Matching Tracksuits

Month: June 2015

Nowy Targ Afternoon

Tuesday 30 June 2015

Every time we go to Poland, we do the same things — and I make that observation. Yet Poland is changing, growing. It’s got one of the strongest economies in Europe now, and when that simple fact is coupled with additional funds that come from the EU, it’s easy to understand why. Yet this is the second day that I look at the pictures and say, “Where in the world is that?” I know where it is: K told me in an email what they did today, and I knew about the afternoon visit long before. But the first part? They’re in Nowy Targ, but where in the world is this park?

I do see one thing that’s not a mystery: the Boy being a gentleman, helping a young friend — dare we say a cousin? After all, K and D are as close to sisters as you might possibly be without an actual genetic bond.

It’s easy to identify the location of the second batch of pictures: the rynek in Nowy Targ. Yet had I not known about the renovations, I never would have guessed it. Until I saw the ice cream: NT has a little hole in the wall with the best ice cream on the planet.

Finally, at the end, familiar faces, familiar location.

Babcia’s Day

Monday 29 June 2015

Not having a driver’s license, Babcia is not able to go where she wills when she wills. For the last few days, K has been taking the lead, I believe, more or less deciding on the agenda. Today was Babcia’s day.

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She wanted to visit a friend. Where? I can’t recall, and the area doesn’t really look familiar at all. There’s a restaurant — karczma it would be called — that looks like a place near Spytkowice, but I don’t think Spytkowice has apartment blocks like that.

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So odd to be looking at your own family’s pictures but not really knowing much more than a stranger at times.

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Playgrounds don’t tell you much, but the architecture of the wooden buildings shows that it’s still in the general area K grew up, still in the mountains.

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Perhaps you should ask K.

Ząb 2015

Sunday 28 June 2015

Click on images for larger versions.

Odpust 2015

Saturday 27 June 2015

Because almost every village is its own parish, almost every village has an odpust. During the last trip to Poland, we were in Pyzówka for their odpust. We were there strictly as visitors, as observers.

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Today, however, the Girl got to participate in Jabłonka’s odpust, as did K.

“I cleaned the church!” K told me, relating her part of the experience. The excitement came from the fact that she cleaned the altar, dusting and wiping down all the statuary that’s part of Jabłonka’s main church’s impressive altar piece. It’s something she’d looked at all her life growing up, so I guess seeing it all so up close, from a different perspective both literally and figuratively, was certainly exciting.

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L’s part, though was as visible as K’s was behind-the-scenes: she was helped lead the procession to the church, sprinkling flowers before the priests and dignified guests as they processed. The whole experience must certainly be novel to the Girl, for even though we’re members of a vibrant and active parish here in Greenville, there’s not a lot of processing going on, not of this nature. And besides, how would everyone treat that?

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In Jabłonka — and elsewhere in Poland — everyone treats it as such a special occasion that all the traditional garb comes out and it becomes a visually lovely experience. In America, everyone would come out in shorts and flipflops because in the summer, that’s about as close as we come to traditional garb. It’s one of the disadvantages of living in such a relatively young country that has, for generations, been much more mobile than the Old Country. We mix and match and before you know it, any sense of tradition that stretches back into the mists of memory have disappeared. The only people that hold to that are the Native Americans (who often have to fight on onslaught of competing cultures that see themselves as somehow extensions of that very culture) and the minority populations, Asian, South American, and to some degree African. It’s a sad thing, but perhaps somewhat unavoidable, given our history and our lack of homogeneity.

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But Poland, especially in the rural areas of the mountains, really exemplifies homogeneity. It was something that took some getting used to when I first moved to Lipnica Wielka, which is just about seven or eight kilometers from K’s home village of Jabłonka. Everywhere I looked I saw homogeneity: white people speaking a single language. When, on a trip to Warsaw, I saw African students in the the main train station, I almost wanted to hug them and say, “Let me just look at you! It’s so refreshing to see some diversity again!” When I saw a young Asian girl and a black girl on a popular TV series, both speaking flawless Polish, I became enthralled, wanting to learn everything I could about them. Heterogeneity was so rare that I just gawked at it.

