Once, when I was about 11 or 12, I came home from mass one summer morning to find a hobo sitting on our back steps having a sandwich and a cup of coffee. I was so surprised I stopped a few feet in front of him, not knowing what to do or say.  This was in the 60's, long after the depression was over, but my neighborhood was riddled with train tracks heading east and west and with spurs leading to the locomotive, radiator,  lingerie and canning factories that gave jobs to the men and women in the entire town.  But in spite of the changed economy there were those who still rode the rails, homeless and jobless, and they became a real point of interest among us kids. We played at being hobo all the time: marching along the railroad tracks, a long stick with a knotted bundle at the end slung over our shoulders; making chalk marks on the sidewalk and on trees pointing to houses. We didn't know exactly what kind of marks to make to indicate that this house was friendly but someone told us this was what the hoboes did,  so that's what we did. We took cans of pork and beans from the cupboard and made "camp" by cooking them over an open fire in the woods and ate the beans sitting around the fire. Nobody told us that we couldn't do any of this stuff and truly, nobody seemed to care what we did during those long summer days as long as we came home for supper and before dark.

There were supposed to be certain locales along the tracks where the hoboes set up their camps.  My brothers, who got a lot more freedom than I did, say they saw them there all the time.  One of them even asked my brother for an aspirin because he had a toothache but the one time I saw a gang sitting under a tree along the tracks, I ran away in fright. And here was one sitting on our back steps - thick set, gray haired, unkempt,  wearing a baggy suit coat and pants.  He had on what I later came to know as a pork pie hat.  I stared, rooted to the sidewalk, but he was pretty much unflapped by my appearance and kept munching on what looked like a ham sandwich, a few crumbs caught up in his black and gray mustache.

I was so tongue-tied, to this day I don't know whether I even said hello to the man and walked past him up the steps that led into our kitchen. As I came in my mother was going out with the yellow enamel coffeepot in her hand to refill his cup. I watched from the safety of the kitchen window as she poured him another cup and he accepted. There was no dialogue between them. Only after he was gone, the empty cup left on the steps, did my mother tell me that he had knocked on the door.  She had understood the words "food" and "give."  She had pointed to the steps and he understood that he was to sit.

"Mama, weren't you afraid?" I asked, a result of all the ghoulish hobo stories we kids told each other. 
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"Nie (no),  I wasn't.  During the war, everybody was hungry, every day, all day," she tells me, "with people begging for food, doing what they had to do to stay alive, to live through the war."  I knew she was talking about herself and the years she spent in Germany as a forced laborer during World War II. 

That's the way it was at our house. A person, an incident, a word, sometimes even silence,  would ignite memories of growing up in Poland or her memories of the war.  It's how I learned history. It's how I learned of what happened to my mother before she was my mother and that she understood people who traveled in cattle cars and had nothing to eat. At one time, she had been one of them.

When we broke up my mother's home, I took that yellow enamel coffee pot. I kept it because at one time she had her hand on that handle and I can put my hand where hers had once been, to connect, to remember that lesson, on that summer day.  
 

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I love the month of May for so many reasons not the least of which is that it brings my name day, the Feast of St. Sofia  (Św. Zofia, in Polish), on May 15.

When I woke up on that day my mother would sing out to me " Bo to dzisiaj imieniny!" ( "It's your name day!")  In Poland,  the most important day of the year for an individual was not their birth day but their name day, their imieniny, the feast day of the saint whose name one received in baptism.  I was baptized Zofia.  When I started first grade in America,  the nuns,  perhaps  to ease me into peer group acceptance, Anglicized my name and called me Sophie.  Sophie it stayed. To my mother and father I was  always Zosia, Zosiu or Zośka, the diminutive, affectionate forms of Zofia.

