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2011

Saturday 31 December 2011

Twelve wishes for the Girl.

January

The Girl is curious. It’s only natural: all children are, and we only use that curiosity when something kills it.

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May you always be fascinated with snow.

February

An early warm spell in late February brought buds and blossoms to trees and bushes, and the Girl was eager to pick the first blossoms. “They’re for Mama,” she explained.

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May the beauty of the world always incline your soul to generosity.

March

“I’m an artist,” she explained as she traced her imagination in chalk on the driveway in the early spring. “Don’t tell anyone,” she asked, but it’s hard to keep such a secret, even for her. She’s always drawing and always eager to share her drawings.

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May your creativity always be a source of pride for you.

April

A new sandbox brought spring joy.

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May you always enjoy getting dirty.

May

During her second camping trip, the Girl found herself having to produce her own entertainment while K and I set up camp. Fortunately, she brought her art supplies.

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May your artistic talent always be a source of comfort.

June

Early June. We headed to Hot Springs, North Carolina, to visit friends and attend the Bluff Mountain Festival, a celebration of bluegrass and old timey mountain music. The Girl sat in rapt fascination as the cloggers clicked their rhythms. Soon, when the small plywood dance floor cleared, L ran out to spin and hop and dance.

The Girls

May traditional music always make you want to dance.

July

A first hot dog. For a girl who always judges food without tasting, trying new foods brings smiles to K’s and my face. It’s such a rarity that it’s photo-worthy.

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May you always be willing to try something new.

August

As the temperature soared, we found ourselves at the pool with increasing frequency. It was during this summer that the Girl finally took off the water wings and tried swimming solo. It was during this summer that the Girl, seeing her best friend from school doing it, finally gathered the bravery to shove her face under the water.

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May water always bring joy.

September

The Girl has had a refined sense of fashion for some time. Only recently did she begin wearing pants on a semi-regular basis. “I don’t want to look like a boy,” she explained, and she simply adored her dresses.

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May you always understand that clothes only highlight out your inner beauty and not the do not contribute to your as a person. 

October

The games we play. To list them all would be impossible: I simply can’t remember them all.

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May you always treasure your imagination.

November

A short trip to visit family in Poland brought a renewed interest in all things Polish. It was a linguistic breakthrough, producing a new willingness to speak the language and a new pride in the Polish side of her being.

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May you always take enormous pride in your Polish heritage.

December

The year ended with news that the Girl will soon be Big Sister.

Big Sister

May the excitement you felt at the news of your brother’s coming be the center of your relationship with him.

The Battle

Friday 30 December 2011

The warrior comes, a vicious flanking surprise attack with that most feared weapon: the broom.

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A fierce battle ensues: experience versus speed, Swiffer Sweeper versus broom.

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If only all of our battles were so fun.

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And surely, I’ll look back at the epic bedtime battles, the fussy mornings, the frustrated afternoons, and I’ll wish our current battles could return.

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Old and Young

Thursday 29 December 2011

There are times when the Girl most decided looks older than her actual age: riding her bike in the carport the other day was such a time; at the beach this summer was another. Yet looking older and being older are two different things. Indeed, looking older, acting older, and being older are three different things. Two of those three are out of anyone’s control. Acting older is a function of biology (brains and bodies must develop, after all), psyschology, and lastly, choice.

I try to influence that choice by increased reference to the Boy. “When Little Brother is here,” I’ll begin when I sense some fussing is approaching, “will you really want to act like such a little child? Don’t you want to be big sister?” Perhaps a bit manipulative, but isn’t that the case with most aspects of child rearing at this age? Manipulation will only get me so far in the game, though. The rest is her choice.

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Tonight’s choice: to cook dinner. It’s a lazy, almost-emergency-nothing-planned dinner: we have a jar of spaghetti sauce and some noodles in the cabinets for such evenings. Perfect for a little girl.

“You’ll do the hot stuff, Tata,” she explains. “I’ll crush the sugar for the noodles and other stuff.” (I can never get “bullion” into her head; it’s always “sugar.”) She pours the jar of sauce into the pan, swirls around the water in the jar to rinse off the leftover sauce, cleans off the table — everything she can do, she does.

These are the small accomplishments that instill intense pride. “When Little Brother is five or six, he can help, too,” she says offhandedly as she crushes bullion cubes. “Guess what, Mama!” she almost yells when K walks through the door, “I cooked dinner!”

And so the future unfurls itself slowly in front of us. We watch and smile, anticipating and almost dreading: we’ll look back wistfully on these blog entries some day, we know.

But this is only half of the story.

As surely as she shows flashes of the years to come, the Girl reminds us that she’s still five. “Want to see how I can jump like a frog?” she asks after dinner.

