the written word

We are eating dinner out -- the first such date since... well, since Europe. And we both bring something to read. A gift to each other -- bring something you've been wanting to read for this gorgeous evening out on a terrace, for a special meal at a place we never go to -- the local Liliana -- a Creole place that is just a tad over what we usually would spend on a meal out. But, it's been a while and they have a Tuesday special and today's Tuesday special is jambalaya and so here we are, reading happily and throwing out the occasional comment on what we've read.

I have with me a library book that's soon due and as usual, I've read almost none of it. So I give it a good effort and conclude at the end of the evening that it's well written but not interesting. It's an autobiography and I think there is not much that I love better than a well written autobiography, but there is something wrong with this one and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Blandness of the entirety even as each recounted episode may be judged to be unusual.

And I think about this  -- the act of writing for an audience and I compare it to the act of teaching a class because in both worlds you strive to capture the heart of the listener/reader and I know all too well that just being a good writer, or being in command of your subject matter in the classroom isn't enough.

So I almost want not to write anything at all on Ocean tonight. I am that demoralized by this unsuccessful (in my opinion) book -- because if this famous writer cannot pull it off, then who are we, us lesser mortals to even try.

But then I remember that this day had such tiny but beautiful twists to it and I want to pay these due respect, bland as this all may seem now to the dutiful Ocean reader.

Breakfast, outside. To get us started.





And a look at this morning's flowers.






Then yoga for me, which is not much of a twist (except in the physical sense), but it does allow me to pass by prairies and cornfields and since I showed off the prairie here the last time, I can show off the tall corn growing to the west of us now.






And so long as I am showing off Things That Grow, why not once again take you back to our veggie garden, where Ed is picking pickling cukes and tomatoes in the basket.






And then I work. On the porch.





Where in this do I see even a potential for a good story? Well wait. The day's not over yet.

Here comes the delightful stuff. Paul's cafe. The library. Tennis among the firs.







And to Freight Harbor (tool shop) where we purchase a pole power saw.  For those tree branches at the farmette that are just too hard to get down with a regular pole saw. [When I am old and infirm, I will most likely miss these trips with Ed most -- tool shopping, viewing construction materials. Because it's always cool to participate in someone else's world -- one that places no demands on you, none whatsoever.]

Now, the beauty of this trip is that we are on Ed's motorbike. On a summer evening, a motorbike ride can be quite exhilarating. But on a highway, with a six foot pole saw? A challenge!

We go, too, to Menard's to examine materials we will be using for that forthcoming small construction project at the farmhouse. (More on this later.)

And finally we are at Liliana's for dinner and now is the time for us to sit back and enjoy reading together.






So, in the end, I couldn't keep the words out of here. And maybe that's not such a bad thing. They distract you from the faults of the other medium. Because honestly, the photos without the words would be not much at all and the words without photos would be bland indeed.

But I do feel, on this evening perhaps more than on most others, the pain of submitting something that is less than well crafted. A narrative that maybe will attest to the difficulties of daily blogging -- especially when posting takes place very late in the evening.

The optimist in me will say -- to a better writing episode tomorrow.

rethinking life

I don't think I am at all unique in sorting things out for myself in a grand way on a fairly regular basis. I mean, not much has to happen for me to go backwards in time and forwards in time and conclude that adjustments are in order.

Perhaps the trigger was a call from some medical person about some rather good medical news (or at least an absence of not good news). Or maybe it was that I met (through a former student now friend and blogger) a person over coffee who brought forth thoughts of a Polish past (her ancestors are from Poland) and a traveling future (she, too, likes to travel and though she is older, she is perhaps a smidgen more adventurous than I have been in recent times). Or maybe it's that when I am surrounded by stacks of books that need my full attention, my thoughts roam.

Rethinking life includes reaching back, beyond my own birth. Here's a photo that I like.  It's of my grandparents, my mom, her brother a handful of years after they pulled up roots and moved to the States (only to return to Poland some years later -- but that's so much a different story).







