Threads of Belonging

 As long as I can remember there were always two different Christmases at our house: the one celebrated by my friends and acquaintances and the one celebrated by my Polish parents. Pieces of the two intermingled in my head – a kind of attempt to make whole something that existed in parts. When friends on the school bus would ask me after the holiday what I got for Christmas, I knew that I was supposed to rattle off a wonderful list of things I had received to show how much I was loved and that I was as worthy and valuable in this world of Nebraska land as they were.  But part of me, a quiet, secret part knew this standard of my value was based on a false premise.

My parents were Polish war refugees who came to the United States on an American military ship in 1949 after World War II ended. They met in a Displaced Person’s camp in Germany, married and had two children, my younger brother and me, before coming to Nebraska, a land that held the promise of a new life and a better future for their children. Three more children were born and thrived in this new country. My mother had been a teacher in Poland who had been taken from her village and put in forced labor in Germany during the war. My father, a young man displaced by the war and struggling to survive on village farms, ended up in a German concentration camp during the last 6 months of the war, finally escaping during a forced march of prisoners from one camp to another when Allied forces were approaching. These were the stories I came from, the ones I grew up knowing.

I knew it wasn’t about the presents from the very beginning. I knew it because my mother told me it was about seeing the first star on Christmas Eve so that we could sit down to eat our Christmas Eve feast of fish and homemade, labor- intensive pierogi stuffed with cottage cheese. And although there was no straw on the table at our house, my parents would describe Christmases of their past when there would be straw just like in Jesus’s manger. And then there was the magic of Midnight Mass. Even the littlest ones were bundled up sleeping or awake and transported to the candlelit church on a cold Nebraska night where baby Jesus lay in his manger near the altar waiting for us to visit him. I had never heard of Santa Claus until my school friends talked about him in an all-knowing way that I knew better than to question. I envied their lack of  doubt and the fact that they all seemed to be part of the same story – one that began and ended in their small town. I wanted so much to be a part of that story, to be a real American. I was determined to accept and become everything my friends were, and it was easy to take part in a fantasy like Santa Claus. Much easier than fantasies of having a living room suite bought new from the local department store; a shiny car -and a mother who knew how to drive it instead of walking to the grocery store; or of having short stylish hair, not the long braids that my parents refused to let me cut until I was older.

The highlight of our Christmas eve meal and the sacred tradition that had to be completed before anyone could touch a morsel of food was the sharing of the “oplatek”, a communion type wafer sent to us by our relatives in Poland- grandmas, aunts, uncles, and cousins- that I had never set eyes upon and who had seen me only in photographs sent by my mother in her best effort to maintain the fragile connection of blood over an incredibly huge ocean that divided my parents from their past. Everyone broke off a piece of each other’s oplatek and wished each other well for the coming year. It was a time to look in each person’s eyes and find love and peace reflected in them, one of the few times in the year we were willing to do that.

We opened our presents on Christmas Eve and not Christmas morning like my friends; and there was usually only one special gift and sometimes one little extra package for each of the five of us. There were no wish lists or letters to Santa. My tatusz did the shopping and he loved surprises. But before we could open any gifts we had to sing. My father insisted on that. He told us he fell in love with our mother because of her beautiful voice, and we knew it was true because of the way he would beg her to sing on special occasions. We did our best to please. Our mother taught us the Polish Christmas carols of her childhood and as I got older and learned to play the piano, I would become the accompanist. Each child also had to sing a solo song and it became my job as the piano playing oldest to help my younger brothers and sister pick out a song and practice it before that much anticipated evening. As we got older the songs were mostly all in English- our new native tongue. I loved it when my sister sang, “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth,” when she turned six or seven and had actually had lost her front teeth.

