Matching Tracksuits

“What’s new in Lipnica?” I asked when I arrived in Lipnica in 2000. And again today, the same question. J, my closest friend from Lipnica, arrived in the early evening and gave the same response to the same question.

We first headed to the border crossing that was just past Lipnica. No border crossing anymore. Thanks to the EU, no border anymore. But that would not be quite right: Slovakia uses the Euro, Poland doesn’t. This means a change in border crossings: in the 1990s, Poles went to Slovakia for cheap goods; these days, the reverse is much more common.

On through the lower part of Lipnica to the Elementary School Number 1.

Where I see the first surprise: a new sports complex.

And further down the road, a few more surprises: street lights with solar panels and wind turbines.

All the while, a new road, a road that doesn’t jostle riders to dust.

Not all surprises are plesant.

And not all sights are surprises.

What’s changed in Lipnica? Everything, and nothing.

Fourteen years — a long time to wait. One could move to another continent, start a life in an American city, move back to the original continent, start life there again, get married, move back again to the other continent, have a child, buy a house, have another child, and a thousand other things in that time. And when there are two involved, the possibilities are even more endless: new businesses, new houses, and more. The children I just finished teaching were born fourteen years ago. Their whole lives are encapsulated in those fourteen years, and for us adults, in reality, fourteen years is ironically almost nothing when casting a backwards glance in time.

A Thursday night fourteen years ago would have often meant only one thing: an evening of billiards and conversation at Dudek (“Woodpecker”), a bar and music room in Nowy Targ. C, the only other American I knew for several kilometers, and I would head out around seven, have something to eat (the owner of the bar fixes the most amazing hamburgers on the planet), then head to the pool table for an evening of nine-ball. We’d flirt a little with the ladies, chat with friends, and be your fairly typical single guys on a night out.

Fourteen years later, we decided it was time to head back. But how times have changed. Both married, both fathers, both with countless other concerns (the cost of heating oil; the potential water damage done during a recent downpour; the health of our children; myriad other worries) than having a good time on a Thursday evening.

But last night, we put all those concerns behind us for a few hours and acted like it was 1999 — literally — again.

We began in the backyard: drinks, cigars, conversation. C’s son, F, regaled us with magic tricks; C, his wife M, and I talked about differences between life in the States and in Poland; and a couple of hours slipped by almost unnoticed.

We headed off down the hill, between the hospital and cemetery (the ironies), stopping momentarily to look at the views. At any rate I stopped and C slowed: the views are almost commonplace for C now, and if the Tatra Mountains aren’t crystal clear, well, there’s not much point in slowing to look. They’ll be clearer tomorrow, or the day after.

Down, down, through a small neighborhood, across the river, and suddenly, there we were,

just a couple of blocks from the town square. And how the rynek has changed. I was honestly too much in awe about the changes to think of taking a picture. Or maybe I just want to save that for some other time.

Yet the tragic highlight of the walk to the club was the construction occurring at what used to be the bus station in Nowy Targ. It was a perfect example of sixties archetecture in Poland.

Now, in its place, they are building a gallery. Why not just renovate? Why throw away a piece of history?

“Perhaps they want to forget about it,” C suggested. Perhaps. Maybe I’m just being overly Romantic about it.

But last night was not the time for wallowing in the past. Well, perhaps it was — after all, we left the site of the old bus station and arrived shortly at our old haunt, and as we walked, almost every sentence began with “Remember when…?”.

We arrived at the fenced outdoor sitting area only to find the gate locked. There were a few people sitting at the tables there, but the gate was locked up tight. And suddenly, from the bar, the owner, G, rushed out to greet us. A burly man in every sense of the word, G had always been kind to us when we were passing seemingly countless hours in his establishment. Sometimes he would bring us free food; sometimes he would bring us free drinks; sometimes he would declare that our five hours of nine-ball that evening were “on the house.”

It was good to be back, especially when we discovered that, like the bus station, Dudek has, for all intents and purposes, passed into shadow. There are no more concerts; the bar is closed except for patrations of the hotel above it. “But you guys come on in!” he declared. He opened the upper room for us to shoot pool, and fourteen years disappeared, and it was 1999 again.

We played pool,

we wandered back into the virtually pitch black concert area, and we reminisced endlessly.

The hours slipped by and before either of us expected it, it was two thirty in the morning. Just like old times. We went down to the main bar area to find we were the only ones in the whole place. G had sat there, putting CD after CD on, keeping us fed and watered, and letting us revel in the last time we’ll ever get to relive those magical years of the late 1990’s.

G called us a taxi, and we chatted one last time.

“In fact, I’m trying to sell the place,” G admits just before we leave.

I know better than to try to capture the long-gone past. I’ve tried it before, and it didn’t work. Still, a thought flashed as G admitted his hopes to sell the place.

“How much would you want for the place? Maybe C and I could go into business together…”