Matching Tracksuits

Month: December 2019

Outside Lighting

Sunday 8 December 2019

K and I decided we were going to forego the usual outside decorations this year and try something new. With two trees in the front yard, there seemed to be only one thing to do: transform them into Christmas trees.

“It should be faster than putting up the icicle lighting,” K said.

“Should be,” I agreed.

So while K was running her first open house as a real estate agent, the kids and I set about wrapping some 344 feet of lights (8 lines of 43 feet each) around our crape myrtles.

I wasn’t sure how it would turn out because of the random places we had to string a line from one branch to another, creating a strange horizontal bit in an otherwise verticle orientation.

In the end, I think it turned out fairly well.

“How long did it take?” asked K earlier this evening.

“About as long as the icicle lighting.”

Maybe next year we’ll do both…or neither.

Apartment

Sunday 8 December 2019

I sit in my parents’ apartment listening to Mozart’s Requiem looking around I completely empty room what was once so full life. The couch, the table, the chairs, the media equipment, the paintings, the photographs, the bookshelves and books, the kitchen utensils — everything is gone, sold for next to nothing or dumped in the trash.

Sitting in this empty house is not the same as sitting in my own empty apartment just before moving out.  There’s more of finality about this. When you’re leaving your own apartment, you know you’re going to a new one. This apartment, we’re just leaving. Someone else will own it, someone else will live in it, someone else will bring new memories into it, and someone else will make new memories out of it. We, on the other hand, consolidated two houses into one with Papa moving in with us, so this is a period for us — an end stop. So many of the memories associated with this home have to do with our children. L playing and the castle that Nana and Papa bought for her when she was around four or five years old. E rolling around on the floor with Papa, rolling around on the floor with Lena, rolling around the floor with whomever who was willing.

But some of the memories are more difficult. Every time I walk down the hall to get something out of the back bedroom or take something to the laundry room — a paintbrush to clean perhaps or a search for something absorbent — I pass by the guest bathroom from which Nana was emerging when it all started. I see her there again on the floor with paramedics around her, with Papa distraught, all knowing the situation but not realizing the gravity of it all.

That was now a year ago. Early December it all started. A trip to the hospital, a return trip home, some physical therapy, a collapse again, back to the hospital, back for physical therapy, to the rehab hospital, back to the hospital, all of it creating an enormous circle that seemed endless but most certainly was not.

Christmas Tree

Saturday 7 December 2019

Six years ago, on December 7, we put up our Christmas tree. It’s a fairly early time for us to put up a tree, I think. I haven’t gone back to check (i.e., look for posts here), but knowing my Polish wife and her desire to keep with the traditions of her youth as much as possible, it’s probably always been later than sooner.

Of course, an odd highlight of the night was liberating the Elf from E’s sleeping hold and deciding where to put him tonight…

Transformations

The Elf

Friday 6 December 2019

E’s class has an Elf on the Shelf. You know the gag: every morning, when the kids come in, the elf is sitting somewhere else. The kids all have a good time looking for him.

Of course, the Boy then wanted one for our house. Fortunately for him, K is Polish, which means we celebrate St. Nicholas’s Day, which is today, which meant lots of excitement in the morning when we left the elf behind, wondering when he’d start migrating through the house.

K texted Papa in the morning. “Please put Emil’s elf in a different location, maybe somewhere in your room. He is supposed to migrate through the house magically. That will make him very happy.” And it did.

When the Boy went with K for tennis lessons this evening, the elf took off again. This time, he headed to Papa’s bathroom and perched himself high on the medicine cabinet.

“We have to be systematic in our search,” I explained as we ate.

“What does that mean?”

I explained; he agreed.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he declared a few minutes later.

“Just go to Papa’s,” I suggested. “It’s closer.”

In he went; out he went — didn’t notice at all.

In our systematic search, he began going through all of Papa’s drawers.

“He’s an elf on a shelf, buddy, not an elf in a drawer,” I reminded, but he continued. Systematically.

We moved to the bathroom and he looked about, suggesting that perhaps the elf might have sought refuge in the washer or dryer. Nope.

He’d started moving to the living room when I pointed out that he’d forgotten one item with a shelf.

Our small X100 in hand, I jumped back as quickly as I could to frame the shot and managed to catch him just at the moment of discovery.

Kolejka

Sunday 1 December 2019

The reality of life in Poland in the 80s was the line. The queue. People stood in line for everything. People stood in line not knowing why they were standing in line. A friend once told me, that she often ended up standing in the line just because there was a line. “If there was a line there must be something she reasoned and no matter what that something was it was something that her family could use or trade with someone else.”

Kinga told us of a story about waiting in line for shoes. “We didn’t even know what kind of shoes they were,” she said, “but they were shoes and we needed shoes.”

I had my own experiences waiting in lines in Poland in the mid-90s, but they were not due to the lack of goods. I mostly waited in line for bureaucratic reasons. When I would go to Krakow training my Visa, I would arrive at the office in question an hour or more before it opened to find the line already stretched halfway down the block.

What better thing to do then some 30 years after communism ended in Poland than to play a game based on this reality. That’s exactly what the game Kolejka is all about: all the frustration of communist Poland in your living room.