Submit, resubmit, resubmit one last time, then patiently
await the final word. Such is work and life and work life under bureaucracy,
even relatively efficient and benevolent bureaucratic institutions. While I
await the final word on my recess appointment, anticipating a good one, I have
begun travel planning and arranging residency. I had hoped to stay in my
cousin’s newly purchased flat in Piasek,
the “Sand” neighborhood in Kraków, next to Nowy Świat, the “New World,” but
his real estate agent has already sublet it for the period of my stay. Efficient
fellow. We’ll find something else, no worries. My cousin invites me to contact this
agent, a lawyer whose last name is Cygan, the Polish word for “gypsy.” A lawyer
and a gypsy, he speaks no English, so I will have to email him in my halted and
halting Polish. Writing to a gypsy lawyer in a difficult language—no worries.
As for travel, I’m trying to book Atlantic passage on a
boat, a container ship, a kind of homage to my grandfather’s comings and
goings, though, of course, my living conditions and experience will be epochally different from his. But I do imagine that being out of the sight of land for
whole days and nights at a time, an entire week and more, on vast seas both
sunny and sunless, under measureless starry night skies, a guy, a fifty-plus
year old man, might feel something of the restless energy of an eighteen year
old immigrant or the ambitious hope of a forty year old family man returning to
Poland to live his dream. I, virulently unromantic, am not uncurious about you
people.