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If only she can keep this balance of youthful excitement over the most seemingly insignificant things and an increasing sense of responsibility, I’m quite certain of her future.

The Boy

Wednesday 28 December 2011

“If we have another daughter, what will I refer to her as on MTS?” I asked myself. The Girl is, after all, the Girl. I can’t very well switch to “Girl A” and “Girl B,” or “Alpha Girl” and “Beta Girl.” Besides sounding stupid, the Girl is the Girl.1

Enter: the Boy.

The Boy

Working name right now: Emil.2

  1. There are naturally other concerns. How does one raise a boy? Is it different from girls? Should it be? Yes and no seem appropriate answers. ↩
  2. Most likely spelled without the final “e”, as this is identical to the Polish spelling. ↩

The Downward Side

Tuesday 27 December 2011

The holiday season is parabolic. We spend all this time preparing for it, getting excited for it, cooking for it, and then, in a rush and a flash, it’s all over. The lights are still shining; the tree is still up; the Girl still sings carols. But we all know that we’re on the downhill side of the parabola. And this morning, it was if the weather were supplying the scenery on cue.

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In the past, this was a source of wistful sorrow, this let down after such an emotional high. It’s the return to the normal, a return from that time when everything seems to stand still for just long enough for us to catch a whisper of something greater than our everyday lives. In Polish, this normal life, this “everyday reality” is called codzienność, “everyday-ness,” and the clumsiness of that translation — that awkward “-ness” — seems somehow more appropriately descriptive of codzienność, without that scent of pseud-philosophy the “reality” part of the English equivalent provides.

Children, I think, get this on a daily, multi-dose basis on the playground. They stand in line for this or that piece of equipment, filled with an anticipation and excitement that only makes the wait more torturous. The actual activity — the slide, the swing — passes in a flash, and they’re back at the end of the line. In that sense, it’s not a parabola; it’s a sine curve. And I suppose it is for us adults as well, it’s just got a longer wave length.

Saint Stephen’s Day 2011

Monday 26 December 2011

For us, the holidays are a time of Wigilia leftovers. We’ve begun our lunch two days in a row now with barszcz z uszkami. The Girl likes her barszcz without the “ears,” (i.e., dumplings), though. For sane people, it’s the wild-mushroom-filled dumplings that elevate the dish to perfection, but the fact that L loves barszcz is enough.

After-Christmas Barszcz

It’s not the barszcz she’s used to, though. This is peppery, clear barszcz, made with fermented beet juice to give it an edge. The result is a testament to the Girl’s love of the soup: it’s peppery enough that afterward, she fusses about how her throat burns, and she eats it knowing this is coming.

After lunch, I pack her small bike and helmet in the trunk, and we head for our favorite park, leaving K at home to rest and enjoy some quiet. L quickly makes friends with a young Latino girl her age who is also on a bike, and the two spend the next ninety minutes together, playing games, comparing notes about second-language abilities, and being five-year-olds.

Later, when L and K are both in bed, I occupy myself with old pictures. I look through the pictures of our wedding in 2004, pictures I’ve seen dozens of times, then move to pictures from the day after: a small garden party, family and friends relaxing in a surprisingly warm day in my in-laws’ yard.

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I drift into thoughts about how different this life is from that, and how similar.

Holiday Riding

Sunday 25 December 2011

Step one: arrange some improvised pylons.

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Step two: break into enormous smiles at the successful completion of the first turn.

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Step three: take off your helmet and engage in wistful thought

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And give another hint of what you’ll look like in ten years.

Wigilia 2011

Saturday 24 December 2011

My first Wigilia — Christmas Eve — celebration was a tense affair. Six months in Poland in December 1996, I’d returned to the host family with whom I’d stayed during the twelve-week training session. While I got along marvelously with my host mother, her son (I suppose one would call him a “host brother”), four years my junior, was not always the most pleasant person to be around. “There’s a lot of tension between you two!” a fellow PCV remarked after spending some time with the two of us. The tension didn’t lessen that Christmas, and it was, in fact, the last time I visited them.

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The next year was the first Wigilia that gave me a hint of what it should be like. I spent it with neighbors in the small village in which I’d been posted. They were so much like family that I’d taken to calling the matriarch “Mama.” I had dinner with the whole family that snowy Christmas Eve before heading to Babcia’s to meet with the rest of the family. Laughter, singing, joy — I knew this was what Christmas Eve was supposed to be like.

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My third Wigilia was in Berlin, with family of an Indian friend that made for a warm mix of the Subcontinent and the Black Forest.

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The next time I celebrated a true Polish Wigilia was three years later, after having spent two years in Boston before realizing that there was something — little did I know at the time, someone — I’d left behind in Poland. I was back with my neighbors, now my landlords, as I was renting a room from them. Still like family, we celebrated another proper Wigilia, waiting for the first star to appear as the various aromas of the waiting feast drifted through the house.

