fun in threes, sometimes fours
polska
My always obsession...
Growing up not celebrating Easter, I never got to paint eggs as a kid. I'm making up for it now, for K and I seem to have established an annual Easter Egg Painting party.
The adults usually have as much fun as -- if not more fun than -- the kids.
Last Sunday, through the afternoon and evening, friends and family filtered through and painted eggs, ate some traditional Polish seasonal Easter food, and generally relaxed and chatted.
The grandparents, of course, were the first to arrive.
Moderates' favorite Polish Party, Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families, that most Catholic of Catholic Parties), has recently moved to rid Poland of a source of immorality and anti-Polish sentiment: the works of Jan Brzechwa. All reference to this Jew propagandist are to be removed. First step -- remove his filthy name (His real name was Lesman -- the horror) from street names in Wraclaw, then in all of Poland. Next, his ungodly, unpatriotic works are to be banned from school.
What kind of garbage was this guy writing?
On the bank of a sky-blue river
live many small sorrows.
The first is sad because
he can't play in the garden.
The second -- that water doesn't want to be dry.
The third -- that a fly flew into his ear.
And what's more, that cats scratch,
That he can't catch the hen,
That he can't bite the neighbor's leg,
and that it never rains sausages,
And the last sorrow is that
People travel by cars, and a pup has to go on foot.
But just give him a little milk,
and bye bye sorrows.
I know most are probably shocked that I would put such pornography on this site, but -- horror of horrors -- K even read it to L and we filmed it! How sick.
Those who read Polish can read the article here.
Fortunately, the LPR is going to save us. They have pointed out that Lesman's Jewish propaganda verse (let's just call a spade a spade) teaches kids to be lazy and to lie -- just like Lesman himself. And naturally, his works are not sufficiently Catholic and Polish, but what can you expect from a Jew?
All sarcasm aside, this is seriously happening in Poland -- a suggestion to ban a poet known and loved for his children's verse, essentially because he's Jewish. The League of Polish Families has ties to Radio Maria, a deeply anti-Semitic religious radio station in Poland. Additionally, Marcin Giertych, a Polish representative at the Council of Europe and an LPR member himself, wrote and published with EU money a book suggesting that all of Jews' problems throughout history are their own fault. He is the father of the current Minster of Education, Roman Giertych.
And so father and son are on a mission to rid Poland of any reference to those "godless Jews" and make sure Poland is a beacon of proper Catholic patriotism, all in the name of the most famous Jew in history...
The other day, I got a comment at another website that meant more to me most other comments I’ve received put together:
Hello! I want to say thanks, because you was (no, are still) very good english teacher… you’s lessons helps me very much, now I’m live in Ireland, and I m still learn… If you want to write me: [email and name redacted]: 1,2e ”zarzadzanie inf, terrorysci…”bye
In a class of “difficult” students (who, in retrospect, were angels), this young lady was one of the few students I could count on consistently. She caused any disruption; she rarely came to class unprepared; she rarely wasn’t smiling and happy.
Naturally, I wrote back. And of course I got this in return:
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. t the moment you cannot send a message to [reacted], try again later 1: retry timeout exceeded
I tried again, knowing it was a futile effort. Still, the thought that it might not go through, and she’ll think my response to her invitation to contact her was, “Um, no thanks,” irritates to no end, so I tried. And yet again.
Which leads me to a question for all tech folks who read this (both of you): What could be causing a consistent problem with delivering email to Polish servers from a given account here in the States? I’ve asked tech support for my web host — they think I’m crazy. But consistently email sent from any address that uses the server this site is hosted on gets bounced back, or simply disappears. As in, “Did you get that email?” “What email?”
What I wouldn’t give, sometimes, for a return to consistent use of regular mail for correspondence…
Throughout much of the world, March 8 is a day to celebrate "the economic, political and social achievements of women." It's International Women's Day, and though it was (according to Wikipedia) first celebrated in America, it's not widely known here. Perhaps the fact that the organization that initiated it was the Socialist Party of America. And most places that still celebrate it with any real vigor are (or were) communist or socialist. (In the minds of many Americans, those terms are equivocal, I know.)
Extra points for knowing the significance of the title without resorting to Google.
Poland is one such country. Though I lived there for seven years, Women's Day never worked its way into my unconscious cultural calendar. I took the cues from those around me and never really made an effort to remember it myself.
In retrospect, that was a very bad idea. That realization occurs most forcefully when you marry a Polish woman and then come home March 8 empty handed...
J (K’s mother) has a new Polish friend (call her “M”) here in town: a retired doctor who just moved to the area. They met the “Welcome to America” party we threw J a couple of weeks after her arrival. They hit it off, and exchanged telephone numbers, with the promise of getting together again soon.
J called M a few days later. She didn’t get in touch with M, but left a message. J waited a few days, and, after hearing nothing, called M again. And again, no answer. J left another message and, after a few more days, began getting concerned.
Eventually, M returned the call. M, however, didn’t know she was returning a call, for the first thing she asked J was “Why didn’t you call?”
“I did call,” J said, explaining the messages she left on the answering machine.