Chances are you may never have heard much of St. Sofia, a martyr of Rome, whose daughters were Faith, Hope and Charity.  It's a hugely popular name in Poland but not so much here in the United States. The only Zosia I knew when I was growing up were middle-aged and/or grandmothers. they were Polish women who had immigrated to America at the turn of the century or were daughters of the earlier wave of Polish immigrants.   I didn't know a single Sophie who was roughly my age. I felt a bit of an oddball but what can you do.

In Poland it was, and still is, customary to offer the celebrant on their name day a bouquet of flowers, or a bottle of wine or a food gift, but I didn't get any presents.  My mother sang me the little ditty, and quoted me a Polish proverb:  "Św. Zofia, kłosy rozwija." ("On St. Sophie, the ears of grain open.") At this time of year in Poland, the fields of wheat or oats or rye were unfurling, ripening and in Poland they had a proverb and weather prognostication for everything.

 And then she'd announce it was now safe to plant the vegetable garden. Year after year, this was her rule. She would wait until after my name day to begin burying the cucumber and beet seeds in the newly tilled ground.  How did she know this?  Because she was still planting on the old Polish beliefs associated with  another proverb: "Pankracy, Serwacy, Bonifacy to grożni  na ogrody chłopacy." ("Pancras,  Servatius and Boniface, are dangerous for the peasant's garden.")  The saints that are celebrated just before mine were Pancras(May 12), Servatius(May 13) and Boniface(May 14). They were known as the winter saints or ice saints who could still send a blast of cold wintery air at a time when everything was blossoming and was still tender growth.

I think of this because today is my name day but also because on the way home from church yesterday, what had started as a cool but sunny morning turned for the worse with torrential rain and chunks of hail.  I guess Bonifacy had to have his say.

Looking back, I realize I did receive gifts from my mother on my Name Day. (1) I hear her voice still, singing to me each name day (2) I have a proverb I can call my very own and (3) I'm in possession of a great gardening tip, a yardstick I use to measure when it's safe to plant my own garden.
 

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Photo: My swięconka basket. It's the same basket I took to church to bless food and water all the years of my growing up.

Holy Saturday was always a quiet day at our house. Early in the morning my mother was back at the stove only this time making red barszcz (red beet soup) and boiling eggs. Sometimes she cooked  the eggs in onion skins to give them a beautiful brown color but mostly I remember simple white eggs boiling away while she grates a raw beet to immerse in the broth to give the barszcz it's deep red color.  Everything else is done. Fresh curtains hang in the windows: white lace for the living room and cafe curtains with yellow tulips marching across the bottom for the kitchen.  Every knickknack has been washed. Every corner dusted. The house is in readiness.

The kitchen smells of sausage every time my mother opens the refrigerator door. There are coils and coils of it, made fresh yesterday, then boiled and baked. The smell of it immediately makes me hungry but no one would dare to take so much as a pinch. We do not eat meat on Holy Saturday. We have to wait.

The living room is filled with the heady scent of a purple hyacinth,  a smell that will always, always take me back to the Easters of my childhood. There is a vase of pussy willows on the desk. Sometimes there are daffodils from the garden there, too.  There are chocolate bunnies in their cellophane wrappers lined up around the flowers as well as some of those yellow marshmallow chicks. Here and there my mother has propped up the Easter postcards sent by her family from Poland.
My brothers are off somewhere doing whatever it is they do and my Tata is slowly pacing through the house. Not a man who has hobbies, he doesn't know what to do with himself when he's not at work.  It is my job to take our basket of food , the święconka basket, to church to be blessed today. My mother still has shoes to shine and church envelopes to fill and just a myriad of small, last minute chores to complete.

