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I have been told that my paternal grandmother, Babcia Zosia, who lives in the small northwestern Polish town of Wrzesnia has not been feeling well these days.
Map of Wrzesnia painted on the side of a building in the rynek (old town square)
So, before retiring to bed, I decided to give my Babcia a ring to cheer her up. Not an easy task, since my Babcia's Slavic blood runs thick with post-Communist pessimism and despair. Regardless of the daunting task, my guilty conscience got the best of me and I called her at 9:30 A.M. her time. She picked up the phone with a weak, "Halo." I asked her how she was doing and once she started to speak I realized there were no words of comfort that I could offer her. They would just be met with helpless resignation to her perceived fate. After all, what does one say to someone whose situation is hopeless?
Speaking with my grandmother reminded me of a passage from a book, Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus, that I started reading a few days ago.
Kraus writes:
When you're young, you look at older women like they're ciphers. Ciphers that you'd rather not decode, because you know you might be looking at the future. Their defeats and compromises are so visible. You wonder if they notice that you're studying their faces as they speak: the sagging flesh around their mouths and foreheads, the heavy fragile eyelids, wondering could she be me? Vague apprehension of a girl believing that she'll beat the odds, although she knows full well the woman that she sees was also once a girl... Not wanting, then, to think too much about how anybody gets from here to there; or more precisely, not wanting to imagine the events that might deform a person over twenty years....Or, even a lifetime...
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