reported in the US, and 851,000 deaths.  That’s a million more cases and a thousand deaths since yesterday when I started thinking about writing this column about fun in the pandemic.

So faced with all this bad news, what can we do to have fun in this pandemic?

I’ll tell you what I’ve discovered.  I’ve discovered that watching TV isn’t fun.  Maybe it’s different for other people, but sitting there in front of the TV and waiting to laugh at some old movie or jump up with excitement when superheroes start flying around isn't fun for me.  I’m still thinking of COVID and all the things I’d rather be doing.

What does give me fun, however, is having my family around, talking about the vacations we took in the  old days, looking at photos from a dozen years ago, playing board games with our daughter and her daughter, baking things in the kitchen, watching our 12-year old granddaughter practice her ballet moves.  

Those are the things that let me forget for a little while the mess this pandemic has created.

—

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

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/w-poszukiwaniu-radosci-podczas-pandemii-looking-for-fun-in-the-pandemic/

.