A trip to the attic retrieves the basket. It is oval shaped so at the bottom of the basket my mother places an oval platter, one that fits snugly to the bottom. Next comes a coil of both fresh and smoked sausage each; a half loaf of rye bread; the boiled eggs, at least six, one for each member of the family; a stick of butter; salt; a jar of horseradish and a jar filled with water. The water jar is nothing fancy- an old mustard jar, carefully washed and aired out. Tucking in a sprig of pussy willow, my mother covers the basket with the prettiest doily or scarf she has and reminds me to make sure to unscrew the jar with the water when the priest comes by to bless the baskets. When I come home and assure my mother that I had opened the jar, that the water was blessed, she opens the jar and begins going through the house, flinging the blessed water with her fingertips on the walls of each room.  I don't remember the words exactly but I do know that it was very short, that she used the words "diabeł" (devil)and "ucziekaj," (be gone); that the devil was to leave, that this was a blessed house.  I walk with her from room to room as she sprinkles the holy water on the walls. She always keeps holy water in the house throughout the year, replacing the old bottle with the new one every Holy Saturday.

 To this day I'm sorry that I never thought to write the prayer down. The closest equivalent I've been able to find is considered one of the earliest  Christian  prayers. ( Euchologium Sinaiticum:  https://www.christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/prayers-of-earliest-christians/
Be off, Satan, from this door and from these four walls. This is no place for you here; there is nothing for you to do here. This is the place for Peter and Paul and the holy Gospel; and this is where I mean to sleep, now that my worship is done, in the name of the Father and of the Holy Spirit.

In Polish customs and traditions, a new house or home is blessed by a priest before the occupants take up permanent residence but it was also customary to keep holy water on hand to keep the devil and evil forces away from a home. Any individual could take holy water and sprinkle it on the home, barns, and outbuildings if they felt the need.  

This Polish house blessing can be said in its entirety as a litany or shortened by choosing various parts.


Niech nas błogosławi i strzeże wszechmogący i miłosierny + Bóg Ojciec, Syn Boży i Duch Święty.
May the all powerful and merciful Lord God, His Son and the Holy Spirit bless us and protect us.
 
Panie Jezu Chryste, wszechmogący Królu nieba i ziemi, Synu Dawida, Jezu Nazareński dla nas ukrzyżowany, Synu Boga żywego, zmiłuj się nad tym domem, strzeż jego mieszkańców. Niech twoje Boskie błogosławieństwo towarzyszy im wszędzie, niech Duch Święty oświeca ich myśli i serca i niech moc Jego działa przez nich na każdym miejscu. Wszystko co się w tym domu znajduje, tych którzy do niego wchodzą i z niego wychodzą niech błogosławi i od złego osłania błogosławieństwo Trójcy Przenajświętszej, aby do niego żadne nieszczęście się nie zbliżyło.
Lord Jesus Christ, all powerful King of heaven and earth, Son of David,  Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified for us, son of the living God, have mercy of this house, protect its inhabitants. May your divine blessings accompany them everywhere, may the Holy Spirit enlighten their thoughts and hearts, and may His power work through them everywhere. All that is in this house, those who come in and out of it, be blessed and protected  by the blessings of the Blessed Trinity, so that no misfortune comes  to them.
 
Niech święte imię Jezusa z dziewięcioma chórami Aniołów będzie obecne w tym domu, darząc go swoim pokojem.
May the holy name of Jesus and nine choirs of angels reside in this home, granting it their peace.
 
Niech go okrywa swoim macierzyńskim płaszczem Najświętsza Maryja Panna.
May it be protected by the maternal coat of the most Blessed Virgin Mary.
 
Niech go strzegą święci Archaniołowie.
May it be protected by the blessed archangels.
 
Niech święci Apostołowie będą szafarzami jego dostatków.
May the holy Apostles be stewards of its abundance.
 
Niech utwierdzają i umacniają go święci Ewangeliści.
May it be strengthened and fortified by the saintly Evangelists.
 
Niech Krzyż Chrystusa będzie dachem tego domu.
May the cross of Jesus Christ be the roof of this house.
 
Niech trzy gwoździe Chrystusa będą jego zaporą.
May the three nails of Jesus Christ be its firewall
 
Niech korona Chrystusa będzie jego tarczą.
May the crown of Christ be its shield.
 
