Back to School – what’s in a name (especially when it’s yours)

… my mother’s boss decided to address me as Adelheid. It threw me off for a minute because my middle name was nowhere close to what she was calling me, phonetically or through any stretch of the imagination when it came to meaning. As it soon transpired there was a more sinister element to her bestowing such a Germanic name on my poor teenage self.

Ode to a Lost Friendship Polish Style II

Click here for Part I The thing with broken kids and kids from broken homes, we always recognize each other. What we do with that information is one thing. But there really is an invisible bond, accessible via the subtlest of signals that brings us kids together. Perhaps Babette was broken, too, but that didn’t…

Ode to a Lost Friendship Polish Style I

He came to me fully grown as a seven-year-old boy about to turn eight, so that’s how I always saw him, as the boy who lived below us in my building and was a year and a month younger than me. There were three of us on our side of the building, so that there…