Rethinking life includes, for me, a good long gaze over the changing landscape around me. You can tell that these fields, worked by Farmer Lee, are in full August mode.






It is a day that constantly threatened rain and indeed, during breakfast (on the porch), the world seemed misty gray and quite wet.






Rethinking life doesn't require inventing anything new for yourself. It doesn't call for a good attitude or a bright smile (though I hope I have both, always). It's more about trying to interpret things in a different light. If I thought one way about something, maybe I should think differently about it?

Anyway, according to deathclock.com (thanks, NYTimes), I have between 19 and 21 years of life left (depending on whether I call myself "normal" or an "optimist" and I do rather think I'm the latter), so, plenty of time to rethink my life again and again.


In the meantime, some aspects to the day remain rooted in their sameness. Breakfast, yes, I noted that already. And a weekly (postponed from yesterday) dinner with daughter and her husband.





And an evening on the couch, writing an Ocean post.

Sunday

We live on a fairly quiet rural road. Though close to Madison, we aren't a through-way to any particular spot and so the traffic -- what there is of it -- is of the go to work, go home type.

Except Sundays.

The road deadends at Lake Waubesa and during the summer, we get the weekend boats -- going to, coming back. All day long.






I can't complain. People like their boats and their lakes and it's hard to feel grumpy at this confluence of pleasures: a day off, superb weather, a waterfront that beckons.

However, today has an added twist -- our neighbor (we really have only one visible neighbor -- to the west of us) is celebrating. Maybe a birthday. There is a sign out front: honk for Dave! And so they do. All those happy people with their boats, sharing the joy: beep! And again. Beep beep. And again.





Country living has its interesting permutations.


On the upside, there is the porch breakfast.






Those strawberries in the bowl? -- Not from the garden. It's not that we do no have any strawberries in our patch this year, it's just that the crop isn't very large. Today, for example, we shared a strawberry. (Here, you take half!)





And speaking of fruit patches, today I finally careened with the tractor-mower over the worst parts of the extended raspberry bed. The machine went right through, jamming only twice. Right now, things look worse than they did before. The jungle of berry canes and weeds has turned into a jungle with weird bald spots. But, there will always be a period of nothing before there is a rebirth of something and so I am somewhat satisfied with having this bit of farmette work behind me.

Work: yes, the rest of the day was about work. School work. Which, these days, is amidst flowers.






And that's a good thing.

and round and round and round and round and round...

Maybe you remember the lyrics to this Beatles song:
...the fool on the hill,
sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round...


It's Saturday. The Polish citizenship issue is pushed to the side. I must confer with my sister. A commenter also suggested I try Polish bureaucrats in another city. New York comes to mind.  The saga doesn't end, but the threads are left dangling for a while.

So I bet you missed my recordings of drama in the matter of identity theft? Well now, that topic is making a come back! Did I mention that the police report that I dutifully filed was sent not to me, but  to the wrong address? And that Pay Pal (aka Bill Me Later) had the audacity to send me a letter (received today) explaining that I was probably a victim of identity theft and that I should register this with Credit Bureaus and thus prevent anyone from opening a new account under my name? Even as they themselves ignored the already in place fraud alert and permitted a new account to be opened despite that alert?

And the latest twist -- the blender that first triggered this round three of theft for us, the blender that came from Walmart, delivered to me on this new account which I never opened? Well now, we learn that it's some fancy blender! Priced at $299. Who even needs a $299 blender?? We call Walmart today, as instructed and ask if they've decided what we should do with it -- do you want us to return it to the store near us perhaps? Yes, do that.

But at Walmart, they're not buyin' it. Or rather -- not takin' it.
We can't accept it unless we credit your account. 
We don't have an account. It's not ours. It's a theft. 
Well then, we can't take it.

Round and round and round and round and round.


I tell Ed that I have never had such a bureaucracy infused spring/summer before. I have four ongoing folders of various messes -- none of them of my doing -- and it's as if they all race to be at the forefront, vying for my attention.