Niech Najświętsza Rana Jego Boskiego Serca będzie schronieniem dla wszystkich jego mieszkańców.
May the wounds of the Sacred Heart be shelter for all of its inhabitants.
 
Jezu, Maryjo, Józefie święty i wszyscy nasi Patronowie, święci Aniołowie Stróżowie, wybłagajcie u Boga w Trójcy Świętej Jedynego, aby raczył zachować ten dom od piorunów, ognia, gradu, głodu, powodzi, napadów złych ludzi, zgorszenia, niedowiarstwa, herezji, długów i wszelakiego nieszczęścia, grożącego duszy lub ciału jego mieszkańców.
Jesus, Mary and St. Joseph and all our patron saints, the holy guardian angels, pray to God in the One and only Trinity to protect this home from lightening, hail, hunger, floods, attacks by bad people, scandal, atheism, heresy, debt and all misfortune that threaten the soul or bodies of its inhabitants.
 
Niech nam w tym dopomoże Trójca Przenajświętsza: Bóg Ojciec, Bóg Syn i Bóg Duch Święty. Amen.
May we be helped in this through the Most Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
Wishing everyone Wesołego Alleluja!  A Joyous Easter!

The DP's in the neighborhood call the radiator factory where my father works the "czerwona" (red) for the rust color of the buildings and the fine coppery dust particles that float unrestrained throughout its cavernous interior.  When the men gather round the table drinking whiskey and beers, they affectionately refer to her womanly qualities. "After a week off I start to miss her," they complain, or "She can kill you if you're not careful." All conversation centers around the shop, the union, grievances and seniority.  They talk about her night and day and go to her even when sick and hung over.  Some, like my Tata, can't even stay away from her while on paid vacation.

               I wake early sometimes and listen to the normal, reassuring sounds of my father going off to work.  Mama moves around the kitchen, stoking up the Kalamazoo, heating thick vegetable soup and slicing bread and sausage for his lunch pail while Tata has his smoke and warms his heavy boots.  They say little to each other.  They sit together in silence at the oilcloth covered kitchen table, teaspoons tinkling against their morning coffees.  Both are lost in their own morning reveries.

               I lie in bed and picture my Tata in the layers of beige-turned brown thermal underwear and his murky black work clothes which have been mended and re-mended.  I contrast this tattered image of him with the younger man I've seen in the photo's that are kept in the Schrafft's  Luxuro chocolate box. Sporting baggy pants and suit jacket, he smiles into a camera while casually strolling down a French street, an arm around the petite, dark haired woman that is my mother.  Another snapshot reveals him astride a motorcycle in high black leather boots, goggles resting on his forehead, obviously cursing the machine.

               As he walks through snowdrifts without benefit of morning light, a respectable person on his way to a respectable job, he doesn't resemble the man who sold his wedding ring on the black market for a pound of butter. As he spades the garden in a baseball cap, he doesn't resemble the man who defied German gendarmes by making moonshine out of apple mash. When he looks at the beets in the garden is he reminded how, wrapping two in a cloth, he threw them over the barbed wire fence in Germany  to feed his wife and child?

               I wonder what he thinks about, my Tata, as he lifts and carries, lifts and carries hundred pound weights of iron against his wiry hundred twenty pound frame?  I wonder whether he hears the noise of the factory or feels the fine steel chips settling quietly, irrevocably on his lungs?  Does he give himself up to the very real moment or does he retreat to thoughts of himself as a young man in Poland atop a horse drawn wagon decorated with white carnations and colorful ribbons as the best man in his friend's wedding?  Is it iron he feels in his hands or is  it the harness that he flicks over the backs of a pair of horses?  In place of smoke and dust does he smell pine and resin while roaming an autumn forest in Poland looking for mushrooms?  Does doubling over in front of his grinding machine remind him of days gone by when a man bowed waist deep to a woman and kissed her hand?  Does he long for the feel and smell of newly tilled earth beneath his feet, the sight of ripening fields of wheat instead of concrete and I-beams? Or is the reality the preferred because in some strange magical combination, steel and sweat makes bread to eat.  The scorching heat,  salt from his pores, dust as fine as flour and muscle fibers continually expanding and contracting blend together to make costly loaves of Polish American bread.