One Christmas my father had a special surprise for us. Unbeknownst to the children, he had purchased a reel to reel tape recorder at an auction in the farming community where we lived. He hid the recorder in a bedroom near the piano and taped the entire evening from the singing to the opening of presents. An unbelievable surprise when he started replaying the tape and we didn’t know where the voices were coming from! And then, every year after that he would insist on playing it again. After I left home, got married, and began to have children of my own, he gave me a cassette copy of it. He had one made for each of us. I still have it, but I don’t think I have ever played it. I am not sure why not. Perhaps I don’t need to listen to it on a machine when it is still very much a part of my being. I can hear the excitement of the children’s voices, the old, out of tune piano, the giggles when someone made a mistake, my mother’s beautiful soprano, and the anticipation and magic of that evening – a celebration of a Polish Christmas in a small Nebraska town where Santa Claus was stopping at my friends’ houses that very same night.

Or perhaps it was too painful to listen to the past when I had put my past behind me and moved several hundred miles away to the east with my husband and daughter. An ocean of states now separated me from those memories. I had married an American – a college-football playing American in fact, perhaps more acceptable to me and my family because of his Lithuanian roots and his Lithuanian/Polish name. My three American children grew up believing in Santa Claus until one Christmas night the two oldest ones heard us coming down from the attic with their presents. They kept the fiction for their little brother until later. I still sang Polish Christmas carols for them at the piano but did not teach them the words so foreign to them. They were curious about the pierogi I made on Christmas Eve and my story about the first star and straw on the table. They somehow seemed to understand that this was a connection for them as well, something that tied them to Babcia and Dziadek, aunt and uncles in Nebraska, and relatives they had never met in a distant country somehow connected by a fragile thread of love through their mother to them.

rock i found on sandy beach and painting august 23, on my birthday. hello all.

First School

The small, white, almost square building shone brightly in the rays of the early morning prairie sun, its windows glazed with reflected light. The flag on the flagpole was unfurling as the ever present Nebraska wind began to pick up. Children were playing in the small surrounding field bordered by tall cornfields, seemingly watched by tall green sentinels. The stalks were just beginning to lose their brilliant summer green to the dryness of early fall and were rustling in the wind. A metal swing set stood in the middle of the field with four wooden swings dangling from chains; and a wooden teeter totter bounced off the ground as children laughed gleefully bobbing up and down. All four swings were occupied by legs pumping the air in piston-like rhythm. 

At the door to the building, under the sign that said District 66, stood a slender woman in a simple shirtwaist dress with light curly bobbed hair and wire rimmed glasses sliding down on her nose. It had been an early morning for her as she got up before dawn to help her husband birth a calf from their prize young Hereford. He had found the pregnant, rust colored heifer lowing and struggling in the field with what was apparently a breech birth. The vet had to be called, and came in time to help free the calf and relieve the animal of her suffering, still wearing his pajama tops under a well-worn denim jacket. Luckily, all seemed to be well with the calf and the young cow. 

She watched and smiled as the little girl and her mother got out of the big black car along with the five Ferguson children who waved at their dad as he drove off, the tires kicking up dry dust on the gravel road. The mother and her child walked up to the building their feet slowly crunching in the loose pebbles. She had heard they were coming – the whole community knew about the Polish war refugees, the couple with two small children that Mr.  Schneider had sponsored to work on his farm two years ago. Who knows what they had gone through in their own country? The father spoke a little English but was difficult to understand with his strong Polish accent. She had heard that the man was a hard, quick worker willing to help in the fields, fix tractors or machinery, and butcher hares in the slaughter house where Schneider raised domestic rabbits. She, herself, did not care for rabbit meat, but there were plenty of people in the county who ate it during the war when other meat was scarce. Didn’t she read somewhere that the Germans and French had eaten rabbit for centuries? Maybe that’s where Schneider got the idea – his grandparents had come over from the old country and settled in this rich flat farmland with its winding prostrate river that reminded them of their homeland, land that was at the mercy of the weather and surrounded by open skies so that storms could be seen approaching for miles, long before they arrived, usually giving people time to seek shelter. Not everyone was always so lucky; she had known more than one farmer hit by lightning while working his field on his tractor. And the destruction of tornados was unpredictable and devastating. Farming the prairie was an occupation not suited to everyone. 

