Fair play
This. This is my life now…
Tomatoes, preferably the ones more oblong than round, because they’re the ones easier to cut into slices. Bread — chleb razowy and chleb alpejski — always these two, and always on Tuesdays. Lemons, but you know — the ones that come together as a set in the mesh bag, not the loose kind, no no.
Cottage cheese and yogurt. Lipton tea, Lipa tea, and let us not forget Melisa.
Pan Andrzej’s little shop on Tuesdays, and the bigger market on Wednesdays but usually also Thursdays, because that’s when the salad is most fresh. And of course the newspaper with its crossword on Fridays — this, this the most important.
Refills at the pharmacy, and the new issue of TeleSwiat every other Tuesday, and just maybe, if she’s feeling up to it, a little walk together out in between the errands, arm in arm, just the two of us heading up and down the street or maybe all the way to the park.
Soup. Today she will ask for jarzynowa (vegetable), and tomorrow it will be ogórkowa (cucumber). If she’s feeling saucy? Pumpkin.
Three Coca-Colas, but only in the glass bottles. Six eggs.
Yes, this is my life now. Buying the same prune cake from the same little bakery, where they always smile and almost always ask, “So how is she now? Any better?” Or: “Does she really not want to try something else, besides the prune?” (And No, no she doesn’t.)
Just down from the bakery are the two girls in the deli, and their little smile to each other always when I come in and try to say połowe pasztet z indyka, which means half a loaf of turkey paté, and then pierogi z jagodami, which means the pierogi with the blueberries.
Zakupy. It means shopping in Polish, and in Poland now I am a shopper. I do it daily for my grandmother, whose back problem this year has robbed her of her independence, her routine of going out and collecting these simple things herself. She loved it, actually. This routine. That simplicity. She used to do it just as all of the other Polish ladies seem to have done it through time — with little canvas pull carts, a metal handle and two wheels, trailing behind them — but now it’s me waking up and having my coffee and then heading on over to her place, where she’ll have the day’s list waiting always, together with her little wallet for bills and her little change holder several decades old. When I return home later with the bagfulls, Babcia usually is just a little bit excited, and will meet me either in the hallway or at the refrigerator door — “so fast today”, she’s always saying, and asks if in fact I got it all.
We’ll then eat lunch together, and always between us find a few good laughs. She tells me also of the awful things she’s heard about on the news, and always then I tell her to stop watching so much of the news.
Those little to-do lists? They come in cursive, on little cut squares of old cardboard, because back in her workroom there is truly an endless supply of this cardboard. The items are written in a specific order (sometimes even after a rough draft or two) — the items written in the order I’ll come to pass them along my way. If she gets something wrong in the order — for example forgetting to write koperek (dill) until after she’s already written down ser królewski (Swiss cheese), which comes later in the store’s path — she then squeezes in the forgotten koperek and tells me to be careful about this.
Once or twice a week, I’ll bring her lunch from a local restaurant, something more exotic when possible, like Pad Thai. And once or twice a week — though this was more before the weather turned so grim, so cold of late — indeed I would convince her to go out for that little walk, to get at least some air, some exercise.
Three to four times a week we apply the electronic stem treatment to the spot on her lower back where it hurts most, and three or four times a week I‘ll head on home carrying some rubbish out with me on my way — the regular trash or the recycling, or the little cartons of molding bio-degradables, or the old papers. Each and every item has its day, its bin.
This is not heavy lifting, heavy work, this looking after this other person. After all she can still do most of that herself — the bathing, some cooking, the laundry. Those are the jobs she insists on still doing, to hang onto whatever strength or independence she still has. So no, this is not heavy lifting at all, what I do for her. But it can get just a little bit heavy in the mind once in awhile. Just the monotony of it all. The sameness, the system.
I am a person who does like a bit of change from time to time. Who likes to travel, likes to write, read. Likes to do my own thing on a daily basis rather than someone else’s — don’t we all? But this, this is the card I’ve drawn in the last year, the card of Caretaker and Card Taker, and that’s perfectly OK. I’m very happy I’m able to do it, that my grandmother doesn’t have to rely on a stranger.
And after all, it’s only fair: she’s my grandmother, my hero, in the first place. And in the second, it wasn’t so long ago it was me laid up in pain after a dislocated knee from playing tennis and then two knee surgeries after that. It was her bringing me some lemon, some tea, for months.
