Minneapolis, 2026. Poland, 1989

 

February 24, 1989

Saturday I read in the paper that there had been a demo on Friday during which some "arrogant students" injured four Police officers "fulfilling their duty." I found this impossible. Polish kids throwing rocks? I didn't give it a second thought.

Wednesday I was sitting in a tram, basking in Stalinist glee -- I'd actually found a seat -- and during rush hour! Around four. But the tram stopped and refused to start up again. Suddenly a voice called out, "Everybody off! Demonstration!" I got off and could barely find the demo. It turned out to be maybe ten kids from 9 to 14, one holding a Czechoslovak flag, another two holding a sign that said, "Free Vaclav Havel."

Kids. Skinny, small girls in net stockings and sneakers and hennaed hair and khaki jackets. Some boys: fat, horribly skinny and dorky, pimply, fresh-faced with that skin that looks like it has never been touched. Moving the way kids move -- loping, giggling, punching each other, self conscious of their bodies. When I joined no one looked at / talked to me -- too great a risk of plants. We marched to the square, where the crowd grew thicker. We marched to a lovely old house on the Maly Rynek where we chanted against General Fatty. We marched to perhaps a police headquarters? Where suddenly everyone ran.

I've never felt like I needed to run away from something. I did. I found myself face to face with Smurfs. I just stood there looking at them. They looked back -- shame facedly, smirky, cocky, lost, confused. Their trucks wobble and shake like cookie tins nailed on wheels. Their uniforms are shabby. They aren't all big. It got old pretty fast. I walked away.

But the kids began to play chicken. The cops did the same thing. I found it rather tragic and futile -- Poles burning up shoe leather chasing each other back and forth over a tiny piece of sidewalk while POLAND was getting flushed down the toilet. Eventually, we regrouped in the square, where, at Mickiewicz's statue, a boy of 18 or so, looking comparatively senior and statesmanlike, got up and announced the score -- how many arrested, "one sign taken," when the next demo would be. Later I found out that that demo had begun at three and was much larger, but had been severely depleted by arrests and beatings. It was held to protest the capricious beatings of kids during the demo of the previous Friday. That demo had already ended; kids were going home, and whammo -- the Smurfs attacked them in the alleys off the square.

Thursday the demo began at three at Collegium Nowum, A la Orange Alternative -- national holiday of the 71 st anniversary of the founding of the Red Army. There's a big plasterboard in the square attesting to this. Theme: "Around the World with the Red Army." Twenty people in mock army uniforms, khaki clothes and exaggerated caricature hats and epaulets made of paper. Funny speeches about the bravery and big heartedness of Soviets -- a playboy-esque poster, red star over her crotch, "I only have love like this for the Red Army." A picture of Gorbachev with a bull's eye centering on his forehead. A large picture of Lenin with wounds on his head, heart, crotch. A sign saying, "With the Red Army since childhood." The crowd chanting, "We want to return to Kabul," and "The Red Army is waiting for you," etc.

We marched to Mickiewicz's statue where more satirical speeches were given. We sang "Sot Lat" to the police. As we tried to march out of the square, they announced over loud speakers that all the streets were closed. I was scared, tense. The crowd began stomping its feet in unison to create a marching sound and people began to chant, oh, so solemnly, "Chcemy sikac!" "We want to pee!"

We marched down a side street a kilometer to the Red Army monument where the true feelings of the crowd were laid bare. A six foot by four foot by three foot wooden tank and all the paper hats and epaulets and wooden sticks handed out earlier were burned while cartons of yogurt were thrown onto the monument. (Couldn't buy yogurt for love or money in Krakow that day.)

Suddenly there was silence as we all stood and stared at the burning symbols. It was such a sudden change, from lighthearted and gay to grim anger and bitterness and seriousness of purpose, like a summer's day erased by a silent hurricane. The break up of demos is always very sudden, abrupt. People change into their "Who? Me?" Couldn't-care-less-half-alive Polak poses. During these demos very badly mimeographed tracts are thrown into the crowd; hands scramble in the sky for one. One said, "Another demo. Friday at three."

At Mickiewicz's statue at three on Friday, tracts were thrown into the crowd by the Federacja Mlodziezy Walczacej. Speeches were made by some gray beards -- Solidarity reps. A KPN boy said, "Someone wrote on a wall in Ulica Grodzka, 'Emigrate or fight.' Well, I don't want to emigrate."