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That was the Poland of the latter mid-90s. Twenty years on, so much has changed. Emigration from Poland has increased with the open EU borders, creating a certain brain drain as many of the more educated young adults move west, and immigration from the east, often illegal, has increased as well, as people from the former Soviet republics move to their own West, which is now Poland. And about all that, I have mixed feelings. I know that Poland will never become America, ethnically speaking, but might it become Germany? France? Diversity is a wonderful thing, but as with everything, it comes with a certain price. Still, I don’t see the highlanders of southern Poland diluting their own culture and pride in it at all for anyone.

Not that I’m suggesting anyone would try to dilute it — it’s just a byproduct, I think, of competing cultures. Not so for the gorals of the south: they’d cling to it ferociously, ever more mindful of the competition. And to some degree, that competition, with the level playing field that the Internet creates, already exists.

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Back to the story: after odpust, everyone went to aunty’s for dinner. And it was a huge feast, in keeping with the Polish saying, “A guest in the house is God in the house.” And even though they’re family, K and the kids are still guests, and the Polish spirit demands sharing on a massive scale.

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L hit it off with K’s cousin, R, who is a technophile as L is becoming. She loves showing people how to play this game or that game on the family tablet, which, truth be told, is more hers than anyone else’s.

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When L and I were there two years ago, we attended R’s and M’s wedding — our daughter’s first experience with a Polish wedding. As a girl who loves — absolutely loves — dancing, she was hooked immediately.

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There’s another family wedding coming up in mid-July, one which I’m hoping to attend myself. Still no decision yet: the to-do list still has a lot to get done, but maybe. Hopefully.

Exploration

Friday 26 June 2015

K and the kids went to the small town nearby where L and S, her cousin, might go to a day camp in the next couple of weeks.

And that’s all I know about that.

Basement

Thursday 25 June 2015

Step one: take almost everything from one side of the basement and put it on the other side. Cram everything in as much as possible — make it look like a complete wreck.

Step two: clean and paint the now-clean side of the basement with waterproofing paint to reduce eliminate the risk of future flooding. (This should be done in conjunction with a complete renovation of the gutters’ drainage system.)

Step three: move everything else out of the basement storage room into only other room in the basement. Pack it all as ridiculously tightly as possible.

Step five (the previous one counts as two steps): clean the other half of the basement storage room floor

Step six: dread reversing all the steps.

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Tuesday 23 June 2015

There was an almost fifty-degree temperature difference between Jabłonka and Greenville this third day of the 2015 summer. There, it was raining all day; here, the sun was merciless. That being said, we all had the same reaction: stay in as much as possible.

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Aunty came by for a visit — she lives just about a mile away, so it’s convenient, and visiting is just what you do when it’s forty-eight degrees and raining in June.

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K told me that she “couldn’t put enough layers on today.” But being trapped indoors leads to discoveries: “We played a couple of games of battleship, and then we discovered the Qwirkle game upstairs in the wooden room. It is a great game, I think we will play it a lot when the rest of the kids join.”

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That will be next week, when Polish schools are done for the year and the cousins come to grandma’s.

On this side of the ocean, I spent the day cleaning out one half of the basement in preparation for a thick, heavy coat of water-sealing paint. “Withstands up to 15 PSI” proclaims the label. Sounds like you could submerge your house in that case. Still, it was a job that required a lot of work that doesn’t leave a lot to show for it. The before and after pictures look almost the same. A little less dirt on the floor, and some patches where I scraped up the old paint entirely.

In theory, this is unnecessary: I’ve discovered the source of our occasional flooding (poorly clogged drainage that leaves the downspouts to pour water along the house), and I’ve fixed the problem. In theory. But I’m not about to take a chance, so I have plans to paint both the basement walls and floor as well as the portion of the crawlspace where water was likely entering.

But it wasn’t all inside work today. I worked in our small garden, finishing pulling up the old peas, straightening some of the tomato stakes, and dreaming of the not-too-distant future when I’m overwhelmed with tomatoes.

Bonfires, Walks, and a Jet

Monday 22 June 2015

I make a pile of the junk found in the basement today as I cleaned: broken hoe handles, bird feeders that had seen their last winter so long ago that I can’t even remember using them, spare wood that I’ve been saving — triangles, short pieces, long half broken pieces, even two broken pool cues well over a year after we gave away our pool table on Craigslist, a pizza box a little over a week old that had been sitting in a refrigerator that entire time holding bits of Howie’s bread that I’ve been nibbling on here and there. A pile of trash collected through the day will soon be nothing bad nothing but ash.