The teacher wondered how much English this child would know if any? There were some German immigrant children at the school who had arrived the previous year and they had learned quickly. Her own great grandparents had been Swedish settlers who farmed a homestead south of town near the Blue River. They belonged to the founders of that community and now lay buried in the town cemetery under the giant Cottonwood trees. But these were the first Poles that she was to meet. She wondered how they would do here in this small town with no one around that spoke their language. And how would they feel about being surrounded by people with German ancestry after being displaced from their homes by the tanks and artillery of German soldiers.

Now they stood in front of her, the tall pretty woman in her blue floral cotton dress and the little dark curly haired girl clinging to her mother’s hand, dressed in what appeared to be boy’s pants but wearing a blouse speckled with tiny pink and blue flowers. Her brown leather shoes looked a little big for her feet, maybe to give her growing room. The little girl kept her eyes down but would sneak quick glances at the playground where the children were playing. She had a determined look about her as though she knew this was something in her destiny, yet her face betrayed a vulnerability, a caution, perhaps a bit of worry? Her mother’s forehead was also furrowed but her eyes smiling as she extended the hand of her child to the teacher as though transferring her somehow to a safe person, a keeper of a safe place. She said the child’s name which sounded like it was Zo-shaa.

Zosia looked up into the teacher’s face and shyly returned the smile. This was the day she had been waiting for.  She would learn to read.  And this was the teacher her mother had told her about. Mother knew all about teachers as she had been a school teacher in Poland.  To Zosia, school was a fantastical place. She would be the only one going this year. Her brother was still too little, and the baby had four more years at home with Mama.  Zosia had overheard her parents talking with the neighbor weeks ago and the three of them kept looking at her as they spoke. They called the neighbor “Singer” in Polish because he would burst into song without any visible provocation. He even taught her mother an American song. Her father later told her Mr. Singer said there was a schoolhouse for all children two miles away. It would open in September and she would go. Zosia’s father had to be at the farm where he worked before dawn to milk cows and clean the barn so he was not able to take her, but Mr. Singer would be glad to give Zosia a ride to school in the mornings along with his five children. That first morning, Mr. Singer’s wife had offered to watch Zosia’s two younger brothers so that Mama could go to school with her and meet the teacher.

The teacher took the little girl’s hand in her own and gently patted it. She called out to one of the older Ferguson girls to come show Zosia around.  Susan, the blond, freckle- faced, 10 year old daughter of Mr. Singer came running and grabbed Zosia’s arm pulling her over to the playground. She showed her to some of the other children and told them her name. Several children gathered around to look at her and asked her questions but Zosia had no idea what they were saying. She was afraid to say the English word “Hello” even though she had been practicing it for days. She could feel herself shrinking inside like the turtle she and her brother had found last summer in the creek near their house. When one of the older girls pointed to an empty swing and motioned for her to sit down, Zosia did so. The girl pushed her from behind and Zosia went flying up in the air like a balloon. What an amazing free feeling! The swing went higher than she had ever gone. She could see way over the corn stalks to a barn and farmhouse far away. She could see her mother and the teacher standing outside the schoolhouse watching her.

The teacher took Zosia’s mother by the arm and led her into the one room schoolhouse. She touched  the desk where Zosia would sit, showed the mother where her child would hang her coat in the winter, and pointed at the children’s lunch boxes lined up on a shelf. She said many things but the mother did not understand the words, only the kindness and hope behind them.  Mama saw the wood stove in the corner and the water jug with the tin cup everyone could share. The stove was not unlike the stove in the village classroom where she had taught. The teacher’s desk stood on a little platform in front of the room and a blackboard spanned the wall behind the desk. Rows of desks of varying sizes filled the room as children from kindergarten to 12^th grade came here to learn.  Each desk was stuffed with books and there were books on shelves around the room, so many books that Zosia would learn to read.  And then maybe Mama would also learn to read in English. Children’s voices echoed in her head as she reached out and touched one of the books, but the voices Mama heard were Polish not English. She had to glance away so that the sudden moisture in her eyes did not betray her. 