We marched down Ulica Anna, then back toward the square, when, for reasons unclear to me, the confrontation began. I saw Martin, to whom I've never been very polite. He stuck by me the whole time. I couldn't see a darn thing. I heard the announcements over bullhorns. Every time the police tried to announce something an eardrum-piercing whistle went up from the crowd. Martin, a skinny, hunched bow of a boy with bad skin and teeth, in need of orthodontia, said to me, "You'd better go now."

"I'm staying."

"Okay," Martin said, "But when it's time to run, run that way. When they catch you, you don't understand a word of Polish."

Stand off. I don't know how long. Suddenly, everyone ran. No choice, no chance to examine my conscience. It was run or get crushed. I have two whopper bruises on my leg, one on my calf, the other on my butt, and a neat foot print on my skirt.

It's very difficult to run in a tightly packed crowd of people running for their lives. I needed to grab onto and hold the people in front of me just to remain upright. At a certain point, we stopped. More of this. Back and forth. I saw a pale, skinny, eleven year old, wrath on his features, pick up a rock.

I circled round with a group of Punks -- Mohawk hairdos, safety pins in ears, painfully thin and frail and pale and burnt out looking with jeans and jackets, signs saying, "Bite the hand that feeds you shit," and other cynical sayings, but determined to do their part for Poland in their own "Fuck Everything!" way.

We circled round and faced a bulletproof face-masked, bulletproof-shielded phalanx of Smurfs. Some of the protesters had entered a church and the Smurfs, for no good reason, stood guard on them there. Passersby simply stopped and were staring at the Smurfs, silently.

I went up close to these men completely dehumanized by their masks and shields. An old woman, barely dressed in a fuzzy, ragged coat and cotton dress and knee high socks and rubber boots and babushka, stepped out of the crowd and walked up to the Smurfs, weeping. Everything was silent.

You could hear her clearly state, "I lived through the Nazi occupation. This is just like it. I never thought I'd live to see Polish boys do anything like this. How could you do this?" It was then that I realized how really demoralized Poles are.

They aren't pretending to be burnt out, cold, demoralized zombies. They *are*. They simply stood there watching all this, some laughing.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, very far, traveling a high arch, a rock, a serious rock, a potentially deadly rock, big as a brick, flew and hit one of the Smurfs square on his shield. Silence. Not a move.

The old woman in her floppy boots and knee-high socks walked over to the rock. "Rocks. None of this." She picked it up and tossed it to the side. She cried and cried.

I reached out to stroke her back. "Bedzie lepiej," I said, at a loss, and a linguistic lack, for anything better or more profound to say.

"Bedzie?" she asked, like a kid, eager to pin hope on a promise.

So we stood, facing the Smurfs, they facing us, canisters of tear gas exploding, blowing our noses, crying, all very anemic, quiet, subdued.

A bus of soldiers pulled up. "Wyciecka," said the sign. "How is our lovely Krakow?" called out a voice. A couple of men remonstrated the Smurfs, but in a subdued way. A couple of others trying to get from A to B tried to deal with them, assuming the, "I'm-a-humble-harmless-person" pose. Patient. No one yelled but no one walked away. People just seemed to be waiting.

Adam, Nina, Carolina, Hugo: I joined them. Went back to thickest scene of trouble. Air blue with tear gas. We had to keep heavy cloths over our mouths and noses. Civilized paths and stodgy lanes transformed into a battleground. Smurfs threw benches across the road as barricades. Paving stones, building bricks, had been torn up. The streets were strewn with them, and broken glass. Huge trucks -- water cannons -- surrounded us. Nothing looked normal, every day. It looked like a war zone.

White tears oozed from Zbiszek's eyes. He warned us not to touch our eyes. We zigzagged aimlessly, hopping on and off trams, marching down streets, shouting, "M.O. Gestapo!" and turning and running when they came after us. Zbiszek ran up to flaming tear gas canisters as they came down and stamped them out with his feet.

Suddenly military vehicles would drive by and slender black-clad figures with black ski masks, all the curve of a major league pitcher, would run out and pelt them with heavy stones. A truck swerved. Breaking glass. Tear gas. Chanting. Crying. We ran to Collegium Nowum. The students there cheered us on: "Faster! Faster!" Once inside, we sat down amid a bustle of smiling, busy-looking students.

A sweet and gentle and pale Polish girl put a vinegar-soaked handkerchief under our noses, and instructed us to inhale. We were told to step into an inner courtyard for some fresh air. We stayed briefly -- as if the sweet air were rationed, and we should take too much, to avoid depriving our comrades.

