First grade friends, career choices and an email from my sister

I got an email from my sister (who lives in Warsaw) telling me about a recent conversation she had with Janek. (In an earlier post I describe him as the first ever to announce that he and I will someday marry; the announcement came when we were buddies in first grade.) Apparently he was trying to locate me last week to arrange an impromptu meeting between him, myself, and our old school chum, Monika (who is briefly in Warsaw). Of course, my sister had to say I was not there and so the effort failed. Still, the reemergence of Monika was a jolt.

Monika is the daughter of a famous Polish economist. But I didn’t know that when I was six. She was a pal simply because we picked each other out in our first grade class (Janek was our buddy as well).

It’s interesting how there are circles that form in one’s life, bringing together fragments, creating continuity out of seeming chaos. Monika’s father died (1965) before I returned to Poland (I lived in the States between 1960 and 1966). But reading his last published work, The Introduction to Econometrics, lead me (in 1969) to choose econometrics as my field of study at the University of Warsaw. He was one of those economists who moved from west to east, both in terms of residence and economic theory. Once a prominent economist at the U of Chicago (he was there prior to World War II – he was an ‘older’ father to Monika), he returned to Poland after the war and aligned himself with the socialist government, calling himself a Marxist theorist and a champion of the state-run economy. I knew little about his work except for this last book on the emerging field of Econometrics which I did think was cool and worthy of further academic study.

It would have been a fantastic reunion. Poles have a strong attachment to their school friends. Most continue to live in the same city and so following the vagrancies and vicissitudes of former classmates is not hard. But our particular once-tight little circle has become fragmented: Monika now lives in SF, I live in Madison, Janek is still in Warsaw. Maybe next year we can better coordinate our reunion.

In the meantime, I am trying to pick out Monika from my first grade photo below (taken in 1959; click to enlarge). Only one of the faces seems potentially fitting. Circled also are the faces of Fela (post from last Friday on ‘Politics at the Personal Level’), Janek, and myself (the school ‘monitor’, of course!).


Warsaw Elementary School no. 43, first grade 

You THINK you’re in a sea of strangers…

I ran into someone at the store this afternoon. I know this person, I thought. I know quite a bit about him. I know something of his family life, his travels, in fact I know where he ate dinner recently. On the other hand, he knows me not at all. If I introduced myself, he would not recognize my name. He would stare blankly at me and say something like “sorry, I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

It’s odd that there are these imbalances of information out there. Because on other days, the flip side of this must happen too – where I am in ignorance of the fact that the person standing next to me knows all sorts of details about me as I innocently go about picking strawberries or granola.

With so many former students remaining in Madison after Law School, the probability of someone recognizing me and me not them is high (it happened just today at the Farmers’ Market). Still, prior to the blog, the amount of information that they would have about me would be limited, for the most part, to what I said in class or in my office. Though not always. It’s a small town and people pass all sorts of stories about others. Teachers are a good target for this kind of talk, I’m sure.

But today was different. I was the one tipping the informational scale. In the end it felt strange to say nothing and so I did introduce myself as one who knew him in this odd one-sided way. Which freaked him out completely. Next time, I think I’ll just grin knowingly. At worst I’ll appear excessively friendly, perhaps deranged even. But I wont cause such great discomfort as I did today, when I said “you don’t know me, but I sure know YOU.”