Left to die

Being a post-war baby in Poland can really cause you to enter the world not kicking and screaming, but coughing and gasping. I was not a healthy little number. By age two (and I mean 2 days), I seem to have been pegged as the one who couldn’t stomach life. By the next two (months this time), I managed to develop the dreaded pneumonia which, without antibiotics, and when added to the fact that I was not eating, was pretty much the kiss of death.

My mother likes to recount this as one hopeless situation. So what did she do? She took me to the village, left me with my grandparents and went back to work in the city (after all, she had one healthy one gurgling in the play pen already).

I have to believe that she shed many a tear, expecting (as she tells it) a little wooden coffin with the limp body of her baby, whom she had barely named some weeks earlier, there - waiting for her upon her next return to the village (they had no phones back then).

I always think that story, which is supposed to be ultimately upbeat (what do you know! On the strength of milk squeezed straight from the cow’s warm udder, you pulled through! -- I am told), is maybe a sign that abandonment works in my favor. True, I was not really abandoned, but I certainly was left to…well, die, actually (if I am to believe my mother’s chipper-ish choice of words).

So if you ditch me for one reason or another – I will surprise you and I will thrive. Fresh warm milk -- organic maybe? -- is all it takes. That is the most obvious conclusion to draw from this. It is, however, not the correct conclusion.