Matching Tracksuits

Month: December 2021

Winter Exploring

Sunday 12 December 2021

It’s been a while since the Boy and I went exploring behind our house. I can’t recall the last time — I don’t know that we did much exploring during the summer if any.

When we got to the place we first cross the creek, we discovered that our normal method was impossible: the bricks and stones we’d set up to step across were gone, washed away by one storm or another. We had to improvise. We had to make a plan. We had to find materials and rig everything together.

“You’re a scout — this is just up your alley!” I suggested.

In the end, we pulled several sticks together to spread our weight out and used another stick for balance. It gave us both a little sense of accomplishment, but I was just enjoying spending time with him.

When we got to the spot we have to cross for the second time, we discovered it too had washed away. Fortunately, there was a log nearby, and we simply had to put it in place.

At the end of our route, where we always exited the sewer easement (that’s essentially where we explore) into an empty lot, we saw that the house begun earlier this year is nearing completion, which means we might not be able to do this much more — at least exit onto the street and walk back via streets.

In the evening, some cards with K.

Nutcracker

Saturday 11 December 2021

Our friend’s daughter danced Clara in tonight’s Nutcracker. And a friend of L’s from middle school danced the lead in the Arabian dance.

Nordic Skiing

Thursday 9 December 2021

Looking through old pictures, I found this one — twenty years ago, when I tried my first (and only) cross-country skiing adventure. I didn’t get more than a few hundred meters before my feet — the muscles in my feet — were utterly cramped.

I must have done something wrong.

Immaculate Confusion

Wednesday 8 December 2021

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a feast day that always puzzled me even when I was actively trying to convince myself that I was a believing Catholic. Britannica defines it succinctly enough in a non-theological, non-devotional way:

Immaculate Conception, Roman Catholic dogma asserting that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was preserved free from the effects of the sin of Adam (usually referred to as “original sin”) from the first instant of her conception. (Britannica)

The question it at first raises, before the skeptic has a full understanding of the doctrine, is why God could not simply do for all humans what he did for Mary. Why not just preserve all people “from the effects of the sin of Adam” instead of this whole convoluted way of getting forgiveness in the Old Testament through blood sacrifice which then comes to full fruition in the New Testament with an actual human sacrifice (i.e. Jesus)? If he could do it for Mary, why couldn’t he do it for everyone?

A Catholic apologist at this point would explain that it’s not simply that God preserved Mary from the effects of this sin without the need of Jesus and his sacrifice. Instead, the apologist would explain, the sacrifice was applied to Mary in some kind of retroactive way. The Catholic Encyclopedia New Advent explains it thusly (emphasis added)

The immunity from original sin was given to Mary by a singular exemption from a universal law through the same merits of Christ, by which other men are cleansed from sin by baptism. Mary needed the redeeming Saviour to obtain this exemption, and to be delivered from the universal necessity and debt (debitum) of being subject to original sin. The person of Mary, in consequence of her origin from Adam, should have been subject to sin, but, being the new Eve who was to be the mother of the new Adam, she was, by the eternal counsel of God and by the merits of Christ, withdrawn from the general law of original sin. Her redemption was the very masterpiece of Christ’s redeeming wisdom. He is a greater redeemer who pays the debt that it may not be incurred than he who pays after it has fallen on the debtor. (New Advent)

Yet far from making this a simpler solution that solves the question of why God didn’t just do this for everyone, it makes an even more convoluted and illogical argument. Somehow, an event that hadn’t yet taken place affected the conception of the person who would later give birth to the individual to whom this salvific event would take place — see, there’s just no way to explain it without it sounding like some kind of theological Rube Goldberg contraption.

Code

Tuesday 7 December 2021

The Boy has become interested in ciphers and codes. They learned about them in school this week and so he wants to learn about more of them. Tonight, he and I were writing things back and forth in pig pen cipher:

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It’s a simple replacement cipher, but the Boy loves it.

During our evening walk, I mentioned to him that Papa knew a real code: Morse Code.

“Really?!”

I thought Papa had mentioned that so many times, doing his “da-dit-dit” routine to spell various words out in code, that no one could have forgotten about that. Apparently, E had.

“I wish Papa was still here.”

We’ll be having those moments for some time to come, I think.

Hanging the Lights

Sunday 5 December 2021

It’s been a few years since we put up any lights for Christmas. I really can’t remember the last time we did it — three years ago? Four?

We put the lights around the crape myrtles a couple of years ago, but that was a bad idea — we never took them down, and the year’s worth of sun and heat and rain predictably destroyed them.

I think last year we just kept putting it off, and before we knew it, it was too close to Christmas to make it worth our time.

“This one works…this one works…oh here’s one that’s out…”

But this year we got the tree up earlier than ever, so what were we to do on a cloudy Sunday afternoon?

Of course, the Boy was eager to help. He loves going into the crawl space with me, but the roof?

Are you kidding? What more could a nine-year-old boy want than to spend some time on the roof?

And a little bit of football time with Mama to boot? What a perfect afternoon!