When it comes time for Tata to come home from the woman who teaches him how to make bread, mama sends me down the block to meet him saying that he's tired and needs someone to help him carry his lunch pail home.  I run down the street, crossing railroad tracks and passing men on their way to second shift, keeping my eye on that distant point where he always first appears. And we meet at the corner, my hand reaching out to grab the lunch pail.

"Zoska," he'll always say, "you'll get your hands dirty."

It's a small game we play together. I know he's saved me a piece of chocolate as a reward for coming to meet him.  I laugh and, tired as he is, he'll smile too, the corners of his eyes creasing up with dirt. And after holding the lunch pail behind his back to tease me, he relents and hands it to me.  I take his hand then, not caring about the dirt at all, and we walk home together, hand in hand, the lunch pail swinging.


I wrote this many years ago but I stlll think of and cherish how hard my Tata worked to give us a decent life in America. January 10th marks his birthday. 

Since both my parents were born and raised in Poland, our family always celebrated Christmas Eve with Wigilia, the Vigil Supper. After sharing the wafer (opłatek) we'd sit down to eat a meal of mushroom soup, fish and pierogi.  When the supper dishes were cleared away, everybody gathered around the Christmas tree and led by my mother, we sang Dzisiaj w Bethlejem (In David's City) Lulaj Się Jezuniu (Slumber on Jesus))and other Polish Christmas carols.
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What I remember best about this special night is not the dolls or candy or games that were under the tree. What I remember best is our evening visitor who came with regularity every year until time and circumstances intruded.

When we finished singing the carols, my mother would always turn to my oldest brother and say, "Michael, call Johnny. Ask him if he'll come over."  Johnny was my brother's friend, someone he went to school with and played with during summer vacation.  He was over to the house frequently and was a nice Polish American boy whose grandmother had crossed the ocean as a young girl to take up life in America.

Obedient to her request, my brother would make the phone call and, like clockwork, year after year, Johnny would leave the circle of his own family to walk along the railroad tracks, trudging through snow drifts, to be our Christmas Eve guest.  My mother, always so pleased to see him, would invite him in and give him a jigger of desert wine.  Every year it was the same.  Every year she would tell us and Johnny, that his visit was special - a male visitor on the night of Christmas Eve brought health and happiness to those who lived within. She believed it, and after a while, so did we, and we looked forward to Johnny's Christmas Eve visit as much as my mother.

The year Johnny was serving in Vietnam, we had no one to call and our yearly tradition was broken.  Up until then I hadn't realized how much his visit meant to me.  That Christmas Eve, I realized that the material gifts we receive on this night are quickly forgotten, long gone from memory before the next year rolls around. What's cherished and remembered is what people did and said on this special night. That's what stays in your mind and heart forever.

Merry Christmas. Wesołych Świąt Bożego Narodzenia.

**The photo is a postcard sent to my mother from her brother in Poland in 1957. 

​ By all standards, our home was small. We had what was called in those days a "front parlor" that faced the street. It was reserved for guests who came to the front door, had better furniture and where we put up the Christmas tree every year. Then there was the room  with a couch, a stuffed chairs and space heater  where we gathered in the evenings to watch Ed Sullivan and The Beverly Hillbillies.  We didn't have a dining room.  What we had was a big kitchen with a white Kalamazoo stove that was part wood burning and part gas.  There was room for the coal scuttle and the wood that fed the stove, the barrel of sauerkraut that fermented in the corner each November and  a table and chairs for the six of us.  There wasn't a lot of counter space so all the chopping, kneading, and pierogi making for Wigilia, the Christmas Eve meal, took place on the table.  
One of the early preparations for Wigilia was making square noodles, in Polish called łazanki, for the  mushroom soup that we ate only once a year on this night. The broth for the soup was made with mushrooms sent from Poland by my mother's family. In spite of Communist rules that forbade sending or taking mushrooms out of the country, a friend of a friend makes a visit to Poland, smuggles it out in their suitcase and then, once in the U.S., sends it to our address. Sometimes it was  the other way around. Someone from Poland received a Visa and came to America with a hidden kilo of dried mushrooms and our address. It was the same when my mother sent packages to Poland.  The packages were opened, inspected, and sometimes the better things were  stolen so what could you do if you wanted to bypass the controllers?  You sewed money into the hem of some not so great dress or the cuff of pair of pants and you ask in your letter (also censored) "Were the pants for Peter the right size?" As always, through 120 years of domination by Russia, Prussia and Austria or through the decades of  Communist rule, you just had to find ways to circumvent the oppressor.
The mushrooms we have so now to make the noodles. They are square and homemade. My mother pulls out her stolnica,  her battered and scarred wooden dough board,  reserved strictly for anything having to do with dough, on the table. A chustka, a scarf, covers her hair and is tied back at the nape of her neck. As always, there's an apron over her house dress. Using a cup with a broken handle as a measure, she scoops out a couple of cups of flour onto the center of the board. Making a  well in the middle, she breaks in two eggs,  sprinkles everything with a little salt and begins working the mixture together with her hands.  It's my job to dribble small amounts of water on the mixture while she keeps squeezing and incorporating the ingredients together. Her hands are here in America but as she kneads the dough, her thoughts are back in Poland. She tells me how, armed with baskets and pails, she and her siblings searched for mushrooms on the forest floor, the air filled with pine and resin from the trees; how the mushrooms were threaded on a string and strung across the enormous stove to dry completely and then stored in cloth bags in a cool, dry place.
 Adding flour under and over the dough to keep it from sticking, she rolls it out paper thin across the entire board.  With a sharp knife she cuts the dough vertically into thin strips and then horizontally across the strips until she has nice small squares of egg dough. She transfers the little squares to a clean dish towel sprinkled with flour and lets them dry over the next few days, tossing and turning them periodically so that they dry thoroughly on both sides. She stores them in a paper bag.
On Christmas Eve our first dish after sharing the opłatek is the mushroom soup made from mushrooms that sprung from Polish soil and the little square noodles. A little bit of Poland in America.
 
Łazanki (Square Noodles)
2 cups all purpose flour
2 eggs
½ teaspoon salt
2-4 tablespoons water
 
 
In a medium sized bowl or on a pastry board,  combine flour and salt. Make a well in the flour, add the eggs (they can be slightly beaten if desired), and mix. If needed, stir in 1 tablespoons water at a time until a nice pliable dough is formed.
 
On a lightly floured surface, knead dough for about 3 to 4 minutes. Adding more flour to bottom surface as needed to keep from sticking, roll dough out until thin.
 
Use knife to cut into ¼ or ½ inch vertical strips along entire dough. Then cut the strips vertically also ¼ or ½ inch wide.
 
Transfer the noodles flat  on floured  surface to dry for a few days. Avoid excessive overlapping  as the noodles may stick together until properly dried. Store in covered container or paper bag. Cook and cool noodles ahead of time and pour  mushroom broth over the noodles or cook right in the mushroom  broth.  If latter approach is used the broth will thicken.
 