Through it all, Zbiszek played the gracious host. Zbiszek is a "nothing." He failed the exam, doesn't have a job. Wears tight jeans, khaki jacket, piercings, funky hair. He seemed to know every fantastically costumed person there. He was a knight, a student of courtly behavior; as we ladies got on and off trams, he made sure we went before him; he was sure to instruct me when to run and when to stop.

A frightening new chant. "We want Afghanistan to happen here." "Enough of this whorehouse of a regime," "Death to Russians."

Poles seem to work at making themselves unreadable. Those who watched the demos pass -- A couple of fat, wrinkled, poorly dressed older women -- just glowed, pride, joy, hey, "Yeah, God bless 'em," written all over their faces. Like watching their grandkids go on their first dates. Quite a few people seemed simply even more zombie-esque than usual: blank faces, staring, hollowed, shadowed, hopeless, detached. As if this were just not their world, but something they watch from their fish bowl tram windows as they go to and from their meaningless jobs. Some looked stupefied, stunned, full of wonderment, as if the leprechauns were dancing in the street.

Disturbingly, many just went about their lives: flirting, striding from A to B in high boots and heavy make-up, licking ice cream, driving trams, commuting, walking the baby, threading  through enraged students, broken glass, riot police, and pleas of "Join us," "Choc z nami!"

Poles are so wounded, so atomized, so convinced that they are doomed to martyrdom, even their pleas of "Join us!" sounded doomed. Raw anger … they want to hurt, fight against, dismantle these forces.

I pity the Smurfs. They've lost their humanity. If a protester dies he dies with his integrity intact. Not so for the Smurfs . . . I think it's all wrongheaded, tragic. The protesters seem to want only to experience the prerequisite Polish rite of passage. Accomplishing something is beside the point. Scoring a direct hit on a Smurf shield seems to be the idea. Poles do these every ten years or so: 56, 68, 70, 80. Then a new regime comes in, jails or kills or exiles the best, pacifies the rest with meat and promises. But when you're near these young men, you sense how much they like it -- playing chicken with the cops, fighting. The Hormonal Imperative. A great percent of any politics.

February 26. Saw Grzegorz Watroba at the Micro yesterday. He said he feels that there must be tragedy, martyrs in Poland. That that is Poland's destiny. He feels the kids have to throw rocks at the police to be taken seriously. He's ice cool and insane, I think. And I have to say, during those demos in Krakow is the first time that I've felt alive in this country.

It's wrong. Violence is wrong except as a last resort. If a person conducts herself with right action and conviction, violence is often not necessary. We can't create life; we can't understand life; it's wrong to destroy life. Self control and control of others is vital in a leader. Do we want to be lead by people who can't control themselves? Would we want to live under a government that has casual disregard for people or property? Would we want to live under a government that has so few creative solutions? What is the creative, rather than the destructive, alternative? The good must be strong and flourish as the good. The milicja are people, too. Are Poles, too. Will be citizens of any future republic.

Some had taken refuge in the church. Some of the priests were attending to those overcome by tear gas; some priests were lobbing gas canisters back at the milicja. Priests were actually carrying some completely prostrate riot victims to safety.

Monika, a cute girl, had a face to face with one of the milicja. He showed her how to operate his tear gas launcher. He said he hated his job, but he would lose his apartment if he quit, and all the other police would hate him.

Rob Minczinowski, from Australia, was in the church. He said, "This is the Poland I came to see." Polska Walczaca.

Two more memories, very vivid:

I'm in a tightly packed throng of protesters. In front of me is a Polish Punk I do not know and never spoke to. He is wearing a khaki jacket and carrying a beaten-up backpack. He has safety pins in his ears. Someone starts up "Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, Kiedy my żyjemy," "Poland is not dead while we still live."

The young Punk in front of me drops his backpack to the ground, stands at military attention, hand over heart, and sings along.

Second memory: If I remember correctly, we were on Ulica Dominikanska, near the Basilica of St Francis, that houses the Wyspianski murals. It's early evening, but very dark already. There is a crowd of protesters marching forward. In front of them, a phalanx of Smurfs. Face shields, batons, helmets. Out of one of the churches, maybe the Dominican church, marches a row of priests. There are many of them. They form a line in the road between the Smurfs and us, the demonstrators. It was a very dramatic moment. Unarmed priests placing their bodies between state-armed thugs and Poles seeking freedom.