The Ocean post begins with recounting the latest in these ongoing sagas because they've become absurdly inflated and therefore almost funny. But they are not at the core of my day. This is:

Breakfast.






The garden.











And a day spent almost entirely on the porch, with my stack of school work. It is the most beautiful summer day of them all! I could not get enough of it!











In the very late afternoon, we bike over to my daughter's house. It's about 6 miles on the bike paths and it is one hell of a gorgeous stretch of pavement. Away from traffic, away from everything, cutting through the prairie as if it were an ordinary patch of grass. But it isn't. The prairie is at its most robust stage. You can't help but stop and admire it.






Again and again.






We visit with Goldie. Well, I visit. Ed raids their cupboards and promptly falls asleep on the couch. Though not before giving the old girl a good rub around her face.






The bike ride home is even more golden and splendid...






And I have one more story to add -- Ed is determined to make the best pickles ever out of our increasingly out of control cucumber crop. After studying the various methods for making pickles, he devises his own, which, so far as I can tell, is based on many assumptions about what happens to gases that build up and how they should be released. Here he is, in the thicket of pickle making:






Me, I just breathe in the evening air and exhale. Again and again.

Friday

Well now, a lot could have happened to completely derail this day, right? I mean, I could have slipped, bumped, stumbled. I could have been told I have five months to live.

None of that happened.

But I did have a beastly phone call with the Mr. Consul from the Polish Consulate in Chicago and that was unfortunate, as no good can ever come from a conversation with a Mr. Consul from the Polish Consulate in Chicago.

But first, there was breakfast.









Soon after, the phone rang and I had an hour's worth of clarifications and explanations to listen to. It appears that my hue and cry caused the staff of bureaucrats at the Consulate to hold a meeting to discuss my case and to develop a coordinated response to future such cases. You're thinking -- that's good, no?

No. They came up with a hard line solution which is so ridiculously difficult for any sane person to implement that it really becomes no solution at all. The newest: before I can do anything, ANYTHING more, I must register my divorce with the Polish courts. Not my marriage, mind you, because they think that would be dishonest. So the divorce. Maybe then the marriage, but that's neither here nor there right now. Moreover, I must do it by myself, in Poland, because, well, it's a shame but their hands are tied -- they don't do such things. Just passports. They're all about passports in Chicago.

I ask, what I think, is a key question -- so, you think a person like me needs to travel to Poland to register a divorce before she can obtain her passport to travel anywhere at all?

I should have saved my breath. The response was long winded and irrelevant, The elders have spoken. Even though I waved the "I'm a lawyer!" card, and, too, the "my father worked his young years in consulates here, just like you!" but it was so useless.

In the end, I did point out that I already had a Polish passport with my married name in it, it's just that it had expired. Well, Mr Consul tells me, now that my room is empty, I can tell you in confidence that I am well aware of the fact that passports had been issued in all sorts of inappropriate ways...
You have no evidence that this was my case! (In fact, mine was a boring, straightforward case of a person who comes for one reason or another and then winds up staying.)
That is true. And it is also true that we have been perpetuating a series of mistakes and omissions. But we will now conform to the law and henceforth do things by the book.
Whose book? You are interpreting laws in the most bizarrely complicated way possible!

By the way, my Polish gets better and better as these conversations proceed. That means that by the end, I talk as all Poles do: at five hundred words per minute. And that is no exaggeration.

Bottom line -- approach the courts in Poland. Huh. That will be the next chapter in the book on how something that should be easy grows so big as to swallow you whole and leave your loved ones wondering -- what just happened here?



In other news, it rained last night. Mighty big and loud drops of rain. The garden (and the bugs) was so happy. In the morning sunlight, it simply glowed.






In the afternoon, I peeked in on Goldie, my older girl's cat. She gets the ending photo for today.






No no! Not that one! The more playful shot!





And there you have it. A day with heart. If you can forget about exasperating phone calls.

family

My daughters' homes have bits of my past in it. I notice these as I spend some minutes in their houses today. A few modest family trinkets, photos on a refrigerator -- from their childhood...






