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Perspective

Friday 09 September 2016

What you see depends on where you stand. It’s true physically and culturally, and there is even some truth in it artistically. Take a novel like William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! in which the story of Thomas Sutpen takes on mythic proportions among the various narrators, each seeing what they want to see, each perspective determined by time and place of birth as well as proximity to Sutpen. We come away from the novel wondering which of the narrators we can really trust, if any of them.

In class today, we began such an examination. Various students took various positions, each of which was determined by their birth date, and the described what they saw. What came out of it was predictable but poignant: everyone was in the same room but everyone’s notes of what they saw were different. No two people made the same notes, or even close to it.

Back at home, K was getting ready for the international festival at our former parish, which still hosts the monthly Polish Mass and so still has a certain draw for us. The Polish community was to have their own booth, selling pierogi and bigos and sausage to raise money for the church.

K and some other Polish women spent last Saturday morning making and freezing pierogi, and today there was an unbelievably long line of people interested enough in Polish food to plop down a couple of $1 tickets for a bit of the old country. The bigos was not completely consumed by the end of the evening. “You know Americans and their wariness of sauerkraut,” K justified.

Still, all the pierogi disappeared, and the Poles got to show off their polka skills, and the Polish community even managed to get the pastor to take a quick shot of vodka as the evening drew to a close.

In some ways, then, the perspective of Poland didn’t really change for the visitors. Its cuisine is heavy on the cabbage and potatoes, and there’s usually alcohol involved — that would probably be the average take on Polish culture. And it’s not entirely wrong. But it is of course only one side of the culture. It would have been hard to show that in a three-hour festival along with all the other communities. People visiting a Polish booth expect pierogi, and so that’s what the community provides. A bit of a self-fullfilling prophecy, but when the food is that tasty, who really cares.

From the Boy’s perspective, it was a bit of a flop. Sure, there were hay bales to jump on and lots to see, but the music was loud, and most of the food was not to his liking.

As the sun set, a group of Latin American parishioners performed a dance that they use every year to pay homage to Our Lady of Guadalupe. One look at the costumes and it’s clear where it all came from. Indeed, G, the de facto leader of the Polish community, came running to the Polish booth urging everyone to come watch. “The Aztecs are coming!”

How strange from a modern perspective. The pre-Columbian Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on an unbelievable scale. And yet here are people dancing in Aztec garb some centuries later and imbuing it with a decidedly Catholic interpretation. Some Christians would naturally argue that it’s still pagan and quite profane: once pagan, always pagan. These are the folks likely not to have Christmas trees or hide Easter eggs.

But what you see depends on where you stand, it from where they stand, this is Christian worship. Far be it from me to say it isn’t.

Sunday

Sunday 04 September 2016

After Mass during the school year, there are a few obligatories: a fresh pot of coffee and something sweet. Feed the soul, then feed the spirit. Something like that. Perhaps accompany it with something to read, maybe a game of chess. But eventually, it’s time for the trial and treasure, for it’s something K loves and loathes doing. Polish lessons.

The love is easy: it’s her language, her culture, that she’s sharing with her beloved daughter. The loathe comes from the frustration that sometimes accompanies it. Perhaps “loathe” is not the right word — perhaps it was just too alliterative to pass up. “It’s something that K loves and that frustrates her” doesn’t quite make it. Always searching for the right word, never able to find it, which is what makes the Polish lessons so frustrating for the Girl. Her passive vocabulary, like everyone’s, is much larger than her active vocabulary. She can understand more than she can say, like me in Polish.

E, on the other hand, has of late only a passive vocabulary for the most part. The production has ceased. However, we’re seeing that language and such is perhaps just not his strength. He can watch a cartoon about how airplanes fly and remember it long afterward. (Language, though? K was trying to teach him a Polish prayer the other evening, and he replied, “You must be kidding me! I can’t remember that!”)

In the evening, it’s time to feed the soul once again — a quiet bonfire in the backyard. The temperatures have cooled, the mosquitoes have disappeared, and we’ve entered our favorite time of the year.

We’ve been waiting all summer for this. The kitchen is mostly done, our routines have returned, the weather has cooled, and it’s time to start everything again. So what better way to end than with a song by Antoine Dufour, a Quebecois guitarist, who wrote a song for his yet-unborn son, a song about waiting, a song I’ve listened to at least a dozen times this weekend. Perhaps the most beautiful acoustic guitar song I’ve ever heard.

Pierogi Party

Saturday 03 September 2016

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.

