As a 15-year old freshman in a stately high school with a 400 or so year pedigree in Krakow, Poland, I recoiled from my studies. I wanted to read philosophy in open air but did not care for the classroom Latin exercises. I stopped going mid-year, instead spending lunch money on movies in the historic town centre, not far from school. I loved going to the movies, do kina. Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino were my heroes, neurotic or brutal, but always heady. I wandered the medieval streets while wearing my fathers vintage bell bottoms and listening to the soundtrack of Hair or The Beatles or the Polish genre of singing poetry. I was a bit of an aspiring poet, hippie, cinephile and buddhist in the months before leaving for America.
My mother was in the manic state of her long-standing, crippling clinical depression--though I did not understand it all too well at the time. The rage was unleashed late summer of 1995, when in the cloud of cigarette smoke, in the twilight hour, I asked about my father. I wanted to believe he was a good man. Almost a mythical figure to me, he left Poland as a political refugee, searching for happiness in California. Through the efforts of the Red Cross for reunification of families, and it being the more relaxed climate of perestroika and glasnost, I first spoke English as a 5-year old. We stayed for only 4 months, my mom sick with Hepatitis A, jaundiced and lonely and unhappy in the poverty of her relationship, took me back to her paternal home in Poland-where no work ever awaited and the days were a slow progression of inertia.
10 years later, I came back. My mother fought to prevent my departure. Months of yelling rants, on one occasion a flying vase, a lighter threatening to light the bedspread, a cover of a pan cold and powerful--the first and only sensation of blood obstructing nasal air passages. Sometimes instead of the noise, a threatening silence. All I wanted to do was leave. Not only my sad and angry mother, but the entire country of failed insurrections and lost wars and pain. My father was my ticket out, a shelter in the wild west of my imagination. And if nothing else, he got me out. On the last day in Poland, I drank a lot of orange juice at the market cafes. It was the liquid of my hope. Moments before take off, I thought of the language that I no longer knew and the one I was leaving behind. All you need is love was my anthem and 20 years since arriving in America, for the second time, on the Hawaiian Islands, I know all you need is love--but this time first and foremost for yourself.