Keeping busy is the key. Idle hands, idle minds — conventional wisdom.
We’ve moved in, and as I don’t have a job, the last week has been busy with straightening and organizing. I’m a house-dad, without the “dad” part. Too bad I can’t just get pregnant and make use of the down time. Indeed -— if that could happen, we’d never have to work again, either of us. Medical miracle. Religious miracle, and it wouldn’t even have to be a virgin birth.
Keep busy. Our computer crashed and we had to buy a new one a few months ahead of schedule. Best Buy almost ripped us off, due to a pricing mistake. I went in ready for a fight. At last I can get out all the frustration building in the last year of Polish bureaucracy and tangle in my native language. No tangling there, though. They gave it to us for the advertised price. As if they wouldn’t. Well, in my recent experience abroad, worse things have happened.
Keep busy — else you end up writing things like this.
Two years in a place is enough to make it home. Three years cements it further, and moving after three years somewhere can be overwhelmingly traumatic. Four years could kill a person if she didn’t some kind of support. Seven years, ten years, twenty-six years — the transition period itself could last years. Family and friends constitute “mitigating factors” but most importantly in my experience is a concrete goal, a reason behind it all that motivates and justifies uprooting yourself.
Kinga and I are now settled in, hoping to take root in America. Because I spent seven of the last nine years in Poland, it’s as much a foreign country for me as for her. How long before we think of this place as “home”? I no longer associate our cozy apartment in Lipnica with that word, but also, I don’t imagine our new place when I think of “home,” either. It’s a word that hangs in my imagination, not even suspended by anything tangible. Maybe it will settle with the dust that will accumulate in our new apartment, and gradually pick up the warm associations it needs.
In the meantime, there’s the inevitable sadness that edges everyday life. I see it sometimes in Kinga’s eyes and remember what it was like when I first moved to Lipnica. The stimulation of all that’s new and different in a foreign country can grow tiring, and it’s then that thoughts turn back to the places and faces that usually come to mind alongside the word “home.”
I feel it like a fog in my own thoughts, when I realize anew how distant all I knew and loved in Lipnica is at this moment – friends, students, and now family. I look at pictures taken during our last weeks in Poland and I feel I’m looking at snapshots of another’s life. Seeing myself in some of the shots reassures me that I was there, that I didn’t just dream it all.
This tint of gloom is nothing compared to the wretchedness I felt when I first returned from Poland in 1999. Struggling at first just to scrounge up enough for Boston’s exurbanite cost of living, feeling intense doubt about graduate school, knowing next to no one, thinking it could be over a year — maybe two — before I’d be teaching again, and being so far from everything and everyone I knew in America made the first months dismal. It’s not that every moment was hellish. Far from it. But the transition from my rural Polish world of certainty was emotionally exhausting.
It was a bad day.
One good way to keep busy is looking for work, combing CareerBuilder.com and Hotjobs and Monster daily. Hourly is the temptation — after all, you can search by the hour. Still once a day should suffice.
Reading is another way to keep busy. God knows we’ve got enough books to read now. Dad gave me his “Great Books” collection. An odd thing, those Great Books. Everything from Freud to Euclid, from Shakespeare to Darwin. They’re big, hardback books, with a sixties binding. I thought about digging into Faraday or Adam Smith, but I still haven’t finished Kapuscinski’s Imperium. For now, Faraday waits on his side, stacked on the floor by the bookcase, with the other Great and Heavy Books of Western History beside anthologies and lesser books. My father said he had decided in the late sixties when he bought that Bundle of Books that he would, through his life, read them all. There are fifty-four volumes, beginning with the Iliad and ending significantly with Freud. I’m not sure how many he read, but I’m fairly sure he never made it out of the ancient Greeks.
The Great Books series gives we intellectual mortals a feeling that we’re somehow greater than we are. After all, we have in our library Gibbon and Ptolemy, Chaucer and Galen. But really, what’s the point? Those who would read them probably already have them. They’re useful for libraries and sect’s bookshelves. No, I’m not so unoccupied that I’ve taken to reading Tacitus, important though he may be.
Keeping busy -— for example, physicals for registering as a substitute teacher, getting a North Carolina driving license (I have to take the test —- can’t just turn in the valid VA license.), getting tags, and so on.