“There were no messages from you,” M said. She suggested they hang up and J try to call and leave a message again.
J hung up, waited a couple of seconds, and called. She left a message, then waited. M called back in about ten minutes, asking why she hadn’t called.
“But I did call,” J confusedly protested.
M asked to talk to K, and asked K to do the same. “Maybe she’s doing something wrong?” M suggested.
K dialed. She left the message. M called back shortly and confirmed receipt of the message.
Then K had an idea. She had her mom dial the number, and it was all clear.
Though she was calling from a cell phone, J didn’t know that she had to put the area code in as well. M, in fact, didn’t include it on the piece of paper she’d given J.
“But what about the voice I heard?” J asked.
And so K explained what “Message JG-23…” means.
K's mom obviously won't be here for Thanksgiving, but we still wanted to give her some idea of what it's like. So my mom did the obvious: cooked a small Thanksgiving dinner.
Turkey, dressing, potatoes, green beans, giblet gravy, rolls and a nice chardonnay. And of course for dessert, sweet potato pie.
The dressing and the pie were the big hits. Made from cornbread (itself a novelty), the dressing is doubly unlike anything in Polish cuisine. As for the pie, the notion of doing anything with a tuber other than boiling it and serving it with salt and pepper is fairly foreign to the village Polish way of cooking.
After dinner, it was time to pull out the thread collection and discuss one of those things that crosses most all western cultural boundaries: crafts.
We have several Polish friends in the area, and a surprising number are in mixed marriages: a Pole and a Bulgarian; a Pole and a Czech; a Pole and an American. We went to a house-warming party at the Pole/Czech couple's house, and as always happens at such parties, I got to thinking about the effects of the English language's relative isolation. Last night, the Czechs spoke Czech, the Poles spoke Polish, and everyone was mutually intelligible. And a Slovak couple been there, they could have spoken Slovakian as well and we'd all get along fine.
I try to imagine what it would be like to experience something similar: to hear someone speaking Dutch, for example, and understand enough of it to be communicative. Poles understand Slovaks; Urdu speakers understand a sizable portion of Hindi; someone fluent in Spanish would make a bit of sense out of Portuguese -- but there's no equivalent in English, that I know of. Sure, German has "gut," and there are a lot of English/French cognates thanks to 1066, but nothing approaching the level of intelligibility speakers of Slavic languages experience.
For me, it can be a bit of a nightmare. I understand a lot of Czech, but it's a stretch to get a real sense of what's being said.
Of course the real winners in such a situation are the children. Growing up speaking three languages -- what a gift to give your child. But I know of situation slightly more linguistically advantageous: a former Polish student of mine married a Spaniard. They live in Vienna and speak English to each other. Now if they could only get a, say, Chinese babysitter...
It seems to be as ubiquitous in rural Poland as the headscarf. Walk into a Polish home and you're likely to see the matriarch in an apron. Whether cooking or not; whether cleaning or not; the only thing that matters is whether or not you're out of bed.
And if you're going to visit family for an extended period of time, you take them with you.
My mother-in-law wears aprons all the time. As I write this, I can look over and see her working crossword puzzles, wearing the apron she was wearing when she emerged from her room at 6:30 this morning.
It makes me smile.
A week into J's visit (J being K's mother) and she finally went out shopping. I took her on our weekly grocery rounds yesterday afternoon, wondering what she'd think of the wonders of American consumer choice, which plays itself out practically in a grocery store that has an entire row of paper towels.
This is not the first time J has been to America. She came for a visit almost ten years ago, but I think she stayed fairly exclusively in the safely Polish sections of Chicago.
When I returned to America after a couple of years in Poland, it was that choice over-kill that shocked me. I'd grown used to little corner stores where I stood on one side of the counter and the food and grocer were on the other, and I had to as for everything by name (which does wonders for language learning). She didn't comment on the paper towels though.
I kept an eye on J, hoping to see what might catch her eye. It was finally in Ingles that she showed some real excitement. We passed an isle display of a particularly southern snack and her eyes light up and she began, "Oh, these are those, those, those," searching for what in the heck you'd call fried pork rinds in Polish.
Thinking she couldn't possibly realize what these things were, I said "the skin of" and she found her word. The best word for something as untranslatable as "pork rinds."ï
"Pig chips!" she cried. "Oh, we loved these. We ate them all the time!"
She had me translate each flavor for her so she could pick the one she wanted: cheddar.
"Of all the things for her to get excited about," I thought, putting a bag of fried pork skin into my shopping cart for the first time in my life.
K’s mother flew in from Poland, arriving Thursday evening. US Air lost her luggage in the flight from the Windy City to Charlotte, but otherwise, it was a relatively survivable experience for Mamus.
When someone’s coming from rural Poland, there’s a certain amount of joy in thinking about all the things you can introduce — namely, food. My mother-in-law has never had fresh pineapple or cantaloupe, so we bought one of each before her arrival. She’s yet to try them, but biscuits — big, fluffy Southern-style biscuits — were a big hit, as was Ben and Jerry’s pistachio ice cream.
We have our own list, but perhaps there are other things she should try while here?