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Finally, during Wigilia 2002, I spent the evening with K and her family. K and I had let our long friendship evolve into something more, and while I might not have been able that evening to say it with 100% certainty, it seemed like the first of many Christmas Eves together.

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Christmas Eve 2003 we were engaged. A friendship that had begun seven years earlier was a few short months away from becoming a life-long and joyous commitment.

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We married a little over four months before our third Christmas Eve together. My folks — Nana and Papa, though still two years away from being Nana and Papa — had sent a tree ornament that celebrated “Our First Christmas,” with an inset for a cameo-size photo. It hangs on our tree as I type, a yearly reminder of that first year together.

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By 2005, we were in the States. It was our first solo Wigilia in the kitchen. We learned a lot that year, including how to make the fermented-beet zakwas for barszcz.

In 2006, we had our first Wigilia as a family of three, the Girl still delicate bundle of spitting-up joy.

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Since then, we’ve begun new traditions, with new guests that arrive every year to celebrate this holy night with us. We share the opłatek, enjoy a traditional meal of barszcz z uszkami, pierogi, fish, kapusta. We open our gifts and try them out — “Can you hear me, over?”

When the guests are gone and my girls are asleep, I sit in the living room, reflecting at the wonder of love and family, and I find myself aware that, as perfect as this evening was, it can only get better.

Previous Years

Wigilia 2003

Wigilia 2004

Wigilia 2005

Wigilia 2006

Wigilia 2007

Wigilia 2008

Wigilia 2009

https://matchingtracksuits.com/2010/12/25/wigilia-2010/

Gnostic Preparation

Saturday 24 December 2011

What happens if the one individual who truly knows how to cook the traditional Christmas Eve meals doesn’t feel like doing much more than resting through her cold?

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To begin with, she drinks folk remedies like egg yolks in hot milk — eggnog base, I guess — and a syrup of honey and garlic that produces breath foul enough to stop a charging rhino. (It’s sweet, though, and the Girl loves it: she takes a bit every night, and it truly helps ward off colds. But the best part for her is running around and breathing on everyone. Probably the fact that, in a fit of hyperbolic play, I fell down dramatically in the middle of the kitchen floor afterward helped encourage the game.)

It also means that the Polish-ized American husband gets his first shot and cooking barszcz from scratch.

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This starts by making an beet-based vegetable stock from:

  • three carrots,
  • three beets,
  • two celery stalks,
  • two parsnips,
  • half an onion,
  • half a dozen cloves of garlic,
  • two prunes, and
  • one apple.

Cubed into large chunks, it all goes into a pot of water to boil, then simmer for two hours. Once everything has cooked soft, pour it through a strainer and all that’s left is a glistening, purple beet stock that has a sweet aftertaste and is ready to the final seasoning (which includes the addition of fermented beet juice) to turn it into barszcz.

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As I strain it, I find myself thinking that perhaps this is the perfect food for gnostics. After all, if it’s the spirit — the essence — of a thing that has any value, as gnostics believed (and still believe), and the physical body itself is useless, what better food to illustrate that than a soup stock that ends with clarified, pure flavor and a steaming pile of now-refuse, vegetable bodies that once carried the essence of flavor but now, limp and colorless, are good only to be tossed in the compost?

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Foolish thoughts, these ruminations of the theology of food: I have other things to worry about, like creating some kind of stuffing for the salmon fillets that will be tonight’s main course. With my usual on-the-fly cooking methods, I end up with sauted crab meat with crushed roasted garlic, capers, and walnuts with a light sprinkling of tarragon and ginger and a squirt of fresh lemon juice just before turning off the heat: a whole slew of flavors that will also be paired with smoked oysters and slivers of roasted garlic before being tucked into a sliced salmon, because Gnostic denial of the senses has no place in the Christmas Eve kitchen.

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Christmas 2011 Baking

Friday 23 December 2011

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A day that starts like this — sunny and warm after a cold, cloudy day before — begs to be played in (and have passive voice sentences written in). We need to visit a park, go for a walk, play in the sun.

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But it’s baking day, and the Girl has been waiting anxiously — pesteringly, one might even say — for this day because she gets to use her fabulous new holiday-themed cookie cutter set. After a quick lesson, she’s ready to go.

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Soon we have candy canes, Christmas trees, gingerbread men (though cut from sugar cookie dough), and stockings ready for the oven.

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All we need are a few sprinkles of decorative mystery color that the Girl picked out, filled with uncontrollable excitement, during a trip to the market yesterday.

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The adult versions get a coating of frosting lemony frosting and a sprinkle of roasted pistachios. A cheese cake in the afternoon and the year’s modest holiday baking is complete.