Nowy Targ 2021
polska
My always obsession...
Riding around Jablonka
Wypasiona Dolina 2021
Despite the fact that L had a less-than-positive experience with the line park just outside of Jablonka, it became just about her favorite activity when at Babcia's.
Overcoming
This year the Boy is old enough to do the larger courses, and it's clear: he'll probably share L's opinion of the park.
Bike Ride
Birthday Lunch
Spytkowice 2021
Arrival 2021
I check K’s location in the morning, knowing what I’ll find. If there had been any issues, K would have contacted me. But there she is, safe in sound in Jablonka.
In the afternoon, we FaceTime a little while as K and E return from a walk to the river — the walk. I see immediately the changes: at least half a dozen new houses along the gravel road where, ten years ago, there was only one and where, when we left Poland in 2005, there were none. Not terribly impressive growth by Greenville standards, to be sure, but in a little village…
As for other pictures — perhaps tomorrow. Today was a rest day, a day with Babcia — as it should be.
To Poland 2021
It's been four years since we last did this. It's actually been more like six -- four years ago, we all went to Poland together. It was the 2015 trip that was split up. I wasn't even planning on going that summer, in fact. This year, just K and E are going, and that long long journey began this morning with a departure from the house at 2:15 to arrive before 4:00 to make it for the 6:00 flight from Charlotte to JFK. We usually go Charlotte-Munich-Krakow, but with covid restrictions and such, K wanted to fly directly to Poland, which meant leaving from JFK. She reasoned she stood less of a chance of having problems getting into Poland with an American passport and an expired Polish passport than into an EU state. When we did all this planning, Americans were still not admitted into Europe, I think. So we left ridiculously early to arrive the requisite 2 hours before departure.
You can see in K's expression just how excited she was. Even though the drive home would normally only be about an hour and twenty minutes, Google routed me a different way: 85 south was closed at some point for construction. We'd seen the backup forming (at 3:00 am), but I'd hoped it would have cleared up by the time I was heading back that way.
It was not, turning an hour-and-twenty-minute drive into a two-hour-twenty-minute drive. (I stopped just before getting on I77 to double-check, hence the two-hour-six-minute time.)
I got home to find Papa awake and needing assistance. By the time everything was squared away, it was 6:35. I set the alarm for 7:35 so I could get up to take L to volleyball conditioning, but of course I never really went to sleep. I was just dozing off as the alarm sounded. Back home at 8:00, I started Papa's morning routine, then left the rest to our wonderful CNA and headed out to the store to buy a few things. No point in lying down for an hour again, I figured.
In the meantime, K and E were having their own adventure, collecting their bags (not checked all the way through because the original plan had been to drive to NYC), finding their way to the terminal from which LOT departs -- all of which absolutely thrilled the Boy. In Munich the last time we were there, he was thrilled by all the moving walkways, all the planes visible from the terminal, and even the self-enclosed smoking pods. I'm sure it was just as thrilling in JFK.
"An airport is a paradise for a nine-year-old boy," I texted K. I always loved going to the airport for Papa's business trips: the hustle and bustle, the equipment, the planes.
But even then, a little one can get tired and frustrated when the layover is hours long. K had a secret weapon, though:
And of course, he knew what was waiting for him on the plane -- he'd been talking about it for the last two weeks:
The final text from K: we're on board but take-off is delayed thirty minutes. For once, that's not a problem: there's no connection to worry about. Waiting at the other end of the flight will be her brother, ready to bundle them off to Babcia's place.
I can only imagine Babcia's excitement after four years.
Polish Lots
A gigantic home on a long, narrow lot…
“Only in Poland” my friend and I would laugh.
One of My Madeleines
The older I get, the more madeleines I discover, most of them are musical, and at least one is tragic: Billy Joel's song, "Goodnight, My Angel."
I'd listened to this song just a few minutes earlier when, in 1999, I received the tragic news that two of my former students in Poland, Marcela and Natalia, had drowned a few days earlier while on an outing to the Baltic Sea. I was staying with my parents because I didn't yet have my own place, and when I got the call, I was sitting on the floor by the bed in the guest room that I'd taken over. It's a song to one's daughter, but the passage "the water's so dark and deep" -- so tragically ironic.
The news was a kick in the gut.
Marcela had just finished her freshman year, and I really didn't know her that well. But I'd been Natalia's English teacher for three years, and I'd watched her go from a hesitant beginner to a confident speaker who absolutely demolished the required oral exam in English just a few months earlier. She was wise and mature for her age, a real leader in the class, and from the beginning, she always intimidated me a bit. A first-year teacher just out of college, I felt like I didn't know what I was doing, and Natalia always sat in the back of the room seeming to say with a slight smile on her countenance, "You don't have the slightest clue what you're doing, do you?" Later, I realized what she was probably saying was, "Whoa! Slow down! Slow down!" She smiled a lot, even when nervous -- we all do that, I think.
Every time I hear that song, I think of Natalia. I try not to imagine what her parents went through, learning their intelligent, beautiful daughter was gone because I'd start imagining what I'd do if some similar tragedy befell my own daughter. That's when the "my angel" hits me. I try not to imagine what kind of woman she'd be now, likely a mother in her late thirties, old enough to have a child that could be sitting in my own classroom now. I don't have, in fact, any really specific memory of her other than of her sitting in the back of the class, smiling slightly, making me feel I'd just done something incomprehensibly stupid, some rookie teacher mistake that even a kid could see.
I can rarely listen to the whole song...