Emails from Janusz

I spent part of the drive into work today re-evaluating my stance of email correspondence. I have at least one close friend with whom I share emails as the primary vector of our communication, and it seems to work well for us. Perhaps it is because he is a foreigner, and especially one who was raised in the old Eastern Bloc during communism. 

Janusz is his name (pronounced YAH-noosh). I met him in the summer of 1985, which was a formative time in my life. It was that summer that, during a break while I dropped out of Georgetown, I scraped together barely enough money to undertake a rather daring, even foolhardy, shoestring backpacking trip to Europe. In some ways, I still look at my life in terms of before and after that trip, as it catapulted me out of a state of boyhood and into a state of feeling like a real adult, standing on my own as a man. It's difficult for me to distinguish between the foolhardiness of it and the wisdom of throwing myself into such risky situations while I traveled from Paris to Scotland to Turkey and then back to Paris, all while spending almost nothing on lodging. I once reckoned that I had paid for lodging only eight nights out of the 88 that I spent overseas that summer.

I met Janusz towards the end of that trip, when I had reached the point where I could sleep on any stretch of ground large enough to stretch out my body. I had not started out the summer that way. In fact I was terrified to do such a thing. Now I would terrified again to do such a thing, but such are the trajectories of life.

Recently I read Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis,  I had the paperback for decades in my collection and only recently decided to tackle it. The first line of that novel, spoken by the narrator in regard to the title character, is "I met him in Piraeaus," referring to the ancient port of Athens, a few miles from the old city walls. This is literally true for me in the case of Janusz.

It was the first week of August. By then I was on my return voyage back from Turkey, and my pilgrimmage to the ruins of Troy. I had gotten a ride with some Italians down the coast to Izmir (Smyrna) and then taken a small ferry across to the Greek island of Samos. After spending a few days there, sleeping on the rocks by the sea (on the advice of the first Greek I met getting off the boat), and also amidst a olive grove I found, I used some of my last precious currency to buy a ticket to Piraeus, which was, and no doubt still is, the hub for all the ferries to and from the Aegean islands. It was a big deal to spend that cash because there was no possibility to get any more off my credit card at that point, because all the banks in Greece were on strike, something I was told happens on a regular basis. 

I remembe the big door of the ferry opening up to disgorge all the passengers onto the pier and coming out onto the sun toting my backpack, which felt light as feather at that point, compared to how it had felt at the beginning of the summer.

Since it was late afternoon, it meant it was time to find a place to spend the night. Just past the docks I saw a small roundabout with a grassy park in the center where traffic turned around at the docks. In the middle was a tiny grassy park that was apparently already half full of vagabonding backpackers stretched out as if camping. I knew immediately this was the place for me. So I stepped over the little fence and made my way through the crowd, finding a space on the grass that would accommodate me. I asked the guy next to the spot if it was free, and he indicated yes in what I could tell was an eastern European accent. I slung down my backpack onto the grass and stretched out in the sun.

And that is how I met Janusz. Over the next three days we became fast friends. I learned that he was from Poland. By then I had fairly sophisticated appreciation of the Eastern Bloc countries. Most of their citizens outside the USSR could travel rather easily to other Eastern Bloc countries. Only the Romanians had difficulty leaving their own country. Yet here he was in Greece, which was ostensibly the "West." It turns out Greece was ok for the Poles. He had finished his service in Polish army and. had a few weeks of travel leave he could apply.

The banks in Greece continued to be on strike, so we coped with our collective cash on hands buying meager meals.  I insisted that we would visit the Acropolis together, so I paid for our tickets after we rode into the city on the train that linked Piraeus to the city. At night we sacked out next to each other on the grass of the roundabout. Finally when the banks opened up we went our separate ways, with him going back to his home country and me purchasing a ticket to Paris (a BIGE "youth" ticket allowed to people under 26. years old that allowed one to break one's stop by getting on and off the train an arbitrary number of times so long as one kept moving in the same direction). I rode across the continent back to Paris, using the flexibile of the BIGE to stop in Ljubljana, Venice, Lausanne, and Dijon before arriving in Paris, where I had a standing invitation to stay with a friend. Then I flew back to Newark and used literally the last of my cash to pay for a People's Express flight back to Denver. A week later I flew to Portland and set foot in Oregon for the first time in my life. A shuttle ride dropped me on the campus in Salem with my backpack, as if it were part of my extended travels. I looked around and thought: what the hell am I doing here? 

Of course Janusz and I had exchanged addresses and resolved to remain friends. Once I was in Salem, I wrote to him and a few weeks later I found an international airmail letter with Polish stamps on it in my campus mailbox. We have remained mostly in contact ever since then, on and off, sometimes losing track of each other in the electronic age but always with one of us tracking the other down.

In 1987, I arranged, at his initiative, to gain a visa to visit the U.S.  We drove from Fort Collins to Chicago together in the VW Baja Bug I bought. It was a crazy fortuitous coincidence that I was going there that fall because of the huge Polish community. There he integrated among his expatriate countrymen while I worked at a government lab. Of course this was before the fall of the Iron Curtain. HE could have stayed in the U.S., but he chose to go back to Poland to finish college and eventually go to medical school. His sister, however, wound up coming to the U.S. and raised her family in Chicago.