...and also photos that I took when I was very young,  Ones that my younger girl dug up from some storage box.






Stuff doesn't matter -- I always say that and think that actually, but some stuff is laden with memories, good ones. And a trinket here, a plate there and suddenly you have the feeling of continuity. Small fragments of the past infused into a new reality. I smile at that, liking so much the new reality that I see in my daughters' lives.


Last night was festive as the girls, their guys, their dad and I gathered for a dinner at Bristol.
While we ate, the rains came down hard. What terrific luck to have the showers wash the sidewalks clean while we were in the warm glow of the restaurant!











The birthday girl. And below, with mom.







And then puff! The rains went by and it was summer again. An evening in Chicago. Ending with the familiar routine of cake and presents. Adding new photos to a family album of memorable milestones.
















In the morning, my younger one leaves early for work.






Her fiancé's off too, so that I am now alone, lingering at their place over my breakfast -- carefully stocked by her for my funny preferences of granola, fruit and kefir (and coffee).






And then I am off. To return soon, with, one hopes, the proper papers for stage x of the saga of documenting nothing special at all -- just a continuation of being a dual citizen. Even as my home is so much here now. In Madison. At the farmhouse.





Later:

Thursday evening is market time for us -- our community market, down the road, where farmer Lee also sells her veggies.






But we don't need a lot. Our own garden is now producing.





So we pick up some bread, a few ears of corn -- the supplements, you might say.






And we head back. Via the tennis courts. We play, we laugh, we go home -- a peaceful place. With its own sets of original ideas about what creates family.

But I see that there's a message on my phone: the Polish consul, the second one, with the different conversation agenda is trying to reach me. I quickly call back. And would you believe it -- he completely contradicts everything that the first Polish consul told me yesterday!
No, no! you need to file your divorce papers with the Polish court first!

It's been a long times since I shouted in Polish.

I put down the phone and I fix the salad, steam the corn, the garden peas, grill chicken brats and sit down to eat with Ed. Isis comes in in time to get the tail end of a chicken brat.

redux

Let's start with the upside:

Breakfast (though again, indoors)! And the flowers outside!











And, too, it did not rain. Which is important for me today.

I have a fourth point! At the Chicago Caribou cafe, where I am currently wiling away a few hours, a kind patron unplugged her computer so that I could plug in. She did it without asking, in a gesture of sharing. I was touched.

Moreover, I have a lovely evening ahead of me. That's a big one. The family is celebrating my older girl's birthday (a day early) and a gathering of parents and daughters with their sweeties is always, always upbeat and wonderful. But that's looking ahead.


Looking back on the rest of the morning and afternoon hours, I have to say, there was a lot to growl about and growl I did! It's not easy to get me riled these days. In fact, really kind of hard. I have so much that is easy and beautiful in my life that most frustrations get a shrug out of me. Not much more than that.

But the Polish Consulate in Chicago can set the fires burning within. And it did just that again today!
Perhaps you remember? I needed to clarify ambiguities about my Polish citizenship in connection with my father's death this year. (Different rules apply for the disposition of his effects depending on my citizenship.)

And I got a stream of tsk tsk commentary and instruction and reprimand when I tried to reestablish my citizenship here, in Chicago, back in May. And so instead of dealing with the bureaucratic mess I was presented with at the Consulate, I decided to hand over my papers to my sister, who could do it in a faster and kinder environment back in Poland.

The decision was issued in Warsaw in good time -- my citizenship was confirmed. So I am a dual. Okay, The last step in the process is for me to pick up the document every Pole living abroad needs -- a passport. Since I had to be in Chicago on this day for the birthday dinner anyway, I thought -- bam! Two nails with one hammer! I will apply for my passport as well.

After the long bus ride and a host of El and bus connections, I enter the venerable building of the Polish Consulate. (If you are not interested in how bureaucracies function, you might want to skip down to the photos and call it a day.)






And I get all the tsk tsk, shake the head, reproach, reprimand, pack your bags and go home empty handed all over again! I protest.
I called this office on Friday and I was told I could file, now that I have the decision!
You were told wrong. I can't be responsible for that. (No, but you can have me curse the fact that I got you and not that other person to talk to today.)

Why can't I file? I have the citizenship confirmation, I have the documents listed on the website.
Ah, but you haven't registered your marriage in Poland.
Yes I have! Look at that! I show him the document confirming my Polish citizenship. It has my married name clearly at the top of the form!
What that office does is really of no concern to me. You need to file the change of marital status in Poland with the appropriate (meaning different) office there.
But I'm not even married. I'm divorced!
That only makes it more complicated.
So go ahead and file it all! Here's my marriage certificate. (I travel with a backpack full of papers in case, like now, they pounce on me with some new request.)
Not so fast. You need an Apostole, attesting to its veracity.
That again? I already did it once!
That was for another office. Not for registering your marriage.
What else?
You need a certified translation of the certificate. Or give it to us -- we'll translate ti for you. For $40.
From English to Polish? You need a translation from English to Polish? You speak English, don't you?
You need to file it with an official translation.
What else?
You need a copy of your birth certificate. Because look how imperfect the Illinois marriage certificate is: it has your age and your husband's age at marriage, but not your dates of birth. Compare that to the Polish one -- he hands me a copy of one smugly -- now that has everything you need, right there!
Well now, my former Polish passport has my date of birth. I have that! And I happen to also have my birth certificate! (I tell you, I come prepared.)
Also that of your husband. His date of birth is essential.
Why? He's my ex-husband! I told you, I'm divorced.
I do not pass judgment on that. I only tell you what you need to establish marriage. Most people will establish marriage at a time when they are happily married. (I get the very real impression that he does not understand the concept of divorce.)
What if I can't procure that, what if my ex wont obtain that for me -- you mean I then can never ever get a Polish passport? Isn't that just a tad bizarre?  (It's less of an obstacle for me than I make it out to be, but I am curious.)
I did not say that. You make your best case. I cannot get into the mind of the decision makers. (I bet. The Wizards of Oz out there are hardly transparent. Maybe they wont accept my name change. That would be interesting.)
So that's it? And if I had all that by this afternoon, I can file today?
No. I am only the Consul for certain conversations. Not that one. That one is done by a different Consul and he is right now out of the office. It would have to be another day. 
And so I have to come back?
I do not tell you what to do. You asked me what papers you need and what to do with them. Once filed, the decision will be made on your name change. Then you can file for a passport.
So I have to come back at least two more times? 
I would not presume to tell you what to do. I am just saying that your case is complicated.

He says all this in a thousand incredibly long sentences and he does not like interruptions. Nor questions that take him away from his preferred narrative.

Of course, he remembers me from our previous (May) conversation. We did not part friends then. I decide to try for a more amicable exit this time, but I see that it all makes no difference to him. His satisfaction comes from outlining hurdles, not from helping you overcome them.

Back I go to the Secretary of State of Illinois to get an apostole for my marriage certificate. But I miss the filing time. By ten minutes.
That's okay -- send us a stamped envelope -- we'll send the papers back to you at home!
Now that's a helpful office.

I had mentioned to Mr. Consul that my sister was met with people going out of their way to help her when she filed papers on my behalf in Poland and that I missed that kind of attitude here in Chicago. But, he is just one peg in the board of workers here and so I should not pass judgment. The security person who checked my backpack at the entrance, for instance, was very pleasant.

I'll include some scenes from my scramble from one end of downtown to the next. And tomorrow, I'll come back to the brighter side of my visit here -- the joy of seeing my girls at dinner.


On the El: can you see that his wrist strap is decorated with bullets?






On the city bus: father and son.






Overcast.







Running, from end of the city to the next, missing the deadline anyway.







Neighborhoods in Chicago: onto Wicker Park. Or is it Bucktown? At any rate, it's all about brown and red.





That last one seems right for a parting photo. May as well be me, with my technology, trying to deal with life's frustrations.