 

Wake Up Dead Man A Knives Out Mystery Movie Review

 

Wake Up Dead Man 2025
 
A Hollywood director takes on Christianity and MAGA

 

SPOILER ALERT: this review will reveal the endings of all three Knives Out films.

 

Wake Up Dead Man is a 2025 murder mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson. Wake Up Dead Man opened in the US on November 26, 2025, and then began streaming on Netflix on December 12th. It is roughly two and a half hours long. The film reportedly cost $151 million.

 

Wake Up Dead Man is the third entry in the Knives Out franchise; the first was 2019's Knives Out; the second was 2022's Glass Onion. The franchise stars celebrity detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a gay Southerner with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. The films feature high production values, witty, literate scripts, and all-star casts. They are mostly family-friendly, with few f-bombs, and no nudity, earning PG-13 ratings. They have been hailed as a return to Golden Age Hollywood glamor and storytelling, and classic Agatha-Christie-style whodunits.

 

Johnson's politics saturate his plots. Knives Out, the first film in the franchise, skewers white Americans with inherited wealth and upholds vulnerable, victimized, and virtuous Hispanic immigrant laborers. Glass Onion critiques tech bros. A rich white man cheats a black woman and drives her to suicide; her heroic sister avenges her death.

 

This review will offer a summary of Wake Up Dead Man's convoluted, implausible plot. It will then discuss the film's critical reception. This review will close with my own reaction.

"I Was the Nuremberg Jailer" Book Review

 

When the “Master Race” Sat in a Jail Cell
A powerful book unveils Nazism after the lights went out.

I Was the Nuremberg Jailer is 211 pages long, inclusive of an index and black-and-white photographs. Coward-McCann Incorporated published Nuremberg Jailer in 1969 and it is currently out of print. I found a copy through inter-library loan. It is also available at Archive.org.

I've read a lot of books about World War II. I Was the Nuremberg Jailer may be my favorite. It's a punchy, no-nonsense exposé by US Army Colonel Burton C. Andrus. For eighteen months, Andrus served as commandant of the prison housing twenty-one Nazis who were to face the International Military Tribunal, or IMT, at Nuremberg in post-World-War-II Germany in 1945.

Nuremberg 2025 movie review

 

Nuremberg 2025

A good movie for grownups about important historical events

Nuremberg is a 2025 historical drama written, directed, and co-produced by James Vanderbilt. Nuremberg is a misnomer; the film is not an exhaustive treatment of the thirteen trials of Nazi war criminals that took place in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. A more accurate title for the film would be Five Men at Nuremberg, those five men being SCOTUS Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), Sergeant Howard Triest (Leo Woodall), and Colonel Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery). Jackson played a key role in initiating the Nuremberg trials. Goering was a top Nazi defendant. Kelley was a thirty-two-year-old Army psychiatrist and lieutenant colonel tasked with assessing the Nazi defendants' mental fitness to stand trial. Triest was a US Army interpreter, and Andrus was the commandant of the Nuremberg prison. Richard E. Grant stars as British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, and Colin Hanks plays a US Army psychologist, Dr. Gustave Gilbert. Nuremberg is roughly two and a half hours long. Nuremberg opened in the US on November 7, 2025.

"After the Hunt" "Blue Moon" and "Good Boy" Movie reviews

 

After the Hunt, Good Boy, and Blue Moon

After the Hunt is a 2025 psychological thriller. Luca Guadagnino directs. His previous films include Call Me By Your Name and Queer. The title After the Hunt is an allusion to a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck. "People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after the hunt." Nora Garrett, a first-time screenwriter, wrote the screenplay in a workshop. Garrett was intrigued by the disconnect between a person's interior life and the persona that one must present in order to be successful. The main character, Alma, a Yale professor pursuing tenure, has "has spent her whole life cordoning off pieces of herself in order to reach this apex … as soon as she's there … circumstances … occur that would make it so that she could no longer successfully keep those other parts of her away from the identity that she projects out into the world."

World Enemy No. 1 by Jochen Hellbeck Book Review

 

World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews

 

A new book moves the center World War II history eastward

 

World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews is a new book that offers a daring interpretation of World War II. Author Jochen Hellbeck is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. German-born Hellbeck's previous works include Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich, and Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin. Hellbeck's father, a 17-year-old draftee, fought briefly for Nazi Germany, before being injured on the Eastern Front. His maternal grandfather ran a factory that used Russian forced laborers. Penguin Press will release World Enemy No. 1 in the US on October 21, 2025. It is 560 pages, inclusive of black-and-white illustrations, maps, a bibliography, and an index.