**Łazanki can also be used to make noodle/ cabbage/sauerkraut dishes for Christmas Eve.
 

So it's Thanksgiving time and I'm thinking of the time my mother got it in her head to have goose to celebrate the American holiday instead of the traditional turkey. Turkey was not foreign to her but growing up in rural Poland where everyone grew most of what they ate, the barnyard was more likely to see smaller poultry like chickens, ducks, and geese.  It was the work of children to tend to the fowl, take them to open pastures to feed and fatten them up. She had been one of those "goose girls" as well. In those days a roasted goose, stuffed with bread and sour apples or bread with the goose liver was the ultimate, quintessential dish for very special occasions like christenings or weddings. But for my mother meat was a "raritas," something rare, something eaten only "when the big bells rang at church" on the high holy days.  Her family grew the geese to sell or barter for something else. The down from the geese was used to make pillows and pierzyna's(comforters) and there was a Jewish woman who would come around buying up the down if anyone had some for sale.

Where she got the geese is lost to me but I do remember two white geese with their orange beaks and feet. My father pens off a corner of the backyard. We live in the city, not the country and rearing poultry in the backyard is against city ordinances but my mother didn't seem to take it too seriously.  Various neighbors had pigeon coops so how was this different? Maybe when you manage to survive a war these issues become small potatoes. Maybe you just want to raise a goose and fulfill a childhood longing. What I did know was that she wanted the down from the geese to make pillows and pierzyna's so for three weeks before Thanksgiving we water and feed the geese, bringing them additional clover and grass from a field beyond the railroad tracks.
 
What was I? Twelve? Thirteen? Old enough by my mother's reckoning. A few days  before Thanksgiving she hands me a wooden spoon and a white enamel bowl that has some vinegar in it and tells me to go out to the barn where my father is waiting.  It's not a barn but really more like a big shed housing the coal and wood to feed the stove along with various gardening items. My father is sitting on a small stool with one of the geese held between his knees. The goose is fussing a little, probably just as clueless as I was, but my father tells me to put the bowl down at his feet and to be ready to mix.  Mix what?

He takes the long lovely white neck of the goose( who is by now very unhappy), bends it into a loop and holds it tightly with his left hand.  In his right hand a knife materializes like out of nowhere and with one sure movement makes a cut into its neck. The blood flows in a steady stream to the bowl. My father hollers,  "Mix!" but I'm rooted to the cement floor. Again he hollers "Mix!" and so, with a shaking hand, I mix. There's chaos in my head.  Slowly the goose stops struggling. "There's really nothing to cry about," my father says, "it's for us to eat." 

 I learned that the vinegar prevented the blood from clotting and the mixture was used to make "czarnina" (duck blood soup), a dish my father really liked. The dead goose was plucked for its  feathers, disemboweled and then there was my mother cranking its liver through the meat grinder to make the stuffing.  I learned that nothing got wasted, everything got used up. It was one of those life lessons, Polish style. 

So it's Thanksgiving time and I'm thinking of the time my mother got it in her head to have goose to celebrate the American holiday instead of the traditional turkey. Turkey was not foreign to her but growing up in rural Poland where everyone grew most of what they ate, the barnyard was more likely to see smaller poultry like chickens, ducks, and geese.  It was the work of children to tend to the fowl, take them to open pastures to feed and fatten them up. She had been one of those "goose girls" as well. In those days a roasted goose, stuffed with bread and sour apples or bread with the goose liver was the ultimate, quintessential dish for very special occasions like christenings or weddings. But for my mother meat was a "raritas," something rare, something eaten only "when the big bells rang at church" on the high holy days.  Her family grew the geese to sell or barter for something else. The down from the geese was used to make pillows and pierzyna's(comforters) and there was a Jewish woman who would come around buying up the down if anyone had some for sale.

Where she got the geese is lost to me but I do remember two white geese with their orange beaks and feet. My father pens off a corner of the backyard. We live in the city, not the country and rearing poultry in the backyard is against city ordinances but my mother didn't seem to take it too seriously.  Various neighbors had pigeon coops so how was this different? Maybe when you manage to survive a war these issues become small potatoes. Maybe you just want to raise a goose and fulfill a childhood longing. What I did know was that she wanted the down from the geese to make pillows and pierzyna's so for three weeks before Thanksgiving we water and feed the geese, bringing them additional clover and grass from a field beyond the railroad tracks.
 
What was I? Twelve? Thirteen? Old enough by my mother's reckoning. A few days  before Thanksgiving she hands me a wooden spoon and a white enamel bowl that has some vinegar in it and tells me to go out to the barn where my father is waiting.  It's not a barn but really more like a big shed housing the coal and wood to feed the stove along with various gardening items. My father is sitting on a small stool with one of the geese held between his knees. The goose is fussing a little, probably just as clueless as I was, but my father tells me to put the bowl down at his feet and to be ready to mix.  Mix what?

He takes the long lovely white neck of the goose( who is by now very unhappy), bends it into a loop and holds it tightly with his left hand.  In his right hand a knife materializes like out of nowhere and with one sure movement makes a cut into its neck. The blood flows in a steady stream to the bowl. My father hollers,  "Mix!" but I'm rooted to the cement floor. Again he hollers "Mix!" and so, with a shaking hand, I mix. There's chaos in my head.  Slowly the goose stops struggling. "There's really nothing to cry about," my father says, "it's for us to eat." 

 I learned that the vinegar prevented the blood from clotting and the mixture was used to make "czarnina" (duck blood soup), a dish my father really liked. The dead goose was plucked for its  feathers, disemboweled and then there was my mother cranking its liver through the meat grinder to make the stuffing.  I learned that nothing got wasted, everything got used up. It was one of those life lessons, Polish style. 

​There are some books that always stay with you; books that you never forget and revisit over and over again during different periods of your life.  That's the way it is with me and The Good Bad Boy by Gerald Brennan. I was in 5th grade when I was introduced to Pompey(what a name!) Briggs who was entering eighth grade and decided to keep a diary because "all great men keep diaries."  It wasn't a book I owned or had taken out of the library.  At the end of the school day, if we had been good and Sister Audrey hadn't handed out too many demerits, we put away our books, placed our hands on our desks as required and Sister read the story to us in installments.

This boy, Pompey Briggs,  pretty much had a Leave it to Beaver kind of life. That is to say, so different from my own. His father had a white collar job and drove a car; mine came home filthy dirty from the radiator factory and walked to and from work. Pompey loved the smell of his mother making ketchup in the kitchen. I watched mine disembowel chickens and, believe me, it didn't smell too good. When Pompey got punished he was sent to his room and was denied TV. Our punishment was a good strapping with the belt. What Pompey and I did have in common, however, was that we both attended a Catholic parochial school, went to church on Sundays and got underwear for Christmas. That I could relate to.

I can see myself, second row from the windows, looking out at the blue sky with the wind tossing the branches of the chestnut trees as Pompey fixed the flats on his bike and met with the members of his secret club, the Beaver Chiefs. His story never left me. To this day I love books in diary form whether it be an adult fictional diary like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows or better yet, any children's fictional diary like Catherine: Called Birdie by Karen Cushman. I've read Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle too many times to count and still enjoy reading it. And from Pompey Briggs came, I'm sure, my own adolescent attempt at keeping a diary and my adult preoccupation with collecting blank books and empty journals in all different shapes and sizes.
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There was another realization about the book  that didn't come to me until much later: that listening to Sister was the first time I can remember someone reading me a story.  We were immigrants to this country and while we kids were reading and writing English by this time, my parents weren't. They had, as the saying goes, "other fish to fry", like taking any overtime that was offered, darning socks, altering clothes to fit us and canning everything in sight. There just wasn't time for English language classes and there just weren't any children's books in Polish to be had and even if there had been, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have read to us anyway.  They came from a different school altogether where kids were kids and it was their job to entertain themselves. The stories we did hear were oral ones, without books, about what life was like in Poland and about the hardships and hunger of war.  Those stayed with me too.

There is one last, lingering effect from Sister reading to us from The Good Bad Boy at the end of the day.  It's only when the day's chores are done and the dishes put away that I put my feet up and read strictly for pleasure.