As I Grow Old, I Remember
My very first memory – I was three or four.
My mother’s girandole earrings (I later learned it was pronounced “jeer-an-dou-lee”), with three green stones dangling at the bottom, the centerpiece slightly lower than the other two. Not Swarovski, but Jablonex, mass-produced behind the Iron Curtain in the neighboring Czech Republic. All year round, Mom kept them locked in a box wrapped in a handkerchief smelling of “Pani Walewska,” a fragrance sold in ultramarine bottles for 5 zloty (also the price of a Shane Nuss chocolate on the black market). She wore them only for New Year’s Eve parties. Dressed in a brocade gown trimmed with lace, with Mary Quant makeup applied to the eyelids but with her nails bitten to the quick, she let me hold them for a few moments before vanishing with a puff of an oh-so-delicate scent like a Communist-era Cinderella. No pumpkin carriage with horse-mice was waiting for her, but an Ikarus bus provided by the steelworks where she worked.
The second – the age of unreason. I was six.
My first dog (I’m on number ten now), a pinscher and terrier mix with crooked legs and a stumpy tail that I, eager to stand out, named Frog. I cried for an entire week when she died at fifteen.
Still figuring out the number, but definitely around the time I was ten—the age of defiance.
Winters with sledding, ice skating, frozen rivers, and my dad’s warnings.
“The ice will break; you’ll fall in and drown like poor Erika,” he roared.
Erika was a fifteen-year-old with special needs who lived in a tiny flat above the delicatessen, which sold Spanish oranges at Christmas, otherwise unavailable at any other time of the year.
Of course, I ignored his advice; the ice broke; I fell in but survived and never told Dad.
Through six to ten and even beyond.
Summers brought excursions to a town on the Warta River with its storks (monogamous creatures), the perfume of newly cut grass (no aroma can match! ), lime trees (casting shadows in the burning heat), and acacia honey on rye (caviar cannot compete).
For two weeks, we pitched a tent behind a vast manor house where Ludwik, my maternal great-great-grandfather, a passionate drinker and adventurer, had squandered away his money betting on slow horses and fast women. Mom whispered through clenched teeth that education was as good as wealth and that I either study or marry a rich man without a gambling problem.
We took a 12-hour train ride to the Hel Peninsula in August, lugging cardboard suitcases with no wheels. Despite its scary name, it was heaven on earth. I lay belly up like a beached whale, face to the sun, from morning to sunset, with no sunscreen save a thick layer of Nivea cream on my shoulders. I can still hear the echoes of a vendor selling freeeeeeshshshhhsh bluuuuueberryyyy piiiiiieeee and smooooked eeeeeeelllll!
But in particular, I recall the treasure hunt for tiny pieces of prehistoric resin immortalized by the cold waters of the Baltic in caramel-colored amber. I kept them in velvet sachets for the remainder of the year to bring back summer warmth on chilly winter mornings.
Next on the list, regardless of the number – early adolescence
The amusement park that visited our town twice a year. A tandem of tired ponies tugged along a kitsch carousel and a cotton candy cart. It was where my first boyfriend (an eighth grader with pimples and crooked teeth) shot a magenta flower with crepe petals and a wooden stem for me. At twelve, I valued it more than the most exquisite orchids I received later in life. Including the fake diamond ring, my first husband gave me instead of a real one. Cheap bastard!
And the one that tops them all—the queen, king, pharaoh, and emperor of all numbers.
Strangely, my children, because I never wanted to be a mother. I lacked the nurturing instinct that we’re meant to be born with. But here they are, at the very top of the list.
Each one is different, one-of-a-kind, and loved from the first heartbeat. I reveled in every millimeter of their growth and celebrated their achievements. But I also treasure the times when I was eager to swap them for a pet parrot. I honor the arduous but extraordinary path of single parenthood far from my homeland, in distant South America.
The memories flow fast now.
- Superb.
- Great.
- Memorable.
- Middling.
- Ordinary.
- Forgettable.
But where are the terrible ones? For some reason, they are gone. Perhaps because I believe life must be lived and commemorated as it comes, with subtle pleasures and intense pain.
And as Eladia Blasquez famously sang:
To deserve life is not
to be silent and to consent
to so many repeated injustices…
It is a virtue;
it is dignity!
It is the most defined
attitude of identity!
That the lasting
and the passing
do not give us
the right to boast
because it is not
the same to live
as to honor life.
Polish by birth, a citizen of the world by choice. First story short-listed for the Irish Independent/Hennessy Awards, Ireland, 1996. Her creative writing was interrupted as she moved to Latin America and started writing textbooks for Latin American Ministries of Education. Since she went back to writing fiction in 2020, 63 of her stories, flash fiction and non-fiction, have been accepted for publication. She has recently won 1st prize in the International Human Rights Arts Movement literary contest.
Aloka 