If you would have asked me what are the chances that a sitting president of the United States would visit a town in south east Poland where my grandfather lived as a young man, I would have answered zero. I should listen to Snowdrop, who keeps claiming that there is no such thing as 0% probability, because there is Mr. Biden, stepping off the Air Force One in Rzeszow.
When my grandfather lived and worked in Rzeszow (and the surrounding towns and villages) in his youth, the city was part of the Austrian Empire. To remind you -- Poland (or the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth as it was then called) itself had been erased from the maps in the 18th century and for 123 years it ceased to exist, having been divided between Austria, Prussia and Russia. My grandmother lived in a village east of Lviv, and in her childhood, it, too was part of the Austrian Empire, although the dominant language then was Polish. Lviv (or Lwow as we know it in Poland) became again part of Poland after the First World War, though after World War II it was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Then of course in 1991, after centuries of partitions, divisions, annexations and domination, Ukraine gained its independence, with Lviv taking the position of its seventh largest city. But the changed demographics of Lviv are telling: after the Second World War, Poles (that dominant language group) were expelled, the sizable Jewish population was gone, exterminated in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians and Russians resettled the city. The spoken language of Lviv is now Ukrainian (nearly 80%), followed by Russian (nearly 20%). No one speaks Polish or Yiddish, the languages of my grandma's childhood. And in Rzeszow? No Jews, no Ukrainians, no Russians. All Poles. Well, until this last month. (Thankfully, there are still no Russians in Rzeszow, though it appears there are plenty of newly arrived Ukraininas and, too, Americans. In uniform.)
And so here we are, March 25th, and President Biden has just landed in my grandpa's town. Population these days? Oh, about half the size of Madison, Wisconsin. Say hello to my cousins there, will you, Mr. President?
As for my day? Well, there are always the colors of a spring breakfast to admire! Note that one tiny cherry blossom is popping out from the twigs Ed and I cut down during our pruning work in the young orchard!
The rest of the day? I worked with a team of Adobe people trying to unravel the mystery of the unpublishable photos stuck in Lightroom, incapable for reasons not known to anyone, of movement into Flickr (my photo storage place). Possibly none of this makes any sense to you and sometimes I wonder if it makes any sense to me. Everything is interrelated and when things fail, it's very hard to find the source of the problem. In the end, Adobe (the parent of Lightroom) told me they were sure it was Flickr's fault. So now I'll have to try to convince the SmugMug (parent company of Flickr) team that the problem is theirs. I have a feeling they'll shoot me right back into the arms of Adobe.
None of this matters, really. Bugs get fixed, life moves on. I gave it a good effort. I'm not going to give it great gobs of time going forward. There are lots more important things to do in life, that trump spending hours, nay, days on glitches in photo storage systems on the internet.
Tomorrow, I switch focus completely: tomorrow, I'm getting myself ready for spring break. More on that... tomorrow!