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Ordinarily I would be a bit worried about starting a fire this late in a South Carolina June. Usually the grass is brutally brittle by now and brown, but back to back monsoons have thoroughly soaked the ground so that the grass looks like it’s early May, and there should be no danger. Still I keep the hose pipe next to me just in case a stray ember ignites a small patch of grass light or, perhaps worse, a concerned neighbor (read: worried; read: nosey?) calls the authorities. “Yes officer, I have a means to extinguish the fire immediately right beside me. No, officer I do not have a permit.”

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It’s probably appropriate that today of all days I have set a fire a bonfire in our backyard, for today Kinga and the kids went for a walk down to the small river that runs through Jablonka, near which teens for decades burned bonfires legally (possibly) and down vodka illegally. When we still lived in Poland, K and I took numerous walks to that same spot. I took my parents to that spot when they came in 2004 for our wedding. I took L to that spot several times when we spent the summer there together in 2013. It’s about a mile from her house, maybe more, but it always seems both shorter order and longer, a path through fields of potatoes, beets, cabbage, grass for livestock. It’s comfortably known, that walk, and it’s always one of the very first things we do when we go back

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Bonfire always makes you think all is well with the world. They’re so calming, so simple, so primitive, so hypnotic. Just sitting looking at the fire (and if you’re lucky enough to hear the crickets around you) seems to square everything in the world. Even if you’re an adult who never really experienced bonfires as a child, it still seems to bring about a rebirth of youth, If you’re with friends, conversation always leave early always meaningful and always nostalgic; if you’re alone, you feel as if you’re the only person on Earth. You can hear cars passing in the distance, your neighbors chatting on their back porch, but you’re still alone in the world.

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I sit in the backyard at our fire thinking of my family in Poland as I hear a jet fly overhead, approaching the regional airport some 15 miles away. I miss them terribly, and our daily Skype chat is a small little blessing. Yet I’m strangely content because because I know that, like the bonfire, the separation is only temporary. And that’s really the trick to getting on in the world contentedly: understanding that so much of it is temporary and making your peace with that simple fact.

Cold Sunday

Sunday 21 June 2015

The Boy likes to help. It’s a common theme here: he helps me mow, he helps us with the garden, he helps us in the kitchen. He just follows along behind and asks, “Can I help?” not expecting any answer other than the affirmative.

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And we rarely say, “No.” Occasionally, we might be in a hurry and so we compromise: “How about you help clean up?”

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Babcia, of course, is never going to say, “No.” But I wonder how this situation came about. Did she ask him if he wants to help grind — what is that? liver? are they working on pate? — or did he manage, “Babcia, moge pomoc?”

The rest of the pictures seem self-explanatory enough. A festival during a cold Sunday when temperatures were almost in the single digits (Centigrade, of course).

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Drain, Rain, and a Snail

Saturday 20 June 2015

Our crawl space flooded at least five times in the last couple of years, and our half-basement itself flooded once or twice as well. It quickly became clear what was the cause: two downspouts of our gutters were gushing water straight into the foundation, which meant that our drainage system (already redone twice) was insufficient, clogged with roots, dirt, and who knows what. So earlier this year, I replaced the system with a temporary fix. An ugly fix. But it solved the problem. I knew I’d have to do it for a second time (the first time was done by a contractor before we moved in, part of our closing deal), but I as in no hurry.

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“Your number one priority while we’re in Poland,” K clarified, though, “is to redo the drains in the front.” So for the last few days, I’ve been digging, tugging, leveling, and getting everything ready for a final fix. I knew it’d be overkill, but I also figured I’d rather not do it another time, so the replacement system is with three-inch schedule 40 PVC pipe. But before I could get everything set, the sky began to gray, and I decided I might need to reattach the old temporary system, just in case.

What followed was a storm unlike anything I’d seen here. “It would have been the perfect test,” I muttered to myself.

Yesterday and today, though, I was able to get back out, finish up the leveling, and finish up the project, by and large. I decided to include two clean-outs in the plan just in case: I do not want to do this yet again. I reattached the hose to the spigot, rammed it down it not the newly constructed system, and turned it on. Perfection.

“Now if I could only get a real test,” I thought. Wish granted: another storm blew through this afternoon and everything worked like a charm. All that’s left is packing a bit more gravel around it and replacing the mulch.

Job one, done. More or less.

But who cares about drains and rain when across the ocean there are snails and soccer games?