Birthday 2025

Birthday 2025 / Three stories about friends

 

Years ago, I had a friend. "Audrey." She was beautiful and rich. I loved her.

 

She invited me into intimacy. At least I thought she did. She said the kinds of things to me that I would not say to another person. She said very frank, unflattering things about her children. Her husband. Her lovers. Her parents. Herself. Her own medical history. I thought, wow, we are really friends.

 

I confided in her, too.

 

I clearly remember one day, many years ago. It was a bright, sunny, unusually warm, October day. I was standing by my window, and I was crying.

 

It was my birthday.

 

I'm used to spending my birthday alone.

 

But this year, I thought I had a friend. Her. I was so foolish. All week before my birthday, as I reached into my mailbox, I kept anticipating feeling the card that I would receive from Audrey. I waited for the phone call. The plan of what we'd do.

 

Nothing.

 

When she had confided in me, I had confided in her. My birthday is hard for me, for reasons I don't need to go into here. Just one of the reasons is that it is the anniversary of the death of someone special to me – special to many people. He was killed in a car accident. He was not the driver. He was beautiful and young. I was the last person in the family to see him alive. I remember him coming down the stairs, pausing, right across from me, at the kitchen sink to take a drink of water. I admired his back. He was wearing a fine shirt, a date-night shirt. He turned and walked out the back door. For years I dreamt that at that moment, I jumped up, ran to the back door, grabbed the handle he was letting go of, and stopped him, and said, "Don't go."

 

But I didn't do that. He did go. And he never came back.

 

Well, there's that. And my birthday is hard for me for other reasons, as well.

 

So, yeah. When this beautiful, rich woman convinced me that I had a friend, I confided in her about this, and I assumed that she'd get it, and at least send me a card. And so I stood by the window on an unusually warm October day and cried.

 

I never want to feel that way again.

 

After a while, I think she got bored with me, and she ghosted me. Audrey won't ever make me feel that way again. Or maybe we'll run into each other and I'll be the proverbial Charlie Brown with the football all over again.

 

***

 

Here's another story about friends.

 

I used to phone S. regularly. I have phone phobia so that I used to call him so often is testimony to how comfortable I felt with S. Once I phoned him on Thanksgiving. His wife answered the phone. She said that S had gone for a walk by himself. She said that Thanksgiving was always a hard day for him. He had grown up in an abusive home, and Thanksgiving brought back memories, and drove him into a funk. So he was off by himself, trodding the hilltops. Something about how M described her husband's solitary trek made it all sound so Byronic. I immediately imagined a woolen cape flapping behind him against the storm-lashed sky, as he paced the moors, alone with his grief, except of course for his trusty Irish wolfhound, named Pilot, or Hound of the Baskervilles, or something.

 

This all happened over thirty years ago.

 

To this day, I am still super careful around S on Thanksgiving. It's a hard day for him. I want, at the very least, not to make it worse for him. He and I are no longer close enough for me to step up and address all this directly, to try to offer him TLC. But in my heart, I do. I think of S every Thanksgiving. I send him silent vibes of TLC. Because I care about him. Because it's a hard day for him. Because someone told me once, one time, that Thanksgiving is a hard day for S, and I never forgot. I penciled it in to my internal date book.

 

I did this because I care about S a great deal.

 

***

 

I know that some people erect unbreachable barriers around friendship. You don't support Trump? Blocked and unfriended. BTDT, many, many times. You support Israel / You are poor / You are black / You aren't cool. We can't be friends.

 

I don't do that.

 

I’m not saying, here, that if someone doesn't send me a birthday card that I would cut them off as a friend.

 

I'm saying that when Audrey didn't send me a birthday card that year, I recognized that she and I were not friends.

 

***

 

I never thought I'd live this long. That's part of what happens when your brother dies young on your birthday. The last line of his obituary was, "The man lived in this area all his life." I'd show them, the bastards that cheated us again and again. I'd travel. I'd see the world. I'd do risky things. Live fast, play hard, die young, leave a good looking corpse. That last is no longer an option for me.

 

When Antoinette was sick, I asked God to take me instead of her. She had so much to live for. Husband. Children. A home. Retirement benefits. Me? None of that. God didn't listen. The bastard.