Barszcz Bowl

Tuesday 30 August 2016

Meeting Family Twenty Years Ago

Tuesday 23 August 2016

It was twenty years ago today that I arrived in Lipnica Wielka, my home in southern Poland for seven years. Upon arriving, I wrote in my journal:

It has taken so much time to reach this point. I am a Peace Corps Volunteer, sitting in my apartment at my site, Lipnica Wielka. In a way I want to cry – not from happiness or sadness. It’s just from relief. I finally made it.

At the time, I was so strung out and excited that I didn't even realize that it was also my mother's birthday. And today, thinking about the fact that it's Nana's birthday, I had no idea that it was also the twentieth anniversary of my arrival in Poland. One eclipsed the other, and then they changed roles and did it again.

The seeds of my own family start on that day as well. I didn't meet K immediately, but it was only a matter of weeks after that I met K in a small bar that served as a dance hall -- a disco as it was called -- on Saturday evenings for local youngsters (at least that's how I view the 18-25 bracket now). Twenty years later, we've started a new branch of our family trees.

1-DSCF0205 — The Girl picking pictures for a class project

The final connection for today: out of the blue, I decided to tinker the other day with the family tree I'd started creating on Ancestry.com. The site offered me a two-week trial subscription, which would allow me to delve into the records of the site rather than just use the site as a record-keeping mechanism. A few hours of research later and I have several generations of the family in America, back to the late eighteenth-century. Or do I? There's really no way of knowing whether or not the Robert Divenny (1773-1852) is my paternal grandfather's mother's grandfather or just some Divenny that seems to match enough of the criteria -- birth period and general location. And of course I don't know anything about the family tree going forward. Still, somehow have a potential name makes it all the more real.

20 Years

Friday 03 June 2016

When we arrived, we were all exhausted. It was not just the journey itself, a trip that included a five-plus hour wait on the tarmac at Dulles while we waited for some part or other to be flown from Atlanta and installed on the plane, replacing the broken whatever that was keeping us grounded. It was not the nauseating bus ride from Warsaw to Radom, where our training was to be held, a ride that included much swaying as memory serves as well as a lot of heat and an already-upset stomach for me. Framing all of this was the simple adventure the group of Americans (were there sixty-some of us, or was it eighty-something?) were embarking upon. A new country with a new language and new culture (new to us, anyway), a new job, a new everything.

We arrived at the training center to find a crowd of Poles -- our host families, with whom we would be spending the next twelve weeks -- milling about the crumbling parking area, walking around the building, just generally waiting. Kids from the surrounding apartment blocks were circling the main training building on roller blades, something that somehow surprised me and stuck with me as the most memorable element of our arrival. Somehow or other we were portioned off to the various families, and I set off in a Polish Fiat 126p -- a Maluch, meaning "a small little thing" -- with a mustachioed man and what I thought was his son. I never saw the man again, never figured out who he was. The young man I thought was his son was Piotr, the son of the woman who was putting me up for twelve weeks during training. My host brother and host mother -- host family -- though the relationship between my "brother" and me at times was so strained that even outsiders noticed the tension.

Of all things about that arrival, though, I most clearly remember those children on roller blades, circling the building, screaming and laughing in a language that was then unintelligible to me but now is an every day reality. Twenty years ago, though, it was gibberish. Poland, a mystery. The future, an adventure.

We were all so naive then. Well, I was so naive then. Naive about my motives. Naive about the impact I would have. Naive about my own ability. Naive about the future. No, not naive, perhaps. Just unable to guess at the turn of events that, twenty years later, would lead me to go on a walk with my Polish (now Polish-American) wife up the street with my son, who just learned to ride a bike really well ("Daddy, I'm really getting the hang of this!") and my daughter on her new roller skates. Not roller blades, but roller skates -- the variety I used myself as a kid, the type I would have expected to find kids wearing in Poland in 1996 instead of roller blades.

Twenty years ago. June 3, 1996 -- the day I arrived in Poland for the first time. The day it arrived in my heart and soul, never to leave.

Ognisko

Saturday 23 April 2016

Spring in the South. Morning temperatures in the low fifties. Afternoon temperatures twenty to twenty-five degrees warmer. In other words, spring in the South is summer in Poland. And summer in Poland means one thing: bonfires.

A home in the South with an enormous tree requires one thing: a tire swing.

Learning

Friday 05 February 2016

My job is about learning. It's about teaching, too, but the more I stand on this side of the desk, the more I realize that teaching is learning. It's not just the simple process -- as if it were so simple in truth -- of learning how to teach. There's that, certainly. I'm better this year than I was last year, I hope. I'm better this year than I was five years ago, I'm sure. I'm better this year than I was fifteen years ago, I know.