K took the kids and Babcia to visit A, K’s sister-in-law, and their kids, who live just outside of Krakow. There was soccer and silliness until L discovered a snail — “na prawda duzy slimak!” K assured me (though probably with better grammar) before I’d had a chance to see the pictures — and that entertained them for a couple of hours.

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L has fallen back into Polish with no problem, K tells me. In fact, she’s eager to accompany her cousin S for a two-week camp up at the coast. The Boy, though, is a different story. Though K speaks almost exclusively in Polish, he’s still not really speaking that much Polish. I would imagine he feels a little left out as a result. “I translate for him a lot,” L explained today during our Skype time, but there’s something about this picture, his hands held in front of him as he watches, that makes me just want to hug him and assure him that he’ll be able to jabber away in no time as long as he makes a real effort. Or maybe there’s something else entirely going on with that picture. Maybe he’s just hungry, ready to head to the kitchen for some chicken and potatoes.

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Or maybe not.

First Pics from Abroad

Friday 19 June 2015

“How will I send you pictures?” K asked before leaving with the kids to Poland. We worked out a couple of different ways, but uploading directly to MTS seems to be the best method.

And so now I begin the shift from blogger to historian, for I’m writing about pictures and events where I was absent. I can look at the pictures, make an educated guess about what was going on (informed by what K told me via Skype), but by and large, I’m still just a historian.

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So I look at the pictures and think, “Hum, at the airport.” And I think further: Charlotte or Munich? It doesn’t look like the terminal from which we’ve always left from Charlotte, but it looks less like the Munich airport. Still, the carpet, the handicap sign (why are my children sitting in a seat for handicapped people?), the general surroundings, the alertness of the kids — it must be Charlotte.

The other pictures are easy: I recognize the spot immediately, and more importantly, K told me about their shopping trip to “downtown” Jabłonka.

The clothes are another clue: Charlotte was 98° when they left; Poland was in the 50s, with the 5 AM morning temperature (Babcia is an early-riser) being a refreshing 32° F. Still, you’ll notice in L’s hand an ice cream cone. Apparently they’re continuing the tradition we started in 2013: if you go to the village centrum, you must get an ice cream cone. Still, you’ll also notice in the background that children returning from school are wearing shorts. It is, after all, June. Summer in Poland.

Here and There

Thursday 18 June 2015

Two stories, one family. Or maybe one family, one story, temporarily told in two parts. The highlight of the day came in the morning, without question. Mug of coffee in hand, I headed downstairs to chat with the better portion of our family. They’re finishing up lunch; I just had breakfast.

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The Boy began with the important information: new additions to the toy collection. With money from Babcia, he bought an entire set of air-travel-based toys: airplane, cargo lifter, the stair-mobile that we occasionally see but almost never use. Except at Krakow’s airport.

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He put a couple of toys down in front of the computer and proclaimed that I could play with those. I suggested we might have to wait until the family is reunited.

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In the meantime, the Girl has dashed up to her room (which means bolting up four sets of stairs) and back to show me what she chose with her money from Babcia: a small Nerf-launching pistol to go along with her Nerf-launching bow that’s still here, in South Carolina.

It’s likely to be a daily or near-daily occurrence. “What kind of plastic nonsense will she have next Wednesday, when you guys go to the flea market?” I ask. L just jumped in joyful anticipation.

My, Our, and The

Wednesday 17 June 2015

It’s a sign of the times that I haven’t been in a bank in probably well over a year. Since almost everything can be done online or at an ATM, why bother? But a substantial withdraw before heading on vacation requires a visit in person, so I dropped off at our local branch and realized immediately upon entering that they’d created a new position since I’d last been inside. Standing at the entrance was essentially a traffic director: a young lady who looked to in her early twenties, fresh out of college, asked all entering customers what they needed and then directed them to the appropriate part of the bank. So essentially it was waiting in line before being told to go wait in this or that line. I knew which line I needed, but I waited patiently while the young lady helped the lady in front of me determine where she needed to go. Finally, it was my turn, and I was brief: “I just need to make a withdraw.”

“Well, if it’s less than $300, you can get it from the ATM,” she smiled, “but if it’s more, you’ll have to see one of my tellers.”

Such a loaded construction: “one of my tellers.” I stood in the second line, thinking of the young lady’s other options. She could have said, “You’ll have to see one of the tellers.” Alternatively, she could have said, “You’ll have to see one of our tellers.” But she chose “one of my tellers.”