In 1990, I returned the favor by visiting him in his hometown in northwest Poland, near the border with the then-USSR. I had come across Russia by train and had crossed the border into Finland, where I caught the night ferry down to Gdansk. There, following his instructions, I had taken the bus to his hometown. I met his parents as well as his girlfriend Dorota, who would become his wife. His family served me pirogis one evening. Of course it is a stuffed dumpling, but I didn't know that word at the time. I thought it was the name of his girlfriend's sister, so I kept calling her "pirogi."

 It would be years until I saw him again. In fact I lost track of him after 2005 and we didn't talk for years. I tried tracking him down on Facebook but could not find him. No Internet search produced any results, and I began to despair that we had lost contact.

Finally in the Fall of 2019, Jessica and I went to the Greek Festival at the Greek Orthodox Church in Phoenix.  The Chruch was part of a large compound of buildings serving the local Greek community, including performing venues. and a building which was practically an indoor mall. I delighted exploring it.  As I meandered through it I saw a little window with a sign above it "Bank of Athens." Seeing it brought back a flood of wonderful memories from long ago. Right at that exact moment as I stood there, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw a notification. It was an email from Janusz. He had found my gmail address.

Three. years later in June 2022, I visited him in his hometown again. It had been 32 years since we had seen each other, but it was like no time had passed. By this time, he had become a psychiatrist and had spent many years working in various mental hospitals in Poland, as had his wife, whom I had met on the visit in 1990. They had four grown children, all of whom had been born since my last visit. I met all of them, as well as his grandchildren, when we drove up to Gdansk to stay at the "city apartment" that they owned, on the grounds of an old German Imperial military base when the city was known as Danzig. We took a tour of the harbor by ferry and he showed me where the Germans had bombed, as the first official wartime act of the Second World War.

One afternoon we sat eating an outdoor restaurant along the beach in Gdansk. I had walked a long the beach for several miles on my own. The beach was crowded with sunbathing enjoying the Baltic Sea. I noticed how much it reminded me of the old Europe I remembered---almost everyone was white and there were hardly any tattoos. Poland is a generation behind the rest of Europe that way, but it will catch up. Warsaw is at the moment a Polish city, will over time, given current trends, likely become a city where the local population become a minority in the face of immigration from Africa and the Middle East, like London, Dublin and Paris---pretty much every city in the West. It is very controversial to mention this, of course. 

I don't understand the politics in Poland, which is refreshing, to be honest. In return I can be very frank about America in a way I can't with most Americans and he treats it with respect and interest.  He is after a ll, a psychiatrist and is used to dealing with crazy people with strange pathologies. 

He and I discussed he original decision to return to Poland instead of staying in America. He could have brought his wife over and like his sister, he could have raised his family here. I told him it was the right thing to do, to return to Poland, and, given what he had seen of his nieces and nephews in Chicago, he agreed. 

At the end of my visit, he dropped me off at the train station so I could return to Warsaw to catch my onward flight to my next destination. Something about the station was familiar to me and in my free time I explored it, and discovered the old bus station adjacent to it. It was dark and empty but one look at the walls, which had a map of Poland, made me realize I had been there before in 1990. I had come full circle.

That trip to Europe in June 2022 was glorious fun---a physics conference plus three visits to friends, sprinkled with a few new explorations in between. I carried a backpack in the same way I had in 1985. But I slept indoors at hotels this time. At fifty-seven years old, I thought maybe it was the last time I would travel that way, recapturing the joy I had felt at twenty, slinging a large backpack over my shoulder like a young soldier while walking through airports and train stations . 

It turned out to be everything I had hoped for that way.  The subtle balance issues I suffered last year make me think my days of freestyle travel with a full backpack are perhaps now behind me. I would likely be too top-heavy, I tell myself. It's hard to give up the idea of certain things in life, that one considers to be a core part of one's identity, and that kind of freedom of physical movement is a tough one for me, to be certain. "So long as I have my two good legs," I always said to myself. Maybe I could still pull it off with some exercises to strengthen my core, which got weak last year during my sedentary downtime at the awful day job I had until last December, during which time I wondered if I was dhying. Building new muscle has been proven to be something one can do no matter what one's age, even to one's advanced years. It is foolish not to take advantage of this as one grows older.. But if I don't travel like that again,  for whatever reason, I think I am at peace with it. It was worth it do it one last time, and to visit my friend, and to feel truly young.

Since then we have been mostly in contact by email, exchanging emails back and forth in spurts, but usually going no more than a few months without talking to each other. He is very concerned about American politics, and I try to give him the perspective about our politics here that is beyond the mainstream news media. He is not a fan of the current president, but he respects my opinions, and in return I try to give him a frank analysiss of why people support him.

One of the thins about email that tends makes me wary of maintaining frienships that way is my own tendency to send multiple emails one after another without waiting for a reply, because my mind keeps going after I hit send. Some people simply cannot handle this, but Janusz is an exception. I last wrote to him about two weeks ago.

But we still send each other snail mail. I send him Christmas cards and sometimes a real letter, just for fun, using one of the international rate "Forever" stamps I bought a couple years ago.  A good friendship can support multiple modes of communication.