And so? So we keep on. Helping each other along. Trading the lemons. Sometimes she’ll forget the name of the simplest item she needs to put on one of her lists, will write only zielony — green — and together then we’ll play a game: is it broccoli you’re thinking of, Babcia? No? Maybe cucumber. Or zucchini. “Yes! Yes zucchini that’s it!” And she’ll update the card, and then whisper to herself in Polish, “How can I possibly forget cukinia?” We laugh about this kind of thing, because what else can we do. “You’ll see. You’ll see when you’re my age. The simplest words, they just… they go. … Cukinia…”
This life of looking after someone else, and these days of the most ordinary tasks, ordinary Tuesdays — all of this has made me appreciate even more the ordinary heroes of everyday. The tired faces we pass on by on the street, or exchange glances with. How many of these people are out there doing these same things for someone else, or will be soon? How many are just out on some same little errand, or going to check in on a loved one, or even doing this for their own living? Caretakers. Nurses. Maids. There is an army of these people, people who spend their every day looking also after others — other people, other homes. All those other people whom we never see, behind all of those other doors.
Life. It can be so extraordinary, yet also this mundane — no? The same places, same lists, the same plastic bottles into the same colored bins.
Maybe life is more about this. About the lemons.
And then it’s also about escape.
At the end of these ordinary days, these To Dos, this monotony, we all need to recede just a little into some escapes. We go to Netflix or YouTube, to some drama series or bad dating show which takes place on a beach. At the end of my ordinary days, well of course I should just be writing more. Researching more. Working more. But it’s hard sometimes, and in this last year especially I’ve noticed an old escape finding its way back in, or me back into it: tennis. This chasing of a fuzzy yellow ball around and making it go where I hope, with just the right spin, the right angle, the right pace. This game of tennis is my favorite release, my meditation, my going away into some other world. My going away from the tomatoes and trips to the pharmacy, to some other thinking, some other thing, into just a world of lines drawn in upon clay.
And Babcia, my grandmother, she knows this well. She used to come watch me train, back when she could. And she knows that here in Warsaw I’ve now become active in competitive tennis again, and if she knows I’ve had a match the night before, just as soon as I show up she’ll ask me “Plus czy minus?” Did I win or did I lose?
Frankly we’re both wowed I’m playing at all, after the extent of my knee reconstruction. And in my first season back to competition, a season that finished not so long ago, I fell seven points shy of making it into the last 16 out of more than a hundred players — my forehand failing me, in the very end.
But then later came the surprise: I was nominated and then voted by my league opponents as winner of the “Fair Play” award, given to that person considered to be a good sportsman, fair on the line calls, and generally affable to play with. This award even came with a little trophy and tiny bottle of champagne. And one day, one ordinary day when I went over for the usual zakupy, the shopping, I presented this trophy and champagne to my grandmother and, well she almost cried.
This means more, she said.
After the shopping was done and the dishes put away, we popped open that little bottle. We clinked glasses and sipped a little of the bubbly. That rare bubbly within the rest of it.
My grandmother now keeps the little trophy at her place. I told her it was hers, after all, a Thank You for everything, for taking care of me when I was unable to move after surgery, but also for introducing me to tennis in the first place: when I was just a chubby little lad and my baseball-crazed brother and I were here visiting from the States, my grandparents thought maybe tennis could give us something to do, some escape back then, and there was the club Solec just down the street. So we began to learn the sport from Pan Marek, Mr. Marek, and practicing against a wall, and both the wall as well as Marek are still there at Solec today, still helping along other forehands, and from time to time I’m still playing on that wall, and still playing still with the great Marek.
The trophy, it sits now on a coffee table, just near my grandmother’s television set where she watches the bad news. She shows it off to any visitor, and tells others about it still on the phone.
It’s as if we won Wimbledon.
But it’s true: it’s quite a nice thing to have been given, to be thought of in that way by everyday opponents and peers. All of us coming to our end-of-day hobby, our escape from our more ordinary days and tasks, our ordinary wins and losses.
So what if it’s not Wimbledon. Or if this last year has become less about me chasing some book deal or other such great triumph, and more about chasing that next good lemon.
Maybe one day I’ll miss the mundane just as much as anything or anyone. Just as my grandmother now misses being able to go out and get these items, do the simplest things, herself.
Maybe one day we’ll have only the memory of the mundane, and a feeling of how good we actually had it.
Maybe.
But for now I must get to wrapping up this little ramble. And brush my teeth, and shower, and head on over. After all it’s Friday. It’s the newspaper and the crossword. And the pierogi with the blueberries because they didn’t have them yesterday, so hopefully today.
And whatever else will be on the card.
Fair play. Maybe she’s right. Maybe this, just this, means more.