I found myself wondering if this was scripted (i.e., the bank manager told her to phrase it that way) or if she made that decision herself. And the more I thought about it, the more I hoped it was the former and not the latter, for if I were a teller at that bank, I would think it would grate on my nerves all day long to hear this young lady refer to me as “one my tellers” when in fact she’s probably just as low on the totem pole as I am. Certainly she could be the manager, but that seems unlikely: too young, and why would the manager be doing such a job?

If it’s the latter, if she’s choosing to say “one of my tellers,” why? It undoubtedly sets up a hierarchy within the bank, with the traffic director placing herself above the tellers. After all, if they’re “my tellers,” I’m in charge. However, if they’re “our tellers,” we’re all subservient to someone else, either the abstract idea of the banking corporation or the specific manager. The final choice, “one of the tellers” makes it seem as if she’s not even really a part of the bank. Clearly “our” is the best choice. So why “my”?

Feed the Cats!

Tuesday 16 June 2015

K and the kids are now somewhere over the Atlantic, on their way to Munich, where they’ll have ninety minutes to make a connection to Krakow, where K’s godfather will pick them up and drive them two hours south almost into Slovakia, where Babcia is waiting with chicken broth and homemade egg noodles. The ninety-minute ride to the airport went fine, the check-in process was flawless, and we even had time to sit and share an over-priced bottle of orange juice before they entered the terminal area restricted to those of us who lack a ticket. I wound through the line with them, ducking out at the last minute just before K and the kids had to take off shoes, belts, etc. The Boy came back over to the rope barrier and gave me another hug and kiss. The Girl followed, on the brink of tears, reminding me for the thousandth time to…

Final Night

Monday 15 June 2015

It comes around generally every two years, but these last couple of times, there’s been a twist: the last night before leaving to Poland has been bittersweet because of the way we’re leaving. Last year, it was L and I who left, with the Boy staying home with K. This year, it is I who stays behind. At least temporarily. At least in theory.

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Whether or not I go, and right now the latter is more likely, depends on a number of variables, some in my control, some perhaps less so.

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So tonight might possibly be the last evening we’re together as a family for up to seven weeks. And what does a family do that last evening when they might not be together for a very long time? If they’ve just received a gifted trampoline, they jump.

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Last Hurrah

Sunday 14 June 2015

It was one last hurrah before everyone went their separate ways. To begin with, I’ll be alone next Sunday, so we had a Father’s Day lunch with family and friends a week early.

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More significantly, it was likely the last time L could spend time with her almost-cousins (though they just call themselves cousins) T and C: they’ll be going to Poland later this summer and staying for the entire first semester of the school year. So this weekend was the last chance for them to play school (why is it that they always play school when they’re together during a break?) for almost six months.

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So during their visit, we did the only logical thing to do in during the hot South Carolina June: stayed inside or stayed in the water.

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The downside of those hot South Carolina June days is the likelihood of thunderstorms every afternoon, which is exactly what happened today, which meant the kids were forced to find another way of entertaining themselves.

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Somehow they managed.

The Battle

Friday 12 June 2015

With K’s and the kids’ departure to Poland nearing, we’re spending as much time as possible at the pool. With L’s swimming lessons — and we were informed that it’s time for her to move to the advanced group next time — that meant that she was hitting the pool twice a day some days. And yet in spite of all this, getting out is the toughest part.

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For the Girl, it’s simple: she just doesn’t want to get it. It’s rare that she’s the one who initiates the “when are we leaving” conversation. Usually, she seems willing to stay and stay and stay. And that translates to excessive lingering in the pool.

For the Boy, it’s a whole other story: the towel is the challenge.

Up and Down

Thursday 11 June 2015

Trampolines, for the briefest of moments, allow you to break an otherwise unbreakable law, unbreakable because it’s a physical not prescriptive cultural law: gravity. We go higher than we otherwise would be able, we seemingly float at our apogee for a half-moment longer, and the effects on our legs of all our weight crashing down are substantially diminished. Which is a long way of trying to explain the obvious: it’s simply fun.

And tempting: as the Girl hurls her feet over her head, trying, again and again, to do a full front flip and land on her feet, I think back to a time ten years ago when, visiting a friend, I bounced about on his kids’ trampoline and casually landed a forward flip. Nothing to it, really. Now, I jump, jump, jump, thinking of what my body needs to do to toss my feet over my own head, and while I know all the components of the action, my body says, “Well, maybe it’s not so simple…”