 

So here I am, it's 2025, and the hard day is coming around again.

 

***

 

Through Facebook, I have reconnected with a kid I used to know in our small hometown. She has matured into a very kind woman. We don't talk at all. She never comments on my posts and I just generally "like" hers. But she is kind. Big heart. She sent me a card. I was so touched.

 

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to spend two days at St. Mary's by the Sea, a blessed refuge for women dealing with cancer. To my great surprise, they sent me a hand-written birthday card! I don't even remember telling them it was my birthday.

 

Almost forty years ago, in Poland, I met one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. T. T and I were constantly together. We traveled to Bialystok together, in a fun but unsuccessful effort to see if we could discover anything about my family, which was from a nameless village nearby. We saw European buffalo together; we met survivors of Nazi slave labor programs, a peasant couple who put us up. After their exploitation in Poland was over, they walked back to Poland, barefoot. God bless those two people! T and I got on the wrong train together. We were together on Dyngus, and one of us got drenched. T met the love of her life, as I looked on. The only creatures I've ever met that are more adorable than T are puppies and kittens.

 

But time marches on. We haven't seen each other in years and we haven't kept up. But she sent me a birthday card this year. That meant so much.

 

Another wonderful woman says she sent me a birthday card. I never got it, but I'm touched that she sent me a screencap of the card.

 

***

 

And then there's this. Someone, who would like to remain anonymous, did an amazing thing. X looked up where my brother, father, and mother – they died in that order – are buried, all in the same grave. I was here for all the deaths, and two of the internments, but I wasn't really paying attention to the location. Feh. Someone could pick me up today, drive me to my next doctor's appointment, and I would have no idea where I am. If someone else is driving – even if I'm driving – I'm not spatially oriented.

 

I remember green grass, and trees. And that's it.

 

And then X offered to take me there, on my birthday, the fiftieth anniversary of Phil's death.

 

Okay, I said.

 

Problem: A nor'easter was due to arrive on my birthday. So we went the day before.

 

I've never visited the grave of a loved one in the US. In Slovakia, once, I visited Uncle John's grave. That's it.

 

I like walking through cemeteries, but other people's cemeteries. I like them for the grass, the quiet, and the statuary, not for any connection. I have willed my own body to science. Once the spirit leaves the body, that's it. The physical remains are no more alive than the dead skin, loose hair, shed blood, exhaled breath, clipped nails, and other unmentionable stuff that our bodies discard daily. At least that's what I think.

 

The sky was gray and cloudy. There was some drizzle.

 

I noticed immediately that the cemetery where my family members are buried is for poor people. All the markers are flat, at most simply adorned stones flush with the surface of the earth. The cemetery is not well maintained. The ground is uneven and many stones tilted or sank. These stones, including my family members' stones, will soon be swallowed up by earth and time. Maybe this will become, like the rest of New Jersey, a strip mall.

 

We had to walk around because we didn't know the exact location. This is a Catholic cemetery and I read many Polish, Italian, and Irish names. And then I read "Goska."

 

My mother's name isn't even on the stone. There really isn't room. Just my brother and my dad. Birth year, death year, not the exact dates, dates I know all too well. No quotes. No carvings. No memories.

 

I called to X. X, who was conducting a search in a different section, approached.

 

I don't know why I've lived this long. It all seems pretty pointless. And it ends, at least for these three members of my family, like this. I'm guessing that no one else has ever visited their graves. Maybe Antoinette? I can't ask her.

 

What's the point?

 

I stood there, on the uneven ground, under the drizzle, staring at the stone beneath me. I didn't feel anything special.

 

I talk to my father regularly. He was a terrific driver. When I have to merge onto a busy highway, I ask him, out loud, for help.

 

I try not to think about Phil too much, because when I do, I cry. Just once a year, on my birthday.

 

My mother … every time I look in the mirror. Bake. Clean. Wish she had left some of her writing with us. She was so damn talented. The stories she could tell.

 

But this stone, and the bones and ashes – my mother, the latecomer, had to be cremated to fit – no, none spoke to me.

 

X, not I, had purchased red carnations. X had no way of knowing that that's a very Polish flower. I placed the red carnations on the stone.

 

X and I moved on.

 

X bought me pizza. And X brought me flowers.

 

The next day, my actual birthday, I read the latest Nazi book, and worked on a review of it, and ate leftover pizza. And I did not cry.