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