food and cooking
Part of being Polish in America is sharing that culture -- with your family, with friends, and even with strangers, which is why you might spend the afternoon making literally hundreds of pierogi.
The Boy, ever willing and thrilled to help, makes a mess in the interest of helping. Afterward, he will come outside and help me in the yard.
The Boy wants to learn how to cook.
We’ve been living without a kitchen for about a month now, and we’ve gotten accustomed to it to a degree. Every day we cook on the grill (including baking biscuits this morning), so every day seems like we’re camping out. If you look at things from a certain perspective, that sense of camping is highlighted even more.
The Boy woke up this morning already discussing the obstacle course we could create that day. "First I'll go to school. Then I'll come home. And when you come home from school, we'll build the obstacle course!" It was the highlight of his morning, this little future utopia that was only hours away.
When I arrived home, though, he was asleep. It happens some times -- he's about to outgrow that nap, but every now and then, he falls asleep. Perhaps it's when he and K are in the car line to pick up L. Maybe it's watching a little TV with L after she's done her homework. Perhaps it just a random "Mommy, I'm tired" situation. Whatever the cause today, he was asleep.
"Good," I thought. "Just enough time to have a bit of coffee and relax for a few moments." Just as the Boy looked forward to his afternoon obstacle course, I always look forward to that afternoon coffee. I put some water on and chatted with K about the day when suddenly from upstairs came an excited call: "Daddy!" That in itself was surprising: it's always K whom he calls for. Not today. "Daddy, we can build the obstacle course!"
I went up to his room and started negotiating. "Well, first we have to do a little cooking."
"Yeah, sure, sure!" he said. The Boy loves cooking, and I knew this wouldn't be a problem. The next item, though, might be a little troublesome.
"Also, I have a little school work to do. How about you watch a Might Machines episode while I drink my coffee and finish up my work?" I suggested.
"Okay. I love Might Machines." And who wouldn't?
After coffee and Machines, it was time for kiełbasa. We had to cut up a link of sausage (read: I had to cut it up) and fry it. The Boy helped with the latter. He's our professional stirrer. If anything needs stirring, providing it's not spitting and bubbling too violently, he's the man for the job.
It's sometimes more trouble than help: he hasn't mastered the gentle stir, and he tends to get a little excited and send various foods flying onto the cook top. Such was the case tonight.
"Daddy, some fell out." I'd pick up the sausage piece, toss it back in, and wait for the next one. "Daddy, some more fell out." One piece, two pieces. He tried putting it back in himself, but by the time he got the nerve up to try it, the sausage was quite hot.
Finally, we were all done.
"Obstacle course?!"
"Obstacle course."
"Hurrah!"
Up the stairs we went, discussing our options.
"I want one just like the one yesterday."
"I'm not sure I can make it like that again." I didn't mention the picture I had taken of it, nor the fact that I could in theory use the picture to recreate it almost perfectly. I wanted to try something else.
"It's more of a maze than an obstacle course," L observed when she got home from dance classes.
It got me to thinking about two different metaphors for life: mazes and obstacle courses. Which would be a more optimistic view? And how much more optimistic? A maze seems almost hopelessly impossible when it's life-size and you're stuck in it, I would imagine. At least with an obstacle course, one can theoretically see the end. But in the end, they both seem just a touch too negative. For most of us, life isn't a game. Indeed, games and play in general, most child psychologists would argue, I think, are really only dress rehearsals for "real" life. Life is like a maze -- at times. It's like an obstacle course -- at times. And sometimes it's a couple of pieces of sausage tumbling from the frying pan.
The Boy is always eager to help, especially when it comes to cooking. Any time K is standing at the stove, E bounds over to the dining table, grabs a chair, and slides it across the whole room to the stove.
"I want to help!"
Most often, that's just stirring. It's simple, difficult to mess up, and difficult to make a mess doing. Today, though, as I was rinsing the boiled eggs we'd be putting in our żurek later, he decided he wanted to learn how to peel the eggs. Rather, having just woke up from a nap, he was encouraged to learn. Bribed, for he's awfully fussy when he's awakened prematurely.
"Want to help me cook?" I began.
He was reluctant at first, but the words "learn" and "something new" seemed to pique his interest, and soon enough, he was peeling an egg.
When it came time for dinner, he was quite insistent that he got the egg that he had peeled.
"Bardzo słuszna koncepcja."
When I was L's age in the early eighties, Thanksgiving almost always meant hours in a car when I was a kid. We lived in the southwestern portion of Virginia, with family in Nashville and the Charlotte area, which mean alternating Thanksgiving journeys of six and four hours respectively. After living in Poland and depending on public transportation for so long, four- and six-hour journeys don't seem like much of anything at all (I recall making back from Warsaw to my village in the south exceptionally quick once in the late-nineties and thinking, "Wow, it only took me nine hours!"). At the time, though, the trips, especially to Nashville, were endless. Add to it my propensity to car sickness and it became a little slice of hell.
The trips to Nashville were simple, small affairs: we stayed on my mother's brother's small farm, and I was essentially alone most of the weekend as my cousins were all much, much older than I (at least at that age, ten years seemed like "much, much"). The great advantage was it was, indeed, a farm, with lots of acreage and a magical, huge barn by a small pond my uncle dug out himself. It was on this farm that I caught my first fish and first shot a gun (my father's relatively rare bolt-action shotgun). My cousins would make a tunnel in the hay just for me (or so I thought -- the truth involved church youth groups), and the hall closet included more board games than I knew existed.
Trips to South Carolina were often much different. Often, my father's whole family gathered together, and with four sisters and a brother, all with their own kids, some of whom had kids themselves (I was the second-youngest on this side of the family), it could be quite a gathering. The vast majority of my father's family smoked at that point, and weather was always a concern. "We don't want to be cooped up in that house with all those smokers," my parents would comment.
This pattern continued through most of my life, even into college. Then, off to Poland for three years, and Thanksgiving became a gathering with the few other Americans in the area or perhaps nothing at all. Then, two years in Boston and Thanksgiving with a friend's family, followed by four more years in Poland, during which time I don't think I celebrated Thanksgiving a single time.
In recent years, we've taken to hosting our own little Thanksgiving dinners. "I'll take Thanksgiving," I told K, and so it was for a couple of years. I found a great recipe for stuffing that I ruined the second time though by playing around with it. And I invented a butternut squash soup that was good enough to repeat the next year.
This year, though, we headed back to family in South Carolina, just east of us, closer to the Charlotte area. My cousin and her husband made a straw house some fifteen or so years ago that in the intervening time has grown and grown becoming charmingly eclectic in all senses.
She and her family always have exchange students staying with them, so there's always an international flair to the dinner with K's Polish additions (by request) and Korean heat.
The Boy made a new friend in an old cousin. It might have been the first time that K saw E. (Initials only can get confusing. Perhaps I should call cousin K "K2" or something similar.) He immediately charmed her, and she played with him and watched over him the entire afternoon.
But through all the changes in how I've experienced Thanksgiving, some things never change.
We tried a new soup tonight for dinner. The Boy wasn’t impressed. A few comments through dinner: