from Warsaw: one last effort

We are not sleeping well. We doze off alright, but at two we are up. I write, Ed reads, we watch CNN and BBC and wait until sunrise. And then we are too tired to get going.

On this last full day in the city, we get to the lovely old (but really new) café for breakfast after they have stopped serving it. No matter. A morning, sorry, afternoon meal of apple cake and a sweet yeast roll is perfect.









And again, slowly, tentatively, the sun comes out.

I tell Ed that I don’t think I have captured the essence of Polish life well enough here, on Ocean. I suggest a walk through my old neighborhoods. Past shoe stores, schools, bread shops, milk bars, past old churches and old women selling old everything. I take a photo or two. Not of anything unusual, not anything splendid at all. Just the ordinary stuff of an ordinary day. Here's one of women waiting for a tram.





As the sun moves closer to the bare branches of trees, I turn in the direction of Lazienki – the most beautiful of all city parks.





The weather – just at the freezing point, but fairly sunny – has brought out more than a handful of people. Older people, non working people, preschoolers.





Everyone has something in their pocket for the birds that live here. My sister has given us bread and nuts too and, as last year, we are absolutely delighted to throw bits of crust for the peacocks, ducks and birds.

















The squirrels are fewer than before and they are fussier: they dispose of uncracked hazelnuts and walnuts and seem to ask us to break the shell before handing them their treat.






When the sun finally disappeares and the chill becomes more pronounced, Ed heads back to the room and I begin what has to be described as a rush of last minute embraces. Some of my friends and family are more patient with my restless spin through Poland this winter. Others – not so much. I understand their puzzlement – why so short? Why only three days?

It is as much as I can do this time.

I stop in again at my dad's, meet up with my sister, drink tea with one special friend and eat dinner with a family of another and now I feel truly that I have never left, even as I sit there and try to bring Ed, who speaks not a word of Polish and understand little of what it means to feel Polish, into this peculiar world of close ties and long history.



daughter, mother



father, daughter


At the end of the day I am spent and so again, I do not sleep. At five in the morning, we are on the way to the airport. Wet freezing drizzle dirties the window of the car. It’s nice to be driving at this hour – the driver tells us. It’s nicer to be sleeping under a quit, I’m thinking.

I’ll be back soon, I tell myself. And maybe I’ll be calmer and less rushed and maybe I’ll venture out of the city and maybe I’ll capture the faces in new ways, because the old ways are beginning to feel remote, as the country distances itself more and more from the way I knew her thirty years ago.

from Warsaw: photographing Chopin

In the year my father was born, the Chopin Monument went up. Then, during the war, it was knocked down. In 1958, when I was five, it was unvelied again.

Photographing Poland. I ask myself each time I am here -- how should I do it?

I'm posting just one photo from today. If you stare at it long enough, you'll race through most of the questions that I have about my days here. Maybe not all. Maybe not even some. Maybe none at all. But to me, this image has soul.





I'll leave Ocean alone for a night. Tomorrow we leave for France and on my way there, I'll again come back to this theme. Because I have been thinking hard about how best to post (and think about my days here) with accuracy, with flare and with an honest punch.

You have to smile. Visitng Warsaw now, you just have to smile. I know that much.

from Warsaw: soft light

We are sitting at Blikle Café, eating breakfast. An egg in a glass for me. Classic Polish stuff, though in the old way, the soft boiled egg would have been pealed and dumped unceremoniously into a tall glass. None of this delicate poaching in the glass stuff that I see now.




It is a late breakfast. The Café doesn’t open until 10 – an interesting time to contemplate an eggs and toast beginning.

(Okay, we cheated: in waiting for it to open, we stumbled into the bakery next door and snacked on sweet cheese yeast rolls.)





In fact, we are not the only ones now sitting down to a full breakfast. Slowly, the place fills. An older gentleman comes in, looks around and approaches Ed. May I have your newspaper? -- he asks. Ed obliges, as well he might since he doesn’t speak Polish and the paper is in Polish (Ed likes to have reading material ever present, even if he cannot read it).

We learn that the man is Swiss, but born in Poland. First time in Poland? He looks at Ed with interest. No, I smile. It’s his second.

The single woman at another table chimes in. He’s a New Yorker? I nod, though by now, Ed has spent far more years in Wisconsin than in his childhood city. But she got it right and she's pleased. Nice day to be outside! Enjoy it.

Polish people are forever curious about people sharing space, even fleetingly, with them.

Second trip for Ed, but the first time in years that my winter days in Warsaw are dappled with sunlight. Throwing back the curtain this morning, I could not believe that I saw this:





A walk. A long overdue walk. I hadn’t done it last year: too cold, too gray, too wet. But now? Ed, we are in for a hike!

And so we step out for a first real look at my city.

Remember the Square of Three Crosses from last night? With the pudgy looking church? Here’s its cross (one of the three!) against a deep blue sky. Oh yeah. That other tower? The Palace of Culture. Gift of Stalin. No cross on that one.





We walk along the "Royal Way," toward Old Town. The pudgy church is behind, casting a wicked eye at the building up front (on the left of the photo) -- the former headquarters of the Communist Party. I used to walk this way daily, to classes at the university. I was destined to have a more personal connection to the place then too. But that's another story for another for another forum.





Oh, the sun, the sun. In spite of near freezing temps, I am not cold. We walk past stalls of flowers -- so common in European cities! Who gets this morning bouquet? An office buddy celebrating a name day? A sweetie back home?




Further up, we pass the univsersity buildings. Hey, my classes were here! I ran out for tea at nearby cafés more than once. More than a hundred times. None of this Starbucks quick latte stuff. Prolonged, animated tea breaks.





And finally, the old town. We slip and stumble over the cobbled streets and icy sidewalks (sand just does not have the melting power of salt). And, I am, as usual, enchanted. Not by the beauty of the place, though there is that...





...I am enchanted by what was reconstructed here, out of rubble, starting just a few years before my birth and well into my childhood. The Royal Castle at the photo's right side? My high school class helped clear the the old bricks and stones to make room for it. The Castle: not old, but looking as it once did, before the Nazis emptied the city of structure and life during the War.

And of children. The children of the war years. The generation just in the shadows of my own.

Ed and I walk into the Museum of Warsaw History. There is a temporary exhibit of photographs and words. Of children, deported from Warsaw to labor camps and transit camps in the last year of the city's destruction, in 1944.

There is nothing I can say here that would adequately convey those stories, their stories. On the website of the Banished Children Project (banwar1944), you'll find more. But let me at least leave you with one tiny image of this unbelievable horror.





We watch a film on the destruction of Warsaw. I had taken my daughters to this very film ten years ago. I could watch it a thousand times and still, I would not be able to comprehend how Warsaw could be reduced to nothing. And rebuilt with such strength and gusto soon after.

Outside, I am dazzled by the light. If ever I loved the soft play of rays on children's faces, it was now, this afternoon. A group of school kids, meandering across the square, taking a quick look at Syrenka, the mermaid with the shield, the symbol of my city. Who can not smile at this?





And all day, we encountered granparents, caring for their little ones while parents are at work.









We pause at a traditional old restaurant where Polish people, older, nonworking people are eating their mid day meal. Ed is thrilled with Polish mushroom soup and I'm happy with my borstch. Warmth from within.





It's getting late and the sunlight is getting dangerously thin, frail, as if it might disappear behind the trees of city parks.





We turn back. We catch a tram along the main street, Marszalkowska, the one that zips past the Palace of Culture.




We get off just steps from where I first lived in Warsaw, in a most unremarkable, tiny apartment, looking out on a tram stop. Around the corner, you can still walk past the markers of what we not so affectionately refer to as Stalinist architecture.




You're probably noting the graffiti. That's new. I'm noting that even at times of envisioning a utipian society, the mother is depicted as holding her child (similar images are on the remaining pillars, where she is also holding tools of work in her empty arm).

It's just a short stroll to the park. Several parks, in fact. Let me end this for today. A long post. A full day. A gradnmother bending down over her little one, wiping his nose.

from Warsaw: first steps

By late evening, the streets are nearly empty. True, it’s January. But it’s not a miserably cold January. And maybe we’re not hitting the tourist by-ways. (How many tourists are there in Warsaw at this time of year anyway?) Still, Warsaw feels quiet.

Oh, there was traffic, sure, a snarl of cars, especially at the periphery of the city, driving in from the airport. But now, as we set out for a quick evening walk across the Square of the Three Crosses, just outside of where we're staying, we encounter few others.

Warsaw is like that: it can quickly become residential, with only the occasional small shop (sausages maybe?) squeezed in among rows of low rise apartment buildings.

Is there a shopping heart to the city? Ed asks.

Is there? I have to think about that.

Yes and no. This is a city of neighborhoods. You return to your own to shop for foods, to drop off your shoes at the cobbler. The heart of the city is a magnet, but not for commerce so much as for its prettiness, its café life, its parks.

But there is no time for that tonight. After many delays and a missed connection, we are dead tired. We flew in at the darkening winter hour of three, pushing through the gray clouds of a January sky.




After a quick first visit with my sister and her son, we make our way to Srodmiescie -- city center. My old neighborhood. The place where I learned to tie my shoe laces and stand in line for warm loaves of bread.

We stop at a local café-bakery...




... and order a salad of greens, pickles, egg, tomato, beans and smoked highland sheep’s milk cheese.





And, rather predictably, we end the first day with a pastry. We aren’t really hungry, but there are too few evenings here and I can’t pass it up – a bite of apple cake with baked meringue.

appetite for travel

The taxi was late. So we (yes, my occasional traveling companion is along for this ride) had to chase the bus for Chicago. There was fog. And rain. And thunder. The flight out to Paris is delayed. So we will miss our flight to Warsaw.

On the other hand:

Chicago weather is not as wretched. Free champagne is always nice. A longer layover at Charles de Gaulle means time for croissants and a cappuccino.

Travel is for the hearty. Or for those with hearty appetites.

The next three days are in Warsaw. I’ll write once we get there.

looking back

How do you regard your past? Most of the time, this is a ridiculous question. You recall moments, they’re good, they’re bad, you move on.

At other times, it’s a challenge.

When I travel back to Warsaw, I almost always ask myself this: what if I had never left? It was chance, really, that brought me to the States. I could have stayed in Warsaw. I almost stayed.

When I am in Poland, it is as if I had decided to stay. Here I am. Walking streets that are my daily route – I know the way the sidewalk concrete aligns itself in this block, I know the store that closes early on this corner.

It’s a desolate feeling, because it is not populated with the people I love – those in the States – so there’s that. I feel alone in Poland, even as it seems very much home.

Now, I imagine this is not unique to the “immigrant” who returns to the old country. Presumably if you lived all your young life in, say Columbus Ohio (is that middle America?) and then move away, but you go back at an advanced age (am I at an advanced enough age?) you feel alone. Yes, most certainly. But do you still think of Columbus Ohio as home? I mean, in the States, isn’t “home” a transferable concept?

There is no way that my Warsaw years can be picked up and transferred here. The people of Warsaw do not think and feel in the way that people in Columbus Ohio (or New York, or Chicago or Madison – the towns of my American existence) think and feel. They just don’t.

But, at the same time, I have chosen to put distance between myself and that world. I am removed from it because I want to be removed from it. No one forced me to give it up. I did it because people here drew me to their world. And I stayed.

Except when I go back. In Poland, I am not American, I am in all essential ways Polish, because, well, I grew up there.

Too foggy for you? Yes, of course. It has to be that way. As yesterday, I was thinking of all this as I was walking to the grocery store late in the afternoon. The fog in Madison was so dense that all the time I was contemplating this photo, I believed that I was watching a man walking his dog.





I was wrong. There was a man. And there was a fire hydrant. And they were not together and he was not walking the fire hydrant. Things get complicated on foggy afternoons.

the cycle of an immigrant

You have no idea how complicated it is to be an immigrant. You love your old home country. You miss it. For whatever reason, you do not live there anymore. You embrace the new land: you learn about being a resident of your curiously different, but increasingly familiar home. You don’t go back to the old place, but then you do go back. You get all nostalgic. You go back again. And again. Until you remember that it’s not all that perfect back home (in the same way that it’s not all that perfect anywhere). You think – I best put it behind me. You do, but you don’t really. You want to write a book about it all. You do write (or commence to write) a book about it all. Then you go back with renewed enthusiasm. After all, your childhood memories were good and pure and simple.

And it does not stop there.

I’m finishing up work here, but my foot is already there, in Warsaw. I can see myself on the January streets of my childhood turf. I can feel the place. Not as it feels to, say, my sister, who lives there now, but how it feels to me, the immigrant, going back to what was once undeniably and completely home.

I was thinking about this as I was walking to Whole Foods this afternoon. Perhaps because the route to the store is so boring.



going there



heading back


Or, because I have a quick (so very brief) trip to Poland ahead of me.


Or both.

taking a detour

Intermittent mechanical problems (say, randomly speaking, in a furnace that works…most of the time) are excruciatingly similar to on-again off-again lovers. They both keep you riveted with what they offer, and then, just as you’re settling in to enjoy their splendidness, they turn away and you’re left out in the cold. Until the next round.

By the time the furnace man came to fix the dysfunctional machine, the furnace was up and running. It tests fine! He tells me.

I know better. It’s a passing phase.



I spend a good part of the day in my office, making progress with various projects. The campus is almost empty. Cold from an almost complete absence of the human form.





Coming back home, I note that I have taken only one photo (see above) the entire day. I’ve had days like this before. To me, they are typically markers of shoddy effort on my part – not so much in terms of finding inspiration, but in terms of making purposeful detours into prettier (or at least more interesting) terrain. If you know your path home is ugly, diversify! If you know your furnace may not be fully functional, dig out more blankets and cook up a zesty Moroccan stew!

Here is my change of direction:





Not pretty enough? Okay, let me stray further, toward Lake Mendota. Frozen now.





You guys cold out there today?
Not so bad.
You are made of different fabric than I am.





At home, I run into the furnace repairperson.
You’ll be fine now! Have a good week-end!
I close the door, listen to the steady hum of the mechanicals within the furnace and wait.

An hour later, I turn toward preparing a pot of Moroccan stew.

home

I am on the Interstate. Alone.


(no, that's not me; I'm the one with camera, remember?)

No one to take charge of the camera in the back seat. Just me. And loosely packed bags thrown about. With dirty laundry.

I search the airwaves for the appropriate song. Maybe the one about going home? To the place where you belong? So, do I belong here, back in the condo?

Sure, yes, but I would like, for once, to come home and not find that in my absence, the furnace has taken a vacation. So that the place has a lovely chill – fitting with the mood of a person leaving behind two weeks of daughters and their hilarity and facing a brief period of intense work and neglected chores.

Coming home. There is no heat, but contacted persons are awfully nice about it. Niceness counts. Home. Home, home. Facing the bright side now: home. With sunlight streaming in, so that the absence of a working furnace is barely noticable. (Until the sun sets.)

By the way, did you ever notice how difficult transitions can be? You have? Really? You too?

from Chicago: cold blast

How do you photograph a blast of Arctic air without spending much time in direct contact with it?

Intense dark blue sky of dusk, remnants of snow on frozen branches – that’s the best I can do.





And forgive me for the brief posts in the next handful of days. I’m returning to Madison tomorrow (sob, no more daughters) to catch up with stacks of papers – all of which must be reviewed and attended to before my departure on Monday. Where to then? Keep reading.

P.S. Ocean is four years old today. Ocean View is one year old this week. Ocean Store is opening for business this month. Is it all driven by a restless winter impatience? Or staying in from the cold? Maybe. So, thank you, Arctic air. And thank you to all who read Ocean. Posting daily makes sense to me so long as I have at least one person who likes to see what I’ve come up with. To all of you – commenters, readers, lurkers, friends, family, occasional traveling companions – thank you for peeking in now and then. It’s utterly wonderful to have you here.

from Chicago: is it about the Eve or the Day?

Without doubt, in Poland, it’s all about the Eve. The Day is only for recovering from the Eve. Maybe under the market economy people now make resolutions – to earn more money, to eat less junk food, that sort of thing – but I doubt it. You greet the New Year and then you forget about it.

I’m not sure where I fall on the Eve/Day dilemma. Which counts? The review of the past and the anticipation of midnight?

Maybe. Last night, the snow fell gently, the taxis were snatched faster than I could say, and we made our way, as last year, to Crofton on Wells – a downtown restaurant, where Suzy Crofton presides over a wonderful kitchen. (We have a tradition of saving the very best eating experience of the year for this evening.)

So, snow, a family frolic and finally, a feast. Not bad.












potato blini with smoked salmon, quail egg custard, etc.


After dinner, a quick glance at the postmidnight crowds (as seen through the window of a moving cab)...




... and then sleep. Had the ride been five minutes longer, I may have begun my night's slumber right there in the taxi.


Today, the snow still fell gently and the day moved gently as well. Here's what I could take in from the back patio of a third floor condo:





It was the kind of day where my big excitement was a trip to the gym, followed by a purchase of coffee. There were many many people buying coffee today. And taking it easy.





Someone sent me an email asking if I made resolutions. I’m on the fence with that as well. I, like millions of others, do believe in self improvement, but I also know that piling it on (be chipper, moderate indulgences, spend less on travel, etc etc) will freeze me in much the same way the computer freezes when it has too many applications open and running. Still, the “do better” slogan stays with me and I get to pick and choose which elements of it are pleasant enough to incorporate into the day.

Day is forward looking. Eve is full of nostalgia. Looking back is sad. Looking forward and doing better is optimistic.

There’s much to be said in favor of Day. Oh, but when I remember last night's mushroom and sunchoke soup...





Happy days ahead to you. And many evenings of good eating!

Chicago confection

I walk over to Pasticceria Natalina on Clark. I love that place. It’s authentic-young. She takes her talents from her Sicilian grandmothers, he brings them from his family bakery in Lebanon. And they create magic.





I wait in line. They’re baking like mad.

When we run out of stuff, we’ll close for the day. For the week actually.
Taking time to welcome the New Year with your family?
Family? Oh no. Not them. Christmas is for family. New Year’s is for fun!

I just want four Sfogliatelle, with ricotta and candied orange peel (right next to the stars below) and a bag of cookies con limone, but I’m enjoying watching others buy boxes and boxes of lovely creations.





Sweeten this day a little! It’s the end of a year and we’re all here and ticking. Celebrate! And hope for an even better 2008. I’m wishing all my readers a tasty ending and a delicious beginning.

To you, straight from my favorite Sicilian bakery on this side of the ocean: