I never considered Germany to be home in any way, shape or form. Ever. Unless you count the time before I knew we would move to the US for the first time. We’d gone before, but it always seemed like a vacation. Just another destination among the countless other destination we had been to. In…
Category: Personal Anecdotes
It is my firm belief that in order to get a proper picture, we have to seek out as many opposing views as possible, and contrast the personal with the official information being put out. Anecdotal evidence is just that, personal and not substantiated by scientific research, but it helps us connect with something we might otherwise miss. Which is also a huge reason behind my preference of asking people instead of just googling. Things come up in those conversations that would otherwise be missed.So read, enjoy and take what works from the pieces featured here.
Home Is Where The Swearword(s) Live(s)
Except, how do you know which ones? They say that you revert to your native language when you count, which was a myth I believed in for a long time until I realized that – with my stronger languages at least – I’d just count in the language I was speaking in. And in a…
The Avon Lady Makes An Appearance, Albeit by Proxy
We’ve been back in the neighborhood for four days and so far we’ve been avoiding the Avon Lady just fine, though with the instinct of the truly calculating she must have sussed something out because she is sending her son over for Russian lessons from someone in the household who is truly qualified and should…
The People Watcher Revisits Some Principles on Mourning
It is that time leading up to All Saints and All Souls, which brings with it the customary cemetery visit to honor those passed before us. And like most people with enough freedom to do so (and with a desire to avoid crowds), we decide to go a few days in advance. Because while it…
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…
The Po’Boy Chef Attempts a Burger
Well, not entirely, but the branding – quite literally – is on point. I’m not even sure how to begin this. When I first moved to Helsinki there was a particular place I really liked and would go to a lot. I became a fixture there. It was a great place to hang out with…
The Author Contemplates a Childhood Friendship Lost
Meeting Ethnic Kin M. would kill me if she found out I was writing this. I can say this for sure because when I wrote a fun piece about our friendship and tracked her down to ok it, she took months to reply and then told me that the reason she did was she was…
Tales of the Polish Relatives: my grandfather (and a little bit of my mother’s mother too)
My grandfather was a deeply religious man, who had one final semester left at the seminary before he met my grandmother and decided that what God really wanted for him was to create a family and a life with the beautiful blonde peasant girl he saw. This is according to my mother and I will…
The Avon Lady is Not The Only One Who Hates Me – a treatise on my relationship with conservative societies
We ran into the Avon Lady again the other day. As always in these cases, I was with her neighbor and – again as always in these cases – we saw her son first. He greeted his neighbor, looked a question at me as though he wasn’t quite sure whether to talk to me or…
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