Lebanon, New Hampshire  

December 2007  

This year the same as last year I begin this letter choosing between first person singular (I, Andrew) or plural (we, Andrew and Magda and Zosia). Most of the incoming December mail has a we perspective to it, and Magda remarked (sadly?) that our outgoing greetings are still divided into hers and mine. Are we not yet enough united in marriage that we can write to folks about our year?

Most of Magda's mail is Europe-bound and is written in Polish. I think it's fairly obvious to her recipients that I don't have much of a part in the composition. If they've ever had a Polish conversation with me (about the weather, or how well I like cheese pierogi, or other such things as I can say), then it would be very obvious to them. Since there will be quite a stack of Polish greetings to send, and since Magda takes care of these single-handedly, I feel responsible myself for keeping up the English language half of things. She can write in English well enough, but its more about fair division of labor.

I could still easily enough write we this and we that to convey a familial esprit de corps. But even though we live in the same apartment on the same street, Magda's experience is different from mine. I can't purport to speak for her. She's still a foreigner on a green card, and she's raising a child in what's for her a foreign country. I often forget that, although she doesn't.

Perhaps one year we'll have the nerve to translate Magda's Polish letter into English for everyone, and to translate my English letter into Polish for her family and friends. This is not the year. Magda does read my English letter before it gets sent out. For the record, I don't read the Polish letter at all. It would take me a few hours with a very fat dictionary.

We traveled to Poland this year to visit Magda's family at Easter. We went especially so that Magda's dying grandmother could meet Zosia. It's hard to imagine now the kind of baby she was then: she could roll from her back to her side, for which everyone applauded. It was a big deal because it prevented us from setting her safely on the sofa. Zosia's Polish great-grandmother was deeply upset that we left Zosia on a blanket on the floor. She didn't think the floor was a proper place for a baby. We kept telling her that it was the only place from which Zosia couldn't fall.

Now we applaud if Zosia takes some small steps. People have made us feel that she's a late walker. We ourselves have seen lots of smaller, younger babies who walked earlier; and it is human nature that we compare people with one another. But the emphasis and the anxiety over walking made me scratch my head—we couldn't take Zosia places without someone consulting the developmental yardstick. We felt so happy and lucky to have a baby who crawled, or to have any baby at all. It had not occurred to me that walking might be so important.

This fall we took a family bicycle ride to Lake Mascoma, with Zosia in a big yellow seat attached to my bicycle. The seat was a gift from my brother, since his children now ride their own bicycles. On the way back from the lake we saw another European woman we know. She was sitting on the side of the trail watching the river. She looked really depressed. See, she has two children who are both autistic. She spends most of her time with the older one, who is severely autistic. And here we were, this happy family coming back from the lake, with our daughter who although not yet a walker appeared perfectly healthy. Sure we'd like to think that Zosia is a reflection of us or that she gives us some reason to be proud. When in fact she was just a winning lottery ticket. I know that the numbers on our ticket were not because of anything special that we did. It's a mystery to me how we got this ticket and not some other one.

I feel sheepish giving the whole Zosia report. Many things which appear noteworthy to me are probably prosaic. By writing about her, I may reveal more about my own general inexperience than I do about the child's particular character. Should I tell you, I wonder, that she sometimes cries for periods of time without my being able to discern what's wrong, beyond saying she's tired. I've learned that Zosia's tired is a convenient explanation whenever I don't know what's the matter. She may or may not be tired. If I put her in her crib, and she doesn't fall asleep, but wails harder and longer than before, what then? Then we say that she is over-tired. Certainly, the parents may be over-tired, but I am not so sure about Zosia. Recently, after a long episode of tears which we couldn't quell, Zosia's grandmother came in the door for a visit, and picked her up, and all was immediately well for the next two hours.

Zosia has both grandmothers on hand these days since Magda's mother is visiting us from Poland, for two months. We worried unnecessarily how our little girl would cope with sharing her small bedroom and having a new caretaker. She's a social girl with very few restraints. The only difficult thing about having Grandmother Urbanek in the house, from Zosia's point of view, would be the lack of physical space in her drawers for all the accompanying gifts. Of course Zosia herself is unaware that she has enough clothes and books to share with a twin, but her parents are keenly aware and it sometimes perturbs us. The children's apparel in the local secondhand shops is often in fact new clothing which nobody appears to have worn, of such high quality and low purchase price, it seems irresistible to certain grandmothers, both the one subsisting on a meager Polish pension and the one earning a modest teacher's wage. Scenes sometimes ensue in the house between Magda and her mother. Most recently in question was a little red vest—beautifully decorative though not at all warm—which cost one dollar and 75 cents. Both women were right: it was pretty and it was a bargain; and also, Zosia already had rather enough vests. Both women tried to enlist me on their side of the argument. I was unsuspecting. I had walked in the door. Grandmother immediately hit me with, Zobacz tatusiu, jaka piękna to which I answered Tak, ładna, and to which mother responded Już ma za dużo ubranek. Some more words were exchanged which you can imagine.

Life is so short! It goes by in this little brief flash. I suppose $1.75 may be spent not to clothe Zosia necessarily but to make an older woman happy. Women find a simple pleasure in buying apparel for a child or for themselves. Magda's happiest days are when someone in the family gets a new pair of shoes. She comes home beaming with joy.

Yet in our small apartment, its not so easy to go overboard in the usual American way. Acquiring something new often means finding something to discard in order to make space. We borrowed a bed for Magda's mother to sleep on, but had to get rid of a desk so that it would fit in the room. Forced economy of space is a nice arrangement which I would recommend to anyone. The desk was in poor condition and had been inherited from the previous tenant. We hadn't used it in the last six months. Now it is gone and not missed. I'm glad we don't have a more spacious apartment that would encourage its useless, cracked existence in a corner.

It's true that people say I am crazy. They wonder, what about his wife, perhaps she suffers in these cramped quarters? Wouldn't she prefer more pricey and spacious living? I'm fortunate that Magda and I have some degree of concordance on these issues. Well, for someone who grew up in a Communist country, Magda isn't always that easy to please, but we could be doing a lot worse for ourselves. It's true our apartment is rather shabby (compared to, say, my sister's and brother's houses) but given the quick rate with which Zosia peels the wallpaper off the walls when our backs our turned, it may soon be ready to repaint. Every time Zosia has an especially industrious morning with respect to the wallpaper, I ask myself if the landlady might legitimately keep our deposit when we move out, or should we rather submit her a bill for the service our little one has provided.

One person wrote to me after receiving last year's Christmas letter that I should send out a Zosia report more frequently. It may well be that other people find my family updates a little bit too personal and figure once a year is quite enough. I know it isn't the conventional Hallmark commercial tiding with which some folks are more comfortable.

It seems things happen so quickly and unexpectedly with Zosia that any report I write, for Christmas or otherwise, is going to be out-of-date by the time the postal service delivers. It so happens that one of the early themes of this letter (Zosia not walking) isn't quite appropriate anymore. During the long span of days this epistle was in progress, she gradually gave up her knees for her foot soles. Yesterday she made it all the way from the sofa on one side of the living room to the bench on the other side. It is a small living room, but we applauded as if she had crossed Niagara falls on a bicycle.