The teacher mistook her tears for regret about leaving her child and put an arm around Mama’s shoulder speaking in reassuring tones about how Zo-shaa would be fine, she seemed to be a smart little girl and would do well. Mama nodded in response to the kind tone and the mention of her child’s name. It was amazing how much one could understand even without knowing the words. She heard the children’s laughter outside, laughter that was the same in any language. 

The teacher invited Mama to sit in a chair in the back of the classroom and gave her some water in the tin cup. She gestured at the clock hanging on the wall, and pointed at the bell she had to ring to call the children inside. All the children came running and chattering as they did every morning, and Susan had Zo-shaa’s hand in hers leading her to where she would sit. When quiet had been restored, the teacher announced that they had a new student, Zo-shaa who was from Poland. She expected they would all help her to learn English and feel welcome in this country which was new to her. Mama watched and listened and remembered.

First Impressions from Hong Kong

I knew I would like Hong Kong when the immigration officer pulled out a tin box covered in Hello Kitty stickers from under her desk, unlocked a flimsy pink plastic lock, and extracted an "immigration approved" stamp from inside it to stamp my passport with. Still giggling over a joke she was sharing with the immigration officer beside her and hardly aware of my nervous presence, she sent me on my way and out into the glittery neon world that is Hong Kong. I was met at the exit by the school director who welcomed me in the name of the school where I will be working, escorted me to the hotel shuttle, and gave me some sound advise on apartment rentals. 

Asia must have cornered the market on cuteness. Everywhere one can place a cute cartoon logo, you can find one. Double-decker buses fly past with happy face cartoons on the side. Advertisements, information, logos--all of it is light and cute. So far, people have been kind and helpful. Despite the fact that at 5 foot ten I tower over 99% of the local population, people see me as a "friendly giant" in need of assistance or advise. When I wandered over to the information booth at the hotel to ask a few questions, the girl behind the counter engaged me in a lively conversation on the advantages of living on Ma Wan Island over Discovery Bay and the difficulties local Chinese have studying English literature. 

The nature I have glimpsed from the airplane and bus window is impressive--lush green mountains in the shapes of massive green mounds reminiscent of the painted silk scrolls in the Asia wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and aquamarine water. Yes, I'm sure the cynics will chime in here and remind me of pollution, but for the moment, I have seen the grandeur of Asia...

19:00: Play: The Interpreter – A Lithuanian Drama

Free performance of the play ‘The Interpreter’ written by Laima Vincė and directed by Alicia Gian (USA) and Marius Mačiulis (LT). Seating is on a first come first serve basis and subject to capacity. Please arrive early for best seating. The house opens at 6:30.

Directors – Alicia Gian (USA)/ Marius Mačiulis (LT)
Playwright – Laima Vince
Stage Design – Angė Kupšytė
Costume Design – Indrė Budreckytė
Sound Design – Deimantė Ponelytė
Performance duration – 90 min. (without interval)
Actors:
Ridas Jasiulionis
Alina Leščinskienė
Arturas Varnas
Larisa Kalpokaitė
Laura Height (UK)
Renata Kutinaitė
Indrė Jaraitė
Tadas Gudaitis
Paulius Valaskevičius
Inga Filipovič

Knots are found in place of cut off tree limbs
Unfeeling, lifeless, blanketed in bark,
But still living, a part of the tree,
Their bodies decay, ever hardening,
Similar to stumps, to roots, to veins,
Their communion limited,
A slight touch of one another through bark,
Touching, trying, shifting closer 
To touch without touching                   (Virgis Malčius)

“We’ve already decided – we don’t talk about Lithuania when we’re together, because it’s cold there, it’s dark there, and it’s rains without stopping.”

Directors Alicia Gian and Marius Mačiulis say they labeled the bilingual production a “national patriotic drama” as a provocation – to make the audience reflect on what exactly this beloved motherland is. “She is like a young girl struggling to put on a national dress” Mačiulis comments. “Who will come and help her?”

They love their motherland from a distance, because each had their own reasons for leaving it. Adele could not support herself on a meagre retirement pension, so she went to England to find a job. Natasha was sold into sex slavery by her boyfriend. Joana left home hoping to find her true love. While Julius…

Julius used to believe in Lithuania, he shared in its euphoric experience of national liberation by helping it communicate with the English-speaking world. Twenty years later, he still does just that, but his Lithuania is very different now, scattered across the globe, though mostly over the British Isles. Julius lives in Buenos Aires with his Argentinian partner Xavier and every morning receives phone calls from welfare institutions in the UK, serving as an interpreter for fellow Lithuanians. They are the ones who personify Julius’s Lithuania – a homeless pensioner, an unemployed man abusing the British welfare system, a childhood friend named Joana with whom he used to play in a sand box underneath the singing pine trees. This childhood friend rekindles in Julius a nostalgia for his country while at the same time, reminds him of its betrayal. Joana stood aside when Julius became a victim of a hate crime in school. Perhaps, if she had come to him and wiped the blood off his face, he wouldn’t have left Lithuania. While communicating with Joana, regardless of distance, he rediscovers his Lithuanian identity which he left behind twenty years ago. Although Julius, played by Ridas Jasiulionis, sits thousands of kilometers away, he serves as the only channel of connection between Joana (Alina Leščinskienė) and the nurse (Laura Height) who treats her at the South London Women’s Health Clinic on nearly a daily basis. The two are bound together by a country neither of them has seen for years, and the more Julius thinks of it, all the more the distance between him and Xavier (Arturas Varnas) grows. It becomes harder and harder for Julius to maintain a professional distance between his work as a translator and his concern for his fellows citizens living abroad. Finally, he and Joana have to make peace with the difficulties of their past. A second chance – to wipe the blood away – can always be discovered.

 Laima Vincė is an author, translator, poet, and journalist. For more than twenty years, Laima has been interested in the historical changes happening in the Baltic states. When Lithuania was still occupied by the Soviets, she came to study poetry translation with Marcelijus Martinaitis at Vilnius University and to participate in the Singing Revolution; in 2008 she published a book of memoirs entitled “Lenin’s Head on a Platter” about the experience. After 20 years, in 1994, she returned to Lithuania as part of the Fulbright scholar program to teach poetry translation theory and creative writing at Vilnius University and at Vytautas Magnus University. She currently translates contemporary Lithuanian poetry and prose into English. She has received more than one national American award for her work such as the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts award and a PEN translation award.

In 2012, a reading of the play “The Interpreter” was staged at the National Drama Theater as part of the Lithuanian playwriting festival “Versme.”

This production is a part of the Baltic Pride 2013 events program. Performances on July 27th and 28th are free to the public courtesy of the US Embassy of Vilnius.

Seating is limited. Please arrive early to find a seat. Doors opens at 6:30PM.

For more information on the production please visit www.vkamerinisteatras.lt

Language: Mixed language production – Lithuanian and English

Location: Vilniaus Kamerinis Teatras / Vilnius Chamber Theatre, Konstitucijos pr. 23B

More information here.

Notes from Enroute to Iceland...

And so here I am,
skimming over the sunset,
trail blazing through cloud cover,
hurtling towards Reykjavik,
peeling a boiled egg
from the black chickens
I left behind in my backyard in Maine,
which I had the foresight
to boil before I left,
passengers staring at me,
as though I were
one of those village women
one spots occasionally
on provincial buses
heading nowhere
and somewhere...

july 19, sacred bee, craigslist, women for men, portland, 64.

stung by a giant bumble bee right next to my left eye

shamanic visioning, drumming, ancient sensings, intuitive connections.

earliest mornings birds singing around the house. crow caws for corn.

fog over ocean holding the smell of fish. expectancy. purpose. bright

yellow gold finch brings good luck.

Riding the circle of the island. Sun has risen into a hazy sky. Heatwave. Goldfinch, my mother's good luck bird, flies next to me, to my right. The ocean has a smell of fish. Seagulls dot the low tide seaweed. Some kind of fish is around, reminding me of years back when I was lobstering and pogies were chased by bluefish and came up onto the shore by the hundreds. Free bait. Today, I do not need to haul a lobster trap. I can simply enjoy the sense of smell of fish as I bike along. Pushing the bike up the last hill, I stop to smell a rose, wet with last night's rain and this morning's dew, I rub my forehead against the pink wetness, a blessing.

If I can see everything as a blessing, I'm okay. Yesterday going into the grocery store, I see something dark and enormous on my shirt, then under my hair and crawling. I startle and start to brush it off, ask for assistance, but what I learn is a giant bumble bee crawls up my face somehow and stings me at the corner of my left eye. I get an ice cube from a kid who works there. Ride with my groceries to the dump with my friend. I have had a dream where tiny white wiggly worms are in a cup of tea she gives me and she is then going into a bedroom and yelling at her son, somehow he is connected. After she dumps her trash, she is standing by the trunk, making loud brushing noises for a long time. She gets back in the car and says maggots have gotten into her trunk from the trash bag. Everything so connected. As to the bee, I mix a paste of baking soda and water, use ice, take benadryl and zone out, but the pain remains. An achy sort of feeling this morning. When I come back from the store, I go to the bathroom mirror to look at my eye, and a different stinging insect is on the other side of my hair. I simply shake it off and it flies away, but the bee. Sacred bee. I've just watched a video about women who take care of bees, their bee hives. The synchronicity of ancient practice of bee keeping and women's frame drumming. I touch the drum stored in the open space at my feet, and give it a quick tap, light a candle, and set it in the middle of the room. Burn a tiny piece of sage. 

I got burned by the sun a few days ago.. Staying out longer than usual, I did not notice it happening. I sat alone on some distant ledges, put my feet in a tide pool,

scraped a toe on a barnacle. Unfamiliar territory and tide so low there was no hope of submerging. I leave that area after a time and go back to the sandy beach, which was so full, I could not find a space to park my bike earlier. This time there is space and I go to the sand, submerge, sit, paint. A young woman opens up to my friend and me. Her mother had died when she was very young. Overdose. She opens her little wine coolers in their plastic tubs with rip off covers. One after another. I tell her I am in 'recovery' and she accidentally spills wine on my shirt. When I leave, I have her promise she will not continue swimming when nobody is there. I watch her from the top of the stairway while I'm leaving, swimming fluidly in the water, slightly drunk. It is like looking through a glass darkly, except I would never be content swimming when under the influence. I would have to find trouble. 

The big AA roundup this weekend on the mountain. I want to go and yet I don't want to go. First the oppressive heat and then the bee sting. I'll have to experience the feeling of loss. The separation from my tribe. I'm invited. A friend will even go to the lengths of driving over an hour to pick me up, but in the end I have declined. I'll have to lean into my feelings, as they say now, and trust that all is truly well. My mother's mantra. Yesterday, I've painted my lawn sale donkey head mask white with pink inner ears and I have decided I'll have to paint a sacred bee on its forehead, a reflection of where I am in the moment. The left side of my  head aches. I remember a few years back when a bee actually flew into my ear. My ear ached and eventually I had it checked out. I'd pulled/pushed the bee out of my ear with my little finger. Perhaps there was something I did not want to hear. Perhaps now, something I do not want to see from my intuitive knowing. I'll keep it as simple as possible this weekend and no matter what I do try and be present and not hurry or worry.

 A wonderful scent comes from seemingly nowhere.Almost like a cedar chest. The candle is burning.