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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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