If childhood is the foundation for a life, then my mother Alice has a strong one. Maybe that’s why she’s had such longevity. She was born, “quite unexpectedly,” into a loving small family headed by ambitious immigrants. I think that is the only kind of immigrant. A sturdy brick multi-unit building, my mother’s first home still stands at the intersection of Lyman and Haines Court, only a few blocks from my own house.
My mother has lived in South Chicago, Garfield Ridge, Mount Greenwood, and the suburbs of Palos Heights and New Lenox Township, but Bridgeport was first. It’s the one neighborhood she still enjoys visiting, and not just because it’s where I live. She enjoys seeing the vibrancy of Morgan Street and is interested to learn that long-suffering Halsted is also revitalizing. My mother likes to sit in my front room/kitchen, where the three big windows give her ample light to cross-stitch. As with us all, a certain sight or smell in the neighborhood will bring forth in her some long-sleeping memory she didn’t even know she had.
My grandfather Tomek (Thomas) Krakowiak, who died when my mother was seven, was a polyglot from Bodzechów, in southeastern Poland, who came to the United States via a ship from Wilno. He had one leg kneeling on the pew when he decided the priesthood wasn’t for him and instead married Anna Paczkowska. A recent interview with my mother revealed a noteworthy tidbit: I never knew, or certainly forgot, that Tomek could paint.
My grandmother lived until 1987, before my teenage years when the importance of documenting the stories of my elders would begin to surface. I have vivid memories of her, but as a grandparent; not as the individual whose life had made her who she was. Now, I can only reconstruct her through the filter of my mother’s own memories. But my mother often prefers to play games on her iPad rather than be interviewed by me. I can’t blame her. One day I, too, will think of what I have to say as unimportant. One day I, too, will want to simply be and not remember.
We tend to frame those who are gone in a diffused light of reverential nostalgia, that longing for what was good in a person to remain with us always. I think of my father, gone these five years, an incredibly warm and giving man who could also be sly if not downright slippery. I wear his army dog-tags around my neck as talismans to protect me from the storms of life. I have his photo on my bed-side table and talk to him through it every night. Given a pass are the indignities and the sorrows his individual actions may have cause the familial unit during the formative years of his children.
As my mother ages I find myself conflicted. Here is the woman who gave me all, who made sure that, even in those dark and lean years, I never wanted for anything. From her I received my talents with the visual arts – no small gift. Yet here also is the obstinate woman who now prefers to spend each day in her robe and nightclothes, who watches the Brendan Frasier Mummy movies on an endless loop, and who refuses to do the dishes. My reverence is tempered by the realities of caring for an aging parent, for the person rather than the idea.
My mother, though, always did and always will view Anna Paczkowska with veneration. For her, my grandmother was more than a milliner, an insurance and travel agent, a writer, a survivor of the violence of both war and the tempers of men, and even a sweetheart. Her mother was the warmth on even the coldest day of the world. She was a treasure, and how do you describe such a treasure?
Join us this Friday just before 6:25 p.m. on Lumpen Radio or at 105.5 FM to hear Alice Krzak speaking about Bridgeport and her family. And, starting next week, you’ll be able to listen to all our episodes whenever you like via our podcast site!
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