Ever since I met Michal at school in 2007, he has been talking about an epic journey around the world. When he married me, I figured he gave up on that dream, but I should have known better.
Today I correctly spelled "man" in Polish. (thanks Duolingo) Since I've learned the language mostly by ear from Michal's family, my spelling is atrocious. Polish has several additional letters with accents and dots and stuff. They have three forms of the letter 'z'. Whew! mężczyzna = man The first word I learned in Polish was zaba (frog). I still do not know how to type on this keyboard and make it produce the dot above the z. Corresponding with my mother-in-law and sisters-in-law is actually easier these days. I type my message into Google Translate, and it gives me the Polish version. Then I copy-paste it to an email and they understand me perfectly. When I meet with them for face to face conversations, we won't have the convenience of typed translation. I usually do well enough in communicating with my Polish in-laws. They all took English in school, and so between our broken languages and hand gestures and context, we manage to get our points across....
When we became pregnant, we spent hours discussing names for our child. I wanted to pick something that would be easily pronounceable in both English and Polish. I liked old-fashioned family names, and nature names. We agreed on “Forest Bogdan” for a name if it was a boy, and “Maria Rose” if it was a girl. Both names were easily pronounceable and readable in both languages. Exhausted after giving birth, and simply grateful that we had a healthy baby boy, I made no protest when Michal asked if we could put the name Bogdan first. It was Michal’s father’s name. I knew how much it meant to him. And so Bogdan Forest Kawka was named. The name itself is ancient slavic, from the words “God” (Bog) and “Given”(dan). My American mother was delighted with her first grandchild. What are the nicknames for Bogdan? She asked. Bodzio is the common Polish diminutive form, and I spelled it for her phonetically “Bojo”. And so we called our son Bojo. He was a good baby! Then around age 1 ½...
I signed us up for the river run on Saturday. I was supposed to unlock the bathrooms, since we've been having issues with our weekend Gates Guy for the parks, so I cycled down to the Marina a bit early. There were already many people gathered under the bright blue sky; moms with strollers, the entire high school wrestling team, old people, young people, and one man in a diaper and wings, with a bow and arrow. Michal showed up two minutes before the gun. He was late, he said, because he was looking for his other glove, and did I know where it was? Of course not. He had one pannier on his bike with water and an extra coat, since he would be cycling to Hood River after the race. He's crazy. He's really serious about cycling as much AS POSSIBLE. But, at least this meant that I would be able to keep up with him during the run; he would be saving his energy for the following bike ride. I was able to run the first 2 kilometers. We passed the wrestling team, including their coach w...
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