 

Dworzec

Saturday 4 December 2021

I gave my students an article of the week about the Kaliningrad House of the Soviets, an administrative building constructed during the Soviet era but never occupied because of structural issues.

The structure was redolent of all the communist-era buildings I’d grown so accustomed to in Poland, and like the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, it has its detractors:

Even architects who admire the original, bold design in a mixture of the modernist and brutalist styles concede that the House of Soviets fell short of its promise as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s control over formerly German land captured during World War II.

Instead, the building became emblematic of flaws in the Soviet system, as shoddy construction and structural defects meant it could never be occupied.

As a result, it’s to be demolished in the spring of this year. As might be expected, this provokes mixed reactions:

“It’s like a monument to the Soviet Union we should keep,” said Yevgenia Kryazheva, a waitress at Tyotka Fischer, a German restaurant with windows overlooking the House of Soviets. “I don’t like how it looks,” she conceded. But “people like things with defects. It’s ugly, but it’s ours.”

I can understand that reluctance to let go of a socialist realist architectural past: I’ve experienced it myself.

The bus station in Nowy Targ was an ugly structure, a mix of traditional wood building materials and the angular modernist look of the seventies. The roof angled upward to the front-right corner of the building, and off the back-right and front-left corners jutted buttress-like structures that likely served no functional purpose but were intended to give that exact impression as if the building were somehow cantilevered at odd angles and but for those buttresses would collapse. The back right corner of the building was the main waiting area, and it was enclosed in glass that rose two stories above the floor, giving the waiting area an open, light-filled feeling when first constructed.

The right-front corner of the building had a second story to serve as offices or shops. There might have been a small cafeteria on the second floor, but I can’t really recall. The ticket booths were on the left-front of the ground floor.

From the back jutted a covered area to wait for busses. Local-haul busses parked on the left; long-haul busses pulled up on the right.

When I first entered the building in 1996, it was a little more than twenty years old, but it already looked much older. The style dated it, but the grimy windows and weathered wooden exterior made it look at least a decade older. The originally-light-hued wood siding had turned dark brown from age and dirt. Spruce trees had grown up around the back-right corner, concealing almost entirely the two-story windows. A fast-food kiosk built behind the building concealed the rest of the windows. At the far end of the line of bus bays was another kiosk that sold CDs and cassette tapes of disco polo, essentially the country music of Poland.

The spacious two-story waiting area, originally conceived to be filled with light, was dark and dirty. Kiosks along one side took up at least half of the waiting area’s original space, crowding passengers into a small dark corner The windows were always streaked with the running beads of condensation formed by the temperature difference in winter, and those streaks dried in the summer to form a dirty haze. There was always a Roma family or two in the waiting room: a mother and a couple of children, sometimes begging, sometimes just waiting.

November 3, 2001

Even on a bright summer morning as passengers sat watching cleaning ladies scrub down this or that, the Nowt Targ bus station felt grimy and tired, as if a film of dirt had bonded permanently to the surfaces of the building. The dated architecture did not help: with the Berlin Wall history and Communist rule nearly a decade in the past, the socialist realist angles and materials simply made the building feel like a relic of an oppressive past.

In winter, there were mountains of snow around the back of the terminal where the busses parked, mountains that steadily turned became covered with flecks of gray and then black as the coal smoke particles from the air and the particulate matter from the bus exhaust settled onto the snow. Puddles formed where the busses had crushed the slush and enough mid-day warmth had melted it further. Passengers performed the same operation as they walked here and there, forming a slush on the covered walkway that ran down the middle of the bus loading area. By December or January, all those puddles turned to dirty ice challenging all but the surest-footed passengers.

Waiting inside was always a risky decision. Most passengers stood around the bay from which their bus was to start, so waiting inside might ruin one’s chances of getting a seat once the driver pulled his bus into the slot, opened the doors, and began boarding. This is not to say one would not have a spot on the bus: there was standing room in the aisle, but it was never pleasant to be standing with one’s shopping spread out all around one.

In truth, it was never really even necessary to go into the bus station. Drivers sold tickets on boarding the bus, and there were far more pleasant places to wait for the bus. Within a couple of blocks, there were several restaurants with hot tea and cleaner surroundings.

Yet it still served as a landmark for me. Heading home after a long day of shopping in Nowy Targ, trudging through snow and slush, I always felt a wave of relief when I turned left from Queen Jadwiga Street on to Jan Kilinski Street, approaching the bus station from the back. The lines of busses, the piles of dirty snow, the people milling about waiting all signaled that I was just about home.

When I was back in Poland in 2013, it was all gone. I was hoping to take some pictures inside and out, to wallow in nostalgia, but it was not to be.

Decorations

Thursday 2 December 2021

Our three teams on the eighth-grade hall are having a contest to see who can decorate their portion of the hallway the most elaborately — which means simply quantity. Our team took matters into their own hands today, or rather on their own shoulders.

Coincidentally, the scouts today also did some decorating — after they got the badges and pins. The decoration pictures are still on the phone, which is still upstairs. So we’ll have to settle for our imagination on that one.