It's not pedagogy and method that I have in mind, though. I've learned that learning is so much more than simply figuring out how to write a good paragraph, understanding how to do geometric proofs, seeing the logic of the scientific method. These things are all well and good -- and important. But they all serve as simple means to ends. We learn to write a good paragraph to be able to communicate better. We work on proofs to be able to construct a scaffold of surety around our knowledge -- to prove to ourselves what is is. (And to move on to higher and more challenging math.) We study the scientific method because it's the best way to find out things about the physical world.

All this knowledge helps us in our day to day functioning, but it does very little to help with our living. I'm not more at peace with myself because I can write a paragraph. I can't show compassion better because I can manage geometric proofs. I'm not more mature because I know the scientific process. My life can bump along just fine without this knowledge, and having this understanding is in now way insulation or protection against anything. I'm not a better person for this.

I'm a better person when I connect with other people. I'm a better person when I understand that the most precious and instructive moments in life are those flashes when a couple of people connect in a real and meaningful way.

I teach my students how to make sense of Shakespeare (and, by proxy, many other challenging texts), and I show them how to organize a paragraph coherently, then how to string several paragraphs together in a logical order. Useful skills, but not life changing. Yet sometimes I get so wrapped up in the importance of those minutia (relatively speaking) that I miss the real teaching and learning opportunities. I forget that just because they're not learning just what I want in just the way I planned it than my students aren't learning. I forget that just because what they're doing for a particular session has nothing to do with English than they're not become better people. I forget that, at it's base, that's what all good teaching is about. There's the subject matter, true, but all the teachers we really remember taught us more than just their subject matter. In some rare cases, we can sometimes barely even remember what exactly they taught us about English or math or Spanish, but we remember what they taught us about life.

Today, I had the privilege of taking about twenty of my students down the street to a community center than has a trice-weekly seniors program. The plan was simple. The plan didn't work as planned due to technical issues. And so from a certain point of view, it was a complete waste of time. It didn't do what I wanted it to do. The plan didn't behave properly. And in that mini-disaster, I learned once again -- my students taught me once again -- that there's more to teaching and learning than nouns and rays and Erlenmeyer flasks.

Sometimes lessons just come along than can't be planned because the lessons themselves come simply from the messiness and unpredictability of life. Sometimes a room full of teens and seniors offers such individualized lessons that could never be planned, never be executed because life can often never really be planned. And that in itself is part of the lesson.

In the afternoon, another lesson about learning: not all learning has any adults at all involved. The kids headed out for their quarterly (or is it more often? I can never remember) reward day, which consists basically of forty-five minutes of freedom outside. Some kids play basketball; some kids play soccer. Some kids walk around and gossip orally; some kids walk around and gossip electronically.

And some kids just do a little bit of everything. The lessons there? Countless, and completely unplanned.

Back at home, L asked K to help her with a traditional Polish dance that she'd like to use to try out for the school talent show later this year. Tryouts are coming soon, and the Girl is not quite sure what she's going to do. This is the first year she's eligible, so she's feeling a bit stressed about making a good impression. She'd noticed that all the Indian students in the past who'd done traditional dances made it to the show itself, so she reasoned that a Polish Highlander dance might stand a good chance.

So K began working on it with her. I'm not quite sure how this is supposed to work because Polish Highlander dances are really not solos -- unless you're dancing a male part. This bit of information prompted a bit of begging from the Girl, so K showed a few male moves. And E decided he wanted to learn them all, male moves and female moves.

Another unplanned lesson.

They're really all around us. The opportunities are endless. And the miracle of it all is that we really don't even have to be aware of it.

Śpij, kochanie

Friday 15 January 2016

“Daddy, I want to go to sleep.” And so I put up the book, turn off the light, and start the music.

The Boy rolls over on his back, and I rest my arm along his back, running my fingers through his hair gently. He stops moving, his breathing slows, and within moments, he’s asleep. Still I lie, continually stroking his head, rubbing his back. He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and sinks deeper.

W górze tyle gwiazd,
W dole tyle miast,
Gwiazdy miastu dają znać,
Że dzieci muszą spać.

Just listening to the Polish lullaby gets me thinking of all the twists and turns it took to get me to this moment in which I’m listening to a song in a language I never dreamed of learning, thinking how appropriate the lyrics — “Above, so many stars / below, so many cities. The stars let the cities know / That it’s time for children to sleep” — are some nights when the Boy tosses and turns and turns and tosses as my Polish wife puts our daughter to bed in the next room. All those little twists and turns, those seemingly insignificant decisions that led to meeting, returning, dancing, flying — all the things that led to the present moment, the present family.

“It was fate,” some might say. “It was the hand of God,” others might rejoin. “It was a happy sequence of accidents,” still others might insist. Fate, accident, God — whatever the cause, I’m grateful for all the steps, trips, and slips that led to this moment. Remembering that on a regular basis, I think, is the key to happiness.